Books
drorzel | June 13, 2011Right around the time I sent in the manuscript for my own book explaining relativity to Emmy, I got an email offering me a review copy of The Manga Guide to Relativity, part of a series of English translations of Japanese comic books explaining complicated concepts in a friendly way. That was clearly too good a wind-down read to pass up.
Like other books in the series, this sets up a manga-type plot that just happens to require introducing relativity. In this case, on the last day of school at Taigai Academy, headmaster Rase Iyaga makes a surprise announcement: that he will throw a dart at…
drorzel | June 12, 2011I've heard a lot of buzz about The Quantum Thief-- see, for example, this enthusiastic review from Gary K. Wolfe, so I was psyched when it finally became available in the US a little while back. Of course, the down side of this sort of buzz is that it's almost impossible to live up to the promise.
the thief of the title is one Jen Le Flambeur, who is in prison when the novel starts. But not an ordinary prison-- the Dilemma Prison, in which infinite replicas of the minds of the imprisoned find themselves in little glass cells which open to reveal one other prisoner. Each of the prisoners has…
drorzel | June 9, 2011While it is not yet officially summer, according to astronomers and horologists, it was approximately the temperature of the Sun here in Niskayuna yesterday, so de facto summer has begun. Accordingly, we have acquired a pool:
Of course, one of the main things you do with a pool is to sit next to it and read in the sun (note the conveniently positioned chair). Of course, then the question becomes "What do you read?
While the obvious answer is How to Teach Physics to Your Dog (now in paperback!), we got a good thread out of non-obvious suggestions for science-related "beach reading" last year…
drorzel | June 4, 2011In past years, I have griped at length about the awful, maudlin dreck that Mike Resnick keeps putting on the Hugo ballot-- see this 2009 post for example. I think Abigail Nussbaum put it very well back in 2009, when she wrote of Resnick's "Article of Faith" from that year's short story ballot that "his greatest failing is and has always been the one encapsulated by "Article of Faith"--his ability to take a subject that underpins some of science fiction's seminal works, write his own spin on it which is neither innovative nor unusual nor particularly good, and send it out into the world…
drorzel | May 31, 2011I heard David Kaiser talk about the history of quantum foundations work back in 2008 at the Perimeter Institute, and while I didn't agree with everything he said, I found it fascinating. So when I heard that he had a book coming out about this stuff, How the Hippies Saved Physics, I jumped at the chance to get a review copy.
This is, in essence, a book-length argument that I owe Frijtof "Tao of Physics" Capra, Gary "Dancing Wu Li Masters" Zukav, and even J*ck S*rf*tt* a beer.
The book expands on things that Kaiser said in that PI talk (which was really good-- you could do worse than to spend…
drorzel | May 30, 2011I had intended last Wednesday's post on the Many-Worlds variant in Robert Charles Wilson's Divided by Infinity to be followed by a post on the other things I said when I did a guest lecture on it for an English class. What with one thing and another, though, I got a little distracted, and I'm only getting around to it now.
Anyway, this was a guest lecture for a class on Science Fiction taught by a friend in the English department. To give you an idea of the stuff they covered, here's the "required books" list from the syllabus:
The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction. (VBFSF) Anthology…
drorzel | May 28, 2011Kij Johnson's "Ponies" is the second on Locus's Short Story Club list of award-nominated stories. More than that, though, it's an actuall award winner, having claimed a share of the Nebula for Best Short Story.
I enjoyed Johnson's two novels, The Fox Woman and Fudoki quite a bit, so I'm happy to see her doing well, with award-nominated short stories the last two years. The problem is, like last's year's "Spar," which was up for the Hugo, my primary reaction to this story is "Oh, ick."
The set-up is simple and heavy-handed: like all young girls, Barbara has a Pony, some sort of artificial…
drorzel | May 21, 2011As mentioned a little while ago, Locus is running a Short Story Club to discuss the award-nominated stories that are available online. First up is Aliette de Bodard's "The Jaguar House, in Shadow". Like her novels and other notable short fiction, this has a Central American theme, though it's alternate-history SF rather than fantasy.
This is a sort of caper story, set in a high-tech Mexica empire, where the elite order of Jaguar Knights are the only survivors of a bloody purge instigated by the new emperor, which has wiped out all the other orders. Xochitl, a young-ish female knight started a…
drorzel | May 17, 2011For both of the readers who enjoyed last fall's Short Story Club, there's another round starting up soon, this time run by Locus, featuring award-nominated works. I'm busier now than I was in the fall, so I'm not sure I'll be able to participate in all of these, but then, I've already read two of the five stories, so that makes it a little easier...
Also in short fiction news, I have to do a guest lecture on Robert Charles Wilson's "Divided by Infinity" for an English class on science fiction this Friday. Which means I probably ought to find some time to figure out what I'm going to say about…
drorzel | May 11, 2011While Kenneth Ford's 101 Quantum Questions was generally good, there was one really regrettable bit, in Question 23: What is a "state of motion?" When giving examples of states, Ford defines the ground state as the lowest-energy state of a nucleus, then notes that its energy is not zero. He then writes:
An object brought to an absolute zero of temperature would have zero-point energy and nothing else. Because of zero-point energy, there is indeed such a thing as perpetual motion.
This is really the only objectionable content in the book, but he certainly made up in quality what it lacks in…
drorzel | May 10, 2011If I get a review copy of a book that sounded interesting from a publicist, but it turns out I kind of hate the book, am I still obliged to read it and write it up for the blog? I'm not talking about the totally unsolicited review copies that turn up unannounced in my mail-- I feel no obligation to read those at all-- but a book where I replied to an email to specifically request a copy.
On the one hand, they did send me something free, expecting some publicity in return. On the other, I suspect they'd be just as happy having me not post a review saying "The first three pages of this made me…
drorzel | May 10, 2011When I was looking over the Great Discoveries series titles for writing yesterday's Quantum Man review, I was struck again by how the Rutherford biography by Richard Reeves is an oddity. Not only is Rutherford a relatively happy fellow-- the book is really lacking in the salacious gossip that is usually a staple of biography, probably because Rutherford was happily married for umpteen years-- but he's an experimentalist, and you don't see that many high-profile biographies of experimental physicists.
When you run down the list of famous and relatively modern scientists who have books written…
drorzel | May 9, 2011While I've got a few more review copies backlogged around here, the next book review post is one that I actually paid for myself, Lawrence Krauss's Quantum Man: Richard Feynman's Life in Science, part of Norton's Great Discoveries series of scientific biographies. I'm a fan of the series-- past entries reviewed here include Richard Reeves's biography of Rutherford, Rebecca Goldstein's biography of Goedel, and David Foster Wallace on Cantor's work on infinity (which is less of a biography than the others). I'm not a huge reader of biographies, but I've liked all the books from this series that…
drorzel | May 8, 2011One of the perils of book reviewing, or any other form of literary analysis is putting more thought into some aspect of a book than the author did. It's one of the aspects of the humanities aide of academia that, from time to time, strains my ability to be respectful of the scholarly activities of my colleagues on the other side of campus. And it frequently undermines reviews of books that I've already read.
A couple of good examples come from this Paul Di Filippo column for Barnes and Noble, where he reviews two books I've read, and one I haven't. I haven't actually read his comments on the…
drorzel | April 27, 2011The nominees for the 2011 Hugo Awards were released on Sunday, which is the sort of thing I usually blog about here, so you might think it's just our flaky DSL that's kept me from saying anything about it. that's only part of the story, though. I haven't said anything about them in large part because it's a really uninspiring bunch of works.
I've only read two of the Best Novel nominees at this point, Cryoburn and The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, and I'm not enthusiastic about either. I have fairly low expectations for a Miles Vorkosigan novel relative to a lot of fans, but Cryoburn failed to…
drorzel | April 22, 2011A few months ago-- just before the paperback release of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog-- Amazon started providing not only their Sales Rank data, but also sales data from Nielsen BookScan. Of course, the BookScan data is very limited, giving you only four weeks, and the Sales Rank data, while available over the full published life of any given book, are presented as a graph only with no way to extract them as a data table. You'd have to be some sort of obsessive nerd to make a quantitative comparison between them.
So, anyway, here's the data I got for How to Teach Physics to Your Dog:
This…
drorzel | April 20, 2011(Alternate Title: "Epic Fantasy Is What We Point to When We Look Down on Epic Fantasy.")
I've been on a bit of an epic fantasy kick lately, evidently due to the thousand-ish pages of The Crippled God not being enough. This means that I was in a weirdly appropriate mental space to catch the recent furor over a fairly dumb NYTimes review of A Game of Thrones on HBO that said some snide things about the genre, particularly that women don't read it. Which has led to a lot of discussion of what epic fantasy is, and whether women read or write it.
A lot of what's been said is dumb in various ways…
drorzel | April 15, 2011Regular blogging has been interrupted this week not only because I jetted off to southern MD but because this week was the due date for the manuscript of the book-in-progress. It's now been sent off to my editor, and thus begins my favorite part of the process, the waiting-to-see-what-other-people-think part.
I'm pretty happy with it, though it's a bit longer than it was originally supposed to be. This is no doubt partly due to the fact that I'm too close to the thing at the moment, and can't see the obvious places where I could cut material, but that's why professional editors get the big…
drorzel | April 12, 2011I'm in last-minute-revision mode here, made mroe frantic by the fact that SteelyKid developed a fever yesterday, and had to be kept home from day care. I did want to pop in to note that I will be giving the Natural Science and Mathematics Colloquium at St. Mary's College in Maryland tomorrow, Wednesday the 13th. This will be the "What Every Dog Should Know About Quantum Physics" talk, described for the colloquium announcement as:
Quantum physics, the science of extremely small things like atoms and subatomic particles, is one of the best tested theories in the history of science, and also one…
drorzel | April 10, 2011Once upon a time, there was a beautiful young girl from a family of modest means, who received a spiffy new jacket as a gift. It was bright red, and had a big warm hood that she could pull up over her head when she didn't feel like combing her hair. She was so pleased with this jacket that she wore it around all the time, even in the summer, and because of this, everybody called her "Red Hood," even her teachers.
One day, she decided to go visit her grandmother, who lived on the other side of the deep dark woods. Her mother said, "As long as you're going to Grandma's house, take her this…