Minor Thoughts from me to you

Summer Knight
by Jim Butcher

My rating: ★★★☆☆
Read From: 27 December 2013 – 29 December 2013

I like the realism of Butcher's Dresden Files novels. If these were mysteries, they'd be called hard boiled.

The Dresden Files tell the story of Harry Dresden, wizard, working in Chicago. Butcher uses all of the common mythical beings — wizards, werewolves, vampires, etc — in a way that fits into the world around us. He doesn't create a fantasy world. He places stories squarely in our world, in a way that feels completely real. You can picture all of the events happening around you, showing up in your daily newspaper.

So far, Butcher has methodically walked through various types of fantasy. The first book featured wizards. The second, werewolves. The third, vampires. And this one, the fourth in the series, focuses on færies. You'll meet Queens Mab and Titania, along with many other members of the Sidhe courts.

I wanted to like this book more than I did. I liked Butcher's typically gritty portrayal of the Summer and Winter courts and the characters in each court. I liked Dresden's creative solutions to the various challenges he faced. I didn't like the ending battle.

I may have disliked it because it took place in the Nevernever (fairy land) instead of in Chicago. Or maybe because it involved a higher than normal number of fantastical beings. Whatever the reason, it felt too fantastic for the overall tone that Butcher has established for these novels. It felt out of place, like something from another author's œuvre.

Overall, it was a good story with a flawed ending.

This morning in church, our pastor asked what had happened to war and violence, since Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day. Had it gone up or down? What would Longfellow think of our world today?

I immediately responded that, of course, violence had gone down. Longfellow would love the our world. I was surprised when Pastor Chris said that things had just gotten worse and worse since then. He showed this depressing graph, taken from a History Today post on the alarming increase in wars.

That confused me. I've been hearing that world violence is at an all time low. PBS aired an interview on this exact topic, two years ago.

Despite news of terrorist bombings and crackdowns in Syria, two recent books argue the world has never seen so little war and violence. Steven Pinker, author of The Better Angels of Our Nature, and Joshua Goldstein, author of Winning the War on War, discuss.

... CONAN: Well, saying that there are fewer war deaths this past decade than at any time in the past 100 years, isn't that another way of indicting the past 100 years and maybe this decade is the anomaly?

GOLDSTEIN: Well no because the past 100 years were - there was a big explosion of violence in the early part of the 20th century, but the 17th century was no picnic, either. The Thirty Years' War destroyed a third of the population of Germany, and back through history, there have been terrible wars much of the time.

And even in prehistoric times, as many as a quarter of the men in a society, not infrequently, died in wars. So it's actually a new thing and something that's developed in the least 60 years and especially the last 20 years.

... PINKER: Yes, the decline of war that scholars such as Joshua Goldstein have documented is one of a number of historical declines of violence. Others include the plummeting of rates of interpersonal violence, one-on-one homicides, which have fallen by about a factor of 35 since the Middle Ages in every European country for which statistics are available.

Another example is the abolition of cruel and barbaric institutionalized practices like human sacrifice, like chattel slavery, like the use of the death penalty for trivial infractions, the burning of heretics, bear-baiting, the list goes on.

And yet another one is the even more recent targeting of violence on smaller scales directed against vulnerable sectors of the population like racial minorities. So we've seen an elimination of the practice of lynching in the United States, which used to take place at a rate of about 150 a year and fell to zero by 1950. Rates of rape have fallen, rates of domestic abuse. Popularity of spanking and other forms of corporal punishment have gone down.

Even more recently, practices that wouldn't even have been categorized as violence in previous decades, like bullying, have now been targeted for elimination. A few years ago, bullying was just childhood, boys will be boys. Now we've brought it in under the umbrella of violence and sought to minimize it for the first time in history.

CONAN: Yet we always hear: the 20th century, the most violent, the bloodiest century in human history.

PINKER: Well, people who make that claim never cite numbers from any century other than the 20th, and as Joshua Goldstein has pointed out, the 17th century with its wars of religion, the 14th century with its Mongol invasions, many other centuries have atrocities that can hold their head high when compared against the 20th century.

The annihilation of native peoples of the Americas and Australia and Africa, the Islamic and Atlantic slave trades racked up horrific death tolls.

What's the story behind that scary graph? Where did that come from and does it contradict Goldstein and Pinker? I looked into it and I don't think it does contract them. Here is how History Today described the study.

The graph below illustrates this increase in pairwise conflicts. It only includes wars between states and does not include civil wars. Conflicts range from full-scale shooting wars and uses of military force to displays of force (sending warships and closing borders, for example). Although Harrison and Wolf’s study does not measure the intensity of violence, it reflects the readiness of governments to settle disputes by force.

According to Harrison and Wolf, this increase in the frequency of pairwise conflicts can be explained by two principal factors: economic growth and the proliferation of borders. The number of countries has thus almost quadrupled since 1870, rising from 47 countries in 1870 to 187 in 2001.

Harrison continued: ‘More pairs of countries have clashed because there have been more pairs. This is not reassuring: it shows that there is a close connection between wars and the creation of states and new borders.’

This study has three flaws. One, it includes displays of force rather than actual uses of force. Thus, India and Pakistan are considered to be at war, even though they're not actually in a state of war. The U.S. is considered to be at war with Iran, etc. This isn't good, but it's different than what most people expect when they hear of an increase in wars.

Second, the study leaves out civil wars, rebellions, coups, etc. As the authors note, the number of countries has quadrupled in the last 150 years. All of the earlier civil wars and unrests that formerly occurred internally now have the potential to be wars between separate nations. The actors and grievances haven't necessarily changed, but the way they're measured has. The left side of the graph understates violence compared to the right side of the graph.

Thirdly, the report doesn't measure the intensity of violence. World War I and World War II each count as one war. So does Desert Storm and the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. The first two wars claimed orders of magnitude more lives than the latter two wars. In this study, they both count exactly the same. Again, that's not what most people would think of when they think about a more violent world.

I think this report (and accompanying graph) are misleading. They give the impression that violence has been steadily increasing over the last 150 years. In fact, the opposite is true. We live in a wonderful time of decreasing violence. War hasn't ended. There are still wars, rebellions, and conflicts. There are still abuses of power and tyranny. But we are far less likely to die from violence than during any other time in human history. I think that's something worth celebrating.

11/22/63
by Stephen King

My rating: ★★★★☆
Read From: 27 November 2013—4 December 2013

I have a habit of overcomplicating my reviews. I'll try to keep this one simple. I like this book. A lot. (I would give it five stars except that I'm still annoyed about the completely gratuitous swipe at the Tea Party that King buries in the novel.)

It's a book about the Kennedy assassination but it's not really about the Kennedy assassination. It's about Jacob Epping, an English teacher in Lisbon Falls, Maine. In 2011, he walks through the back of the pantry in the local diner and ends up in 1958. After some reflection, he decides to stick around for the next 5 years, to stop Lee Harvey Oswald before he assassinates President Kennedy. The resulting story is focused heavily on Oswald. I learned a lot about him—his motivations, his mannerisms, and his actions prior to the assassination.

Jacob narrates the entire story, frequently using lots of foreboding foreshadowing. He calls the world of the past "the Land of Ago". Once he really commits to his mission, he's a very driven character. The eponymous date isn't the focus of the book. Jake's journey is. King uses Jake to take a loving, sentimental look at 1950's America. Most of the story takes place in small towns in Maine, Florida, and Texas. It's almost a paean to small town America, in a time long gone.

As someone who never came close to seeing the 1950's or the 1960's, it's an interesting experience. The foods were richer and tasted better. The people trusted each other more. There was much more isolation between cities, towns, and regions. It was easy for someone to start over in an (essentially) new world, just by moving several states away. Because of the isolation, most people seemed far more ignorant of the nation as a whole.

It wasn't all good though. King describes the industrial areas as smelling much worse than they do today. There are also flashes of the ugly racism that was so prevalent during that era. Surprisingly, there was less visible racism than I expected. On reflection, I think that may reflect just how segregated the races were at the time. There isn't much opportunity for daily racism when minorities aren't even around to visibly discriminate against.

As I read the book, I was continually aware of how much was missing from the 1950's, compared to now. The entertainment options were almost painfully limited. There were just three TV channels—if you were lucky enough to live somewhere with good TV reception. The VCR hadn't been invented yet. Your choices were limited to what was on, at that exact moment. There was no way to rewatch favorite movies or TV episodes.

It was harder to communicate with people over a distance, especially when half of the neighborhood might be listening in on a party line. Research and knowledge sharing would have been painfully limited. No internet. No Google searches or Wikipedia lookups. No instant access to history, news archives, or scholarly articles. There was no ability to pull the information you needed whenever you wanted. You either found it at the local library while the library was open or you didn't find it all.

King painted a very attractive, bucolic picture of mid-century America. I don't think I could go back to live in that era. The limited options of the past would feel like a straitjacket now that I've experienced the massive connectedness and resources of our time. Thankfully, I don't have to go back to that era in order to experience a small slice of it. King provides that experience through this excellent story. You won't regret reading it. I sure don't.

The Revolution Trade
by Charles Stross

My rating: ★★☆☆☆
Read From: 17 October 2013—26 November 2013

This should be the exciting conclusion to Stross's Merchant Princes series. But it's not. I found myself losing interest shortly after I started the book and it took me a while to actually finish it. I kept hoping that it'd be better than it was.

The main problem was that this book seemed to contain a lot more cardboard cutout characters than the previous two did. Stross turned Vice-President Cheney into even more of a one-dimensional villain than he already had been. He also sidelined or killed the story's more interesting characters and featured the less interesting ones.

The Revolution Trade shifted the focus towards the interworld conflicts and firefights. The development economics and interworld trade that made the first two stories so interesting were sidelined. The story ended with a literal bang that completely overwhelmed my suspension of disbelief.

Because it focused on much less interesting character dynamics and much less intelligent plot points, I found the book to be a disappointing end to a series that started out well.

Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, August 2013
by Sheila Williams

My rating: ★★★★☆
Read From: 11 November 2013–21 November 2013

Novella

The Application of Hope by Kristine Kathryn Rusch—Victoria Sabin is a captain in the Fleet. Her people have traveled the stars for generations, always moving from one place to another, never settling down and never circling back to a previous stop.

Years ago, her father's ship disappeared. That loss pushed her to develop her engineering, science, and leadership skills so that she could personally be involved in the search. Now, years later, another captain has disappeared under mysterious circumstances. Will the application of hope be enough to see her through the crisis?

I really enjoyed this story. Enough so that I'll be checking out Rusch's other books set in this universe. It seemed to hit some of the same emotional notes as Stone to Stone, Blood to Blood but from a different direction. Easily 4 stars.

Novelettes

Stone to Stone, Blood to Blood by Gwendolyn Clare—"Two young men living on a planet far from us in time and space take off on a desperate attempt to out run their destiny."Duyi, the heir to the Regency, and Feng, his bodyguard brother, attempt to escape from the palace. Waiting for them if they fail: Duyi's upcoming ceremony where he has to make a personality changing oath of loyalty to Duyi's sister: the Regent. They'll try to change their fates and that of their culture. 4 stars.

Arlington by Jack Skillingstead—In 1982, sixteen year old Paul Birmingham got lost above the Olympic Peninsula, while attempting his first solo cross country flight. Thirty years later, he's living alone, in great pain, slowly dying. He buys the plane he flew in 1982 and tries to retrace his earlier flight and the events that followed. What happened to him in 1982 changed his life forever, trapping him in a solo existence. 4 stars.

Lost Wax by Gregory Norman Bossert—Artists battling the revolution with their hearts and hands reveal the terrifying weapon that can be sculpted with Lost Wax. I'm not even sure how to describe this story. Steampunk? But with vats of yeast as the motivating agent instead of steam? It was odd. And interesting. And contained mechanical golems, called golethe. And possibly about what makes us human, in and among the machines. I'll give it three stars.

Short Stories

The Ex-Corporal by Leah Thomas—"It had been several weeks since the ex-corporal had replaced our father. The ex-corporal wore his skin very well, seeping right into Dad's follicles and wrinkles, occupying Dad's dimples when he smiled."

Dad abruptly started suffering epileptic seizures. After his seizures, he acted like a different man. Did the seizures propel his consciousness to different worlds in the multiverse? Did someone else visit our world, through his body? Or was it all just mental illness? 4 stars.

My Take

This may be my favorite issue of Asimov's yet. I liked all but one of the stories and I really loved several of them. I've been thinking about canceling my subscription, after reading some of the previous issues. This one really makes me question that and makes me excited to see what's ahead in September's issue. Overall, 4 stars.

A. Barton Hinkle, writing for the Richmond Times-Dispatch, talks about why democracy is such a lousy form of government.

A mere 43 percent of registered Virginia voters cast a ballot this year. Even if the winners received 100 percent of the votes, they still would have the support of less than half the electorate. In the governor’s race, Terry McAuliffe won only 48 percent, making him the first governor to enter office with a plurality in half a century. His 48 percent of the 43 percent who voted gives him the support of only 20 percent of the state’s electorate — and that is before you take into account the fact that, according to one poll, 64 percent of his supporters said they really were voting against Republican Ken Cuccinelli, rather than for McAuliffe. If the poll is accurate, then less than one voter in 10 cast an affirmative ballot in the Democrat’s favor.

And yet someone has to be governor, so it is on such slender reeds as these that history is built. McAuliffe might not have won the Executive Mansion were not the current occupant, Bob McDonnell, sidelined by an ethics scandal that spattered Cuccinelli as well. McDonnell himself probably would not be governor had he not beaten Creigh Deeds for attorney general eight years ago by 360 votes, or one one-hundredth of 1 percent.

I really like his conclusion.

Great innovations should not be forced on slender majorities, said Jefferson, but from the Iraq war to Obamacare, they almost always are. For those who care about the consent of the governed, that is one more reason to limit government’s scope: Democracy is just about the worst way possible to run a country. Except, of course, for all the others.

∞

Roasting in Hell's Kitchen
by Gordon Ramsay

My rating: ★★★☆☆
Read From: 13 November 2013—17 November 2013

My wife introduced me to Gordon Ramsay a year or two ago. At first, I just saw episodes of Hell's Kitchen in passing. Then I started watching episodes of Kitchen Nightmares. Finally, I made it through the final ¾ of the most recent season of Master Chef.

I was sucked in by Gordon's passion. His outspokenly blunt assessments of the weaknesses of restaurants, chefs, and restaurant food. Because of his shows, I've begun to have a more critical eye towards restaurants and the quality of the food I eat. I'm taking more of an interest in "fancy" food and the real skill and creativity that goes into high end restaurants.

When I saw that the local library had a Kindle copy of this book, I was intrigued. I've wanted to know more about Gordon Ramsay: what makes him tick, how he built his food and media empire, how he deals with the many challenges to his time, etc.

This book was published in November, 2006. It ends on his very first entry into American TV, so it's not very up to date. The vast, vast bulk of the book covers Ramsay's early life, his aborted soccer career, and his early years learning to cook.

There are only a few, short, chapters on his career after he opened his first restaurant. There is next to no information on what it took to open and manage multiple restaurants, what it took to write multiple books, run multiple TV shows, or juggle all of the different demands in his time. I got a lot of information on his early life, but next to nothing about what it's like to be Gordon Ramsay today.

On the plus side, Ramsay's voice comes through quite clearly in this book. I don't know whether he wrote it himself or if he had someone ghost write it. Either way, it doesn't seem to matter. The breezy, vulgar style of the book sounds exactly like Ramsay sounds on screen. It's akin to sitting and listening to Ramsay reminisce on his early career, challenges, and successes. I very much enjoyed the style and tone of the book.

I was struck by how very hard Ramsay worked to get where he is today. He spent years working 80-90 hour weeks in the kitchen. He endured endless abuse from senior chefs (and not so senior chefs) just to learn as much as he could. He spent several weeks literally working 20 hours a day, to earn the money he needed and to learn the skills he needed even more. Whatever level of wealth he has today, I'd find it very hard to say that he hasn't earned every bit of it.

Overall, I very much enjoyed reading Ramsay's story. I just wanted a much deeper look at it what it took to open restaurants number 2-10. And what it took to run the restaurants while appearing on TV shows. And a look at how much control or influence he has over the style and content of what airs each week. From that perspective, this book was a disappointment. From other perspectives, it was a lot of fun.

Do Americans really pay more for healthcare and get less for it than most other industrialized countries? Avid Roy does some myth busting.

If you really want to measure health outcomes, the best way to do it is at the point of medical intervention. If you have a heart attack, how long do you live in the U.S. vs. another country? If you’re diagnosed with breast cancer? In 2008, a group of investigators conducted a worldwide study of cancer survival rates, called CONCORD. They looked at 5-year survival rates for breast cancer, colon and rectal cancer, and prostate cancer. I compiled their data for the U.S., Canada, Australia, Japan, and western Europe. Guess who came out number one?

∞

Warren Meyer is both a small business owner and a outspoken advocate of gay rights. He tried to put a gay marriage amendment on the Arizona ballot, earlier this year. And, yet, he opposes the current Senate bill to make sexual orientation a protected class. He explained why, on his blog.

If you are unfamiliar with how it works, this is perhaps how you THINK it works:  An employee, who has been mistreated in a company based on clear prejudice for his or her race / gender / sexual orientation, etc. has tried to bring the problem to management's attention.  With no success via internal grievance processes, the employee turns finally to the government for help.

Ha!  If this were how it worked, I would have no problem with the law.  In reality, this is how it works:  Suddenly, as owner of the company, one finds a lawsuit or EEOC complain in his lap, generally with absolutely no warning.  In the few cases we have seen in our company, the employee never told anyone in the company about the alleged harassment, never gave me or management a chance to fix it, despite very clear policies in our employee's manuals that we don't tolerate such behavior and outlining methods for getting help.  There is nothing in EEO law that requires an employee to try to get the problem fixed via internal processes.

As a result, our company can be financially liable for allowing a discriminatory situation to exist that we could not have known about, because it happened in a one-on-one conversations and the alleged victim never reported it.

What I want is a reasonable chance to fix problems, get rid of bad supervisors, etc.  A reasonable anti-discrimination law would say that companies have to have a grievance process with such and such specifications, and that no one may sue until they have exhausted the grievance process or when there is no conforming grievance process.  If I don't fix the problem and give the employee a safe work environment, then a suit is appropriate.  The difference between this reasonable goal and the system we actually have is lawyers.  Lawyers do not want the problem to be fixed.  Lawyers want the problem to be as bad as possible and completely hidden from management so there is no chance it can be fixed before they can file a lucrative lawsuit.

This is a strong argument for rejecting this bill. It's not homophobia or oppression to demand that the law respect both employers and employees. This law doesn't and that's a problem.

∞

Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, July 2013
by Sheila Williams

My rating: ★★★☆☆
Read From: 1 September 2013—11 November 2013

Novelettes

The Art of Homecoming—I enjoy Carrie Vaughn's urban fantasy series, about werewolves. But I wasn't sure what kind of science fiction story to expect from here. I needn't have worried. This is a character story driven by very human themes. Who am I? Where do I fit in? Where is home, if I haven't seen family in decades and they live in an alien environment?

Yubba Vines—The magazine describes this story as "gnarly realism". A roving restaurant, Lifter, fattens up the guests for an out of this world slaughterhouse. Weird and a bit trippy.

What is a Warrior Without His Wounds?—A Russian war hero, an amputee, is given the opportunity to be whole again. But at what price?

This was a good story but I felt like it was fairly predictable, lessening any emotional impact.

At Palomar—This is another of Rick Wilber's "Moe Berg" stories. Moe is back in another adventure playing baseball, crossing timelines, and (as always) fighting fascists. I enjoy these stories so it was a pleasant surprise to get a new one.

Short Stories

Haplotype 1402—A dystopic near future story. A disease wiped out most of Earth's population and only the lucky few, with the right haplotypes providing immunity, lived through it. A tiny band of survivors travels between reservations where the survivors live. But there are still moral choices to confront.

This was a weak story. The title doesn't match the narrative. Haplotypes are finally mentioned somewhere near the end, but haplotype 1402 never is. There's a throwaway line about American Indians ironically having more survivors than anyone else but the author never does anything with it. Overall, it felt like Kosmatka had more ideas than he had space. Rather than fitting the story to the space, he tried to jam everything in. It didn't work.

Blair's War—This one failed to catch my interest, thus I never read it.

Today's Friends—The Grays have invaded Earth. They're not like us and that's a problem because they want us to be just like them.

A good, chilling story. TODAY'S FRIEND WANTS TO HEAR YOUR SONG.

D. J. Jaffe taught me something that I had no idea about.

President Obama should focus any incremental expansions in social-service and health-care programs on those who need it most. Ninety percent of people with the most serious mental illness, schizophrenia, cannot work and therefore do not have private insurance — they rely on Medicaid. The new regulations will mean little to them. Medicaid reimburses states for roughly 50 percent of the cost of caring for the truly indigent. But an obscure provision of Medicaid law called the “IMD Exclusion” prevents Medicaid from reimbursing states for the care and treatment of people in state psychiatric hospitals. As a result, states bear 100 percent of the costs of state psychiatric hospitals and have learned that, by kicking people out of such institutions, they can get reimbursed by Medicaid for fifty percent of their care in the community. So kick them out they do. 

A report I co-authored with lead author Dr. E. Fuller Torrey of the Treatment Advocacy Center found that, in 1955, ten years before Medicaid was enacted, there were 340 public psychiatric beds available per 100,000 Americans. In 2005, there were only 17 public psychiatric beds available per 100,000. In other words, the number of beds per capita dropped 95 percent from 1955 to 2005. We are now short over 100,000 beds for the most seriously mentally ill — and that assumes we had perfect community services, which we don’t.

That's pretty bad. If the President wants political wins, I think this is worth pushing for. It's something that seems like it would really help and—in the wake of mass shootings by mentally ill individuals—he has a good chance of getting the NRA and other groups to support it.

∞

Ira Stoll, writing for Reason.com, points out that the experts are often wrong.

So, of the 60 baseball “experts” in total, not a single one of them picked the Red Sox to win the American League pennant. Only one of the 60 picked the Cardinals to win the National League pennant.

You would have been better off throwing darts at a dartboard than you would have been listening to the baseball “experts.” The Wall Street Journal used to demonstrate this in a regular column in which stocks picked by throwing darts randomly often outperformed the selections of Wall Street professionals who were even more highly compensated than ESPN journalists.

Complex systems are hard to predict.

That doesn’t mean we should ignore all experts. But it does mean we should routinely treat their predictions with the skepticism they deserve. This goes for predictions from experts preferred by the political left, who warn that the sea level rise from global warming is going to leave us all under water, and for predictions from experts preferred by the political right, who warn that the future cost of entitlement programs is going to leave us all under water.

It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t plan for the future, whether on entitlements, or the threat of global warming. But what planning we do should take into account the possibility that the experts will be wrong.

Exactly. I do trust experts when they're giving advice about what to do in response to what we know is happening right now. I'm far more distrustful when they're prognosticating about what might happen later and what we should do to prepare for that potential future. In fact, given how often expert predictions are wrong, I think blindly following their advice about potential futures might be worse than blindly ignoring their advice about potential futures.

∞

Roma Eterna
by Robert Silverberg

My rating: ★★★☆☆
Read From: 20 October 2013—1 November 2013

In the Aeneid, Virgil wrote: "To Romans I set no boundary in space or time. I have granted them dominion, and it has no end." What if that was true? What if the Roman Empire had never fallen? What if it had been eternal? Robert Silverberg wrote a collection of short stories around that theme. The stories start in A.D. 450 and continue through A.D. 1970, covering 1500 years of Roman history.

We see the attempted colonization of North America (Nova Roma), the civil wars between the Roman and Greek halves of the Empire, the crazy emperors, and the purges. The stories are well written, as you'd expect from Silverberg. They focus on many different time periods, physical locations, and characters. Historians, court functionaries, soldiers, and provincial royalty. In fact, that was the second flaw I noted with this collection—very little focus on the common man of the Empire. They mostly focused on people of high position or people who interacted with the high and mighty. There was only one story that dealt with the commoners.

The largest flaw was right at the beginning of the book. Silverberg obviously knew that he needed a framing device to illustrate how and why his Rome was different from our Rome. He starts by having a Roman historian (in A.D. 450) deliver a monologue to a friend.

The monologue concerns a thought experiment in which the Hebrews ("you do know who they are, right?) weren't just an obscure people group but had instead escaped Egypt, founded a nation, and eventually generated a major world religion that took over the Empire, leading to its gradual weakening and ultimate collapse.

Yes, that's right. Our entire history (an unlikely chain of events in itself) is recast as a thought experiment that one Roman just happens to think up for a book he's planning to write. Once the stories get started, that matters a lot less. But it was an incredibly clunky way to start the book.

Overall, this was an entertaining book, page turner in parts. There were certainly some interesting characters and events in it. It is intriguing to speculate about all of the ways that history might have been different if the Roman Empire had never fallen, if we'd never gone through a medieval "dark ages", and if Western Civilization hadn't moved its center to Western Europe and North America.

If that interests you, definitely consider reading Roma Eterna. Otherwise, rest assured that you're not missing a must-read book.

The Traders' War
by Charles Stross

My rating: ★★★★☆
Read From: 9 October 2013—16 October 2013

So there's a Clan of jumped-up tinkers from an alternate timeline who can world-walk between timelines. They grew massively wealthy through a simple physical arbitrage. They pick up medicinal grade heroin down in Florida or Central America. They switch over to their home timeline, still stuck in the medieval period. They load the heroin into a caravan, guarded by Clan members with automatic weapons. They transport the heroin all the way north to their home base of the Gruinmarkt. Then they switch over to our timeline and deliver the heroin to the Boston based buyers. Voila! A secure, completely untraceable conduit for drug deliveries, worth millions.

They make money the other way by acting as a super high speed courier service. Take a letter from a king or a duke or a count in the Gruinmarkt. Switch to our timeline, catch a plane to Seattle, and carry the letter with you. Pop back to your home timeline and deliver the letter, next-day post, to the recipient, neatly avoiding the bandits and the multi-week horseback trip that would be required in your home timeline.

It sounds like a neat setup, right? Good family men, good business men, providing a needed service on both worlds. But what would happen if the DEA were to find out about these untraceable heroin couriers? Worse yet, what if a highly trusted individual were to sell out the Clan to the DEA, telling them everything he knows about safe houses, transfer points, and delivery networks?

Well, let's just say that America's ever paranoid security services wouldn't react well. At all. After all, if these people can securely transfer heroin, who's to say that they're not transferring bombs? Or terrorists? Or nukes? What if they might be hostile? It'd be far better to treat them as a hostile government and take them out first, before they take you out, wouldn't it?

And so it goes for Miriam Beckstein. Right as she's establishing a toehold in her family's business and starting to gain a little freedom for herself, the Clan ends up in a clandestine war with the U.S. government. Everything goes to pieces and Miriam gets herself even more tightly restricted than she already was.

Stross once again superbly plays the realistic reaction card. You, the reader, can understand and sympathize with both the government security forces and the Clan. Their both acting rationally according to the information they have, the cultures they're from, and the interests they need to protect. And it's probably not going to end well for either of them. It's a train wreck that you see coming from miles away, drive by the logical decisions of each character. It's unsettlingly realistic and slightly depressing. There's no authorial deus ex machina to make everything turn out well for your favorite characters. There's only the inexorable march of inevitable events.

That's refreshing to read in a science fiction story. I'm looking forward to seeing how it all ends.

The Bloodline Feud
by Charles Stross

My rating: ★★★★☆
Read From: 1 October 2013—8 October 2013

Charlie Stross puts this story squarely in the real world. Sure, it's science fiction. But that only means that it has a fictional element to it. The rest of it reads as real as history.

Miriam Beckstein is a tech journalist in Boston and the adopted daughter of sixties radicals. She has a fairly normal life writing investigative journalism (and getting fired for uncovering the wrong bit of sleaze). Normal, that is, until her step-mother gives her a locket that her birth mother had when she died. Suddenly, Miriam finds herself in an alternate universe version of Boston. One where the Roman empire never ruled the known world, the Catholic church was never dominant, and the British empire never reached North America. Instead of Boston, she finds herself in the Gruinmarkt, a semi-Danish kingdom, stuck with medieval technology.

Besides a foreign land and a foreign language, Miriam has to contend with a new family. It turns out that she's a long lost duchess, from a whole family of world walkers—the Clan. Unfortunately for her, while her family has heard of women's lib, they hold no truck with it. They may have modern amenities and they may enjoy the high tech American lifestyle, but they're still medieval underneath. Like Saudi princes in New York—they may look sophisticated and urbane but back in the Kingdom they're still patriarchal jerks.

To make things worse, every member of the Clan is expected to contribute to the family business or die. When Miriam shows up, they waste no time trying to assimilate "Duchess Helge" into their pre-existing plans. Thus Miriam gets sucked deeper and deeper into her family's affairs, almost entirely against her will. She has to fight hard to have even the slightest control over what happens to her.

There's a lot going on in this story and most of it feels completely realistic. Miriam and her family are each acting in their own best interests. It's hard to fault either of them for acting as they do, given the constraints that they each operate under. Their motivations and actions all make sense, given the worlds they live in. None of which changes the fact that Miriam's situation well and truly sucks, even as she lives out the sci-fi dream of being able to travel between worlds.

The story would be well worth recommending just on that angle. But Stross didn't stop there. He also built the story around development economics. Miriam desperately wants to raise the standard of living of the Gruinmarkt from subsistence-level medieval farming to modern industry. But how do you bootstrap an entire kingdom into the modern era? Especially given that the only cargo you can move between worlds is what you can physically carry, your family distrusts your every move lest you rock their boat too much, and the people of the Gruinmarkt consider you a witch?

This book is fun, thought-provoking, and frustrating (in the best possible way). This is exactly what good science fiction should be.

More Than Human
by Theodore Sturgeon

My rating: ★★★☆☆
Read From: 24 September 2013—1 October 2013

Theodore Sturgeon's acclaimed classic about a group of gifted misfits who discover that together they have the power to move humankind forward—or destroy it completely.

Lone is a seemingly simple young man living on the street and in the woods, dim and helpless, yet effortlessly able to read the thoughts of others. His true nature won't be revealed until the arrival of eight-year-old Janie, a telekinetic; twins Bonnie and Beanie, who can teleport easily across great distances; and Baby, an infant with a super-computer brain. Together they are the Gestalt, a single extraordinary being composed of remarkable parts (although an essential piece may be missing).

But are they the next stage in human development or harbingers of the end of civilization? It's a question that takes on a terrifying new relevance when Gerry joins their group—for though he's powerfully telepathic, he lacks a moral compass . . . and his hatred of the world that has rejected him could prove catastrophic.

This description caught my eye, when I saw it on my library's website. I'm always interested in speculative fiction about the future of humanity or people with unusual talents and abilities. When those people are actually blending together into a new life form, the concept just becomes more interesting.

The story wasn't the tightly plotted thriller or straightforward character development story that I expected. Instead, it was a series of vignettes, each focusing on different characters from different viewpoints, some from first person perspective and some from third person perspective. Some of the vignettes were beautifully and poetically written, others were more straightforward prose. Some focused directly on the main characters, others focused only peripherally on the main characters. Together, they formed a tapestry that told the story.

The book's flaw is that Sturgeon told more than he showed. He mentions, several times, that these multiple characters form one single entity. He even has one of his characters say that she can no more live without the others than an arm or a leg could live without the rest of the body.

And, yet, the story never shows that this is true. From what I saw, the characters don't appear to be that tightly linked. True, they worked well together and all of their gifts complemented each other. And they formed a tight knit family. But I never got the sense that they more than a close, devoted family. I never sensed that they were a linked entity that would truly be unable to live or operate as individuals. Diminished, yes. Demolished, no. As poignant as the book is, this flaw drags down the rest of the story.

To Live Again
by Robert Silverberg

My rating: ★★★★☆
Read From: 20 September 2013 - 24 September 2013

I've never been a huge fan of literary fiction. Perhaps it's because I find our world to be so familiar as to be boring. These science fiction novels by Robert Silverberg were a nice compromise. They were literary in tone but set in a world a bit different from ours.

Both stories share a theme: who am I? Not in the grand mystical sense of "where did we all come from?" but in the more personal sense of "what makes me, me?"

In To Live Again, the Scheffing Institute regularly records the brain scans of the super rich. Then, after death, their scans can be implanted in someone else's brain. The host gets to experience the memories, knowledge, insight, and personality of the dead. The dead get to experience living all over again, even if just as passengers in someone else's head.

Some people have productive relationships with their implants while others live in near constant conflict with them. What does it mean to be "you" when there is someone else in your head? When you have two sets of memories and a voice constantly whispering in your mind, are you really the same person anymore? Silverberg uses this setting to explore maturity, ambition, jealousy, and loyalty.

The Second Trip features Paul Macy. Paul used to be Nat Hamlin, a famous and successful sculptor. Four years ago, Nat was convicted of multiple rapes and was sentenced to Rehab. In the story, Rehab is a process of completely purging the personality and then building a new personality from the ground up—complete with a manufactured past. Paul Macy is the new personality in Nat Hamlin's body.

Nat Hamlin is gone. Or is he? The story plays out almost entirely in Paul's / Nat's mind, as Nat struggles to regain his own life and body and Paul struggles to establish his right to exist, even though "he's" less than 4 years old without any true life experience. Again, there's the theme of "who am I?" coupled with the question of "do I even have a right to exist?". The resulting conflict is interesting to watch and spurs much thought.

The Man Who Sold the Moon
by Robert A. Heinlein

My rating: ★★★★☆
Read From: 15 September 2013 - 19 September 2013

This is another collection of some of Heinlein's early stories. In this case, more of his "Future History" stories. The volume is almost worth reading just for John Campbell's introduction, explaining why Heinlein was such a great writer.

Simply put, he faced the challenge of conveying the mores and patterns of a strange cultural background, the technological background that created and sustained that culture, and the characters that inhabited that culture. He managed to do it brilliantly, over and over again, without resorting to the info dumps that are so often present in literature.

These stories, "Life-Line", "Let There Be Light", "The Roads Must Roll", "Blowups Happen", "The Man Who Sold the Moon", and "Orphans of the Sky" all illustrate that part of Heinlein's talent. And they're all enjoyable.

"Life-Line"—how would the world react if someone could predict the instant of anyone's death?

"The Roads Must Roll"—Cars do not roll upon the roads. The roads themselves roll. What might force that innovation, what kind of world would it create, and what risks would come with that world?

"The Man Who Sold the Moon"—The one man who most wants to visit the moon, who will do the most to push humanity to the moon, may be the one man who never sees the moon. Poignant.

"Orphans of the Sky"—Residents of a generational starship believe that The Ship is all there is to the universe. They've systematically reinterpreted all of the scientific texts as various forms of allegory and myth. But what happens when one man is convinced of the truth and tries to act the missionary to his fellow voyagers?

This collection is definitely worth a read.

This closes the loop on a story that I first noted back in July 2012.

According to police reports, Officers Gregory Martin and Jeremy Brindle entered Howard’s room in the locked-down Alzheimer’s unit and told him to enter the ambulance.

When Howard did not respond to commands, Martin unholstered his Taser and told him he would be Tased if he didn’t comply.

Brindle attempted to gain control of Howard’s arms to restrain him, and a struggle ensued. When Howard turned towards Brindle, Martin then Tased him, which caused Howard to drop to the floor.

Howard was then Tased by Martin two more times while on the ground after ordering him multiple times to roll onto his stomach. Police said Howard resisted constraint and attempted to fight them while on the floor.

Brindle then handcuffed Howard, which left a large, bloody gash on his wrist and escorted him to Duke’s Memorial Hospital. Officers said he was combative in the ambulance until his wife arrived at the hospital and calmed him down.

Howard’s wife, Virginia, ... said her husband was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s 13 years ago and doesn’t understand the simplest directions or commands like “sit down or pick up a book.”

In August 2012, the Peru, IN police department fired Gregory Martin. Martin immediately appealed his firing and the case went to court. On September 5 2013---more than a year later---the appeals court denied Martin's appeal. It's now official that Martin won't be going back to the Peru, IN police force.

I'm glad this case is finally over and that justice ultimately was served. But this case illustrates why I believe that police unions are a bad idea. In a normal business, you could fire an employee for this kind of overreaction and walk away, confident that the firing would stick. The city of Peru fired Martin and then had to fight multiple battles to ensure that the firing would stick.

This kind of long drawn process gives too much power to the police department, to our civil "servants". It mights it too costly to get rid of bad actors and makes it more likely that the bad actors stick around, causing more problems down the road.

Union defenders claim that the government unions are necessary, to protect employees against abusive employers and managers. But the city of Peru is ultimately responsible to its citizens. Police who think they are wrongly treated can make their case at the ballot box. They shouldn't be able to use the coercive power of unionization to dictate terms to the citizens who ultimately pay their salaries and employ them.

Reamde
by Neal Stephenson

My rating: ★★☆☆☆
Read From: 19 August 2013 - 15 September 2013

Start with a family reunion. Focus on the black sheep of the family. Make him wealthy. Now give him a nerdily interesting, checkered past. Finally set him up as the creator of a Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game that's built around making money in creative ways that other MMORPG's find distasteful.

The MMORPG is called T'Rain, built on the back of a truly nitpicky landscape generator called TERRAIN. (Terrain, T'Rain, get it?) It's set up with the careful attention to detail , accuracy, and knowledge of geek culture that only Stephenson can provide.

This is all part of the setup and it does take a while to set up and to start the story rolling. But once stolen data is encrypted by a virus (called REAMDE) and held hostage for (virtual) ransom, things start rolling along. Stephenson sets up a story that rolls along like billiard balls or a Rube Goldberg machine. One set of characters takes action that results in then careening into a new set of characters who are then jolted into action and sent careening into a new, completely separate and different, set of characters. And the actions just bangs along from one continent to another.

Or, at least, it seems to at the beginning. But once Stephenson has introduced all of the characters, he seems to lose control of the narrative. Within a short while, the book consumes itself with the intricate details of how, exactly, characters move from one location to another. Given the sheer number of characters Stephenson introduced, that poses a bit of a problem.

The story just switched from character to character to character to character to character, showing how they were moving around. Even the action sequences, when they finally came, suffered as too many characters were doing too many things in too many different locations. It was a chore to keep track of everyone and where Stephenson last left them. The ending, when it finally came, was a blessed relief that even managed to feel rushed.

Ultimately, Reamde is a book with some good ideas about the MMORPG gaming world and how it interacts with the real world. But it's a mediocre action story that could have used a good bit of reductive editing.