A few books
I am in New York again, and as usual up at jetlag-o'clock and avoiding prep for my panel later. I am insanely perky now after going out at 5am to get coffee, but expect this to fade rapidly when I actually need the energy, so am coasting for a bit.
Some books I have read.
A very long book, and the first 60% of it was really good. The moon breaks up and will make planet Earth uninhabitable for thousands of years, starting in two years. The future of life on Earth depends on a desperate scramble to set up self-sustaining space habitats using what is essentially today's technology, and support from the vast majority of people who will be left behind.
This is the good bit. I haven't read any other Stephenson but he seems comfortable writing engineers and rational people who work together for a common good. The engineering challenges seem realistic, the solutions plausible - including a fair disregard for human life, after all risk looks different when you only have two years to live anyway - and the characters reasonable. I liked the Dinah and Ivy dynamic, where two women who might be seen as rivals are actually good friends who work together well.
I'm not sure it is a good idea to look for an overriding political or moral message in a book that's really all plot. Any one left in is probably unintentional. However, 'politicians, charismatic people and media people bad, scientists and venture capitalists good' seems to be a theme.
In the end, the survival of the human race is a lot tighter than it should have been due to the actions of people who are more political. (Or was it? The human race gets down to 8 known individuals at one point, because of a series of basically self-imposed disasters. But under the circumstances, maybe only 8 could have survived anyway and a larger base population would have run across other constraints and wiped itself out even more surely? I get the impression we're meant to really dislike Julia, the paranoid, scheming politician who shouldn't have come to space at all. But what is she actually guilty of? Nuking Venezuela, a desperate measure but perhaps justified to get more shuttles up above the atmosphere. Catching one of the last rockets up against previous agreements, but hey, if you didn't have anyone else ready to go, wouldn't you? I'm not sure we should hold it against characters that they act selfishly when faced with death. Stirring up political trouble in the Swarm, which is perhaps the most damning indictment, since as far as we can tell the government of the space population was benign-to-heroic at the time).
It's got very good worldbuilding, lots of realistic-sounding acronyms and technologies that might work in a jury-rigged desperate way. The first 60% was a page turner as I wanted to know if the human race managed to get to a sustainable situation.
The last 40% of the book is set 5,000 years later in the world that results from the events of the first bit. And it's a mess. I mean, I can absolutely believe that in 5,000 years humans would have created new and stupid complications for themselves, including managing to make seven distinct and sometimes hostile races from eight individuals, but it still falls under 'frustratingly stupid'. They had the technology to clone pretty much any human, they didn't have to keep tweaking the genes of the survivors, including developing a synthetic y-chromosome. Didn't some brave woman in 5,000 years think, 'hey, you know how I can de-escalate this racial segregation conflict? Instead of breeding gene-tweaked clones of myself, I can bear a clone of a great peace activist and a great engineer and a great scientist, who will belong to none of the races and be happy to miscegenate with anyone they fancy, and in a dozen generations nearly everyone will have a bit of Aidan and a bit of Julian and a bit of the rest and the whole 'curse' will be moot.' As it was, you had the impression that the poor old Julians were good for nothing, which is probably not true; the ability to be paranoid and scheming is probably not an evolutionarily useless feature.
Also, after following how fragile the thread of human survival was in one civilisation, it's a bit jarring to suddenly be presented with two other surviving civilisations, both of which seemed like very long shots at the time. And because the first 60% of the book is quite strict with realistic science, it's tempting to question everything that seems off about the last bit (geothermal: you don't just need heat, you need a heat differential to generate energy. Where did the Diggers get their cooling? When did the sea people start to selectively breed for life in water - because I doubt 300 years is enough to produce significant changes to human design, given the length of human generations, and if they started 5,000 years ago they produced a lot of frustrated people designed for life in water who never got to swim....)
I think it would have been a better book if after the gripping first 60%, we'd segued to a future where the human race had established itself in space, bred itself to a mixture where people could be individuals, and was then looking at reseeding Earth.
Via cartesiandaemon. Quite entertaining Victorian urban fantasy fluff, with a wildly positive and generous protagonist and sensible backup characters. Well plotted. Could have been better executed. I especially liked that there seemed to be a reason why the protagonist got to age 30 without developing any connections, occupation, or diversions; too often you wonder why an intelligent character with initiative seems to come with little backstory.
Some books I have read.
A very long book, and the first 60% of it was really good. The moon breaks up and will make planet Earth uninhabitable for thousands of years, starting in two years. The future of life on Earth depends on a desperate scramble to set up self-sustaining space habitats using what is essentially today's technology, and support from the vast majority of people who will be left behind.
This is the good bit. I haven't read any other Stephenson but he seems comfortable writing engineers and rational people who work together for a common good. The engineering challenges seem realistic, the solutions plausible - including a fair disregard for human life, after all risk looks different when you only have two years to live anyway - and the characters reasonable. I liked the Dinah and Ivy dynamic, where two women who might be seen as rivals are actually good friends who work together well.
I'm not sure it is a good idea to look for an overriding political or moral message in a book that's really all plot. Any one left in is probably unintentional. However, 'politicians, charismatic people and media people bad, scientists and venture capitalists good' seems to be a theme.
In the end, the survival of the human race is a lot tighter than it should have been due to the actions of people who are more political. (Or was it? The human race gets down to 8 known individuals at one point, because of a series of basically self-imposed disasters. But under the circumstances, maybe only 8 could have survived anyway and a larger base population would have run across other constraints and wiped itself out even more surely? I get the impression we're meant to really dislike Julia, the paranoid, scheming politician who shouldn't have come to space at all. But what is she actually guilty of? Nuking Venezuela, a desperate measure but perhaps justified to get more shuttles up above the atmosphere. Catching one of the last rockets up against previous agreements, but hey, if you didn't have anyone else ready to go, wouldn't you? I'm not sure we should hold it against characters that they act selfishly when faced with death. Stirring up political trouble in the Swarm, which is perhaps the most damning indictment, since as far as we can tell the government of the space population was benign-to-heroic at the time).
It's got very good worldbuilding, lots of realistic-sounding acronyms and technologies that might work in a jury-rigged desperate way. The first 60% was a page turner as I wanted to know if the human race managed to get to a sustainable situation.
The last 40% of the book is set 5,000 years later in the world that results from the events of the first bit. And it's a mess. I mean, I can absolutely believe that in 5,000 years humans would have created new and stupid complications for themselves, including managing to make seven distinct and sometimes hostile races from eight individuals, but it still falls under 'frustratingly stupid'. They had the technology to clone pretty much any human, they didn't have to keep tweaking the genes of the survivors, including developing a synthetic y-chromosome. Didn't some brave woman in 5,000 years think, 'hey, you know how I can de-escalate this racial segregation conflict? Instead of breeding gene-tweaked clones of myself, I can bear a clone of a great peace activist and a great engineer and a great scientist, who will belong to none of the races and be happy to miscegenate with anyone they fancy, and in a dozen generations nearly everyone will have a bit of Aidan and a bit of Julian and a bit of the rest and the whole 'curse' will be moot.' As it was, you had the impression that the poor old Julians were good for nothing, which is probably not true; the ability to be paranoid and scheming is probably not an evolutionarily useless feature.
Also, after following how fragile the thread of human survival was in one civilisation, it's a bit jarring to suddenly be presented with two other surviving civilisations, both of which seemed like very long shots at the time. And because the first 60% of the book is quite strict with realistic science, it's tempting to question everything that seems off about the last bit (geothermal: you don't just need heat, you need a heat differential to generate energy. Where did the Diggers get their cooling? When did the sea people start to selectively breed for life in water - because I doubt 300 years is enough to produce significant changes to human design, given the length of human generations, and if they started 5,000 years ago they produced a lot of frustrated people designed for life in water who never got to swim....)
I think it would have been a better book if after the gripping first 60%, we'd segued to a future where the human race had established itself in space, bred itself to a mixture where people could be individuals, and was then looking at reseeding Earth.
Via cartesiandaemon. Quite entertaining Victorian urban fantasy fluff, with a wildly positive and generous protagonist and sensible backup characters. Well plotted. Could have been better executed. I especially liked that there seemed to be a reason why the protagonist got to age 30 without developing any connections, occupation, or diversions; too often you wonder why an intelligent character with initiative seems to come with little backstory.