Minor Thoughts from me to you

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.

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.

Nixon and Kissinger
by Robert Dallek

My rating: ★★★☆☆
Read From: 30 July 2013 - 6 September 2013

I have a few thoughts after reading this book.

1. It felt really long. Obviously, it was long. But some long books feel short and some short books feel long. This book felt really long.
2. How in the world did we manage to elect a neurotic, insecure, narcissistic man like Nixon to the Presidency? Especially one who would work in close partnership with another thin-skinned neurotic, in Kissinger? Sure, Johnson was also a power hungry manipulator. But he wasn't actually mentally unstable the way that Nixon appears to have been.
3. Why does Dallek always refer to Nixon as "Nixon" but mostly refer to Kissinger as "Henry"? It seems very odd.
4. It's a wonder that the U.S., and the rest of the world, survived the Nixon / Kissinger partnership as well as they did. Between Chile, Vietnam, Cambodia, the Middle East, and the Indo-Pakistan War, it was pretty bad. But it could have been a whole lot worse.
5. The book was aptly titled. It was entirely about situations that involved both Nixon and Kissinger. Dallek focused exclusively on foreign policy. He entirely excluded domestic policy from the book. Aside from the inescapable inclusion of Watergate during the last 6 months of Nixon's Presidency, you could be forgiven for forgetting that anything outside of foreign policy even happened between 1968 and 1974.
6. Even Nixon himself disappeared from the pages of the book when he wasn't dealing with foreign policy. Dallek focused almost exclusively on Kissinger's actions during the last 6 months of Nixon's presidency.

If you want an overview of the Nixon presidency combined with his partnership with Kissinger, I can't recommend this book. If you're interested in the detailed day by day account of Nixon and Kissinger's foreign adventures together, this is the book you've been looking for.

Analog Science Fiction And Fact, September 2013
by Trevor Quachri

My rating: ★★★☆☆
Read From: 16 July 2013 - 24 August 2013

There were some decent stories in this issue.

• Murder on the Aldrin Express—The hard nosed captain of a solar transport investigates a potential murder. There are more than a few references to a similarly named Agatha Christie story.
• Creatures From a Blue Lagoon—Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be an intergalactic, inter species veterinarian? Probably not nearly as much fun as you'd think. But this story was fun.
• Life of the Author Plus Seventy—Debts. Cryogenics. And statutes of limitations. Can you win against the machine?
• Wreck Support—Archaeological find of an ancient tech support document.

Wyrd Sisters
by Terry Pratchett

My rating: ★★★★☆
Read From: 20 August 2013 - 23 August 2013

I can tell I'm reading a good Discworld novel when the humor walks up behind me with a cudgel and lays me low. It starts with a surprised snort and devolves into irrepressible giggling. I can force it down but it threatens to come back whenever I think of the offending passage.

This book had that effect on me. It may have borrowed a bit too heavily from Shakespeare (and particularly Macbeth) but it was still a good Discworld novel.

This is the bit that got me.

"Would you care to share our lunch, old...good wo...miss?" he said. "It's only salt pork, I'm afraid."

"Meat is extremely bad for the digestive system," said Magrat. "If you could see inside your colon you'd be horrified."

"I think I would," muttered Hwel.

Equal Rites
by Terry Pratchett

My rating: ★★★★☆
Read From: 17 August 2013 - 19 August 2013

Another fun, enjoyable read in the Discworld universe. A dying wizard tries to give his staff to the newly born eighth son of an eighth son. But the new son turns out to be a new daughter and the Discworld is about to see its first female wizard. Or its first wizard witch. Or something. The result is, as you might expect, both humorous and poignant.

This book definitely has Pratchett's trademark humor. I loved his pun on Granny Weatherwax's observation that "good fences make good neighbors".

The Uplift War
by David Brin

My rating: ★★★★☆
Read From: 28 July 2013 - 6 August 2013

This is the concluding book in David Brin's original Uplift trilogy. These stories take place in an imaginative universe.

All races in the Galaxy have been “uplifted” into sentience by a prior alien race, in a chain stretching back to the Progenitors. Humans have even uplifted dolphins and chimpanzees into sentience. But who uplifted humanity? This is a great mystery and the other races are antagonistic towards the “wolfing” human race, without patrons or lineage.

The last book, Startide Rising, dealt primarily with the neo-dolphins that humanity has Uplifted into intelligence. This book deals primarily with the neo-chimpanzees that have been similarly Uplifted.

Startide Rising dealt almost entirely with the neo-dolphins. The Galactics were in the story but we only got cursory glimpses of them and didn't become familiar with any one race. The Uplift War turns that around.

The action takes place on the planet of Garth, a human and neo-chimp colony. Garth is invaded by the Gubru (an avian species). Several of the chimp characters take leading roles. Humanity is allied with another alien species, the Tymbrimi. The story also features Athacleana, the daughter of the Tymbrimi ambassador.

I liked this focus on the chimp and Tymbrimi characters. David Brin does a pretty good job at bringing a non-human perspective to the story. (I did feel, at times, that Athacleana was acting too much like a human female though.)

Brin has hinted in the previous books about the different species, their behaviors, and Galactic customs. In this book, he moved from hints to specifics. He used this story to narrow the focus from all of the Galactics to just two or three specific species. He then dove into the details of how the races acted, politicked, and made war. It gave a lot of depth and realism to his universe.

This was a very good end to Brin's original trilogy. It didn't answer any of the big mysteries from Startide Rising, but it expanded the scope of the story and made it clear that there are many, many more stories that could yet be told.

Red Planet
by Robert A. Heinlein

My rating: ★★★★☆
Read From: 26 July 2013 - 27 July 2013

Once I'd finished Tunnel in the Sky (it was such a quick read), I wasn't ready to be done with Heinlein. And I had this book sitting around, checked out from the library. So I went ahead and read it. It's another of Heinlein's juveniles. It's not as much of a coming of age story as Tunnel in the Sky. It certainly has elements of that but it's a bit more focused on the line between authority and tyranny.

Heinlein hits on some familiar themes: responsibility is a matter of maturity and skill, not of age. Self-defense is the right of every person. The man asking (or requiring) you to disarm yourself doesn't have your best interests at heart. He undoubtedly has someone's best interests in mind, but it's not you. Respect for other civilizations and peoples is not only a matter of decency, it can also be a matter of life and death. Self-reliance and initiative is far preferable to dependency and trust in good intentions.

It's an entertaining story, with a necessary message about life. It's another one that I'll be recommending to my daughters, as they grow up.

Tunnel in the Sky
by Robert A. Heinlein

My rating: ★★★★☆
Read From: 25 July 2013 - 26 July 2013

After reading (and being disappointed by) Darkship Renegades, I decided to read something from Heinlein himself, to cleanse the palate. I'd heard about Tunnel in the Sky last July, from a blog comment on Tor.com.

Whenever you’re sitting around and thinking to yourself, “You know I could really go for a novel in which is exactly like Lord of the Flies, but only in space,” then this is your book. Funnily enough, this book was published the same year as Golding’s Lord of the Flies and if it were up to me, it would be taught instead. The primary SF conceit of the novel deals with interplanetary colonization through big teleport jumps. Naturally some younger folks get stranded and certain ugly aspects of human nature are revealed. The only one of Heinlein’s “juvenilia” that I feel gets overlooked, and easily my favorite from that period.

It's a short read and I ripped through it pretty quickly. But it's a good one. As a "juvenile" (what we'd now call young adult) novel, it's a coming of age novel. Heinlein writes a story that's character driven, moves quickly, and is entertaining.

Heinlein spends a lot of time talking (through the story's events) about responsibility, proper attitudes towards survival, and what makes civilization. He uses the story to make a strong argument that proper government is a necessary component of civilization. That sounds odd, coming from a libertarian, but I think he wins his argument.

The government doesn't have to be large, overbearing, or especially powerful. But there are certain tasks that need to be done to protect the civilization (no matter how small it is). There are certain matters of organization and defense that need to be arranged. Someone has to give those orders and everyone else has to accept those orders as legitimate and proper.

Humanity invented government to allow that to happen. The type of government will differ in different times and different places. And each group of people will need to make their own decisions about what constitutes legitimate authority. Heinlein effortlessly illustrates all of this through the story as these lost students (high school and college aged) work to build a society once they realize that they've been stranded on an alien planet.

This story works on all levels. It's both thought provoking and entertaining. The philosphy doesn't interfere with the adventure, it merely backs it up and deepens it. This is definitely a story that I'll be recommending to my daughters as they grow older.

Darkship Renegades
by Sarah A. Hoyt

My rating: ★★★☆☆
Read From: 22 July 2013 - 24 July 2013

Goodreads book summary:

Entry number two in Sarah A. Hoyt’s rollicking and popular Darkship series, sequel to Darkship Thieves,and winner of the Prometheus Award. After rescuing her star pilot husband and discovering the dark secret of her own past on Earth, Athena Hera Sinistra returns to space habitat Eden to start life anew. Not happening. Thena and Kit are placed under arrest for the crime of coming back alive. The only escape from a death sentence: return to Earth and bring back the lost method for creating the Powertrees, the energy source of both Eden and Earth whose technological origins have been lost to war. But that mission is secondary to a greater imperative. Above all else, Thena must not get caught. If she does, then suicide is to be the only option.

I had trouble reviewing Ms. Hoyt's previous entry in this series, Darkship Thieves. At the time, I ended the review by saying "It felt very uneven and not all that 'real'." After reading this book, I have a better understanding of what I don't like about this series.

Sarah Hoyt is a strong libertarian and an admirer of Robert Anson Heinlein. (She dedicated this book to her son, Robert Anson Hoyt.) I think these books are intended to be an imitation of, and homage to, Heinlein's more openly political novels.

Hoyt has her characters sharing political asides with each other and also shares their inner monologues and thoughts. In these novels though, it doesn't really work. Hoyt is not as good of a writer as Heinlein (but who is?) and isn't able to pull off what he can pull off. The political insertions feel awkward and contrived rather than natural. It makes the story limp along and is, in my opinion, what drags this down from being a 4-star adventure story.

Startide Rising
by David Brin

My rating: ★★★★☆
Read From: 17 July - 21 July

This is the second entry in David Brin's Uplift series. The first book, Sundiver, was a mediocre story in a very interesting universe. This book is a very interesting story in the same very interesting universe.

All races in the Galaxy have been "uplifted" into sentience by a prior alien race, in a chain stretching back to the Progenitors. Humans have even uplifted dolphins and chimpanzees into sentience. But who uplifted humanity? This is a great mystery and the other races are antagonistic towards the "wolfing" human race, without patrons or lineage.

Startide Rising is the story of the first dolphin crewed spaceship. The Streaker made the find of the millenium and was rewarded by hot pursuit from most of the galaxy's inhabitants. After fleeing from a battle, the Streaker crash lands on the water world of Kithrup.

The neo-dolphins must hide from the aliens currently engaged in combat above the planet, attempt to repair their ship, and hope for an opportunity to sneak away again. The resulting adventure deals with dolphin psychology and features an intriguing version of a dolphin language. It also showcases the various alien races and their unique perspectives on the universe and the purpose of life.

This is both a fun read and a chilling one. It's a hostile universe, full of races that would like nothing more than the opportunity to gain power over humanity and tweak and twist our genetic code until they've turned us into something more to their liking. David Brin's universe is interesting but I'm pretty sure I wouldn't want to live in it.

The book ends on a delightfully unresolved note. We end the book still not knowing what the Streaker found, what its importance is, or what will ultimately happen to Earth and the human race. That's as it should be for a universe with this much scope.

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen

My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Personal Enthusiasm: It Was Okay

Literary fiction. It's the one genre (if you can call it that) that the reviewer has studiously avoided. And, yet, here he is. Writing a review of a literary novel. And not just any literary novel. Joe's writing a review of a novel that was picked by Oprah, for her noted national book club.

The reviewer thinks it's worth reflecting on how Joe got here. There was definitely some overconfidence and hubris involved. There was a sense that Joe could read the tea leaves better than others. Joe bet on the outcome of an election and lost. The tide of events was stronger than the strength of his convictions. In losing, he temporarily sacrificed control of his reading time.

Joe's good friend Adam believed that Joe's loss reflected bigger things. (That, at least, is how the reviewer chooses to view matters.) Perhaps a view of culture that's too constricted. Maybe an unbalanced reading list. Or a narrowness of mind. Whatever the reason, Adam assigned him the task of reading and reviewing Freedom.

Joe immediately suspected that this book represented the heretofore avoided "literary fiction" shelf. Never having actually bothered to fully define literary fiction, he was forced to do so. Naturally, he consulted Wikipedia on the topic.

Literary fiction, in general, focuses on the subjects of the narrative to create "introspective, in-depth character studies" of "interesting, complex and developed" characters. This contrasts with paraliterary fiction where "generally speaking, the kind of attention that we pay to the subject in literature ... has to be paid to the social and material complexities of the object".

Literary fiction does not focus on plot as much as paraliterary fiction. Usually, the focus is on the "inner story" of the characters who drive the plot with detailed motivations to elicit "emotional involvement" in the reader.

The tone of literary fiction is usually serious and, therefore, often darker than paraliterary fiction.

The pacing of literary fiction is slower than paraliterary fiction. As Terrence Rafferty notes, "literary fiction, by its nature, allows itself to dawdle, to linger on stray beauties even at the risk of losing its way."

Neal Stephenson has suggested that while any definition will be simplistic there is a general cultural difference between literary and genre fiction, created by who the author is accountable to. Literary novelists are typically supported by patronage via employment at a university or similar institutions, with the continuation of such positions determined not by book sales but by critical acclaim by other established literary authors and critics. Genre fiction writers seek to support themselves by book sales and write to please a mass audience.

Joe found that this description captured what he'd always feared about literary fiction. The genre represents novelists, freed from the constraints of financial or popular success, writing slow, serious, dark, plotless novels about the inner lives of characters. It sounded like a recipe for a boring, depressing book. And his honor depended on him reading it, finishing it, and reviewing it.

The thought of this book filled Joe with dread. He had to spend nearly a week nerving himself to start it, expecting weeks of painful slogging. Reality was a pleasant surprise. (The last time in this narrative that it would be.) Freedom was easy to read and did give the reader some incentive to progress through the story. Once started, he didn't feel tortured by his continued progress through it. Nevertheless, his fears weren't groundless. It was slow, serious, dark, and mostly (but not entirely) plotless. It focused on the inner lives of its characters, for the purpose of revealing their flaws and selfish motivations. For this reason, Joe would never consider it a page turner or book that he was eager to pick up.

What did Joe read? He read the story of Walter and Patty Berglund, a socially aware couple, leading the gentrification of a neighborhood in St. Paul, Minnesota. Outwardly, they were well matched and successful. They had two kids, a nice house and a secure income.

The reality was less pretty. Patty Berglund doted on her son, Joey, to the exclusion of both husband Walter and daughter Jessica. Walter, perhaps in reaction to Patty's weird indulgences of Joey, constantly fought with Joey and doted on Jessica (whom Patty nearly ignored). Patty always claimed (both to herself and to others) that Walter was the center of her life. But she really lusted after Walter's college friend, Richard Katz, being nearly unable to sexually resist him. Richard was a struggling, principled, indie rocker. Walter constantly competed with him, like the brother that he'd always wished he'd had. Patty constantly wished she could be with Richard but feared irretrievably damaging Walter's psyche.

Freedom starts with an overview of the Bergland's early life in their neighborhood, focusing on Patty's interactions with their neighbors. Then it suddenly detours into about 200 pages of Patty's therapeutic autobiography before jolting back to the main narrative. The reviewer had to read about the inner life of each Berglund, as well as the inner life of Richard Katz. The narrative showed how Patty's screwed up family life led to the screwed up way that she treated her own children. It showed how Walter's screwed up family life led to the screwed up way that he treated his own children. It showed how Katz just enjoyed screwing up everyone's life.

(The reviewer should mention, at this point, that there are no pleasant or sympathetic characters in this novel. At multiple points during each character's time on screen, he entertained fantasties of throttling each character and walking away. The reviewer cheerfully admits to avoiding "stupid" people and resents that Franzen thinks there is something to be gained by spending large quantities of time with said stupid people.)

(And, how is the reader supposed to interpret Franzen's portrayal of Patty? Does she really say "ha ha ha" in a pathetic attempt at sarcastic humor? Or is that merely Franzen's lame attempt at communicating the sound of laughter during those times in which he doesn't want to just say "she laughed"?)

Freedom is so named (so the reviewer thinks) because it portrays a modern American family, living a life full of "freedom". But, ultimately, that freedom doesn't really make them happy. Pretty much everyone is miserable in some way, at every point of the story.

Now that he has finished the book, the reviewer does have a trinitarian question. "So what? What's the point? Why does this book exist?" Are Americans really that oblivious to the life around them that they require a novelist to document it and point out its flaws? Does a certain, perhaps self-righteous, segment of society enjoy reading how about other portions of society go about ruining their lives?

At the risk of either boasting or appearing self congratulatory, the reviewer feels that he has a rich and detailed introspective view of his own life. His own inner narrative sounds remarkably like a literary fiction novel. No aspect of human nature, revealed by Freedom, was a revelation to him. It was ultimately dreary and uninteresting. If the reviewer wants a revealing view of human nature, he need only open the newspaper. (The sad story of General Petraeus and Patricia Broadwell teaches us that much.) He finds that literary fiction may be enlightening without being entertaining.

The Passage of Power by Robert A. Caro

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I've been looking forward to this book, ever since I read Master of the Senate two years ago. I knew it would involve the Johnson presidency but not the entire thing. So, I wasn't quite sure what to expect when I finally picked it up.

The book covers Johnson's flawed and failed candidacy for the 1960 Democrat Presidential nomination and Johnson's experience on the Kennedy-Johnson ticket. It covers his 3 years, as Kennedy's Vice-President, and then his succession to the Presidency itself and what he did during his first 7 weeks in office—the time from Kennedy's assassination to the 1964 State of the Union address.

Telling you that doesn't really convey what the book is about though. Here, in Caro's words, is the center of the book.

[T]he succession of Lyndon Johnson deserves a better fate in history. For had it not been for his accomplishments during the transition, history might have been different. Because the headlines in that first blizzard of news—PRISONER LINKED TO CASTRO GROUP; SUSPECT LIVED IN SOVIET UNION—have long been proven false or exaggerated, it has been easy to forget that for several days after the assassination America was reading those headlines, easy to forget the extent of the suspicions that existed during those days not only about a conspiracy but about a conspiracy hatched in Cuba or Russia, two nations with whom, barely a year before, America had been on the brink of nuclear war.

... Nor should other aspects of the transition be passed over as lightly as they have been. Because he moved so swiftly and successfully to create the image of continuity that reassured the nation, it has been easy to overlook how the Kennedy men might simply have resigned. It has been easy to overlook the obstacles—the shock and mystery of the assassination, the mushroom cloud fears, the deep divisions in the country over his predecessor’s policies—that stood in the way of unifying America behind his Administration; easy to overlook how difficult to unify even his own party: to rally into line behind his Administration’s banner labor leaders, black leaders, liberals, many of whom had, for years, been deeply suspicious of him and who would have needed little excuse to fall irrevocably into line behind another, more familiar banner, the brother’s banner, that could so readily have been raised within party ranks; to fall into line behind a leader they knew, and were quickly beginning to love.

This book is the story of that transition. Everything else in the book is designed to set the stage for the transition. Caro wants you to understand, the man, the times, the place, and the history leading up to that transition.

In true Caro style, we get a mini-biography of President John F. Kennedy. We're treated to an up-close look at how Johnson lost his opportunity and 1960 and what he endured as Vice-President. But all of that is window dressing, to set the stage for the transition. Caro's focus on the transition is truly illuminating of both President Johnson and of how power is wielded in America.

This book was a shorter read than Master of the Senate and was truly engaging. I had trouble putting it down, once I started it, and was once again drawn into Caro's portrayal of this era of American history. Once again, I have to highly recommend Caro's work on Johnson. You won't regret reading it and you'll definitely learn from it.

Change.edu: Rebooting for the New Talent Economy by Andrew S. Rosen

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Andrew Rosen is the CEO of Kaplan, Inc. Most people know of Kaplan through their SAT test preparation materials. Kaplan has been busy diversifying beyond test prep and is now also running Kaplan University, home to 50,000 online students. Andrew has written Change.Edu as an explanation of what he sees wrong with the traditional college experience and what he hopes to accomplish with Kaplan University. He also answers the most common criticisms of for-profit universities.

This is a book that I highly recommend, if you're interested in where higher education is going and how we can improve educational quality while increasing the number of college graduates, while dealing with bloated government budgets.

The book is clearly laid out, with six main ideas.

1. Harvard Envy. Rosen calls this the "Ivory Tower Playbook" and says that most universities feel that "the only permissible strategy is to climb the prestige ladder". Schools are competing with each other to gain prestige, not to deliver an education. This strategy makes sense for the schools but not for society.

   Schools spend ever larger amounts of money on buildings, on attracting faculty, and on building better sports teams. Schools also compete for the best and brightest students. The result is that the school itself becomes more prestigious but doesn't increase the number of students receiving an education and doesn't even necessarily increase the quality of the education that the lucky students receive.

   The end result is that most schools are competing for the best and the brightest students. But no one is competing for the poor student or for the middle-class student that just wants to learn something, without breaking the bank.

2. Club College. In many ways, this chapter is a continuation of the criticisms of the first chapter. Many universities are focusing their attention—and their budgets—on non-academic areas. In this chapter, Rosen examines the lavish lifestyle that many universities offer to students. From dining options, to living options, to fitness facilities, to sports teams and more, many universities are competing to offer incoming students the most entertaining 4 years possible.

   All of these expenditures have nothing to do with academics and everything to do with attracting the most desirable students. Then, after those students graduate, the school can bask in the glow of their famous and accomplished alumni. The alumni, in turn, will look back on their college years with favor, leading to donations, prestige, and word of mouth marketing.

   Rosen is careful to point out that there's nothing wrong with schools wanting to be prestigious or wanting to attract top students. The problem is that schools are spending large amounts of federal, state, and local tax dollars to do so. American taxpayers are paying hundreds of billions of dollars annual to subsidize expenses that have nothing to do with actual learning.

3. Community Colleges. Theoretically, community colleges are supposed to be the solution to status obsessed or entertainment obsessed schools. They're supposed to be a low-cost alternative for the masses. Unfortunately, Rosen concludes, they're failing in their mission.

   They run their institutions based on a very different set of conventions—one I think of as the All-Access Playbook: They see their mission as providing an opportunity for everyone.

   ... Part of the problem with community colleges is the wide variety of goals and missions they are attempting to tackle. “If you visit a four-year college, you can predict what sort of student you are going to bump into,” writes New York Times columnist David Brooks. “If you visit a community college, you have no idea. You might see an immigrant kid hoping eventually to get a PhD, or another kid who messed up in high school and is looking for a second chance. You might meet a 35-year-old former meth addict trying to get some job training or a 50-year-old taking classes for fun.”

   The problem is that community colleges are dependent on state and local funding. Often, when students most want access to classes, funding is limited. Many governments can't afford to increase funding and most community colleges are unable or unwilling to raise tuition to compensate. As a result, community colleges are unable to meet the demand and students are left without options. The "All Access Model" has noble goals but is often unable to meet them.

4. Private Universities. Rosen presents private, for-profit, universities as the answer to America's education dilemma. ("How do we educate a large segment of the population efficiently and without bankrupting the nation?") Private universities are often mocked, but it's clear that they meet a need for a large number of students.

   The largest of the private-sector schools, the University of Phoenix, counted more than four hundred thousand students in 2010, an enrollment larger than the undergraduate enrollment of the entire Big Ten.

   He talks about why these schools are popular with both students and employers.

   Private-sector schools tend to align their curriculum around those skills that are most needed in the workforce. Many of these institutions have advisory boards that consult with employers to get feedback on what employers want from prospective employees in a given area, and they regularly update their curricula to teach to those skills.

   If a school is giving students the knowledge that employers most want to see, employers benefit by having an appropriately skilled workforce available and students benefit by being able to quickly and easily find jobs that utilize their new skills.

   He points out that for-profit schools are not a new institution, driven by modern greed.

   “The earliest universities in late medieval times were profit-making corporate associations, and the black gowns that professors still wear at graduations and special events have deep pockets into which students in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries deposited their fees,” writes George Keller, an educational historian.

   ... Viewed in this light, the surge of private-sector colleges over the last generation can be seen less as a new phenomenon taking hold, and more as a long-standing and successful educational model enjoying a renaissance—largely as a result of the unsustainable funding model relied upon by the public institutions that became dominant over the last century.

   He points out that for-profit schools receive all of their revenue from student tuition. The only way they can grow, thrive, and survive is to offer students a benefit that's worth the direct tuition cost. By contrast, "at public universities, where taxpayers bear most of the costs, money from students can account for only 13 percent of the revenue." As a result, private universities are very responsive to the direct needs of students while public universities can give the impression of being contemptuous of the needs of undergraduate students.

   He talks, at length, about the culture and characteristics of private universities. Example: they don't live on donations, so you'll never have to worry about being hassled for alumni donations. For another: they don't focus on the educational inputs (teachers, buildings, libraries, etc). Instead, they focus on the educational outputs (percentage of students who graduate, percentage of graduating students who find work in their major, etc). The result is a university that feels far more focused on education than most public universities do.

   He also talks about how the private universities work to standardize their curricula, to ensure that all students receive the same quality education. As a result, their able to identify which teachers need additional help, which teachers need to be fired, and which teachers need raises. They're also able to quickly identify which students need additional help and how they can best be helped. They can also see when the curriculum itself needs to be revised, in order to better meet the needs of the students and to teach the concepts more clearly.

   By standardizing the curriculum, it is possible to measure outcomes and make continuous improvements that will ensure that each term of students is getting a better learning experience than the term before it. Over time, the compounding effect of these steady improvements will be enormous.

5. Answering the Critics. This chapter was the main reason why I bought this book. Rosen offers an extremely compelling answer to all of the criticisms of for-profit education.

   Do for-profit schools waste taxpayer money by encouraging students to sign up for lots of financial aid dollars?

   Perhaps the biggest fallacy in the debate over proprietary schools is the argument that the private sector is “wasting” taxpayer money because most of its students make use of federal financial aid programs. In fact, the truth is precisely the reverse: analyses show that private-sector colleges use substantially fewer taxpayer dollars per student than traditional institutions, a gap that widens even further when you measure them apples to apples based on the number of demographically comparable students who actually make it through to graduation. Only by comparing use of federal Title IV student aid dollars in isolation, and ignoring all other governmental contributions to higher education, can one plausibly make the case that private-sector colleges over consume taxpayer dollars.

   Do for-profit schools suck up large amounts of taxpayer money?

   ... And when it comes to direct support—government money contributed directly to institutions, as opposed to student financial aid that is based on where an individual student goes to school—the difference is even starker. “For every $1 in direct support for private for-profit institutions, per student, at federal, state and local levels, private not-for-profit institutions receive $8.69 per student and public institutions receive $19.38 per student.”

   Do for-profit schools lead students to amass large debts and then default on them?

   ... [S]tudies have shown that nonprofit schools that also serve nontraditional student populations have nearly identical default rates, and that students’ socioeconomic level is by far the dominant driver of defaults. There is a very high (91 percent) correlation between institutional default rates and the percentage of low-income, Pell Grant students at an institution.

   Do for-profit schools sucker students into taking classes that they won't benefit from?

   At Kaplan, we’ve gone a step further by making the first weeks of school “risk free.” Kaplan assesses students during the first month of each program and determines whether they evidence the ability and rigor to succeed; if not, they are asked to withdraw, without any tuition owed or debt incurred. And any student who finds that the real experience during that period does not match his or her expectations for any reason can choose to withdraw, similarly without tuition obligation. A large percentage of those who drop out do so in the first term; the “Kaplan Commitment” leaves most of these students with no debt at all.

6. The Learning Playbook. Rosen concludes with a look at how standardized curricula, online learning, and the lack of prestigious campuses could transform the face of American education. More students could receive a better education, at a lower cost. If he's right, the future is very bright. And I think he's right.

Fuzzy Nation by John Scalzi

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Personal Enthusiasm: Loads of Fun

I really should know better than to underestimate John Scalzi. After all, I still think Old Man's War was one of the best books I've read in the past 7 years. But, I did. I didn't expect Fuzzy Nation to be all that good.

I had my reasons too. Fuzzy Nation is a remake of H. Beam Piper's book Little Fuzzy. Movies are remade all of the time in Hollywood. And most of those remakes are poor imitations of the original. How often are books remade? Never? I should have taken a clue from Tyler Cowen and realized if something is done that's never done, that's likely to mean it's of higher than average quality. And, boy, is that ever true here.

Scalzi took a good but dated 1950's story and updated it into a very good, and fresh, story for the 2010's. The broad, general, structure of the original is still here. Jack Holloway is a prospector working on Zarathustra XXXIII, looking for sunstone gems. He discovers an immense cache of them, enough to make his fortune several times over. Then he meets a small, fuzzy (of course), cute creature. Then he meets the creature's family. Soon, he's involved in determining whether these cute creatures are super smart animals or sentient people.

Scalzi modifies the story a good bit too. His book is every bit as much of a page turner as the original was, just in different ways. He manages to make a series of court cases far more interesting than the original did. But I find the most interesting changes to be the way that the story revolves around Jack Holloway.

Scalzi's version of Little Fuzzy is really about Holloway. The fuzzys are there and central to that story, but Holloway is the focus. He's a complex character and Scalzi progressively reveals him to us. Is he merely the galaxy's biggest jerk? Or is there more to him than that? Scalzi continually gives us more insight into him as the story moves along, but still manages to keep his character ambiguous until the end. It's not character development, exactly, but it's character revelation, which I find just as interesting.

After reading this book, I've very definitely moved from "I'll read it because it's from Scalzi" to "I'd definitely recommend this book". If you're looking for an entertaining read, pick this up. I don't think you'll be disappointed.

Sir Dominic Flandry: The Last Knight of Terra by Poul Anderson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book contains three complete Flandry novels. (Books were a lot shorter, in decades past.) Here, collected in one volume for the first time, is The Plague of Masters (aka Earthman, Go Home), Hunters of the Sky Cave and A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows.

The Plague of Masters had an enjoyable setup. Flandry lands on a planet where the air itself is deadly and prolonged exposure will lead to a torturous death. The only hope of a survival is to take a specific drug, every 30 days. It's not even enough to flee the planet—without a final dose of the drug, you'll die from the delayed effects of the air. Of course, the planet is under the thumb of a dictatorial group of scientists, who tightly control access to the drug. Anyone whoever stops playing along, stops getting doses. The setup and development of the story is wonderful. The ending is almost confusingly abrupt, lessening what would have otherwise been a very good story.

Hunters of the Sky Cave has Flandry confronting some invaders that he finds personally likable. Unfortunately, in order to complete his mission he has to smash not only their invasion but also their societal structure, just to keep the Terran Empire alive for a few more years. This was a well told story that showed Flandry doing what he does best but also recognizing that his efforts would have limited impact on the larger picture.

A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows is the best story of the bunch. Flandry finds the son he didn't know he had as well as a woman he can actually love. In the end, he completes his mission but at a staggering personal cost. As the story ends, you know the Empire will live on but you wonder if Flandry, personally, sees any point to it anymore.

These stories are uniformly good because they feature an older, wiser Flandry. He still cracks wise, he still dresses well and loves fine women. He's still a staunch defender of the Terran Empire. However, he's increasingly more aware of how decadent, corrupt, and unworthy that Empire is. It's the best thing going, but it's failing fast and not even he can keep it together much longer. He does everything he can to push back the arrival of The Long Night, even knowing that everything he does will ultimately prove futile.

That underlying emotional tension drives the stories and forced me to sympathize with Flandry to a much greater degree than I have previously.