Tab Dump (as Seen on TV!)

Check out these amazing pictures from A Brief History of Children’s Picture Books and the Art of Visual Storytelling - some amazing pictures here.

The Kinks are one of the best rock bands of all time, and were fueled by the tension between brothers Ray and Dave Davies. We've heard Ray's story, now we can see Dave's side in this documentary.

Is S&M anti-feminist? Um... no.

A good primer on reading Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow

Dear SciFi writers, please stop being so pessimistic.

On the subject of Stephenson, here's a fun examination of how relevant his dreams of a data haven are today. BTW, if you haven't read Cryptonomicon, what are you waiting for?

A good video explaining why "global warming" is a misnomer and explaining why yes, climate change means that your average situation may get more extreme. "The wet get wetter and the dry get drier"

Everything you need to know about culture in 10 books

A great Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson at Capitola Book Café in 2012

In other KSR news, the quantum computers that he predicted in his books (specifically in 2312) is one step closer to reality. Money quote:

The D-Wave machine, which its makers say makes use of such unusual properties of quantum physics as a particle’s ability to move in one direction and its opposite at the same time. ... While quantum properties are among the most tested and proven domains of physics, the concepts behind them — for example, suggestions that we live in one of many universes, or that objects not in direct contact can affect each other — make such properties hard to accept.
Harnessing them for the sake of computation, suggested as a possibility more than two decades ago, has proved difficult.
The optimization problem is typically something like how a traveling salesman would plan a complicated trip most effectively. Ms. McGeoch tested three problems involving optimization. In two of them, the D-Wave computer was slightly faster. In the third, it was markedly faster.

Read the whole thing. It's just fascinating.

Along those lines, Quantum Foam is just a cool thing to ponder.

Comics:

• Fun drawings of the Avengers as sailors
• This is what feminine superheroes should really look like, not the balloon-boobed ones currently out there.

My first introduction to Jack Gilbert's excellent poem "Failing and Flying"

Take the time to see the beauty in boredom.

A New Yorker report on the light pollution epidemic and an analysis of how Tucson, AZ of all places solves the problem:

Tucson’s code limits the brightness of exterior fixtures and requires most of them to be of a type usually known as “full cutoff” or “fully shielded,” meaning that they cast no light above the horizontal plane and employ a light source that cannot be seen by someone standing to the side. These are not necessarily more difficult or expensive to manufacture than traditional lights, and they typically cost less to operate. Calgary, Alberta, recently cut its electricity expenditures by more than two million dollars a year, by switching to full-cutoff, reduced-wattage street lights.

A fun, old-school Aphex Twin video interview from 1996

Book Review: Neil Stephenson's "Reamde"

Neil Stephenson is usually summarized as a "cyberpunk" author, one best known for SciFi books like Snow Crash or speculative literature like Cryptonomicon. The reviews will have you believe that Reamde, his recent 1000+ page novel, is a return to those days, but I suspect that's just a marketing ploy designed to lure readers - like myself - that were turned off by Anthaem, his dense religious philosophical epic. So while Reamde contains quite a few scenes in T’Rain, a World of Warcraft-style virtual reality, make no mistake: it is a thriller along the lines of Zodiac, his 1988 novel set in Boston. I’m not going to even attempt a summary of this wildly plotted, overlong shaggy mess of a book other than to note that it’s basically the attempts of a family to get a kidnapping victim back, but also touches on computer viruses (the title is a deliberate misspelling of “readme”), a theft of money both virtual and real, a kidnapping, Russian mobsters, Chinese hackers, private jets, travel to at least six countries, and an incredible shootout that spans at least 100 pages. It also happens to be a propulsive read that is hard to put down.

One could argue that Reamde has a lot of flaws: for one, all of his characters think of similar tactics in the action sequences, and this analysis, which interesting, can feel repetitive. In addition, the romantic subplots aren't remotely believable, feeling almost insultingly tacked on. Despite this, Stephenson’s strengths – his ideas and his digressions – shine through. Stephenson’s knowledge is encyclopedic, and so he can write authoritatively about a wide range of topics. Here, enjoying the ride thorough his convoluted plot, I learned an incredible amount about Xiamen, Eritrea, constructing virtual realities, money transfers, how to illegally cross borders, the difficulties in decrypting computer files, and guns. Lots and lots of guns.

Reamde is a smart book that carries you along with its enthusiasms, a thriller as much at home with databases and social media as it is with gunplay and secret agents. If reading over 1000 pages of this stuff sounds like your cup of tea, dive in, because Stephenson’s the best in the game.

Cross Posted on Reading, Running and Red Sox

Who is Neil Stephenson?

Tom Bissell's classic take, from the NYTimes review of Stephenson's excellent 2011 novel Reamde, where he pictures novelists as "unannounced visitors":

"Neal Stephenson, on the other hand, shows up smelling vaguely of weed, with a bunch of suitcases. Maybe he can crash for a couple of days? Two weeks later he is still there. And you cannot get rid of him. Not because he is unpleasant but because he is so interesting. Then one morning you wake up and find him gone. You are relieved, a little, but you also miss him. And you wish he’d left behind whatever it was he was smoking, because anything that allows a human being to write six 1,000-page novels in 12 years is worth the health and imprisonment risk."

Packing for a Trip

"In a manner familiar to anyone who had ever packed a car for a family trip, genial confusion gave way to impatience, then furious ultimatums, then ill-advised snap decisions. Finally the lines were untied, and the smaller vessel began to move away."
 – Neil Stephenson, p.147, Reamde


I meant to post this in time for Memorial Day, but better late then never!

First Lines of Reamde

"People who had job titles and business cards could say easily where they worked and what they did for a living, but those who worked for themselves, doing things of a complicated nature, learned over time that it was not worth the trouble of supplying an explanation if its only purpose was to make small talk. Better to just go directly to airline travel."
- Neil Stephenson, Reamde, p. 14

So not the first lines, but a good quote nontheless. I had forgotten what an entertaining writer Stephenson is, even when he's not distilling a complicated technology or arguement down to its essence. I was scared after abandoning Anathem - a book I found to be needlessly obscure - that Stephenson had lost his technically savvy voice that I came to love in Diamond Age and Cryptonomicon. Based on the first 70 pages (of a 900+ page novel!), my fears were misguided, for I'm already hooked and can't wait for nighttime to come so I can dive back into this world again.

Age as Genre?

This arrogant article about how normal adults shouldn't read fiction marketed to Young Adults won't do anything combat the impression that the New York Times is elitist:

Books are one of our few chances to learn. There’s a reason my teachers didn’t assign me to go home and play three hours of Donkey Kong. I have no idea what “The Hunger Games” is like. Maybe there are complicated shades of good and evil in each character. Maybe there are Pynchonesque turns of phrase. Maybe it delves into issues of identity, self-justification and anomie that would make David Foster Wallace proud. I don’t know because it’s a book for kids. I’ll read “The Hunger Games” when I finish the previous 3,000 years of fiction written for adults.

This is the worst kind of lazy thinking. Note how he admits that he doesn't know what he's bashing, only that because it's labeled as "Young Adult" it's not worthwhile to him. This really raises my hackle. First of all, it's the worst kind of literary snobbery. Has Mr. Stein even asked himself who labels a book as YA or not? I certainly don't want anyone making these decisions for me. For example, knowing the kinds of excellent fiction that are disparaged as "science fiction" when one could make a very strong argument that they should be marketed as "regular" fiction (Stephenson and Gibson, to name just two), makes me wary of trusting any booksellers to label what i'm reading. Secondly, it's a bit stunning to think of the excellent books that he'll miss under this line of thinking: off the top of my head, he's miss out on The Chocolate War and The Catcher in the Rye along with countless others.

Personally, I enjoy ripping through a YA novel now and again. I recently ripped through L'Engle's Wrinkle in Time in a few days and found it highly enjoyable, both as a good story and also as a fun nostalgia trip back to the kid I was when I first read it. I also continually get meaning out of Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth when I pick it up every few years or so. It's good to look through the eyes of a kid now and again!

For a better argument against Mr. Stein's writing, see Alyssa's good breakdown. What are your thoughts? Do you avoid YA books, find them a "guilty pleasure," or actively seek them out?

The Top SciFi and Fantasy Novels?

So NPR recently polled its readers for the 100 best scifi/fantasy novels, and published the results here. These types of exercises are pretty meaningless in that they are highly dependant on the people that respond (have internet access at home, have time to kill, are fans of the genre and poll host, etc.) but I’ll bite and offer some reactions:

- There’s no way that you should combine SciFi and Fantasy together. While there are sometimes some blury lines between the two, most often books fall hard to one side or another of this line. The survey would have been MUCH more relevant if the had been sepearated – even if to the top 50 in both.

- Nice to see that enough other people like Neil Stephenson that four of his books made the cut. Having said that, as pure SciFi, The Diamond Age (#75) is 1000% better than Snow Crash (#26). The Diamond Age is a trip because it combines stunning ideas, excellent writing, and believeable words together while continually pulling the rug out from underneath you, so that the world at the end of the novel is completely transformed from the world at the beginning. It's a hell of a lot of fun! Snow Crash feels like Neuromancer-lite and is probably is more popular because it’s less complex and was his first book that propelled Stephenson into the mainstream. Cryptonomicon(#53) is an excellent, amazing read (have to read it again sometime) but it’s not strictly scifi (in this case, the book is lumped in with the genre because of his past work). Anathem (#86) was unreadably dense.

- Only one PKD (at #21)? Really? The problem here is that some of his best writing and ideas are in short stories, and he doesn’t have any truly excellent collections like Ray Bradbury (both The Martian Chronicles at #27 and The Illustrated Man at #91 helped flesh out my dreams). I would have voted for UBIK, one of the best mind-fucks of a book i've ever encountered.

- Again, suffering for being a novella rather than a novel, but Arthur C. Clarke’s
"A Meeting with Medusa" is one of the best SciFi writings I’ve come across.

- To have left Solaris off this list completely is an inexcusable oversight. To be recognized as being even remotely credible, this book really has to be in the top 20.

- Have Canticle for Libowitz (#35); haven’t read it yet. Should move it to my bedside table.

- The first Dune (#4) really is an excellent novel. It sticks with you. Haven’t read any of the sequels though.

- China Miéville should really be higher than #98.

- As much as I like William Gibson, they did him right by only including Neuromancer (#14), although I can’t imagine anyone would quibble with the Burning Chrome collection.

- A bit surprised that Stephen King’s It didn’t make the cut - I still think it's the best thing he's ever done. Can’t speak to The Stand (#25), as it’s the only major Stephen King novel I haven’t yet read. Enjoyed the Dark Tower series (#23) but it didn't blow me away.

- I’m not much of a fantasy reader, but I do enjoy some of the classics like Lord of the Rings (#1) and LeGuin’s Wizard of Earthsea. If you want a good fantasy read, pick up the old Years Best Fantasy and Horror anthologies (edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling) at your local used book stores; they were gold mines of good stories, and I still pick them up to this day to read a story or two.

Cross-posted at Reading, Running and Red Sox.

Books I Want to Read for $300, Alex

Neil Stephenson's going to be publishing a new book shortly called Anathem. Not sure when i'll actually be able to get around to reading almost 1000 pages, but his work is exciting, intelligent, and fun as hell.