SF
drorzel | September 21, 2014My bedtime reading for the past week or so has been Steven Gould's Exo (excerpt at Tor). This is the fourth book in the Jumper series (not counting the movie tie-in novel), and ordinarily wouldn't be worth much of a review, because if you haven't read the first three, this book won't make a lick of sense. If you have read the others, it's a worthy sequel, but three earlier books makes for a lot of backstory to explain in writing the book up.
It's worth noting, though, because it belongs to a sort of unofficial subgenre: books about Working Things Through. The story includes a huge amount of…
drorzel | September 4, 2014Three weeks in Europe means a lot of time on planes and trains, so I actually got to read some fiction for a change. I'm stuck in a meeting all day today, and need a morale boost on the way in, so I'll go back to my book-blogging roots and type up the books that I read:
-- Lev Grossman, The Magician's Land. Conclusion of the trilogy begun with The Magicians back in the day, and while it's a better book than the first one, if you didn't like the first book, you probably won't like this. Mostly because of the characters, who are very much a like-them-or-hate-them crew.
Personally, I think it's…
drorzel | September 1, 2014I'm up way too early with jet lag, looking over Twitter, and ran into Nick Falkner's report on the TED panel I moderated at Worldcon, which reminded me that I never did write anything about the con. Late is probably still better than never, so here are some quick long-after-the-fact comments about my program items:
-- Only one person showed up for my Kaffeeklatsch, probably because it was at dinnertime on the first day of the con, and also the Kaffeeklatsch rooms were in a place that didn't look like somewhere you were allowed to go. My one guest was a guy I've exchanged emails with for many…
drorzel | July 19, 2014Since lots of other people are posting their Worldcon progrm(me) schedules, I might as well share mine, too. Frankly, I find it a little baffling:
Kaffeeklatsch
Thursday 18:00 - 19:00, London Suite 5 (ExCeL)
Kay Kenyon, Chad Orzel
Banksian
Saturday 11:00 - 12:00, Capital Suite 9 (ExCeL)
'Banksian' has become a commonplace descriptor in SF reviews, but what do we mean by it? What are the characteristics we associate with Iain M Banks' work? How far has his influence travelled? Who is writing Banksian SF today?
Chad Orzel (M), Michael Cobley, Jaine Fenn, Paul Kincaid, Ruth O'Reilly
We need to…
drorzel | June 23, 2014As previously noted, I'm going to the Wordlcon in London this August, and as such will be voting on this year's Hugo Awards. The publishers provided a packet with at least bits of all the fiction nominees, so I've been reading through them at bedtime, and over the weekend finished all the regular nominees-- I still have stuff that I may or may not read for the Campbell-that-is-not-a-Hugo-but-is-handed-out-at-the-same-time. I wouldn't really bother to say anything about them beyond the couple of comments I've already dropped on Twitter, but Kate quoted me in her recap of the Short Story…
drorzel | May 14, 2014One of the very best treatments of the scientific method in fiction that I've read-- I suspect it may be the best, but years on the Internet make me want to hedge everything-- is the Steerswoman series by Rosemary Kirstein. The main character, Rowan, is a Steerswoman, a member of an order dedicated to collecting and sharing knowledge of the quasi-medieval world in which she lives, and over the course of four books she puzzles out some amazing things about the secret origins of her world and society. It's a joy to watch the scientific reasoning process Rowan follows, and the plots have plenty…
drorzel | May 6, 2014Last week's talks were using sci-fi space travel as a hook to talk about relativity, and my original idea for the talk was to explain how faster-than-light travel ultimately ends up violating causality. Some observers will see effects happening before the events that cause them, and that's just weird. In How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog, the illustration I use is a stationary dog watching a cat moving by at half the speed of light and a space alien zipping past at four times the speed of light. In that scenario, the dog can hand a water balloon to the passing alien to soak the cat, and…
drorzel | April 18, 2014Astonishingly, in the last few weeks, I've actually found time to read some-- gasp-- novels. In particular, I finished two books that probably belong in the "Hard SF" genre: A Darkling Sea by James L. Cambias and Lockstep by Karl Schroeder. Both Jim and Karl are people I've met many times at cons; I've enjoyed a lot of books by Karl, but this is Jim's first published novel (I think).
I'm lumping these together both because it's rare for me to get time to read, let along booklog stuff, but also because there's a sense in which they're complementary books: Both offer thoroughly fascinating far-…
drorzel | January 20, 2014I've gotten out of the habit of blogging about the books I read for fun here, mostly because I've gotten out of the habit of reading for fun. Not for lack of desire, but because between my job and the kids and the massive amounts of research reading for the book-in-progress, I haven't had time.
Of course, I make the occasional exception, and when one of my very favorite SF authors comes out with a new one, that's a great reason to read a little fiction. Robert Charles Wilson isn't the most prolific author, but he's consistently excellent, and always thought-provoking, so I was very happy to…
milhayser | November 10, 2013This movie was already spoiled for me because I read the book many years ago. But the movie can't help but spoil itself. It's a great film and one of the best adaptations of a novel to ever appear onscreen, but if you really know nothing about Ender's Game, and can read at a 9th grade level, honestly go read the book first. If you have time.
The problem is that by the time of Ender's "final exam," it's hard to imagine anyone in the audience sympathizing with Ender's shock that he hasn't really been playing a video game; he and his tween friends have been controlling actual spaceships…
drorzel | February 19, 2013This past weekend, I was at Boskone, where I appeared on a few science-y panels. One of these was on the possibility of beaming power down from space:
Energy From Space
Beam me down some juice, Scotty? Let's talk about the possibilities -- and practicalities -- of really long-distance power transmission.
Tom Easton (M), Jordin T. Kare, Chad Orzel, Jeff Hecht, Joan Slonczewski
This was a little odd, as Jordin does this for a living-- he's been working on a proposal to NASA for a solar power generating satellite that would use lasers to beam power down to photovoltaic panels on the ground--…
drorzel | November 20, 2012I've got a bunch of browser tabs open on my various computers that have been there for weeks, one of which is Alastair Reynolds on writing science fiction. This is mostly a response to a not-terribly-interesting complaint that the science fiction genre has been "exhausted," but there was a bit in there that resonated with me, where Reynolds talks about how he started writing one of his books:
That reaction, for me, encapsulates something fairly central to my subsequent relationship with SF. I don't care for a lot of it. Never have done, never will. But at the same time, I doubt that I'd feel…
drorzel | November 9, 2012In which I use my double license as a physicist and a science fiction fan to engage in some half-assed futurism spinning off Chris Hayes's much-discussed book.
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I don't read a lot of political books, because I tend to find them frustrating. They're usually surprisingly ephemeral, trying to spin Deep Meaning out of a collection of recent events that are highly dependent on short-term context. They also tend to be much better at identifying problems than suggesting plausible solutions, coming off like that famous Sidney Harris cartoon with a bunch of equations on the left side of a…
drorzel | October 11, 2012It's a banner day for science explainer things I wrote, as a piece I wrote has just gone live at Tor.com:
Why Gandalf Is Wrong
Even as a kid, reading J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings at the golden age of twelve or so, Gandalf’s response to Saruman never sat well with me. Splitting white light into its component colors is awesome, and taking things apart is the best way to learn how they work. Knowing how things work is the first step toward making them work better, a process that leads to the technologies that make modern life comfortable enough to, among other things, provide Oxford…
drorzel | May 10, 2012There's been a bunch of discussion recently about philosophy of science and whether it adds anything to science. Most of this was prompted by Lawrence Krauss's decision to become the Nth case study for "Why authors should never respond directly to bad reviews," with some snide comments in an interview in response to a negative review of his latest book. Sean Carroll does an admirable job of being the voice of reason, and summarizes most of the important contributions to that point. Some of the more recent entries to cross my RSS reader include two each from 13.7 blog and APS's Physics Buzz.
I…
drorzel | March 10, 2012I've gotten out of the habit of booklogging recently, which is sort of a shame, because it means I've also gone back to the problem that led Kate and me to start booklogs in the first place: people ask what I've been reading recently, and I can't remember... As a sort of corrective to this, though, here's a post lumping together short comments on my three most recent reads: Karl Schroeder's Ashes of Candesce (excerpt at Tor.com), Tobias Buckell's Arctic Rising (excerpt at Tor.com), and Myke Cole's Shadow Ops: Control Point (which isn't a Tor book, so they didn't do an excerpt).
Ashes of…
drorzel | February 20, 2012This was the title of the group discussion I led at Boskone on Saturday, and since it's probably relevant to the interests of people reading this blog, I figure it's worth posting a quick recap. Of course, between the unfamiliar format and Friday's travel with the Incredible Screaming Pip, I didn't actually make any notes for this, so what follows is my sketchy recollection of what I said; omissions and misstatements are a reflection of my dodgy memory, not an attempt to distort anything.
The title is obviously a little tongue-in-cheek, because the goal is really to not wreck your career with…
drorzel | February 18, 2012I'm at Boskone this weekend, and this morning went to a fairly frustrating panel on "SF/F/H As a Mirror on Society," described thusly:
It's simplistic to say genre fiction maps to current politics. Vampires are bankers, zombies are the revengeful victimized classes, and werewolves are the media in feeding frenzy? C'mon. But did we write more optimistic SF when the space race was young? Or victorious spacewar stories when we were losing Vietnam? If fiction in any way reflects societal anxieties or moods, what do we make of steampunk, or sparkly vamps, or dystopian YA, or upticks in stories…
drorzel | February 13, 2012I've been falling down a little in the area of shameless self-promotion, but I will be at Boskone this coming weekend, where I'll be doing three program items:
Reading: Chad Orzel (Reading), Fri 19:30 - 20:00
This will be a section from the forthcoming book, probably involving Emmy and particle physics. Or possibly William Butler Yeats.
How to Wreck Your Career with Social Media (Special Interest Group)
(M), Sat 16:00 - 17:00
What are the new opportunities for public humiliation opened by the
Internet? Join this entertaining discussion about authors getting
into nasty public spats with…
drorzel | February 9, 2012In a book that I read recently (either The Cloud Roads or The Serpent Sea-- I finished the first and immediately started the second), as some characters are traveling from one place to another, there's a passing mention that they weren't able to hunt at night because the moon wasn't out and it was too dark. Which sort of bugged me, and I was reminded of it tonight when I took Emmy out for our post-dinner walk-- it's very clear tonight, and a lot of stars were visible, even here in the light-polluted suburbs, but the moon wasn't up yet.
And the thing is, while it's darker when the moon isn't…