Re-Read Ringworld Engineers

Published in 1979 to tie up the many, many loose ends from his 1970 novel Ringworld (mentioned earlier here), it holds up well, even better than the first one.  Might get around to the remaining two books in the series later this year, but I need a break from Niven stories for the moment.

Perhaps the most entertaining part of the book is the dedication in the front matter, where the author details all of the, um, help he had from True Fans (that last really needs the old html <blink> tag) in fleshing out the Ringworld itself.  Obsessive proofreading.  Design for a seafloor sediment recycling system.  Calculations for the minimum tensile strength of the underlying structural material.  MIT students chanting at a sci-fi convention about the inherent instability of solid rings orbiting stars.  Even Freeman Dyson(!!) got in on the letter writing.  In the end it was all too much for Niven, so he had to write this book.  Honestly, the first one is incomplete without this, so if you read the first, be prepared to dive into the second immediately.  Well, maybe sandwich Protector between reading the two, mostly for the break but also for some in-universe background.

Adventures planned, so onward with the day.

Book Mention: Take Me to Your Leader

Continuing this week's alien theme, I finally finished reading through Neal deGrasse Tyson's latest book, Take Me to Your Leader last night.  It's a fun little romp through all of the pop culture, credible sworn testimony, conspiracy theories, and blurry pictures of the last eighty or so years, along with reasonable musings on the Fermi Paradox, what forms extraterrestrial life (and their perceptions and senses) might take, etc. etc.  With all that, we are left with one stark, undeniable observation:

There is not one whit of actual evidence of alien visitation.  No artifacts, no hard data, and, despite upwards of seven billion digital cameras on this planet, no unambiguous pictures.

With that uncomfortable truth in mind, the author plows forward with his usual good-natured skeptical, slightly sarcastic way, considering all sides of the issues and philosophical conundrums.  It is very clear that he's open to any evidence, even an outright personal abduction.  However, to date, there just isn't any there there, and he's quick to gently point this out.

Recommended, but only if you generally like this sort of thing.

Finally, if you do manage to get yourself abducted, please take Seth Shostak's advice and pocket an alien artifact on your way out the door/hatch/portal/whatever.  We've all had more than enough of heartfelt testimony on these matters.  It's time for a metamaterial multitool, or whatever else they're using these days.  Plonk it down on the table in front of skeptics, say a hearty "nyeh-nyeh-nyeh," donate it to the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum, write a bestseller, and enjoy the good life.

Re-Reading Ringworld

You know how it goes.  Or you should – in which case you should remedy this deficiency ASAP.  In any case, here's a graphic from Larry Niven's site, and encouragement to re-read it yourself.

Sometimes, you've just got to get there fast.

Crashlander: Some Things Are Better Left Untold

I just finished reading Larry Niven's short story collection Crashlander, a compilation of his

Known Space tales centering on ace star pilot Beowulf Shaeffer.  The collection serves as a sort of biography of one of the main characters in Niven's future history series, and knits these stand-alone shorts together with brief bridge chapters.  It also adds a new (well, 1994) Shaeffer short story, Procrustes, and somewhat ambiguously wraps it all up with a "happily ever after – maybe" epilogue, which is frustrating in and of itself.

The original set of stories dating from the 60's and 70's are all great.  The new short story is not, and neither are the bridge chapters.  The older stories are sleek tales, where Shaeffer figures out the key puzzle piece and with a narrow margin moves on in one piece himself.  Procrustes and its surrounding bridge stories are more of a wheels-within-wheels slog of tale, with several unsavory characters that a smart guy like the Shaeffer of the earlier stories would have automatically avoided.  Not worth the small price of the new collection, not worth the reading time.

All of the good stuff can be found in the earlier collections Neutron Star and Tales of Known Space, along with many other excellent short stories Niven produced in the same era.  Give Crashlander a pass, buy and read those two other collections.  Then use your leftover time to read (or re-read) Protector.

Re-Read for the Nth Time: Protector by Larry Niven

After last week's slog-fest, I had to clear my mind with some actual science fiction, and Larry Niven's 1973 novel Protector is always a good choice.  You can find others' plot summaries and spoilers elsewhere, but here's why it's so good.  In a scant 217 pages it tells one hell of a story, but the first 100 pages cover:

• humanity's status on Earth in 2125
• humanity's status in the asteroid belt as well
• a glimpse into the friendly but slightly strained interplanetary politics of the era
• an alien first contact story
• everything you need to know about the aliens' motives and their unusual life-cycle
• how this all ties into one big package
• and finally, several tidbits to link the story into Niven's larger future history universe.

And that's just the first half of the book.  There are many more thrills, chills, and chase scenes in the second half, before the ride comes to a graceful halt with the gas tank nearly empty and all four tires smoking.

You see, this is how a good science fiction author does it.  None of it is forced or rushed, and Niven never, ever resorts to the tired "Well professor, tell us how it all happened" trope.  The whole book is just one big cavalcade of interesting ideas strung together with believable characters and competent prose.

Four point five out of Five Stars,  Recommended.

Book Mention: Recursion by Blake Crouch

Going from a recommendation by Andy Weir to a fan who's read Project Hail Mary 58 times (!, and yeah, that is kind of strange), I picked up a copy of Recursion, and expected science fiction.  However, the core technology of the story – a memory enhancing device that turns out to induce time travel – I just didn't buy into.  I mean, how could a single person's subjective experience warp objective reality for the rest of us?  "Oh, but you see, it's technology-enhanced, so it's more intense."  Well, some psychotic patients have pretty intense visions too, but they don't get to re-define reality on a whim either.  No, I'm not having any of the premise here.  Calling this book science fiction makes zero sense.  It's more of "a science-flavored substance" fiction, to recycle a phrase from hack TV comedy writing.

As a side note, this book might have worked if Crouch had skipped the sci-fi angle altogether and just used a woo-woo meditation method one of the characters discovers, say, deep in the Himalayas or on late-night paranormal talk radio.  Yeah, that would have been much better than bothering with force-wedging matters into sci-fi.

So, why did I bother finishing?  First off, a recommendation from Andy Weir is hard to ignore.  Secondly, and this may have a lot to do with Weir's high regards for this book, the page-to-page writing really is top-notch.  Definitely a pleasurable read, in its own "look at my skilled wordsmithing" way.  However and returning to my previous themes, this is ultimately a hollow shell of a book.

Two out of Five Stars, but only for the writing that kept the story rolling and the skill required for keeping timelines sorted out.  Not recommended.  In fact, this one exposure is enough to put me off of Blake Crouch's books altogether.

ps: If you want a real sci-fi story about time travel that results in tragedy, timeline patches, and various resulting nosebleeds, just go watch the classic movie Primer.  It has a much better treatment of time travel, explores the same themes, and won't waste your time on beautiful, empty prose.  In fact, thinking back on it, Crouch just might have borrowed the whole time-shock-nosebleed thing from Primer.  That one is a little, well, too on the nose to be otherwise.

PHM Side-Note on Accidents

Following up on last week's review of Project Hail Mary, one of the things that struck me both while reading and watching were the parallels between PHM and the Manhattan Project.  Yes, both were multinational big-budget science and engineering projects carried out in a rush, but that explosion 

boom

put a punctuation mark on things.  And while in the story the explosion did add a dramatic element, it was also the catalyst behind the major plot twist about which the entire story revolves.  Moreover, the incident very much echoes two criticality accidents at Los Alamos that happened just as and just after WWII ended.

Reenactment with inert components.  Don't try this one at home, kids.

Maybe it's my background, but while reading PHM this parallel jumped out immediately and it gave the whole book – and later movie – a ring of authenticity.  In case you want to learn more on the Manhattan Project (and perhaps get the feel for the behind the scenes action in PHM), look no farther than Richard Rhodes' fine 1986 history The Making of the Atomic Bomb.

Yeah, just go read the book.  Both of 'em, I mean.  And see the movie.

A Look at the Science Behind 'Project Hail Mary'

By no coincidence at all, it's this week's topic at Big Picture Science podcast.  Go & download & listen.

I'd put in an image, but just click through and you'll get all the image I'd put here.

Really looking forward to this movie.

Re-Reading Andy Weir's Project Hail Mary

As before, this sci-fi novel's going quickly.  Note that the movie hits theaters on March 30th.  Go read my 2021 review of the book, then get reading yourself.

Binge: Just Kinda Fun

Douglas Coupland's 2021 short story collection (60!) is a hoot to read.  In many ways its structure is reminiscent of Quentin Tarantino's 1994 now-classic movie Pulp Fiction, in that many of the stories touch onto each other, mcguffins and characters get swapped around like so many DNA sequences between interacting bacteria, and unexpected turns ensue.  Also, like all of Tarantino's movies, this book is not one for the easily offended.  (Don't give out copies to family unless you're pretty sure it'll be cool.)  Unlike Tarantino's movies it's not all slam-bang blood-soaked crime noir, but more of semi-everyday lives gone wrong, or at least very weird.

Reading through the above, it doesn't say what sort of things this book is about.  How about a guy begging for spare change outside a liquor store on a rainy night; what's his real backstory?  And then, how do a few simple acts of kindness from a passing liquor store customer change things?  (Don't worry, this isn't Dickens.)  How to give away Starbucks gift cards, creatively, and yet in a high school-appropriate manner?  Why does a seemingly normal wife-and-mom suddenly go vegan, and what are the downstream consequences?  Because there's always a downstream and there are always consequences.  And on it goes.

Anyway, it's not so much an engrossing read as an unputdownable bag of potato chips, and yes that's the reason for the book's title.  If there are any take-aways, they'd be somewhere between "There but for the grace of God go I" and "OK, I can totally see that weird shit happening to – or possibly because of – my friends and me."  And remember, there are always downstream consequences, both good and bad, that may not be immediately evident.  Just ask RFK jr.  It could happen to you.

Sci-Fi Rotten Egg? Maybe.

The upcoming movie The Astronaut – trailer clip here – looks like an adaptation of the rotten old sci-fi novel The Space Egg.  Here, read a synopsis and watch the clip, and decide for yourself.  I wonder if it is in fact an adaptation, or a re-invention of an old hack plot?

With so many good and classic sci-fi stories out there just waiting for adaptation, why bother with this junk?  Ah well, decide for yourself.  Looks pretty rank to me though.

ps: On a better note, looking around for mentions of The Space Egg on the web lead me to the site Stranger Than SF, which of course has a scathing and spoilerific review of that particular book here.  StrangerThanSF seems to be a passion project of a voracious SF reader, and there's a lot there spread around in good, bad, ugly, and indifferent.  Worth your time to poke around.

An Interesting Little Collection of Heinlein Short Stories

Last Friday over at viewfromtheporch, Tam posted a sexy pic of Sally Rand's 1938 Packard along with a link to a collection of Heinlein's short stories which has some peripheral connection to said car.  I clicked through and discovered – for the deep bargain price of $0.99 – eleven stories I'd already read and four that I hadn't!  Specifically, these are:

• Let There Be Light, about the invention of the Douglas-Martin sunscreens that figure so prominently in RAH's Future History series.  Glad to finally read it, but I can see why he omitted it from various short story collections throughout his later life.  Being his second story published, it's just not all that good.
• The Year of the Jackpot, another stinkeroo, as Heinlein termed his early fumbling works.  Still, it has some interesting ideas about what would happen if a mathematician devised a way to predict the future.  SHGT anyone?
• Project Nightmare, an early Cold War thriller about a hastily concocted team of psychics staving off nuclear blackmail – if they can just keep from falling asleep.
• Sky Lift, in which a pair of pilots give their all to deliver vital medical supplies – to Pluto.

I can vouch for the remainder of the stories.  Because they're better than the four listed, they've shown up in various other collections, most of which are on my living room shelf.  Click through to the above link and click through to Amazon for the complete list, or to buy, in which case Tam gets her affiliate cut.

Now about the publisher and illustrations, I'm not so sure.  Most of the stories seem to be from the late 30's to about 1950, so maybe the copyright has timed out?  Don't ask me, I'm not a lawyer.  The publisher and copyright are both from Ukraine, which is slightly suspect.  The illustrations are few, probably machine-generated, and don't really add much.  Maybe those are a copyright fig leaf?  Again, not a lawyer.  Will Heinlein or his spouse miss out on any royalty payments because of these (possible) shenanigans?  Pfft, they've been dead 37 and 23 years respectively, so that's not a concern.  I like to think that they'd just be glad to see some early works getting a little more airplay.  Let the dead sleep and the living read.  Onward.

Overall and despite those concerns, I'm glad to have finally read these, especially Let There Be Light.  The Douglas-Martin sunscreens are in so many of Heinlein's Future History stories that not having read this always felt like a big hole in my literary knowledge.  Turns out it wasn't, but for $0.99 the itch has been scratched.

Life is Short and Time is Tight. Read the Abstracts.

Over at Books, Bikes, & Boomsticks Tam writes on the problems associated with reading a summary.  Here, it's short, go read the whole thing: Soulless Drones

<insert schmaltzy interlude music here>

OK, we're all back.  For great art, sure, I'll agree that one has to read / listen / watch the entire piece as presented.  However, if you just want to get caught up on the n movies you missed in the Avengers movie series over the past m summers so that you can go to an afternoon matinee and enjoy it with friends – without having to spend a week of catch-up in front of the tube – nah, go ahead and skip to the Wikipedia plot summaries.  You won't have missed much anyway.  Long-series TV shows that start off promising but take a dip in the second year?  Sure, skip ahead with the summaries and see if the third year picks up to determine if it's worth your time to work through the series.  That politics-tainted speculative fiction (i.e., really bad near-future sci-fi) potboiler that everyone's talking about?  Definitely.  You'll want to know a little about what Cousin Hal or Aunt Margaret are going on about at the next family gathering, but you probably don't want to take that 500 page slog.  Again, when it comes to real art don't take any shortcuts, but when it comes to lesser works, go for the bottom line and get on with life.

Taking this a step further, who doesn't cull through the titles, then skim through the half-dozen abstracts, then really read only one or two papers each month in their favorite journals?  There just isn't time enough to keep up in a field any other way.  

Harsh Critics

A short cartoon about what various authors have said of others – and occasionally themselves – at SMBC.

Pirates!

While poking around Sundog Books last (very rainy) Saturday afternoon, I tripped across The Penguin Book of Pirates.  First thing, I had to flip to everyone's favorite New Orleans privateer, Jean Laffite.  The five-page mini-biography ends its tale with "He was the mildest manner'd man, That ever scuttled a ship or cut a throat;"

With a glowing recommendation like that, passing by this book was impossible.  Not sure I'd want him along fishing offshore however.

No mention of Capt. Pitcher however, and that is quite a tale.  (If you really want the story right now, here's a somewhat rambling 14 minute video.  And no, you could not give that accursed chunk of beachfront to me, not even if you threw in a lifetime supply of rum.  Because I suspect it would be a remarkably small quantity of rum to match a correspondingly short life expectancy.)

Book Mention: Wyrd Warfare

Yet another fun-filled short story anthology from Raconteur Press, this one highlighting what would happen when the supernatural crosses paths with armies.  It's in the same vein as David Drake's Arclight (TLDR: What to do when a bunch of soldiers in Vietnam stumble upon a crypt of unspeakable horror?  The name of the short story provides a hint).  In fact, the entire book is dedicated to Drake.  So what do we have in store?  Here you go:

• Full-on GWOT dueling wizard warfare, circa 2005.
• Undead trouble in the Philippine jungle, circa 1945.
• There are worse things than nukes or anthrax to put in an SLBM warhead, far worse.
• Camping out in Count Chockula's forest on a mission to observe and report.
• Napoleonic wizard warfare, circa 1800.
• A tale from the Valley of the Cursed Goats in Afghanistan, post-2021.
• A super-secret lab and its quirky inhabitants, looking into a minor dragon problem.
• Trouble in the Fulda Gap, worse than WWIII, 1987.  Positively Lovecraftian trouble.
• More GWOT action, this time with Marines and werewolves.  You know, the usual.
• A young grandson reaches back through time to help his grandfather, circa 1944.

That was a lot of fun, and I don't think I gave anything away in these one-liner descriptions.  If it appeals, it appeals.  My favorite?  Probably the Fulda Gap story.  Weakest?  I'll go with the dragon story, mostly because it reminded me too much of work (yes, I once worked in a very strange place).  But they're all good-to-excellent, so jump right in.

Finished the collection before getting out of bed this morning, then read about these happenings over coffee this morning (the creepy part is towards the end).  Yeesh.

'Forbidden Area' Adaptation on Playhouse 90

Last October I blogged about reading Pat Frank's novel Forbidden Area, and mentioned that there was a TV adaptation written by Rod Serling.  Found it, at long last!  Link.  (note: doesn't play on Safari, works fine on Firefox)

It's... eh.  The super-genius female lead in the novel gets demoted from being a key member of the Enemy Intentions Group to merely its secretary, and finally has a dramatic meltdown in the arms of Charlton Heston.  The central cause of why the B-99 bombers keep blowing up is tipped off way too early.  There's some two-fisted drama in the last 20 minutes that hasn't aged well.  Apart from all that, it's a decent adaptation of the fair-to-good source novel.  At an hour and a quarter length, it's probably time better spent than on what's in the theaters these days.

Book Mention: 7 Seconds to Die

Sounds pretty grim, like some kind of hard-boiled spy thriller.  Unfortunately the actual story is even more grim.  7 Seconds to Die is a history of the little-known Second Nagorno-Karabakh War that happened just four years ago.  What seemed like a resumption of a nasty border dispute between Armenia and Azerbaijan turned into a swift forty-four day clean-sweep victory for Azerbaijan.

So how did this happen?  Holding the high ground in the mountainous border region, Armenia rested on its laurels with what they imagined to be similar Soviet-era military technology as Azerbaijan.  Unbeknownst to Armenia however, Azerbaijan was re-equipping and re-training for the 21st Century with drone technology supplied by Turkey and Israel.  If this all sounds like a dress-rehearsal for the current Ukraine conflict, that's because it is.  The chief difference with the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War is that only one side had embraced the new drone technology.  The result was like a 1945 WWII armored division going up against green WWI troops from 1914.

The questions now are, why have so few people heard of this war, and what lessons can we learn from it?  For most of us here in the West, largely reliant on Western news media during the tumult of 2020, the war was over so quickly that it never quite made headlines.  As to the lessons, beyond "Don't rest on your laurels!  Keep up on technology and training," you'll have to read the book for specifics.

A Creepy Tale for This Halloween Evening

The Voice in the Well, by Justin Patrick Moore over at his site.

Yeah, it's about everything you'd want or expect for a good ghost story on Halloween.  At around 1300 words (unlucky 13! and a hundred of 'em!), it's a quick read.  Enjoy your shortening days.  I mean, shorter daylight and crisp autumn weather, not, um, you know, the other meaning of that last sentence, but take it either way you wish.  Boo!  Scary, huh?

Book Mention: Forbidden Area

Originally serialized as Seven Days to Never, (a much better title) this 1956 Pat Frank nuclear thriller delivers.  Growing up in a small town in north Florida in the 70's, Frank's Alas Babylon got passed around my group of friends sometime around 8th grade.  "That's too scary for you kids" the more prudish adults said, it was quasi-contraband in middle school, but read it we did.  While Forbidden Area was only published three years prior, it has a very post-WWII feel whereas Alas Babylon is firmly set in the Cold War.  The shift in tone is subtle, but quite noticeable.  In fact the main plot line, about Soviet saboteurs being delivered to U.S. shores via submarine, is lifted directly from the WWII German Operation Pastorius.

So, a synopsis: Soviet sub drops off four saboteurs on a remote Florida east coast beach.  A deep-secret DoD think tank, the "Enemy Intensions Group" surmises that the Soviets are in a wind-up for a nuclear first strike knock-out punch.  Paths intertwine, action happens, sleuthing occurs, more action... and no more because that'd be a spoiler!

One flaw in this book is nailing down the year in which things happen.  On one hand, most of the characters are WWII veterans of one sort or another with about 5 to 10 years' more experience and rank.  That would place it somewhere circa 1950 – 1955, and that matches the book's feel.  However, the B-47 and B-52 bombers were all mothballed and replaced by a fleet of "B-99"s – a high-flying beast that more or less corresponds to the never-built B-70 fleet.  That would place it in perhaps the mid-to-late 1960's.  ICBMs in this book are just coming online, but in secretive ways, and in limited numbers.  Finally the Soviet submarines and their nuclear strike capabilities are like a late-1940's fever dream based on WWII pipe dreams.  So, as for the real year?  It's a work of fiction, so take your pick.

Apart from the anachronistic aspects of the characters and military hardware, a second flaw the book suffers from is an excess of "tell, don't show."  Frank had much improved his writing by the time of Alas Babylon to reverse this to "show, don't tell," but in this novel it makes the story drag at times.

Having said all that, this book does fairly accurately anticipate the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, if not in specific detail, then more in the general nuclear brinksmanship and skulduggery departments.  For that alone it is worth the read.  It's an interesting time capsule, and a look back at a very different time here in America.

ps: It was adapted by none other than Rod Serling into the first episode of Playhouse 90, with a cast of names you'd easily recognize.  Probably worth digging around for a copy.

pps: Video of that Playhouse 90 episode found!