September 29, 2005
Neutron Star by Larry Niven
Reading this classic collection of short stories is a bit like watching the Marx Brothers. You know that the contributions were seminal and shaped the future in the genre, but everything is dated, implausibly created and hokey in comparison to modern examples of the genre.
Many of the stories, while hard sf in spirit are too caught up in the Apollo era which glorified astronauts over scientists. Scientific facts that should be obvious within the context of each story are `discovered' by astronaut flyboys in many stories in this volume.
The most compelling aspect of this collection of stories is that it fleshes out a single imagined universe constructed by Niven -- the so-called Known Space series of stories that form the basis of many of his short stories and novels. Many future sf worlds, including those imagined by Iain M. Banks, Bruce Sterling among others show their roots in Niven's fiction.
`Neutron Star' (published in Worlds of If, October 1966) is perhaps Niven's most famous short story. It won the Hugo award in the year it was published. In retrospect, the plot seems ludicrous. Today, you can find Java applets that show you how light bends around neutron stars -- making it quite implausible that astronauts going to visit a neutron star would not be aware of the basic unsurprising physical facts that they would encounter well before they would reach their destination.
`A Relic of the Empire' is a good old sense-of-wonder story with a good invention (starseeds) in a stale plot.
`At the Core' is an attempt to recreate his success with Neutron Star. It also strains credulity -- read "Diaspora" by Greg Egan which has a similar plot twist but in a much better constructed setting.
`Flatlander' is also about discovering a strange natural phenomenon. The story is well constructed and the twist is quite good. Subsequently, however, the central idea has been used in far too many stories for there to be any novelty left in the idea.
`The Ethics of Madness' and `The Handicapped' are the best stories in the collection. `The Handicapped' promises to be the best hard sf story here but is spoiled somewhat by taking recourse to telepathy and other pseudo-science. It's still a good sf story, however.
`Grendel' closes the collection with the story of an alien abduction of very different kind.
%T Neutron Star %A Larry Niven %I Ballantine Books %D 1968 %G ISBN: 0356026523 (pb) %P 285 %K science-fiction
Review written: 2001/08/22
The Engines of God by Jack McDevitt
The Engines of God ultimately is a space opera novel posing as hard-sf, all the time promising to become a really interesting novel, until the pages run out and disappointment sets in.
The thought of first contact with an alien race only through their artifacts is one that is close to the heart of science fiction. Surprisingly, this kind of plot has rarely been handled well in the sf literature. The best known example in my experience still remains "Rendezvous with Rama".
The premise is a great one: after the discovery of superluminal travel, humans discover several alien artifacts, most of them works of art. One of them is even found on Saturn's moon Iapetus. Humans seem to have temporally missed these alien Monument Makers by tens of thousands of years, but archaeologists search for clues to their disappearance in their monuments and in the excavated cities of other missing alien races found on planets that orbit stars in the neighbourhood of our solar system.
The book sets up this grand mystery of the ultimate fate of these aliens, and there is adequate sense-of-wonder about the painstaking setup of the entire universe and the archeological details of these dead civilizations. Unfortunately, this means that the entire novel depends on a brilliant resolution of this mystery that is interesting but also accounting for the numerous clues that were collected during the length of the book. And there is no such brilliant resolution. The answer when it comes is strained, incomplete and uninteresting, the worst kind of outcome for a novel longer than 400 pages.
The plotting attempts to have it both ways with the sensibility of hard-sf permeating the presentation of the archeology of alien artifacts, but with pointless capers and life-threatening adventures thrown into the storyline for no reason other than to get rid of some of the characters and to make the survivors seem somewhat heroic. The glue between these varieties of plot does not hold together.
Strangely, in this novel, while technology has advanced, the political situation seems to have remained exactly the same. This fact is puzzling but never explained.
Also strange is the similarity of all the other worlds discovered by humans to the life that arose on Earth. Only after about 300 pages, McDevitt offers an explanation: `Nature chooses the simplest way'. There are so many things wrong with such a statement that one barely knows where to begin. One suspects that it is not nature's limitation so much as it is the author's lack of imagination.
%T The Engines of God %A Jack McDevitt %I New York: Ace Books %D 1994 %G ISBN: 0441002846 (pb) %P 419 %K science-fiction
Review written: 2001/04/01
The Salaryman's Wife by Sujata Massey
Rei Shimura stumbles into a murder during her New Year vacation to Shiroyama. She has a dead-end job as an English teacher for a corporation that makes kitchen appliances. She would rather be an antiques dealer, but instead she lives in a Tokyo slum. Her vacation was going to be her time to be alone and browse around for antiques in picturesque old Japanese towns. Instead, she is a suspect in a murder investigation.
Rei is Japanese-American and while she can speak fluently, albeit with an accent, she has a tough time with reading kanji. She seems to be living in Tokyo, dealing with the close-minded clannish nature of the Japanese people, only because she wants to be independent and far away from her parents who live in California.
The high profile murder and her close involvement in it has now made Rei a target for both the police detectives and the paparazzi. Rei struggles with her alienation in trying to find the true reason behind the original murder.
While the arc of the story sustains interest, the prose is workmanlike and at times is outright awkward. There is almost no creation of suspense in the writing. Crucial or violent events happen in the same flow as the rest of the novel. Events never almost happen, they simply transpire.
Rather than have a glossary in the back for those terminally lacking in general knowledge, the text explains each occurence of fairly obvious concepts like the `yakuza', or who directed The Seven Samurai. At the same time, terms like `Ranma' go unexplained. Perhaps this was because of compulsive editing caused by the publisher's low opinion in the intelligence of their target demographic.
This book won the Agatha award for best first novel in 1998.
Related to the events described in this book: there was a series on hostessing in Tokyo that ran on salon.com that is worth reading before or after reading this novel.
%T The Salaryman's Wife %A Sujata Massey %I Harper Paperbacks %D 1997 %G ISBN: 0061044431 (pb) %P 424 %K crime-fiction
Review written: 2001/06/13
September 28, 2005
The Code Book: The Evolution of Secrecy from Mary, Queen of Scots to Quantum Cryptography by Simon Singh
There have been many books that have explored the history, the scientific and engineering contributions and the mathematics behind cryptography. One of the most comprehensive early books on the topic was "Secret and Urgent, the story of codes and ciphers" by Fletcher Pratt (Blue Ribbon Books, 1942). More recently, "The Codebreakers; The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication from Ancient Times to the Internet" by David Kahn attempted a detailed history of cryptography. The emphasis in Kahn's book was on the historical details, more or less assuming a familiarity with the mathematics behind the algorithms.
Of late, popular writing about mathematics is better than ever. Many subjects previously thought too obscure have had skilled writers tackle the exposition of these subjects for a layperson audience. As a result, Simon Singh can attempt to explain in somewhat more detail the development of crypographic methods including all the math and the details of the ingenuity behind these methods. But one should keep in mind that this is a book for popular consumption -- those deeply interested in cryptography should pick up one of the many textbooks on the matter and read David Kahn's book for the history. This book is for those who want to read a compelling and important story.
Singh's book is a welcome addition to the selection of books about cryptography. You'll find some stories in Fletcher Pratt's book which don't make it into "The Code Book". And while David Kahn's book attempts to be far more comprehensive by being more than a 1000 pages long, Singh's narrative is trimmer and will inform you about the techniques and the history in a smaller dose.
Rather than concentrating on telling all the stories in the history of cryptography, Singh chooses a few important ones and tells them with their context and without sacrificing details (at least until the last chapters of the book). Many details are relegated to appendices which should not be skipped.
Singh describes the development of cryptographic methods as a result of co-evolutionary behaviour of those who encrypt messages to secure them (usually in a war with lives at stake) and those who are equally compelled to decrypt these messages. At some point, encryption methods seem to be unbreakable and induces a sense of security for the codemakers who think that their ciphers are unbreakable, until new methods are invented for their decipherment rendering the old encryption methods extinct and making way for a search for new forms of encryption and cycle repeats itself.
Singh also includes a chapter about the decipherment of ancient scripts which is unusual for a book on cryptography. But as the name suggests, such methods of de-cipher-ment have a lot in common with the methods of cryptography. Singh picks the examples of the decipherment of the ancient Egyptian script and that of the Linear B script from Crete. Singh avoids the uncomfortable example of the Mayan script to which various cryptographic techniques were applied to no avail, until the linguistic insight of the Russian philologist Knorosov provided success in decipherment.
The narrative also includes the story of the Navajo code talkers. And to drive home the wartime nature of cryptography the narrative includes stories like the following:
If you so much as held up your head six inches you were gone, the fire was so intense. And then in the wee hours, with no relief on our side or theirs, there was a dead standstill. It must have gotten so that this one Japanese couldn't take it anymore. He got up and yelled and screamed at the top of his voice and dashed over our trench, swinging a long samurai sword. I imagine he was shot from 25 to 40 times before he fell.
There was a buddy with me in the trench. But that Japanese had cut him across the throat, clear through to the cords on the back of his neck. He was still gasping through his windpipe. And the sound of him trying to breathe was horrible. He died, of course. When the Jap struck, warm blood spattered all over my hand that was holding the microphone. I was calling in code for help. They tell me that in spite of what happened, every syllable of my message came through.
From Doris Paul's book, The Navajo Code Talkers
The book also includes a detailed chapter on quantum cryptography. Since it is still in its budding stages, it is mostly a description of the pioneers in the field. The descriptions of quantum decryption are admirably done, but the explanations that accompany the story of quantum encryption methods are somewhat rushed and should've been presented as carefully as the earlier methods were.
The most admirable thing about Singh's writing is the attention to detail in the explanation of the various methods. He does not hurry through explanations of the Enigma or even the RSA algorithm. He provides several examples, works through them, and also provides metaphors and analogues to help understanding the algorithm. With this three-fold presentation, almost everyone should find something to keep them interested in the presentation.
There are some missteps in the writing. The descriptions of cryptographic techniques earlier in the book are longer and more lucid while those towards the end of the book seem rushed. Many historical details, especially about Mary, Queen of Scots are included at length, while details of events towards the end of the book from the near future are shortened drastically. There are several typographic errors to do with missing fonts and a few cases of lousy editing -- unforgivable lapses in a book that costs US $25. Also, a quick search on amazon provides several editions of "The Code Book" all of them written by Simon Singh but each with a different subtitle, some of them with 'Mary, Queen of Scots' and other citing 'Ancient Egypt'.
%T The Code Book %T :The Evolution of Secrecy from Mary, Queen of Scots to Quantum Cryptography %A Simon Singh %I Doubleday %D 1999 %G ISBN: 0385495315 (hc) %P 402 %K science, computer-science, cryptography, linguistics
Review written: 2001/10/16
The Perilous Frontier: Nomadic Empires and China, 221 BC to AD 1757 by Thomas Barfield
The nomads of Inner Asia have remained a subject of fascination and controversy into modern times: the stereotype of barbarians who were both feared and despised, or romantically portrayed as wild and free by those who admired them. However, most histories fail to make the region and its people comprehensible. These accounts consist of seemingly random events presented chronologically, with one obscure tribe following another. When the nomads did make an appearance on the stage of world history by invading their neighbours, such events were treated as a form of natural history, like a plague of locusts.
Barfield's thesis is simple, and its basic premise is laid out in the introduction itself: the creation of a powerful state by the seeming consolidation of the steppe tribes was a result of a natural opposition to its sedentary neighbours, particularly China, with whom they had a complex relationship of extracted tributes and mutual distrust. In their long shared history, a collapse of the Chinese dynasty usually resulted in the collapse of the nomadic one. The great expansion by Chinggis Khan in the 13th century is explained by Barfield within the framework laid out by this theory. However this is not a popular history book -- far from it. The prose is terse and assumes a lot of the reader.
However, if you have ever despaired at the simplistic or harebrained documentaries about Chinggis Khan, or if you want to get further insight into how nomadic cultures in Central Asia were organized and the complex history of the region, then this book is a must-read. While it takes quite a bit of effort to read, the finely textured detail of history will shine through and dazzle the patient reader.
Other notable books in this topic are: Owen Lattimore's classic "Inner Asian Frontiers of China".
Contents
- Introduction: The Steppe Nomadic World (Nomadic Pastoralism, Tribal Organization)
- The Steppe Tribes United: The Hsiung-nu Empire (Foreign Affairs - the Han connection, Hsiung-nu Civil Wars)
- The Collapse of Central Order: The Rise of Foreign Dynasties (Hsien-pi ``Empire'', Ch'in and Liang, the T'o-pa, the Jou-jan, the Sinification of the T'o-pa Wei)
- The Turkish Empires and T'ang China (A Chinese Khagan, the Uighur Empire)
- The Manchurian Candidates (The Khitan Liao Dynasty, the Jurchen Chin Dynasty conquers China)
- The Mongol Empire (The Rise of Chinggis Khan, the Yüan Dynasty)
- Steppe Wolves and Forest Tigers: The Ming, Mongols and Manchus (Mongolia in Post-Yüan Era, the Oirats and the Ming, Altan Khan and the Ming Capitulation, the Rise of the Manchus, the Early Ch'ing state)
- The Last of the Nomad Empires: The Ch'ing Incorporation of Mongolia and Zungharia (Manchu conquest of China, the Zunghars -- last of the Steppe Empires)
- Epilogue: On the Decline of the Mongols
%T The Perilous Frontier %T :Nomadic Empires and China, 221 BC to AD 1757 %A Thomas J. Barfield %I Blackwell %D 1989 %G ISBN: 1557863245 (pb) %P 325 %K history, anthropology
Review written: 2002/02/23
September 07, 2005
River Beneath The River by Alu Basu
... I have become aware of the many dangers that lurk behind the writer of fiction. The worst of them are:
- The idea that the writer must be a sociologist and a politician, adjusting himself to what are called social dialectics.
- Greed for money and quick recognition.
- Forced originality -- namely, the illusion that pretentious rhetoric, precious innovations in style, and playing with artificial symbols can express the basic and ever-changing nature of human relations, or reflect the combinations and complications of heredity and environment.
These verbal pitfalls of so-called ``experimental'' writing have done damage even to genuine talent ... Literature can very well describe the absurd, but it should never become absurd itself.
-- Issac Bashevis Singer, In the Author's note to The Collected Stories, a selection of his best stories
This novel is a strange tour de force. Part dirge for the future of India, and part fictionalized and thinly disguised history of the violent Naxalite communist movement of West Bengal from the mid-1960s.
The plot of this novel, such as it is, moves between one storyline set in 2050 in the village of Phansijhora, where Malvik Beriya is an over-educated consultant trying to manage his employment problems in a strange economic landscape, in an India colonized by multinational companies. The other storyline is set in 1965, not far from Phansijhora, where the Prince of Arambari loses his kingdom to a violent Marxist-Leninist movement that is populated by the oppressed lower-caste inhabitants of Arambari and young Bengali intellectuals from Calcutta who cross over to China hoping for military aid.
Apart from the free rein afforded by a fictional account of the Naxalite movement, it isn't clear what Alu Basu is driving at. It could be a complex exploration of heredity, or it could simply be a refutation of each of the tenets laid out by Isaac Bashevis Singer in the quote (reproduced above) that appears at the beginning of the book. There is no easy answer, at least for me, to the structure of this novel. If the scenes of incest between Malvik Beriya and his daughter, 12 year old, Neenia are not disturbing enough, the recurring rape and torture scenes might be.
At least one statement is true about this book: it is entirely original. It is apparently entirely alienated from every philosophy and is distant and unsympathetic towards almost every character in this novel. Alu Basu has a particular knack for nihilism and cynicism and this novel seems to address philosophical concerns of the present through the creation of a dystopian future for India. However, in this philosophy, almost no viewpoint is left unexcoriated.
%T River Beneath The River %A Alu Basu %I Magna Publishing %D 1996 %G ISBN: unknown-1996 (pb) %P 296 %K science-fiction
Review written: 2001/07/28
Bios by Robert Charles Wilson
Computer hardware fetishists should not pick up this title under the impression that Bios is in any way about the exciting world of Basic Input/Output Systems (also BIOS) -- the software which runs just before the operating system loads on your computer. Bios here is a contraction of the word biosphere.
And biology permeates this book, from the close, almost fetishist descriptions of an alien ecology to the close attention paid to the bio-technology: intrinsic to every character in this novel.
In the 22nd century, while traversing interstellar distances is possible, it is extremely expensive. The current program of extrasolar exploration is as expensive in terms of costs and political impact as the Apollo/Soyuz programs. The Solar System is a dystopic authoritarian place ruled by corporation Families. Personnel and Devices and the Works Trust are the anonymously named arms of the bureaucracy that runs the Solar System. The only real free humans have taken up residence in the Kuiper Belt in kibbutzims of various political persuasions. The Works Trust and P&D have picked Isis, a green and Earth-like world, as the single candidate for exploration.
Isis has had a different evolutionary history from Earth due to a complete lack of disastrous cometary or asteroid strikes in its history. All life on Isis, including bacterial, has evolved based on an escalating arms race of attack and counter-attack to the point. Life is so hostile on Isis that any humans that travel without elaborate contagion protection on its surface would be liquefied within minutes by a combination of bacteria, prions and other lethal micro-organisms.
Zoe Fisher is a human engineered by the P&D to be able to withstand anything that Isis can throw at her. The novel is her story of discovery -- both of her past, and of the secrets that await her on the surface of Isis.
The plot is the standard sf adventure fare: a group of scientists in a hostile environment risking their lives in the cause of Science. When properly done this can be entertaining, and thankfully, Robert Charles Wilson manages to keep the plot moving and trades verbosity for a quick moving storyline.
The book would have been mediocre if it wasn't for the ending with which it truly breaks out of the usual mold of sf adventure novels primarily written for a teenage audience. It has a truly scientific speculation at its core and it includes what is perhaps the only reasonable extrapolation of Penrose's "theory" of consciousness ever to be used in an sf novel.
** minor spoiler **
In a collection of essays edited by Penrose, Stephen Hawking raises the point that if consciousness is due to the quantum mechanics that arises within `tubules' in human neural cells, then why doesn't a caterpillar endowed with the same set of cells possess consciousness as well? In this book, Robert Charles Wilson manages to build his speculations on a possible answer to this question, which also answers the famous Fermi paradox: "So, where are they?" that haunts SETI.
%T Bios %A Robert Charles Wilson %I Tor %D 1999 %G ISBN: 0812575741 (pb) %P 214 %K science-fiction
Review written: 2001/07/17