Annex

"Annex", by Rich Larson, 2018, 350 pages, 105k words. Book 1 of The Violet Wars.

Reading through Neil Clark's 1st 5 "Best Science Fiction of the Year", the Larson stories really stood out - very fast-moving, smack-you-upside-the-head kind of writing. "Annex" is an alien invasion story with lots of interesting twists. The aliens are being opposed by a diverse band of children calling themselves the Lost Boys, so I guess this is a YA novel. The last 1/3 is "can't put it down" kind of page turning. And when you think you are heading for a great and satifying conclusion, you get an even better one! Nice!

The story was followed by an excerpt from "Cypher - Book Two of the Violet Wars". I had enjoyed the whiz-bang ending of "Annex" enough that I decided to forge ahead into the 2nd book. So, I go to buy it, no dice. He published a 2nd novel "Ymir" in 2022, which was labeled "Book Two of the Violet Wars" somewhere, but whose synopsis makes it sound like its unrelated. ??? He has published 100 or more short pieces, maybe he struggles with longer stuff. He published a short story collection, 23 stories, in 2018 - same year as "Annex". There are bunch of his short stories - TOR originals - for sale for $1.99 on Kobo. I guess I'll get the next "Best Science Fiction of the Year", which is for 2020, and see if he's in there. I hope he's doing OK.

Argle Blargle

1st up, "The High Sierra", subtitled "A Love Story", by Kim Stanley Robinson, 2020, 625 pages, 170k words. KSR, the dean of climate fiction, has been hiking in the California Sierra mountains for almost 50 years. It is indeed a love story. It covers a lot of different topics: geology, locales, types of trails, history, people, equipment. I have labeled this as travel? KSR is lucky to have formed such an connection with such a beautiful place. I certainly have nothing comparable in my life. I bought this in hardcover, others might like it as a vacation book.

Next, "Attack Surfact", by Cory Doctorow, 2020, 531 pages, 144k words. I also bought this in hardcover, so as to spread the memes. That is why I just got around to reading it.

Doctorow is the bard of the revolution. This story is a continuation of the story arc of 2008's "Little Brother", blogged here, and 2013's "Homeland", blogged here - no wait, I haven't read "Homeland" yet! This is what comes of buying hardcovers! Oh boy, I got that going for me, I needed something good to get rid of the bad taste in my brain left by the last 2 books (below).

In "Attack Surface", we go from teenagers vs the evil Department of Homeland Security to 20-somethings vs evil private security government contractors. Great insight into the tech & tactics of the burgeoning surveillance state.

3rd, "The Iron Gate: A Twenty Palaces Novel", by Harry Connolly, 2022, ? pages, ? k words. I liked this series years ago, then its publisher discontinued it. Connolly did a kickstarter for this book & 1 more in the series. It was a nice, diverting read. The mystical Twenty Palaces society continues to protect earth from extra-dimensional horrors with a taste for human minds.

4th, "Victories Greater Than Death", by Charlie Jane Anders, 2021, 373 pages, 101k words. This is billed as YA, which I generally do well with. This seems to be targetted to younger YA readers, tweens maybe - agonizing on "should I kiss them", etc. If you have seen the movies "Jupiter Ascending" and/or "The Last Starfighter" you have most of the plot. But these aliens are so much more considerate and advanced than the aliens in those other stories - they always introduce themselves both by their name and their gender pronouns. I won't be continuing this series, it's just too juvenile. I think I got spoiled by the YA novels of Paolo Bacigalupi. Cory Doctorow, & others.

Last, "A Half-Built Garden", by Ruthanna Emrys, 2022, 345 pages, ? k words. An interesting premise - 50 or years in the future, aliens show up just in time to help us emigrate from Earth to their Dyson sphere, before Earth becomes unlivable. Earthlings in 2080 feel they have the climate crisis under control such they can save the Earth & not abandon it. Conflict.

Ok, starting to get weird. Local government on earth is ... watershed watch networks?!?!? My wife has collected water samples from local creeks for Kentucky River Watershed Watch for many years. I act as her 2nd pair of hands and puller-out-of-the-creek. I have attended KRWW meetings. It really, really seems like an unlikely group to be running things - and to have succeeded in banishing the corporations & capitalism to New Zealand and other island sanctuaries. I'm guessing the author is active in their local watershed watch.

Plus, above & beyond the expected gender pronouns, the corporations use gender pronouns based on role-playing roles - 6 of those. The author in the acknowledgements calls out their gender pronoun wrangler - maybe something you didn't used to need to write a book. By the end of the book you are guessing that words are gender pronouns with no idea what they are supposed to represent. There should have been a table.

Most annoying of all, the protagonist (& the author?) is a kosher-keeping practicioner of Judaism. So the aliens offer her food in greeting & she can't eat it because she doesn't know if it is kosher. The book should have come with a large-type warning label:

WARNING: CONTAINS BRONZE AGE RELIGIOUS BULLSHIT!!!

The protagonist (& the author?) is a nursing mother, so we get lots of detail on breast pain & letting down, etc. My wife nursed our 4 kids, it is a wonderful thing, but I don't think all the breast-feeding detail added to the narrative of the novel.

The watershed watch society is based on social media reputation-based governance, with algorithms for everything. I have been off social media for years, it is toxic, & I think as stultifying as the society in this book seems to be.

Then at the end, the big reveal: the wife of the progagonist (& the author?) used to be a male.

The book seems like the author constructing a narrative where all her interests & life choices are what will save the earth, defeat capitalism, & provide a safe & just place for all. To me, that seems, what, narcissistic? Solipsistic? Self-centered?

Meanwhile, the pacing is totally odd - "hi, we're aliens, can we come in?". There was a trip to visit the aliens during a hurricane that was suspenseful, other than that the drama is fairly minimal.

I almost quit reading this book several x, but I wanted to see if it got any better. Not particularly. Interesting that I can write so much about a book with no Spoiler Alert. I'm giving you a precis so you don't have to read it.

On to "Homeland", yay!

Multiverse Fatigue

1st up, a duology from Stephen Baxter, whose series I have enjoyed over the years:

1. "World Engines: Destroyer", 2019, 523 pages, 142k words;
2. "World Engines: Creator", 2020, 500 pages, 136k words.

Set a few hundred years in a future, on a post-climate crisis world where humanity has decided that space exploration is a bad idea. Then, an artifact of a level 2 or 3 galactic civilization turns up, and it's pretty exciting from then on.

********************** SPOILER ALERT **********************

But then, stuff starts happening in multiple, parallel planes of the multiverse. In 1, Armstrong had a heart attack & died on the moon. In another, the British Empire didn't go away. Etc, etc, etc.

I think I 1st remember the multiverse being introduced in the Michael Moorcock Eternal Hero stories of the 1970's? It never caught on much.

But now that Marvel has gone that way, I suspect we'll be seeing more & more of it. My wife & I watched "Everything, Everywhere, All At Once". My wife actively didn't like it, I was like meh.

The thought that I have been entertaining is that, once you invoke the multiverse, science fiction becomes much more like fantasy - anything goes, internal consistency not required. I'm not sure this is a good thing.

Both books are well-written page turners, and worth reading.

********************** END SPOILER ALERT **********************

Next up, "Up Against It", Laura J. Mixon, 2011, 504 pages, 137k words. The main progagonist is an 18YO, so I guess this is a YA novel. A well-plotted tale of plucky youngsters helping to save their asteroid home. Lots of plot, good adult characters as well as our teenaged heros. I liked this enough that I purchased the 1st novel of a trilogy by Mixon.

Next up, "The John Varley Reader", subtitled "Thirty Years of Short Fiction", 2004, 899 pages, 244k words, 18 stories. I think this was a $1.99 special via BookBub. Varley has been 1 of my fav authors going back to his earliest stuff in the 1970s. These are some great stories, I had read most of them already. In addition to the stories, after having been reticent about discussing his work for years, Varley introduces each story with autobiographical info about when the story was written. A very pleasant read.

I was recommending Varlay to a young person who had just begun transitioning to being female. Not sure if that is good advice or not. Varley was writing about gender change from the beginning, late 1970s, but surely modern people know a lot more about it now.

Following those great words of wisdom from that emminent post-modern philosopher Bruce Ehrler - "wait a while" - I put off writing this long enough that I read a 5th book: "Wanderers", by Chuck Wendig, 2019, 975 pages, 265k words. Wow, was that book that long? It was definitely a page turner, I finished it at 1:30 am this morning. Published in 2019, a disease jumps from bats to ravage the human race? Seriously? If I had realized that was the plot, I might have skipped it. But, it was a very good read. Plus very spot on re white supremacist militias, christian nationalism, most of our modern political quarrels.

I will pick a couple of bones though.

********************** SPOILER ALERT **********************

Last line of the Interlude at the end of Part One:

And by then, it would be far too late for him — and for everyone else.

Middle of Chapter 15:

They had no idea how true that was.

Isn't this way heavy-handed foreshadowing? Or is this not foreshadowing, but some other blunt instrument? It reminds me of those true crime shows on cable, where they dole out the info in dribbles amidst dire insinuations of things to come. Pretty tacky.

********************** END SPOILER ALERT **********************

I have pre-ordered the sequel, which is due out in November.

Perfect timing, I'll switch over and clear the magazine stack. Momentarily tempted to ditch it, as I was tempted to blow off blogging these books. I may have a bit of process fatigue. But, I think that the older I get, the more important it is to keep my exocortex updated. So, brace up! Books blogged, #SongOfTheDay recorded, Music In processing proceeding, on to the magazine stack!

Getting a Lot of Reading Done - Oops!

Tearing through a few books lately. I've had more time to read, due to having had a fairly serious bike wreck on Thursday October 21. Biking the Legacy Trail with my wife, I got distracted where the trail crosses the main entrance to the Kentucky Horse Park and ran into 1 of the 3' tall steel posts in the middle of the trail (car discourager) going around 15 mph. Main point of contact was about 4" above the knee on my right inner thigh. Bruising the entire length of the leg, plus a 8" diameter bruise on my left lower back, which I suspect is where I hit the ground. Various pulled muscles in my back and groin, very little road rash. I have pix but I will not engage in injury porn.

8 days later, I am still limping around, with a knot the size and shape of 1/2 a pear in my right thigh, and trying as much as possible to keep off of the leg and keep it elevated. I suspect it will be weeks if not months before I am fully recovered.

I have been saying for years that I would know it was time to quit biking when I had a serious wreck. I would follow that with, "That's not a good algorithm, I clearly need to replace it." Too late, the algorithm has fired. Time to quit biking.

I've greatly enjoyed biking, both in Florida and especially in the beautiful rolling (or nasty steep and long) hills of the horse country around Lexington. Since I retired in 2012, I have biked most Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays. My app says that since 2013 I have biked 16,039 miles, an average of 1,782 miles/year. It looks like 2020 was my peak year, 2,447 miles, probably because I spent 9 months of 2020 in Florida.

But, at my age (70), I can't afford to be laid up for weeks, gaining weight and losing muscle mass. Plus, this was a bad wreck, and I'm lucky I didn't break anything. I'm not going to press that luck.

I'll keep walking Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday - although that was problematic for a while. March 4 I was 4.5 miles into a 5.7 mile walk when I got a sharp pain in the arch of my right foot. I had to lay off of it 6 weeks before I could start walking again. But, I now have arch support insoles in all my shoes, including the slippers I wear around the house all the time now - no more going barefoot, my southern heritage is officially betrayed - and I do many more stretches of my feet and ankles, particularly before I get out of bed in the morning. So hopefully I'm cleared to walk.

Maybe on my old biking days I'll add some weight work to my floor work. Hopefully I will feel safe using a gym soon.

---

The reading has been all good. 1st, Charles Stross, "Invisible Sun", 2021, 544 pages, 148k words. This is the 3rd and final book of the Empire Games series, and the 6th and FINAL book of The Merchant Princes extended series. Stross does his usual great job. Lots of interesting politics here. A fitting completion for these books, I gave it 5 stars, unusual.

Between this series and The Laundry Files, so much of Charlie's bandwidth has been eaten up over the last 2 decades or so. He is the only author extant where I have repeatedly had the thought, "I wish Charlie had a clone or 2.", such that he could do more of the other speculative narratives of his non-series novels, or other new ideas he has mentioned.

2nd, Adrian Tchaikovsky, "Shards of Earth", 2021, 524 pages, 142k words. Apparently #1 in The Final Architecture series. Mr. T is becoming my fav space opera author. Lots of flavors of aliens, some approaching god-like status, lots of flavors of humans, lots of plot, lots of action. Very enjoyable.

3rd & lastly, Benjamin Rosenbaum, "The Unraveling", 2021, 384 pages, 104k words. I think Cory Doctorow strongly recommended this book in his most excellent Pluralistic blog. I found it a little offputting at 1st. 1st off, it is set 550,000 years in the future. I'm sorry, that is way too far. Anything that far in the future involving humans had better be happening in at least 27 dimensions. I would put the tech in this book at a few 1000 years in the future, tops. Or maybe a few decades, if somehow The Singularity actually appears?

2ndly, I finally did figure out the gendering situation: 2 genders, Staids, who are emotionally repressed scholars of some infinitely long book, and Vails, who are more normal people who like the 3 Fs: fashion, fighting, and fucking. It kind of reminded me of 2 of 7 of Ada Palmer's hives: the Staids as Masons, and the Vails as Humanists. Where are the other 5 hives?

It also reminded me of the theistic Buddhist states, like Tibet say. Real people generating capital, theistic leaches at the top sucking it off.

The book's metadata points out Rosenbaum's apparent engagement with his Judaism. So maybe we see the Staids as Talmudic scholars ... boring.

The story then winds up being a Romeo & Juliet story - a forbidden Staid-Vail romance, shocking! Then we get an inequality based revolution, civilization overturned, dogs sleeping with cats, where will it end? Note that, although their civilization is designed to minimize economic inequality, the inequality they have is at the most basic level of humankind: who gets to reproduce, and who decides? I think that I have mentioned before, the right to reproduce w/o anyone's permission is the most basic and primitive of all human rights. Hence 2x kudos to the Chinese, who actually successfully curtailed the reproduction rights of their population. (But now their demographics are inverting, trouble ahead, oops!)

Overall, it was engaging towards the end. But, our Romeo & Juliet are 1st introduced to us at 9YO, then for most of the action of the book at 16YO. So, is this then a YA novel? The book does not appear to be much targeted at a YA audience. I was thinking, teenagers as protagonists === YA book.

Maybe not? After a bit of consideration, I'd say this book was hackneyed & predictable, but, still mostly an enjoyable read.

Both Pretty Good

I've been reading at a pretty good clip. A trilogy and a duology.

1st up, "The Age of Madness" trilogy by Joe Abercrombie. I enjoyed his 1st 2 trilogies. This story is set in the same world as the 1st trilogy, "The First Law", 20-40 years later. Some of the characters were around for the 1st trilogy. The 3 books:

1. "A Little Hatred", 2019, 683 pages, 186k words.
2. "The Trouble with Peace", 2020, 739 pages, 201k words.
3. "The Wisdom of Crowds", 2021, 733 pages, 199k words.

So what we have here is a 2,155 page book. There are 9 sections in the book, 3/volume, and the numbering spans the 3 volumes.

I like his writing. Humanly fallable characters. Lots of action. Great plot twists, all tied up nicely in the end.

Funny that the message of the book is so timely. Shakespeare was wrong when he wrote "First, we kill all the lawyers.". He should have said, "First, we kill all the bankers." Seems to me like a jubilee would be a lot easier.

2nd, I reread, for the 3rd or 4th time, "Songs of Earth and Power", by Greg Bear. The complete duology, only $2.99 on Kobo! What an entertainment bargain! The 2 component volumes are:

1. "The Infinity Concerto", 1984, 472 pages, 128k words.
2. "The Serpent Mage", 1986, 430 pages, 117k words.

I've always loved this series. A 17 YO young man is transported to The Realm - of Fairie - to be trained as a mage by Sidhi-human half-breeds (Breeds). It is a compelling story, well paced. I think this should be labeled YA - part of the plot concerns our young male protagonist having his 1st clueless encounters with women - a YA speciality.

I have complained before about theism in Bear's work. I will complain again. In both books the progagonist is in a tight spot and he prays to a very Jehovah-seeming God - despite the revelations in the book that all of earth's gods were Sidhi doing magic tricks to mislead and hold back human development. Sad that such a great mostly sci-fi author - this was his only fantasy until recently - should have his brain infested by theism.

I always loved this one quote from the very end. I think I have used the last line before, this time I'll include the whole thing. A nice humanistic toast:

“To all of us, of all races, and the matter we are made of, and the ground beneath our feet, and the worlds over our head. To strife and passage and death and life.” He held his glass higher. “To horror, and awe, and all strong emotions, and most of all, to love.”

4 + 2

I think BookBub offered me "The Chaos Chronicles Books 1-3", by Jeffrey A. Carver, for $2.99 or some such. I remembered Carver as being a hard, galactic sci-fi kind of guy a la Gregory Benford or Greg Bear, so I went for it. The 3 novels it contains are "Neptune Crossing", 1994, 582 pages; "Strange Attractors", 1995, 352 pages; and "The Infinite Sea", 1996, 379 pages. These were fun, comic-bookish stories. An alien artifact on Triton implants an earthing with high-tech translator stones. He saves the earth, and then moves on to other galactic adventures with other translator stone holders. It kind of reminded me of Green Lanterns (DC comic). There is lots of action. The 2nd book does a good job of keeping us wondering, will the earthling hook up with the female 4-breasted humanoid empath stone holder? I did like that the main power of the translator stones was to ... translate, enabling communication with several other alien species.

I enjoyed these enough that I bought the 4th novel of the series, "Sunborn", 2011, 478 pages. Another cosmic story. Ha ha, in this one, at one point, our earthling tells 1 of the 2 smart ass robots that are part of the company, "Lead on, kemosabe." I'm immediately going, wow, is that a temporal tell, or what? And sure enough, Carver was born in 1949, so he's 2 years older than me. Ha ha, I wonder what is the youngest person who would get the reference? I queried my son born in 1976. He knew it had to do with the Lone Ranger & Tonto, but not sure exactly what. I queried my youngest daughter born in 1983. She replied with the image below, so I guess she got the reference. But I bet a 20-something would have no clue.

A 5th novel in the series is due out later this year.

I had 2 Karl Schroeder novels on my iPad, plus a Neal Stephenson. Decisions, decisions. I went with the older of the Schroeder novels, "The Million", 2018, 192 pages. I'm guessing this was actually a novella. It is set in the same universe as his "Lockstep". This is a really interesting concept - that in the absence of FTL travel, the way you could have an interstellar civilization is by slowing time way down by having entire worlds hibernate most of the time - except for The Million, who are the real-time caretakers. The novella is an interesting exploration of the ramifications of the concept, with action, plucky characters, etc. As the characters are mostly young adults, I'm guessing this is a YA story.

Then, on to the Stephenson: "Fall; or, Dodge in Hell: A Novel", 2019, 892 pages. Well, it was great to see Stephenson give props to "'D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths" and "D'Aulaires' Book of Norse Myths". These are family favorites - I have already bought all my grandchildren copies.

But, I was a little sad that the 1st person uploaded posthumously into quantum computers builds a world strongly along the lines of genesis. It was interesting as time passes and many of the books real-world characters get uploaded and now take part in the drama in Bitworld - culiminating in a Tolkienesque quest. But I kind of agree with the story's antagonist, El (Elohim), that they maybe could have done a lot better than creating a very medieval flavored world.

There wasn't as much snappy dialog and turns of phrase as is usual for Stephenson. So, an enjoyable, sprawling read, but maybe Stephenson is showing his age slightly.

3 By ♀

I've read a couple of articles - tor.com, gizmodo maybe? - about male authors still dominating science fiction. I'm curious with regards to my reading - I'm going to do a spreadsheet for the last year and count. Meanwhile, I read 3 mostly sci-fi books by females.

1st, "How Long 'til Black Future Month?", by N. K. Jemisin, 2018, 416 pages. I had read Ms. Jemisin's 1st fantasy trilogy several years ago. Hmmm, per my blog post on it, I liked it more than I remember. But I had not read any more of her work. I liked the title of this short story collection which just came out, so I gave it a go. I was very impressed, hard sci-fi as well as fantasy stories, all very good. I got teary-eyed reading the story "Red Dirt Witch" - damn, I miss the Obamas! So I actually gave this book a 5 star rating, which is very unusual for me. Wow, Ms. Jemisin appears to have been awarded the Hugo the last 3 years in a row for each of the novels in her latest trilogy. I don't think that has ever happened before. I guess I will need to check those out.

2nd, "Semiosis", by Sue Burke, 2018, 336 pages. Not sure where I got this from. A very good story of colonizing an exoplanet over 6 generations. Interesting speculation on an intelligent plant-based super-organism. The ending seemed a little abrupt, but, still, a good read. Ah, there is another book planned. That makes sense, I will look forward to it.

3rd, "Implanted", by Lauren C. Teffeau, 2018, 400 pages. Again, not sure where I got this from. The 1st novel from Ms. Teffeau. It definitely has a YA feel, although the protagonists are mostly in their early 20s. Humanity has been driven into domed cities by the climate crisis but now repair and reconstruction outside may be to the point where humanity can emerge. It reminded me very much of some YA movies I have seen - fast-paced, lots of action, lots of hormones. Interesting speculation of the impact of implanted net links on human interaction and culture but, an extremely unrealistic and naive take on the climate crisis.

Spreadsheet results for 2018:

• Males: sci-fi, 20 books by 12 authors; fantasy, 9 books by 7 authors (funny that Charles Stross has 2 fantasy books);
• Females: sci-fi, 10 books by 9 authors; fantasy, 2 books by 2 authors;
• Other: 3 sci-fi short story collections.

I am somewhat surprised by this result. Slightly skewed by 1 each sci-fi and fantasy trilogy by males vs. no trilogies by females but still > 2/1. So I guess sci-fi is still male dominated. The fact that I am surprised I think shows how much this is default thinking. Well, upwards and onwards I guess. Several great new female authors out there, yay!

More of the Same

I blasted through the Everness series, a YA parallel worlds saga by Ian McDonald. McDonald has always written good stuff. Apparently this is his 1st YA effort. The books are "Planesrunner", 2011, 269 pages; "Be My Enemy", 2012, 268 pages; and "Empress of the Sun", 2014, 288 pages. Hmmm, these books are no longer on the Kobo website for me to link to - whut hoppen?

These are definitely YA books. The main protagonist is a 14 YO London young male of Indian ancestry. He is a math, physics, and computer genius, and completes his father's work on the device that will allow easy exploration of all 10^80 alternate Earths, rather than just the 10 parallel Earths currently known.

The central cast of characters is the 5 person crew of a freight airship from Earth 3 - an earth with coal, electricity, carbon nanotubes, and 200 meter long airships, but no oil and plastic. So kind of a steampunkish feel. The characters are all quirky. Kind of reminded me of "The Expanse". The crew of a small ship makes for a manageable number of characters with quirks and backstories, I guess.

The plots move quickly. A few twists seem arbitrary, but, that must be the price you have to pay for an airship duel. McDonald comes up with very interesting alternate histories for the parallel earths, and seemed to be just getting warmed up. At the end of the 3rd book, we've taken care of the local crises but still have the overarching bad guys (The Order) to be dealt with. McDonald could probably crank out 1 of these stories every year or so without breaking a sweat.

Bonus points for having a Tarot-like deck of cards as part of the plot. The origin of the deck is unknown, and it is a dynamic deck, with cards being created and removed by its keeper, the 13 YO female main protagonist and (puppy) love interest. Some good card names:

• The Cockle-child
  
• Swannhilde and Swannhamme
  
• The Winter Watcher
  
• The Traveller Hasteth in the Evening
  
• Season of the Wolf
  
• Yubileo
  
• Two Bad Cats
  
• Lone Tree Hill
  
• The Sun Empress
  

Here's another post where I talk about my love of cards. I probably could use to find a card game.

I'm down to 21 unread books in my iPad. I may be forced to read something worthwhile before too long. Oops.

4 Channels + 1 + 2

Still escaping.

Been playing with some great musicians lately and having a lot of fun. I bought a new mid-sized amp: a 50 watt solid state Marshall MG50CFX. It has 4 channels: clean, crunch, overdrive 1 & 2. All the settings on each channel are soft so when I change something and like the outcome I hit the Save button, which saves it to that channel.

I got scientific and used the decibel meter app on my on phone to set up the channel volumes. With the master volume - the only "hard" knob on the amp - set to 5, for playing rhythm, the clean and crunch channels with the guitar volume on 8 are at 97 decibels. With the guitar volume on 10, they are 100 db. With the guitar volume on 8, the 2 overdrive channels are at 100 db. So I play rhythm on the clean or crunch channel with the guitar volume on 8. To take a lead, I can turn the guitar volume up to 10, or leave the volume alone and use 1 of the overdrive channels. Overdrive 2 is more fuzzy and trebly than overdrive 1.

The amp has a reverb knob, of which I have a little on the crunch channel. It has 2 effects knobs: 1 has chorus, phaser, flanger, vibe and octaves, the other 4 types of delay. The chorus is very nice, and I have it set on the clean channel. The delay I don't anticipate using much, if at all. There is also a damping button which "switches the power amp damping between classic amp feeling and modern response". It is off for Overdrive 1 and on for Overdrive 2.

I have had it out 2x, including a 3 hour gig yesterday. It has a 2 button foot switch. The left button switches between the clean and crunch channels, the right button switches between overdrive channels. I am still messing up and hitting the right button to kick on overdrive, then hitting it again to turn off overdrive, which instead selects the other overdrive. You have to hit the left button to get out of overdrive. I suspect I'll get used to it. Just have to remember the buttons select channels, unlike effects pedals which are on off.

I read Charlie Stross's latest, "Empire Games", 332 pages. This is "The Merchant Princes, the Next Generation". It's set 17 years after the end of the 6 Merchant Princes books. I liked those books - worldwalkers reminiscent of Zelazny's Amber books, but more science fiction than fantasy. The worldline closest to us has a scary, post-nuclear-attack US that is a complete surveillance society. The other main worldline explores what the US might be like if the American Revolution had happened well after the Industrial Revolution.

The 1st half of the book is mostly setup. The main character is likeable enough. It was a quick read, and I am glad Stross has returned to this series.

Stross has also lately in his blog making some pretty scary conjectures on the outcome of the rise of neo-fascism, as shown in Brexit, the Trump/Breitbart ascension, and other far right politicians gaining ground in Europe. See for instance his latest post.

I really liked the story by Karl Schroeder in the Heiroglyph collection, which I blogged about here. His focus seems to be on the future of governance and economics in our environment of ever-increasing information. I also have liked some of his blog posts and other writing. I thought he had written on addressing the "fake news" problem by using blockchain technology to automatically establish provenance on every item on the internet - hmmm, I can't find it, maybe he just tweeted a link to an article similar to this one.

Anyway, I decided to backfill myself on some of his earlier novels. 1st up was his 1st novel "Ventus", 2001, 485 pages. This reminded me of the movie "Avatar" in that it is about a post-singularity world, as I was convinced that the Avatar world of Pandora was. Note, tho, the novel predates "Avatar" by 8 years.

Ventus is a designed world with nanotechnology infusing everything, creating what should be an intelligent world where most wishes can be easily granted by the environment - but which refuses to cooperate and follow commands.

Schroeder creates the concept thalience - of intelligent matter maybe striving for consciousness, but on its own terms, rather than on human ones. Some interesting ideas there. I was reminded of a recent article claiming that the Google translation software may have essentially invented its own language. This is yet another of the many, many areas where we find that our anthropocentric and parochial attitudes are dead wrong. Real AI, once it starts to grow, will definitely go its own way. I just hope they love us. Or that we are, as Shroeder puts it, "regarded ... as a treasured companion".

The story also reminded me of the Iain M. Banks Culture novels. The backdrop is The Archipelago, a galactic civilization of 10s or 100s of 1000s of habitats, and a solar system with a population of 70 trillion, and godlike AIs and uploaded humans in the mix. Nice! An enjoyable read with interesting concepts.

At some point, I would like to go back and reread the Culture novels in order - all 9 of them. Well, I got that going for me. I still am bummed by Banks' early death at age 59 in 2013.

Then I read Schroeder's most recent novel, "Lockstep", 2014, 352 pages. I figured out early on that this was a YA novel. The protagonist is 17 and part of the plot is his trying to get a girlfriend.

This book reminded me of the movie "Jupiter Ascending", which came out 1 year after this book. In both, the young protagonist finds out suddenly that they are heir to a vast fortune including 10s of 1000s of worlds, and that their relatives are not happy about sharing.

There are some interesting concepts in the book. "Lockstep" is the system whereby worlds hibernate for 30 years in between 1 month periods of wakefulness. It was originally developed to allow life on resource-poor, dark worlds - more resources can be aggregated by non-sleeping automation during the hibernation periods. It enables, realistically, the creation of an interstellar civilization that does not have FTL (faster than light) travel - interesting.

The starting point of the book includes an earth where the trillionaires just want more, more, more, and could care less about everyone else. Sound familiar? Schroeder also explores some ideas on new forms of governance.

I found the emotional responses of some of the characters at the end of the book to be somewhat unrealistic. I don't think Schroeder has fully realized his character development writing skills yet - or maybe he's just dumbing it down a little for the YA audience - but his books sure have great concepts. This was another enjoyable read.

Between books, I have been skimming a book my wife got me for xmas: "The Ants", by Bert Holldobler & E.O. Wilson, 1990, 732 pages. She found me a used copy of this epic hardcopy tome - it weighs 7.2#. Many fun facts about the family Formicidae, and lots of nice pictures.

Next up, I am going to attempt to transition back to some more serious economics reading by a collection of short stories about climate change, and a collection about surveillance and transparency.

Lots + 1 + 1

I'm still attempting to ignore reality for a while, so, more science fiction!

I had not read any short stories for a while and noticed I had Just Over the Horizon The Complete Short Fiction of Greg Bear (Book 1) so I went for it. Greg Bear was one of my favorite authors in the 1980s, particularly his "Eon/Eternity" books and "The Forge of God/Anvil of Stars", "Blood Music", "City of Angels", and his fantasy series "The Infinity Concerto/The Serpent Mage". Lots of good physics. I have read all of these books multiple times. Hmmm, he is 73 days younger than me.

The short stories were OK, but I think he is much better at longer form writing. The short story version of "Blood Music" was fun to read again. Some of the things that dated some of the stories were interesting. One example, a cafeteria in a medical facility that had a smoking section. Ha ha, of course all medical campuses that I know of now are completely smoke free.

I then noticed I had a short story by John Scalzi, "An Election", 24 pages. The eBook was $0.99. I hadn't read any Scalzi in a while. The story really didn't do much for me. I think it was supposed to be cutesy, not so much to me. In a finger to the eye of the puppies, the protagonist is married to another man. Progressive SF is definitely in favor of LGBTQA inclusion.

Finally, I noticed a novel that seemed to have come to the top of my eBook reader: "Among Others", by Jo Walton, 2011, 304 pages. This book won the Hugo and Nebula for best novel. I guess since the protagonist is 15 YO, it is yet another YA novel that makes excellent reading for all ages. It is a fantasy, but I liked that it wasn't until 3/4 of the way through the book that you knew that for sure. Up until that point, it could have been a mainstream novel about a troubled young woman with schizophrenia including as a symptom extreme pareidolia.

The protagonist is also a voracious reader, mainly of science fiction. There is much discussion of various authors and titles, all pre-1979/1980, when the story is set. This reminded me of some movies about movie-making, where the gist seems to be "We make movies, movies are magic, we're really cool!" In this book, though, this did not come across as nearly so self-congratulatory. It wound up being fun, as the authors were mostly among my favorites from Back In The Day, and I had read most of the titles discussed - but 40 or so years ago!

I have been (exercising in the morning,) reading in the afternoons, and watching movies at night. I powered on through this book last night and finished around 11:00. With about 10 pages to go, my iPad ran out of juice - the charging cable had come unplugged! So a slight delay to reaching the very satisfying conclusion. This was a very enjoyable book.

Next up to read, "The Chemical Wedding" by John Crowley. I really enjoyed much of John Crowley's work, going back to the late 1970s. Very self-referential - I remember a couple of his novels where the characters gradually come to understand that they are characters in a fairy tale. I hadn't seen anything from him for a while, so I backed this kickstarter.

My reward was a hardcover copy of the book, which came last week. But, somehow, my reward also included 5 x 500 page hardcover books (9" total thickness) - The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, 17th-21st editions (2004-2008). I had the 4th and 8th editions of this series, so there was a place for it on my bookshelves. I guess the publisher had a bunch of these in a warehouse somewhere and wanted to get the space back, but still, when I saw what had been included, I was definitely like "post-scarcity utopia"!

The Doubt Factory

I kind of got in the groove reading "General Theory" - read 8 chapters and was thinking about forging ahead and reading the final 6. But then, needed a break. I went back to the unread books in the Kobo app on my iPad - currently down to 19 books! I decided on "The Doubt Factory" by Paolo Bacigalupi. It is a YA novel - and I know this for sure because the central character is a teenage high school girl, and part of the plot is her getting a boyfriend.

She starts out being pretty annoying, a smart but spoiled 1%er child in a private academy. But the subject matter quickly becomes very topical and important. Her father is 1 of the 2 principals of "The Doubt Factory" - a PR firm that specializes in "product defense". They are the masters of sowing doubt via paid experts and other techniques to keep harmful products on the market for as long as possible to squeeze out just a little more profit - "delay = $$$". The father's firm is very happy to work in the shadows, but it is targeted for exposure by a lovable group of young misfits all of whom have lost family to products that The Doubt Factory helped keep on the market.

I read this in 1 day, so it is definitely a page turner. Lots of action and explosions, should make a great movie. Paolo is performing a really valuable service in exposing young adults to this topic. He and Cory Doctorow are both Bards of the Revolution. And unlike "Hunger Games" or "Divergent", both of which have vague future dystopias, their works are based on aspects of our modern world that are for the most part spot on.

In a nice piece of synchronicity, Greenpeace has just this weekend outed a major academic climate denier for having taken payment from the fossil fuel industry for "scholarly" articles denying anthropogenic climate change. Nice!

The Joint Is Jumpin'

I decided to go on and plow through Keynes "General Theory". It is rough going - harder to read than Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations" written 150 years earlier. So I'm reading it 5 chapters at a time, with a break in between.

For my first break, I decided to read the latest Jumper book by Steven Gould, "Exo". This is the 4th book in the series. I started it and realized quickly I had not read the previous book. So I downloaded "Impulse" and then binge read the 2 of them in about 3 days.

The 1st book "Jumper" came out in 1992. A teenage boy saves his life by jumping (teleporting). He becomes a superhero, but is pursued by government agencies and/or an evil billionaire. There was a not-so-good movie made of this starring the ever-so-wooden Christian Hayden. They added very unnecessary plot modifications: multiple jumpers who have been pursued for millennia by a cult who ritually murders them because they are too powerful to leave alone.

The 2nd book, "Reflex" came out in 2004. The boy is older now and his jumping ability rubs off on his girlfriend who later becomes his wife. More trying to be do-gooders while evading the powers that be.

The 3rd and 4th books both follow their 16-17 year old daughter, who also learns to jump to save her life. In "Impulse" she is mostly helping out the downtrodden in her new high school (she had been home-schooled). "Exo" gets a little more cosmic in its scope, and we have bad guys back. Some interesting side effects of teleportation are put to good use.

These are all very enjoyable reads, total page turners. And no question that these are YA novels. There was 1 line about putting makeup on in "Impulse". I couldn't find it, but searching the eBook for "makeup" found 14 matches. So definitely a lot of teenage angst. Hmmm, the Wikipedia page for Steven Gould says he is 4 years younger than me. So, a pretty old guy, he must be using his daughters for source material.

Rhesus Burn

I read the latest of Charlie Stross's (@cstross) Laundry novels "The Rhesus Chart" on my flights to Zagreb last month. I bought it in hardback, as my son-in-law (in Zagreb) also enjoys these novels - I left him the copy. This series has a great memotype: Dilbert meets H.P.Lovecraft at the bottom, with an additional flavor thrown in on top. Additional flavors have included James Bond and other spy novel variants. This time the special sauce is vampires.

Is there a scholarly study on why the vampire meme is so incredibly strong? There are so many variations. After the original Stoker, I think the Anne Rice novels reopened the doors. Then came Coppola, Blade, Underworld, UltraViolet, Twilight and a couple of TV series (of which I have seen zilch - should I consider that as "I've got that goin' for me" to check out, or should I ignore them all?) At one point, I had a life goal of watching all vampire movies - I have abandoned that goal.

The ship captain vampire was a great addition to Peter Watts "Blindsight" (which I've talked about a couple of times before), with a great appendix giving the details on Watts's version of What Is Vampirism.

I liked Charlie's postulate in the vampiric memespace: that as totally top-of-the-food-chain predators, vampires would pretty much always try to wipe each other out soonest.

So for this Laundry novel, Charlie picked the "bacon" of special sauces. I thought that this was one of the best plotted novels of the series. He continues to innovate to keep the series fresh, but I think a few more and he will be done here.

Of course, Joe Bob sez, "Check it out".

On the 16 hr trip home, I saved the one other novel I'd decided to read for the final legs and watched a few airplane movies on the long trans-Atlantic leg.

The 1st was "Divergent": should I say "Holy crap, what shit!", or "Holy shit, what crap!" I mean, really, at the end, after being rescued by her mom (our own Ashley Judd), who then buys it, the heroine winds up reunited with her boyfriend/mentor, her brother, her father, and the leader of their clan - Ray Stevenson??? I had blogged before about YA novels, and about how good they were. This is more what I would expect YA to be: complete adolescent crap.

Then I watched "Noah", OMG what a load of crap! It kind of reminded me of "City of God", in which a protagonist makes incredibly stupid, unrealistic, and unpragmatic decisions based on moral or religious grounds. I guess it's a good object lesson in how corrupting it is to allow your mind to be controlled by a virus. My recommendation is, spare yourself.

The 3rd movie I watched I can't remember, which is unfortunate, because it was way better than the 1st 2. OK, it's 4 days later, my subconscious is mute as to what this movie was. I'm assuming it's gone forever. YASM (Yet Another Senior Moment) :-(

And speaking of crappy movies, I purchased and watched "Under The Skin". Incomprehensible. Clearly an Art Film, but not a very good one. I find it particularly annoying when someone who doesn't know science fiction makes what they think is an edgy, artsy sci fi movie which mostly serves to demonstrate that non-afficianados have no idea how edgy good sci fi currently is.

So after the moviefest, I read "Cibola Burn" by James S.A. Corey (2 guys, @JamesSACorey). This is the 4th novel in their series - I have blogged the other 3. A good read. The hero - the incorruptible man who will always speak truth to power - is back, with the other 3 interesting members of his crew. Plus we get a character from the 1st book back in an interesting twist.

I think the series is moving into more conventional territory - we've gone from an ancient countermeasure bioweapon threatens life in the solar system to exploring 1000s of worlds opened through a newly awakened ancient portal system. But still good plotting, and a bad guy who I think speaks to our times: a psychopath whose dedication to corporate goals is beyond psychotic.

This is one of the best new series of the last decade. I think they can keep it interesting for at least a few more novels. They have also published 2 novellas in the same story universe which I have yet to read. I'm happy to say, I've got that goin' for me!

YA

I did a reread of "Blindsight", by Peter Watts (2006). Hmmm, I thought I'd blogged on this, but I can't find it. I must have read during the period when I had quit blogging. I thought this novel was the best I read that year -- whatever year that was, see what happens when you quit blogging? It is a very unusual first contact novel. The alien race we encounter is incredibly intelligent but completely unconscious. The contention, that such a race would see consciousness as parasite that does nothing but waste energy, which is not an unreasonable argument. Most mentation is accomplished by subconscious processes, the conscious mind then just chimes in and takes credit.

Another nice twist was that the leader of the small, rushed human expedition was a vampire. Vampires had been extinct for 6000 years but "jurassic park"ed back into existence. They have very different mental organization and are ruthless predators -- just who we need to meet aliens.

The reread was good. The main new thing I noticed this time through was that garden variety homo sapiens was being pretty much consigned to the dustbin of history, being replaced by cyborgs, AIs, and, of course, vampires.

I also noticed in an afterword a reference to the novel "Permanence", by Karl Schroeder (2003), and decided to give it a try. A good read, with some interesting use of new science. One of these concepts was that habitable planets could exist around brown dwarf "stars", and that these could be closer together than normal stars. Another was some ideas about consciousness similar to "Blindsight": that technological, conscious races become so because they are poorly adapted to their ecological niche. As eons pass and the race becomes better adapted, it will become increasingly unconscious and instinctive in its behavior. Also some good astro-archeology with artifacts of defunct alien interstellar civilizations.

I wonder if this was published as a Young Adult (YA) novel? The protagonist is a woman in her late teens, and there is a definite subplot of her hooking up with the right guy, i.e., we got us a chick flick here as well as a good hard sci-fi space opera. I know "Hunger Games" was YA. I've got the new Paulo Bacigalupi "Ship Breaker" on my iPad, it was listed as YA, the synopsis says the hero is a teenage boy. So does having a teenager as the protagonist make a novel YA? Seems like there are others ("Jumper" by Steven Gould comes to mind) that have teenage protagonists but weren't called YA. So I guess I'm confused by the YA designation.

Regardless, I've always loved stories with kids or teenagers as the protagonist. They make me think of how much I would have enjoyed reading them when I first started shoveling this stuff in, at age 12 or so.

Free stuff! I was going to buy some of Peter Watts' older stuff, but couldn't get the eBook for the 1st book of a trilogy he had published: "Starfish", "Maelstrom", and "Behemoth". Then found out, these are all available for free at his website. Also all his short stories. Pretty cool!

Karl Schroeder also has his novel "Ventus" available for free at his website. It's interesting how more options for obtaining books keep popping up. Nice!