Tag Archives: reviews

Pissing People Off With My Writing

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It happens, sometimes. Not intentionally. I try to be fair, perform some honest research, leave polemicism out of it. But sometimes there are people out there with an interest in my writing something very different than what I have, in fact, chosen to write.

Some time ago I wrote on Care2 about a fossil fuel shill who managed to get an instructor gig in one of those massive, science-for-humanities-majors intro courses, in Canada’s own Carleton University. I was alerted to the story by one of the science policy/education watchdog groups I keep in touch with (and have done since before I wrote about this sort of stuff — science teachers need to know about attacks on reality as much as science/environment writers do).

The story was easily verified by checking out the actual course information on Carleton’s own website, and the sort of falsehoods being propagated by this climate denier in the classroom are neither subtle nor relative. Just the other day, Tom Harris left a comment both on that months-old article, and here on the site (on my About page). He wants me to take down the article. I won’t be doing that.

There’s no need to respond to his message point-by-point because he complains my article is inaccurate, when it simply isn’t. You either understand and buy into the scientific method, or you think you can just make anything up you want. I’m not going to attempt a rational conversation with someone who falls into the latter group.

Also recently, I received a message about a restaurant I reviewed here on the site, my local Zesto’s. I had a bad experience there, but didn’t pile on (I think) too much. It’s not the first response I’ve received to that review: not long after the posting went up, somebody commented on Urban Spoon (to which I linked in the review) that I was full of it. It was a bit suspicious (the user made an account apparently just to comment on my review and has never made another posting since I last checked), and in any case, there was little to it other than name-calling.

But the message I received this week was from the actual restaurant owner apologizing for the issues I experienced,and inviting us back for another meal. I give her credit for that. I appreciate the difficulty in finding good people in the service industry, and I’m happy to know that that particular employee’s behaviour is at least not official Zesto’s policy.

I won’t be taking up that meal offer, but I acknowledge it here. She’s trying to make up for a bad first impression, which is difficult to do. At the very least, a polite, honest communication is more likely to get a response from me than ad hominems.

Book Review: The Child Garden

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Viral programming has infants discussing Shakespeare, toddlers running storefronts or repairing sewage lines. But knowledge which is downloaded from a standard package rather than built up from individual experience creates a uniform way of thinking and being that is particularly frightening for outliers.

Read my full review at AESciFi.

LJ Reviews Roundup

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My first three Library Journal reviews have run, and are partially or completely available online. Parts of my review of X and the City can be found here.

My full review of Benoit Mandelbrot’s memoir, The Fractalist, is quoted on the Barnes and Noble page for the book here.

My review of the coffee table book, Spectrums, gets the lead in a recent Xpress Reviews post at the Library Journal online.

Book Review: The Quantum Thief

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I could make some surface comparisons to another critically-acclaimed debut from years past. Richard K. Morgan’s Altered Carbon is also set some centuries hence, also takes place in a universe of heavy extra-terrestrial human colonization, and also features the altered social, legal, and economic dynamics of a humanity that’s bested mortality. But as excellent as Morgan’s post-cyberpunk whodunit is, comparing the two titles, even favourably, sells The Quantum Thief short.

The speculative fiction/noir crossover is not a new thing, from Jim Butcher’s private eye wizard to Neal Asher’s Agent Cormac to any number of genre-tinged Holmes pastiches. Maybe SF and Chandleresque plots just go together like peanut butter and chocolate. I’m sure not complaining. I devour these things.

But Quantum isn’t just a mystery. It’s a caper. And the thief and hero of this title, with the completely appropriate name of Jean le Flambeur, is more in the vein of Arsene Lupin than Marlowe.

Through alternating chapters with titles like “The Thief and the Goddess”, or “The Detective and the Chocolatier”, we follow the parallel stories of a master criminal, and the one man who may perhaps trap him.

At book’s opening, the titular thief is trapped in a literal prisoner’s dilemma.  Once every hour, for a subjective near-eternity, he picks up a gun and  either shoots or doesn’t shoot. This pseudo-virtual game of betrayal and co-operation with other prisoners is based on a genuine idea from game theory, along with a reasonable application of both conditioned response in psychology and evolutionary algorithms in computer programming. And this is just the first chapter!

In short order he’s been busted out and you don’t think about the dilemma prison for awhile. Yet it’s such a cool idea for something which is more of a prologue to the main story.

The book switches both between and within chapters from the thief’s first-person viewpoint to a third-person focus on his keeper, the mysterious Mieli, and his antagonist, the detective Isidore. Most of the story unfolds on a Martian city which has developed a rather unique privacy-based culture.

The Gevulot is a sensory- and memory-mediating technology which accomplishes everything from blurring out individuals who don’t wish to be noticed or recognized in public, to preventing which experiences an individual is allowed to remember after the fact. Combined with the Exomemory, which stores and encrypts everything anybody ever sees, the result is a world where personal information is both ubiquitous and unattainable.

The social protocols of such a society are weird but plausible. Although intensely private with strangers, citizens of the Oubliette (literally a place of forgetting) are capable of sharing thoughts and emotions directly, by granting access to memories. In fact, everything from street directions to meeting plans are frequently shared in the form of a co-memory, rather than words.

I haven’t even mentioned the other unique aspect about life on Mars. The only currency that matters is time. Everything from a cab ride to a valuable work of art is measured in kilo- or megaseconds. What happens when somebody runs out of time? They drop dead, wake up in a robot slave body, and spend a few years earning back the time to rejoin the human world.

The ideas are dense in this book, and the more you know about both the SF tropes and the actual science he extrapolates from, the more you can appreciate just how clever and thoughtful this first-timer’s writing is. But first and foremost, Rajaniemi always manages to keep moving the plot forward. It’s like fractal bonus material: read between the lines and these subtle throwaway references lead to deeper and more intricate implications, but gloss over them and the big picture remains intact.

(Another thing I like about this book is that the base science is fairly accurate: Flambeur literally is a quantum thief — by which I mean he commits quantum theft, not that he is himself a quantum object, although, in the dilemma prison, that’s arguably true as well.)

By the time I’d gotten a third of a way through the book, I was pretty hooked. Rajaniemi is aware of and respects his genre tropes, but there’s still so much in the world-building of this novel that seems, near as I can tell, wholly new. And there’s something refreshing about a future that isn’t just the American culture, redux. Who ever heard of looking to Provence for inspiration when imagining 25th-century Martian society? Apparently only a Fin living in Edinburgh.

(Tor, 2012)

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

Game Review: Growlanser IV

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Originally a Japan-only PS2 release way back in 2003, Growlanser IV was remade with expanded content and new characters for the PSP system in Japan last year. This time around, they opted for an English-language release to follow.

And it’s actually a little surprising we didn’t see this title in North America after its initial release nine years ago. The story isn’t too far “out there” — one of those untranslateables which, in the old days, just didn’t seem like they could flourish outside the Japanese milieu. In fact, after a slow start, the characters and storyline are entirely decent in this very playable, though admittedly, high-difficulty TRPG.

Marketing mysteries aside, the sprite-based, classic gameplay is the sort that ages well in the bottle. With the updated content, there’s no sense that this is a decade-old game, nor that it was ever intended for anything other than than a Playstation Portable system, as is the case sometimes with simple ports.

Despite the fact that this game is fourth in a series, the story and characters appear to stand entirely alone. The narrative revolves around a character named Creville, the archetypical “silent protagonist” of RPG convention, whose only dialogue is selected by the player in a multiple-choice fashion. We find out early on that he is a so-called “Ruin Child”, individuals found in a technological stasis in the few remaining structures from an ancient civilization.

The same threat that wiped out this advanced ancestral culture, some 2000 years before the events of the game, may be arising again. However, these mysterious forces, in the guise of city-destroying angels, almost fall to the background for much of the game, as no less than four different countries wage war against each other.

Starting out as members of a mercenary band, the characters fighting both on and alongside your team shift allegiances several times, ultmately battling with and against the members of several nations’ armies. The discovery of ancient magical spells are treated as a major tactical advantage, since initially, only one nation has access to them.

(The player also has the option of unlocking better and more powerful spell abilities of his own by performing sidequests and putting supporting members of the team to work on magical research.)

Combat-wise, tactics overshadow level-grinding as the big timesuck in this title. Rather than spending hours clicking “attack” in dungeon runs, the player can expect to put in the same hours going through the same boss battles until the trick to undoing the enemy defense becomes clear. This is particularly true with extra-challenging clear conditions that vary from rescuing hostages, defending strategic routes, and guarding VIPs.

A plethora of special abilities and accessories (everything from stealth skills which allow Creville to more closely approach an enemy before beginning a battle, to random chances of inflicting or resisting status effects) make preparations before a big battle as important as commands in the fight itself. Side missions and non-battle activities at the home base, including business ventures, weapons research, and, oddly, city planning, all ultimately feed into supporting the player’s fighting power. It’s a sort of “supply lines” strategy aspect to the game that I found unusual and interesting.

Atypically for a TRPG, battles are active time rather than strictly turn-based, and movement is analog instead of based on a grid. More typically for a TRPG, boss battles (which usually feature tough odds against overwhelming numbers of enemy soldiers) are usually an affair of 30 minutes to over an hour. Never get complacent. Much like a game of chess, it’s not over until it’s over. Victory can be snatched away, even in the final minutes of a campaign.

On the whole, I found the game often frustrating, but remarkably addictive, and ultimately rewarding. The story and characters aren’t going down in gaming history for me, but the gameplay is interesting and challenging, and the engaging and plausible way the non-battle elements of the game tie in with field tactics put this one over the top for me. Recommended.

Article first published as PSP Review: Growlanswer IV: Wayfarer of Time on Blogcritics.

Book Review: Paradise Tales

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“With a few exceptions, the sixteen stories in this collection exemplify well-grounded, character-driven fiction. While some of the stories fall squarely within the realm of speculative fiction, others could wear labels such as ‘slipstream’ or ‘magical realism’ just as comfortably.”

Read my full review of Geoff Ryman’s excellent story collection at AESciFi.

Book Review: The Once and Future King

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“I will tell you something else, King, which may be a surprise for you. It will not happen for hundreds of years, but both of us are to come back. Do you know what is going to be written on your tombstone? Hic jacet Arthurus Rex quondam Rexque futurus. Do you remember your Latin? It means, the once and future king.” -Merlin, in The Queen of Air and Darkness

I’m going to make a (I think) reasonable assumption here, that the reader is aware of basic Arthurian legend. Guinevere, Lancelot, Mordred, Morgause, and Morgan Le Fay. The Round Table, Holy Grail, and the sword called Excalibur. There will be some spoilers, some universal to the legend, perhaps one or two little ones specific to this particular book. If this concerns you, read no further.

T.H. White’s four-volume take on the Arthurian cycle draws heavily on the late-fifteenth century epic, Le Morte d’Arthur, by Sir Thomas Malory. This in turn brought together in one place the myriad legends, songs, and poems, both French and English, about the mythical king and his knights. But in the half century and change since its publication, White’s tetralogy has almost certainly been the more widely read, if not amongst scholars of medieval literature.

The first part, originally published as a stand-alone novel, even inspired a feature-length animated film from Disney: The Sword in the Stone. It’s a natural fit. Though relatively lighthearted compared to later books, Arthurian legend is so deeply embedded in the collective consciousness of Western society, even young children certainly must pick up on the fact that great things are in store for the young Wart.  Certainly that self-proclaimed nigromancer, the white-bearded Merlin, would not take such an interest in his tutouring otherwise.

The Once and Future King is certainly more readable (and several hundred pages shorter) than Malory’s tome (or so I suspect, not having read that work myself), but it’s not an abridged version, a children’s version, or an update with modern language. It’s an entirely new work of Arthurian fantasy, implicitly based on Le Morte d’Arthur as all such works must be, but even within the constraints of retelling this old story, somehow managing to tell a different one.

The titles themselves are revealing. The publisher gave Malory’s work as a whole the same title as the final section. To him (and to White, nearly five centuries later), the ultimate narrative arc was the slow playing out of Arthur’s inevitable tragedy. Themes of sin, doom, and fate pervade the work. Questions of morality, the right to rule, the possibility of change, are given short shrift.

But if Malory’s story was all about the ending, White’s was all about continuing on. The book’s closing chapter drops the curtains before Arthur strides out to his final battle, and the reader is reminded of Merlin’s promise. One day, returning perhaps from beyond the vail of Avalon, Arthur will rejoin the world and be king once again.

The Once and Future King is about the important lessons Arthur learned in his boyhood, and worked hard all his life to put into effect. It’s about how the world was different for his having lived in it. It’s about how, whether he comes back bodily or not, the spirit of Arthur is in all the good parts of humanity and governship today.

The morality in Le Morte is, at times, contradictory, ambiguous, or altogether absent. But White makes the assumption that there is a reason this man is special, beyond finding a magical sword and winning all his battles. He became king for a reason: to make things better. Consequently, he is far more interested in how Arthur strives to achieve this (and how, even today, we strive to achieve it) than in enemies slain or heads chopped off.

Despite this comparative optimism, White doesn’t shy away from the gruesome facts of the barbaric Britain in which his story is set. He avoids detail but states plainly that such things occur. He thoroughly demonstrates the point that might does not, and cannot make right. Simultaneously, he makes clear that finding a better way is an uphill battle. The world can get better. But it is a slow and painful process. Even for wizards, legendary kings, and the best knights the world has ever seen. Every single one of them, you see, is merely human.

The Once and Future King remains today, as the day it was first published, one of the very best works of fantasy ever written. An absolute must-have for any fantasist, literati, or parent. And the Ace hardcover is absolutely lovely.

(Ace, 2011)

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

Book Review: The Manga Guide to Linear Algebra

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Vectors, matrices, and eigenvalues, oh my! The Manga Guide series’ triumphant return to the fertile and abstract realms of mathematics is, to this reader, most welcome and not a little overdue. This is not to say that previous forays into the physical-, life-, and computer sciences were at all unsuccessful. But even on their worst day, these real-world subjects are not nearly so difficult to penetrate as, say, set theory or integral calculus. And this is coming from a card-carrying math geek.

The wonderful and beautiful thing about this series is in its ability to come at complex and foreign topics from a sideways angle. I’m still amazed at the unusual points of reference the book authors find to bring the reader into some notoriously difficult topics – explaining onto and one-to-one functions in terms of restaurant orders, for example. The highly visual nature of the comic medium also serves as an anchor in what might otherwise be a text-heavy topic.

The manga scenario wrapped around all this math draws on a number of classic tropes, and not only from the realm of manga. Reiji is working hard as the newest student in his university karate club, a membership he paid for by agreeing to tutour his sensei’s sister in linear algebra. He’s the proverbial 98-pound weakling with a good heart, and it’s as good a reason as any to have two young people flirt and talk about matrix multiplication.

Of eight chapters, the first six are laid out as groundwork before the “real” linear algebra topics in the last two. The fundamentals in chapter two include reiviews of (or introductions to) set theory, some basic mathematical logic, and functional relationships. Following this are two chapters covering matrices, and two more on vectors (in a matrix interpretation). Only then are we able to tackle the true topics of the book title, linear transformations, eigenvectors, and eigenvalues.

It may sound like a hodgepodge, but it’s not. Each chapter builds carefully on the previous one. No calculus and only some basic algebra, trigonometry, and co-ordinate geometry are needed before reading this book. But the topics are tough for a newbie. This is university-level mathematics and requires a lot of practice problems before it will sink in for most readers.

The example problems in the text are great, but there are only a few. As with all books in the series, The Manga Guide to Linear Algebra is best utilized in conjunction with a thick textbook, chock-full of additional practice exercises. Much like earning a black belt, the road to mathematical mastery requires many hours of practice and perhaps more than a few forehead smacks on nearby slabs of wood.

(No Starch Press, 2012)

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

Book Review: Technicolor Ultra Mall

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 I don’t want to call Ryan Oakley’s 2012 Aurora nominee A Clockwork Orange 2.0. There are so many other ways to describe it: it’s raw and bloody; beautiful and horrific; staccato like a machine-gun; and as fresh as it is familiar. His homage to Burgess’ 1962 classic could hardly be more faithful, yet it stands alone, quintessentially a product of now, though with a degree of the timelessness which cemented that earlier novel as a classic.

Read my full review at AESciFi.