Joe Martin
I've heard of Robert Silverberg, of course. It's hard to be fan of the “golden age” of science fiction and not have heard about Silverberg. But I've never really read him before. (My library growing up had a far larger selection of Asimov and Heinlein than it did of Silverberg.) In many ways, this was my first real exposure to his stories.
And what an exposure it is. All of these short stories are excellent. As he explains in the introduction, this was the beginning of the period in which he began to take his craft seriously and to write stories that he could be proud of. These are, dare I say it?, literary science fiction stories. Oh, the wonder of strange things is there. But the stories are more focused on what it means to be human than they are on what the technology is.
My favorite story of the collection also happens to lead off the collection: To See the Invisible Man. What if your sentence was to be legally invisible for a year—no one can respond to you, talk to you, help you, or hinder you in any way. Would it be heaven? Or hell?
Neighbors concerns two men who have hated each other their entire lives. Hawkwsbill Station is a bleak story about political prisoners who have been exiled to the Paleozoic era, where trilobites are the only life. Bride 91 concerns a man who marries for the 91st time—every marriage to a female of a different alien race. All of these stories are superbly written and bleak in some way that's truly human.
This is probably the best volume of short stories that I've read in a long time.
I'd previously heard of The Satanic Verses and “Salman Rushdie”. I knew that there had been a fatwa against him because of his novel. But that was pretty much all I knew about Rushdie or about The Satanic Verses.
This is Rushdie's memoir about the years that he spent under the Iranian government's threat of murder. It's the only thing I've ever read by Rushdie, so I don't know whether the pacing and atmosphere is typical of his works or not.
Overall, I would describe the book as a long, slow slog. It was hard to read. Sure, it was long. But even so, it usually doesn't take me 5 months to get through a book. Rushdie spends a lot of time talking about his early life, his career up until The Satantic Verses, his friends, his enemies, the basic events of his life, etc.
The book is tedious but that very tediousness could be a deliberate affection. (Or it could just be Rushdie. I suspect it's just Rushdie, but I'm trying to give him the benefit of the doubt.) His life, for 10 years, was a very tedious one. He lived under constant police supervision. He couldn't go outside of his home unless the entire trip had been precleared first, something that could take days. He couldn't even take a walk on the spur of the moment. He had to move often and was largely cut off from both friends and family. The very tediousness of the book thus reflects the tediousness of his own life.
The entire book is narrated in the third person. That may be deliberate. Rushdie talks about feeling like “Joseph Anton”, his pseudonym, is a separate person from himself. If so, it's not done well. He refers to himself in the third person before, during, and after the fatwa. Either way, it quickly grew tiresome.
The fight over The Satanic Verses is interesting though. I was surprised by how much non-Muslims hated him for writing the book and “stirring up all that trouble”. Outside of the literary world, very few people were willing to defend him, his book, or the general right of free speech against the Muslim's supposed right of outrage.
The British government, in particular, appeared to be far more worried about international consequences than about fundamental human rights. I've always admired Maggie Thatcher, but her Conservative government did very little to defend Rushdie. (Sure, they provided round the clock protection. But they did nothing in the realm of positive PR or moral defense.)
Rushie may be, as other reviewers claim, an arrogant jerk. But that in no way limits his right (or anyone else's right) to free speech. True barbarism is lies in trying to kill a man for his beliefs. True moral courage lies in defending a man's right to his own beliefs. As a portrayal of a nation's (indeed, a world's) defense of human rights, this was a very valuable book.
I've been thinking about this book for several days and I'm still not sure what to think about it. I like the concept of the Mules and Earth's sketchy history with genetic engineering. The backstory is believable. The central character, perhaps less so. It was interesting. It was fun. But, ultimately, I felt like some of the central tensions were resolved too easily. Athena Hera Sinistra is fiercely independent, combative, and assertive except when she's not. It felt very uneven and not all that “real”.
I've probably read this book 4 or 5 times over a 15 year period. I like it as much now as I did when I first read it. I can unreservedly recommend it.
The title is taken from a quote by Friedrich Schiller: “Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.” (“Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain.”) The novel is divided into three sections: “Against Stupidity”, “The gods themselves”, “Contend in Vain?”. Asimov features completely different characters in each of the three sections. The story revolves around parallel universes and the different physical laws that affect each universe. The physics of our universe and the para universe are absolutely integral to the story.
Specifically, the strong nuclear force is weaker in our universe than it is in the parallel universe. This has all kinds of interesting effects. The para-suns are smaller and cooler than our own. Because the strong nuclear force is stronger there than it is here, it's possible for matter to stick together even as the atoms are farther apart. This, in turn, means that life there is different. Life forms can change their solidity at will, even thinning out to an amorphous gas without actually losing physical cohesion.
Asimov uses these physical differences in the parallel universe to comment on society and sex in our own universe. The para universe has many interesting parallels to our own society, even as the story stays true to the physical laws of the para universe.
As you'd might expect, the novel also deals with stupidity and pride in its various manifestations in varying people. I liked the portrayals of each of the main characters and their motivations. The characters' attitudes drive the story. They act according to their own motivations as they each grapple with the physical laws and the way that the physical laws vary between universes.
I saw that Baen Books was (re)releasing [b:The Ship Who Searched 176850 The Ship Who Searched (Brainship, #3) Anne McCaffrey http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1172444671s/176850.jpg 3431] and that reminded me that I had a copy of both that book and [b:PartnerShip 410927 PartnerShip (Brainship, #2) Anne McCaffrey http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1174512926s/410927.jpg 1003777], in this one volume. I'd read it years ago but I thought it would be fun to re-read it. And it was.I very much like the big idea here: people who would be crippled or dead can find a new life as the living brain of a ship, city, or space station. Full neural connections to the ship allow the person to experience the ship as their own body and operate it as smoothly as we operate our own limbs.The stories are fun too.
This book was advertised a pulp classic and it lived up to the billing. The overall level and style of writing reminded me of the 1990's Hardy Boys series more than anything else. There were two plucky young men, some older men that needed rescuing, and a damsel in distress who was the fiancé of one of the main characters. This book just had alien invaders whereas the Hardy Boys normally faced off against the Assassins.
Also, “Sue” was a definite non-entity in the book. She really only excited to give the men a reason to chase after the aliens and someone to rescue. She didn't do or say anything of consequence. She was so quiet that when I saw her name in one particular section of the book, I initially thought that it was an OCR scan error. I had to actually stop and think to realize that, yes, she was present now and had been present in the last several scenes.
My verdict: miss this one with confidence.
The title gives a decent clue about what this is. Tor.com publishes a new short story every week. The editors collected the best stories from 2012 into this volume.
All of these stories are worth reading. I had a few particular favorites.
* “The Mongolian Wizard” by Michael Swanwick. A young soldier and his wolf stop a plot by a power hungry wizard. Or do they? And what are the consequences of succeeding?
* “A Tall Tail” by Charlie Stross. As you read this story, it helps to have a basic familiarity with chemistry. A tale of the space race and international intrigue that's just plausible enough to make it a true tall tale.
* “The Ghosts of Christmas” by Scott Bakal. A women creates an experimental treatment for schizophrenia and then uses it to affect her own past and her own present—and not always for the better.
* “The Finite Canvas” by Brit Mandelo. A country doctor on an ecologically devastated Earth does a small job for an assassin. As she works, she listens to the assassin's story.
* “About Faeries” by Pat Murphy. A woman mulls over the true nature of faeries, while dealing with her father's Alzheimer's and approaching death.
* “Our Human” by Adam-Troy Castro. How might societies be affected by dealing with aliens who live far longer than they do?
These stories are definitely worth reading. The book itself is free on Kindle, so you have no excuse not to.
Ben Bova wrote the Orion series to explore one big idea: what is our relationship to god or to the gods? Does humanity create the gods or do the gods create humanity? What if the relationship is circular and more messy than you think? Orion was created by the Creators, to fight their battles in their past. He's stronger than regular humans and has abilities that regular humanity does not. He's more than a man but less than a god. But with each mission that he's sent on, he becomes a little stronger, a little more capable, and a little closer to the Creators.
In this novel, Orion is sent back to ancient Earth. Set, an alien who inspired the stories of the Egyptian god, is trying to wipe out all of humanity. Set wants to populate the earth with his own reptilian race and Orion is all that's standing between him and the elimination of the human race. The story ranges back and forth through time, allowing us to see both the dawn of humanity as well as the Cretaceous period.
Ben Bova used this story to illustrate cosmology (Set's home planet is a red dwarf star, sitting where Jupiter sits in our solar system), paleontology (what was the Cretaceous period really like?), and biology / sociology (how would a race of intelligent lizards evolve and what would their society look like?). He succeeded, as the science was interesting without being dry and pedantic.
I had reservations about the action side of this story, however. I know that Orion's growth and development was a big point of both this story and the overall series. I know that Orion needs to develop godlike powers, to achieve Bova's goals. I felt like Bova's goals were too important and the needs of the story were not important.
Orion's powers developed at very convenient points in the story. Whenever he hit a roadblock or faced defeat, he would suddenly realize that he was capable of something new, something that would have have an immediate impact and benefit. It was too convenient and detracted from the realism of the story.
I'll probably still read some of the other books in this series, to see the science that Bova puts into them. But I hope the other stories aren't as flawed as this one.
This is the third book in Bujold's “Chalion” series. It is the first book that doesn't actually take place in Chalion. Everything occurs in a completely different section of the planet and doesn't reference any of the events or characters from the previous two books. It is a stand alone story that takes place in the same universe.The story involves a murdered prince, a possessed swordsman (Lord Ingrey kin Wolfcliff), the possessed murdered (Lady Ijada), and several hundred years of weighty history.I was disorientated at the beginning of the book because none of the peoples, places, or customers were familiar. It took several chapters before things began to make sense. The dislocation was exacerbated by the fact that Bujold introduced an entirely new magic system for this new ethnic group. It's a magic system (based on spirit animals) that sits alongside of (and somewhat in opposition to) the Five Gods of Chalion and the surrounding areas.Overall, I like the new magic system. It has a lot of potential for intriguing stories. It was well used here and this book didn't really scratch the surface of what could be possible. However. I don't like the fact that it was layered into this existing world. Given what we know of the Five Gods and how they are tied into everything, I don't think that it works to introduce something that's so disconnected from them. I didn't think it fit all that well.There were portions of the [b:Paladin of Souls 61904 Paladin of Souls (Chalion, #2) Lois McMaster Bujold http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1348894979s/61904.jpg 819610] that were too similar to [b:The Curse of Chalion 61886 The Curse of Chalion (Chalion, #1) Lois McMaster Bujold http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1322571773s/61886.jpg 1129349]. I can understand why Bujold wanted to avoid doing a third book in that vein. I think it was a mistake to stay in the same universe while still making this radical of a change. The story itself was very entertaining but the overall environment didn't quite mesh the way that it should have.
“Mad Ista” was a minor character in the previous book of this series, [b:The Curse of Chalion 61886 The Curse of Chalion (Chalion, #1) Lois McMaster Bujold http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1322571773s/61886.jpg 1129349]. Here, she is a main player. “Mad Ista” is not really mad. She never was. She was tormented by the curse of Chalion.Ista's torments ended when the curse was lifted. But she still had a problem. She was a virtual castle prisoner of her concerned relatives and attendants. They all believed that she was crazy and fragile. Nothing she said could change their minds. So she escaped.After her experiences, Ista wanted nothing to do with the gods. But the gods weren't through with her. The Bastard had a job that needed doing and thought Ista would be perfect for it. Her escape from her overly caring family is complicated by the circumstances that the Bastard draws her into.Sequels are always tricky. It's nice to see familiar characters again but it can also be limiting to see nothing but the same characters. Bujold was able to expand her universe nicely by taking a minor character and turning her into a major character while also showing us new places and new people. It's possible to read this book without having read the prior book because the connection to prior events is so loose.Bujold used the new situations to show off additional elements of her magic system. All of these elements fit well with the new circumstances and were, in many ways, expansions of what we'd seen in [b:The Curse of Chalion 61886 The Curse of Chalion (Chalion, #1) Lois McMaster Bujold http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1322571773s/61886.jpg 1129349]. The expansion of characters, places, and magical details made for a richer, more realistic universe.
“That idiot Ivan” finally gets his own book. And while Miles will always be the more fun character, Ivan Vorpatril is perfectly capable of carrying a story by himself.Going into this book, I knew that Ivan would finally get married. But he gets married in a way that's far more interesting than one would expect. The particulars are more similar to [b:The Warrior's Apprentice 61906 The Warrior's Apprentice (Vorkosigan Saga #3) Lois McMaster Bujold http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1170597854s/61906.jpg 2792] and [b:Komarr 61884 Komarr (Vorkosigan Saga, #11) Lois McMaster Bujold http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1322572043s/61884.jpg 1129294] than I would like. However, that passes fairly quickly and the rest of the story is engaging. Ivan has definite reasons for acting the way he's always acted. I can identify with him better than I can identify with Miles. Ivan is more, well, normal and doesn't share his cousin's frenetic need for constant “forward momentum”.While I really want to read another book about Mark Vorkosigan ([b:Mirror Dance 61909 Mirror Dance (Vorkosigan Saga, #9) Lois McMaster Bujold http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1297831387s/61909.jpg 287351] definitely wasn't enough), I'd also be happy to read more stories about Ivan.
This was an enjoyable story and a quick read. It's told from the perspective of Fin, a member of a 3-person team exploring and charting an alien world. Fin and Carson have to explore the entire planet pretty much single handedly. As if that wasn't hard enough, they have to deal with the Politically Correct edicts of a far off government. The edicts are meant to combat a sense of imperialism and to prevent the despoiling of this planet. The edicts do that but they also make it nearly impossible to actually chart the territory.
The characters were believable and the bureaucratic stupidity was definitely believable. If mankind ever does make it to the stars, there's a scary possibility that the result could look something like this.
I first became interested in this book when I read N. K. Jemisin's write up in Scalzi's “Big Idea” feature.
I'm supposed to talk about the idea that touched off the Dreamblood duology here, but if I talked only about that, this would be a really short post. That's because it wasn't a very big idea, at least at first; really, I just wanted to write about ninja priests. Nothing grand or revolutionary, nothing especially thought-provoking, no gods or universes at stake. Just shadowy figures who would creep into people's rooms in the dead of night and... I dunno, bless them to death or something. “Missed you at confessional today, Bob.” “Wha — AGCK!” That was how all this began.
But that's the punchline of a bad joke, not a story, and fortunately the image that popped into my head to accompany it was considerably less silly than the idea itself. I envisioned a man — tall, shaven bald, remarkable in his stillness both physically and spiritually — standing at the foot of a bed and contemplating the person who slept there, whom he meant to kill. This man, this priest, would work only at night; indeed, night would be a holy time for him. And the clincher of his character was that he wouldn't be doing it for some paltry material reward or to satisfy a bloodthirsty god; he would be doing it because he cared. He would intend only the best for his victims; indeed, he would be trying to save them from a far worse fate. He would love them. And what could be more effective — or relentless — than an assassin motivated by love?
I really enjoyed this book. Part of it may have been my relief that it was so much better than the Sharing Knife series. But I think it was good in its own right too.
Chalion has the weakest gods that I've ever seen, in a fantasy series. Chalion has a family of five gods: the Father, the Son, the Mother, the Daughter, and the Bastard. The gods have their own unique focuses but all share a common trait: they are completely unable to act in the world or affect it. The only way they can have any influence at all is if an individual freely surrenders his will to the god, allowing the god to act through him or her. Even then, the individual can withdraw their will at any time and leave the god powerless once again.
In this universe, choices and sacrifices matter. A lot. The land of Chalion came under a curse many years prior to the start of the story. The curse will only be lifted, if it can be lifted at all, through the willing sacrifices of the story's characters.
The story moved along very briskly. I was able to guess a few of the reveals ahead of time but not always the method by which things would happen. The main character, Cazarel, is portrayed very well. Other characters are a little too sketchily drawn but the overall effect is still a good one.
What happens if your high school classmates are obsessed about winning entrance to the Space Academy? And you're not? And you're forced into the program anyway. What would you do? And why? And why were you forcibly entered?
This fun little novella (it sits right at the intersection of being a long novelette or a short novella) answers all of those questions in an entertaining way. And when a story is this short, why not read it?
Literary fiction. It's the one genre (if you can call it that) that the reviewer has studiously avoided. And, yet, here he is. Writing a review of a literary novel. And not just any literary novel. Joe's writing a review of a novel that was picked by Oprah, for her noted national book club.
The reviewer thinks it's worth reflecting on how Joe got here. There was definitely some overconfidence and hubris involved. There was a sense that Joe could read the tea leaves better than others. Joe bet on the outcome of an election and lost. The tide of events was stronger than the strength of his convictions. In losing, he temporarily sacrificed control of his reading time.
Joe's good friend Adam believed that Joe's loss reflected bigger things. (That, at least, is how the reviewer chooses to view matters.) Perhaps a view of culture that's too constricted. Maybe an unbalanced reading list. Or a narrowness of mind. Whatever the reason, Adam assigned him the task of reading and reviewing Freedom.
Joe immediately suspected that this book represented the heretofore avoided “literary fiction” shelf. Never having actually bothered to fully define literary fiction, he was forced to do so. Naturally, he consulted Wikipedia on the topic.
Literary fiction, in general, focuses on the subjects of the narrative to create “introspective, in-depth character studies” of “interesting, complex and developed” characters. This contrasts with paraliterary fiction where “generally speaking, the kind of attention that we pay to the subject in literature ... has to be paid to the social and material complexities of the object”.
Literary fiction does not focus on plot as much as paraliterary fiction. Usually, the focus is on the “inner story” of the characters who drive the plot with detailed motivations to elicit “emotional involvement” in the reader.
The tone of literary fiction is usually serious and, therefore, often darker than paraliterary fiction.
The pacing of literary fiction is slower than paraliterary fiction. As Terrence Rafferty notes, “literary fiction, by its nature, allows itself to dawdle, to linger on stray beauties even at the risk of losing its way.”
Neal Stephenson has suggested that while any definition will be simplistic there is a general cultural difference between literary and genre fiction, created by who the author is accountable to. Literary novelists are typically supported by patronage via employment at a university or similar institutions, with the continuation of such positions determined not by book sales but by critical acclaim by other established literary authors and critics. Genre fiction writers seek to support themselves by book sales and write to please a mass audience.
Joe found that this description captured what he'd always feared about literary fiction. The genre represents novelists, freed from the constraints of financial or popular success, writing slow, serious, dark, plotless novels about the inner lives of characters. It sounded like a recipe for a boring, depressing book. And his honor depended on him reading it, finishing it, and reviewing it.
The thought of this book filled Joe with dread. He had to spend nearly a week nerving himself to start it, expecting weeks of painful slogging. Reality was a pleasant surprise. (The last time in this narrative that it would be.) Freedom was easy to read and did give the reader some incentive to progress through the story. Once started, he didn't feel tortured by his continued progress through it. Nevertheless, his fears weren't groundless. It was slow, serious, dark, and mostly (but not entirely) plotless. It focused on the inner lives of its characters, for the purpose of revealing their flaws and selfish motivations. For this reason, Joe would never consider it a page turner or book that he was eager to pick up.
What did Joe read? He read the story of Walter and Patty Berglund, a socially aware couple, leading the gentrification of a neighborhood in St. Paul, Minnesota. Outwardly, they were well matched and successful. They had two kids, a nice house and a secure income.
The reality was less pretty. Patty Berglund doted on her son, Joey, to the exclusion of both husband Walter and daughter Jessica. Walter, perhaps in reaction to Patty's weird indulgences of Joey, constantly fought with Joey and doted on Jessica (whom Patty nearly ignored). Patty always claimed (both to herself and to others) that Walter was the center of her life. But she really lusted after Walter's college friend, Richard Katz, being nearly unable to sexually resist him. Richard was a struggling, principled, indie rocker. Walter constantly competed with him, like the brother that he'd always wished he'd had. Patty constantly wished she could be with Richard but feared irretrievably damaging Walter's psyche.
Freedom starts with an overview of the Bergland's early life in their neighborhood, focusing on Patty's interactions with their neighbors. Then it suddenly detours into about 200 pages of Patty's therapeutic autobiography before jolting back to the main narrative. The reviewer had to read about the inner life of each Berglund, as well as the inner life of Richard Katz. The narrative showed how Patty's screwed up family life led to the screwed up way that she treated her own children. It showed how Walter's screwed up family life led to the screwed up way that he treated his own children. It showed how Katz just enjoyed screwing up everyone's life.
(The reviewer should mention, at this point, that there are no pleasant or sympathetic characters in this novel. At multiple points during each character's time on screen, he entertained fantasties of throttling each character and walking away. The reviewer cheerfully admits to avoiding “stupid” people and resents that Franzen thinks there is something to be gained by spending large quantities of time with said stupid people.)
(And, how is the reader supposed to interpret Franzen's portrayal of Patty? Does she really say “ha ha ha” in a pathetic attempt at sarcastic humor? Or is that merely Franzen's lame attempt at communicating the sound of laughter during those times in which he doesn't want to just say “she laughed”?)
Freedom is so named (so the reviewer thinks) because it portrays a modern American family, living a life full of “freedom”. But, ultimately, that freedom doesn't really make them happy. Pretty much everyone is miserable in some way, at every point of the story.
Now that he has finished the book, the reviewer does have a trinitarian question. “So what? What's the point? Why does this book exist?” Are Americans really that oblivious to the life around them that they require a novelist to document it and point out its flaws? Does a certain, perhaps self-righteous, segment of society enjoy reading how about other portions of society go about ruining their lives?
At the risk of either boasting or appearing self congratulatory, the reviewer feels that he has a rich and detailed introspective view of his own life. His own inner narrative sounds remarkably like a literary fiction novel. No aspect of human nature, revealed by Freedom, was a revelation to him. It was ultimately dreary and uninteresting. If the reviewer wants a revealing view of human nature, he need only open the newspaper. (The sad story of General Petraeus and Patricia Broadwell teaches us that much.) He finds that literary fiction may be enlightening without being entertaining.
Anthologies are tricky. At the most basic level, they boil down to a collection of stories. Sometimes, the stories are intended to go together. This can happen when an editor proposes a theme and solicits contributions, from multiple authors, structured around that theme. Sometimes the stories aren't intended to go to together. This can happen when stories from a single author, over time, are collected together.
Such it is with the The Technic Civilization Saga from Baen Books and Poul Anderson. This 5-volume series collects stories that were written over many years and that, combined, tell a future history of humanity. Many of these stories were written for magazines. They're meant to describe a common world but they weren't necessarily meant to be read one right after the other. Poul Anderson repeats himself a fair bit and, read consecutively, that can become wearying. That's the weakness of this volume and of this entire series. It wasn't meant to be read one right after another and it reveals that too much of a good thing can, in fact, just be too much.
For this volume, I decided to slow down and read the stories slowly, interspersed with other things that I wanted to read. I wanted to space out the stories and experience them as they were originally written: a universe to come back to again and again, over time.
Once I did that, I really started to enjoy this book. Their are some really good, moving stories in here. Stories of how humanity changes and yet the essence of humanity—hope, compassion, forgiveness, greed, envy, and more—remains the same. Poul Anderson is a good author and this is a collection worth reading.
I bought this at Adam's recommendation. And I'm glad I did. I read Issue #1 a few days ago and was intrigued, but not terribly so. I came back to it tonight and sped right through Issues #2-6. I couldn't put it down. Now I'm hooked and I'm looking forward to reading Volume 2.
The Keyhouse is interesting. The characters are good. The art is good. The writing is good. Everything about this is good. I don't normally read comics and I enjoyed this. Recommended, definitely.
A lot of people seem to like this biography. I do not. I think it's pretty terrible. Walter Isaacson had a wonderful opportunity to write a biography and he muffed the job. Isaacson appears to be largely unfamiliar with technology or with the computer industry. I think the poor quality of this biography is related to the fact that Isaacson didn't know how to ask the right questions, how to interpret responses, or when to follow-up on certain issues.
Throughout the book, Isaacson misquoted people's comments about technology. A prime example is Isaacson recording that Bill Gates said that the NeXT workstation would fail because the latency was “too low” on its optical drive. There are two things wrong with that. First, there's no such thing as latency that's “too low”. High latency is a big problem but low latency is very, very good. Secondly, Bill Gates would never make that mistake. Isaacson obviously both misreported Gates' words and didn't understand what Gates was saying. If he had understood it, he never would have made that error.
I get the feeling that Isaacson didn't understand technology nearly well enough to be able to understand Steve Jobs. Because he couldn't understand his subject, he couldn't ask the truly interesting questions or differentiate the critical from the banal. The result is a book that's nothing but uninteresting mush. That's perhaps the greatest possible insult to a man who's career was built on avoiding the uninteresting and pursuing the truly exceptional.
This book has some redeeming value. If you're completely unfamiliar with Steve Jobs or with Apple, this book will serve as a decent entry-level primer into what Jobs and Apple have done over the past 3 decades.
Unfortunately for us, this book wasn't supposed to be an entry-level primer into Jobs and Apple. It was supposed to be the definitive biography of one of the more interesting public figures of the last 30 years. Isaacson had exclusive access to Steve Jobs, for multiple one-on-one interviews. Jobs also gave his family, friends, and business associates full permission to cooperate with Isaacson and to answer any questions that Isaacson chose to ask.
His book can, roughly, be broken down into three sections: Jobs' early years growing up and at Apple, Jobs' time at Pixar and NeXT, and Jobs' massive success after he returned to Apple. The first section is largely a retelling of stories that people told him. It's also largely material that has been published before in other books or told in documentaries. Isaacson didn't really add anything new here.
Jobs was fired from Apple, in 1985, because he was a colossal jerk and because he couldn't manage people well enough to create a follow-up product to the successful Macintosh. He spent the next 11 years working at NeXT and Pixar before rejoining Apple. After rejoining Apple, he became a fantastic CEO and managed people well enough to create one hit after the other: the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad.
Something happened during those 11 years. Jobs never stopped being a jerk but he did, somehow, become a successful manager. I would love to know what happened. I was really hoping Isaacson would tell me. But he didn't. His book focused on the major events of those years but it never delved below the surface to see how Jobs himself changed and what influenced him to change. How did he manage things at NeXT? At Pixar? At the beginning, middle, and end of those 11 years? Was there a progression? Isaacson, apparently, wasn't curious enough to find out.
The last third of the book (Steve Jobs' second stint at Apple) focuses almost entirely on Apple's successful product introductions. There's very little discussion of who Steve Jobs was and what it was like to be around him during this time. Paint me a picture of what he did in his office? Was it all examining prototypes and screaming at subordinates or did he spend time in his office examining spreadsheets? True, Apple's products were a major part of Jobs—perhaps the major part. But I don't think they were everything. But, again, Isaacson apparently didn't think that was worth sharing.
I've known the history of Apple and the business side of Jobs. I really wanted to get to know Jobs the man. How did he interact with his wife? With friends? What was home life like? Did he watch TV? If so, what were his favorite shows? Did he read? If so, who and what? Did he read rarely, often, or compulsively? How did he relax at the end of a long day? How long was “a long day”? What did he do to relax? From Isaacson: nothing but silence.
I can't recommend this book to anyone and I look forward to the day that someone else takes on the task of writing a much better biography of Steve Jobs.
If I gave out half star reviews, this would rate 3.5 stars. As a story, it's really a 4-star story. The overall flaws of the series bring it down to 3 stars though. Fawn is still way too wise for her years. Far too much of the story revolves around her insights and probing questions. She and Dag are far too comfortable a couple, for people who met just under a year ago, in a time of great personal and emotional trauma. It would seem likely that Fawn, at least, would need more time to heal and process everything that had happened too her.
Leaving aside those flaws, this was a very solid story. There was a good mix of elements of day to day life as well as action sequences. The story built very well towards a very satisfying conclusion that tied together both the threads of this novel as well as the threads of the overall series. The magic system continued to be a high point and moved towards some very satisfying insights.
I'd probably rate the overall series as a 3-star series. It started out weak but each book was increasingly stronger and more rewarding.
This is the first book in the Sharing Knife series that feels like a Bujold book. Parts of the writing still feel clunky. Fawn, at age 19, is still the wisest character in the book. But, for the first time, the story seems to be really going somewhere. Fawn and Dag take a trip on a river boat, headed South. Along the way they pick up a lot of side characters, taking the story from the Fawn & Dag show towards more of an ensemble story.
As the characters travel and move through the world, they also travel and move through discoveries. We learn a lot more about the magic system that Bujold has constructed and we see the characters actively learning and discovering too. This makes for a far more engaging story than we've seen before.
I'm still don't think I'd recommend this series to anyone but it's at least something less than the complete disaster that I'd feared it was.
Why did I read this? I have an aversion to starting a series and not finishing it. Also, I respect Bujold and I didn't believe that the entire series would be horrible. But book #2 isn't much of an improvement over book #1.
This book didn't suffer from the Horrible Borrowed Setting that the first book suffered from. (Yes, the characters carried over but the situations and events started to diverge.) On the other hand, it was mostly pretty boring.
Dag spent much of the book sitting around convalescing. He also spent a lot of time arguing with his family, who absolutely hated the idea of him marrying Fawn and preferred to pretend that it never happened and wasn't valid even if it had happened. There was a spot of action about 60% in but that just resulted in more injuries and more time spent convalescing. SpoilerThen Dag chose to leave his home and culture and venture out into the great unknown, thereby ending the entire controversy.
So, boring. And not really recommended.
I'm really happy that Singularity&Co chose this book to convert to an eBook and send to their subscribers. I was expecting classic SF stories that read like classic SF stories: dated science, dated tone, a story that felt stale because I've seen so many of its descendants and imitators. None of that was true about this book.All of these stories felt timeless, in the best sense. They dealt less with technology and more with people. In fact, I had to check the original publication date a couple of times. These stories feel so fresh and relevant that it's hard to believe they were originally written 60 years ago.This is my first exposure to Ms. Moore's writing. It won't be my last. I'm already looking forward to purchasing [b:Northwest Smith 941224 Northwest Smith C.L. Moore http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1317078181s/941224.jpg 926172] and [b:Doomsday Morning 12414222 Doomsday Morning C.L. Moore http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1314072256s/12414222.jpg 1477804] from Singularity&Co.Highly recommended.
I agree with this book's other reviews. This is a great prose version of a comic book story. I could picture the various costumes, expressions, characters, places, and events as I read the story and it felt very similar to the (admittedly limited number of) comic book stories that I've read.
If the book has a flaw, it's that after a while it gets tiring constantly having characters flip from good guy to bad guy. I know Adam Christopher wanted to portray moral ambiguity, but I'm not convinced he needed to use practically the entire cast of the book to do it.
Still, recommended.