Gravity's Rainbow

I received Gravity's Rainbow as a Christmas gift.  The back cover made it sound a little strange, missiles hitting in exactly the same spots as a random soldier having sex?  Thus, it was with some trepidation that I embarked on the journey of reading the book.  However, remembering the fondness that I view Blackout/All Clear with, I was willing to give another abnormal story about World War II a chance. 

The time that it took me to read this book would normally allowed me to read several books, but I found that I had difficulties finding the time to read it.  Not that there wasn't time, but that I was allocating that time to other things.

I think that the key part of my issue with the book is that it didn't live it up to its potential.  This book had great promise of being a kind of strangely silly WWII story; a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy but set on Earth in the 40's.  In the beginning, it gives you some hints that perhaps that is where it is going.  It is not going there, it is going some place far, far stranger and less enjoyable.

In the interest of full disclosure, I will admit that I read a New York Times review of the book before I started writing this.  Normally, I try to avoid reading reviews until after I write mine (a small part of the reasons for this blogs existence is that I rarely fully agree with a review).  However, this book was nominated for and won several awards and just narrowly missed getting a Pulitzer and I was worried that by disliking it I was missing some fundamental part.  The New York Times article's author obviously had a better time than I did but it was still rather critical of the book and I think that some of the points that he made are very valid.  (For the curious, here is the review: http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-rainbow.html )

In short, the book tries to be an expansive in depth story, but it almost collapses under its own weight.  There are so many characters that don't make sense and seem pointless, so many plot threads that remain basically unresolved, so many resolutions that are at best strange and at worse unsatisfactory.  This book is more than 700 pages and I feel like it might have done better to be 200 pages longer and perhaps divided up into a few of books to better allow the characters a more coherent story.

A special note on one of the resolutions.  One mystery in particular, the 00000 rocket, is brought up again and again throughout the book and it resolution, when it finally arrives, is so strange and so anticlimactic that it does not do itself justice.

One other thing that I did not like was the sex.  I am by no means a prude but the sex in this book was, frankly, ridiculous.  It is not so much the quantity as the general types.  There are is the B, the D, the S, and the M from BDSM, urine, pedophilia, orgies, and the only sex scene I have ever read with feces. I have not had that much trouble reading any single scene since the scene in Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho where the main character kills a hobo very graphically.

This book is not entirely bad.  The second of the four parts is quite an enjoyable read (though it does randomly drop a bunch of plots from the first part) and it really explores the levels of paranoia that, somewhat ridiculously, seem justified.  I am also generally glad to read award winning books because I like to see what kind of books win awards.  This book was a bit of a slog but I am glad that I read it.

Overall, I would give this book a 70%.

Some Remarks

Reading this blog, it becomes readily apparent that I am a big fan of Neal Stephenson.  I have read the majority of his books and am eagerly awaiting his next novel, whatever that may be.  I ordered his book, Some Remarks, because I thought it would make for interesting, light reading on my holiday travels.  Some Remarks, was billed as a collection of Neal Stephenson's shorter works that were generally not reprinted.  I was interested to read a series of works from him from across his career. 

The first thing that surprised me about the book was how small it was.  I am used to my Neal Stephenson books easily breaking the 500 page mark.  Coming in at just over 300 pages, this was noticably physically smaller than all of my other books by him.  However, it is a collection of short pieces and so I am not sure that he has another 200 pages of short work laying around.

Most of the pieces have been previous published in some medium or other with two exceptions. However, unless you devotedly snap up literally everything Stephenson writes, this will probably be mostly new material.  As someone who has read most of Stephenson's novels, I had a fun time seeing how he got ideas for parts of them in some of the articles.

The longest article in the book, by a wide margin, is called "Mother Earth, Mother Board".  At almost 120 pages, it takes up more than a third of the book.  This is a piece on laying an international cable from Europe to Asia and how the author went and visited various places that it went through or was in the process of going through.  This was clearly an inspiration for a lot of the modern day shenanigans in the modern part of Cryptonomicon.  However, it is really, really long for being about the subject that it is about.  Honestly, I think the book would have been improved if he had abridged it, and I am rarely for abridgement.

There are a number of other pieces in the book with topics ranging from treadmill desks to space travel.  There are also a few interviews where he discusses his opinions and also some of his works, depending on the times that the interviews took place.  Lastly, there are a couple of pieces of fiction which are interesting, one of which could be considered a connection between the end of Cryptonomicon and the beginning of Snow Crash which I enjoyed immensely because of my love of interconnected stories and cohesive canons.

While this is definitely Neal Stephenson's style, the short article or story format doesn't give him the time to set up that often makes his stories so worthwhile and good.  While the long cable laying article was interesting, undersea cable has never been one of my major interests and unfortunately that piece failed to inspire me to make it one.  That being said, the man is knowledgeable on a wide variety of topics, making this book an interesting read and, because he is such a good author, an enjoyable one as well.



Overall, I would give this book an 84%.

SuperFreakonomics

A while back I read Freakonomics (and reviewed it on here).  I really enjoyed the book, it offered an interesting perspective on several common issues.  Superfreakonomics continues in the same vein, exploring the hidden, economic side of the world.  In this book, to live up to its "super" title the authors expand the scope of the issues they talking about.  In the second book they deal with issues of more global significance like global warming and prostitution.  While these topics are certainly interesting, because they are more global in scope, they are more oft discussed, which means that the revelations that come from this book are much less fresh and exciting than those that come from this first book.

However, I am a big advocate of increasing public awareness of global warming and this books chapter on global warming gives a different take than the norm and is certainly more interesting for it.  This chapter provided some solutions that were alternatives to the ones that are often presented and I think they could make fixing the issue more palatable to many people (though perhaps less palatable to some).

In addition, there was some information about the Kitty Genovese case that is rarely discussed.  That was interesting because the case is discussed in basically every class that falls under jurisdiction of the Philosophy or Communication departments at most colleges and it does somewhat change the way that the case is looked at.  I wish that I had read that before some of the class discussions I have had.

This book, like many sequels, is not as good as the book before it.  Despite this, it was still a great read and I hope that Mr. Dubner and Mr. Levitt write a Super-Duper-Freakonomics or whatever they choose to call the sequel.

Overall, I would give this book an 87%.

The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge

When I started reading Across Realtime, I knew that I wanted to read the story that fell in between the two books contained within (see my review of Across Realtime for more info) so I grabbed this short story collection on my Kindle.  As I mentioned before, Vernor Vinge has some fantastic ideas and so I was a little worried that the short story format would not give him time to explore each idea to the fullest.  There were definitely some ideas that I felt could have held up whole novels, but it was definitely a good read, especially for fans of his other work.   As one would expect from a short story collection there were many good stories and a few bad ones.

Each of the stories had an introduction by him and some of them had a post script as well.  It made the collection have a much more personal feel than it otherwise would have.  I wish that other short story collections would do the same.  It also helped to explain the background of some of the stories that were part of his larger work collections.

This was a nice little collection.  My biggest problem with it is that, when you read all of his short stories, some of which are set in the same (or at least very similar) worlds as his novels, it becomes apparent that he does not place nearly as much value on a cohesive canon as I do.  Perhaps that is unfair.  What I mean to say is that some of the stories that take place in (supposedly) the same universe as some of his other stories are so different from the novel based stories in those universes as to necessitate serious explanation as to how the characters reached that point.

However, that is more of a personal problem than any one with the book.  Overall, I would give this book an 86%.

Across Realtime

Warning: Since Across Realtime is a collection of two books, The Peace War and Marooned in Realtime, this review will have minor spoilers for The Peace War so that I can adequately discuss Marooned in Realtime

Vernor Vinge has always been a man of great ideas.  In every single one of his books that I have read, one of the central ideas in it has been unique or, at the very least, extremely interesting.  For example, in The Witling, he has a group of aliens that can teleport but, because he is a hard science fiction writer, he does it in such a way that it still takes into account momentum and everything else on a planetary scale.  This then shapes the way that they teleport and makes the story much more interesting than a normal teleportation story.  In another of his stories (A Fire Upon the Deep), there is an alien species that look like dogs.  However, alone they are only semi-sentient.  But they can commucate with each other to form packs which work together as one brain.  If the packs get too big, though, the number of competing desires and ideas becomes impossible to manage and they are no longer a functioning organism.  These are just two of his ideas that have convinced me that he is definitely worth reading.

As I mentioned in the warning, Across Realtime is two books.  They both take place in the same universe but one takes place long after the other.  There are very few repeated characters (and it could be argued that there are none) but the second book takes the science concepts introduced in the first book and takes them to their logical conclusion.  Since I have hyped his ideas up until this point, you are probably wondering what those science concepts are in this book.  Before the book starts a group of people called The Peace Authority has become the ultimate power in the world because they have developed a technology called bobbles.  These bobbles are spheres that nothing can penetrate, not light, heat, or anything else.  They have covered all of the military installations in the world with these bobbles and, because of this, most governments have broken down.  (THIS IS WHERE THE MINOR SPOILERS BEGIN)  Through the course of the book, the protagonists discover a key fact about the bobbles: time stops within them.  They also discover how to modulate the amount of time that a bobble is active for, allowing them to be used defensively or offensively.

The second book takes place "mega years" in the future, with a different protagonist.  This protagonist was introduced in the short story "The Ungoverned" which was collected in a short story collection (which I will review soon).  I read that story in between the two parts of Across Realtime.  Honestly, I am very glad that I did.  It doesn't contribute very much to the main story, but it fills in a lot of background for some of the characters which is nice in the beginning. 

Vernor Vinge avoids predicting what technological heights humanity will have reached millions of years in the future by having some people "miss" some event where all of the people except for those who were bobbled.  The story in the second part is kind of a mystery story trying to figure out how someone managed to get left outside a bobble for such a long period of time despite safety protocols.

(THIS IS WHERE THE MINOR SPOILERS END)  I really enjoyed this book, as I have every Vernor Vinge book I have read.  One of my only problems with it was that it did not include the aforementioned short story.  (Note: one edition of the book does contain this story but the one I read does not)  Overall, I would give this book a 92%.

The Mandel Files

The Mandel Files were really three books collected into two books, all written by prolific science fiction author Peter F. Hamilton.  I received the first book as a gift from a friend who thought I might enjoy it.  However, I had heard a lot of bad things about Mr. Hamilton from some of my other friends so the book lived on my shelf for a few months while I viewed it with some trepidation.  Eventually, of course, I got around to reading it and I was pleasantly surprised. 

These books are the first that Mr. Hamilton got published and, as such, do not go with his normal setting of far future space opera.  Instead they are set in a near future Britain where the world is recovering from significant changes that global warming inflicted upon it.  This book manages to do this without being as preachy as some other books that are in a post global warming apocalypse, which is nice.  The books follow a detective named Greg Mandel (hence the name of the series) who has an interesting ability.  The back of the book calls him a human lie detector, and that is the boiled down version, but basically he is somewhat telepathic.  However, the story does a reasonably good job of explaining how this came to pass and walks the fine line between introducing too many characters with abilities similar to Greg's, thereby turning the story into a clash of superheroes, and too few, making Greg seem a superman among mortals. 

The first book (of the three), is called Mindstar Rising, it does a great job of setting up the world and the protagonists of the stories, and is a good blend of mystery and science fiction.  The second book, A Quantum Murder, is much more of a mystery than the previous story.  There is not very much action until the end, but that is part of the bargain in a mystery.  The third, The Nano Flower, has perhaps the weakest plot but it has some fantastic action scenes (guys on jetpacks attacking a zeppelin, for example).





These books were written in the early to mid 90's and were supposed to take place in the 2030's.  Obviously, they didn't guess right on all of the technological fronts (though he does start out volume 1 with a forward that is basically an apology for not being able to accurately predict technological progress, which somewhat annoyed me) but what is cool is that he used some companies from his day as the creators of the technology in his story.  This, most of the time, adds a layer of realism.  Of course Lockheed would still be making military tech and so the fact that he slaps the Lockheed name on there instead of a made up company makes it seem a little more real and possible.  However, since these were written 20 years ago, there are some companies that are now laughable.  At one point, they break into a computer hackers den and one of his nicest computers is made by Commodore.  This seems unlikely in any future and broke my suspension of disbelief a little.

Some of the character development in the series is a little lacking.  Occasionally, characters make decisions for basically no reason that is clear to the reader.  But overall the books still have a net positive quality level.  I would say Mindstar Rising is the overall best but The Nano Flower is the most fun to read.  I give the series as a whole an 88%.

Freakonomics

I realize that I am a bit behind the curve, reading Freakonomics now.  It was the big thing to be reading back when it came out, back in 2005.  There were a huge variety of spin offs and other tie ins but then it slowly faded from the public perception.  It is always been on my "to read" list and this summer my curiosity was particularly piqued by a comment about how the book discusses the relations of names to career success. This was the straw that broke the camels back and finally convinced me to read the book.

The book as a whole was extremely interesting.  It beats the reader over the head with the fact that it has no unifying theme and instead just explores several issues.  Basically, the two authors use economic concepts in ways that they are not typically used.  While I did take a couple of economic classes in college, I by no means consider myself to have a background in Economics and it was perfectly reasonable so prospective readers do not have to be worried about not understanding the books.

The variety of subjects covered makes each chapter of this book a separate adventure.  They each build off of each other but they can easily be read alone or with significant time in between them.  Despite what finally encouraged me to read the book, that was not what I found most interesting when I read the book.  The chapter that was the most fascinating was the one on the sudden drop in the crime rate in the 1990's.  They conclude that it was, in fact, the legalization of abortion.  This is certainly not a reason that is immediately obvious but they back it up with evidence very well.  The book is full of insights of similar, but less controversial, quality. 

This book was fun, insightful, and easy to read.  I would give this book a 89%.