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Review

“Countdown”

Sarah Scoles

Bumped this up in my reading queue so I could have it done prior to the discussion of my recent book club read, The Curve of Binding Energy. It seemed like it would be a nice accompaniment, and it was—didn’t captivate me with the writing style in the way McPhee does, but it sure tackled the same material from a perspective 40-odd years later. Not an update, per se, but a companion.

I’ve read a fair few books about the nuclear industry, both weapons and civilian, and found this to be a very interesting addition to that set. Because it’s not about the history, really, the way most of those others have been. Sure, there’s some context provided, but it’s mostly interested with what’s going on right now. It’s very clear that, for all our collective willingness to treat nuclear weapons as a problem that ended with the Cold War, they are still very much an ongoing concern. And boy, is that ever a thing to be worried by. Although how much to worry might vary a bit as you read the book, because a lot of the people working in the industry are doing so because they want to make sure it’s safe, that we won’t be facing the nuclear apocalypse.

This was an absolutely fascinating read, and I got through it… not in one sitting, because I started it too late in the day for that, but in the space of 24 hours. Well worth reading; check it out.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“The Vegan Meat Cookbook”

Miyoko Schinner

This worked surprisingly well as a counterpoint to The Vegetarian Flavor Bible. Where that one went all-in on “there’s so many interesting fruits/vegetables/etc. that you won’t even miss meat,” this is a lot more “so: you miss eating meat, but want to stick with not eating meat.” It’s an interesting approach! It felt weird to be reading through the steps and see “add the chicken” or whatever, and need to look over at the ingredients list and see that it was specifying a couple of different vegetarian “chicken” options.

The introduction covered a long list of meat-imitation products, many of which I hadn’t heard of, and I found it to be a useful resource; I’ve got some notes for next time I’m at the grocery store, to see what’s available. It also had some instructions on making your own meat replacements, which I… don’t think I’ll actually be following. I can’t be bothered to make my own bread, so a vegan ‘chicken’ recipe that seems to be making bread with twice the steps and triple the work isn’t an easy sell for me. Still, it’s useful that it’s there, and I’ll happily keep this on the shelf as reference in case the inspiration ever strikes.

Overall, a neat little cookbook; I took some notes, and bookmarked some recipes, and I think it’ll be a good addition to my little collection. Check it out.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

Moist von Lipwig

Terry Pratchett

I never feel quite right about writing a book review of a book that I’d already read before, but sometimes I can bring myself to do it with a series. In this case, it’s a sub-series—the Moist von Lipwig books within Terry Pratchett’s greater Discworld series. I didn’t quite intend to, but wound up rereading all three of them. In reverse order, in fact, which really highlights the “didn’t quite intend to”—had I known that’s what I was doing, I probably would’ve done it in the proper order, but I read the last one and then went “I want a bit more of that,” read the second one, and thought “well, I might as well finish the set.”

It’s not a surprise to me that I love these books, that they’re some of my favorite in the whole series, that I come back to them fairly often. There’s a specific aspect to them that I love: the feeling of building something. Moist, and oh what a name, is a man who works only in words—something I can relate to, being a programmer—and yet these books are three different times that he used that to help build something real. Rebuild the post office, rebuild the banks, and then build the railway.

I never regret reading a Pratchett book. In your case, dear reader, I’d say to actually go from first to last, rather than mixing it all around: start with Going Postal.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review Writing

“Your Idol”

Sounding the spoiler horn: not only will I be making no effort to avoid spoilers for K-Pop Demon Hunters here, I will be actively assuming that the reader has seen the movie.

Continue reading ““Your Idol””
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Review

“Night Sky Mine”

Melissa Scott

I really enjoyed this one! I think it counts as cyberpunk, but the digital world stuff was a really neat take on evolutionary programming. I’m actually over here wondering how much this was an inspiration for Code Lyoko, the visuals I was imagining felt very similar.

The setting is basically that, at some point, software engineers went “screw it, we’ll just evolve software to do what we want instead of trying to write it ourselves.”1 Skip forward a mystery amount of time, and they’ve accidentally created entire ecosystems – pieces of software acting like flora and fauna in a networked environment, preying on one another and, occasionally, going all cancerous and crashing the entire substrate running it all.2

The book takes place a long time after that; there’s entire careers in software breeding now, as well as people who go hunting in the wild parts of the net, looking for useful programs.

My only negative I’ve got is that the pacing feels off; the ebook came in at something like 440 pages, and the denouement hit on, like, page 430. It felt rushed, and like there was closure missing for the characters and the story itself. I suppose that means I need to go see if there’s a sequel.

I also spent the entire book reading the title with the word ‘mine’ meaning ’belonging to me,’ despite the fact that the asteroid-mining megacorporation in the background is named Night Sky Mine Co., but that’s more on me than the book.

Anyhow, I quite enjoyed the read – check it out!3

  1. If this feels familiar, you are correct, that’s what all the modern AI stuff is. ↩
  2. This goes poorly for people relying on other software running on that substrate – for example, navigation and life support systems for faster-than-light starships. ↩
  3. This is an Amazon affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I prefer Bookshop affiliate links to Amazon when possible, but in this case, the book wasn’t available there, so it’ll have to do. ↩
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Review

“The Curve of Binding Energy”

John McPhee

Truly astonishing that it took me this long to read this book; it’s thoroughly right up my alley.1 To start with, it’s McPhee, and he’s my favorite nonfiction author. And after that, it’s about nuclear weapons, nuclear power, and proliferation… with a solid digression into nuclear rocketry, which has long been an interest of mine.2 Nothing in the rocketry section was new to me—I’ve read up enough on that to the point that everything was familiar, although the personal story of Taylor, the interviewee, selling Wernher von Braun on the concept wasn’t something I recalled previously.

What was new, and awe-inspiring in a sort of dry-mouthed terror kind of way, was the nuclear weaponry aspect. This is a book about Theodore B. Taylor, one of the world’s greatest experts in the design of atomic weapons. Over the course of the book he does things like, sitting in front of McPhee during an interview, sketch out plans for a low-yield atom bomb that could be built using only commercially-available equipment and products, with the sole exception of the enriched uranium. He does so while carefully using only publicly-available information. And, in the midst of doing it, he describes each likely point in the commercial reactor fuel processing cycle that said fissile materials could be stolen, and exactly what you would need to do to process that form of the material into what you’d need to build a bomb. This book is, in essence, just a little bit short of being an instruction guide on How To Build A Nuke In Your Garage.

Pair that with a series of explorations of nuclear facilities, in-depth review of the various security failings therein, and a memorable anecdote about the time a fourteen-year-old boy came up with credible designs for a hydrogen bomb, and the fact that the we still, nearly 50 years after this book came out, have yet to see a terrorist organization—or just a really motivated whack-job—build their own bomb is, as I said, awe-inspiring in a dry-mouthed terror kind of way. It isn’t nearly as hard as it should be.

That’s really the key point of this whole book, and the thing that kept standing out to me. I had moments of fun dorkiness—laughing aloud about midway through when Taylor, distracted by a thought, started describing his plan to build what we’d today call a hyperloop network. A certain somebody isn’t nearly as inventive as he’d like to pretend he is; this guy was talking about it when you were still in diapers!3

All in all, this book was an absolute delight to read. I’m likely to reread it again in the next month, and only partially because I wound up finishing it with a bit too much lead-time before the actual book club meeting. I just really enjoyed it, and would like to take a second crack at it, this time without the commonplace book beside me to jot down notes. I absolutely recommend the read; check it out.4

  1. It says good things about my devotion to the whole “don’t buy yourself new books until you finish reading all the ones you’ve already bought” plan that I had to sell my book club on reading it so I could sneak it through the “buying books for book club doesn’t count” exception. ↩
  2. I’m a little tempted to publish the essay I wrote in high school about nuclear rocketry, since I dug it up to look at again while reading this, but probably for the best that I don’t. I’m not interested in knowing how bad my writing skills were that long ago. Or, worse, finding out that they’ve decayed. ↩
  3. Admittedly, Not Tony Stark’s approach gets some points for doing tunneling the boring way (ba-dum-tss) instead of through Taylor’s proposed plan of nuclear shaped charges.
    That said, Taylor’s expertise, and the paragraph of explaining how well one actually can shape a nuclear explosion when they’re Theodore Taylor, makes it a more credible plan than when I talk about that kind of concept. ↩
  4. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“Your Code as a Crime Scene”

Adam Tornhill

This was an odd read. I think the core idea—version control systems are a layer of metadata on top of our code, which we seldom use for anything valuable but should—is a good one, but the actual implementation of the book just didn’t work for me. Part of the issue was that it made a terrible ebook—there’s a fair amount of charts, all of which rely on color-coding, and thus become entirely illegible on a grayscale e-ink screen.1

Past that, though, a whole lot of it felt like a veiled advertisement for the author’s company. A couple pages of introducing an analysis concept, and then, would you look at that, a tutorial of how you could, laboriously, do that analysis yourself… or a much shorter tutorial on how you could do it using their product! After a while it started to feel like I was getting a hard sell. And, c’mon man, this was a $35 ebook, you’re already charging like it’s a required textbook for a college course.

  1. Visual accessibility, for colorblind folks, is a problem software has started to address. I guess the publishing industry just… didn’t notice that? ↩
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Review

“Creating Software with Modern Diagramming Techniques”

Ashley Peacock

“Pragmatic Express” is an interesting imprint for this, but I suppose it tracks – this is a short book that mostly just introduces Mermaid as a concept, as well as going through a couple use-cases of diagramming in general. I did wind up writing some Mermaid diagrams as I was reading through the book, as it lined up well with some documentation I needed to write. I was a little tempted to figure out a way to inject Mermaid into this site when I saw that it has Sankey diagrams, but decided against it as I don’t actually do the kind of writing that would necessitate those. Still, would’ve been fun!

Overall, a useful introduction to a programming tool. Felt like it needed another editing pass, but it’s a good start, after which you can go to the actual Mermaid docs instead. If you’re a programmer, check it out.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“Images of Rail: Portland’s Streetcar Lines”

Richard Thompson

This was a fun little thing to flip through. I actually didn’t realize when I grabbed it at the book store (Powell’s, if I can be a little more Portland) that it was a photo book – the “Images of Rail” bit in the title is in a much smaller print than the “Portland’s Streetcar Lines” bit. Several thoughts I had on the way through:

  1. I live by one of the new streetcar lines, and quite appreciate it, but the new streetcars don’t have the same aesthetic appeal as the old ones.
  2. I never knew about the origin of the Montavilla neighborhood’s name: Mount Tabor Villa, which was shortened (per the book, on the streetcar signs) first to “Mt. Ta. Villa” and then “Monta.Villa”
  3. Lastly, page 73 features the schedule, from 1891, for the Portland-Vancouver streetcar line. It is infuriating.1

So many of the photos mention being in areas that I think of as very built-up, but in the backgrounds there’s… nothing. A single building, maybe. It was fascinating to see the amount of change that’s happened in the century and a half. And, aside from my little transportation-policy rant that accounts for about half of this book review, I quite enjoyed it. Check it out.2

  1. There were departures from Portland every 20 minutes from 6:00 AM to 7:00 PM, at which point it dropped to every 30 minutes until midnight. Leaving Vancouver, on the other hand, required a bit more planning—departures were every 40 minutes from 6:45 AM to 11:15 PM. Seven days a week, though on Sunday mornings they didn’t start until 7:40 AM.
    That’s a pretty robust amount of service, especially considering that as of the 1890 census, Portland’s population came in at just over 46,000, whereas Vancouver had had a massive amount of growth since 1880, and now boasted 3,500 residents!
    Compare that to the current populations – Portland at 630,000 or so, and Vancouver at 190,000. With that sort of population growth, surely the public transit options between the cities have gotten even better! Let me just check my notes here…
    Ah. There’s no rail infrastructure at all. The interstate bridge replacement program is going to extend the light-rail network over the river any time now—as of this writing, they’re only a couple years behind schedule and a couple billion dollars over budget, having… yet to establish a “start of construction” date.
    That’s fine, maybe the busses are better?
    Ah. “Busses” was the wrong word; it seems I meant “bus”. On weekdays, you can catch a bus, once every 40 minutes, to get between the downtown cores of these two neighboring cities. And on the weekends, you can… walk, I guess?
    Thanks, America. ↩
  2. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“A Wizard of Earthsea”

Ursula K. Le Guin

I know this is one of the classic fantasy novels, but I must admit, it just didn’t click for me. Maybe I’m coming to it too late—too many of the things it did have become norms, part of the standard lexicon of fantasy novels. It did have two things about it that stuck with me, though:

  1. The protagonist, and most of the characters, aren’t white. It’s sorta snuck in—benefits of being a completely different world, if there isn’t a history of racism being A Thing, then people just… don’t think about it as much.
  2. This fantasy novel from 1968 has a magical Roko’s Basilisk in it. It’s not described that way, but it’s an extremely powerful entity trapped in a box, which has suborned its captors and is trying to use them to in turn suborn more powerful entities.
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Review

“Atomic Robo: The Roleplaying Game – Majestic 12”

Brian Clevinger, Mike Olson, and Scott Wegener

A quick follow-on to last week’s review – very much an expansion pack to the game, but one that added a lot of detail to the backstory of Majestic. The idea of The System, a deliberately-obtuse bureaucracy meant to ensure that nobody knows enough of what’s going on to effectively leak things, is a nice touch. Pairs extremely well with the existence of ALAN in the comics. A nice follow-up.

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Review

“Atomic Robo: The Roleplaying Game”

Brian Clevinger, Mike Olson, and Scott Wegener

Doesn’t quite fit my review concept, as I’d call this more of a reference book than anything else, but having just sat and read through the whole thing, I may as well do a quick write-up!

The Fate Core system seems more approachable to me than the classic Dungeons & Dragons thing; I’m hopeful that I’ll have a chance to try this at some point. The Atomic Robo universe feels like an absolutely perfect fit for a game like this, particularly the more episodic (or rather, issue/volume) structure of the stories. I also enjoyed that there was more material in this book than I’ve seen in the actual comic—the timeline, in particular, includes quite a few things that have yet to make an appearance in the comic, and helped to build out the world even more. Fun!

So hey, if you’re interested in RPGs, consider this one.

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Review

“The Paradox Paradox”

Daniel Hardcastle

This… is one of the greatest books I have ever read. I’ll tackle the easy thing first: the comedy is sublime. Not surprising, given that Hardcastle is one of my favorite YouTubers, and has been for checks notes over a decade. He’s got this ‘entertaining people’ thing down.

Next easiest to tackle: the cast and setting. The cast is delightful, a wonderfully diverse mix of species, and watching them all interact is an absolute delight. Everyone is likable, everyone has a fascinating backstory, every last one of them I want more of. And the setting is absolutely gorgeous; it has that Douglas Adams feel of some of the details being played purely for comedy, but every last one of them still works. Like, towards the end, there’s a throwaway line about banana peels having been re-engineered to be edible centuries ago, and it’s meant as a joke about the fact that they still taste like the wrong kind of banana the same way all fake banana stuff does, but that works. Centuries of scientific progress, and of course we’d have some little detail like that that we’d hang on to for the sake of nostalgia rather than sense. The future won’t be shiny and perfect, but it will be shiny, and full of interesting decisions that people have made because they’re still people.

And now, the hardest bit to talk about, particularly without spoiling anything: the time travel. It’s named “The Paradox Paradox,” of course it’s about time travel. But this is, I think, the best-thought-out system of time travel I’ve ever seen. I’m not entirely certain that I’m grasping the whole of it, but it all works. And the way the book is put together makes it work even better – the chapter numbers are chronological, the chapters themselves are not. Because it’s a book about time travel, of course the sequence of events doesn’t follow the calendar! But, beyond that, the chapter numbers don’t match the table of contents. I was reading this on an e-reader, one that shows the chapter title up at the top of each page, and those don’t always align with the actual title card at the beginning of the chapter. You can’t trust the chapter numbers, but they are deeply meaningful. They just might be lying to you. And it is sublime.

I finished this book feeling a sense of awed delight. This is a masterwork, this is one of the greatest things I have ever read. I cannot recommend it highly enough; please read it.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“The Haunting of Tram Car 015”

P. Djèlí Clark

A couple big reviews of big books recently, so I very deliberately went for something small this time. And this was a delightful little read! Wound up going through the whole thing in a single sitting and absolutely loving it. Just the right amount of world-building in what is a very interesting setting; it fed me new bits of background information at just the right speed to keep me hooked. The title had me worried that I was making a mistake, grabbing this as my before-bed reading, that I’d be setting myself up to be too spooked to sleep well, but there was very little “horror” to the feel of it at all.

Very enjoyable read, and the print version was very satisfying in the hand, with a lovely bit of cover art. Check it out.1

  1. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩
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Review

“A People’s History of the United States”

Howard Zinn

This was one of those books that took me a long time to get through; 650 pages of small print, dense with names and dates, it’s basically my precise weakness in reading. It is also—and, in reading it over the course of several weeks, I assure you I have had time to think about this—one of the most important books I’ve ever read.1 I’ll let Zinn speak for himself in what purpose the book actually serves:

As for the subtitle of this book, it is not quite accurate; a “people’s history” promises more than any one person can fulfill, and it is the most difficult kind of history to recapture. I call it that anyway because, with all its limitations, it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people’s movements of resistance.

That makes it a biased account, one that leans in a certain direction. I am not troubled by that, because the mountain of history books under which we all stand leans so heavily in the other direction—so tremblingly respectful of states and statesmen and so disrespectful, by inattention, to people’s movements—that we need some counterforce to avoid being crushed into submission. (631)2

This is the counterpart to my “I went to public schools in the USA” education.3 This is the book that points out the things I never think about, because we’re gently guided away from thinking about them.4

It is also, setting aside the aforementioned name-and-date density, very well written. Some choice quotes, where I just truly appreciated the writing style:

In premodern times, the maldistribution of wealth was accomplished by simple force. In modern times, exploitation is disguised—it is accomplished by law, which has the look of neutrality and fairness. By the time of the Civil War, modernization was well under way in the United States. (240)

… one could call that a zinn-ger.5

It had long been true, and prisoners knew this better than anyone, that the poorer you were the more likely you were to end up in jail. This was not just because the poor committed more crimes. In fact, they did. The rich did not have to commit crimes to get what they wanted; the laws were on their side. (516)

And one more quote that I enjoyed enough to copy down:

Vietnam was “lost” (the very word supposed it was ours to lose). (551)

The chapter that felt like the original end to the book, prior to it being updated for the Clinton and Bush administrations, had a little bit of a call-to-action feel to it, but given when it was written, it mostly just made me think oh, this is a really useful way to look at the elections that’ve happened in my adult life.

Capitalism has always been a failure for the lower classes. It is now beginning to fail for the middle classes. (637)

I enjoyed the hell out of this book. I wish I could get my hands on a version that covered up until now, but alas, old historians never die… they just become primary sources. Still, despite being over 20 years old, the only part of it that actually felt dated to me was how little reference to the LGBTQ rights movement there was.6 Absolutely worth the read; check it out.7

  1. It’s also one of the first times in quite a while that I’ve used Ulysses’ little ‘notes’ sidebar to store a set of quotes to maybe insert into my writing, so: brace yourself. ↩
  2. I’m quoting from the 2003 “Perennial Classics” edition; given how many different versions of the book I saw when I picked it up at Powell’s, that may still not be enough to narrow down exactly which version it is, but hopefully the page numbers will at least get you close. The afterword in this edition ended on page 688. ↩
  3. I’m not quite paraphrasing Zinn, but I got close:
    > For the United States to step forward as a defender of helpless countries matched its image in American high school history textbooks, but not its record in world affairs. (408) ↩
  4. For example: it’s a little weird that we talk up how close any given presidential election is when, to use 2016 as an example, of the eligible voters in the US, Donald Trump got 25.6% of the vote, and Hillary got 26.8%. ↩
  5. Given how mad at me autocorrect got about trying to type that pun, one probably shouldn’t. ↩
  6. Roughly two paragraphs, all told; one mention of the earlier parts of it, and several chapters later, an admission that it should’ve been covered more. Yep! It should’ve! ↩
  7. This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩