The McWetlog

John Scalzi’s aliens are sparsely described and unconvincingly Other (he’s no Larry Niven) and his characters are usually some variation on smartass. But his novels, with exciting plots and witty dialogue (see “some variation on smartass,” above), never fail to entertain. So it is with Zoe’s Tale, which is a retelling of the story of The Last Colony (which missed winning this year’s Hugo Award for Best Novel by a whisker) from the point of view of the protagonists’ adopted daughter, Zoë. (Why she loses the umlaut in the book’s title, I have no idea.)

The Last Colony suffered from a couple of plot holes (viz., where did those werewolves go, and how did Zoë get that deus-ex-machina technology?) that Zoe’s Tale fills fulsomely. In fact, it’s impossible to consider Zoe’s Tale absent The Last Colony: it’s very much a mirror image of that novel. The two novels are both case studies in limited first-person narration: neither John Perry, the protagonist of The Last Colony and Zoë’s stepfather, nor Zoë herself in Zoe’s Tale, knows exactly what the other is doing; essentially, these are two books trying to tell the same story. Two blind grabs at the same elephant. The end result is that Zoe’s Tale deals in detail with what The Last Colony mentioned in passing; unfortunately, the converse is also true: the grand plot of The Last Colony is given short shrift in Zoe’s Tale — key points are mentioned briefly, plot twists are telegraphed — and I’m not sure if Zoe’s Tale stands alone as a result.

The tension between the novel’s two ambitions — a retelling of the events of The Last Colony from Zoë’s perspective, and an attempt to explore Zoë’s tragic background and her role as an object of veneration for an entire alien species — is sometimes strained, and I think the latter suffers a little bit at the expense of the former. Despite Scalzi’s breezy and accessible prose and the book’s positioning as a young-adult novel, Zoe’s Tale is an ambitious book. Despite its flaws, it mostly succeeds, in that it’s got lots of good bits in it and is fun to read. Which, in the end, is really what matters, don’t you think?

Zoe’s Tale by John Scalzi

Amazon.ca • Amazon.com

Marsbound, Joe Haldeman’s latest novel, starts slowly and intimately: the first quarter of the novel is spent following his young protagonist, Carmen Dula, and her family on a weeks-long trip up a space elevator and thence on their journey to Mars. The second quarter unfolds like a Heinlein juvenile (except for the sex), with Carmen’s struggle to survive on Mars personified by a stern and bureaucratic authority figure with whom she comes into conflict. Once Carmen runs away and stumbles upon a colony of Martians, however, the similarities to, say, Red Planet end. The novel pivots, draws back in scope and dramatically accelerates its pace; years fly by in the same number of pages that described hours, as Carmen returns to Earth orbit with a posse of Martians — who turn out not to be indigenous to Mars and unsure of their own origins — as they try to figure out where they come from. Marsbound finishes as another iteration on a common Haldeman theme: human beings facing the judgment of overwhelmingly powerful aliens. The Martians and other aliens are wonderfully imagined in this otherwise spare novel, whose two halves never quite fuse into a satisfactory whole.

Marsbound by Joe Haldeman

Amazon.ca • Amazon.com

Let’s face it: travel writing, for the most part, sucks. It’s vapid, junket-driven, cliché-laden dross in which anything remotely interesting is boiled away for fear of offending the travel industry whose ads pay for said junkets and for the travel sections of the weekend editions of newspapers in which this stuff appears. Chuck Thompson makes this point in his new book, Smile When You’re Lying: Confessions of a Rogue Travel Writer. Not even the Lonely Planet guides (“Lonely Planet is the only publisher I know of that seems to actively dislike its readers”) are exempt.

It’s an entertaining read, but it doesn’t quite make it. Attacking the clichés of the genre would make for a pretty slim volume; there are chapters sharing his experiences as a travel magazine editor, as a travel writer, and as a traveller, full stop. They seem like padding to me, but if nothing else, they explain how easy it is to become jaded by the travel industry. His realization that his dislike of the Caribbean is because of the juxtaposition of luxury resorts and endemic poverty resonates with my own ambivalence about the idea of vacationing there. His off-colour, disaster-laden travel stories are just the sort of thing that would be unlikely to appear in the travel section of a newspaper, but it’s hardly transgressive that they’re seeing print — Paul Theroux was writing stronger stuff 30 years ago.

And there’s a point there: there are two genres of travel writing, the literary sort (Chatwin, Naipaul, Theroux) and the advertorial sort; this book is about the latter (even if, in one telling passage, Thompson nails Theroux for writing the advertorial pabulum that his overall body of work seems to stand against).

Smile When You’re Lying: Confessions of a Rogue Travel Writer by Chuck Thompson

Amazon.ca • Amazon.com

I just finished reading Timothy Ferris’s Seeing in the Dark, a book about amateur contributions to astronomy. This is something I’ve been struck by the more I get into astronomy: it not only accepts amateur contributions, it relies on them. While professional astronomers compete for limited time on research telescopes, the sheer number of amateurs looking skyward allows them to do things that professionals simply can’t (because there are fewer of them looking through fewer telescopes). Such as long-term observations of single objects (like variable stars), and searching for asteroids, comets and supernovae. (The subsequent PBS documentary did not emphasize this point to the same extent.)

I’m struck by this partly because it’s not the same with herpetology, or at least the wildlife conservation part of it, where amateurs are frequently seen as part of the problem, rather than part of the solution — with the notable and important exception of frog monitoring. (On the other hand, you can’t poach a comet.)

But Ferris points out that amateur astronomy is a relatively recent phenomenon, a result of larger apertures and digital cameras passing into amateur hands; a half-century ago, amateurs were limited to long-focal-length, small-aperture refractors and reflectors, and planetary observations. A lot has happened to empower amateur astronomers since then. In the meantime, amateur herpetologists have been facing increasing regulations and sharp professionalization, both of which restrict the lay enthusiast from doing meaningful work in the wild, and send many of us to our basements to focus on exotics.

Seeing in the Dark by Timothy Ferris

Amazon.ca • Amazon.com

Seeing in the Dark (DVD)

Amazon.ca • Amazon.com

The problem, says Neil Gaiman, “isn’t that books are given away or that people read books they haven’t paid for. The problem is that the majority of people don’t read for pleasure.” The argument for giving away free e-books is that it encourages people to buy your other works; the broader argument is that it encourages people to read, full stop. There are social benefits to having a population that reads; it’s why there are libraries, and it’s why online e-book piracy must be dealt with more carefully than movie or music piracy. Via Boing Boing.

Once Amazon.ca launched, I abandoned Chapters.indigo.ca — I went five years between orders. Lately I’ve been noticing that Amazon.ca doesn’t always have better selection (i.e., items actually in stock) or lower prices: sometimes Chapters.indigo.ca discounts a book more, sometimes Amazon.ca does. It varies book by book (or, more to the point, publisher by publisher).

Last week I decided to run an experiment. I ordered about $100 worth of books from each store, assigning each book to the store that either had it in stock or had it for less, to see how they would handle the order. The orders were made 10 minutes apart on the evening of Monday, February 18. Everything was listed as in stock; I chose free shipping in both cases.

I received shipping confirmation from Amazon.ca on Tuesday afternoon, and received the package on Thursday. Shipping confirmation for the Chapters.indigo.ca order came at 3 a.m. on Wednesday morning; the package didn’t turn up until the following Monday. Two working days or four days, depending on how you count things. Or, three days vs. a week. Interesting that there would be that much of a difference: enough to be significant, but not enough to be important, if you follow me.

Gary K. Wolfe, referencing Crichton, has the following to say about Kim Stanley Robinson in his review, in this month’s Locus, of Sixty Days and Counting, third in Robinson’s series of near-future political thrillers dealing with global warming:

[O]ne of his main flaws as a writer of political thrillers is that he’s not nuts.

Put that on the cover of the paperback edition!

(There was a time when I would grab, and read, a new Robinson novel the moment it came out, but I’m about four books behind at the moment. Not faulting Robinson; I’m just so far behind on my reading.)

Just finished reading Charles C. Mann’s 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. Despite the title’s superficial resemblance to Menzies’s 1421 (a crackpot theory that the Chinese discovered America), Mann’s 1491 is a serious survey of new research on pre-Columbian Native Americans. The new, emerging consensus can be summarized as follows.

Continue reading this entry »

The geek world is a-twitter with the news that an unfinished work by J. R. R. Tolkien has been completed by his son, Christopher, and will be published next spring.

The book is The Children of Húrin, and we’ve seen the tale before, in broad strokes or in fragments: it’s chapter 21 of The Silmarillion (“Of Túrin Turambar”) and the second chapter of Unfinished Tales (“Narn i Hîn Húrin”). The latter version was fragmentary (though not as fragmentary as some other parts in Unfinished Tales) but it seems that Christopher Tolkien has completed that narrative:

It has seemed to me for a long time that there was a good case for presenting my father’s long version of the legend of the children of Húrin as an independent work, between its own covers.

I can see why he’s done it. Large portions of the story are complete (see Unfinished Tales) and the story itself is quite powerful: a full-on epic tragedy that is Shakespearean in ambition and operatic in scope. (There are at least half a dozen operas in The Silmarillion alone; Tolkien produced enough material for an entire culture’s mythology.)

Sam Posey’s Playing with Trains will not reveal anything new to anyone already involved in the hobby of model railroading, but for the general reader it’s a reasonably good, and evocatively written, introduction to the state of the hobby.

Posey, a former race car driver and a sports commentator, spends the first half of the book on his own model railroading history, from his childhood, with his mother helping him build his first layout, to his adulthood, when he hired someone to build his expansive Colorado Midland layout with his family. (My father read the book while he was visiting, and sniffed, as many in the hobby would, at the notion that he paid someone else to build his layout.)

The second half of the book is a new-journalism-style look at the state of the hobby, with Posey visiting a number of luminaries of the field — none of whom will be unfamiliar to anyone who’s been reading Model Railroader for the last couple of decades — and talking about their approaches. This part is a little light, a little superficial, but its great strength is crystallizing a schism in the hobby that I was only dimly aware of myself: the schism between the operators who focus on simulating, in miniature and in precise detail, the work — and paperwork — undertaken by real railroads (think Tony Koester) at the expense of scenery, and those focused on jaw-dropping scenery at the expense of realistic operations (think Malcolm Furlow, or even George Selios).

Most of us, naturally, are somewhere in the middle: we’d like to do more than run trains around in a loop, but we’d like to do more than run them on bare plywood. The Koester mode is in the ascendancy at the moment, to the extent that his book on layout design elements isn’t about the elements’ function in the abstract, it’s about replicating real things: for example, not about understanding how an interchange works in theory, but in copying a real interchange. This is a considerable change from the Armstrong mode, where understanding how real railroads work is the necessary first step, not simply slavishly replicating what really existed (without, I suspect, necessarily understanding why it existed).

Taking my cue from Jennifer’s announcement that she’s finished updating her LibraryThing catalogue, I’ve gone and done the same thing. You can view the results here.

The steps I took were as follows:

1. Upgrade to a paid lifetime membership with LibraryThing (US$25 via PayPal).
2. Export my library data from Delicious Library.
3. Make my LibraryThing library private.
4. Upload the library data file using LibraryThing’s import feature.
5. As the library file uploads (it’s throttled to avoid overloading the library and Amazon servers LibraryThing uses to look up book data), delete duplicate books.
6. Delete the books that are definitely Jen’s. (We use Delicious Library to manage our combined book collection; LibraryThing is social software, so it’s got a different purpose: because books say something about the person, I want the books I chose to say it.)
7. Delete the books that I don’t want you to know I have. (Heh.)
8. Make my library public again.
9. Spend hours tinkering with each entry — editing fields, choosing cover art, and so forth. Automatic importing is fast, but it’s imprecise; this will probably be a neverending task.
10. Add a nifty badge to the McWetlog’s sidebar.

One observation during this process: LibraryThing is a lot more feature-rich than it was when I first started using it. It’s come a long way in a short time, and I’m very impressed.

Shipping books is expensive. I discovered this when I started selling off the last of my academic books via Amazon’s Marketplace program: the shipping credit was never enough to cover the postage, and was sometimes short by several dollars.

In this context, libraries have had a singular advantage: a subsidized rate for interlibrary loans. When I was a graduate student, and required all sorts of obscure, only-one-copy-in-Canada books for my research, I practically lived on interlibrary loans. Rural libraries, whose collections are understandably limited, absolutely rely on it.

But now Canada Post is trying to end the subsidy, which means, suddenly, that cash-strapped libraries will have to pay high rates for books that most will not be able to absorb. Whether or not Canada Post is justified in wanting to save the money, this will kill interlibrary loans as a service, and diminish the available resources of many rural libraries. In some cases, it may well be cheaper to buy the book online. There’s something perverse when shipping from Amazon is free with a minimum purchase, but shipping library books back and forth costs a fortune.

Alternatively, libraries may set up their own, ad hoc shipping services. When the cost of domestic stamps skyrocketed in Germany, I was told, utility companies hired students to deliver notices by hand. Raise the cost of a service, and people will cease using it. Rural libraries may resort to in-house, long-distance deliveries within a regional network — an employee in a minivan — if they can, but resources outside the local pool would remain elusive.

I expect a political solution, though.

Update (July 23): Told you, I did.

Late last week, a copy of Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s Making Book finally arrived from Amazon; I’d ordered it in late December (that’s “special order” for you). It’s an interesting collection of short pieces on diverse topics — often autobiographical, such as getting excommunicated by the Mormons or dealing with narcolepsy, and often whimsical. It reads, in other words, like a blog before the fact: proof positive that such writings did exist before them thar Internets; they were just in zines and such, and as such harder to find. More to the point, it reads like Teresa’s excellent blog.

The meat of the book, in substance if not in length, is the essay “On Copyediting,” derived from an internal document at Tor Books for their copyeditors. Since my work has, from time to time, included such diverse elements as may be considered copyediting, this was compelling stuff. But, probably because my own copyediting was highly specific and technical, viz., federal statutes and regulations, I wasn’t aware of some of the more general idiosyncracies of the field. Notably, style sheets — I’d never heard of them before in a copyediting context (an article reprinted in a 1994 book is probably not referring to CSS). So much for doing any freelance copyediting. But, Google is my friend: here’s a sample style sheet and, from the SFWA, A Writer’s Guide to Understanding the Copyeditor. Aha. Now, we had those at Justice; they just weren’t individualized, naturally.

Just finished John Barnes’s 1996 fantasy novel, One for the Morning Glory — about which I’d heard good things, so when I saw it at the library I picked it up. Most of the reviews I’ve seen compare it with The Princess Bride, but I think that’s superficial: it’s because both are playful and light in tone, rather than the heavy high-vatic drudgery one expects from epic fantasy. True, this is a fairy tale that does not take itself completely seriously; but, while the tone is light, breezy and immediately engaging, the story itself is not frivolous, and is at times quite dark. It is, as some have commented, the Brothers Grimm at novel length, with the wonderfully subversive proviso that the characters themselves are fully aware that they themselves are in the middle of a Tale, and conduct themselves accordingly. It’s tremendous fun, and worth a read if you can find a copy; unfortunately it appears to be out of print at the moment.

Good new writers should get as much word-of-mouth as possible; Karen Traviss deserves a bit of buzz. She’s been compared (favourably) to Arnason, Cherryh and Le Guin; comparisons aside, if you like complex alien societies and tough moral questions in your SF, grab her stuff immediately — you’ll love it.

Her first two novels, City of Pearl and Crossing the Line, are the first two-thirds of a trilogy that’s ostensibly about first contact (with four separate, and fully fleshed out, alien cultures), but has a lot to say about ethics, conflict, and alterity. (Follow the links for a plot summary; this isn’t a book report.) Everyone, alien and human alike, has their own motivations, worldviews and ethical systems; the interplay between these cultures makes the plot wonderfully complicated and the books awfully fascinating — full of interesting, believeable characters.

The second book does end on a cliff-hanger, but Traviss manages to bring it off, with the result that instead of tossing the book across the room, I’m eagerly awaiting the sequel, The World Before, due out late this year.

In a strange coincidence, Jennifer and I are each reading a short-story collection by Paul Di Filippo at the moment: she’s reading Ribofunk; I’m reading Strange Trades. I’m a few stories into the latter, which has a doozy about underground currency called “Spondulix” that could easily serve as the basis for the next Coen Brothers movie. In addition to writing way-cool stuff, Di Filippo is legendary for his support of, and tendency to publish with, small presses; even so, I’m baffled by the fact that the novel-length version of Spondulix is apparently only available in a 300-copy limited edition. That can’t be it, can it?

Via Jessamyn, an article about the benefits of audio books, by an English professor who professes to be embarrassed by the fact.

Listening to tapes while engaged in mindless but unavoidable activities, I get through about 30 books a year that I would not otherwise have read. It’s almost like I’m sneaking in an extra half-lifetime of reading in the course of doing my ordinary chores, which have a way of getting done more thoroughly as a result of listening while I work.

There is no way I can justify devoting the next two weeks of bedtime reading to Tom Wolfe’s new novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons. I have too much professional reading and course preparation to do. But I can permit myself to listen to all 25 hours of Wolfe’s novel while I am in the shower, eating breakfast, and driving to and from work.

It put me in mind of a passage of Stephen King’s On Writing, which I read earlier this year:

Of the books I read each year, anywhere from six to a dozen are on tape. As for all the wonderful radio you will be missing, come on — how many times can you listen to Deep Purple sing “Highway Star”?
(p. 148)

Audiobooks have always seemed like a good idea to me, especially when I’ve had long bus rides to deal with. (That 13-disc set of The Silmarillion, ripped to my iPod, really passed the time on weekends when buses are slow and infrequent.) They’ve also been a godsend on long highway trips.

But at present I don’t commute. In this town, no trip on foot would get me more than a few paragraphs further along. Making the car iPod-compatible, through a new stereo deck with an aux-in or a wireless transmitter, would open up all the audiobooks available through iTunes. (Without a cassette player in the car, the audiobooks on cassette aren’t an option, though the CD versions still are. Incidentally, they’re all awfully expensive — especially the unabridged versions — don’t you think?)

Now, were I to begin commuting into Ottawa on a regular basis — a likely scenario if I get full-time work or even a short- or medium-term contract — I’d almost certainly iPod up the car and get a few of the audiobooks I’ve been eyeing on iTunes double quick. I don’t know if it’s my imagination that the CBC is less listenable than it used to be, but I’ve been switching off the radio more and more — usually as something tedious came on. So it’d be nice to have something else to listen to. I might not even mind the traffic congestion.

Where Is Here? Canada’s Maps and the Stories They Tell by Alan Morantz

Crossing the Line by Karen Traviss

Bones of the Earth by Michael Swanwick

Model Railroading with John Allen: The Story of the Fabulous HO Scale Gorre & Daphetid Railroad by Linn H. Westcott

Heavy Weather by Bruce Sterling

Designing with Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman

The Happy Isles of Oceania: Paddling the Pacific by Paul Theroux

Foundation, Foundation and Empire and Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov (marathon reread of new editions)

Realistic Model Railroad Operation by Tony Koester

The Void Captain’s Tale by Norman Spinrad

City of Pearl by Karen Traviss

The Salmon of Doubt by Douglas Adams (site)

The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov (reread)

The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov (reread)

A Place So Foreign and Eight More by Cory Doctorow (site, download)

Calculating God by Robert J. Sawyer (author, book)

When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress by Gabor Maté (site)

Rainbow Boas and Neotropical Tree Boas by R. D. Bartlett

Red-Tailed Boas and Relatives by R. D. Bartlett and Patricia Bartlett

On Writing by Stephen King (author)

A glitch at Amazon.ca caused the names of anonymous reviewers to be displayed, revealing that many authors, apparently to combat poison-pen reviews by colleagues and adversaries, had published glowing anonymous reviews of their own work, the New York Times reports in a profile of the feuds going on via the Amazon reviews system.