I got in, just in case you didn't already know, which you did. One of the things that happened in the month I've been away from this blog is that I was accepted into the University of Washington. I received a letter informing me of this two days before my birthday. I suppose my birthday was another thing that happened during the period of time I've been away, but it was rather uneventful other than the electricity being out. Anyway, I guess finding out for sure that I would finally be transferring to a university was sort of an early birthday present. It was a birthday present from me to myself, because I am awesome.
Come January, I'll probably be super busy with school. But that's not the only news. I'm also moving. Being closer to school will be convenient, but it's also a bit intimidating because I need to secure a job of some sort. Actually, I don't just need to secure a job of some sort: I need to secure a job that fits my school schedule. I've been sort of nervous about this and I still am. Fortunately, I can still work as a substitute for the library system. So there's that. It doesn't eliminate my concern, but it helps.
Agitatingly, I still have to wait like almost two weeks before I get my orientation. I have no idea what my schedule will be or what classes I'll get to take. I have to wait.
But most importantly, better living through chemistry, oh yeah!
Friday, December 3, 2010
Thursday, December 2, 2010
NaNoWriMo
I see that, since returning from vacation, I wrote one post here, then left again for a month. I'd be embarrassed, but I did have my reasons. Well, one reason, anyway. I decided to participate in NaNoWriMo. So for the entire month of November, I was writing a novel instead of doing the things I would normally be doing. Well, not all of the things I'd normally be doing. I'll post more about that later. In fact, missing a month has left me with a whole lot to tell you. And I do plan on catching up. So there will be several new posts here about what's been going on while I was away. But those ones can wait for a moment. This post is about my novel.
The title is Adventures of Xad Volume One: Worldweaver. It's an extremely cheesy science fiction book with spaceships and laser guns. I described it a couple of times as verging on "Flash Gordon" levels of cheesiness. In the end, I don't think that's quite true. But it really is a silly book. It's not the sort of thing I'd always wanted to write. But I had a month to write 50,000 words. I didn't want to get caught up in trying to go back and change things. I didn't want to worry that my project, my baby, was turning out awfully. I didn't want to say, "This is completely wrong. Why am I even doing this?" I wanted something that I wouldn't be too attached to, that I wouldn't have to take seriously. I didn't take any of my old ideas or abandoned projects. I didn't try to make it awesome. I just tried to meet the goal, and in the end, I did: it wasn't even close. By November 30th, the novel was 60,000 words.
Now, I know you're wondering when you'll have a chance to read it. Well, I'll try to make that happen, but it might take a while. NaNoWriMo isn't about getting to a completely polished, publishable work in one month. It's about writing a rough draft in a month. My novel needs some heavy editing. I made everything up as I went along. I don't think there are any major continuity errors, but some sections definitely need revising. I need to move events around and add to some portions that I feel are incomplete. If I find the time to do this, and I hope that I do, I won't be at all surprised if the final product is a lot longer. How much longer, I won't say. But for now, it's 60,000 words.
I recommend NaNoWriMo. I don't know if I'll do it again because I see now just how big of a commitment it is to actually finish. It's not the effort: it's the time. I mean, presumably you have to work. A project like this could suck up all your free time for a month. But it's also educational. I learned much about my own writing habits along the way. I sort of always thought of myself as a competent writer. I've read plenty of things, even by professionals, and thought, "I can write better than this." I don't think it's pure delusion. I have written things. Some of them really are better than what I've seen from certain purported professionals. But I've never written anything on the scale of a novel. Short stories, yes. Essays, of course. But a novel is an entirely different animal.
I thought I might get lost in it and not be able to continue the story. That I'd get stuck. It didn't happen. I thought I would probably be energetic about this in the first week, drop off and fail to write in the second week, try to play catch-up in the third week, and go for broke in the fourth week. That didn't happen either. In a way, I don't believe it. I always procrastinate. Or I used to. I practically planned to procrastinate. And instead, I wrote 2,000 words a day. There were a few busy days where I wasn't at my computer and caught up over the next day or so. But generally, it was a constant pace. This is the first time in my life that I can recall ever properly pacing myself in anything at all. It's sort of amazing.
I think I wrote good characters and a more-or-less coherent plot. The biggest deficiency in my rough draft is with the setting. In my mind, as I was coming up with things to write, I could envision the characters and the circumstances they found themselves in. But scenery was either not there until I needed it for the plot, or not important enough to write down. It's not that everything in my head happened on some blank, empty field. But I was thinking so much about the characters and the dialogue and the action that what a place looked like didn't seem important. Maybe it's me. One place is much the same as any other place to me. So that's something that needs work. But I know I can fix that with editing. I just wasn't focused on it while writing the rough draft.
So yeah, I've written a 60,000-word novel, by far the longest thing I've written so far. And that's why I haven't been updating this blog for a month. But I've been busy with some other things too. I'd tell you about them right now, but I have to go to work. So you'll just have to wait for my next post, whenever that is.
The title is Adventures of Xad Volume One: Worldweaver. It's an extremely cheesy science fiction book with spaceships and laser guns. I described it a couple of times as verging on "Flash Gordon" levels of cheesiness. In the end, I don't think that's quite true. But it really is a silly book. It's not the sort of thing I'd always wanted to write. But I had a month to write 50,000 words. I didn't want to get caught up in trying to go back and change things. I didn't want to worry that my project, my baby, was turning out awfully. I didn't want to say, "This is completely wrong. Why am I even doing this?" I wanted something that I wouldn't be too attached to, that I wouldn't have to take seriously. I didn't take any of my old ideas or abandoned projects. I didn't try to make it awesome. I just tried to meet the goal, and in the end, I did: it wasn't even close. By November 30th, the novel was 60,000 words.
Now, I know you're wondering when you'll have a chance to read it. Well, I'll try to make that happen, but it might take a while. NaNoWriMo isn't about getting to a completely polished, publishable work in one month. It's about writing a rough draft in a month. My novel needs some heavy editing. I made everything up as I went along. I don't think there are any major continuity errors, but some sections definitely need revising. I need to move events around and add to some portions that I feel are incomplete. If I find the time to do this, and I hope that I do, I won't be at all surprised if the final product is a lot longer. How much longer, I won't say. But for now, it's 60,000 words.
I recommend NaNoWriMo. I don't know if I'll do it again because I see now just how big of a commitment it is to actually finish. It's not the effort: it's the time. I mean, presumably you have to work. A project like this could suck up all your free time for a month. But it's also educational. I learned much about my own writing habits along the way. I sort of always thought of myself as a competent writer. I've read plenty of things, even by professionals, and thought, "I can write better than this." I don't think it's pure delusion. I have written things. Some of them really are better than what I've seen from certain purported professionals. But I've never written anything on the scale of a novel. Short stories, yes. Essays, of course. But a novel is an entirely different animal.
I thought I might get lost in it and not be able to continue the story. That I'd get stuck. It didn't happen. I thought I would probably be energetic about this in the first week, drop off and fail to write in the second week, try to play catch-up in the third week, and go for broke in the fourth week. That didn't happen either. In a way, I don't believe it. I always procrastinate. Or I used to. I practically planned to procrastinate. And instead, I wrote 2,000 words a day. There were a few busy days where I wasn't at my computer and caught up over the next day or so. But generally, it was a constant pace. This is the first time in my life that I can recall ever properly pacing myself in anything at all. It's sort of amazing.
I think I wrote good characters and a more-or-less coherent plot. The biggest deficiency in my rough draft is with the setting. In my mind, as I was coming up with things to write, I could envision the characters and the circumstances they found themselves in. But scenery was either not there until I needed it for the plot, or not important enough to write down. It's not that everything in my head happened on some blank, empty field. But I was thinking so much about the characters and the dialogue and the action that what a place looked like didn't seem important. Maybe it's me. One place is much the same as any other place to me. So that's something that needs work. But I know I can fix that with editing. I just wasn't focused on it while writing the rough draft.
So yeah, I've written a 60,000-word novel, by far the longest thing I've written so far. And that's why I haven't been updating this blog for a month. But I've been busy with some other things too. I'd tell you about them right now, but I have to go to work. So you'll just have to wait for my next post, whenever that is.
Saturday, October 30, 2010
The Return of, well, ME!
It's been a while, but then again, I said it would be. After all, I have been on vacation. I did get back almost a week ago, but things have been a bit weird, I guess. For one thing, my mother messed my room up. Before I left, she kept threatening to paint it while I was gone. I told her not to, but she did it anyway. She also removed the shelf built onto the western wall of the room and boxed all my stuff. I'm in the process of putting the room back together, but progress is slow on that front.
If you haven't already seen them on Facebook, I ended up taking over 11,000 pictures while on vacation. And one thing even the people who closely followed the pictures on Facebook wouldn't know is that one thing I did was upload pictures from the camera's memory card to my computer every night before I went to bed. What that means is that on my computer, I have a separate folder for each day of my vacation. With the pictures organized like that, I can easily look back and sort of retrace my steps, using the pictures to help remember everything. Until a few days ago, one of my plans was to use this blog (or start a new one) doing just that. One post summarizing each day of my vacation, with pictures thrown in too. I took pictures in Europe 34 days in a row, so that would be a lot of content. But I'm not doing it. At least, not for now.
The reason I'm not going to take the time to blog about my adventures in Europe (at least not yet) is that I've decided to write something else instead, and I don't think I'll have the time to do both. I've officially signed up for NaNoWriMo and plan to write a novel in November. If I do make it to 50,000 words, it will certainly be the longest thing I've ever written (longest single work, anyway). I'm trying to get other people to do this too, so if you're reading this and it's still October, come on and join the insanity. Anyway, I haven't written a word of my novel yet (that would be cheating) but I do intend for it to be a really bad science fiction story, just in case you were wondering.
Speaking of books, I read two of them while on vacation and probably should have brought at least two more, but whatever. I read The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov. Not much to say about that, because it's by Asimov, so of course it's good, but it's also one of his earlier ones, so of course it's also sort of silly. I guess it counts as part of the robots series. Next was Stardust by Neil Gaiman. It was a fun little book, but not really that interesting. It deployed that thing where there's an excerpt from another book by the same author, in this case The Graveyard Book, which looks like something I'd be more inclined to read than Stardust but whatever. Also, I'm now reading The Stars, Like Dust and that one is also by Isaac Asimov.
Anyway, that's all for now.
If you haven't already seen them on Facebook, I ended up taking over 11,000 pictures while on vacation. And one thing even the people who closely followed the pictures on Facebook wouldn't know is that one thing I did was upload pictures from the camera's memory card to my computer every night before I went to bed. What that means is that on my computer, I have a separate folder for each day of my vacation. With the pictures organized like that, I can easily look back and sort of retrace my steps, using the pictures to help remember everything. Until a few days ago, one of my plans was to use this blog (or start a new one) doing just that. One post summarizing each day of my vacation, with pictures thrown in too. I took pictures in Europe 34 days in a row, so that would be a lot of content. But I'm not doing it. At least, not for now.
The reason I'm not going to take the time to blog about my adventures in Europe (at least not yet) is that I've decided to write something else instead, and I don't think I'll have the time to do both. I've officially signed up for NaNoWriMo and plan to write a novel in November. If I do make it to 50,000 words, it will certainly be the longest thing I've ever written (longest single work, anyway). I'm trying to get other people to do this too, so if you're reading this and it's still October, come on and join the insanity. Anyway, I haven't written a word of my novel yet (that would be cheating) but I do intend for it to be a really bad science fiction story, just in case you were wondering.
Speaking of books, I read two of them while on vacation and probably should have brought at least two more, but whatever. I read The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov. Not much to say about that, because it's by Asimov, so of course it's good, but it's also one of his earlier ones, so of course it's also sort of silly. I guess it counts as part of the robots series. Next was Stardust by Neil Gaiman. It was a fun little book, but not really that interesting. It deployed that thing where there's an excerpt from another book by the same author, in this case The Graveyard Book, which looks like something I'd be more inclined to read than Stardust but whatever. Also, I'm now reading The Stars, Like Dust and that one is also by Isaac Asimov.
Anyway, that's all for now.
Sunday, September 19, 2010
Vacation starts today
Technically, my vacation that I took from work doesn't start until Tuesday, but shut up. I know I haven't talked about this vacation on this blog, but no one reads this stuff anyway, so I don't feel the need to explain myself. Later today, I will be in the sky. And that is awesome. I probably won't be writing about much else besides this vacation for a while, so get used to it. Anyway, I don't leave yet. First I should sleep or something. That is all for now.
Friday, September 17, 2010
Book review: Spectrum 5 edited by Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest
Another science fiction anthology purchased at one of the library book sales. I've had this one for several years. It was on the top of the tub of books that I have but have yet to read. The book was published in 1966, but all of the stories it contains were originally published in the 1950's in Astounding Science Fiction except for one which was published in Galaxy.
This is vintage science fiction. It's the sort of stuff that not everyone would appreciate, but that I find fascinating. It's usually not very good, but it's sort of a time capsule, a glimpse into the future of the past, or something. The fact that it's interesting from a literary or psychological point of view or whatever is good enough for me. But it can also, at times, be totally hilarious. In one of these stories, characters who arrive on a planet using faster-than-light travel do calculations using slide-rules. There's some kind of dilemma when writing a fiction story that takes place in the distant future. You can invent fantasy technologies and not describe them, but too much of that is, well, boring. You can add more detail and mix technologies that are theoretically possible but not yet worked out with real technology and with concepts that are purely imaginary, but the more detail you add, the greater the risk that things are going to look stupid later. Great science fiction writers typically try to strike a balance, from what I've seen. They don't always succeed at doing so, of course, that's because it's challenging and that's why pulling it off is an attribute of greatness.
This was a quick and altogether pleasant read. I don't know that I'd ever heard of any of these old-timey authors, but some of them I rather like. The editors, not so much. In the introduction, they attempted to be bold, which I appreciate, but once I'd read the whole thing, I thought they were really pretentious, which maybe worked out because it gave me low expectations for the anthology as a whole.
Student Body by F.L. Wallace: A classic example of bad science fiction. Humans land on alien planet and are unprepared for the native fauna. The science it butchers is biology, which leaves me wondering how much had to do with the ignorance of the individual author there and how much had to do with the state of the whole field or public understanding of it at that time.
Crucifixus Etiam by Walter M. Miller: A story about terraforming Mars. I didn't even know they had stories about terraforming Mars back in 1953, so I'm impressed. The story is hilariously dated in several ways, but is actually pretty good. I was annoyed that a few pages were ripped partially or entirely from the book here.
Noise Level by Raymond F. Jones: Reminded me of The Toynbee Convector. To be fair, this story was written way, way before The Toynbee Convector. But it's also far inferior. By the end, I just couldn't suspend my disbelief. One page was missing here, so I didn't get to read part of the beginning, but the story goes something like this. The top scientists are brought to secret government project with military guys and one psychologist, where it is revealed that some random nobody demonstrated his anti-gravity device in a secret military demonstration, but it malfunctioned somehow in the second test and the inventor and the device were destroyed. The scientists are tasked with recreating the device before the Russians can invent anti-gravity themselves. The main character is a physicist who is good friends with the psychologist who is inexplicably working on this project and spends a lot of time talking to his friend. One of the scientists keeps trying to insist that anti-gravity is impossible (for a reason that doesn't actually make any scientific sense in the real world, but whatever), but the rest of them figure that since it was on video, it must have happened, and try to figure out how. The main character is out fishing with his psychologist friend and invents a new theory of gravity that would make such a device possible, so he begins working on it. Simultaneously, the guy who kept insisting that anti-gravity was impossible has news for everyone. He has meticulously gone over the labs and libraries of the supposed inventor of the device and has come to the conclusion that the whole thing is staged. The labs don't look like real labs that anyone has ever used and nothing about them makes sense. It's all some big hoax. No one listens to him and they insist he's had some sort of mental breakdown. Everyone teams up with the main character to build a device based on his brand new theory. It works. Yay, they did it. Then the psychologist reveals that yes, the original video and everything really was fake. It was a ruse to make the scientists think outside the box or something. Human beings can achieve anything if they get past the mental blocks that make them think things are impossible. I am not making this up.
Grandpa by James H. Schmitz: I guess in the 1950's it seemed totally plausible that if we could use faster-than-light travel, we'd find lots of worlds with nitrogen-oxygen atmospheres and water and plants and animals. The plants and animals evolved in different ways from ours, but somehow they'd be biochemically compatible so they could eat us and we could eat them and such. Still, this is a decent story.
Mother of Invention by Tom Godwin: I'm pretty sure that scientists did have a theory for ferromagnetism back in the 1950's and that this author just missed that somehow (in the story, magnets were some big mystery because even though everyone knew they worked, no on had a model explaining why they worked). Despite some annoying silliness with things like that, some of this is really cool. The character aren't threatened by man-eating aliens or anything like that. They discover a planet with seemingly benign biology. It's the geology that's the problem: the place is full of diamonds. Sandstorms are a lot more vicious when the sand is more diamond than quartz. Neat idea, even if parts of the story are just silly.
The Far Look by Theodore L. Thomas: A story about astronauts on the moon, but written long before there were ever really astronauts on the moon. Probably even worse in retrospect, but the whole concept is rather fanciful anyway. The idea is that the moon is just so harsh and barren and removed from the world the astronauts know that they'd completely lose their heads except they're sent in pairs, so they're able to rely on each other to remain sane. Once they come back home, reconnecting with the human race causes them to have some sort of super-wisdom and be total aces at whatever they choose to do.
Big Sword by Paul Ash: Another alien story, but I really like this one. Much better written than most of the stories here.
Commencement Night by Richard Ashby: Very, very silly. The nations of the world collaborate to build an island paradise on which to place infants who never have contact with anyone from outside so that they can form their own society and be spied on constantly. That way, we can learn about human nature and figure out how to prevent war. But aliens secretly communicate with the islanders, and the whole thing turns into one big hippie mess, except this story predates hippies by like a decade I think. Whatever.
This is vintage science fiction. It's the sort of stuff that not everyone would appreciate, but that I find fascinating. It's usually not very good, but it's sort of a time capsule, a glimpse into the future of the past, or something. The fact that it's interesting from a literary or psychological point of view or whatever is good enough for me. But it can also, at times, be totally hilarious. In one of these stories, characters who arrive on a planet using faster-than-light travel do calculations using slide-rules. There's some kind of dilemma when writing a fiction story that takes place in the distant future. You can invent fantasy technologies and not describe them, but too much of that is, well, boring. You can add more detail and mix technologies that are theoretically possible but not yet worked out with real technology and with concepts that are purely imaginary, but the more detail you add, the greater the risk that things are going to look stupid later. Great science fiction writers typically try to strike a balance, from what I've seen. They don't always succeed at doing so, of course, that's because it's challenging and that's why pulling it off is an attribute of greatness.
This was a quick and altogether pleasant read. I don't know that I'd ever heard of any of these old-timey authors, but some of them I rather like. The editors, not so much. In the introduction, they attempted to be bold, which I appreciate, but once I'd read the whole thing, I thought they were really pretentious, which maybe worked out because it gave me low expectations for the anthology as a whole.
Student Body by F.L. Wallace: A classic example of bad science fiction. Humans land on alien planet and are unprepared for the native fauna. The science it butchers is biology, which leaves me wondering how much had to do with the ignorance of the individual author there and how much had to do with the state of the whole field or public understanding of it at that time.
Crucifixus Etiam by Walter M. Miller: A story about terraforming Mars. I didn't even know they had stories about terraforming Mars back in 1953, so I'm impressed. The story is hilariously dated in several ways, but is actually pretty good. I was annoyed that a few pages were ripped partially or entirely from the book here.
Noise Level by Raymond F. Jones: Reminded me of The Toynbee Convector. To be fair, this story was written way, way before The Toynbee Convector. But it's also far inferior. By the end, I just couldn't suspend my disbelief. One page was missing here, so I didn't get to read part of the beginning, but the story goes something like this. The top scientists are brought to secret government project with military guys and one psychologist, where it is revealed that some random nobody demonstrated his anti-gravity device in a secret military demonstration, but it malfunctioned somehow in the second test and the inventor and the device were destroyed. The scientists are tasked with recreating the device before the Russians can invent anti-gravity themselves. The main character is a physicist who is good friends with the psychologist who is inexplicably working on this project and spends a lot of time talking to his friend. One of the scientists keeps trying to insist that anti-gravity is impossible (for a reason that doesn't actually make any scientific sense in the real world, but whatever), but the rest of them figure that since it was on video, it must have happened, and try to figure out how. The main character is out fishing with his psychologist friend and invents a new theory of gravity that would make such a device possible, so he begins working on it. Simultaneously, the guy who kept insisting that anti-gravity was impossible has news for everyone. He has meticulously gone over the labs and libraries of the supposed inventor of the device and has come to the conclusion that the whole thing is staged. The labs don't look like real labs that anyone has ever used and nothing about them makes sense. It's all some big hoax. No one listens to him and they insist he's had some sort of mental breakdown. Everyone teams up with the main character to build a device based on his brand new theory. It works. Yay, they did it. Then the psychologist reveals that yes, the original video and everything really was fake. It was a ruse to make the scientists think outside the box or something. Human beings can achieve anything if they get past the mental blocks that make them think things are impossible. I am not making this up.
Grandpa by James H. Schmitz: I guess in the 1950's it seemed totally plausible that if we could use faster-than-light travel, we'd find lots of worlds with nitrogen-oxygen atmospheres and water and plants and animals. The plants and animals evolved in different ways from ours, but somehow they'd be biochemically compatible so they could eat us and we could eat them and such. Still, this is a decent story.
Mother of Invention by Tom Godwin: I'm pretty sure that scientists did have a theory for ferromagnetism back in the 1950's and that this author just missed that somehow (in the story, magnets were some big mystery because even though everyone knew they worked, no on had a model explaining why they worked). Despite some annoying silliness with things like that, some of this is really cool. The character aren't threatened by man-eating aliens or anything like that. They discover a planet with seemingly benign biology. It's the geology that's the problem: the place is full of diamonds. Sandstorms are a lot more vicious when the sand is more diamond than quartz. Neat idea, even if parts of the story are just silly.
The Far Look by Theodore L. Thomas: A story about astronauts on the moon, but written long before there were ever really astronauts on the moon. Probably even worse in retrospect, but the whole concept is rather fanciful anyway. The idea is that the moon is just so harsh and barren and removed from the world the astronauts know that they'd completely lose their heads except they're sent in pairs, so they're able to rely on each other to remain sane. Once they come back home, reconnecting with the human race causes them to have some sort of super-wisdom and be total aces at whatever they choose to do.
Big Sword by Paul Ash: Another alien story, but I really like this one. Much better written than most of the stories here.
Commencement Night by Richard Ashby: Very, very silly. The nations of the world collaborate to build an island paradise on which to place infants who never have contact with anyone from outside so that they can form their own society and be spied on constantly. That way, we can learn about human nature and figure out how to prevent war. But aliens secretly communicate with the islanders, and the whole thing turns into one big hippie mess, except this story predates hippies by like a decade I think. Whatever.
Saturday, August 28, 2010
I read some more books
The book I was talking about that I was reading while I made my last post (which was about another book that I had already read) was Classic Feynman: All the Adventures of a Curious Character (which is actually all the stories from two older books: Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman, and What Do You Care What Other People Think). I finished it a while ago though. I guess I forgot to say anything about it here. Anyway, I'm still kind of sick right now (stomach was killing me yesterday) and don't feel up to giving this book a proper review, even though I have a lot that I could potentially say about it.
Actually, I'm kind of torn when it comes to this book: I don't know whether it's a fascinating and quirky set of mostly lighthearted stories that make for an easy and entertaining read or a mindblowing collection of some of the most profound stories I've ever read. Which one would be preferable anyway? I do highly recommend this though, especially since it's more convenient than reading the original two volumes separately.
Since then, I've finished another book. So now I need to find something else to read before I go to work today (would have already done so if I hadn't been sick in bed all yesterday and this morning). The book I just read is Blackout by Connie Willis. I don't normally read science fiction novels (or any novels for that matter) that are less than ten years old. Not out of principle or anything, it's just that there are so many good older books for me to read and they tend to be easier to find. Well, I'd read the two previous books in this "series" (or whatever you'd call it) earlier this year, and found out about this one while I was reading one of them, so I put it on hold.
My tendency to not read books that are too recent has probably just been reinforced. At first, I was excited to once again explore the world of Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog: How We Found the Bishop's Bird Stump at Last. Comparing it to them, I found that there were more returning characters from the former, but that thematically it seemed more like the latter. About halfway through, I started to become a bit irritated, though. My train of thoughts went something like this, "The book keeps jumping back and forth between all these characters, but doesn't seem to be going anywhere. I'm already halfway through this and I'm only just getting into it. This book isn't nearly as good as the other two. Well, finally we're getting somewhere. Wait, there doesn't seem to be enough book left here to finish the story. There's not going to be any room for denouement here. Something is wrong. Am I reading an unfinished book here? But nothing indicates that this is unfinished. Well, just a few more pages left, so let's see what happens. It's definitely implausible that this story will be finished by the time I reach the last page, but let's finish this weirdness. What's this? 'For the riveting conclusion to Blackout, be sure not to miss Connie Willis's All Clear. Coming from Spectra in Fall 2010.' Oh. Dammit, I'm never reading a recently published book again."
So yeah, somehow I'd missed the fact that I was reading the first volume of a two-volume story, the second of which is not even released yet. I know that there are other people who do that sort of thing. Like the people who waited eagerly in anticipation of each new book in the Harry Potter series or whatever. But I've never really been that guy, nor wanted to be. Enough of this. Time to find something else to read.
Actually, I'm kind of torn when it comes to this book: I don't know whether it's a fascinating and quirky set of mostly lighthearted stories that make for an easy and entertaining read or a mindblowing collection of some of the most profound stories I've ever read. Which one would be preferable anyway? I do highly recommend this though, especially since it's more convenient than reading the original two volumes separately.
Since then, I've finished another book. So now I need to find something else to read before I go to work today (would have already done so if I hadn't been sick in bed all yesterday and this morning). The book I just read is Blackout by Connie Willis. I don't normally read science fiction novels (or any novels for that matter) that are less than ten years old. Not out of principle or anything, it's just that there are so many good older books for me to read and they tend to be easier to find. Well, I'd read the two previous books in this "series" (or whatever you'd call it) earlier this year, and found out about this one while I was reading one of them, so I put it on hold.
My tendency to not read books that are too recent has probably just been reinforced. At first, I was excited to once again explore the world of Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog: How We Found the Bishop's Bird Stump at Last. Comparing it to them, I found that there were more returning characters from the former, but that thematically it seemed more like the latter. About halfway through, I started to become a bit irritated, though. My train of thoughts went something like this, "The book keeps jumping back and forth between all these characters, but doesn't seem to be going anywhere. I'm already halfway through this and I'm only just getting into it. This book isn't nearly as good as the other two. Well, finally we're getting somewhere. Wait, there doesn't seem to be enough book left here to finish the story. There's not going to be any room for denouement here. Something is wrong. Am I reading an unfinished book here? But nothing indicates that this is unfinished. Well, just a few more pages left, so let's see what happens. It's definitely implausible that this story will be finished by the time I reach the last page, but let's finish this weirdness. What's this? 'For the riveting conclusion to Blackout, be sure not to miss Connie Willis's All Clear. Coming from Spectra in Fall 2010.' Oh. Dammit, I'm never reading a recently published book again."
So yeah, somehow I'd missed the fact that I was reading the first volume of a two-volume story, the second of which is not even released yet. I know that there are other people who do that sort of thing. Like the people who waited eagerly in anticipation of each new book in the Harry Potter series or whatever. But I've never really been that guy, nor wanted to be. Enough of this. Time to find something else to read.
Saturday, August 7, 2010
Book Review: The Hidden Forest by John R. Luoma (and a note about what I've been doing)
I haven't posted much on books here lately, and that really is because I haven't been reading as much. Up until this week, a lot of that could probably be attributed to playing Oblivion all the time. I've eased up on that for now.
Runswithsnails IV has come a long way since March and passed up his predecessors in every respect and then some. In fact, it's one of my little qualms with the game: it could be fun to do a character that focuses on blunt weapons and healing or one that only uses bows for damage and backs then up with illusion spells or one that uses poisoned daggers and sneak attacks or whatever. The possible specializations, while finite, are quite extensive. But because I'm such a completist, I had to go and make my first character one that can do anything.
Sure, I could make a character that specializes in only a few skills, but that character would be strictly inferior to the one I spent so much time on already, so there'd be no point. I mean, I do like my invincible character, I really do. But I wish the leveling system were more "choose your weapons" and less of a counter-intuitive mess that leaves you with a puny character if you don't know what you're doing, but lets you take as big a slice of the broken pie as you want if you are willing to put in the effort. And I ended up taking the whole pie.
Right now, Runswithsnails has completed every quest in the entire game (including all the official plug-ins and the expansion) that can be completed except for the ones that require the character to get kicked out of a guild and one other one. Also, when I called him invincible, I kind of meant it: his gear gives him 101% Reflect Damage and 110% Resist Magic, so the only things enemies can use (successfully) on him are arrows, and he'll win any shoot-out because he has maxed out armor rating, insane healing, maxed out marksmanship, a bow that will eat your soul, and the option to become completely undetectable whenever he feels like it. So while I haven't cleared out all of the dungeons littering the world, it's basically a formality.
And with all that in mind, I've been cutting back (somewhat) on video games in favor of reading and stuff. I'm halfway through a book that is absolutely fantastic, so I suppose I'll say some words about my most recent read: The Hidden Forest. I borrowed this book from a friend a while back. I initially declined the offer because I knew from circumstances at the time that it would be a while before I'd have a chance to read it, but he insisted, and now I'm kind of glad that he did, as it's not a book I would normally have read. I think it's the only book with ecology as its main subject that I've actually read, and broadening my horizons is cool.
The most impressive thing about this book is, by far, the content. It's a short read, about 200 pages, but it's packed with interesting information. I've studied biology and had some notion of most of the processes that Luoma writes about, but not at this level of detail. While I don't know how many books have that information, I know that lots of books carry information of the same sort. But the parts about the history of forestry, up to very recent history indeed at the time the book was written (1999), were unlike anything I'd encountered before and were certainly the main force behind this work. Given the choice, I'd read a more general account of the history of forestry rather than this one, which is more specifically confined to a single research forest, but it was enlightening nevertheless.
That's the good. Now for the bad. Maybe I'm spoiled because lately I've been reading good science writers. I know bad science writers are out there in droves, but I've been reading the really good ones. Luoma just doesn't compare to the great writers I've grown accustomed to. If it's possible to rate style and ignore actual content, I'd say that while none of this is awful, none of it is great either. It looks like it should be a draft, perhaps a late draft, but not the final product.
On a lighter note, The Hidden Forest is dated, sometimes hilariously so. And 1999 doesn't sound like a long time ago to me, but I guess it was. I got a kick out of him using "World Wide Web" with the capital letters like that and a bigger one from "electronic mail" (I hadn't seen e-mail called "electronic mail" since, well, probably before this book was written). He also made some of the technologies he described researchers using sound awesome and oh-so-very advanced when now it all seems pretty routine.
If that was the worst of it, I'd be praising this book as a solid introduction to the topics discussed. But sometimes, The Hidden Forest inexplicably takes a turn for the stupid. Since I still haven't returned the book, I just flipped through it for a particularly egregious example...
...or not. Wait. Oh wow, that's even worse than I remembered. I was planning to write something emphasizing that my issues with this excerpt aren't just me being pedantic, but that this is seriously messed up. I would then have addressed the problems. But now that I've transcribed it and seen just how many errors there are, I don't even want to bother. So I'll just color the offending parts...
Orange = Misinterpretation of the facts.
Yellow = Doesn't make sense.
Green = Really stupid diction
And that's just the parts I could note by changing the word color. All this leaves me wondering just how accurate the rest of the book is. I was easily able to spot errors like the conflation of glucose and sucrose because of my chemistry background. But when Luoma writes about fields where I have little knowledge, I'm a lot less likely to catch such errors.
That's the bad. Now for the ugly.
The end. Seriously, the end is the worst part. It gets very, very ugly. Luoma kept things relatively apolitical for the first 200 pages or so. He covered controversy and disputes over logging, but did so in a convincingly journalistic manner, not taking sides but telling story and at least looking like it's an objective rendition (whether it is or not is another matter). Then in the last handful of pages, he goes off the deep end, delving into philosophy of science (a field that Luoma is apparently clueless about) to explain why ecological research isn't getting enough funding, then seemingly arbitrarily hating on the space program and advocating that ecological research should get that money instead.
This is one of my pet peeves. There are lots of people who think that sure, space is cool and all, but we have so many problems down here on Earth, so let's just stop spending so much money on space and use that money for things that are more important because, after all, space will still be there once we deal with this other stuff. Do I really need to point out that, with that line of reasoning, we'd be cutting ourselves off from space travel forever? There will always be something more important or more pressing. Suck it up. If you want more funding for ecological research, fine, but don't attack the space program.
Runswithsnails IV has come a long way since March and passed up his predecessors in every respect and then some. In fact, it's one of my little qualms with the game: it could be fun to do a character that focuses on blunt weapons and healing or one that only uses bows for damage and backs then up with illusion spells or one that uses poisoned daggers and sneak attacks or whatever. The possible specializations, while finite, are quite extensive. But because I'm such a completist, I had to go and make my first character one that can do anything.
Sure, I could make a character that specializes in only a few skills, but that character would be strictly inferior to the one I spent so much time on already, so there'd be no point. I mean, I do like my invincible character, I really do. But I wish the leveling system were more "choose your weapons" and less of a counter-intuitive mess that leaves you with a puny character if you don't know what you're doing, but lets you take as big a slice of the broken pie as you want if you are willing to put in the effort. And I ended up taking the whole pie.
Right now, Runswithsnails has completed every quest in the entire game (including all the official plug-ins and the expansion) that can be completed except for the ones that require the character to get kicked out of a guild and one other one. Also, when I called him invincible, I kind of meant it: his gear gives him 101% Reflect Damage and 110% Resist Magic, so the only things enemies can use (successfully) on him are arrows, and he'll win any shoot-out because he has maxed out armor rating, insane healing, maxed out marksmanship, a bow that will eat your soul, and the option to become completely undetectable whenever he feels like it. So while I haven't cleared out all of the dungeons littering the world, it's basically a formality.
And with all that in mind, I've been cutting back (somewhat) on video games in favor of reading and stuff. I'm halfway through a book that is absolutely fantastic, so I suppose I'll say some words about my most recent read: The Hidden Forest. I borrowed this book from a friend a while back. I initially declined the offer because I knew from circumstances at the time that it would be a while before I'd have a chance to read it, but he insisted, and now I'm kind of glad that he did, as it's not a book I would normally have read. I think it's the only book with ecology as its main subject that I've actually read, and broadening my horizons is cool.
The most impressive thing about this book is, by far, the content. It's a short read, about 200 pages, but it's packed with interesting information. I've studied biology and had some notion of most of the processes that Luoma writes about, but not at this level of detail. While I don't know how many books have that information, I know that lots of books carry information of the same sort. But the parts about the history of forestry, up to very recent history indeed at the time the book was written (1999), were unlike anything I'd encountered before and were certainly the main force behind this work. Given the choice, I'd read a more general account of the history of forestry rather than this one, which is more specifically confined to a single research forest, but it was enlightening nevertheless.
That's the good. Now for the bad. Maybe I'm spoiled because lately I've been reading good science writers. I know bad science writers are out there in droves, but I've been reading the really good ones. Luoma just doesn't compare to the great writers I've grown accustomed to. If it's possible to rate style and ignore actual content, I'd say that while none of this is awful, none of it is great either. It looks like it should be a draft, perhaps a late draft, but not the final product.
On a lighter note, The Hidden Forest is dated, sometimes hilariously so. And 1999 doesn't sound like a long time ago to me, but I guess it was. I got a kick out of him using "World Wide Web" with the capital letters like that and a bigger one from "electronic mail" (I hadn't seen e-mail called "electronic mail" since, well, probably before this book was written). He also made some of the technologies he described researchers using sound awesome and oh-so-very advanced when now it all seems pretty routine.
If that was the worst of it, I'd be praising this book as a solid introduction to the topics discussed. But sometimes, The Hidden Forest inexplicably takes a turn for the stupid. Since I still haven't returned the book, I just flipped through it for a particularly egregious example...
...or not. Wait. Oh wow, that's even worse than I remembered. I was planning to write something emphasizing that my issues with this excerpt aren't just me being pedantic, but that this is seriously messed up. I would then have addressed the problems. But now that I've transcribed it and seen just how many errors there are, I don't even want to bother. So I'll just color the offending parts...
Snap a photograph with a camera and you engage in a photochemical instant: a pattern of light moving through the lens hammers its photons at a silver-sensitized bit of film, photochemically reconfiguring the molecules into a pattern that will become an image on a negative. Similarly, a photon hurtles its way into a molecule of the pigment chlorophyll and triggers a chain reaction, destabilizing a "light trap" molecule so vigorously, and exciting its spinning electrons so wildly, that one electron from a molecule in the green light-trap literally achieves escape velocity and spins out of orbit. All in an instant of time, that wildly careering electron hurtles its way into the orbit around an atom behind it, in turn energizing and destabilizing that atom, until one of its own electrons spins out into the next atom in the chain. The pattern replicates in the next atom, and the consequence blazes through the green membrane and into a wet solution of water and proteins. There, the sheer force of energy that moved electron to electron severs the strong bonds between hydrogen and oxygen in a water molecule. The foundation act of photosynthesis has been accomplished.Red = Complete factual error.
The split of a water molecule leaves free atoms of oxygen, which snap furiously together in pairs and then diffuse out of the leaf's stomata, the pores that allow it to breathe O2—the oxygen of the atmosphere. Trees and other plants manufacture the Earth's atmosphere. Virtually all of the oxygen in the air we breathe was made by green plants, photosynthesizing over hundreds of millions of years, ripping apart molecules of water for the benefit of their hydrogen, sending the residual oxygen into the skies.
In the leaf, the liberated hydrogen proceeds through a series of tightly linked reactions with enzymes in a complex process called, with intimations of mysticism, the dark phase. Just as oxygen has diffused out of the stomata, carbon dioxide has diffused in. Now the hydrogen atoms and enzymes react with that carbon dioxide.
The finished product is a molecule made of one carbon, two hydrogens, and an oxygen. You can find it abundant not only in the sap of the living tree but, for that matter, in packets on the table of any diner. It is sucrose, simple table sugar. The sweet of the sugarcane or of the beet or of maple sap is simply an amplification of the sugar-rich bath in which every plant cell lives. It is photosynthate, the child of sun, and carbon in the air, and photosynthesis.
Scientists, in their labs, have tried to replicate this wonder. To a degree, they've succeeded. With enormous, detailed effort and excellent equipment, a trained scientist can indeed produce a few motes of sugar from the same basic chemical recipe. But perhaps an ornamental maple sits outside the window of that clever scientist's laboratory. If that tree happens to be mature, and in full leaf, it offers to the sun, in layers, about half an acre of total leaf surface. That half acre of leaf absorbs some 188 million calories of sunlight per hour, just under thee billion calories on a long midsummer day. If each square meter of leaf is photosynthesizing optimally, it produces about a gram of sugar per hour. Over the course of one growing season, the biochemist might dither with high-tech equipment to produce an iota of sugar. In the same time, the tree silently produces about two tons.
Orange = Misinterpretation of the facts.
Yellow = Doesn't make sense.
Green = Really stupid diction
And that's just the parts I could note by changing the word color. All this leaves me wondering just how accurate the rest of the book is. I was easily able to spot errors like the conflation of glucose and sucrose because of my chemistry background. But when Luoma writes about fields where I have little knowledge, I'm a lot less likely to catch such errors.
That's the bad. Now for the ugly.
The end. Seriously, the end is the worst part. It gets very, very ugly. Luoma kept things relatively apolitical for the first 200 pages or so. He covered controversy and disputes over logging, but did so in a convincingly journalistic manner, not taking sides but telling story and at least looking like it's an objective rendition (whether it is or not is another matter). Then in the last handful of pages, he goes off the deep end, delving into philosophy of science (a field that Luoma is apparently clueless about) to explain why ecological research isn't getting enough funding, then seemingly arbitrarily hating on the space program and advocating that ecological research should get that money instead.
This is one of my pet peeves. There are lots of people who think that sure, space is cool and all, but we have so many problems down here on Earth, so let's just stop spending so much money on space and use that money for things that are more important because, after all, space will still be there once we deal with this other stuff. Do I really need to point out that, with that line of reasoning, we'd be cutting ourselves off from space travel forever? There will always be something more important or more pressing. Suck it up. If you want more funding for ecological research, fine, but don't attack the space program.
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