Special Circumstances

Planet Quest by Ken Croswell

The majority of popular science books are about cosmology, gravitation and/or quantum physics. But there are dismally few books about astronomy or astrophysics. So a book about the greatest astronomy story in this century is welcome news.

If you are remotely interested in astronomy, then this book is a must-read. Furthermore, I was pleased with how Ken Croswell has kept the book short enough to read over a single weekend but still included a fairly detailed history about the search and discovery of planets both within and outside our solar system. Croswell does a competent job in giving the reader enough peripheral knowledge such as theories of planetary formation in our solar system to give a context to the later chapters.

Croswell starts off gently with the discoveries of Uranus, Neptune and Pluto and describes the futile search for other planets in our solar system: Vulcan (which was postulated to exist within the orbit of Mercury to describe Mercury's eccentric orbit, later explained by Einstein); and the chimeric Planet X (the tenth planet).

Croswell next catalogs the controversy over `brown dwarfs' and whether such `failed' stars can be referred to as planets. The description of the varying methods used in discovering extrasolar planets such as the Doppler shift and astrometry (measuring the wobble size of a star) was adequate enough to understand the results although I would have preferred more details.

Surprisingly, the first extrasolar planets were discovered around the pulsar PSR B1257+12 and not around a main sequence star (in fact when planets were discovered finally around a main sequence star this historical precedent was not reported at all). Soon after this amidst fierce rivalry between the various teams working on this problem the first planet around a more `normal' star was discovered: 51 Pegasi. The controversy surrounding its announcement to the press was unfortunate and is documented here in full. In a field where retractions of claims are as common as the claims themselves, the story of the confirmation of extrasolar planets is also interesting. The final list at the close of the book includes 47 Ursae Majoris, Rho¹ Cancri A, Tau Boötis A, and Upsilon Andromedae. All except for 47 Ursae Majoris are gas giants orbiting closer to their suns than Mercury orbits our sun. Of course, these are just the first results of an ongoing search.

This book also has a few tables of data that are useful as a reference: e.g. a list of the known stars within 12 light years and their properties. And, by the way, did you know that Copernicus was Polish?

For recent news about extrasolar planets visit the Extrasolar Planet Encyclopedia.

There is another book on the same topic: "Other Worlds : The Search for Life in the Universe" by Michael D. Lemonick. Also, "In Search of Planet Vulcan" by Richard Baum and William Sheehan is about the early 19th century futile search for a planet inside the orbit of Mercury.

Update on Tue Aug 31 2004: Recent news stories on detecting small "Earth-like" planets.

%T Planet Quest
%T :the Epic Discovery of Alien Solar Systems
%A Ken Croswell
%I The Free Press
%D 1997
%G ISBN: 0684832526 (hc)
%P 324
%K science, astronomy

Review written: 1999/09/17

Destination Mars by Martin Caidin and Jay Barbree

This is basically a coffee table book about Mars. The pictures are good but the text is mostly insipid. It's 228 pages long, but can be read easily in a couple of hours. If you haven't read much about Mars before, it is a useful introduction to the topic.

As the subtitle suggests, this book is about the influence of the planet Mars on human myth, literature and art. In myth, the book only deals with Greek and Roman legends. Science-fiction and non-fiction is covered in more depth from early works like "The War of the Worlds" by H. G. Wells upto "Red Mars" by Kim Stanley Robinson. It is also about the various milestones of the scientific exploration of Mars which is covered in reasonable depth for the size of the book. And there are quite a few pictures from the Mariner and Viking missions and from the Hubble telescope. Since the book was published before Pathfinder and the Mars Global Surveyor missions it feels a bit out of date. The writing is erratic and some topics are included which are quite unrelated to Mars and there is the occasional typo. But the pictures are pretty.

The proposed topic of the book is a big one and "Destination Mars" points out all the highlights but does not pretend to be an exhaustive source of information.

%T Destination Mars
%T :in Art, Myth and Science
%A Martin Caidin
%A Jay Barbree
%A :with Susan Wright
%I Penguin Studio
%D 1997
%G ISBN: 0670860204
%P 228
%K science, literature

Review written: 1999/08/21

A Choice of Gods by Clifford D. Simak

Clifford Simak was born and raised in south-western Wisconsin and throughout his career he has been careful to allow his rural background to permeate his writings in science-fiction: a trait that is, to my knowledge, singular to Simak within the genre of hard-sf.

This book with its wonderfully ambiguous title (can you pick out more than two alternative interpretations?) is not considered to be his best work (most critics pick "Way Station" as the quintessential Simak book), but I highly recommend this book. It has big ideas, strange robots and stranger post-humans. The blurb on the back of the book has a uncharacteristically good synopsis, so I'll just reproduce it here:

One night in July, 2135, there were some eight billion people on Earth. The next morning there were perhaps 400. There was no clue to what had happened to the world's population -- but, over the centuries that followed, still stranger things occurred.

The human lifespan now stretched to millenia instead of decades, and much of the remaining population developed the ability to move at will among the stars -- and abandoned their homeworld for a life in deep space.

Then, after 3000 years, a star-rover discovered what had happened to Earth's original inhabitants -- and that they were coming to reclaim their heritage. Those who had stayed behind knew, with a growing fear, that the mystery of what had been done to Earth and why it was about to be solved ... in a way that would change humanity forever.

If you liked this novel, try "Way Station" as well.

%T A Choice of Gods
%A Clifford D. Simak
%I Ballantine Books
%D 1972
%G ISBN: 0345298683
%P 190
%K science-fiction

Review written: 1999/08/20

Takedown by Tsutomu Shimomura

This is a non-fiction account of the famous arrest of hacker/cracker Kevin Mitnick written by the person who tracked him down by deciphering computer system logs and good old-fashioned detective work.

For all its flaws, this modern day Sherlock Holmes adventure is pretty captivating. This is surprising because there are no sympathetic characters in this story. Sherlock Holmes could afford to be annoyingly over-confident and dismissive of everyone else because he was a fictional character. Those traits don't sit so well with Tsutomu, who seems to dislike almost everyone he comes into contact with: from his graduate student Andrew Gross all the way to the NSA. Only Richard Feynman and his love-interest Julia are spared. I wonder if Julia was included here as a parallel with Clifford Stoll's "The Cuckoo's Egg".

Surprisingly, John Markoff does not play the role of Watson in this story as Tsutomu writes this book in the first person. In fact apart from a small part, Markoff has barely any role here. The fact that Tsutomu took over complete control over the description of events is both good and bad. Tsutomu gives a lucid descriptions of the details behind all of the cracking hijinks; the description of the IP spoofing attack and the surprisingly effective X11 screen capture hack itself is worth the price of admission. The technical details are the saving grace of this book. On the other hand, the description of all the events are completely one-sided, biased and Tsutomu has a naive good vs. evil philosophy against Kevin Mitnick. Tsutomu writes himself into a stereotypical Hiro Protagonist role. Not to mention the annoyingly long and pompous sub-title to the book (see the book ISBN information).

Inspite of all these flaws, it's still worth reading. Although read "The Cuckoo's Egg" first; Clifford Stoll is much easier to get along with.

For a diametrically opposed point of views visit kevinmitnick.com. The website of the book takedown.com has extremely interesting telnet sessions captured from Kevin Mitnick's break-ins.

%T Takedown
%T :the pursuit and capture of Kevin Mitnick, 
%T  America's Most Wanted Computer Outlaw 
%T  -- By the Man who Did it
%A Tsutomu Shimomura
%A :with John Markoff
%I Hyperion
%D 1996
%G ISBN: 0786889136
%P 324
%K non-fiction, computer science

Review written: 1999/08/20

Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier by Katie Hafner and John Markoff

A mainstream depiction of the cracker subculture: this books lacks many of the technical details which make these kind of stories interesting to read.

The book has three short stories about some of the more famous cases of computer crimes from the late 80s to the early 90s. There is the now extremely famous case of Kevin Mitnick (also the subject of another book "Takedown"), the story of Robert Tappan Morris -- `inventor' of the first internet worm, and the chronicles of the German cracker clique called Project Equalizer which formed out of the Chaos Computer Club (who also appear as dramatis personae in "The Cuckoo's Egg").

There is surprisingly little overlap between "The Cuckoo's Egg" and the story of the Chaos Computer Club presented here. The story of Kevin Mitnick (minus the platitudes) is useful as a counterbalance to the story presented in "Takedown" which is singularly one-sided.

There is no ambivalence in the writing: cracking is considered to be a VERY BAD thing and no effort is made to understand why someone would spend all of their time for very little financial gain doing something increasingly considered as terrorism. The only exception made here is for Robert Tappan Morris, which is ironic, because that part of the book seems to be trying to uncover exactly such a double standard.

For another point of view on the hostility against the cracker subculture look at "The Hacker Crackdown" by Bruce Sterling which is freely available online.

%T Cyberpunk
%T :Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier
%A Katie Hafner
%A John Markoff
%I Touchstone Books
%D 1995
%G ISBN: 0684818620
%P 368
%K non-fiction, computer science

Review written: 1999/08/17

The Cuckoo's Egg by Clifford Stoll

Stoll's story starts with the 75-cent accounting error that first tips him off to the uninvited visitors to the Lawrence Berkeley Lab computers. The online trail that he uncovers is interspersed with details of his personal life (and this is more interesting than you would imagine). The trail eventually leads to Hanover, Germany and to the Project Equalizer plot.

Project Equalizer was an improbable initiative by the KGB to pay the West German Chaos Computer Club members to hack into United States military computers. In the end, the information that the hackers involved uncovered was not judged worth the expense by the KGB, and this book is the story of how Clifford Stoll eventually got the Chaos Club members arrested.

Stoll is ambivalent between his condemnation of the crackers and whether perhaps his liberal ideals are being strained by collaborating with the CIA. Should he be helping institutions which he is not particularly fond of but whose members are easy to get along with since they share his indignation against the crackers. Stoll's argument against the crackers eventually settles on the fact that the crackers are corrupting the fragile trust on which the networks are based on making these protocols increasingly less open in the future.

This is the most entertaining of all the various `cracker/hacker' books that came out of the late-80s.

After reading "Takedown", another cracker pursuit story, it is interesting to compare Tsutomu Shimomura with Clifford Stoll. It is surprising how good-natured Clifford Stoll is as he chronicles how he tracked down the people responsible for cracking into the Lawrence Berkeley Lab computers in the mid-80s. He once calls these crackers `varmints' no less.

For more background information on the Chaos Computer Club, see "Cyberpunk" by Katie Hafner and John Markoff.

%T The Cuckoo's Egg
%T :Tracking a Spy through the Maze of Computer Espionage
%A Clifford Stoll
%I Pocket Books
%D 1989
%G ISBN: 0621726889
%P 326
%K non-fiction, computer science

Review written: 1999/08/24

John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener: from Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death by Steve Heims

On the face of it, John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener have little to do with each other. They did not collaborate in their professional careers and did not know each other very well. But the subtitle to the book is the key to Steve Heims intentions in putting the biographies of these two men into one book. He wants to discover what in the background of a scientist is responsible for such brilliant minds to collaborate in the construction of weapons of mass destruction and policies of mutually assured destruction.

John von Neumann was aggresively brilliant and made several contributions to mathematics and physics. He was also a key technical adviser and proponent of the nuclear proliferation conducted by the United States in order to target the Soviet Union. Norbert Wiener was arguably equally brilliant but sacrificed several aspects of his career as a scientist because he refused to create anything that could be misused to a destructive end. He practised an applied moral and social philosophy in his attitude towards technology. This is the juxtaposition that Heims offers in this book. A story of two men and their research programs.

What Heims seems to be after is the moral or ethical core of any scientist. Should you fund your research if you know that it will lead to an eventual misuse of it antithetical to your moral values (although von Neumann seemed to truly hate the Soviet Union enough to consider mutually assured destruction a valid option for the greater good). Heims gives us a crucial insight into this question. It is even more to his credit that Heims follows this objective without sacrificing any details in the biographical details of these scientists.

Those interested in these issues should also read "The First Circle" by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, where issues of ethics in research are covered in a fictional setting in a research station gulag in Stalinist Russia.

%T John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener
%T :from Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death
%A Steve Heims
%I MIT Press
%D 1980
%G ISBN: 026258056X (pb)
%G ISBN: 0262081059 (hc)
%P 547
%K science, biography

Review written: 1999/08/15

Coming of Age in the Milky Way by Timothy Ferris

The topic of this book is one to which no single book can do justice. Given the scope of the enterprise it is no surprise that the book falls short of its goal. However, if you have to read a single book about early astronomy, the gradual acceptance by humans of the laws of classical physics, the realization of subatomic particles, the evolution of life on earth, and the origin of the universe then you could do much worse than Ferris' offering.

In fact, if you are new to popular science writing then this is an excellent first book to read. Ferris also brings a unique historical view to his writing which is mostly missing from many popular physics books which usually spiral around the theory of black holes and quantum physics and so Ferris' book is a good companion to other books in this field.

Even if you have read everything there is to read about stellar physics from Kip Thorne and Stephen Hawking; and imbibed all the natural selection you can from Dawkins, there is still something you should read in this book. Apart from the historical perspective, Ferris in the chapter "Mind and Matter" gives a beautiful description of a galactic network which will someday be used to transmit and store information across impossibly vast distances. Apparently, Ferris has returned to a similar topics in another book "The Mind's Sky".

%T Coming of Age in the Milky Way
%A Timothy Ferris
%I William Morrow and Company
%D 1988
%G ISBN: 0688058892
%P 495
%K science, cosmology

Review written: 1999/08/14

The Inverted World by Christopher Priest

I had reached the age of six hundred and fifty miles.

This is the kind of first line that I read science-fiction for. Within a few pages you are introduced to a universe where the sun and the other heavenly bodies are hyperbolic in shape and where an entire population inhabits a city moving inexorably on its rails towards some unknown destination.

I thought I should introduce some books that I read when I was very young that were crucial in my adult fascination with science-fiction. Books like this one which do not seem to have aged at all. The ideas still provide that healthy dose of `sense-of-wonder'. I still remember reading this book in one sitting during a warm Bombay summer day (and night).

Be careful about reading too many reviews of this book. It's one of those books that can be easily ruined with too much information.

This book is not as well known as a classic in the sci-fi community, which is a shame.

%T The Inverted World
%T :a novel
%A Christopher Priest
%I Harper and Row
%D 1974
%G ISBN: 0060134216
%P 240
%K science-fiction

Review written: 1999/08/14

New Maps of Hell: a Survey of Science Fiction by Kingsley Amis

Kingsley Amis was already a fairly well-established literary figure after the publication of his "Lucky Jim", and his detailed analysis of the science-fiction of his time is surprising since even now science-fiction is all but ignored by the literary critics (this is changing but not rapidly).

Here he lays out a map of the various science-fiction that had been published until 1960 (still early days for the genre). His sweep is broad and touches on generalities that are relevant even for today's brand of science-fiction with its nanotechnology and cellular automata.

Amis talks at length about fantasy and space opera and the various visions of utopia that permeate science-fiction. Apart from the general points this book makes, there is also a wealth of information about the science-fiction of the 40s and 50s including people like Sheckley, Heinlein, Clarke, Miller, van Vogt, Kornbluth, Pohl, Asimov and other luminaries. It is somewhat surprising that this book has not dated much even though science-fiction has changed immensely since the 50s.

This book was formed out of a series of lectures delivered by Amis in the spring of 1959 as part of the Christian Gauss Seminars in Criticism at Princeton University.

%T New Maps of Hell
%T :a Survey of Science Fiction
%A Kingsley Amis
%I Ballantine Books
%D 1960
%G ISBN: 0405063210
%G LC: 60-5441
%P 161
%K science-fiction

Review written: 1999/08/14

Queen of Angels by Greg Bear

The book opens on 12.23.2047 with the world undergoing yet another millenium fever for the `binary' millenium: 2^11. The plot is set in these last few days before 2048. The concern over the date, while not plausible in itself, is a concept useful in creating a sense of a Singularity: a sense that simply surviving a date will transform the world.

This book is intended to be an exploration of consciousness, intelligence and free will. There are three interleaving stories which are related only by this common theme.

Greg Bear tries something very ambititious in this book; unfortunately he does not succeed. However, the result is still interesting, but if you're looking for a representative Greg Bear novel there are much better ones out there ("Moving Mars" for example).

The main story follows a hardboiled LA detective Mary Choy who is assigned to find out why a famous American poet and author Emmanuel Goldsmith has killed 6 of his friends. Following standard cyberpunk tradition, Mary has been completely transformed physically and mentally by modern nanotechnology: a process called transforming. The other (more interesting) thread follows the exploration of the planetary system of Alpha Centauri B by an artificially intelligent probe called AXIS. The third thread follows Richard Fettle who is one of Goldsmith's friends who has to deal with the murder of his friends by his mentor. Greg Bear uses a hypothetical architecture of the mind called the Country which is modeled vaguely on Minsky's "Society of Mind".

Unfortunately, the content in this book outstrips the length. It could have been an interesting, even recommendable book at less than half its current size (about 400 pages). As it stands it is sluggish and self-indulgent.

Greg Bear seems to have read a lot of Harlan Ellison while writing the first few hundred pages of this book which is filled with phrases like `dolphinslick' and `sherlocking'.

Greg Bear cites the following non-fiction works as inspiration for the ideas in this book: "The Engines of Creation" by K. Eric Drexler (Doubleday/Anchor), "Bound for the Stars" by Saul J. Adelman and Benjamin Adelman (Prentice-Hall/Spectrum) and "Mirror Matter" by Robert L. Forward and Joel Davis (Wiley).

%T Queen of Angels
%A Greg Bear
%I Warner Books
%D 1990
%G ISBN: 0446361305 (pb)
%G ISBN: 0446514004 (hc)
%P 420
%K science-fiction

Review written: 1999/08/15

Tehanu: the last book of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin

Between 1968 and 1972, Le Guin published the Earthsea trilogy: "A Wizard of Earthsea", "The Tombs of Atuan" and "The Farthest Shore". The Earthsea trilogy is that rare brand of fantasy trilogies that is truly engaging and in a new voice that does not mimic any of the traditional bell-wethers of fantasy literature, whether you consider John Milton, Lord Dunsany, J.R.R. Tolkien, or Mervyn Peake.

In 1990, Le Guin decided to add a fourth book to this trilogy: a novel named Tehanu. The perils of established authors revisting their earlier triumphs are quite familiar. The failure rate is almost complete (you can see a perfect example of this in Arthur C. Clarke). In this case, however, the trepidation is uncalled for. This book is the perfect follow-up to the earlier trilogy.

In the Earthsea trilogy, the first book followed Ged, the second was the story of Tenar, while the third returned to Ged. So, logically, Tehanu returns to the story of Tenar. As the story opens you learn that The Eaten One who renounced her faith in "The Tombs of Atuan" has left behind the study of high magic and the companionship of a powerful mage to lead a simple life as a farmer's wife. The story begins as Tenar's life becomes intertwined with that of an abused and horribly burnt little girl when Tenar adopts her as her child. Ged does make an appearance later in the book, but the events will probably not be as you expect them to be. There are many surprises: including the rejection of magic. While the Earthsea trilogy had a balanced view of what magic could accomplish, in this book magic is mostly shunned by the characters: in Ged's case, because of his previous life. After reading Danny Yee's review (see Danny's Reviews), I agree with his conclusion that Tehanu to a large extent abandons the Taoist bent of the original Earthsea book. However, while it stands apart from the other Earthsea books, it is still a notable achievement.

The title of this book contains the promise The Last Book of Earthsea. This is a promise broken by Le Guin in 2001 when she wrote a fifth book in this series entitled "The Other Wind". Defying all odds, even this overextended visit to Earthsea is not accompanied by a repetition of old ideas. Le Guin seems to re-open the story only when she has something new to say.

Ursula Le Guin has always extended the genre of fantasy fiction, for instance, her series of Hainish short stories typically categorized as fantasy read more like anthropological science fiction. Her Hainish short stories (which can be easily found in the "Year's Best Science Fiction" collections edited by Gardner Dozois) and "The Left Hand of Darkness".

%T Tehanu
%T :the last book of Earthsea
%A Ursula K. Le Guin
%I Bantam Books
%D 1990
%G ISBN: 0553288733 (pb)
%G ISBN: 0689315953 (hc)
%P 226
%K fantasy

Review written: 2000/11/18