Tag Archives: reviews

Book Review: Triggers

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A couple of years ago, one of Robert J. Sawyer’s novels was turned into a prime-time television series, in the vein of 24. For fans of the science fiction writer who missed it, this may come as a surprise. Sawyer novels are interesting, perhaps even epic, but what they are not is action-packed. And indeed, the change of genre was a conscious one in the hopes of attracting a mainstream television audience.

But it got the writer thinking. Maybe he could write a thriller novel, something that might appeal to the sort of audience his series had brought to his fiction. He came up with an idea: what if an experiment gone awry suddenly caused a random group of strangers to become psychically-linked to each other, able to access memories not their own? And what if one of those people was the president of the United States, on the eve of a major military operation, resulting in an unprecedented breach of national security?

It sounds sufficiently thrilling to be worth a shot, and Sawyer must have thought so, too, since it was only a short time later that Triggers was born.

Dan Brown wrote a couple of techno-thrillers, which were heavy on the thriller and frequently inaccurate on the technical details. Still, they were readable, if not thought-provoking. Sawyer, coming at the problem from the other side, must have had a different sort of struggle. Trying to keep the frenetic pacing required while exploring the kind of philosophical quandaries that keep SF readers and writers so addicted to the genre must have been quite a balancing act.

If I were to treat this as a straight thriller, there were probably some spots after the first third or so of the novel where I might have said “we don’t need this scene”, “that’s slowing us down too much”, “we need another disaster right about here to ramp up the immediate tension again”.

But it’s not a straight thriller, and we do need those scenes, and the novel does maintain its tension, just not of the same kind as in a pure thriller. Sometimes it’s an emotional tension, and sometimes it’s the anticipation of nascent intellectual discovery. Sawyer develops his characters more, allows them (and the reader along with them) to sit and think about things a lot more, and fills in a lot more (fascinating) technical background on the scientific underpinnings than a thriller writer would.

This should come as no surprise. After all, a number of Sawyer novels one might point to involve little more than smart people sitting around and talking, and you can’t expect him to forgo this sort of material entirely. Calculating God, for example, is a book-length conversation between a dying paleontologist and a visiting extraterrestrial. There is some action in there, but not the violent sort one finds in the genre of espionage and assassins.

The ending of Triggers, too, is of a very classic SF sort. It’s one previously employed by a couple of past SFWA Grandmasters, whom I will decline to name, rather than give anything away. And it’s also very in line with themes of consciousness explored by Sawyer over much of his career. I’m reminded of one of his early hits, The Terminal Experiment, along with his recent WWW trilogy.

But just because I’ve been sitting here explicating where Triggers differs from your standard thriller, don’t get the impression that I’m arguing against that label. I just think SF fans should know this Hugo, Nebula, and Campbell award-winner hasn’t gone over to the dark side. There’s still plenty of food for thought here, nestled between gun-fights and explosions.

(Ace, 2012)

Reprinted with permission from The Green Man Review
Copyright (2012) The Green Man Review

Book Review: The Chronoliths

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Robert Charles Wilson is fast becoming the guy I pull out when I want to stealth-gift SF to my non-genre friends. It used to be Margaret Atwood or Michael Chabon, but it’s nice to be able to point to someone firmly in the genre as an example of some of the finest writing being done today, period.

Read the rest of my review at AESciFi.

Keeping Up With Reviews

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I’m down to my last three review titles on hand. I expect to finish off two of them (a pop physics book from Brian Greene and a text from an academic press for Library Journal) this week. Then I’ll get started on the last by the weekend, and hopefully put a big dent in it before a new batch of review copies from a favourite small press of mine will be introducing me to a new author.

I’ve made notes of a few books from another publishing house I plan to request, but I’m not even going to ask for them until I get caught up with my other stuff.

You might well ask, with so many review books, when do I get a chance to read for pleasure? Well, the answer to that is two-fold:

First, by and large, I do get pleasure from reading these review books, or I wouldn’t have requested them in the first place. Some were assigned to me, rather than requested, but I have broad interests, so I usually enjoy them, as well.

Second, I do find time to slot in books I’ve bought and paid for (though I make fewer purchases these days than I used to and have mostly been working my way through a two-year old pile). Sometimes I’ll have a pile of six books to review, and after reading half of them, I’ll grab something from my non-review pile that will be a fast read, a sci-fi paperback, for example, and take a couple of days with that before jumping into more review copy.

It all depends on my deadlines, of course. But deadline-wise, I’m doing okay. I haven’t been late on any assigned reviews this year. Not that that’s a frequent occurrence even at the worst of times.

Book Review: Physics of the Future

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Michio Kaku is a physicist and science popularizer, taking a page each from the books of Neil DeGrasse Tyson and fellow string theorist, Brian Greene. He’s written several popular science books on the wacky and wonderful words of relativity, quantum mechanics, and string theory. His last book, however, Physics of the Impossible, was a departure from branes and n-dimensional space. He used fictional technologies like teleportation, time travel, and Star Trek’s phasers as jumping off points for the known physics of today.

That book turned into a Science Channel program of the same name, and the approach was successful enough that he’s done something similar this time around. In Physics of the Future, however, there is a clear, unifying theme. Though he still offers somewhat of a grab bag of physics, drawing on all different areas based on what’s interesting right now, it’s all geared towards answering one question: what are the next hundred years going to look like?

Kaku looks at basically every technology or technological field that is a) integral to our lives, and b) likely to undergo serious changes in the next few generations. There’s a chapter on the future of computing, a separate one on artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, medicine, energy, and space travel. Each chapter has an introduction, a vision of the near future (until 2030), mid-century (2030-2070), and the far future (2070-2100).

The last two chapters, the future of wealth and the future of humanity, are less about any specific technology than the specific changes to our economic, social, and legal systems as a result of these technological changes. The end of wealth, for example, is about our transition to a more and more information-based economy throughout the world, and how we will need a new economic system with the end of scarcity (though he points out certain things will remain scarce, primarily knowledge workers whose labour can’t be automated).

The text is very readable, any number of sections could be essentially lifted from the book and used as feature articles in Popular Science or Discover. For all I know, selected excerpts have indeed seen magazine stands. Kaku is careful not to get bogged down too much in the science behind these technologies. The book’s audience are technology geeks, futurists — most of us, in fact, of the digital age. It’s for the curious layperson, not just the educated layperson. No physics education required

Speaking as someone who has some education in physics, this is nevertheless refreshing. Kaku could have screwed things up by doing too much — trying to give a detailed grounding in the physics when the book is really about how the technology will affect our lives. Having spoken to three hundred scientists at the leading edge of their fields, I’ve no doubt he took enough notes for a dozen technical volumes. But he resists the temptation to ramble, considering societal consequences in broad strokes while avoiding technical trivia.

And that’s the beauty of this book. It’s deep in insights but not bogged down in details. The result is a fast read that you’ll continue thinking about long after you’ve finished the book. Time will tell which predictions hit the mark. But it gives all of us something to look forward to, whether we expect to experience Kaku’s epilogic “day in the life in 2100” or not.

Reprinted with permission from The Sleeping Hedgehog
Copyright (2012) The Sleeping Hedgehog

Book Review: Starman Jones

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Baen Books has been releasing new editions of Robert A. Heinlein works for over a decade, at a steadily increasing pace. So far this has included about half of the famed Heinlein juveniles, originally written for Scribner between 1947 and 1958. The latest from Baen is Starman Jones, first published in 1953.

Like other RAH reprints from Baen, Starman Jones includes an introduction from William H. Patterson, Jr. putting the novel in the context of the time and with respect to Heinlein’s other works. I already knew from Patterson’s biography of the grandmaster that Heinlein was consciously influenced by Horatio Alger, a nineteenth-century writer of adventure stories for boys.

Like Alger, Heinlein strove to provide moral training for the young people (especially young men) of his generation. The recurring moral theme of Heinlein’s juveniles (and many of his later adult novels as well) includes such prescriptions as “hard work pays off,” “honesty is the best policy,” and “study hard,” amongst others. By all accounts, Heinlein truly lived and espoused these values, and such universal lessons lend these books greater staying power than some of his more overtly political works.

One thing I didn’t realize, however, was that Heinlein had taken the basic plot for Starman Jones from a real-life event. If you wish to avoid all spoilers, you’ll want to skip over this next (quoted) paragraph, and Patterson’s introduction, as well. In Heinlein’s own words (as quoted by Patterson from the Heinlein Archive at UC Santa Cruz):

“This book was written without an outline from a situation in the early nineteenth century. Two American teenagers took off in a sail boat, were picked up by a China clipper, were gone two years — and returned to Boston with one of them in command.”

Heinlein took that same basic situation and turned it into space opera. At the novel’s opening, our hero, Max Jones (his precise age isn’t given but he seems to be in his late teens) is a farm boy, working the land hard each day to provide for himself and his widowed, but irresponsible step-mother. When she comes home with a new husband, known by everyone in town as a drunk and a lout, announcing that they’ve sold the farm, Max decides his filial duties are over. He leaves the farm with not much more than the clothes on his back and a vague plan of getting into space.

Ultimately, Max finds a friend in the older and wiser Sam, a roguish character with a penchant for bending the rules, but a good heart, and the two of them scam their way onto a starship. Through a series of unlikely but plausibly-written events, Max manages to rise higher and higher in the chain of command. When disaster strikes, his talents turn out to be crucial to saving the ship, its passengers, and his fellow crew members.

Heinlein’s earliest novels did read very much like early “boys adventure stories,” with two-dimensional characters and pulp-novel situations. Books like Rocket Ship Galileo and Space Cadets weren’t bad, mind you. But they weren’t great. By the time he was writing Farmer in the Sky and Starman Jones, however, Heinlein was in the groove.

RAH didn’t apologize for a certain degree of formula in these stories, an update of Alger’s from a century earlier: a young man from a modest background, through the virtues of hard work, a bit of luck, and (uniquely, in Starman Jones) perhaps taking some liberties with the truth to get his foot in the door, eventually proves his mettle and resourcefulness and saves the day. Hey, it’s a good formula.

I haven’t read any of Horatio Alger’s books, but other comparisons spring to mind. A young lad on ship, starting at the bottom rung, eventually saving the day — sounds like Treasure Island, albeit without the treasure. In fact, Max Jones bears more than a passing resemblance to the young Jim Hawkins, each having lost a father, each finding a friend and role model in someone of dubious morals, Sam Anderson being Heinlein’s stand-in for Long John Silver.

Yet, though less obvious than the Robert Louis Stephenson comparison, I found myself thinking more frequently of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn during Max’s interstellar adventures. Max Jones is, like most of Heinlein’s scrupulously honest young protagonists, very much more of a straight-arrow than the uncivilized Huck ever was, but he still finds it necessary to lie in order to get a fair shot. For the protagonist of a Heinlein juvenile to profit by something like falsifying shipboard documents is unusual enough to be worth mentioning, and reminds me more than a little of Huck, who had little need for civilization or rules but had little trouble determining right from wrong.

Mark Twain had something to say in his book about the difference between morality and law, particularly with respect to slavery and discrimination; Robert Heinlein had a similar bone to pick as well. The SF Grandmaster’s targets were the unions who, he thought, sought to trample the downtrodden, and make the rich richer. Standing in for them in this novel is an exclusive hereditary guild system, making it almost impossible to get into space if you don’t know the right people. (This is a major plot point in the story, forcing Jones’ hand in the deception.) It seems to me that Heinlein, politically very different in many ways, sought the same sort of social equality and freedom that Twain had, some 70 years earlier.

And it’s these universal themes that make him still so readable. True, the technological aspects haven’t aged well. On the one hand Heinlein describes precision, supersonic bullet trains that never touch the ground. On the other hand, ship’s crew perform calculations by hand and feed the answers into antique computers for interstellar jumps.

Yet I’ll wager that most modern readers will suspend their disbelief on these points. The well-realized characters and smooth plotting represent this writer at his best. There’s nothing particularly revolutionary about most of the ideas in this novel; it’s just a solid adventure tale (with a subtle moral undercurrent) that’s as fun to read today as it was 60 years ago. But with no larger goal than that in mind, Heinlein wrote a classic.

(Baen Books, 2011)

Reprinted with permission from The Green Man Review
Copyright (2012) The Green Man Review

Food Review: Foosh Energy Mints

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Foosh Energy Mints are made by Vroom Foods, the same company that has been making Buzz Bites for years. The basic idea of both products is the same: take the caffeine of a full cup of coffee (100 mg, to be precise), wrap it up in a small candy that you can pop right into your mouth.

I happen to not be a coffee drinker. I drink both black and green teas, neither on a daily basis, and even the former has significantly less caffeine than a cup of coffee. I used to drink soda on occasion, but have essentially been off the fizzy sugar water for years. In other words, I was completely decaffeinated when I decided to test these “seriously caffeinated” peppermints out.

Somewhere around mid-morning on a Friday, I decided to try my first one. Vroom didn’t invent caffeine, and I’m not going to hold them responsible for the effects of the stimulant, which can vary from person to person. I will note that the body adjusts to caffeine, so if you want your cup of coffee, Foosh, or whatever to be truly effective, you should make sure you are not ingesting caffeine either frequently or regularly, but only as needed.

Having done just that, the result in my caes was a certain nervous energy that, unfortunately, I had no real way to dissipate. I wondered if I might be experiencing a placebo effect, so I took another mint to make sure, and soon the physical signs were unmistakable. I was jittery, my hands were shaking, my heart was running a little faster, and I wanted nothing more than to start running laps until the feeling went away. If I were on my way to a work-out, this would have been ideal. For the bad timing of being over-caffeinated in an office environment, I can only blame myself.

Don’t be so surprised at my poor decision. I wasn’t really expecting such a pronounced effect, since I didn’t realize how high this dose was compared to anything I’ve ever experienced before. It turns out that 100 mg of caffeine is the equivalent of three cans of soda (which put me at six cans’ worth of caffeine, with my two mints). Also, besides the caffeine, the mints include a cocktail of other, somewhat less potent stimulants, like ginseng and taurine, plus a handful of vitamins. I’ll be sure not to underestimate their effect on me the next time.

Taste is almost beside the point, so long as the candies aren’t inedible. I’ll note that caffeine is actually quite bitter. Most people don’t realize this because it’s rarely found in such a concentrated dose; in a soda or cappuccino, for example, the caffeine taste is basically drowned out by sugar and other flavours. Given such a large amount in a candy of this size, it’s impossible to completely mask the taste of the bitter alkaloid. The strength of the peppermint flavour, however, similar to what you’ll find in an Altoid, at least relegates the bitterness to an odd aftertaste. Certainly the caffeine peppermint pairing works much better than the “chocolate” Buzz Bites chews.

Foosh Energy Mints do pretty much exactly what they promise: they’re edible enough, serve as potent breath fresheners, and deliver a powerful dose of caffeine (along with a handful of secondary active ingredients). How you use them and to what effect will depend on how much of a caffeine hound you already are, and probably on many parametres of your baseline physiology. But I have no qualms at endorsing these as, indeed, seriously caffeinated.

Article first published as Tastes Review: Foosh Energy Mints on Blogcritics.

The Many Faces of Sherlock Holmes

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I’m sure you’ve all watched Guy Ritchie’s second Sherlock Holmes movie. Where can you get your detective fix, now? I can help you with that.

In keeping both with his to-the-point writing style and the cultural expectations of the time, Conan Doyle did not much expound on Sherlock’s early life or psychology, and the detective himself rarely spoke of such things. The potential for interpretation is broad. . . .

While Robert Downey, Jr. portrays somewhat of a wise-cracking action hero, Sherlock‘s title character (played by Benedict Cumberbatch) is both intensely intelligent and coldly indifferent to the human element in his puzzles. . . . “I can’t be the only one that gets bored.”

Read about several of the most interesting film, television, and book properties to re-imagine the great detective recently in my article, The Many Faces of Sherlock Holmes.

Book Review: The Manga Guide to Biochemistry

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I was looking forward to No Starch Press’ latest Manga Guide release for months before it actually came out. I quite enjoyed The Manga Guide to Molecular Biology, and thought this would make for an excellent companion piece. Obviously I wasn’t the first person to think so, the author of that previous book, Masaharu Takemura, must have felt the same or he wouldn’t have agreed to write this one as well.

Biochemistry and molecular biology are like solid state physics and physical chemistry or, if you like, psychology and sociology. Both disciplines find themselves interested in many of the same phenomena, but consider slightly different aspects of each one.

Molecular biology is interested in how the body works as a system on the sub-cellular level. The basic processes of life are considered with respect to how they manage to maintain all the functions of a cell. Biochemistry is interested in all the chemical behaviour involved in life, which ultimately is responsible for all those same cellular functions.

Both books discuss many of the same ideas, therefore, but there’s virtually no overlap in content. In Molecular Biology, enzymes were considered as helpers in chemical processes. In Biochemistry, more time was spent on the specific reactions they catalyzed, and the actual chemical structures of reactants and products. Both books discuss the way DNA information is read and translated into specific proteins, but biochemistry goes into the chemical detail of DNA, RNA, and the amino acids that make up a protein and determine its folding.

The storyline is cute: Kumi is a teenage girl constantly worried about her weight. She decides to study biochemistry so she has a better understanding of her metabolism and its relationship to weight gain. This is not just an entertaining framing device; Takemura is intentionally using a non-traditional approach to the topic, introducing major chemical characters into the narrative in an organic way as they become relevant to particular chemical processes.

Proteins, fats (lipids), and carbohydrates (saccharides or sugars) are each discussed in different chapters. The chapter on carbs isn’t really just about carbs, it’s about how sugars are used to create ATP which in turn provides energy for the cell (amongst many other things). The chapter on proteins isn’t just about the Atkins diet, it’s also about how enzymes are created and how they function as biological catalysts.

This isn’t the first Manga Guide to take a non-traditional approach to a topic. Calculus took a much more intuitive, less mechanical approach to derivatives and integrals, though not a less rigourous one. Universe followed a historical sequence in discussing the heavens, steadily overturning pre-conceptions as contradictions were discovered. And all of the books in this series have emphasized real-life examples and applications, whatever the topic. The chemical reactions discussed in the book are used to explain everything from the ripening of fruit to the springiness of mochi-style rice.

And it works. There are a number of topics in science that are frequently taught a certain way because it makes it easier to organize a textbook, or faster to “cover” in class, even though it’s not the most efficient approach to actual learning. I appreciate this series’ willingness to eschew traditional learning sequences in favour of intuition, learning in context, and developing ideas organically from previous knowledge. Another enjoyable entry to the series.

(No Starch Press, 2011)

Reprinted with permission from The Sleeping Hedgehog
Copyright (2012) The Sleeping Hedgehog

Book Review: The Green Hills of Earth & The Menace from Earth

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The stories of Green Hills have that special just-can’t-wait-for-the-future sheen that science fictional works of the ’40s and ’50s tended to have. Luna City, colonies on Mars and Venus, a new class of adventurers and fortune-seekers rocketing to the outer planets to establish new outposts and write their own tickets. There’s opportunity for the taking, if you just have brains and gumption enough to get it!

Read my complete review on Revolution Science Fiction.