Books

Look to Windward

"Look to Windward" is the seventh (arguably) book in Iain M. Banks' "Culture series". Despite Wikipedia calling it a "sequel", I found it to be a self-contained story with about 5 main-ish characters that need no introduction and that are not important in later books. The story takes a while to come together, but it all makes sense in the end; as a result, I enjoyed the final 100 pages much more than the first 400. Hard to say more without spoilers. :)

As with other Culture books, the settings and worlds are the centerpiece of the text. But since most of this book takes place on a single world, the scenery is a bit less varied than "Use of Weapons" and "Surface Detail".

My strongest complaint of "Look to Windward" is about the hundreds of pages spent on how Culture citizens pass the time. There are pages upon pages of cocktail parties, hiking trips, hunting trips, hang gliding, concerts, and chit-chat. I think Banks is trying to convey the frivolity and existential emptiness of an immortal life without want in the Culture's idyllic future, but it is damned boring. Slashing 100 pages of descriptions of guided tours of beautiful landscapes would be a big help.

On the bright side, I enjoyed the complexity of the characters in this book: there were funny side characters, despicable protagonists, likable villans, tragic heros, and surprising but believable motives that carry the story to its conclusion.

Overall I would call this a lesser Culture book, but perhaps worth your time if you've read all the rest and are still wanting more. Just skim the hang-gliding scenes.

Reamde

I've become a pretty big Neil Stephenson fan over the last decade, starting with the Baroque Cycle and then reading through the back catalog, and even though it took me a while to decide to pick up Anathem, I think it's now tied with The Diamond Age as being my favorite.

This new book, Reamde, is different from those.

It's a thriller. Reviews that compared it to Snowcrash and Zodiac are not wrong (probably -- I've never read the latter), but it's blissfully missing what Rus calls "the Sumerian chapter". There's no 50-page exposition about a theory of worlds or ideas. It's just nonstop action, after a few chapters of background. I was excited by the background, because the technology and sociology both seemed plausible to me, and I think it's rare for an author to get both.

I try to include zero spoilers in reviews (unlike, say, the New York Times review, which gives this book's plot away all the way through to the final chapter), so I'll just give you the setting that you'd get from the first chapter anyway: Reamde is set either in the present or the very near future. In Stephenson tradition, it leaps across the globe and drops a lot of geeky references, but since we're living roughly in the present, characters talk about tweeting, and check up on each other by scanning their Facebook pages. One character is known by strangers primarily through his wikipedia page, and he's coy about which parts are fact and which are fiction.

One thing that really stuck with me is how Stephenson casts a cynical but loving eye back down on 21st century culture. A memorable scene in Anathem describes a group of obese men, wearing jerseys of a sports team, slurping sugar water from enormous cups -- not a particularly flattering or subtle characterization of Americans. But in Reamde, characters drop knowledge about Walmart, the firearms subculture, Montana cults, and southern trailer parks, and always in a positive (or at least neutral) light. Usually this knowledge is practical to the matter at hand, and frequently it helps save lives.

If true sci-fi requires a description of a technology that doesn't exist yet, this is true sci-fi. The characters live in a world in which "World of Warcraft" became surpassed by a similar game that understood how to make the MMORPG model even more successful: The economy of the game is connected to the real-world economy in a direct and theoretically secure way that makes the phrase "real-world economy" ambiguous. Players can use in-game winnings to pay their subscription fee, vastly widening the potential customer base, and professional authors are on staff to ensure that the game continues to evolve and provide ongoing entertainment. It's new, and so 20-20-hindsight-obvious that I marveled that nobody's actually written it yet.

But the story is really a long chase/action sequence, using the game as a backdrop and side quest. About one quarter of the way through, I started to get exhausted and complained to a friend that there was no natural stopping place, because things are constantly happening. The only breaks are occasional bits of whitespace where the narrative shifts point-of-view, or chapter markers when 24 hours have passed: "Day 3", it helpfully points out, before continuing with the description of an oil tanker explosion. My friend said, "Just wait till you get to the last half of the book."

I made up the oil tanker explosion, but there are events on that level of destruction and firepower. If it wasn't so intellectually grounded, it could be a new Jason Bourne movie. It probably still could. It was really hard to put down, and usually when I did, it was only because it's hard for me to stay on the edge of my seat for so long at a time.

Even so, it was a very fun read. I was hooked from the first page, and never disappointed. Strong recommendation.

1493

I accidentally finished reading 1493 last night, and loved it. But first, a detour about e-books.

This is the first time a book has been victimized by e-book-ification for me. The author or publisher clearly went to some length to make the book "e-book friendly", but the result is actually worse than if they had left it alone.

There are at least a dozen maps and charts mixed in with the narrative, and they look like they might be interesting, but they're too small to read. Each one has a helpful link underneath saying "Click for larger version". Clicking the link takes you to a separate page, with the image about 10% larger, and no added detail. I tried using the e-book's zoom feature, but the images just pixelize -- there's no actual detail there. The image was destroyed in the process of making the file.

Footnotes are similarly awkward. You have to click on a very tiny little link (usually I had to pull out the stylus for accuracy), and it just takes you to a separate page where the footnote is written in a tiny font. When you're done, you need to navigate through three tiers of menu to get back to where you left off. It's hard to understand what the intent was. If the footnote popped up in a dialog, you could read and dismiss it without losing your place. Or if they had just put the footnote at the bottom of the current page like a paper book, it could be in a tiny font but easily discoverable without interrupting the flow of reading. Instead, it's got the worst of all worlds.

Finally, the book is 450 pages long, though it appears to be nearly 700 in an e-reader. This is apparently because over 200 extra pages are needed to hold the dysfunctional maps and a vast number of unreferenced notes. I suspect the original text was supposed to reference the notes inline somehow, but the e-reader people, who had just faced an existential crisis in trying to figure out how to fuck up the footnotes, just threw up their hands and dumped all the notes at the end.

In short, I begrudgingly recommend that you buy this book in paper form, which kinda invalidates the very idea of e-readers.

The book itself is incredible. I read the introduction while I was still in the middle of reading a different book, and I couldn't put it down. I think I plowed through 50 pages a day at one point.

It covers the "Columbian Exchange", a term scientists use to describe the ecological changes that started when Europeans and Africans first visited the Americas. The author, Charles Mann, claims that a new ecological era began the day Columbus landed on Hispaniola: the Homogecene, an era when all parts of the earth began to intermingle and become the same.

Mann doesn't really try to prove anything. Instead he tells a series of anecdotes that weave together in a convincing way. The book is so full of fascinating stories that I peppered my friends with them incessantly for a month. Some quickies: Africans outnumbered Europeans in America for over 300 years. Jamestown was so malaria-ridden that colonists warned the English companies that at least 3/4 of any new arrivals would be killed in their first year. They called it "seasoning". Inflation from Spanish silver probably wrecked China's economy.

See? It's full of these. Each chapter covers a single topic in detail, but the stories are all interconnected in the way that the world has become. I also appreciated that even though Mann has an opinion about cause and effect, and is trying to convince us of the truth of the Homogecene, he doesn't take sides on the hot topics of the day, like globalization. He meets with farmers, scientists, environmentalists, and government officials, and lets them tell their stories, but doesn't moralize.

In the coda, he describes the plight of terrace farmers in the Phillipines. The terraces are endangered by earthworms unleashed by the Columbian Exchange, but they were probably built by people fleeing the Spanish-Chinese battles in Manila. How do you preserve a way of life that is itself a product of the destruction of an older way of life? There often isn't a good guy or bad guy. In the words of Marge Simpson, it's just a bunch of stuff that happened.