*scottstuff*

I’m a big fan of Charlie Stross; I think I’ve now read all of his published fiction. I’ve mentioned his books a few times here; he’s probably my favorite author at the moment.

That’s part of why I didn’t read The Family Trade when it came out last fall–it was originally written as the first half of a larger novel and then split into two by the publisher. I didn’t want to get engrossed in The Family Trade and then suddenly have the book stop halfway through the story. The second half, The Hidden Family, came out recently, so I ordered both of them from Amazon and settled in for a bit of reading.

Stross is generally a science fiction author, but this series is more or less fantasy. That is to say that it’s based on the same premises as about half of the fantasies clogging up your local bookstore, but it’s written by a good science fiction author and he spends a lot more time dealing with technology, politics, and economics then I’m used to seeing in fantasy. In the end, I’d say that this series is fantasy in about the same way that Stephenson’s baroque books are historical fiction–deep down, I know that they’re really scifi, with the “traditional” scifi elements hidden by the trappings of a different genre. That makes me feel a lot better about these two books, because normally I wouldn’t be caught dead reading fantasy.

Another difference between Stross’s new series and most of the fantasy I read when I was younger is the protagonist–instead of a stupid (or at least inexperienced) late teen/young adult wandering around lost in some fantasy land, Stoss gives us Miriam Beckstein, a thirtysomething first-string tech journalist with a MD and a history of backing Larry Ellison-types into corners. She’s still stuck with the fantasy land, but she comes to grips with things and is good at landing on her feet.

All in all, I enjoyed the two books. Perhaps not quite as much as I enjoyed The Atrocity Archives, but more then most of the other books that I’ve read recently. Surprisingly enough, the two books actually do fairly well on their own–they were divided at a natural breaking point, where most of the early plot threads were resolved before moving into a new set of issues in the second book. There’s a third book planned for next May or June.

I’ve been able to get a lot of reading done over the last couple weeks–I’ve been taking the bus to work, so I have about 90 minutes of reading time per day (instead of 90 minutes of driving time). Here are the others that I’ve finished lately:

• The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson. Basically an alternative history where the Plague killed Europe off in the 1300s, so Islam, India, and China are left sharing the world. It has a few interesting plot devices–the main characters keep getting killed off and then reincarnated back together again–but it was a painfully slow read for me, and when I was done I realized that I’d have to re-read it several times to fully understand what the heck just happened. Call it 3 stars.
• Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J.K. Rowling. Yeah, I read it too. Everyone’s read it. The ending worked okay for me.
• Blind Lake by Robert Charles Wilson. I liked his Cronoliths, but Blind Lake didn’t really do it for me. It doesn’t quite pull a deus ex machina at the end, but it’s pretty close.
• Jumper by Steven Gould. I added this to my list after a glowing recommendation on Boing Boing earlier this year. It’s obviously a juvenile, but it’s well written and manages to cover old ground (the “Wow, I can teleport!” story) without sounding like a retread. I’d probably have enjoyed it more if I’d read it when I was a lot younger–some of the coming-of-age stuff was kind of tedious.

Charlie Stross’s latest book, Accelerando is now available as a free (CC-licensed) ebook. Accelerando started life as a collection of short stories following three generations of the same family through the Singularity. I think I read at least 6 of the 9 stories when they originally came out, and I’ve been waiting for the whole collection to become available. Now it is. Enjoy, and go pre-order a printed copy to help support the author.

I’ve enjoyed Christopher Moore’s books for years, starting with The Island of the Sequined Love Nun, which I bought largely because of the title and an Amazon recommendation. Since then, I’ve bought all of his other books and enjoyed all of them, although Lamb was frequently aggravating, but at least thought provoking.

So I was happy to receive a copy of his latest in the mail: Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings as a gift from my sister. The first half of the book is as enjoyable as anything he’s written, but it all kind of came apart at the end. In retrospect, I would have enjoyed the book more if he’d just stopped 2/3 of the way in, even with the gaping unresolved plot holes. The last few chapters required way too much suspension of disbelief, and even once that was achieved, I had a hard time following what was supposed to be happening.

The book tells the story of Nathan Quinn, a humpback whale researcher in Maui. He’s spent most of his life studying the humpback’s song, trying to find meaning in their slowly changing notes. Every spring, the humpbacks (megaptera novaeangliae, or roughly “the great wing of new england”–hence the “winged whale” in the title) return to Maui to calve, swimming thousands of miles and spending months at a time without food. There are a number of mysteries about the humpback’s song–why do only the males sing, who are they singing to (other males in Maui? Whales on the other end of the ocean?), why do the whales all sing the same basic song every year?

Fortunately or unfortunately, the book answers the question, but only in the very end, after a rollercoaster ride across the pacific. Before the ride began, we got to meet a great cast of characters, like Kona, their white rasta hawaiian native jewish boat washer from New Jersey–even he couldn’t keep track of which accent he was supposed to be using half of the time. The story was moving right along until the author decided to pull out the “magic happens here” card and the entire book disintegrated into a pile of stinking whale vomit. Which is a shame, because it was a great book right up to that point.

I read Charlie Stross’s Iron Sunrise over the weekend. It’s a sequel to Singularity Sky, which I reviewed briefly when it came out. I enjoyed Singularity Sky, but I didn’t feel that it was that strong of a book; it had some interesting ideas, and a couple of the characters were memorable, but it didn’t completely work for me. I probably would have been happier buying the paperback, frankly.

Iron Sunrise resurrects the two or three most memorable characters from Singularity Sky and sends them, plus a handful of new characters, on a quest to stop someone from killing two planets. The main character is a covert UN “black chamber” weapons inspector in a world where there are too many people with too many fun toys. The big problem isn’t nutcases who build nukes in their kitchen (although cheap heavy elements and home nanofabs are a bad mix); the real problem tends to come from authoritarian institutions who are willing to get in a fight with something that introduces itself as “I am not your god” and novas the stars of people who step too far outside the lines.

I really enjoyed Iron Sunrise much more then Singularity Sky, although I probably wouldn’t have enjoyed it as much if I hadn’t read the previous novel first. There were a number of situations in Iron that echoed similar situations in Singularity, but played off the similarity towards interesting goals. Basically, I found it to be well written with interesting characters, plots, and gizmos. Just the thing for a summer weekend. There were a couple points in the book where it felt a little too 2004, and a few other points where it felt like we were hearing some of Stross’s website rants all over again (like the panopticon bit), but none of it really detracted from my enjoyment of the story. All in all, it’s one of the top books that I’ve read this year (along with his earlier Atrocity Archives).

Still, as good as his novels are becoming, his short stories tend to be even better. Go read ”Lobsters” online some time for an example.

I finished two books this weekend: Neal Stephenson’s The Confusion and Charlie Stross’s The Atrocity Archives.

First, The Confusion. I’ve been a Neal Stephenson fan since college, when I first read Snow Crash. The Confusion is the third book in his latest set, following Cryptonomicon and Quicksilver, and continues on where Quicksilver left off, following the Waterhouses and Shaftoes from around 1690 to 1702. Like his previous two books, The Confusion is largely the tale of money and finance, and how our current financial system came about. It’s also a fascinating tale of English and French history, and occasionally filled with swashbuckling pirates. It was an enjoyable read, but it was also a long, dense book, and it ended with a totally unexpected twist. Once the fourth volume, The System of the World comes out in September, the entire set will stretch from the 1660s to the present day and cover over 3,500 pages. They’re good books, but you’ll want to block out a month or two to read them all, and then re-read them to figure out what the heck was going on the whole time.

The Atrocity Archives is a bit different–it’s set in the modern era, and the main story is only 178 pages long, although there’s an excellent novella tacked on at the end the carries the characters on a bit further. In Hollywood-speak, it’s probably best described as H.P. Lovecraft meets Simon Travaglia. It’s basically a spy story. Our hero works for The Laundry, a branch of the British government charged with suppressing dangerous knowledge and preventing disasters. In the world of the novel, there are things that go bump in the night, and the right incantation (or the right software) can trigger things that science is still laboring (in secret) to understand. If you’ve seen Hellboy or any of a thousand similar movies, then you understand the setting. The really enjoyable part of The Atrocity Archives is the story itself and the writing. I’d highly recommend picking up a copy. You may also wish to read A Colder War, one of the author’s short stories, although the short story is a lot creepier and less enjoyable then the novel.

Update: Found an excerpt.

I finished reading Cory Doctrow’s A Place So Foreign and Eight More over the weekend. It’s a collection of (surprise) 9 of his short stories. I wasn’t very impressed with Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom when I read it a month or so ago, but A Place So Foreign was much more enjoyable. I’ve really been enjoying science fiction short stories more then novels recently.

I didn’t mention it at the time, but I finished Charlie Stross’s Singularity Sky a few weeks back. I enjoyed it more then Down and Out, but less then A Place So Foreign. He has a collection of short stories out, so I’ll try to grab those next.

My current read is Lamb by Christopher Moore. I loved Island of the Sequined Love Nun (possibly the best title of any book ever), along with most of his other books, so we’ll see how this one goes.

Of course, I’d be stuck on the bus without anything to read. At least I can write, right?

Once advantage of staying home for Christmas is that I’ve had time to do a bit of reading. I finished Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom around 30 minutes into the year, after a memorable New Year’s trying to get Sophie to stop crying and back to sleep. I don’t feel like writing a big review at the moment, but I don’t know if I can call it any better then just okay. It had some interesting points (that’s half of wnat I read scifi for), but it didn’t really excite me. I really like the stuff that he’s co-written with Charlie Stross, but I like pretty much everything of Stross’s that I’ve read. His Singularity Sky is next on my list.

Before I got to Down and Out, I re-read Lucifer’s Hammer for the fourth or fifth time. If you aren’t familiar with it, it’s from 1975 or so and tells the story of a major civilization-destroying comet strike. It shows its age at times–the social issues that characters worry about are very 1970s, and the approach to sex is very 70’s-scifi-author, but the story just feels right, and I’m continually drawn back into reading it. The sign of a good book, I guess :-). Its semi-sibling, Footfall is nearly as good–instead of a comet, Footfall has aliens, but it’s a fun read. Between the two books, movies like Independence Day and Bruce-Willis-and-the-Physics-Defying-Asteroid are really disappointing.

Oh yeah, one other thing to recommend Footfall: they nuke my home town in the end. Things like that always make me happy.

Amazing–a book on role-based access control. Enhanced security models like RBAC and MAC have been making their way into Unix and Linux for years, but I still haven’t found a good introduction to either model. Maybe this is finally it. The Linux Journal reviews it:

A good overview of implementing RBAC in the enterprise for students as well as corporate-level decision makers. [Linux Journal]

Amazon has it for $79, or £55 from amazon.co.uk.

Interestingly enough, the UK Amazon has an ebook on HIPAA and RBAC that I didn’t see when searching on amazon.com. That’s strange because HIPPA is a US thing, not a UK thing. I’m not particularly interested in HIPAA, though, and I prefer paper books.

I finally finished Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver. I can’t believe it took most of a month to read it, but I’ve been juggling kids, work, house cleaning, and a few other projects, and I never seem to have time to read any more. All in all, it’s an interesting book, but it’s not at all what I was expecting. Most of his previous works were more or less science fiction, up until Cryptonomicon, which was more “geek fiction” then anything else; it’s frequently called SciFi anyway though, because no other description fits it any better. Before Quicksilver, I’d have ranked Cryptonomicon in his top three, along with Snow Crash and Zodiac (I’m probably in the minority on Zodiac, but I liked it). Some days, I like it better then Snow Crash, and other days it’s down to number 2 or 3, but it’s always up there somewhere.

Now Quicksilver has jumbled things up a bit. First, it’s even less SciFi then Cryptonomicon (although there’s always the Enoch problem in both books). At least it fits into an identifiable genre–it’s clearly historical fiction (err, mostly–Enoch). But, it’s geeky historical fiction, where technical and philosophic advancements mean at least as much as political events, but the two are starting influence each other, as science begins to emerge and the modern world starting being constructed.

I’m going to reserve final judgment on Quicksilver until I’ve had time to read the rest of the set–The Confusion is supposed to be out in April, and System of the World is due out late next year. Quicksilver is clearly just Act 1; at the end you’re aware that he’s spent a lot of time setting up events that are going to take a long time to resolve. Except, since it’s historical fiction, it’s obvious what’s going to be happening–of course Charles II died, leaving the throne to James II. Of course William of Orange took it from James. Of course it passed from William and Mary to Anne, and then onto Sophie’s offspring. Any history book (or Wikipedia) will tell you that. Somehow, though, Stephenson manages to make all of that as interesting as the gold hunt in Cryptonmicon. So, even though he managed to leave characters hanging in the most irritating places at the end of this book, I’m looking forward to the next installment in the set. Even though I already know how it’s going to turn out.

Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt’s The Pragmatic Programmer is one of the best programming books that I’ve read in years. Dave’s talk at last year’s Ruby Conference was one of the highlights of the event for me. Now, they’re back with a pair of new books:

It’s been a busy couple of months here as we prepare to launch our new book-printing imprint, The Pragmatic Bookshelf. We spent the year writing the first two books, Pragmatic Version Control and Pragmatic Unit Testing. [PragDave]

Time for two more entries on my to-read list.