From eagle at eyrie.org  Mon Jan  1 11:51:18 2018
From: eagle at eyrie.org (Russ Allbery)
Date: Mon, 01 Jan 2018 11:51:18 -0800
Subject: 2017 reading in review
Message-ID: <878tdhmk7d.fsf@hope.eyrie.org>

So much of my reading energy this year went into endlessly reloading
political web sites and reading essays and poll analysis. This was not
a very good use of that energy, but I did it anyway, and I'm not sure I
could have stopped. It was a very 2017 problem, and I know I'm not
alone — it was an anxious, anger-inducing year for a lot of us. I think
that's also why I read shorter books (although more of them) than in
2016. Most of the year's reading happened in a couple of bursts during
vacations.

My reading goal for last year was to get back to reading award nominees
and previous award winners. The overall quality of my reading rose
towards the end of the year, and I think several books I read in 2017
are likely to be award nominees or winners in 2018, but I still fell
short of that goal. I'm carrying it over to 2018, coupling it with a
goal to read more non-fiction, and calling that a goal to make time and
energy for deeper, more demanding, and more rewarding reading. I want
to sustain that over the year, rather than concentrating all my reading
energy in vacations.

There were no 10 out of 10 books this year, but there were 6 books with
a 9 rating. On the fiction side, two of them were the second and third
books of Julie E. Czerneda's Species Imperative series: [1] Migration
and [2] Regeneration. I recommend the entire series, starting with
[3] Survival, as excellent SF focusing on practicing scientists and on
biology and ecology rather than physics. Czerneda has a slightly
cartoony style that can take a bit to get used to, and I found the
romance subplot unfortunate, but the protagonist was a delight and the
last two books of the series were excellent.

The other fiction books with 9 out of 10 ratings were Becky Chambers's
[4] A Closed and Common Orbit, a sequel to [5] The Long Way to a Small,
Angry Planet that I thought was even better than the original, and
Melina Marchetta's [6] The Piper's Son. Many thanks to [7] Light for
the recommendation of the latter; it's the sort of mainstream literary
fiction that I wouldn't have found without recommendations. It's a
satisfying story about untangling past emotional mistakes and finding
ways to move forward, but all the subtle work done by friendship
networks was what made it special to me.

The two non-fiction books I gave 9 out of 10 ratings this year were
[8] Algorithms to Live By by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths, and
[9] Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker. The first was a well-structured
look at how we apply computer science algorithms to everyday life:
short on actionable insight, but long on thoughtful analogies (email
and social media as buffer bloat!) and new ways to view everyday
decisions. The second is a passionate attempt to convince everyone to
get more sleep. Like many projects dear to the author's heart, it
should be taken with a grain of salt, but I found the summary of
current sleep research fascinating.

The last book that I think deserves special mention is [10] The Tiger's
Daughter by K. Arsenault Rivera. It lacks the polish of some of the
other books I read, and at times could be a sprawling mess, but of all
the books I read this year, it's the one that most reliably puts a
smile on my face when I remember it. It is completely unabashed about
its emotions and completely in love with its characters and dares the
world to do something about it, and I needed a book like that in 2017.

The [11] full analysis includes some additional personal reading
statistics, probably only of interest to me.

References

   1. https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-7564-0260-3.html
   2. https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-7564-0345-6.html
   3. https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-7564-0180-1.html
   4. https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-06-256942-2.html
   5. https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/1-5004-5330-7.html
   6. https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-7636-5458-2.html
   7. https://lightreads.dreamwidth.org/
   8. https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/1-62779-037-3.html
   9. https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/1-5011-4433-2.html
  10. https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-7653-9254-2.html
  11. https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/year/2017.html

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

From eagle at eyrie.org  Sun Jan 28 19:29:57 2018
From: eagle at eyrie.org (Russ Allbery)
Date: Sun, 28 Jan 2018 19:29:57 -0800
Subject: Review: Roads and Bridges, by Nadia Eghbal
Message-ID: <87efm9s5oq.fsf@hope.eyrie.org>

Roads and Bridges
by Nadia Eghbal

Publisher: Ford Foundation
Copyright: July 2016
Format:    Epub
Pages:     143

Subtitled The Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure, Roads and
Bridges isn't a book. It's a long report for the Ford Foundation,
available for free from [1] their web site. But I read it like a book, so
you get a review anyway.

If, like me, you've spent years in the free software community, you'll
know much of this already. Eghbal starts with a survey of the history
of free software and open source (skewed towards the practical and
economic open source analysis, and essentially silent on ethics), and
then a survey of how projects are currently organized. The emphasis,
consistent with the rest of the report, is on how these free software
building blocks underlie nearly all the consumer software and services
used today. Eghbal singles out OpenSSL as her example of lack of
infrastructure support due to Heartbleed and the subsequent discussion
of how vital OpenSSL is but how little funding it received.

Eghbal hit her stride for me at the end of the third section, which
tries to understand why people contribute to open source without being
paid. I'm a bit dubious that many people contribute to build their
personal reputation, since that's not a commonly stated reason in my
areas of the free software community, but Eghbal's analysis of the risk
of this motive from the infrastructure perspective seemed on point if
this is becoming common. Better was her second motive: "the project
became unexpectedly popular, and the maintainer feels obligated to
support it." Yes. There is so much of this in free software, and it's a
real threat to the sustainability of projects because it's a
description of the trajectory of burnout. It's also a place where a
volunteer culture and the unfairness of unpaid labor come into
uncomfortable tension. Eghbal very correctly portrays her third reason,
"a labor of love," as not that obviously distinct from that feeling of
obligation.

The following discussion of challenges rightfully focuses on the
projects that are larger than a weekend hobby but smaller than Linux:

  However, many projects are trapped somewhere in the middle: large
  enough to require significant maintenance, but not quite so large
  that corporations are clamoring to offer support. These are the
  stories that go unnoticed and untold. From both sides, these
  maintainers are told they are the problem: Small project maintainers
  think mid-sized maintainers should just learn to cope, and large
  project maintainers think if the project were "good enough,"
  institutional support would have already come to them.

Eghbal includes a thoughtful analysis of the problems posed by the vast
increase in the number of programmers and the new economic focus on
software development. This should be a good thing for free software,
and in some ways it is, but the nature of software and human psychology
tends towards fragmentation. It's more fun to write a new thing than do
hard maintenance work on an old code base. The money is also almost
entirely in building new things while spending as little time as
possible on existing components. Industry perception is that open
source accelerates new business models by allowing someone to build
their new work on top of a solid foundation, but this use is mostly
parasitic in practice, and the solid foundation doesn't stay solid if
no one contributes to it.

Eghbal closes with a survey of current funding models for open source
software, from corporate sponsorship to crowdfunding to foundations,
and some tentative suggestions for principles of successful funding.
This is primarily a problem report, though; don't expect much in the
way of solutions. Putting together an effective funding model is
difficult, community-specific, and requires thoughtful understanding of
what resources are most needed and who can answer that need. It's also
socially fraught. A lot of people work on these projects because
they're not part of the capitalist system of money-seeking, and don't
want to deal with the conflicts and overhead that funding brings.

I was hoping Eghbal would propose more solutions than she did, but I'm
not surprised. I've been through several of these funding conversations
in various communities. The problem is very hard, on both economic and
social levels. But despite the lack of solutions, the whole report was
more interesting than I was expecting given how familiar I already am
with this problem. Eghbal's background is in venture capital, so she
looks at infrastructure primarily through the company-building lens,
but she's not blind to the infrastructure gaps those companies leave
behind or even make worse. It's a different and clarifying angle on the
problem than mine.

I realized, reading this, that while I think of myself as working on
infrastructure, nearly all of my contributions have been in the small
project. Only INN (back in the heyday of Usenet), OpenAFS (which I'm no
longer involved in), and Debian rise to the level of significant
infrastructure projects that might benefit from funding. Debian is
large enough that, while it has resource challenges, it's partly
transitioned into the lower echelons of institutional support. And INN
is back in weekend project territory, since Usenet isn't what it was.

This report made me want to get involved in some more significant
infrastructure project in need of this kind of support, but
simultaneously made it clear how difficult it is to do this on a hobby
basis. And it's remarkably hard to find corporate sponsorship for this
sort of work that doesn't involve so much complexity and uncertainty
that it's hard to justify leaving a stable and well-understood job.
Which, of course, is much of Eghbal's point.

Eghbal also surfaces the significant tension between the volunteer,
interest-based allocation of resources native to free software, and the
money-based allocation of resources of a surrounding capitalist
society. Projects are usually the healthiest and the happiest when they
function as volunteer communities: they spontaneously develop
governance structures that work for people as volunteers, they tend
towards governance where investment of effort translates into influence
(not without its problems, but generally better than other models), and
each contributor has a volunteer's freedom to stop doing things they
aren't enjoying (although one shouldn't underestimate the obligation
factor of working on a project used by other people). But since nearly
everyone has to spend the majority of their time on paying work, it's
very difficult to find sustained and significant resources for
volunteer projects. You need funding, so that people can be paid, but
once people are paid they're no longer volunteers, and that
fundamentally alters the social structure of the project. Those changes
are rarely for the better, since the motives of those paying are both
external to the project (not part of the collaborative decision-making
process) and potentially overriding given how vital they are to the
project.

It's a hard problem. I avoided it for years by living in the academic
world, which is much better at reconciling these elements than
for-profit companies, but the academic world doesn't have enough total
resources, or the right incentives, to maintain this type of
infrastructure.

The largest oversight I saw in this report was the lack of discussion
of the international nature of open source development coupled with the
huge discrepancy in cost of living in different parts of the world.
This poses strange and significant fairness issues for project funding
that I'm quite surprised Eghbal didn't notice: for the same money
required to support full-time work by a current maintainer who lives in
New York or San Francisco, one could fund two or three (or even more)
developers in, say, some eastern European or southeast Asian countries
with much lower costs of living and average incomes. Eghbal doesn't say
a word about the social challenges this creates.

Other than that, though, this is a thoughtful and well-written survey
of the resource problems facing the foundations of nearly all of our
digital world. Free software developers will be annoyed but unsurprised
by the near-total disregard of ethical considerations, but here the
economic and ethical case arrive at roughly the same conclusion: nearly
all the resources are going to companies and projects that are
parasitical on a free software foundation, that foundation is nowhere
near as healthy as people think it is, and the charity-based funding
and occasional corporate sponsorship is inadequate and concentrated on
the most visible large projects. For every Linux, with full-time paid
developers, heavy corporate sponsorship, and sustained development with
a wide variety of funding models, there are dozens of key libraries or
programs developed by a single person in their scant free time, and
dozens of core frameworks that are barely maintained and draw more
vitriol than useful assistance.

Worth a read if you have an interest in free software governance or
funding models, particularly since it's free.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Reviewed: 2018-01-28

[1] https://www.fordfoundation.org/library/reports-and-studies/roads-and-bridges-the-unseen-labor-behind-our-digital-infrastructure/

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

From eagle at eyrie.org  Mon Jan 29 20:40:57 2018
From: eagle at eyrie.org (Russ Allbery)
Date: Mon, 29 Jan 2018 20:40:57 -0800
Subject: Review: Reap the Wild Wind, by Julie E. Czerneda
Message-ID: <87efm8q7qe.fsf@hope.eyrie.org>

Reap the Wild Wind
by Julie E. Czerneda

Series:    Stratification #1
Publisher: DAW
Copyright: 2007
Printing:  September 2008
ISBN:      0-7564-0487-8
Format:    Mass market
Pages:     459

Reap the Wild Wind is the first book in the Stratification series. This
is set in the same universe as the Trade Pact series (which starts with
A Thousand Words for Stranger), but goes back in time, telling the
story of the Om'ray before they left Cersi to become the Clan. You may
have more interest in this series if you read and enjoyed the Trade
Pact trilogy, but it's not a prerequisite. It's been over ten years
since I read that series, I've forgotten nearly everything about it
except the weird gender roles, and I didn't have any trouble following
the story.

Aryl Sarc is member of the Yena Clan, who live a precarious existence
in the trees above a vast swamp filled with swarms of carnivorous
creatures. They are one of several isolated clans of Om'ray on the
planet Cersi. Everything about the clans is tightly constrained by an
agreement between the Om'ray, the Tiktik, and the Oud to maintain a
wary peace. The agreement calls for nothing about the nature of the
world or its three species to ever change.

Reap the Wild Wind opens with the annual dresel harvest: every fall, a
great, dry wind called the M'hir flows down the mountains and across
the forest in which the Yena live, blowing free the ripe dresel for
collection at the treetops. Dresel is so deeply a part of Aryl's world
that the book never explains it, but the reader can intuit that it
contains some essential nutrient without which all the Yena would die.
But disaster strikes while Aryl is watching the dresel harvest,
disaster in the form of a strange flying vehicle no one has seen before
and an explosion that kills many of the Yena and ruins the harvest
essential to life.

The early part of the book is the emotional and political fallout of
this disaster. Aryl discovers an unknown new talent, saving the man
she's in love with (although they're too young to psychically join in
the way of the Om'ray) at the cost of her brother. There's a lot of
angst, a lot of cliched descriptions of internal psychic chaos (the
M'hir that will be familiar to readers of the Trade Pact books), and a
lot of her mother being nasty and abusive in ways that Aryl doesn't
recognize as abuse. I struggled to get into the story; Aryl was an
aimless mess, and none of the other characters were appealing. The
saving grace for me in the early going were the interludes with Enris,
an Om'ray from a far different clan, a metalworker whose primary
dealings are with the Oud instead of the Tiktik.

This stage of the story thankfully doesn't last. Aryl eventually ends
up among the Tiktik, struggling to understand their far different
perspective on the world, and then meets the visitors who caused the
disaster. They're not only from outside of Aryl's limited experience;
they shouldn't even exist by the rules of Aryl's world. As Aryl slowly
tries to understand what they're doing, the scope of the story expands,
with hints that Aryl's world is far more complicated than she realized.

Czerneda sticks with a tight viewpoint focus on Aryl and Enris. That's
frustrating when Aryl is uninterested in, or cannot understand, key
pieces of the larger picture that the reader wants to know. But it
creates a sense of slow discovery from an alien viewpoint that
occasionally reminded me of Rosemary Kirstein's Steerswoman series.
Steerswoman is much better, but it's much better than almost
everything, and Aryl's growing understanding of her world is still fun.
I particularly liked how Aryl's psychic species defines the world by
the sensed locations of the Om'ray clans, making it extremely hard for
her to understand geography in the traditional sense.

I was also happy to see Czerneda undermine the strict sexual dimorphism
of Clan society a tiny bit with an Om'ray who doesn't want to
participate in the pair-bonding of Choosing. She painted herself into a
corner with the extreme gender roles in the Trade Pact series and
there's still a lot of that here, but at least a few questions raised
about that structure.

Reap the Wild Wind is all setup with little payoff. By the end of the
book, we still just have hints of the history of Cersi, the goals of
the Oud or Tiktik, or the true shape of what the visitors are
investigating. But it had grabbed my interest, mostly because of Aryl's
consistent, thoughtful curiosity. I wish this first book had gotten
into the interesting meat of the story faster and had gotten farther,
but this is good enough that I'll probably keep reading.

Followed by Riders of the Storm.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Reviewed: 2018-01-29

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

From eagle at eyrie.org  Tue Jan 30 20:23:01 2018
From: eagle at eyrie.org (Russ Allbery)
Date: Tue, 30 Jan 2018 20:23:01 -0800
Subject: Review: My Grandmother Asked Me..., by Fredrick Backman
Message-ID: <87lgge64ii.fsf@hope.eyrie.org>

My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry
by Fredrik Backman

Series:     Britt-Marie #1
Translator: Henning Koch
Publisher:  Washington Square
Copyright:  2014
Printing:   April 2016
ISBN:       1-5011-1507-3
Format:     Trade paperback
Pages:      372

Elsa is seven, going on eight. She's not very good at it; she knows
she's different and annoying, which is why she gets chased and bullied
constantly at school and why her only friend is her grandmother. But
Granny is a superhero, who's also very bad at being old. Her
superpowers are lifesaving and driving people nuts. She made a career
of being a doctor in crisis zones; now she makes a second career of,
well, this sort of thing:

  Or that time she made a snowman in Britt-Marie and Kent's garden
  right under their balcony and dressed it up in grown-up clothes so
  it looked as if a person had fallen from the roof. Or that time
  those prim men wearing spectacles started ringing all the doorbells
  and wanted to talk about God and Jesus and heaven, and Granny stood
  on her balcony with her dressing gown flapping open, shooting at
  them with her paintball gun

The other thing Granny is good at is telling fairy tales. She's been
telling Elsa fairy tales since she was small and her mom and dad had
just gotten divorced and Elsa was having trouble sleeping. The fairy
tales are all about Miamas and the other kingdoms of the
Land-of-Almost-Awake, where the fearsome War-Without-End was fought
against the shadows. Miamas is the land from which all fairy tales
come, and Granny has endless stories from there, featuring princesses
and knights, sorrows and victories, and kingdoms like Miploris where
all the sorrows are stored.

Granny and Miamas and the Land-of-Almost-Awake make Elsa's life not too
bad, even though she has no other friends and she's chased at school.
But then Granny dies, right after giving Elsa one final quest, her
greatest quest. It starts with a letter and a key, addressed to the
Monster who lives downstairs. (Elsa calls him that because he's a huge
man who only seems to come out at night.) And Granny's words:

  "Promise you won't hate me when you find out who I've been. And
  promise me you'll protect the castle. Protect your friends."

My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry is written in third
person, but it's close third person focused on Elsa and her perspective
on the world. She's a precocious seven-year-old who I thought was
nearly perfect (rare praise for me for children in books), which
probably means some folks will think she's a little too precocious. But
she has a wonderful voice, a combination of creative imagination,
thoughtfulness, and good taste in literature (particularly Harry Potter
and Marvel Comics). The book is all about what it's like to be seven,
going on eight, with a complicated family situation and an awful time
at school, but enough strong emotional support from her family that
she's still full of stubbornness, curiosity, and fire.

Her grandmother's quest gets her to meet the other residents of the
apartment building she lives in, turning them into more than the
backdrop of her life. That, in turn, adds new depth to the fairy tales
her Granny told her. Their events turn out to not be pure fabrication.
They were about people, the many people in her Granny's life, reshaped
by Granny's wild imagination and seen through the lens of a child. They
leave Elsa surprisingly well-equipped to navigate and start to untangle
the complicated relationships surrounding her.

This is where Backman pulls off the triumph of this book. Elsa's
discoveries that her childhood fairy tales are about the people around
her, people with a long history with her grandmother, could have been
disillusioning. This could be the story of magic fading into reality
and thereby losing its luster. And at first Elsa is quite angry that
other people have this deep connection to things she thought were hers,
shared with her favorite person. But Backman perfectly walks that line,
letting Elsa keep her imaginative view of the world while intelligently
mapping her new discoveries onto it. The Miamas framework withstands
serious weight in this story because Elsa is flexible, thoughtful, and
knows how to hold on to the pieces of her story that carry deeper
truth. She sees the people around her more clearly than anyone else
because she has a deep grasp of her grandmother's highly perceptive, if
chaotic, wisdom, baked into all the stories she grew up with.

This book starts out extremely funny, turns heartwarming and touching,
and develops real suspense by the end. It starts out as Elsa nearly
alone against the world and ends with a complicated matrix of friends
and family, some of whom were always supporting each other beneath
Elsa's notice and some of whom are re-learning the knack. It's a
beautiful story, and for the second half of the book I could barely put
it down.

I am, as a side note, once again struck by the subtle difference in
stories from cultures with a functional safety net. I caught my
American brain puzzling through ways that some of the people in this
book could still be alive and living in this apartment building since
they don't seem capable of holding down jobs, before realizing this
story is not set in a brutal Hobbesian jungle of all against all like
the United States. The existence of this safety net plays no
significant role in this book apart from putting a floor under how far
people can fall, and yet it makes all the difference in the world and
in some ways makes Backman's plot possible. Perhaps publishers should
market Swedish literary novels as utopian science fiction in the US.

This is great stuff. The back and forth between fairy tales and Elsa's
resilient and slightly sarcastic life can take a bit to get used to,
but stick with it. All the details of the fairy tales matter, and are
tied back together wonderfully by the end of the book. Highly
recommended. In its own way, this is fully as good as A Man Called Ove.

There is a subsequent book, Britt-Marie Was Here, that follows one of
the supporting characters of this novel, but My Grandmother Asked Me to
Tell You She's Sorry stands alone and reaches a very satisfying
conclusion (including for that character).

Rating: 10 out of 10

Reviewed: 2018-01-30

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

From eagle at eyrie.org  Wed Feb 28 20:58:08 2018
From: eagle at eyrie.org (Russ Allbery)
Date: Wed, 28 Feb 2018 20:58:08 -0800
Subject: Coding Freedom, by E. Gabriella Coleman
Message-ID: <87d10ol7dr.fsf@hope.eyrie.org>

Coding Freedom
by E. Gabriella Coleman

Publisher: Princeton University Press
Copyright: 2013
ISBN:      0-691-14461-3
Format:    Trade paperback
Pages:     223

Subtitled The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking, Coding Freedom is a
rare beast in my personal reading: an academic anthropological study of
a fairly new virtual community. It's possible that many books of this
type are being written, but they're not within my normal reading focus.
It's also a bit of an awkward review, since the community discussed
here is (one of) mine. I'm going to have an insider's nitpicks and
"well, but" reactions to the anthropology, which is a valid reaction
but not necessarily the intended audience.

I'm also coming to this book about four years after everyone finished
talking about it, and even longer after Coleman's field work in support
of the book. I think Coding Freedom suffers from that lack of currency.
If this book were written today, I suspect its focus would change, at
least in part. More on that in a moment.

Coding Freedom's title is more subtle and layered than it may first
appear. It is about the freedom to write code, and about free software
as a movement, but not only that. It's also about how concepts of
freedom are encoded in the culture and language of hacking communities,
and about the concept of code as speech (specifically free speech in
the liberal tradition). And the title also captures the idea of code
switching, where a speaker switches between languages even in the
middle of sentences. The free software community does something akin to
code switching between the domains of technical software problems,
legal problems, and political beliefs and ideologies. Coleman covers
all of that ground in this book.

Apart from an introduction and conclusion, the book is divided into
five chapters in three parts. The opening part talks about the typical
life story and community involvement of a free software hacker and
briefly sketches the legal history of free software licenses. The
second part talks about the experience of hacking, with a particular
focus on playful expression and the tension between collaboration,
competitiveness, and proving one's membership in the group. The final
part dives into software as speech, legal and political struggles
against the DMCA and other attempts to restrict code through copyright
law, and the free software challenge to the liberal regime of
capitalism and private property, grounded in the also-liberal value of
free speech.

There's a lot here to discuss, but it's also worth noting what's not
here, and what I think would have been here if the same field work were
done today. There's nothing about gender or inclusion, which have
surpassed DMCA issues to become the political flash point de jour.
(Coleman notes early in the book that she intentionally omitted that
topic as one that deserves its own separate treatment.) The
presentation of social norms and behaviors also felt strongly centered
in an early 2000s attitude towards social testing, with low tolerance
of people who haven't proven their competence. Coleman uses the term
meritocracy with very few caveats and complications. I don't think one
would do that in work starting today; the flaws, unwritten borders, and
gatekeeping for who can participate in that supposed meritocracy are
now more frequently discussed.

Those omissions left me somewhat uncomfortable throughout. Coleman
follows the community self-image from a decade or more ago (which makes
sense, given that's when most of her field research and the majority of
examples she draws on in the book are from): valuing technical acumen
and skilled play, devoted to free speech, and welcoming and valuing
anyone with similar technical abilities. While this self-image is not
entirely wrong, it hides a world of unspoken rules and vicious
gatekeeping to control who gets to have free speech within the
community, what types of people are valued, and who is allowed to not
do emotional labor. And who isn't.

These are rather glaring gaps, and for me they limit the usefulness of
Coding Freedom as an accurate analysis of the community.

That said, I do want to acknowledge that this wasn't Coleman's project.
Her focus, instead, is on the way free software communities noticed and
pushed into the open some hidden conflicts in the tradition of
liberalism. Free political speech and democratic politics have gone
hand-in-hand with capitalism and an overwhelming emphasis on private
property, extended into purely virtual objects such as computer
software. Free software questions that alliance, pokes at it, and at
times even rips it apart.

The free software movement is deeply embedded in liberalism. Although
it has members from anarchist, communist, and other political
traditions, the general community is not very radical in its
understanding of speech, labor, or politics. It has a long tradition of
trying to avoid disruptive politics, apart from issues that touch
directly on free software, to maximize its political alliances and
avoid alienating any members. Free software is largely not a critique
of liberalism from the outside; it's a movement that expresses a
conflict inside the liberal tradition. It asks whether self-expression
is consistent with, and more important than, private property, a
question that liberalism otherwise attempts to ignore.

This is the part of the book I found fascinating: looking at my
community from the outside, putting emergent political positions in
that community into a broader context, and showing the complex and
skillful ways that the community discusses, analyzes, and reaches
consensus on those positions while retaining a broad base of support
and growing membership. Coleman provides a sense of being part of
something larger in the best and most complicated way: not a
revolution, not an ideology, but a community with complex boundaries,
rituals that are both scoffed at and followed, and gatekeeping behavior
that exist in part because any human community will create and enforce
boundaries.

When one is deeply inside a culture, it's easy to get lost in the
ethical debates over whether a particular community behavior is good or
bad. It takes an anthropologist to recast all those behaviors, good and
bad, as humans being human, and to ask curious questions about what
social functions those behaviors serve. Coding Freedom gave me a
renewed appreciation of the insight that can come from the
disinterested observer. If nothing else, it might help me choose my
battles more strategically, and have more understanding and empathy.

This is a very academic work, at least compared to what I normally
read. I never lost the thread of Coleman's argument, but I found it
hard going and heavy on jargon in a few places. If, like me, you're not
familiar with current work in anthropology, you'll probably feel like
part of the discussion is going over your head, and that some terms
you're reading with their normal English meaning are actually terms of
art with more narrow and specific definitions. This is a book rather
than an academic paper, and it does try to be approachable, but it's
more research than popularization.

I wish Coding Freedom were more engaged with the problems of free
software today, instead of the problems of free software in 2002, the
era of United States v. Elcom Ltd. and Free Dmitry. I wish that Coleman
had been far more critical of the concept of a meritocracy, and had dug
deeper into the gatekeeping and boundaries around who is allowed to
participate and who is discouraged or excluded. And while I'm not going
to complain about academic rigor, I wish the prose were a bit lighter
and a bit more approachable, and that it hadn't taken me months to read
this book.

But, that said, I'm not sorry to have finally read it. The perspective
from the anthropological view of one's own community is quite valuable.
The distance provides an opportunity for less judgmental analysis, and
a reminder that human social structures are robust and complex attempts
to balance contradictory goals.

Coleman made me feel more connected, not to an overarching ideology or
political goal, but to a tangled, flawed, dynamic, and responsive
community, whose primary shared purpose is to support that human
complexity. Sometimes it's easy to miss that forest for the day-to-day
trees.

If you want to get more of a feel for Coleman's work, her keynote on
Anonymous at DebConf14 in Portland in 2014 is very interesting and
consistent in tone and approach with this book (albeit on a somewhat
more controversial topic).

Rating: 6 out of 10

Reviewed: 2018-02-28

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

From eagle at eyrie.org  Sat Mar 31 20:35:39 2018
From: eagle at eyrie.org (Russ Allbery)
Date: Sat, 31 Mar 2018 20:35:39 -0700
Subject: Review: Russell's Attic Interstitials, by S.L. Huang
Message-ID: <87efjz1tv8.fsf@hope.eyrie.org>

Russell's Attic Interstitials
by S.L. Huang

Series:    Cas Russell
Publisher: S.L. Huang
Copyright: 2014, 2015
ASIN:      B00RFW1FTQ
ASIN:      B013ZB43XU
Format:    Kindle
Pages:     43

Between Half Life and Root of Unity, Huang published two short stories
in the Cas Russell universe. These were separately published, so
normally I'd give both of them a full review, but they're extremely
short and that felt silly. So both are getting reviewed in this "fake"
book.

To make things more confusing, the series has been picked up by Tor and
is in the process of being reissued as the Cas Russell series, rather
than Huang's original series title of Russell's Attic (which I think is
much better, but I don't work in book marketing). But the short stories
were published with the subtitle A Russell's Attic Interstitial, so I'm
sticking with that for the title here.

You can read both of these for free online if you join Huang's mailing
list, or they're about $1 each from ebook retailers.

"A Neurological Study on the Effects of Canine Appeal on Psychopathy,
or, RIO ADOPTS A PUPPY": Those who have read the series at all will
recognize Rio as Cas's disturbing psychopath friend. Dexter is the
analogy that others may be familiar with: Rio is a mass murderer who
has adopted Christianity as an external moral code, follows it very
precisely but selectively to do good in the world (mostly by going
after bad people), and expects to be going to Hell anyway. After all,
he does torture and kill people regularly, and religion is rather clear
about these things.

In this short story, a starving and injured dog shows up at Rio's
doorstep, and Rio of course takes care of the dog because that's what
one is supposed to do. It's mostly an opportunity to show a day in
Rio's life from his own perspective, including his constant temptation
towards torture and artistic slaughter (indulged once here against one
of his targets, so there's a lot of very graphic violence). If you like
Rio more than I do and want the details of how Rio copes with his
compulsions, there's a lot of that here, but I think it's obvious and
skippable. I didn't learn anything of consequence about Rio that wasn't
already obvious from the rest of the series, and I found being inside
his head disturbing and not particularly enjoyable. The best thing
about the story was the title. (4)

"An Examination of Collegial Dynamics as Expressed Through
Marksmanship, or, LADIES' DAY OUT": Pilar decides that since she's
around people who are constantly using deadly weapons, she should learn
how to shoot. So she asks Cas, who is entirely nonplussed by the
request. But Pilar is very good at talking people into doing things.

Pilar is one of the few people who could tolerate Cas's acerbic
grumpiness. Cas has no desire to be a teacher, but she can see exactly
what Pilar's doing wrong with every attempt, so she's surprisingly good
at it. But the depth of the story comes not from the teaching, but from
Pilar's reactions to having and potentially using a gun, intermixed
with Cas's fights with her own demons and her willingness to kill.

This, I liked, at about the level of the rest of the series. Since it's
an optional interstitial, it does suffer from an inability to make any
dramatic forward progress with characterization or life decisions for
the characters. But I like both Pilar and Cas as characters, and I like
watching them interact. If you enjoy the rest of the series, this is
worth your time. (7)

Rating: 6 out of 10

Reviewed: 2018-03-31

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

From eagle at eyrie.org  Sun Apr 29 21:19:16 2018
From: eagle at eyrie.org (Russ Allbery)
Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2018 21:19:16 -0700
Subject: Review: Full of Briars, by Seanan McGuire
Message-ID: <87fu3ds4vv.fsf@hope.eyrie.org>

Full of Briars
by Seanan McGuire

Series:    October Daye #7.1
Publisher: DAW
Copyright: August 2016
ISBN:      0-7564-1222-6
Format:    Kindle
Pages:     44

"Full of Briars" is a novella set in the October Daye series, between
Chimes at Midnight and The Winter Long, although published four years
later. It was published independently, so it gets a full review here,
but it's $2 on Amazon and primarily fills in some background for series
readers.

It's also extremely hard to review without spoilers, since it is the
direct consequences of a major plot revelation at the end of Chimes of
Midnight that would spoil a chunk of that story and some of the series
leading up to it. So I'm going to have to be horribly vague and fairly
brief.

"Full of Briars" is, unlike most of the series and all of the novels,
told from Quentin's perspective rather than Toby's. The vague thing
that I can say about the plot is that this is the story of Toby finally
meeting Quentin's parents. Since Quentin is supposed to be in a blind
fosterage and his parentage kept secret, this is a bit of a problem. It
might be enough of a problem to end the fosterage and call him home.

That is very much not something Quentin wants. Or Toby, or any of the
rest of the crew Toby has gathered around her in the course of the
series.

The rest of the story is mostly talking, about that decision and its
aftermath and then some other developments in Quentin's life. It lacks
a bit of the drama of the novels of the series, but one of the reasons
why I'm still reading this series is that I like these characters and
their dialogue. They're all very much themselves here: Toby being
blunt, May being random, and Quentin being honorable and determined and
young. Tybalt is particularly good here, doing his own version of
Toby's tendency to speak truth to power and strongly asserting the
independence of the Court of Cats.

The ending didn't have much impact for me, and I don't think the scene
worked quite as well as McGuire intended, but it's another bit of
background that's useful for series readers to be aware of.

This is missable, but it's cheap enough and fast enough to read that I
wouldn't miss it if you're otherwise reading the series. The core plot
outcome is predictable, as is much of what happens in the process. But
I liked Quentin's parents, I liked how they interact with McGuire's
regular cast, and it's nice to know exactly what happened in this
interlude.

Followed by The Winter Long (and also see the Toby Short Stories page
for a list of all the short fiction in this universe and where it falls
in series order).

Rating: 6 out of 10

Reviewed: 2018-04-29

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

From eagle at eyrie.org  Mon Apr 30 20:45:19 2018
From: eagle at eyrie.org (Russ Allbery)
Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2018 20:45:19 -0700
Subject: Review: Vallista, by Steven Brust
Message-ID: <87tvrsavjk.fsf@hope.eyrie.org>

Vallista
by Steven Brust

Series:    Vlad Taltos #15
Publisher: Tor
Copyright: October 2017
ISBN:      1-4299-4699-7
Format:    Kindle
Pages:     334

This is the fifteenth book in the Vlad Taltos series, and, following
the pattern, goes back to fill in a story from earlier in the series.
This time, though, it doesn't go back far: Vallista takes place
immediately before Hawk (at least according to the always-helpful Lyorn
Records; it was not immediately obvious to me since it had been several
years since I read Hawk). That means we have to wait at least one more
book before Vlad is (hopefully) more free to act, but we get a bit more
world-building and a few more clues about the broader arc of this
series.

As is hopefully obvious, this is not at all the place to start with
this series.

Vallista opens with Devera finding him and asking him for help. Readers
of the series will recognize Devera as a regular and mysterious
feature, but this is one of the most active roles she's played in a
story. Following her, Vlad finds himself at a mysterious seaside house
that he's sure wasn't there the last time he went by that area. When he
steps inside, Devera vanishes and the door locks behind him.

The rest of the book is Vlad working out the mystery of what this house
is, why it was constructed, and the nature of the people who occupy it.
This is explicitly an homage to Gothic romances. The dead daughter Vlad
encounters isn't exactly a ghost, but she's close, and there's a
locked-up monster, family secrets, star-crossed lovers, and ulterior
motives everywhere. There's also a great deal of bizarre geometry,
since this book is as detailed of an exploration of necromancy as we've
gotten in the series to date.

Like many words in Dragaera, necromancy doesn't mean what one expects
from the normal English definition, although there's a tricky
similarity. In this world it's more about planes of existence than
death in particular, and since one of those planes of existence for
Dragaerans is the Paths of the Dead and their strange connections
across time and space, necromancy is also the magic of spacial and
temporal connections. The mansion Vlad has to find his way out of is a
creation of necromancy, as becomes clear early in the book, and there
is death involved, but there are also a lot of mirrors, discussion of
dimensional linkage and shifts, and as detailed of an explanation as
we've gotten yet of Devera's unique abilities.

Vlad seems less devious in his attempts to solve mysteries than he is
in his heist setups. A lot of Vallista involves Vlad wandering around,
asking questions, complaining about his head hurting, and threatening
people until he has enough information to understand the nature of the
house. Perhaps a careful reader armed with a good memory of series
details would be able to guess the mystery before Vlad lays it out for
the reader. I'm not that reader and spent most of the book worrying
that I was missing things I was supposed to be following. Thankfully,
Brust isn't too coy about the ending. Vlad lays out most of the details
in the final chapter for those who weren't following the specifics,
although I admit I visited the Lyorn Records wiki afterwards to pick up
more of the details. The story apart from the mystery is a very typical
iteration of Vlad being snarky, kind-hearted, slightly impatient, and
intent on minding his own business except when other people force him
to get involved in theirs.

As is typical for the series entries that go back and fill in side
stories, we don't get a lot of advancement of the main storyline. There
is an intriguing scene in the Paths of the Dead with Vlad's memories,
and a conversation between Vlad and Verra that provides one of the
clearest indications of the overall arc of the series yet, but most of
the story is concerned only with the puzzle of this mansion and its
builder. I found that enjoyable but not exceptional. If you like Vlad
(and if you're still reading this series, I assume you do), this is
more of Vlad doing Vlad things, but I doubt it will stand out as
anyone's favorite book in the series. But the series remains satisfying
and worth reading even fifteen books in, which is a significant
accomplishment.

I eagerly await the next book, which will hopefully be the direct
sequel to Hawk and an advancement of the main plot.

Followed by (rumored, not yet confirmed) Tsalmoth.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Reviewed: 2018-04-30

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

From eagle at eyrie.org  Fri May 11 20:19:25 2018
From: eagle at eyrie.org (Russ Allbery)
Date: Fri, 11 May 2018 20:19:25 -0700
Subject: Review: Always Human, by walkingnorth
Message-ID: <87a7t5ftmq.fsf@hope.eyrie.org>

Always Human
by walkingnorth

Publisher: LINE WEBTOON
Copyright: 2015-2017
Format:    Online graphic novel
Pages:     336

Always Human is a graphic novel published on the LINE WEBTOON
platform. It was originally published in weekly updates and is now
complete in two "seasons." It is readable for free, starting with
[1] episode one. The pages metadata in the sidebar is therefore a bit
of a lie: it's my guess on how many pages this would be if it were
published as a traditional graphic novel (four times the number of
episodes), provided as a rough guide of how long it might take to read
(and because I have a bunch of annual reading metadata that I base on
page count, even if I have to make up the concept of pages).

Always Human is set in a 24th century world in which body modifications
for medical, cosmetic, and entertainment purposes are ubiquitous. What
this story refers to as "mods" are nanobots that encompass everything
from hair and skin color changes through protection from radiation to
allow interplanetary travel to anti-cancer treatments. Most of them can
be trivially applied with no discomfort, and they've largely taken over
the fashion industry (and just about everything else). The people of
this world spend as little time thinking about their underlying
mechanics as we spend thinking about synthetic fabrics.

This is why Sunati is so struck by the young woman she sees at the
train station. Sunati first noticed her four months ago, and she's not
changed anything about herself since: not her hair, her eye color, her
skin color, or any of the other things Sunati (and nearly everyone
else) change regularly. To Sunati, it's a striking image of
self-confidence and increases her desire to find an excuse to say
hello. When the mystery woman sneezes one day, she sees her
opportunity: offer her a hay-fever mod that she carries with her!

Alas for Sunati's initial approach, Austen isn't simply brave or
quirky. She has Egan's Syndrome, an auto-immune problem that makes it
impossible to use mods. Sunati wasn't expecting her kind offer to be
met with frustrated tears. In typical Sunati form, she spends a bunch
of time trying to understand what happened, overthinking it, hoping to
see Austen again, and freezing when she does. Lucky for Sunati, typical
Austen form is to approach her directly and apologize, leading to an
explanatory conversation and a trial date.

Always Human is Sunati and Austen's story: their gentle and
occasionally bumbling romance, Sunati's indecisiveness and tendency to
talk herself out of communicating, and Austen's determined, relentless,
and occasionally sharp-edged insistence on defining herself. It's not
the sort of story that has wars, murder mysteries, or grand
conspiracies; the external plot drivers are more mundane concerns like
choice of majors, meeting your girlfriend's parents, and complicated
job offers. It's also, delightfully, not the sort of story that creates
dramatic tension by occasionally turning the characters into blithering
idiots.

Sunati and Austen are by no means perfect. Both of them do hurt each
other without intending to, both of them have blind spots, and both of
them occasionally struggle with making emergencies out of things that
don't need to be emergencies. But once those problems surface, they
deal with them with love and care and some surprisingly good advice. My
first reading was nervous. I wasn't sure I could trust walkingnorth not
to do something stupid to the relationship for drama; that's so common
in fiction. I can reassure you that this is a place where you can trust
the author.

This is also a story about disability, and there I don't have the
background to provide the same reassurance with much confidence.
However, at least from my perspective, Always Human reliably treats
Austen as a person first, weaves her disability into her choices and
beliefs without making it the cause of everything in her life, and
tackles head-on some of the complexities of social perception of
disabilities and the bad tendency to turn people into Inspirational
Disabled Role Model. It felt to me like it struck a good balance.

This is also a society that's far more open about human diversity in
romantic relationships, although there I think it says more about where
we currently are as a society than what the 24th century will
"actually" be like. The lesbian relationship at the heart of the story
goes essentially unremarked; we're now at a place where that can happen
without making it a plot element, at least for authors and audiences
below a certain age range. The (absolutely wonderful) asexual and
non-binary characters in the supporting cast, and the one polyamorous
relationship, are treated with thoughtful care, but still have to be
remarked on by the characters.

I think this says less about walkingnorth as a writer than it does
about managing the expectations of the reader. Those ideas are still
unfamiliar enough that, unless the author is very skilled, they have to
choose between dragging the viciousness of current politics into the
story (which would be massively out of place here) or approaching the
topic with an earnestness that feels a bit like an after-school
special. walkingnorth does the latter and errs on the side of being a
little too didactic, but does it with a gentle sense of openness that
fits the quiet and supportive mood of the whole story. It feels like a
necessary phase that we have to go through between no representation at
all and the possibility of unremarked representation, which we're
approaching for gay and lesbian relationships.

You can tell from this review that I mostly care about the story rather
than the art (and am not much of an art reviewer), but this is a
graphic novel, so I'll try to say a few things about it. The art seemed
clearly anime- or manga-inspired to me: large eyes as the default, use
of manga conventions for some facial expressions, and occasional nods
towards a chibi style for particularly emotional scenes. The color
palette has a lot of soft pastels that fit the emotionally gentle and
careful mood. The focus is on human figures and shows a lot of subtlety
of facial expressions, but you won't get as much in the way of
awe-inspiring 24th century backgrounds. For the story that walkingnorth
is telling, the art worked extremely well for me.

The author also composed music for each episode. I'm not reviewing it
because, to be honest, I didn't enable it. Reading, even graphic
novels, isn't that sort of multimedia experience for me. If, however,
you like that sort of thing, I have been told by several other people
that it's quite good and fits the mood of the story.

That brings up another caution: technology. A nice thing about books,
and to a lesser extent traditionally-published graphic novels, is that
whether you can read it doesn't depend on your technological choices.
This is a web publishing platform, and while apparently it's a good one
that offers some nice benefits for the author (and the author is paid
for their work directly), it relies on a bunch of JavaScript magic (as
one might expect from the soundtrack). I had to fiddle with uMatrix to
get it to work and still occasionally saw confusing delays in the
background loading some of the images that make up an episode. People
with more persnickety ad and JavaScript blockers have reported having
trouble getting it to display at all. And, of course, one has to hope
that the company won't lose interest or go out of business, causing
Always Human to disappear. I'd love to buy a graphic novel on regular
paper at some point in the future, although given the importance of the
soundtrack to the author (and possible contracts with the web
publishing company), I don't know if that will be possible.

This is a quiet, slow, and reassuring story full of gentle and honest
people who are trying to be nice to each other while navigating all the
tiny conflicts that still arise in life. It wasn't something I was
looking for or even knew I would enjoy, and turned out to be exactly
what I wanted to read when I found it. I devoured it over the course of
a couple of days, and am now eagerly awaiting the author's next work
([2] Aerial Magic). It is unapologetically cute and adorable, but that
covers a solid backbone of real relationship insight. Highly
recommended; it's one of the best things I've read this year.

Many thanks to [3] James Nicoll for writing a review of this and
drawing it to my attention.

Rating: 9 out of 10

Reviewed: 2018-05-11

  1. https://www.webtoons.com/en/romance/always-human/1-i-guess-thats-why-i-admire-her/viewer?title_no=557&episode_no=1
  2. https://www.webtoons.com/en/heartwarming/aerial-magic/list?title_no=1358
  3. https://jamesdavisnicoll.com/review/do-what-you-do

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

From eagle at eyrie.org  Sat May 12 21:34:19 2018
From: eagle at eyrie.org (Russ Allbery)
Date: Sat, 12 May 2018 21:34:19 -0700
Subject: Review: Deep Work, by Cal Newport
Message-ID: <87a7t4uqb8.fsf@hope.eyrie.org>

Deep Work
by Cal Newport

Publisher: Grand Central
Copyright: January 2016
ISBN:      1-4555-8666-8
Format:    Kindle
Pages:     287

If you follow popular psychology at all, you are probably aware of the
ongoing debate over multitasking, social media, smartphones, and
distraction. Usually, and unfortunately, this comes tainted by
generational stereotyping: the kids these days who spend too much time
with their phones and not enough time getting off their elders' lawns,
thus explaining their inability to get steady, high-paying jobs in an
economy designed to avoid steady, high-paying jobs. However, there is
some real science under the endless anti-millennial think-pieces. Human
brains are remarkably bad at multitasking, and it causes significant
degredation of performance. Worse, that performance degredation goes
unnoticed by the people affected, who continue to think they're
performing tasks at their normal proficiency. This comes into harsh
conflict with modern workplaces heavy on email and chat systems, and
even harsher conflict with open plan offices.

Cal Newport is an associate professor of computer science at Georgetown
University with a long-standing side profession of writing self-help
books, initially focused on study habits. In this book, he argues that
the ability to do deep work — focused, concentrated work that pushes
the boundaries of what one understands and is capable of — is a
valuable but diminishing skill. If one can develop both the habit and
the capability for it (more on that in a moment), it can be extremely
rewarding and a way of differentiating oneself from others in the same
field.

Deep Work is divided into two halves. The first half is Newport's
argument that deep work is something you should consider trying. The
second, somewhat longer half is his techniques for getting into and
sustaining the focus required.

In making his case for this approach, Newport puts a lot of effort into
avoiding broader societal prescriptions, political stances, or even
general recommendations and tries to keep his point narrow and focused:
the ability to do deep, focused work is valuable and becoming rarer. If
you develop that ability, you will have an edge. There's nothing
exactly wrong with this, but much of it is obvious and he belabors it
longer than he needed to. (That said, I'm probably more familiar with
research on concentration and multitasking than some.)

That said, I did like his analysis of busyness as a proxy for
productivity in many workplaces. The metrics and communication methods
most commonly used in office jobs are great at measuring responsiveness
and regular work on shallow tasks in the moment, and bad at measuring
progress towards deeper, long-term goals, particularly ones requiring
research or innovation. The latter is recognized and rewarded once it
finally pays off, but often treated as a mysterious capability some
people have and others don't. Meanwhile, the day-to-day working
environment is set up to make it nearly impossible, in Newport's
analysis, to develop and sustain the habits required to achieve those
long-term goals. It's hard to read this passage and not be painfully
aware of how much time one spends shallowly processing email, and how
that's rewarded in the workplace even though it rarely leads to
significant accomplishments.

The heart of this book is the second half, which is where Deep Work
starts looking more like a traditional time management book. Newport
lays out four large areas of focus to increase one's capacity for deep
work: create space to work deeply on a regular basis, embrace boredom,
quit social media, and cut shallow work out of your life. Inside those
areas, he provides a rich array of techniques, some rather
counter-intuitive, that have worked for him. This is in line with
traditional time management guidance: focus on a few important things
at a time, get better at saying no, put some effort into planning your
day and reviewing that plan, and measure what you're trying to improve.
But Newport has less of a focus on any specific system and more of a
focus on what one should try to cut out of one's life as much as
possible to create space for thinking deeply about problems.

Newport's guidance is constructed around the premise (which seems to
have some grounding in psychological research) that focused,
concentrated work is less a habit that one needs to maintain than a
muscle that one needs to develop. His contention is that multitasking
and interrupt-driven work isn't just a distraction that can be
independently indulged or avoided each day, but instead degrades one's
ability to concentrate over time. People who regularly jump between
tasks lose the ability to not jump between tasks. If they want to shift
to more focused work, they have to regain that ability with regular,
mindful practice. So, when Newport says to embrace boredom, it's not
just due to the value of quiet and unstructured moments. He argues that
reaching for one's phone to scroll through social media in each moment
of threatened boredom undermines one's ability to focus in other areas
of life.

I'm not sure I'm as convinced as Newport is, but I've been watching my
own behavior closely since I read this book and I think there's some
truth here. I picked this book up because I've been feeling vaguely
dissatisfied with my ability to apply concentrated attention to larger
projects, and because I have a tendency to return to a comfort zone of
unchallenging tasks that I already know how to do. Newport would
connect that to a job with an open plan office, a very interrupt-driven
communications culture, and my personal habits, outside of work hours,
of multitasking between TV, on-line chat, and some project I'm working
on.

I'm not particularly happy about that diagnosis. I don't like being
bored, I greatly appreciate the ability to pull out my phone and occupy
my mind while I'm waiting in line, and I have several very enjoyable
hobbies that only take "half a brain," which I neither want to devote
time to exclusively nor want to stop doing entirely. But it's hard to
argue with the feeling that my brain skitters away from concentrating
on one thing for extended periods of time, and it does feel like an
underexercised muscle.

Some of Newport's approach seems clearly correct: block out time in
your schedule for uninterrupted work, find places to work that minimize
distractions, and batch things like email and work chat instead of
letting yourself be constantly interrupted by them. I've already
noticed how dramatically more productive I am when working from home
than working in an open plan office, even though the office doesn't
bother me in the moment. The problems with an open plan office are
real, and the benefits seem largely imaginary. (Newport dismantles the
myth of open office creativity and contrasts it with famously creative
workplaces like MIT and Bell Labs that used a hub and spoke model,
where people would encounter each other to exchange ideas and then
retreat into quiet and isolated spaces to do actual work.) And
Newport's critique of social media seemed on point to me: it's not that
it offers no benefits, but it is carefully designed to attract time and
attention entirely out of proportion to the benefits that it offers,
because that's the business model of social media companies.

Like any time management book, some of his other advice is less
convincing. He makes a strong enough argument for blocking out every
hour of your day (and then revising the schedule repeatedly through the
day as needed) that I want to try it again, but I've attempted that in
the past and it didn't go well at all. I'm similarly dubious of my
ability to think through a problem while walking, since most of the
problems I work on rely on the ability to do research, take notes, or
start writing code while I work through the problem. But Newport
presents all of this as examples drawn from his personal habits, and
cares less about presenting a system than about convincing the reader
that it's both valuable and possible to carve out thinking space for
oneself and improve one's capacity for sustained concentration.

This book is explicitly focused on people with office jobs who are
rewarded for tackling somewhat open-ended problems and finding creative
solutions. It may not resonate with people in other lines of work,
particularly people whose jobs are the interrupts (customer service
jobs, for example). But its target profile fits me and a lot of others
in the tech industry. If you're in that group, I think you'll find this
thought-provoking.

Recommended, particularly if you're feeling harried, have the itch to
do something deeper or more interesting, and feel like you're being
constantly pulled away by minutia.

You can get a sample of Newport's writing in his Study Habits blog,
although be warned that some of the current moral panic about excessive
smartphone and social media use creeps into his writing there. (He's
currently working on a book on digital minimalism, so if you're
allergic to people who have caught the minimalism bug, his blog will be
more irritating than this book.) I appreciated him keeping the moral
panic out of this book and instead focusing on more concrete and
measurable benefits.

Rating: 8 out of 10

Reviewed: 2018-05-12

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

From eagle at eyrie.org  Sun May 13 20:46:38 2018
From: eagle at eyrie.org (Russ Allbery)
Date: Sun, 13 May 2018 20:46:38 -0700
Subject: Review: Twitter and Tear Gas, by Zeynep Tufekci
Message-ID: <87d0xy5275.fsf@hope.eyrie.org>

Twitter and Tear Gas
by Zeynep Tufekci

Publisher: Yale University Press
Copyright: 2017
ISBN:      0-300-21512-6
Format:    Kindle
Pages:     312

Subtitled The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest, Twitter and
Tear Gas is a close look at the effect of social media (particularly,
but not exclusively, Twitter and Facebook) on protest movements around
the world. Tufekci pays significant attention to the Tahrir Square
protests in Egypt, the Gezi Park protests in Turkey, Occupy Wall Street
and the Tea Party in the United States, Black Lives Matter also in the
United States, and the Zapatista uprising in Mexico early in the
Internet era, as well as more glancing attention to multiple other
protest movements since the advent of the Internet. She avoids both
extremes of dismissal of largely on-line movements and the hailing of
social media as a new era of mass power, instead taking a detailed
political and sociological look at how protest movements organized and
fueled via social media differ in both strengths and weaknesses from
the movements that came before.

This is the kind of book that could be dense and technical but isn't.
Tufekci's approach is analytical but not dry or disengaged. She wants
to know why some protests work and others fail, what the governance and
communication mechanisms of protest movements say about their
robustness and capabilities, and how social media has changed the tools
and landscape used by protest movements. She's also been directly
involved: she's visited the Zapatistas, grew up in Istanbul and is
directly familiar with the politics of the Gezi Park protests, and
includes in this book a memorable story of being caught in the Antalya
airport in Turkey during the 2016 attempted coup. There are some drier
and more technical chapters where she's laying the foundations of
terminology and analysis, but they just add rigor to an engaging,
thoughtful examination of what a protest is and why it works or doesn't
work.

My favorite part of this book, by far, was the intellectual structure
it gave me for understanding the effectiveness of a protest. That's
something about which media coverage tends to be murky, at least in
situations short of a full-blown revolutionary uprising (which are
incredibly rare). The goal of a protest is to force a change, and
clearly sometimes this works. (The US Civil Rights movement and the
Indian independence movement are obvious examples. The Arab Spring is a
more recent if more mixed example.) However, sometimes it doesn't;
Tufekci's example is the protests against the Iraq War. Why?

A key concept of this book is that protests signal capacity,
particularly in democracies. That can be capacity to shape a social
narrative and spread a point of view, capacity to disrupt the regular
operations of a system of authority, or capacity to force institutional
change through the ballot box or other political process. Often,
protests succeed to the degree that they signal capacity sufficient to
scare those currently in power into compromising or acquiescing to the
demands of the protest movement. Large numbers of people in the streets
matter, but not usually as a show of force. Violent uprisings are rare
and generally undesirable for everyone. Rather, they matter because
they demand and hold media attention (allowing them to spread a point
of view), can shut down normal business and force an institutional
response, and because they represent people who can exert political
power or be tapped by political rivals.

This highlights one of the key differences between protest in the
modern age and protest in a pre-Internet age. The March on Washington
at the height of the Civil Rights movement was an impressive
demonstration of capacity largely because of the underlying
organization required to pull off a large and successful protest in
that era. Behind the scenes were impressive logistical and governance
capabilities. The same organizational structure that created the March
could register people to vote, hold politicians accountable, demand
media attention, and take significant and effective economic action.
And the government knew it.

One thing that social media does is make organizing large protests far
easier. It allows self-organizing, with viral scale, which can create
numerically large movements far easier than the dedicated
organizational work required prior to the Internet. This makes protest
movements more dynamic and more responsive to events, but it also calls
into question how much sustained capacity the movement has. The
government non-reaction to the anti-war protests in the run-up to the
Iraq War was an arguably correct estimation of the signaled capacity: a
bet that the anti-war sentiment would not turn into sustained
institutional pressure because large-scale street protests no longer
indicated the same underlying strength.

Signaling capacity is not, of course, the only purpose of protests.
Tufekci also spends a good deal of time discussing the sense of
empowerment that protests can create. There is a real sense in which
protests are for the protesters, entirely apart from whether the
protest itself forces changes to government policies. One of the
strongest tools of institutional powers is to make each individual
dissenter feel isolated and unimportant, to feel powerless. Meeting,
particularly in person, with hundreds of other people who share the
same views can break that illusion of isolation and give people the
enthusiasm and sense of power to do something about their beliefs.
This, however, only becomes successful if the protesters then take
further actions, and successful movements have to provide some
mechanism to guide and unify that action and retain that momentum.

Tufekci also provides a fascinating analysis of the evolution of
government responses to mass protests. The first reaction was media
blackouts and repression, often by violence. Although we still see some
of that, particularly against out groups, it's a risky and ham-handed
strategy that dramatically backfired for both the US Civil Rights
movement (due to an independent press that became willing to publish
pictures of the violence) and the Arab Spring (due to social media
providing easy bypass of government censorship attempts). Governments
do learn, however, and have become increasingly adept at taking
advantage of the structural flaws of social media. Censorship doesn't
work; there are too many ways to get a message out. But social media
has very little natural defense against information glut, and the
people who benefit from the status quo have caught on.

Flooding social media forums with government propaganda or even just
random conspiratorial nonsense is startlingly effective. The same lack
of institutional gatekeepers that destroys the effectiveness of central
censorship also means there are few trusted ways to determine what is
true and what is fake on social media. Governments and other
institutional powers don't need to convince people of their point of
view. All they need to do is create enough chaos and disinformation
that people give up on the concept of objective truth, until they
become too demoralized to try to weed through the nonsense and find
verifiable and actionable information. Existing power structures by
definition benefit from apathy, disengagement, delay, and confusion,
since they continue to rule by default.

Tufekci's approach throughout is to look at social media as a change
and a new tool, which is neither inherently good or bad but which
significantly changes the landscape of political discourse. In her
presentation (and she largely convinced me in this book), the social
media companies, despite controlling the algorithms and platform, don't
particularly understand or control the effects of their creation except
in some very narrow and profit-focused ways. The battlegrounds of "fake
news," political censorship, abuse, and terrorist content are murky
swamps less out of deliberate intent and more because companies have
built a platform they have no idea how to manage. They've largely
supplanted more traditional political spheres and locally-run social
media with huge international platforms, are now faced with policing
the use of those platforms, and are way out of their depth.

One specific example vividly illustrates this and will stick with me.
Facebook is now one of the centers of political conversation in Turkey,
as it is in many parts of the world. Turkey has a long history of sharp
political divisions, occasional coups, and a long-standing, simmering
conflict between the Turkish government and the Kurds, a political and
ethnic minority in southeastern Turkey. The Turkish government
classifies various Kurdish groups as terrorist organizations. Those
groups unsurprisingly disagree. The arguments over this inside Turkey
are vast and multifaceted.

Facebook has gotten deeply involved in this conflict by providing a
platform for political arguments, and is now in the position of having
to enforce their terms of service against alleged terrorist content (or
even simple abuse), in a language that Facebook engineers largely don't
speak and in a political context that they largely know nothing about.
They of course hire Turkish speakers to try to understand that content
to process abuse reports. But, as Tufekci (a Turkish native) argues, a
Turkish speaker who has the money, education, and family background to
be working in an EU Facebook office in a location like Dublin is not
randomly chosen from the spectrum of Turkish politics. They are more
likely to have connections to or at least sympathies for the Turkish
government or business elites than to be related to a family of poor
and politically ostracized Kurds. It's therefore inevitable that bias
will be seen in Facebook's abuse report handling, even if Facebook
management intends to stay neutral.

For Turkey, you can substitute just about any other country about which
US engineers tend to know little. (Speaking as a US native, that's a
very long list.) You may even be able to substitute the US for Turkey
in some situations, given that social media companies tend to outsource
the bulk of the work to countries that can provide low-paid workers
willing to do the awful job of wading through the worst of humanity and
attempting to apply confusing and vague terms of service. Much of
Facebook's content moderation is done in the Philippines, by people who
may or may not understand the cultural nuances of US political fights
(and, regardless, are rarely given enough time to do more than
cursorily glance at each report).

This is already a long review and there still more important topics in
this book I've not touched on, such as movement governance. (As both an
advocate for and critic of consensus-based decision-making, Tufekci's
example of governance in Occupy Wall Street had me both fascinated and
cringing.) This is excellent stuff, full of personal anecdotes and
entertaining story-telling backed by thoughtful and structured
analysis. If you have felt mystified by the role that protests play in
modern politics, I highly recommend reading this.

Rating: 9 out of 10

Reviewed: 2018-05-13

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

From eagle at eyrie.org  Mon May 14 21:38:36 2018
From: eagle at eyrie.org (Russ Allbery)
Date: Mon, 14 May 2018 21:38:36 -0700
Subject: Review: Thanks for the Feedback, by Douglas Stone & Sheila Heen
Message-ID: <87a7t1cz3n.fsf@hope.eyrie.org>

Thanks for the Feedback
by Douglas Stone & Sheila Heen

Publisher: Penguin
Copyright: 2014
Printing:  2015
ISBN:      1-101-61427-7
Format:    Kindle
Pages:     322

Another book read for the work book club.

I was disappointed when this book was picked. I already read two
excellent advice columns (Captain Awkward and Ask a Manager) and have
read a lot on this general topic. Many workplace-oriented self-help
books also seem to be full a style of pop psychology that irritates me
rather than informs. But the point of a book club is that you read the
book anyway, so I dove in. And was quite pleasantly surprised.

This book is about receiving feedback, not about giving feedback. There
are tons of great books out there about how to give feedback, but, as
the authors say in the introduction, almost no one giving you feedback
is going to read any of them. It would be nice if we all got better at
giving feedback, but it's not going to happen, and you can't control
other people's feedback styles. You can control how you receive
feedback, though, and there's quite a lot one can do on the receiving
end. The footnoted subtitle summarizes the tone of the book: The
Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well (even when it is off base,
unfair, poorly delivered, and, frankly, you're not in the mood).

The measure of a book like this for me is what I remember from it
several weeks after reading it. Here, it was the separation of feedback
into three distinct types: appreciation, coaching, and evaluation.
Appreciation is gratitude and recognition for what one has
accomplished, independent of any comparison against other people or an
ideal for that person. Coaching is feedback aimed at improving one's
performance. And evaluation, of course, is feedback that measures one
against a standard, and usually comes with consequences (a raise, a
positive review, a relationship break-up). We all need all three but
different people need different mixes, sometimes quite dramatically so.
And one of the major obstacles in the way of receiving feedback well is
that they tend to come mixed or confused.

That framework makes it easier to see where one's reaction to feedback
often goes off the rails. If you come into a conversation needing
appreciation ("I've been working long hours to get this finished on
time, and a little thanks would be nice"), but the other person is
focused on an opportunity for coaching ("I can point out a few tricks
and improvements that will let you not work as hard next time"), the
resulting conversation rarely goes well. The person giving the coaching
is baffled at the resistance to some simple advice on how to improve,
and may even form a negative opinion of the other person's willingness
to learn. And the person receiving the feedback comes away feeling
unappreciated and used, and possibly fearful that their hard work is
merely a sign of inadequate skills. There are numerous examples of
similar mismatches.

I found this framing immediately useful, particularly in the confusion
between coaching and evaluation. It's very easy to read any
constructive advice as negative evaluation, particularly if one is
already emotionally low. Having words to put to these types of feedback
makes it easier to evaluate the situation intellectually rather than
emotionally, and to explicitly ask for clarifying evaluation if
coaching is raising those sorts of worries.

The other memorable concept I took away from this book is
switchtracking. This is when the two people in a conversation are
having separate arguments simultaneously, usually because each person
has a different understanding of what the conversation is "really"
about. Often this happens when the initial feedback sets off a trigger,
particularly a relationship or identity trigger (other concepts from
this book), in the person receiving it. The feedback giver may be
trying to give constructive feedback on how to lay out a board
presentation, but the receiver is hearing that they can't be trusted to
talk to the board on their own. The receiver will tend to switch the
conversation away to whether or not they can be trusted, quite likely
confusing the initial feedback giver, or possibly even prompting
another switchtrack into a third topic of whether they can receive
criticism well.

Once you become aware of this tendency, you start to see it all over
the place. It's sadly common. The advice in the book, which is
accompanied with a lot of concrete examples, is to call this out
explicitly, clearly separate and describe the topics, and then pick one
to talk about first based on how urgent the topics are to both parties.
Some of those conversations may still be difficult, but at least both
parties are having the same conversation, rather than talking past each
other.

Thanks for the Feedback fleshes out these ideas and a few others (such
as individual emotional reaction patterns to criticism and triggers
that interfere with one's ability to accept feedback) with a lot of
specific scenarios. The examples are refreshingly short and to the
point, avoiding a common trap of books like this to get bogged down
into extended artificial dialogue. There's a bit of a work focus, since
we get a lot of feedback at work, but there's nothing exclusively
work-related about the advice here. Many of the examples are from
personal relationships of other kinds. (I found an example of a father
teaching his daughters to play baseball particularly memorable. One
daughter takes this as coaching and the other as evaluation, resulting
in drastically different reactions.) The authors combine matter-of-fact
structured information with a gentle sense of humor and great pacing,
making this surprisingly enjoyable to read.

I was feeling oversaturated with information on conversation styles and
approaches and still came away from this book with some useful
additional structure. If you're struggling with absorbing feedback or
finding the right structure to use it constructively instead of getting
angry, scared, or depressed, give this a try. It's much better than I
had expected.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Reviewed: 2018-05-14

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

From eagle at eyrie.org  Tue May 29 20:41:37 2018
From: eagle at eyrie.org (Russ Allbery)
Date: Tue, 29 May 2018 20:41:37 -0700
Subject: Review: Bull by the Horns, by Sheila Bair
Message-ID: <87in75kdxq.fsf@hope.eyrie.org>

Bull by the Horns
by Sheila Bair

Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Copyright: 2012
Printing:  September 2013
ISBN:      1-4516-7249-7
Format:    Trade paperback
Pages:     365

Sheila Bair was the Chair of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation
from 2006 to 2011, a period that spans the heart of the US housing
crisis and the start of the Great Recession. This is her account, based
on personal notes, of her experience heading the FDIC, particularly
focused on the financial crisis and its immediate aftermath.

Something I would like to do in theory but rarely manage to do in
practice is to read more thoughtful political writing from people who
disagree with me. Partly that's to broaden my intellectual horizons;
partly it's a useful reminder that the current polarized political
climate in the United States does not imply that the intellectual
tradition of conservatism is devoid of merit. While it's not a complete
solution, one way to edge up on such reading is to read books by
conservatives that are focused on topics where they and I largely
agree.

In this case, that topic is the appalling spectacle of consequence-free
government bailouts of incompetently-run financial institutions,
coordinated by their co-conspirators inside the federal government and
designed to ensure that obscenely large salaries and bonuses continued
to flow to exactly the people most responsible for the financial
crisis. If I sound a little heated on this topic, well, consider it
advance warning for the rest of the review. Suffice it to say that I
consider Timothy Geithner to be one of the worst Secretaries of the
Treasury in the history of the United States, a position for which the
competition is fierce.

Some background on the US financial regulatory system might be helpful
here. I'm reasonably well-read on this topic and still learned more
about some of the subtleties.

The FDIC, which Bair headed, provides deposit insurance to all of the
banks. This ensures that whatever happens to the bank, all depositors
of up to $100,000 (now $250,000 due to a law that was passed as part of
the events of this book) are guaranteed to get every cent of their
money. This deposit insurance is funded by fees charged to every bank,
not by general taxes, although the FDIC has an emergency line of credit
with the Treasury it can call on (and had to during the savings and
loan crisis in the early 1990s).

The FDIC is also the primary federal regulator for state banks. It is
not the regulator for federal banks; those are regulated by the Office
of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and, at the time of events in
this book, the Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS), which regulated
Savings and Loans. Some additional regulation of federal banks is done
by the Federal Reserve. The FDIC is a "backup" regulator to those other
institutions and has some special powers related to its function of
providing deposit insurance, but it doesn't in general have the power
to demand changes of federal banks, only the smaller state banks.

This turns out to be rather important in the financial crisis: bad
state banks regulated by the FDIC were sold off or closed, but the huge
federal banks regulated by the OCC and OTS were bailed out via various
arranged mergers, loan guarantees, or direct infusions of taxpayer
money. Bair's argument is that this difference is partly due to the
ethos of the FDIC and its well-developed process for closing troubled
banks. The standard counter-argument is that the large national banks
were far too large to put through that or some similar process without
massive damage to the economy. (Bair strenuously disagrees.)

Bair's account starts in 2006, by which point the crisis was already
probably inevitable, and contains a wealth of information about the
banking side of the crisis itself and its immediate aftermath. Her
story is one of consistent pressure by the FDIC to increase bank
capital requirements and downgrade risk ratings of institutions, and
consistent pressure by the OCC, OTS, and Geithner (first as the head of
the New York branch of the Federal Reserve and then as Treasury
Secretary) to decrease capital requirements even in the height of the
crisis and allow banks to use ever-more-creative funding models backed
by government guarantees. Bair fleshes this out with considerable
detail about how capital requirements are measured, how the loan
guarantees were structured, the internal arguments over how to get
control of the crisis, and the subsequent fights in Congress over
Dodd-Frank and how TARP money was spent.

(TARP, the Troubled Asset Relief Program, was the Congressional
emergency measure passed during the height of the crisis to fund
government purchases and restructuring of troubled mortgage debt. As
Bair describes, and has been exhaustively detailed elsewhere, it was
never really used for that. The government almost immediately
repurposed it for direct bailouts of financial institutions and
provided almost no meaningful mortgage restructuring.)

This account also passes my primary sniff test for books about this
crisis. Fannie and Freddie (two oddly-named US government institutions
with a mandate to support mortgage lending and home ownership) are
treated as bad actors and horribly mismanaged entities that made the
same irresponsible investments as the private banking industry, but
they aren't put at the center of the crisis and aren't blamed for the
entire mortgage mess. This disagrees with some corners of Republican
politics, but agrees with all other high-quality reporting about the
crisis.

Besides fascinating details about the details of banking regulation in
a crisis, the primary conclusion I drew from this book is the power of
institutions, systems, and rules. One becomes good at things one does
regularly. The FDIC closes failing banks without losing insured
depositor money, and has been doing that since 1933, often multiple
times a year. They therefore have a tested system for doing this, which
they practice implementing reliably, efficiently, and quickly. Bair
states as a point of deep institutional pride that no insured depositor
had to wait more than one business day for access to their funds during
the financial crisis. Banks are closed after business hours and,
whenever possible, the branches was open for business under new
supervision the next morning. This is as important as the insurance in
preventing runs on the bank that would make the closing cost even more.

Part of that system, built into the FDIC principles and ethos, was a
ranking of priorities and a deep sense of the importance of
consequences. Insured depositors are sacrosanct. Uninsured depositors
are not, but often they can be protected by selling the bank assets to
another, healthier bank, since the uninsured depositors are often the
bank's best customers. Investors in the bank, in contrast, are wiped
out. And other creditors may also be wiped out, or at least have to
take a significant haircut on their investment. That is the price of
investing in a failed institution; next time, pay more attention to the
health of the business you're investing in. The FDIC is legally
required to choose the resolution approach that is the least costly to
the deposit insurance fund, without regard to the impact on the bank's
other creditors.

And, finally, when the FDIC takes over a failing bank, one of the first
things they do is fire all of the bank management. Bair presents this
as obvious and straight-forward common sense, as it should be. These
were the people who created the problem. Why would you want to let them
continue to mismanage the bank? The FDIC may retain essential personnel
needed to continue bank operations, but otherwise gets rid of the
people who should bear direct responsibility for the bank's failure.

The contrast with the government's approach with AIG, Citigroup, and
other failed financial institutions, as spearheaded by Timothy
Geithner, could not be more stark. I remember following the news at the
time and seeing straight-faced and serious statements that it was
important to preserve the compensation and bonuses of the CEOs of
failed institutions so that they would continue to work for the
institution to unwind all of its bad trades and troubled assets. Bair
describes herself as furious over that decision.

The difficulty in critiques of the government's approach to the
financial crisis has always been that it was a crisis, with unknown
possible consequences, and the size of the shadow banking sector and
the level of entangled risk was so large that any systematic bankruptcy
process would have been too risky. I'm with Bair in finding this
argument dubious but not clearly incorrect. The Lehman Brothers
bankruptcy was rocky, but it's not clear to me that a similar process
couldn't have worked for other firms. But that aside, retaining the
corporate management (and their salaries and bonuses!) seems a clear
indication to me of the corruption of the system. (Bair, possibly more
to her credit than mine, carefully avoids using that term.)

Bair highlights this as one of the critical reasons why the FDIC
process is legally akin to bankruptcy: these sorts of executives write
themselves sweetheart employment contracts that guarantee huge payouts
even if their company fails. In the FDIC resolution process, those
contracts can be broken. If, as Geithner did, you take heroic measures
to avoid going anywhere near bankruptcy law, breaking those contracts
becomes more legally murky. (Dodd-Frank has a provision, strongly
supported by Bair, to create a legal framework for clawing back
compensation to executives after certain types of financial
misreporting, although it's still far more limited than the FDIC
resolution process.)

A note of caution here: this book is obviously Bair's personal account,
and she's not an unbiased party. She took specific public positions
during the crisis and defends them here, including against analysis in
other books about the crisis. She also describes lots of private
positions, some of which are disputed. (Andrew Ross Sorkin's book is
the subject of some particularly pointed disagreement.) I have read
enough other books about the crisis to believe that Bair's account is
probably essentially correct, particularly given the nature of the
contemporaneous criticism against her. But, that said, the public
position against bailouts had become quite clear by the time she was
writing this book, and there was doubtless some temptation to remember
her previous positions as more in line with later public opinion than
they were. This sort of insider account is always worth a note of
caution and some effort to balance it with other accounts, particularly
given Bair's love of the spotlight (which shines through in a few
places in this book).

Bair is a life-long Republican and a Bush appointee. I suspect she and
I would disagree on most political positions. But her position as head
of the FDIC was that bank failure should come with consequences for
those running the bank, that the priority of the government should be
protection of insured bank depositors first and the deposit insurance
fund second, and that other creditors should bear the brunt of their
bad investment decisions, all of which I agree with wholeheartedly.
This account is an argument for the importance of moral hazard, and an
indictment and diagnosis of regulatory capture from someone who
(refreshingly) is not just using that as a stalking horse to argue for
eliminating regulation. Bair also directly tackles the question of
whether the same moral hazard argument applies to the individual loan
holders and concludes no, but this part of the argument was a bit light
on detail and probably won't convince someone with the opposite
opinion.

It's quite frustrating, reading this in 2018, how many of the reforms
Bair argues for in this book never happened. (A ban on naked credit
default swaps, for example, which Bair argues increase systemic risk by
increasing the consequences of institutional bankruptcy, thus creating
new "too big to fail" analyses like that applied to AIG. Timothy
Geithner was central to defeating an effort to outlaw them.) It's also
a tragic reminder of how blindly partisan our national debates over
economic policies are. You can watch, in Bair's account, the way that
Democrats who were sharply critical of the Bush administration handling
of the financial crisis, including his appointed regulators, swung
behind the exact same regulators and essentially the same policies when
Obama appointed Geithner to head Treasury. Democrats are traditionally
the party favoring stronger regulation, but that's less important than
tribal affiliation. The change is sharp enough that at a few points I
was caught by surprise at the political affiliation of a member of
Congress who was supporting or opposing one of Bair's positions.

As infuriating as this book is in places, it is a strong reminder that
there are conservatives with whom I can find common cause despite being
on the hard left of US economic politics. Those tend to be the people
who believe in the power of institutions, consistent principles, and
repeated and efficient execution of processes developed through
hard-fought political compromise. I think Bair and I would agree that
it's very dangerous to start making up policies on the spot to deal
with the crisis du jour. Corruption can more easily enter the system,
and very bad decisions are made. This is a failure on both the left and
the right. I suspect Bair would turn to a principle of smaller
government far more than I would, but we both believe in better
government and clear, principled regulation, and on that point we could
easily find workable compromises.

You should not read this as your first in-depth look at the US
financial crisis. For that, I still recommend McLean & Nocera's All the
Devils are Here. But this is a good third or fourth book on the topic,
and a deep look at the internal politics around TARP. If that interests
you, recommended.

Rating: 8 out of 10

Reviewed: 2018-05-29

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

From eagle at eyrie.org  Mon Jun  4 20:24:02 2018
From: eagle at eyrie.org (Russ Allbery)
Date: Mon, 04 Jun 2018 20:24:02 -0700
Subject: Review: The Obelisk Gate, by N.K. Jemisin
Message-ID: <87bmcpud9p.fsf@hope.eyrie.org>

The Obelisk Gate
by N.K. Jemisin

Series:    The Broken Earth #2
Publisher: Orbit
Copyright: August 2016
ISBN:      0-316-22928-8
Format:    Kindle
Pages:     448

The Obelisk Gate is the sequel to The Fifth Season and picks up right
where it left off. This is not a series to read out of order.

The complexity of The Fifth Season's three entwined stories narrows
down to two here, which stay mostly distinct. One follows Essun, who
found at least a temporary refuge at the end of the previous book and
now is split between learning a new community and learning more about
the nature of the world and orogeny. The second follows Essun's
daughter, whose fate had been left a mystery in the first book. This is
the middle book of a trilogy, and it's arguably less packed with major
events than the first book, but the echoing ramifications of those
events are vast and provide plenty to fill a novel. The Obelisk Gate
never felt slow. The space between major events is filled with
emotional processing and revelations about the (excellent) underlying
world-building.

We do finally learn at least something about the stone-eaters, although
many of the details remain murky. We also learn something about
Alabaster's goals, which were the constant but mysterious undercurrent
of the first book. Mixed with this is the nature of the Guardians
(still not quite explicit, but much clearer now than before), the
purpose of the obelisks, something of the history that made this world
such a hostile place, and the underlying nature of orogeny.

The last might be a touch disappointing to some readers (I admit it was
a touch disappointing to me). There are enough glimmers of forgotten
technology and alternative explanations that I was wondering if Jemisin
was setting up a quasi-technological explanation for orogeny. This book
makes it firmly clear that she's not: this is a fantasy, and it
involves magic. I have a soft spot in my heart for apparent magic
that's some form of technology, so I was a bit sad, but I do appreciate
the clarity. The Obelisk Gate is far more open with details and
underlying systems (largely because Essun is learning more), which
provides a lot of meat for the reader to dig into and understand. And
it remains a magitech world that creates artifacts with that magic and
uses them (or, more accurately, used them) to build advanced
civilizations. I still see some potential pitfalls for the third book,
depending on how Jemisin reconciles this background with one
quasi-spiritual force she's introduced, but the world building has been
so good that I have high hopes those pitfalls will be avoided.

The world-building is not the best part of this book, though. That's
the characters, and specifically the characters' emotions. Jemisin
manages the feat of both giving protagonists enough agency that the
story doesn't feel helpless while still capturing the submerged rage
and cautious suspicion that develops when the world is not on your
side. As with the first book of this series, Jemisin captures the
nuances, variations, and consequences of anger in a way that makes most
of fiction feel shallow.

I realized, while reading this book, that so many action-oriented and
plot-driven novels show anger in only two ways, which I'll call "HULK
SMASH!" and "dark side" anger. The first is the righteous anger when
the protagonist has finally had enough, taps some heretofore unknown
reservoir of power, and brings the hurt to people who greatly deserved
it. The second is the Star Wars cliche: anger that leads to hate and
suffering, which the protagonist has to learn to control and the
villain gives into. I hadn't realized how rarely one sees any other
type of anger until Jemisin so vividly showed me the vast range of
human reaction that this dichotomy leaves out.

The most obvious missing piece is that both of those modes of anger are
active and empowered. Both are the anger of someone who can change the
world. The argument between them is whether anger changes the world in
a good way or a bad way, but the ability of the angry person to act on
that anger and for that anger to be respected in some way by the world
is left unquestioned. One might, rarely, see helpless anger, but it's
usually just the build-up to a "HULK SMASH!" moment (or, sometimes,
leads to a depressing sort of futility that makes me not want to read
the book at all).

The Obelisk Gate felt like a vast opening-up of emotional depth that
has a more complicated relationship to power: hard-earned bitterness
that brings necessary caution, angry cynicism that's sometimes wrong
but sometimes right, controlled anger, anger redirected as energy into
other actions, anger that flares and subsides but doesn't disappear.
Anger that one has to live with, and work around, and understand,
instead of getting an easy catharsis. Anger with tradeoffs and
sacrifices that the character makes consciously, affected by emotion
but not driven by it. There is a moment in this book where one
character experiences anger as an overwhelming wave of tiredness, a
sharp realization that they're just so utterly done with being angry
all the time, where the emotion suddenly shifts into something more
introspective. It was a beautifully-captured moment of character depth
that I don't remember seeing in another book.

This may sound like it would be depressing and exhausting to read, but
at least for me it wasn't at all. I didn't feel like I was drowning in
negative emotions — largely, I think, because Jemisin is so good at
giving her characters agency without having the world give it to them
by default. The protagonists are self-aware. They know what they're
angry about, they know when anger can be useful and when it isn't, and
they know how to guide it and live with it. It feels more empowering
because it has to be fought for, carved out of a hostile world, earned
with knowledge and practice and stubborn determination. Particularly in
Essun, Jemisin is writing an adult whose life is full of joys and
miseries, who doesn't forget her emotions but also isn't controlled by
them, and who doesn't have the luxury of either being swept away by
anger or reaching some zen state of unperturbed calm.

I think one key to how Jemisin pulls this off is the second-person
perspective used for Essun's part of the book (and carried over into
the other strand, which has the same narrator but a different
perspective since this story is being told to Essun). That's another
surprise, since normally this style strikes me as affected and
artificial, but here it serves the vital purpose of giving the reader a
bit of additional distance from Essun's emotions. Following an
emotionally calmer retelling of someone else's perspective on Essun
made it easier to admire what Jemisin is doing with the nuances of
anger without getting too caught up in it.

It helps considerably that the second-person perspective here has a
solid in-story justification (not explicitly explained here, but
reasonably obvious by the end of the book), and is not simply a
gimmick. The answers to who is telling this story and why they're
telling it to a protagonist inside the story are important, intriguing,
and relevant.

This series is doing something very special, and I'm glad I stuck to it
through the confusing and difficult parts in the first book. There's a
reason why every book in it was nominated for the Hugo and The Obelisk
Gate won in 2017 (and The Fifth Season in 2016). Despite being the
middle book of a trilogy, and therefore still leaving unresolved
questions, this book was even better than The Fifth Season, which
already set a high bar. This is very skillful and very original work
and well worth the investment of time (and emotion).

Followed by The Stone Sky.

Rating: 9 out of 10

Reviewed: 2018-06-04

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

From eagle at eyrie.org  Sat Jun 23 21:08:38 2018
From: eagle at eyrie.org (Russ Allbery)
Date: Sat, 23 Jun 2018 21:08:38 -0700
Subject: Review: The Trouble with Physics, by Lee Smolin
Message-ID: <87muvkkerd.fsf@hope.eyrie.org>

The Trouble with Physics
by Lee Smolin

Publisher: Mariner
Copyright: 2006
Printing:  2007
ISBN:      0-618-91868-X
Format:    Trade paperback
Pages:     355

A brief recap of the state of theoretical physics: Quantum mechanics
and particle physics have settled on the standard model, which provides
an apparently complete inventory of fundamental particles and explains
three of the four fundamental forces. This has been very experimentally
successful up to and including the recent tentative observation of the
Higgs boson, one of the few predictions of the standard model that had
yet to be confirmed by experiment. Meanwhile, Einstein's theory of
general relativity continues as the accepted explanation of gravity,
experimentally verified once again by LIGO and Virgo detection of
gravitational waves.

However, there are problems. Perhaps the largest is the independence of
these two branches of theoretical physics: quantum mechanics does not
include or explain gravity, and general relativity does not sit easily
alongside current quantum theory. This causes theoretical understanding
to break down in situations where both theories need to be in play
simultaneously, such as the very early universe or event horizons of
black holes.

There are other problems within both theories as well. Astronomy shows
that objects in the universe behave as if there is considerably more
mass in galaxies than we've been able to observe (the dark matter
problem), but we don't have a satisfying theory of what would make up
that mass. Worse, the universe is expanding more rapidly than it
should, requiring introduction of a "dark energy" concept with no good
theoretical basis. And, on the particle physics side, the standard
model requires a large number (around 20, depending on how you measure
them) of apparently arbitrary free constants: numbers whose values
don't appear to be predicted by any basic laws and therefore could
theoretically be set to any value. Worse, if those values are set even
very slightly differently than we observe in our universe, the nature
of the universe would change beyond recognition. This is an extremely
unsatisfying property for an apparently fundamental theory of nature.

Enter string theory, which is the dominant candidate for a deeper,
unifying theory behind the standard model and general relativity that
tries to account for at least some of these problems. And enter this
book, which is a critique of string theory as both a scientific theory
and a sociological force within the theoretical physics community.

I should admit up-front that Smolin's goal in writing this book is not
the same as my goal in reading it. His primary concern is the hold that
string theory has on theoretical physics and the possibility that it is
stifling other productive avenues, instead spinning off more and more
untestable theories that can be tweaked to explain any experimental
result. It may even be leading people to argue against the principles
of experimental science itself (more on that in a moment). But to mount
his critique for the lay reader, he has to explain the foundations of
both accepted theoretical physics and string theory (and a few of the
competing alternative theories). That's what I was here for.

About a third of this book is a solid explanation of the history and
current problems of theoretical physics for the lay person who is
already familiar with basic quantum mechanics and general relativity.
Smolin is a faculty member at the Perimeter Institution for Theoretical
Physics and has done significant work in string theory, loop quantum
gravity (one of the competing attempts to unify quantum mechanics and
general relativity), and the (looking dubious) theory of doubly special
relativity, so this is an engaged and opinionated overview from an
active practitioner. He lays out the gaps in existing theories quite
clearly, conveys some of the excitement and disappointment of recent
(well, as of 2005) discoveries and unsolved problems, provides a solid
if succinct summary of string theory, and manages all of that without
relying on too much complex math. This is exactly the sort of thing I
was looking for after Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe.

Another third of this book is a detailed critique of string theory, and
specifically the assumption that string theory is correct despite its
lack of testable predictions and its introduction of new problems. I
noted in my review of Greene's book that I was baffled by his embrace
of a theory that appears to add even more free variables than the
standard model, an objection that he skipped over entirely. Smolin
tackles this head-on, along with other troublesome aspects of a theory
that is actually an almost infinitely flexible family of theories and
whose theorized unification (M-theory) is still just an outline of a
hoped-for idea.

The core of Smolin's technical objection to string theory is that it is
background-dependent. Like quantum mechanics, it assumes a static
space-time backdrop against which particle or string interactions
happen. However, general relativity is background-independent; indeed,
that's at the core of its theoretical beauty. It states that the shape
of space-time itself changes, and is a participant in the physical
effects we observe (such as gravity). Smolin argues passionately that
background independence is a core requirement for any theory that aims
to unify general relativity and quantum mechanics. As long as a theory
remains background-dependent, it is, in his view, missing Einstein's
key insight.

The core of his sociological objection is that he believes string
theory has lost its grounding in experimental verification and has
acquired far too much aura of certainty than it deserves given its
current state, and has done so partly because of the mundane but
pernicious effects of academic and research politics. On this topic, I
don't know nearly enough to referee the debate, but his firm dismissal
of attempts to justify string theory's weaknesses via the anthropic
principle rings true to me. (The anthropic principle, briefly, is the
idea that the large number of finely-tuned free constants in theories
of physics need not indicate a shortcoming in the theory, but may be
that way simply because, if they weren't, we wouldn't be here to
observe them.) Smolin's argument is that no other great breakthroughs
of physics have had to rely on that type of hand-waving, elegance of a
theory isn't sufficient justification to reach for this sort of
defense, and that to embrace the anthropic principle and its inherent
non-refutability is to turn one's back on the practice of science. I
suspect this ruffled some feathers, but Smolin put his finger squarely
on the discomfort I feel whenever the anthropic principle comes up in
scientific discussions.

The rest of the book lays out some alternatives to string theory and
some interesting lines of investigation that, as Smolin puts it, may
not pan out but at least are doing real science with falsifiable
predictions. This is the place where the book shows its age, and where
I frequently needed to do some fast Wikipedia searching. Most of the
experiments Smolin points out have proven to be dead ends: we haven't
found Lorentz violations, the Pioneer anomaly had an interesting but
mundane explanation, and the predictions of modified Newtonian dynamics
do not appear to be panning out. But I doubt this would trouble Smolin;
as he says in the book, the key to physics for him is to make bold
predictions that will often be proven wrong, but that can be
experimentally tested one way or another. Most of them will lead to
nothing but one can reach a definitive result, unlike theories with so
many tunable parameters that all of their observable effects can be
hidden.

Despite not having quite the focus I was looking for, I thoroughly
enjoyed this book and only wish it were more recent. The physics was
pitched at almost exactly the level I wanted. The sociology of
theoretical physics was unexpected but fascinating in a different way,
although I'm taking it with a grain of salt until I read some opposing
views. It's an odd mix of topics, so I'm not sure if it's what any
other reader would be looking for, but hopefully I've given enough of
an outline above for you to know if you'd be interested.

I'm still looking for the modern sequel to One Two Three... Infinity,
and I suspect I may be for my entire life. It's hard to find good
popularizations of theoretical physics that aren't just more examples
of watching people bounce balls on trains or stand on trampolines with
bowling balls. This isn't exactly that, but it's a piece of it, and I'm
glad I read it. And I wish Smolin the best of luck in his quest for
falsifiable theories and doable experiments.

Rating: 8 out of 10

Reviewed: 2018-06-23

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

From eagle at eyrie.org  Sun Jul 15 18:28:24 2018
From: eagle at eyrie.org (Russ Allbery)
Date: Sun, 15 Jul 2018 18:28:24 -0700
Subject: Review: Effective Python, by Brett Slatkin
Message-ID: <87bmb87yvb.fsf@hope.eyrie.org>

Effective Python
by Brett Slatkin

Publisher: Addison-Wesley
Copyright: 2015
ISBN:      0-13-403428-7
Format:    Trade paperback
Pages:     216

I'm still looking for a programming language book that's as good as
Joshua Bloch's Effective Java, which goes beyond its surface mission to
provide valuable and deep advice about how to think about software
construction and interface design. Effective Python is, sadly, not that
book. It settles for being a more pedestrian guide to useful or tricky
corners of Python, with a bit of style guide attached (although not as
much as I wanted).

Usually I read books like this as part of learning a language, but in
this case I'd done some early experimenting with Python and have been
using it extensively for my job for about the past four years. I was
therefore already familiar with the basics and with some coding style
rules, which made this book less useful. This is more of an
intermediate than a beginner's book, but if you're familiar with list
and hash comprehensions, closures, standard method decorators, context
managers, and the global interpreter lock (about my level of experience
when I started reading), at least half of this book will be obvious and
familiar material.

The most useful part of the book for me was a deep look at Python's
object system, including some fully-worked examples of mix-ins,
metaclasses, and descriptors. This material was new to me and a bit
different than the approach to similar problems in other programming
languages I know. I think this is one of the most complex and
hard-to-understand parts of Python and will probably use this as a
reference the next time I have to deal with complex class machinery.
(That said, this is also the part of Python that I think is the hardest
to read and understand, so most programs are better off avoiding it.)
The description of generators and co-routines was also excellent, and
although the basic concepts will be familiar to most people who have
done parallelism in other languages, Slatkin's treatment of parallelism
and its (severe) limitations in Python was valuable.

But there were also a lot of things that I was surprised weren't
covered. Some of these are due to the author deciding to limit the
scope to the standard library, so testing only covers unittest and not
the (IMO far more useful) pytest third-party module. Some are gaps in
the language that the author can't fix (Python's documentation
situation for user-written modules is sad). But there was essentially
nothing here about distutils or how to publish modules properly, almost
nothing about good namespace design and when to put code into
__init__.py (a topic crying out for some opinionated recommendations),
and an odd lack of mention of any static analysis or linting tools.
Most books of this type I've read are noticeably more comprehensive and
have a larger focus on how to share your code with others.

Slatkin doesn't even offer much of a style guide, which is usually
standard in a book of this sort. He does steer the reader away from a
few features (such as else with for loops) and preaches the merits of
decomposition and small functions, among other useful tidbits. But it
falls well short of Damian Conway's excellent guide for Perl, Perl Best
Practices.

Anyone who already knows Python will be wondering how Slatkin handles
the conflict between Python 2 and Python 3. The answer is that it
mostly doesn't matter, since Slatkin spends little time on the parts of
the language that differ. In the few places it matters, Effective
Python discusses Python 3 first and then mentions the differences or
gaps in Python 2. But there's no general discussion about differences
between Python 2 and 3, nor is there any guide to updating your own
programs or attempting to be compatible with both versions. That's one
of the more common real-world problems in Python at the moment, and was
even more so when this book was originally written, so it's an odd
omission.

Addison-Wesley did a good job on the printing, including a nice, subtle
use of color that made the physical book enjoyable to read. But the
downside is that this book has a surprisingly expensive retail ($40
USD) for a fairly thin trade paperback. At the time of this writing,
Amazon has it on sale at 64% off, which takes the cost down to about
the right territory for what you get.

I'm not sorry I read this, and I learned a few things from it despite
having used Python fairly steadily for the last few years. But it's
nowhere near good enough to recommend to every Python programmer, and
with a bit of willingness to search out on-line articles and study
high-quality code bases, you can skip this book entirely and never miss
it. I found it oddly unopinionated and unsatisfying in the places where
I wish Python had more structure or stronger conventions. This is
particularly odd given that it was written by a Google staff engineer
and Google has a quite comprehensive and far more opinionated coding
style guide for Python.

If you want to dig into some of Python's class and object features or
see a detailed example of how to effectively use coroutines, Effective
Python is a useful guide. Otherwise, you'll probably learn some things
from this book, but it's not going to significantly change how you
approach the language.

Rating: 6 out of 10

Reviewed: 2018-07-15

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

From eagle at eyrie.org  Fri Jul 20 21:01:58 2018
From: eagle at eyrie.org (Russ Allbery)
Date: Fri, 20 Jul 2018 21:01:58 -0700
Subject: Review: The Power of Habit, by Charles Duhigg
Message-ID: <8736wdgrt5.fsf@hope.eyrie.org>

The Power of Habit
by Charles Duhigg

Publisher: Random House
Copyright: 2012, 2014
Printing:  2014
ISBN:      0-679-60385-9
Format:    Kindle
Pages:     366

One problem with reading pop psychology is that one runs into a lot of
books like this one: summaries of valid psychological research that
still leave one with the impression that the author was more interested
in being dramatic and memorable than accurate. But without reproducing
the author's research, it's hard to tell whether that fear is
well-grounded or unfair, so one comes away feeling vaguely dissatisfied
and grumpy.

Or at least I do. I might be weird.

As readers of my book reviews may have noticed, and which will become
more apparent shortly, I'm going through another round of reading
"self-help" books. This time, I'm focusing on work habits,
concentration, and how to more reliably reach a flow state. The Power
of Habit isn't on that topic but it's adjacent to it, so I picked it up
when a co-worker recommended it.

Duhigg's project here is to explain habits, both good ones and bad
ones, at a scientific level. He starts with a memorable and useful
model of the habit loop: a cue triggers a routine, which results in a
reward. The reward reinforcement strengthens the loop, and the brain
starts internalizing the routine, allowing it to spend less cognitive
energy and essentially codifying the routine like a computer program.
With fully-formed habits (one's daily bathing routine, for example),
the routine is run by a small, tuned part of your brain and requires
very little effort, which is why we can have profound shower thoughts
about something else entirely. That example immediately shows why
habits are valuable and why our brain is so good at creating them: they
reduce the mental energy required for routine actions so that we can
spend that energy elsewhere.

The problem, of course, is that this mechanism doesn't first consult
our conscious intent. It works just as well for things that we do
repeatedly but may not want to automatically do, like smoking a pack of
cigarettes a day. It's also exploitable; you are not the only person
involved in creating your habits. Essentially every consumer product
company is trying to get you to form habits around their products,
often quite successfully. Duhigg covers marketing-generated habits as
well as social and societal habits, the science behind how habits can
be changed, and the evidence that often a large collection of
apparently unrelated habits are based in a "keystone habit" that, if
changed, makes changing all of the other habits far easier.

Perhaps the most useful part of this book is Duhigg's discussion of how
to break the habit loop through substitution. When trying to break
habits, our natural tendency is to consciously resist the link between
cue and routine. This is possible, but it's very hard. It requires
making an unconscious process conscious, and we have a limited amount
of conscious decision-making energy available to us in a day. More
effective than fighting the cues is to build a replacement habit with
the same cue, but this requires careful attention to the reward stage
so that the substituted habit will complete the loop and have a chance
of developing enough strength to displace the original habit.

So far, so good. All of this seems consistent with other psychological
research I've read (particularly the reasons why trying to break habits
by willpower alone is rarely successful). But there are three things
that troubled me about this book and left me reluctant to recommend it
or rely on it.

The first is that a useful proxy for checking the research of a book is
to look at what the author says about a topic that one already knows
something about. Here, I'm being a bit unfair by picking on a footnote,
but Duhigg has one anecdote about a woman with a gambling problem that
has following definitive-sounding note attached:

  It may seem irrational for anyone to believe they can beat the house
  in a casino. However, as regular gamblers know, it is possible to
  consistently win, particularly at games such as blackjack. Don
  Johnson of Bensalem, Pennsylvania, for instance, won a reported
  $15.1 million at blackjack over a six-month span starting in 2010.
  The house always wins in the aggregate because so many gamblers bet
  in a manner that doesn't maximize their odds, and most people do not
  have enough money to see themselves through losses. A gambler can
  consistently win over time, though, if he or she has memorized the
  complicated formulas and odds that guide how each hand should be
  played. Most players, however, don't have the discipline or
  mathematical skills to beat the house.

This is just barely this side of being outright false, and is
dangerously deceptive to the point of being casino propaganda. And the
argument from anecdote is both intellectually bogus (a lot of people
gamble, which means that not only is it possible that someone will go
on that sort of winning streak through pure chance, it is almost
guaranteed) and disturbingly similar to how most points are argued in
this book.

If one assumes an effectively infinite deck (in other words, assume
each card dealt is an independent event), there is no complicated rule
you can memorize to beat the house at blackjack. The best that you can
do is to reduce the house edge to 1-2% depending on the exact local
rules. Wikipedia has a comprehensive discussion if you want the
details. Therefore, what Duhigg has to be talking about is counting
cards (modifying your play based on what cards have already been dealt
and therefore what cards are remaining in the deck).

However, and Duhigg should know this if he's going to make definitive
statements about blackjack, US casinos except in Atlantic City (every
other example in this book is from the US) can and do simply eject
players who count cards. (There's a legal decision affecting Atlantic
City that makes the story more complicated there.) They also use other
techniques (large numbers of decks, frequent reshuffling) to make
counting cards far less effective. Even if you are very good at
counting cards, this is not a way to win "consistently over time"
because you will be told to stop playing. Counting cards is therefore
not a matter of memorizing complicated formulas and odds. It's a
cat-and-mouse game against human adversaries to disguise your technique
enough to not be ejected while still maintaining an edge over the
house. This is rather far from Duhigg's description.

Duhigg makes another, if less egregious, error by uncritically
accepting the popular interpretation of the Stanford marshmallow
experiment. I'll spare you my usual rant about this because The
Atlantic has now written it for me. Surprise surprise, new research
shows that the original experiment was deeply flawed in its choice of
subjects and that the effect drastically decreases once one controls
for social and economic background.

So that's one problem: when writing on topics about which I already
have some background, he makes some significant errors. The second
problem is related: Duhigg's own sources in this book seem unconvinced
by the conclusions he's drawing from their research.

Here, I have to give credit to Duhigg for publishing his own criticism,
although you won't find it if you read only the main text of the book.
Duhigg has extensive end notes (distinct from the much smaller number
of footnotes that elaborate on some point) in which he provides
excerpts from fact-checking replies he got from the researchers and
interview subjects in this book. I read them all after finishing the
rest of the book, and I thought a clear pattern emerged. After reading
early drafts of portions of the book, many of Duhigg's sources replied
with various forms of "well, but." They would say that the research is
accurately portrayed, but Duhigg's conclusion isn't justified by the
research. Or that Duhigg described part of the research but left out
other parts that complicated the picture. Or that Duhigg has simplified
dangerously. Or that Duhigg latched on to an ancillary part of their
research or their story and ignored the elements that they thought were
more central. Note after note reads as a plea to add more nuance, more
complication, less certainty, and fewer sweeping conclusions.

Science is messy. Psychological research is particularly messy because
humans are very good at doing what they're "supposed" to do, or
changing behavior based on subtle cues from the researcher. And most
psychological research of the type Duhigg is summarizing is based on
very small sample sizes (20-60 people is common) drawn from very
unrepresentative populations (often college students who are
conveniently near the researchers and cheap to bribe to do weird things
while being recorded). When those experiments are redone with larger
sample sizes or more representative populations, often they can't be
replicated. This is called the replication crisis.

Duhigg is not a scientist. He's a reporter. His job is to take
complicated and messy stories and simplify them into entertaining,
memorable, and understandable narratives for a mass audience. This is
great for making difficult psychological research more approachable,
but it also inherently involves amplifying tentative research into
rules of human behavior and compelling statements about how humans
work. Sometimes this is justified by the current state of the research.
Sometimes it isn't. Are Duhigg's core points in this book justified? I
don't know and, based on the notes, neither does Duhigg, but none of
that uncertainty is on the pages of the main text.

The third problem is less foundational, but seriously hurt my enjoyment
of The Power of Habit as a reader: Duhigg's examples are horrific. The
first chapter opens with the story of a man whose brain was seriously
injured by a viral infection and could no longer form new memories.
Later chapters feature a surgeon operating on the wrong side of a
stroke victim's brain, a woman who destroyed her life and family
through gambling, and a man who murdered his wife in his sleep
believing she was an intruder. I grant that these examples are
memorable, and some are part of a long psychological tradition of
learning about the brain from very extreme examples, but these were not
the images that I wanted in my head while reading a book about the
science of habits. I'm not sure this topic should require the reader
brace themselves against nightmares.

The habit loop, habit substitution, and keystone habits are useful
concepts. Capitalist manipulation of your habits is something everyone
should be aware of. There are parts of this book that seem worth
knowing. But there's also a lot of uncritical glorification of
particular companies and scientific sloppiness and dubious assertions
in areas I know something about. I didn't feel like I could trust this
book, or Duhigg. The pop psychology I like the best is either written
by practicing scientists who (hopefully) have a feel for which
conclusions are justified by research and which aren't, or admits more
questioning and doubt, usually by personalizing the research and
talking about what worked for the author. This is neither, and I
therefore can't bring myself to recommend it.

Rating: 6 out of 10

Reviewed: 2018-07-20

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

From eagle at eyrie.org  Sun Aug 19 20:05:52 2018
From: eagle at eyrie.org (Russ Allbery)
Date: Sun, 19 Aug 2018 20:05:52 -0700
Subject: Review: Riders of the Storm, by Julie E. Czerneda
Message-ID: <87sh39spnz.fsf@hope.eyrie.org>

Riders of the Storm
by Julie E. Czerneda

Series:    Stratification #2
Publisher: DAW
Copyright: 2008
ISBN:      1-101-21557-7
Format:    Kindle
Pages:     452

Riders of the Storm is the second book in the Stratification sub-series
in Czerneda's larger Trade Pact universe, and a direct sequel to Reap
the Wild Wind. Czerneda is telling a larger story in multiple parts, so
this isn't a series to read out of order.

Reap the Wild Wind broke apart Aryl's world view (along with everything
else about her life) and gave her contact with a larger universe than
she thought existed. Riders of the Storm builds on that, doing
middle-book setup and stabilization and bringing the shape of the
trilogy into clearer focus. But it takes its sweet time getting there.
First, we get an interminable slog across snowy mountains during a
winter storm, and then a maddeningly slow exploration of an oddly
depopulated Om'ray settlement that none of Aryl's clan knew about (even
though that shouldn't be possible).

This book does get somewhere eventually. Aryl can't avoid getting
pulled into inter-species politics, including desperate attempts to
understand the maddeningly opaque Oud and unpredictably malevolent
Tiktik. There's less contact with varied off-worlders in this book than
the last; Aryl instead gets a much deeper connection and conversation
with one specific off-worlder. That, when it finally comes, does move
past one of my complaints about the first book: Aryl finally realizes
that she needs to understand this outside perspective and stop being so
dismissive of the hints that this reader wished she'd follow up on.
We're finally rewarded with a few glimpses of why the off-worlders are
here and why Aryl's world might be significant. Just hints, though; all
the payoff is saved for (hopefully) the next book.

We also get a glimpse of the distant Om'ray clan that no one knows
anything about, although I found that part unsatisfyingly disconnected
from the rest of the story. I think this is a middle-book setup
problem, since the Tiktik are also interested and Czerneda lays some
groundwork for bringing the pieces together.

If Riders of the Storm were just the second half of this book, with
Tiktik and Oud politics, explorations of Om'ray powers, careful and
confused maneuvering between the human off-worlder and Aryl, and
Enris's explorations of unexpected corners of Om'ray technology, I
would have called this a solid novel and a satisfying continuation of
the better parts of the first book. But I thought the first half of
this book was painfully slow, and it took a real effort of will to get
through it. I think I'm still struggling with a deeper mismatch of what
Czerneda finds interesting and what I'm reading this series for.

I liked the broader Trade Pact universe. I like the world-building
here, but mostly for its mysteries. I want to find out the origins of
this world, how it ties into the archaeological interests of the
off-worlders, why one of the Om'ray clans is so very strange, and how
the Oud, Tiktik, and Om'ray all fit together in the history of this
strange planet. Some of this I might know if I remembered the first
Trade Pact trilogy better, but the mystery is more satisfying for not
having those clues. What I'm very much not interested in is the
interpersonal politics of Aryl's small band, or their fears of having
enough to eat, or their extended, miserable reaction to being in a
harsh winter storm for the first time in their lives. All this
slice-of-life stuff is so not why I'm reading this series, and for my
taste there was rather too much of it. In retrospect, I think that was
one of the complaints I had about the previous book as well.

If instead you more strongly identify with Aryl and thus care about the
day-to-day perils of her life, rather than seeing them as a side-show
and distraction from the larger mystery, I think your reaction to this
book would be very different from mine. That would be in line with how
Aryl sees her own world, so, unlike me, you won't be constantly wanting
her to focus on one thing when she's focused on something else
entirely. I think I'm reading this series a bit against the grain
because I don't find Aryl's tribal politics, or in-the-moment baffled
reactions, interesting enough to hold my attention without revelations
the deeper world-building.

That frustration aside, I'm glad I got through the first part of the
book to get to the meat because that world-building is satisfying. I'm
thoroughly hooked: I want to know a lot more about the Oud and Tiktik,
about the archaeological mission, and about the origins of Aryl's
bizarre society. But I'm also very glad that there's only one more book
so that this doesn't drag on much longer, and I hope that book delivers
up revelations at a faster and more even pace.

Followed by Rift in the Sky.

Rating: 6 out of 10

Reviewed: 2018-08-19

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

From eagle at eyrie.org  Fri Aug 24 21:14:57 2018
From: eagle at eyrie.org (Russ Allbery)
Date: Fri, 24 Aug 2018 21:14:57 -0700
Subject: Review: Overwhelmed, by Brigid Schulte
Message-ID: <87in3z2ibi.fsf@hope.eyrie.org>

Overwhelmed
by Brigid Schulte

Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Copyright: 2014
ISBN:      1-4299-4587-7
Format:    Kindle
Pages:     286

Subtitled Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time, Overwhelmed is
part of the latest batch of reading I've been doing on time management
and life organization. The focus of this book is particularly
appealing: Why does life feel so busy? Why do we feel constantly
overwhelmed with things we're supposed to be doing? Did something
change? If so, what changed? And how can we fix it? Schulte avoids many
of the pitfalls of both science popularization and self-help books by
personalizing her questions in an appealing way. She is overwhelmed,
she wants to escape that trap, and she goes looking for things that
would help her personally, bringing the reader along for the ride.

The caveat to this approach, which I wish were more obvious from the
marketing surrounding this book, is that Overwhelmed is focused on the
type of overwhelm that the author herself is dealing with: being a
working mother. Roughly two-thirds of this book is about parenting,
gender balance in both parenting and household chores, time stress
unique to working mothers, and the interaction between the demands of
family and the demands of the workplace.

To be clear, there is nothing wrong with this focus. I'm delighted to
see more time and attention management books and workplace policy
investigations written for the working mother instead of the male
executive. Just be aware that a lot of this book is not going to apply
directly to people without partners or kids, although I still found it
useful as a tool for building social empathy and thinking about work
and government policy.

Schulte starts the book with a brilliant hook. Overwhelmed, fragmented,
and exhausted, Schulte had kept a time diary for a year, and is turning
it over to John Robinson, a well-known sociologist specializing in time
use. Schulte memorably describes how her time diaries have become
confessionals of panic attacks, unpaid bills, hours spent waiting on
hold, and tarot readings telling her to take more quiet time for
herself. But Robinson's conclusion is ruthless: she had 28 hours of
leisure in the week they analyzed during the visit. A little less than
average, but a marked contrast to Schulte's sense that she had no
leisure at all. Based on his research with meticulous time diaries,
Robinson is insistent that we have as much or more leisure than we had
fifty years ago. (He has his own book on the topic, Time for Life.)
Schulte's subjective impression of her time is wildly inconsistent with
that analysis. What happened?

In the first part of the book, Schulte introduces two useful concepts:
time confetti, to describe her subjective impression of the shredding
of her schedule and attention, and role overload. The latter is used in
academic work on time use to describe attempting to fulfill multiple
roles simultaneously without the necessary resources for all of them,
and has a strong correlation with depression and anxiety. Schulte
immediately recognized the signs of role overload in her own conflicts
between work and parenting, but even without the parenting component, I
recognized role overload in the strain between work and volunteer
commitments. Simplified, it's a more academic version of the common
concept of "work-life balance," but it comes with additional research
on the consequences: constant multitasking, a sense of accelerating
pace, and a breakdown of clean divisions between blocks of time devoted
to different activities.

The rest of the book looks at this problem in three distinct spheres:
work, love (mostly family and child-rearing), and play. Schulte adds
the additional concepts of the Ideal Worker, Ideal Mother, and
Providing Father archetypes and their pressure towards both gender
stereotypes and an unhealthy devotion to work availability and long
work hours. I found the Ideal Worker concept and its framing of the
standards against which we unconsciously measure ourselves particularly
useful, even though I'm in an extremely relaxed and flexible work place
by US standards. The Ideal Mother and Providing Father concepts in the
section on love were more academic to me (since I don't have kids), but
gave me new empathy for the struggles to apply an abstract ideal of
equal partnership to the messy world of subconscious stereotypes and
inflexible workplaces designed for providing fathers.

Schulte does offer a few tentative solutions, or at least pushes in a
better direction, but mostly one comes away from this book wanting to
move to Denmark or the Netherlands (both used here, as in so many other
places these days, as examples of societies that have made far
different choices about work and life than the US has). So many of the
flaws are structural: jobs of at least forty hours a week, a culture of
working late at the office or taking work home, inadequate child care,
and deeply ingrained gender stereotypes that shape our behavior even
when we don't want them to. Carving out a less overwhelmed life as an
individual is an exhausting swim upstream, which is nigh-impossible
when exhaustion and burnout is the starting point. If you're looking
for a book to make you feel empowered and in control of eliminating the
sense of overwhelm from your life, that's not this book, although that
also makes it a more realistic study.

That said, Schulte herself sounds more optimistic at the end of the
book than at the beginning, and seems to have found some techniques
that helped without moving to Denmark. She summarizes them at the end
of the book, and it's a solid list. Several will be familiar to any
time management reader (stop multitasking, prioritize the important
things first, make room for quiet moments, take advantage of human
burst work cycles, be very clear about your objectives, and, seriously,
stop multitasking), but for me they gained more weight from Schulte's
personal attempts to understand and apply them. But I think this is
more a book about the shape of the problem than about the shape of the
solution.

Overwhelmed is going to have the most to say to women and to people
with children, but I'm glad I read it. This is the good sort of summary
of scientific and social research: personalized, embracing ambiguity
and conflicting research and opinions, capturing the sense of muddling
through and trying multiple things, and honest and heartfelt in
presenting the author's personal take and personal challenges. It
avoids both the guru certainty of the self-help book and the excessive
generalization of Gladwell-style popularizations. More like this,
please.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Reviewed: 2018-08-24

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

From eagle at eyrie.org  Mon Aug 27 20:49:34 2018
From: eagle at eyrie.org (Russ Allbery)
Date: Mon, 27 Aug 2018 20:49:34 -0700
Subject: Review: So Lucky, by Nicola Griffith
Message-ID: <87zhx75ewh.fsf@hope.eyrie.org>

So Lucky
by Nicola Griffith

Publisher: FSG Originals
Copyright: 2018
ISBN:      0-374-71834-2
Format:    Kindle
Pages:     179

The first sign of trouble was easy to ignore. Mara tripped on the day
her partner of fourteen years moved out, and thought nothing of it. But
it was only a week and a half before the more serious fall in her
kitchen, a doctor's visit, and a diagnosis: multiple sclerosis.

The next few days were a mess of numbness, shock, and anger: a fight at
her job as the director of an HIV foundation over a wheelchair ramp, an
unintended outburst in a spreadsheet, and then being fired. Well, a
year of partial pay and medical coverage, "as gratitude for her
service." But fired, for being disabled.

Mara is not the sort of person to take anything slow. Less time at the
job means more time to research MS, time to refit her house for her
upcoming disability, time to learn how to give herself injections, time
to buy a cat. Time to bounce hard off of an MS support group while
seeing an apparently imaginary dog. Time to get angry, like she had
years ago when she was assaulted and threw herself obsessively into
learning self-defense. Time to decide to fight back.

I so wanted to like this book. It's the first new Nicola Griffith novel
since Hild, and I've loved everything of hers I've read. It's a book
about disability, about finding one's people, about activism, about
rights of people with disabilities, and about how people's reactions to
others with disabilities are predictable and awful and condescending.
Mara isn't a role model, isn't inspiration, isn't long-suffering. She's
angry, scared, obsessive, scary, and horrible at communication. She
spent her career helping people with a type of medical disability, and
yet is entirely unprepared for having one herself.

I'm glad this book exists. I want more books like this to exist.

I mostly didn't enjoy reading it.

In part, this is because I personally bounced off some themes of the
book. I have a low tolerance for horror, and there's a subplot
involving Mara's vividly-imagined fear of a human predator working
their way through her newly-discovered community that made me actively
uncomfortable to read. (I realize that was part of the point, and I
appreciate it as art, but I didn't enjoy it as a reader.) But I also
think some of it is structural.

There is a character development arc here: Mara has to come to terms
with what MS means to her, how she's going to live with it, and how
she's going to define herself after loss of her job, without a
long-term relationship, and with a disabling disease, all essentially
at once. Pieces of that worked for me, such as Mara's interaction with
Aiyana. But Griffith represents part of that arc with several
hallucinatory encounters with a phantom embodiment of what Mara is
fighting against, which plays a significant role in the climax of the
book. And that climax didn't work for me. It felt off-tempo somehow,
not quite supported by Mara's previous changes in attitude, too abrupt,
too heavily metaphorical for me to follow.

It's just one scene, but So Lucky puts a lot of weight on that scene.
This is a short novel full of furious energy, pushing towards some sort
of conclusion or explosion. Mara is, frankly, a rather awful person for
most of the book, for reasons that follow pre-existing fracture lines
in her personality and are understandable and even forgivable but still
unpleasant. I needed some sort of emotional catharsis, some dramatic
turning point in her self-image and engagement with the world, and I
think Griffith's intent was to provide that catharsis, and it didn't
land for me, which left me off-balance and disturbed and unsatisfied.
And frustrated, because I was rooting for the book and stuck with it
through some rather nasty plot developments, hoping the payoff would be
worth it.

This is all very individual; it doesn't surprise me at all that other
people love this book. I'm also not disabled. I'm sure that would add
additional layers, and it might have made the catharsis land for me.
But I personally spent most of the book wanting to read about Aiyana
instead of Mara.

Spending the book wishing I was reading about the non-disabled
character, the one who isn't angry and isn't scary and isn't as scared,
is partly the point. And it's a very good point; despite not enjoying
this book, I'm glad I read it. It made me think. It made me question
why I liked one character over another, what made me uncomfortable
about Mara, and why I found her off-putting. As a work of activism, I
think So Lucky lands its punches well. People like me wanting comfort
instead of truth is part of how people with disabilities are treated in
society, and not a very attractive part. But at the same time, I read
books for pleasure. I'm not sure how to reconcile those conflicting
goals.

So Lucky is a Griffith novel, so the descriptions are gorgeous and the
quality of the writing is exceptional. Griffith gives each moment a
heft and weight and physicality. The relationships in this book worked
for me in all their complexity, even when I was furious at Mara for
breaking hers. And Griffith's descriptions of physical bodies, touching
and feeling and being in each other's spaces, remain the best of any
author I've read. If the plot works better for you than it did for me,
there's a lot here to enjoy.

I can't quite recommend it, or at least as much as I hoped I could. But
I think some people will love it.

One final note: I keep seeing reviews and blurbs about this book that
describe it as an autobiographical novel, and it irritates me every
time. It's not autobiographical [1]. Yes, Griffith and the protagonist
both have MS, are both lesbians, and both taught self-defense. But
Griffith has put lesbians, self-defense teachers, and people with MS
in many of her books. Mara runs a charitable organization; Griffith is
a writer. Mara's relationships are a mess; Griffith has been happily
married for nearly 25 years. I'm sure Griffith drew heavily on her own
reactions to MS to write this novel, as novelists do, but that doesn't
make Mara a self-insert or make this fictional story an autobiography.
Disabled authors can write disabled protagonists without making the
story non-fiction. It's weirdly dismissive to cast the book this way,
to take away Griffith's technique and imagination and ability to
invent character and situation and instead classify the book as some
sort of transcription of her own life. And I don't think it would
happen if it weren't for the common disability.

This is identifying people as their disability, and it's lazy and wrong
and exclusionary. Stop doing this.

Rating: 5 out of 10

Reviewed: 2018-08-27

[1] https://nicolagriffith.com/2018/04/02/how-ableism-affects-a-book-review/

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

From eagle at eyrie.org  Sun Sep  2 20:34:28 2018
From: eagle at eyrie.org (Russ Allbery)
Date: Sun, 02 Sep 2018 20:34:28 -0700
Subject: Review: So Good They Can't Ignore You, by Cal Newport
Message-ID: <87k1o3w8xn.fsf@hope.eyrie.org>

So Good They Can't Ignore You
by Cal Newport

Publisher: Grand Central
Copyright: September 2012
ISBN:      1-4555-0910-8
Format:    Kindle
Pages:     237

The problem area of task management, mental focus, and prioritization
is vast and sprawling, full of techniques that work only in some
situations, in some moods, for some people, or with some types of
tasks. Time and attention management books therefore work best if the
peculiar focus of that book happens to align with a set of problems the
reader currently has. I occasionally survey the field for something
that speaks to whatever corner of the problem I'm currently working on,
and then chase that thread for as long as it seems useful.

Cal Newport is my latest thread. I encountered Deep Work while feeling
frazzled and pulled in too many directions to do a good job at any one
thing. It laid out a helpful approach to problems of focus and
multitasking (enough so that I read it twice), so I started reading
backwards through Newport's blog and picked up this earlier book. It's
not his first, but before So Good They Can't Ignore You, Newport
focused on practical study tips for high school and college students. I
may read those someday as curiosities, but I doubt they'll be as
interesting to me now, more than twenty years out of college.

Going backwards through an author's writing like this is a bit of a
risk, since it's relatively common in this genre of non-fiction for an
author to have only one book I find interesting. For example, David
Allen's Getting Things Done is worthwhile reading for anyone interested
in time management systems as long as you don't focus exclusively on
that one system, but it's safe to skip everything else he's written.
Thankfully, Newport appears to be an exception. His blog is full of
interesting tidbits and is worth an archive trawl, and So Good They
Can't Ignore You is a broader survey of what it means to have a good
career and how to get there. I think it's worth reading alongside the
more focused advice of Deep Work.

One caveat in all that follows: Newport is a computer science professor
and is writing primarily for people with similar resources, so this
book is a bit relentlessly upper-middle class. The audience of this
book is primarily white-collar knowledge workers with college degrees,
and its framework becomes increasingly dubious outside of that social
class.

The core argument of So Good They Can't Ignore You is that "follow your
passion" is awful career advice that you should ignore. More
specifically, Newport argues that it is far more common to enjoy
something because you're good at it than to be good at something
because you enjoy it. Initial passion is therefore a risky and
incomplete guide. This doesn't imply that you need to do work that you
hate; in fact, if you dig deep enough you may find that you hate that
work because you're not good at some less obvious but still essential
part of it. It does imply that every career is going to have bits that
you don't enjoy, that learning something new has inherently
uncomfortable parts and is therefore not always something you'll feel
passionate about, and that passion is more often a reward at the end of
a journey than a signpost at the start. Therefore, rather than looking
for work that immediately excites you, look for work that interests you
(a lower bar) and that you are capable of learning how to do well.

On the surface, it's odd that I got as much out of this book as I did,
given that I'm the poster child for following one's passion into a
career. I'm working in the field I decided I wanted to pursue when I
was around eight years old, with essentially no wobbles along the way.
But, digging a little deeper, I've accidentally followed Newport's
approach in my choices of career focus. I never set out to work in
computer security, for example; I just did enough of it, first by
happenstance and later by choice, that I became good at it.

The drawback of the unreliability of passion is that most people will
not experience a sudden emotional epiphany that guides them into their
ideal career, or may find that such epiphanies point them the wrong
direction. The advantage Newport points out, and backs up with numerous
anecdotal examples, is that choosing a career is less fraught than the
passion approach would lead one to believe, and that your initial
emotional reactions are less critical than you might fear. There is not
one and only one career waiting for you that you must discover. While
the possibilities are not completely unbounded, there are numerous
careers at which you could succeed with sufficient practice, and any of
them can lead to a happy and rewarding work life. Rather than searching
for that one career that sets off a special spark, find a career that
you can become good at and that people will pay you for, and then put
in the work to build your skills. This will give you the resources to
shape your work into something you're passionate about.

Newport's writing has a bit of "eat your vegetables" practicality:
learning something will be uncomfortable at times, you have to put in
the work before you'll get the rewards, and (specifically for careers)
you have to test your goals against some measure of external value. But
Newport also has a disarming and thoughtful way of talking about the
overall arc of a career that avoids making this sound dreary and
emphasizes the rewards along the way. His delight in the inherent
merits of work done well shines through, as does his focus on a career
as a process of taking control over one's own work.

That concept of autonomy as a career goal was the part of So Good They
Can't Ignore You that most caught my attention. Newport's argument here
is that how you do your work has as much impact on career satisfaction
and overall happiness as what you work on. Autonomy, flexibility, and
choice in one's work often translates into joy and passion for the
work. But there are two control traps you have to avoid: trying to take
control with insufficient career capital to back it up, and being
prevented by others from spending your career capital on more control.

The first trap is the more obvious one: you need some external
validation that you're good enough to start setting some of the terms
of your own work. Newport recommends financial rewards as a feedback
mechanism: if you ask people to pay you for your work, in money or
other things of obvious value (increased vacation, for instance),
you're likely to get a more honest (and therefore more actionable)
measure of how good you are at your craft. The anti-capitalist in me
wanted to argue with the financial focus, but Newport is very good at
keeping his argument narrow. People may have a lot of social motives
for praising your work uncritically. To improve, you need a feedback
cycle that's more objective and is willing to tell you when you're not
yet good enough to take the next career step. In our current society,
one good way to force that feedback cycle is to ask for money, in one
form or another.

The second trap is more subtle and very useful for where I'm at
personally. Once you are good enough to have accumulated the career
capital to start taking more control over your work, you're also good
enough that your employer will want to prevent you from doing this.
They instead will want to maximize your benefit to them, or give you
the kind of control that comes with more responsibility rather than
more freedom. (Newport titles this section of the book "Turn Down a
Promotion.") You may have to force matters and make your employer
somewhat unhappy to win the type of autonomy that brings more personal
happiness.

Newport's own summary of So Good They Can't Ignore You is:

  To construct work you love, you must first build career capital by
  mastering rare and valuable skills, and then cash in this capital
  for the type of traits that define compelling careers.

No one model of careers will capture all the nuance that goes into
work, but I'm particularly fond of this one. It combines a cautious
practicality with a clear-eyed vision of the end game that doesn't
confuse the journey with the destination. The point is not to have rare
and valuable skills; the point is to have a satisfying and compelling
career, and the skills are a tool. Deep Work was focused on how to
build a certain class of skills that are valuable in some types of
work. So Good They Can't Ignore You is about the bigger picture: what
are you using those skills to achieve, and why?

Those are big questions without any one universal answer, but Newport
is thinking about them from an angle that shed some light on some
things I'm mulling over. If the same is true of you, I think you'll
find this book worth reading.

Rating: 8 out of 10

Reviewed: 2018-09-02

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

From eagle at eyrie.org  Mon Sep 17 20:42:15 2018
From: eagle at eyrie.org (Russ Allbery)
Date: Mon, 17 Sep 2018 20:42:15 -0700
Subject: Review: The Collapsing Empire, by John Scalzi
Message-ID: <87sh27pj3c.fsf@hope.eyrie.org>

The Collapsing Empire
by John Scalzi

Series:    Interdependency #1
Publisher: Tor
Copyright: March 2017
ISBN:      0-7653-8889-8
Format:    Kindle
Pages:     333

Cardenia Wu-Patrick was never supposed to become emperox. She had a
quiet life with her mother, a professor of ancient languages who had a
brief fling with the emperox but otherwise stayed well clear of the
court. Her older half-brother was the imperial heir and seemed to enjoy
the position and the politics. But then Rennered got himself killed
while racing and Cardenia ended up heir whether she wanted it or not,
with her father on his deathbed and unwanted pressure on her to take
over Rennered's role in a planned marriage of state with the powerful
Nohamapetan guild family.

Cardenia has far larger problems than those, but she won't find out
about them until becoming emperox.

The Interdependency is an interstellar human empire balanced on top of
a complex combination of hereditary empire, feudal guild system, state
religion complete with founding prophet, and the Flow. The Flow is this
universe's equivalent of the old SF trope of a wormhole network: a
strange extra-dimensional space with well-defined entry and exit points
and a disregard for the speed of light. The Interdependency relies on
it even more than one might expect. As part of the same complex and
extremely long-term plan of engineered political stability that created
the guild, empire, and church balance of power, the Interdependency
created an economic web in which each system is critically dependent on
imports from other systems. This plus the natural choke points of the
Flow greatly reduces the chances of war.

It also means that Cardenia has inherited an empire that is more
fragile than it may appear. Secret research happening at the most
far-flung system in the Interdependency is about to tell her just how
fragile.

John Clute and Malcolm Edwards provided one of the most famous
backhanded compliments in SF criticism in The Encyclopedia of Science
Fiction when they described Isaac Asimov as the "default voice" of
science fiction: a consistent but undistinguished style that became the
baseline that other writers built on or reacted against. The field is
now far too large for there to be one default voice in that same way,
but John Scalzi's writing reminds me of that comment. He is very good
at writing a specific sort of book: a light science fiction story that
draws as much on Star Trek as it does on Heinlein, comfortably sits on
the framework of standard SF tropes built by other people, adds a bit
of humor and a lot of banter, and otherwise moves reliably and
competently through a plot. It's not hard to recognize Scalzi's
writing, so in that sense he has less of a default voice than Asimov
had, but if I had to pick out an average science fiction novel his
writing would come immediately to mind. At a time when the field is
large enough to splinter into numerous sub-genres that challenge
readers in different ways and push into new ideas, Scalzi continues
writing straight down the middle of the genre, providing the same sort
of comfortable familiarity as the latest summer blockbuster.

This is not high praise, and I am sometimes mystified at the amount of
attention Scalzi gets (both positive and negative). I think his largest
flaw (and certainly the largest flaw in this book) is that he has very
little dynamic range, particularly in his characters. His books have a
tendency to collapse into barely-differentiated versions of the same
person bantering with each other, all of them sounding very much like
Scalzi's own voice on his blog. The Collapsing Empire has emperox
Scalzi grappling with news from scientist Scalzi carried by dutiful
Scalzi with the help of profane impetuous Scalzi, all maneuvering
against devious Scalzi. The characters are easy to keep track of by the
roles they play in the plot, and the plot itself is agreeably twisty,
but if you're looking for a book to hook into your soul and run you
through the gamut of human emotions, this is not it.

That is not necessarily a bad thing. I like that voice; I read Scalzi's
blog regularly. He's reliable, and I wonder if that's the secret to his
success. I picked up this book because I wanted to read a decent
science fiction novel and not take a big risk. It delivered exactly
what I asked for. I enjoyed the plot, laughed at some of the
characters, felt for Cardenia, enjoyed the way some villainous threats
fell flat because of characters who had a firm grasp of what was
actually important and acted on it, and am intrigued enough by what
will happen next that I'm going to read the sequel. Scalzi aimed to
entertain, succeeded, and got another happy customer. (Although I must
note that I would have been happier if my favorite character in the
book, by far, did not make a premature exit.)

I am mystified at how The Collapsing Empire won a Locus Award for best
science fiction novel, though. This is just not an award sort of book,
at least in my opinion. It's book four in an urban fantasy series, or
the sixth book of Louis L'Amour's Sackett westerns. If you like this
sort of thing, you'll like this version of it, and much of the appeal
is that it's not risky and requires little investment of effort. I
think an award winner should be the sort of book that lingers, that you
find yourself thinking about at odd intervals, that expands your view
of what's possible to do or feel or understand.

But that complaint is more about awards voters than about Scalzi, who
competently executed on exactly what was promised on the tin. I liked
the setup and I loved the structure of Cardenia's inheritance of
empire, so I do kind of wish I could read the book that, say, Ann
Leckie would have written with those elements, but I was entertained in
exactly the way that I wanted to be entertained. There's real skill and
magic in that.

Followed by The Consuming Fire. This book ends on a cliffhanger, as
apparently does the next one, so if that sort of thing bothers you, you
may want to wait until they're all available.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Reviewed: 2018-09-17

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

From eagle at eyrie.org  Mon Oct 22 22:00:04 2018
From: eagle at eyrie.org (Russ Allbery)
Date: Mon, 22 Oct 2018 22:00:04 -0700
Subject: Review: The Stone Sky, by N.K. Jemisin
Message-ID: <87woq9w94b.fsf@hope.eyrie.org>

The Stone Sky
by N.K. Jemisin

Series:    The Broken Earth #3
Publisher: Orbit
Copyright: August 2017
ISBN:      0-316-22925-3
Format:    Kindle
Pages:     464

So, this is it: the epic conclusion of the series that began with The
Fifth Season. And it is a true conclusion. Jemisin's world is too large
and her characters too deep (and too real) to wrap up into a simple
package, but there's a finality to this conclusion that makes me think
it unlikely Jemisin will write a direct sequel any time soon. (And oh
my do you not want to start with this book. This series must be read in
order.)

I'm writing this several months after finishing the novel in part
because I still find it challenging to put my feelings about this book
into words. There are parts of this story I found frustrating and
others I found unsatisfying, but each time I dig into those
disagreements, I find new layers of story and meaning and I can't see
how the book could have gone any other way. The Stone Sky is in many
ways profoundly uncomfortable and unsettling, but that's also what
makes it so good. Jemisin is tackling problems, emotions, and
consequences that are unsettling, that should be unsettling. Triumphant
conclusions would be a lie. This story hurt all the way through; it's
fitting that the ending did as well. But it's also strangely hopeful,
in a way that doesn't take away the pain.

World-building first. This is, thankfully, not the sort of series that
leaves one with a host of unanswered questions or a maddeningly opaque
background. Jemisin puts all of her cards on the table. We find out
exactly how Essun's world was created, what the obelisks are, who the
stone eaters are, who the Guardians are, and something even of the
origin of orogeny. This is daring after so much intense build-up, and
Jemisin deserves considerable credit for an explanation that (at least
for me) held together and made sense of much of what had happened
without undermining it.

I do have some lingering reservations about the inhuman villain of this
series, which I still think is too magically malevolent (and ethically
simplistic) for the interwoven complexity of the rest of the
world-building. They're just reservations, not full objections, but
buried in the structure of the world is an environmental position
that's a touch too comfortable, familiar, and absolute, particularly by
the standards of the rest of the series.

For the human villains, though, I have neither objections nor
reservations. They are all too believable and straightforward, both in
the backstory of the deep past and in its reverberations and
implications up to Essun's time. There is a moment when the book's
narrator is filling in details in the far past, an off-hand comment
about how life was sacred to their civilization. And, for me, a moment
of sucked-in breath and realization that of course it was. Of course
they said life was sacred. It explained so very much, about so very
many things: a momentary flash of white-hot rage, piercing the
narrative like a needle, knitting it together.

Against that backdrop, the story shifts in this final volume from its
primary focus on Essun to a balanced split between Essun and her
daughter, continuing a transition that began in The Obelisk Gate. Essun
by now is a familiar figure to the reader: exhausted, angry, bitter,
suspicious, and nearly numb, but driving herself forward with
unrelenting force. Her character development in The Stone Sky comes
less from inside herself and more from unexpected connections and
empathy she taught herself not to look for. Her part of this story is
the more traditional one, the epic fantasy band of crusaders out to
save the world, or Essun's daughter, or both.

Essun's daughter's story is... not that, and is where I found both the
frustrations and the joy of this conclusion. She doesn't have Essun's
hard experience, her perspective on the world, or Essun's battered,
broken, reforged, and hardened sense of duty. But she has in many ways
a clearer view, for all its limitations. She realizes some things
faster than Essun does, and the solutions she reaches for are a
critique of the epic fantasy solutions that's all the more vicious for
its gentle emotional tone.

This book offers something very rare in fiction: a knife-edge
conclusion resting on a binary choice, where as a reader I was, and
still am, deeply conflicted about which choice would have been better.
Even though by normal epic fantasy standards the correct choice is
obvious.

The Stone Sky is, like a lot of epic fantasy, a story about
understanding and then saving the world, but that story is told in
counterpoint with a biting examination of the nature of the world
that's being saved. It's also a story about a mother and a daughter,
about raising a child who's strong enough to survive in a deeply unfair
and vicious world, and about what it means to succeed in that goal.
It's a story about community, and empathy, and love, and about facing
the hard edge of loss inside all of those things and asking whether it
was worth it, without easy answers.

The previous books in this series were angry in a way that I rarely see
in literature. The anger is still there in The Stone Sky, but this book
is also sad, in a way that's profound and complicated and focused on
celebrating the relationships that matter enough to make us sad. There
are other stories that I have enjoyed reading more, but there are very
few that I thought were as profound or as unflinching.

Every book in this series won a Hugo award. Every book in this series
deserved it. This is a modern masterpiece of epic fantasy that I am
quite certain we will still be talking about fifty years from now. It's
challenging, powerful, emotional, and painful in a way that you may
have to brace yourself to read, but it is entirely worth the effort.

Rating: 9 out of 10

Reviewed: 2018-10-22

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

From eagle at eyrie.org  Wed Oct 24 21:54:32 2018
From: eagle at eyrie.org (Russ Allbery)
Date: Wed, 24 Oct 2018 21:54:32 -0700
Subject: Review: Move Fast and Break Things, by Jonathan Taplin
Message-ID: <87lg6md3sn.fsf@hope.eyrie.org>

Move Fast and Break Things
by Jonathan Taplin

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Copyright: April 2017
Printing:  2018
ISBN:      0-316-27574-3
Format:    Kindle
Pages:     288

Disclaimer: I currently work for Dropbox, a Silicon Valley tech
company. While it's not one of the companies that Taplin singles out in
this book, I'm sure he'd consider it part of the problem. I think my
reactions to this book are driven more by a long association with the
free software movement and its take on copyright issues, and from
reading a lot of persuasive work both good and bad, but I'm not a
disinterested party.

Taplin is very angry about a lot of things that I'm also very angry
about: the redefinition of monopoly to conveniently exclude the largest
and most powerful modern companies, the ability of those companies to
run roughshod over competitors in ways that simultaneously bring
innovation and abusive market power, a toxic mix of libertarian and
authoritarian politics deeply ingrained in the foundations of Silicon
Valley companies, and a blithe disregard for the social effects of
technology and for how to police the new communities that social media
has created. This is a book-length rant about the dangers of monopoly
domination of industries, politics, on-line communities, and the arts.
And the central example of those dangers is the horrific and
destructive power of pirating music on the Internet.

If you just felt a mental record-scratch and went "wait, what?", you're
probably from a community closer to mine than Taplin's.

I'm going to be clear up-front: this is a bad book. I'm not going to
recommend that you read it; quite the contrary, I recommend actively
avoiding it. It's poorly written, poorly argued, facile, and unfair,
and I say that with a great deal of frustration because I agree with
about 80% of its core message. This is the sort of book from an
erstwhile ally that makes me cringe: it's a significant supply of straw
men, weak arguments, bad-faith arguments, and motivated reasoning that
make the case for economic reform so much harder. There are good
arguments against capitalism in the form in which we're practicing it.
Taplin makes only some of them, and makes them badly.

Despite that, I read the entire book, and I'm still somewhat glad that
I did, because it provides a fascinating look at the way unexamined
premises lead people to far different conclusions. It also provides a
more visceral feel for how people, like Taplin, who are deeply and
personally invested in older ways of doing business, reach for a sort
of reflexive conservatism when pushing back against the obvious abuses
of new forms of inequality and market abuse. I found a reminder here to
take a look at my own knee-jerk reactions and think about places where
I may be reaching for backward-looking rather than forward-looking
solutions.

This is a review, though, so before I get lost in introspection, I
should explain why I think so poorly of this book as an argument.

I suspect most people who read enough partisan opinion essays on-line
will notice the primary flaw in Move Fast and Break Things as early as
I did: this is the kind of book that's full of carefully-chosen quotes
designed to make the person being quoted look bad. You'll get a tour of
the most famous ill-chosen phrases, expressions of greed, and
cherry-picked bits of naked capitalism from the typical suspects:
Google, Facebook, and Amazon founders, other Silicon Valley venture
capitalists and CEOs, and of course Peter Thiel. Now, Thiel is an
odious reactionary and aspiring fascist who yearns for the days when he
could live as an unchallenged medieval lord. There's almost no quote
you could cherry-pick from him that would make him look worse than he
actually is, so I'll give Taplin a free pass on that one. But for the
rest, Taplin is not even attempting to understand or engage with the
arguments that his opponents are making. He's just finding the most
damning statements, the ones that look the ugliest out of context, and
parading them before the reader in an attempt to provoke an emotional
reaction.

There is a long-standing principle of argument that you should engage
with your opponents' position in its strongest form. If you cannot
understand the merits and strengths of the opposing position and
restate them well enough that an advocate of the opposing view would
accept your summary as fair, you aren't prepared to argue the point.
Taplin does not even come close to doing that. In the debate over the
new Internet monopolies and monopsonies, one central conflict is
between the distorting and dangerous concentration of power and the
vast and very real improvements they've brought for consumers. I don't
like Amazon as a company, and yet I read this book on a Kindle because
their products are excellent and the consumer experience of their store
is first-rate. I don't like Google as a company, but their search
engine is by far the best available. One can quite legitimately take a
wide range of political, economic, and ethical positions on that
conflict, but one has to acknowledge there is a real conflict. Taplin
is not particularly interested in doing that.

Similarly, and returning to the double-take moment with which I began
this review, Taplin is startlingly unwilling to examine the flaws of
the previous economic systems that he's defending. He writes a paean to
the wonderful world of mutual benefit, artistic support, and economic
fairness of record labels! Admittedly, I was not deeply enmeshed in
that industry the way that he was, and he restrains his praise
primarily to the 1960s and 1970s, so it's possible this isn't as
mind-boggling as it sounds on first presentation. But, even apart from
the numerous stories of artists cheated out of the profits of their
work by the music industry long before Silicon Valley entered the
picture, Taplin only grudgingly recognizes that the merits he sees in
that industry were born of a specific moment in time, a specific
pattern of demand, supply, sales method, and cultural moment, and that
this world would not have lasted regardless of Napster or YouTube.

In other words, Taplin does the equivalent of arguing against Uber by
claiming the taxi industry was a model of efficiency, economic
fairness, and free competition. There are many persuasive arguments
against new exploitative business practices. This is not one of them.

More tellingly to me, there is zero acknowledgment in this book that I
can recall of one of the defining experiences of my generation and
younger: the decision by the music and motion picture industries to
fight on-line copying of their product by launching a vicious campaign
of legal terrorism against teenagers and college students. Taplin's
emotional appeals and quote cherry-picking falls on rather deaf ears
when I vividly remember the RIAA and MPAA setting out to deliberately
destroy people's lives in order to make an example of them, a level of
social coercion that Google and Facebook have not yet stooped to, at
least at that scale. Taplin is quite correct that his ideological
opponents are scarily oblivious to some of the destruction they're
wreaking on social and artistic communities, but he needs to come to
terms with the fact that some of his allies are thugs.

This is where my community departs from Taplin's. I've been part of the
free software community for decades, which includes a view of copyright
that is neither the constrained economic model that Taplin advocates as
a way to hopefully support artists, nor the corporate libertarian
free-for-all from which Google draws its YouTube advertising profits.
The free software community stands mostly opposed to both of those
economic models, while pursuing the software equivalent of artist
collectives. We have our own issues with creeping corporate control of
our communities, and with the balance to strike between expanding the
commons and empowering amoral companies like Google, Facebook, and
Amazon to profit off of our work. Those fights play out in software
licensing discussions routinely. But returning to a 1950s model of
commercial music (which looks a lot like the 1980s model of commercial
software) is clearly not possible, or even desirable if it were.

And that, apart from the poor argumentative technique and the tendency
to engage with the weakest of his opponents' arguments, is the largest
flaw I see in Taplin's book: he's invested in a binary fight between
the economic world of his youth, which worked in ways that he considers
fair, and a new economic world that is breaking the guarantees that he
considers ethically important. He's not wrong about the problem, and I
completely agree with him on the social benefit of putting artists in a
more central position of influence in society. But he's not looking
deeply at examples of artistic communities that have navigated this
better than his own beloved music industry (book publishing, for
example, which certainly has its problems with Amazon's monopsony power
but is also in some ways stronger than it has ever been). And he's not
looking at communities that are approaching the same problem from a
different angle, such as free software. He's so caught up on what he
sees as the fundamental unfairness of artists not being paid directly
by each person consuming their work that he isn't stepping back to look
at larger social goals and alternative ways they could be met.

I'm sure I'm making some of these same mistakes, in other places and in
other ways. These problems are hard and some of the players truly are
malevolent, so you cannot assume good will and good faith on all
fronts. But there are good opposing arguments and simple binary
analysis will fail.

Taplin, to give him credit, does try to provide some concrete solutions
in the last chapter. He realizes that you cannot put the genie of easy
digital copies back in the bottle, and tries to talk about alternate
approaches that aren't awful (although they're things like
micropayments and subscription services that are familiar ground for
anyone familiar with this problem). I agree wholeheartedly with his
arguments for returning to a pre-Reagan definition of monopoly power
and stricter regulation of Internet advertising business. He might even
be able to convince me that take-down-and-stay-down (the doctrine that
material removed due to copyright complaints has to be kept off the
same platform in the future) is a workable compromise... if he would
also agree to fines, paid to the victim, of at least $50,000 per
instance for every false complaint from a media company claiming
copyright on material to which they have no rights. (Taplin seems
entirely unaware of the malevolent abuses of copyright complaint
systems by his beloved media industry.) As I said, I agree with about
80% of his positions.

But, sadly, this is not the book to use to convince anyone of those
positions, or even the book to read for material in one's own debates.
It would need more thoughtful engagement of the strongest of the
arguments from new media and technology companies, a broader eye to
allied fights, a deep look at the flaws in the capitalist system that
made these monopoly abuses possible, and a willingness to look at the
related abuses of Taplin's closest friends. Without those elements, I'm
afraid this book isn't worth your time.

Rating: 3 out of 10

Reviewed: 2018-10-24

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

From eagle at eyrie.org  Sat Oct 27 20:07:13 2018
From: eagle at eyrie.org (Russ Allbery)
Date: Sat, 27 Oct 2018 20:07:13 -0700
Subject: Review: Record of a Spaceborn Few, by Becky Chambers
Message-ID: <87efcakbvi.fsf@hope.eyrie.org>

Record of a Spaceborn Few
by Becky Chambers

Series:    Wayfarers #3
Publisher: Harper Voyager
Copyright: July 2018
ISBN:      0-06-269923-7
Format:    Kindle
Pages:     360

This is the third book in the loose Wayfarers series and has a distant
connection to (and a few minor spoilers for) The Long Way to a Small,
Angry Planet, but it could easily be read out of order. That said, I
think it carries some extra emotional heft from the sense of humanity's
position in the larger galaxy one gains from reading the two previous
books.

I'm about to rave about this book, but I also suspect this is the type
of book that some will read and think "huh, what was the point of that
story?" or find it lacking in plot. Others are going to bounce off of
the science or world-building. I adore this book, but it's one that's
best approached from a particular mindset, so let me try to frame it
for you so that you know whether it will fit your mood.

First, Record of a Spaceborn Few is a mosaic novel: an interwoven set
of stories told from the perspective of five inhabitants of the Exodus
Fleet. It's set in the home of humanity in the stars in this universe,
a place mentioned in the previous two books but never before seen
directly. Mosaic novels can require some up-front investment because of
the number of character introductions required. That's complicated here
by starting the book with a brutal disaster, which makes the early
parts of the novel both slow going and somewhat depressing.

Second, as you might guess from a setting on an evacuation fleet for
humanity, or from reading previous books in this series, the science is
in service of the story rather than the other way around. If you're
going to be thrown out of the story by generating power for a
spacecraft from the movement of water through its recycling system, do
yourself a favor and put off reading this book until your suspension of
disbelief is strong enough to hold perpetual motion machines. I've come
to love how Chambers chooses technology to build atmosphere,
particularly in this book where the subjective feel of the technology
is a vital part of the story. But, despite some surface appearances,
this is not hard science fiction, and will not be satisfying if read on
those terms.

And third, this is not a book with a strong, driving plot. A Closed and
Common Orbit had more narrative urgency, but Record of a Spaceborn Few
is a return to the more relaxed pace and closer character work of The
Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet (only with more skill and more
sure-footed writing). It shows excerpts from the lives of five people,
touching and sometimes entwining, but following separate paths. None of
those lives are dramatic, none are central to wars or diplomatic crises
or the future of civilization. They are important to the individuals
who lived them, and to their families, and for what they show of the
ideals and structures of a culture and a community.

And now we come to the raving part of this review, because once
Chambers starts drawing the pieces of the mosaic story together, it
becomes a beautiful and deeply moving meditation on place and culture,
on what it means to be from somewhere or to be part of something, on
when and why social rituals matter. Like the best of Chambers's
writing, it's a master course in empathy. She quietly leads you into
other people's lives, helps you feel their day-to-day concerns and
fears and frustrations, shows you their good and bad decisions, and
leaves you caring deeply about the twists and turns of their lives. Her
previous novels were about found and constructed communities, about
chosen families; this one is about the communities you're born into,
the ones you inherit, and all the ways people maneuver around them, and
why none of those ways are wrong.

There are some tragedies at the center of this book, but it is not a
tragic book. Quite the contrary: it's deeply hopeful in a way that's
forgiving, understanding, open-hearted, and gracefully welcoming. It is
one of the most touching presentations of the meaning of culture that
I've read: how it can matter where you're from even if it's not where
you choose to stay, how the shapes of our cultures are neither
intrinsically good nor bad but the variety of them becomes good because
of its diversity, and why passing down that culture matters as a
gesture of humanity. And it does something very rare in a science
fiction novel. It shows how the contributions of people who are not the
strongest or most visible matter, not because they happen to be the
linchpin in some grand plot, but because small actions build into a
shared experience, and that shared experience is part of what makes us
human.

The science is not hard science, and the focus is on universal truths
about people and communities, but this is a science fiction story
through and through. You could not tell the story Chambers does without
the alienation of the reader provided by the tropes and setting of
science fiction. She creates a human culture that is quite different
from ours out of science fiction necessity, and then uses it to hold up
a mirror that shows the special magic of all cultures while not hiding
the dirt or the frayed corners or the sharp edges.

I suspect others won't have quite as strong of a reaction to this book
as I did, but it was exactly the book I needed to read when I read it,
and I love it beyond words. I was crying through most of the last third
of the book and absolutely could not put it down. For me, this was
something very magical, and very special, and one of the best books
I've ever read.

Rating: 10 out of 10

Reviewed: 2018-10-27

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

From eagle at eyrie.org  Wed Oct 31 20:27:03 2018
From: eagle at eyrie.org (Russ Allbery)
Date: Wed, 31 Oct 2018 20:27:03 -0700
Subject: Review: In Pursuit of the Traveling Salesman, by William J. Cook
Message-ID: <87pnvpa35k.fsf@hope.eyrie.org>

In Pursuit of the Traveling Salesman
by William J. Cook

Publisher: Princeton University
Copyright: 2012
ISBN:      0-691-15270-5
Format:    Kindle
Pages:     272

In Pursuit of the Traveling Salesman is a book-length examination of
the traveling salesman problem (TSP) in computer science, written by
one of the foremost mathematicians working on solutions to the TSP.
Cook is Professor of Applied Mathematics and Statistics at Johns
Hopkins University and is one of the authors of the Concorde TSP
Solver.

First, a brief summary of the TSP for readers without a CS background.
While there are numerous variations, the traditional problem is this:
given as input a list of coordinates on a two-dimensional map
representing cities, construct a minimum-length path that visits each
city exactly once and then returns to the starting city. It's famous in
computer science in part because it's easy to explain and visualize but
still NP-hard, which means that not only do we not know of a way to
exactly solve this problem in a reasonable amount of time for large
numbers of cities, but also that a polynomial-time solution to the TSP
would provide a solution to a vast number of other problems. (For those
familiar with computability theory, the classic TSP is not NP-complete
because it's not a decision problem and because of some issues with
Euclidean distances, but when stated as a graph problem and converted
into a decision problem by, for example, instead asking if there is a
solution with length less than n, it is NP-complete.)

This is one of those books where the quality of the book may not matter
as much as its simple existence. If you're curious about the details of
the traveling salesman problem specifically, but don't want to read a
lot of mathematics and computer science papers, algorithm textbooks, or
books on graph theory, this book is one of your few options.
Thankfully, it's also fairly well-written. Cook provides a history of
the problem, a set of motivating problems (the TSP doesn't come up as
much and isn't as critical as some NP-complete problems, but optimal
tours are still more common than one might think), and even a
one-chapter tour of the TSP in art. The bulk of the book, though, is
devoted to approximation methods, presented in roughly chronological
order of development.

Given that the TSP is NP-hard, we obviously don't know a good exact
solution, but I admit I was a bit disappointed that Cook spent only one
chapter exploring the exact solutions and explaining to the reader what
makes the problem difficult. Late in the book, he does describe the
Held-Karp dynamic programming algorithm that gets the work required for
an exact solution down to exponential in n, provides a basic
introduction to complexity theory, and explains that the TSP is
NP-complete by reduction from the Hamiltonian path problem, but doesn't
show the reduction of 3SAT to Hamiltonian paths. Since my personal
interest ran a bit more towards theory and less towards practical
approximations, I would have appreciated a bit more discussion of the
underlying structure of the problem and why it's algorithmically hard.
(I did appreciate the explanation of why it's not clear whether the
general Euclidean TSP is even in NP due to problems with square roots,
though.)

That said, I suppose there isn't as much to talk about in exact
solutions (the best one we know dates to 1962) and much more to talk
about in approximations, which is where Cook has personally spent his
time. That's the topic of most of this book, and includes a solid
introduction to the basic concept of linear programming (a better one
than I ever got in school) and some of its other applications, as well
as other techniques (cutting planes, branch-and-bound, and others). The
math gets a bit thick here, and Cook skips over a lot of the details to
try to keep the book suitable for a general audience, so I can't say I
followed all of it, but it certainly satisfied my curiosity about
practical approaches to the TSP. (It also made me want to read more
about linear programming.)

If you're looking for a book like this, you probably know that already,
and I can reassure you that it delivers what it promises and is
well-written and approachable. If you aren't already curious about a
brief history of practical algorithms for one specific problem, I don't
think this book is sufficiently compelling to worth seeking out anyway.
This is not a general popularization of interesting algorithms (see
Algorithms to Live By if you're looking for that), or (despite Cook's
efforts) particularly approachable if this is your first deep look at
computer algorithms. It's a niche book that delivers on its promise,
but probably won't convince you the topic is interesting if you don't
see the appeal.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Reviewed: 2018-10-31

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

From eagle at eyrie.org  Mon Nov 19 20:51:25 2018
From: eagle at eyrie.org (Russ Allbery)
Date: Mon, 19 Nov 2018 20:51:25 -0800
Subject: Review: Hidden Figures, by Margot Lee Shetterly
Message-ID: <875zwscpwy.fsf@hope.eyrie.org>

Hidden Figures
by Margot Lee Shetterly

Publisher: William Morrow
Copyright: 2016
ISBN:      0-06-236361-1
Format:    Kindle
Pages:     272

I appreciate the film industry occasionally finding good books that I
should read.

As I suspect most people now know from the publicity of the movie,
Hidden Figures is the story of the black women mathematicians who
performed the calculations that put a man on the Moon. Or at least
that's the hook, and the conclusion of the story in a way. But the meat
of the story, at least for me, was earlier: the black women who formed
the mathematical backbone of NACA, the National Advisory Committee for
Aeronautics, and specifically the NACA facility at Langley Research
Center in Hampton, Virginia. NACA eventually transformed into NASA and
took on a new mission of space exploration, but that comes relatively
late in this story.

The story opens in 1943 when Melvin Butler, the personnel officer at
the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory, had a problem: he needed
more support staff for NACA's mission to improve US airplane
technology. Specifically, he needed mathematicians and computers (at
the time, computer was a job title for a person who performed
mathematical computations; practical electronic computers were still
far in the future). An initially-controversial female computing pool,
started at Langley in 1935, had proven incredibly successful, but
mathematically-trained white women were in scarce supply. Butler
therefore, with support and cover from A. Philip Randolph's successful
push for Roosevelt to open war jobs to black candidates, made the
decision to start recruiting black women.

Shetterly makes clear how complex and fraught this was. Langley was
located in Virginia, a segregated southern state, and while the NAACP
had already started opening cracks in the walls of segregation, Brown
v. Board of Education was more than ten years into the future. The
white female computers were already logistically separated, since no
woman could supervise a man. The black women would need to be
segregated further, and Butler's recruitment efforts were kept fairly
quiet. But wartime necessity opened a lot of doors. And so, West
Computing (distinct from the white women in East Computing) was formed,
named after its location in Langley's underdeveloped West Area.

Hidden Figures starts with Dorothy Vaughan, the woman who will
eventually become the head of West Computing, and later follows threads
of connection from her to Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson, and others
who started in West Computing. It also, effectively and memorably,
starts by setting the scene through both biographical details of the
women's lives and authorial descriptions of the complex tapestry of
black colleges and social relationships they came from.

For me, writing this as a white man in 2018 who grew up on the west
coast and visited even the modern US South a mere handful of times,
it's very hard to get an emotional or visceral sense of what
segregation was like, beneath the bones of historical fact. Hidden
Figures does the best job of that of any book I have ever read.
Shetterly is blunt and unflinching in her descriptions, but also
borrows from her biographical subjects a sense of practical
determination and persistence that avoids drowning the story in the
injustice of US racial politics. Segregation was an obstacle and a
constraint these women navigated around, persisted against, suffered
through, and occasionally undermined, but it wasn't the point. The
point was the work they were doing: the NACA work to develop and then
fine-tune military aircraft technology, the post-war work of supersonic
research, and finally the space program. Segregation, racism, and
sexism was pervasive, but at the same time they were just injustices
that got in the way of what their true life's work. That core of
determined joy in the work is what makes this book sing, and outlines a
path towards hope.

That this is Shetterly's first book is extremely impressive. She has a
confident grasp of her material, full control over a complicated
interweaving of timelines and biographies of multiple women, and an
ability to describe both cultural institutions and engineering work in
a way that holds a reader's attention and interest. This is tricky
material for a book because, while these women's lives are dramatic,
it's a drama of careful work, slow progress, persistence, and
carefully-chosen defiance. (I will always remember the story of Miriam
Mann taking the "COLORED COMPUTERS" sign off the lunch table each day
and making it disappear into her purse, until whoever was responsible
for placing it finally gave up and stopped.) The dramatic beats don't
follow a normal plot structure. But Shetterly handles this
magnificently for most of the book, keeping the pacing fast enough to
remain engrossing but slow enough to communicate the underlying reality
and sense of place.

The one mild criticism I have of the book is that once it enters the
NASA era and the challenge of the space program, I thought Shetterly
started forcing her dramatic beats just a touch. I think she was trying
to build to a climactic payoff and emphasizing the inherent drama of
the Moon landing to do so, but it felt in a few places like she was
trying too hard and not letting the story carry itself. This was at the
same time as a huge transition from performing calculations themselves
to learning to program computers, and I would have loved for Shetterly
to dwell a bit more on that, but she rarely got into the details of the
day-to-day work. That quibble aside, though, the story is compelling
and fascinating to the very end.

Shetterly also pulls off a very advanced technique that I would not
recommend other writers try: the whole story is told using the language
of the time. Black people are Negros, women are girls, and the very
language of the book rolls back decades of social progress. This was
done carefully and exceptionally well, and for me it did a lot to
communicate the visceral feel of the time (and to drive home just how
much society has changed in at least the level of condescension and
contempt that can be openly stated). I was surprised at how much the
pervasive use of "girls" made my skin crawl, and how clearly and
succinctly it communicated the struggle of the computers to be taken
seriously as mathematicians and engineers.

I have not watched the movie version of Hidden Figures and probably
won't, although I hear it's very good. But for others like me who
prefer words over images, I can confirm that the book is excellent.
It's not just a valuable history at the cross-section of aviation,
computing, racial politics, and gender politics. It's also an
illuminating and compelling case study on the effects of institutional
racism and sexism, on how black women maneuvered through those
restrictions, and on the persistence, determination, and patience
required for social change.

Recommended. This is a piece of American history that you don't want to
miss.

Rating: 8 out of 10

Reviewed: 2018-11-19

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

From eagle at eyrie.org  Tue Nov 20 20:32:17 2018
From: eagle at eyrie.org (Russ Allbery)
Date: Tue, 20 Nov 2018 20:32:17 -0800
Subject: Review: Skeen's Leap, by Jo Clayton
Message-ID: <87tvkb6ofi.fsf@hope.eyrie.org>

Skeen's Leap
by Jo Clayton

Series:    Skeen #1
Publisher: Open Road
Copyright: 1986
Printing:  2016
ISBN:      1-5040-3845-2
Format:    Kindle
Pages:     320

Skeen is a Rooner: a treasure hunter who finds (or steals) artifacts
from prior civilizations and sells them to collectors. She's been doing
it for decades and she's very good at her job. Good enough to own her
own ship. Not good enough to keep from being betrayed by her lover, who
stole her ship and abandoned her on a miserable planet with a long
history of being temporarily part of various alien empires until its
sun flares and wipes out all life for another round.

At the start, Skeen's Leap feels like a gritty space opera, something
from Traveller or a similar universe in which the characters try to
make a living in the interstices of sprawling and squabbling alien
civilizations. But, shortly into the book, Skeen hears rumors of an
ancient teleportation gate and is drawn through it into an entirely
different world. A world inhabited by the remnants of every
civilization that has fled Kildun Aalda during one of its solar flares,
alongside native (and hostile) shape-changers. A world in which each of
those civilizations have slowly lost their technology from breakdowns
and time, leaving a quasi-medieval and diverse world with some odd
technological spikes. And, of course, the gate won't let Skeen back
through.

This turns out not to be space opera at all. Skeen's Leap is pure sword
and sorcery, with technology substituted (mostly) in for the sorcery.

It's not just the setting: the structure of the book would be
comfortably at home in a Conan story. Skeen uses her darter pistol and
streetwise smarts to stumble into endless short encounters, most of
them adding another member to her growing party. She rescues a
shapeshifter who doesn't want to be rescued, befriends an adventuring
scholar seeking to map the world, steals from an alien mob boss,
attaches herself to four surplus brothers looking for something to do
in the world, and continues in that vein across the world by horse and
ship, searching for the first and near-extinct race of alien refugees
who are rumored to have the key to the gate. Along the way, she and her
companions occasionally tell stories. Hers are similar to her current
adventures, just with spaceships and seedy space stations instead of
ships and seedy ports.

Skeen's Leap is told in third person, but most of it is a very tight
third-person that barely distinguishes Skeen's rambling and sarcastic
thoughts from the narration. It's so very much in Skeen's own voice
that I had to check when writing this review whether it was
grammatically in first or third. The narrator does wander to other
characters occasionally, but Skeen is at the center of this book:
practical, avaricious, competent, life-hardened, observant, and always
a survivor. The voice takes a bit to get used to (although the lengthy
chapter titles in Skeen's voice are a delight from the very start), but
it grew on me. I suspect one's feeling about Skeen's voice will make or
break one's enjoyment of this book. I do wish she'd stop complaining
about her lost ship and the lover who betrayed her, though; an entire
book of that got a bit tiresome.

One subtle thing about this book that I found fascinating once I
noticed it is its embrace of the female gaze. In most novels, even with
female protagonists, descriptions of other characters use a default
male gaze, or at best a neutral one. Women are pretty or beautiful or
cute; men are described in more functional terms. Skeen's Leap is one
of the few SFF novels I've seen with a female gaze that lingers on the
attractiveness and shape of male bodies throughout, and occasionally
stands gender roles on their head. (The one person in the book who
might be Skeen's equal is a female ship captain with a similar
background.) It's an entertaining variation.

Despite the voice and the unapologetic female perspective, though, this
wasn't quite my thing. I picked up this book looking for a space opera,
so the episodic sword-and-sorcery plot structure didn't fit my mood. I
wanted deeper revelations and more complex world-building, but that's
not on the agenda for this book (although it might be in later books in
the series). This is pure adventure story, and by the end of the book
the episodes were blending together and it all felt too much the same.
It doesn't help that the book ends somewhat abruptly, at a milestone in
Skeen's quest but quite far from any conclusion.

If you're looking for sword and sorcery with some SF trappings and a
confident female protagonist, this isn't bad, but be warned that it
doesn't end so much as stop, and you'll need (at least) the next book
for the full story.

Followed by Skeen's Return.

Rating: 6 out of 10

Reviewed: 2018-11-20

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

From eagle at eyrie.org  Wed Nov 28 21:26:29 2018
From: eagle at eyrie.org (Russ Allbery)
Date: Wed, 28 Nov 2018 21:26:29 -0800
Subject: Review: The Blind Side, by Michael Lewis
Message-ID: <87bm68mp2y.fsf@hope.eyrie.org>

The Blind Side
by Michael Lewis

Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company
Copyright: 2006, 2007
Printing:  2007
ISBN:      0-393-33047-8
Format:    Trade paperback
Pages:     339

One of the foundations of Michael Lewis's mastery of long-form
journalism is that he is an incredible storyteller. Given even dry
topics of interest (baseball statistics, bond trading, football
offensive lines), he has an uncanny knack for finding memorable
characters around which to tell a story, and uses their involvement as
the backbone of a clear explanation of complex processes or situations.
That's why one of the surprises of The Blind Side is that Lewis loses
control of his material.

The story that Lewis wants to tell is the development of the left
tackle position in professional football. The left tackle is the player
on the outside of the offensive line on the blind side of a
right-handed quarterback. The advent of the west-coast offense with its
emphasis on passing plays, and the corresponding development of
aggressive pass rushers in the era of Lawrence Taylor, transformed that
position from just another member of the most anonymous group of people
in football into one of the most highly-paid positions on the field.
The left tackle is the person most responsible for stopping a pass
rush.

Lewis does tell that story in The Blind Side, but every time he diverts
into it, the reader is left tapping their foot in frustration and
wishing he'd hurry up. That's because the other topic of this book, the
biographical through line, is Michael Oher, and Michael Oher the person
is so much more interesting than anything Lewis has to say about
football that the football parts seem wasted.

I'm not sure how many people will manage to read this book without
having the details of Oher's story spoiled for them first, particularly
given there's also a movie based on this book, but I managed it and
loved the unfolding of the story. I'm therefore going to leave out most
of the specifics to avoid spoilers. But the short version is that Oher
was a sometimes-homeless, neglected black kid with incredible physical
skills but almost no interaction with the public school system who
ended up being adopted as a teenager by a wealthy white family. They
help him clear the hurdles required to play NCAA football.

That's just the bare outline. It's an amazing story, and Lewis tells it
very well. I had a hard time putting this book down, and rushed through
the background chapters on the evolution of football to get back to
more details about Oher. But, as much as Lewis tries to make this book
a biography of Oher himself, it's really not. As Lewis discloses at the
end of this edition, he's a personal friend of Sean Tuohy, Oher's
adoptive father. Oher was largely unwilling to talk to Lewis about his
life before he met the Tuohys. Therefore, this is, more accurately, the
story of Oher as seen from the Tuohys' perspective, which is not quite
the same thing.

There are so many pitfalls here that it's amazing Lewis navigates them
as well as he does, and even he stumbles. There are stereotypes and
pieces of American mythology lurking everywhere beneath this story,
trying to make the story snap to them like a guiding grid: the wealthy
white family welcoming in the poor black kid, the kid with amazing
physical talent who is very bad at school, the black kid with an addict
mother, the white Christian school who takes him in, the colleges who
try to recruit him... you cannot live in this country without strong
feelings about all of these things. Nestled next to this story like
landmines are numerous lies that white Americans tell themselves to
convince themselves that they're not racist. I could feel the
mythological drag on this story trying to make Oher something he's not,
trying to make him fit into a particular social frame. It's one of the
reasons why I doubt I'll ever see the movie: it's difficult to imagine
a movie managing to avoid that undertow.

To give Lewis full credit, he fights to keep this story free of its
mythology every step of the way, and you can see the struggle in the
book. He succeeds best at showing that Oher is not at all dumb, but
instead is an extremely intelligent teenager who was essentially never
given an opportunity to learn. He also provides a lot of grounding and
nuance to Oher's relationship with the Tuohys. They're still in
something of a savior role, but it seems partly deserved. And, most
importantly, he's very open about the fact that Oher largely didn't
talk to anyone about his past, including Lewis, so except for a chapter
near the end laying out the information Lewis was able to gather, it's
mostly conjecture on the part of the Tuohys and others.

But there is so much buried here, so many fault lines of US society, so
many sharp corners of racism and religion and class, that Oher's story
just does not fit into Lewis's evolution-of-football narrative. It
spills out of the book, surfaces deep social questions that Lewis
barely touches on, and leaves so many open questions (including Oher's
own voice). One major example: Briarcrest Christian School, the high
school Oher played for and the place where he was discovered as a
potential NCAA and later professional football player, is a private
high school academy formed in 1973 after the desegregation of Memphis
schools as a refuge for the children of white supremacists. Lewis
describes Oher's treatment as one of only three black children at the
school as positive; I can believe that because three kids out of a
thousand plays into one kind of narrative. Later, Lewis mentions in
passing that the school balked at the applications of other black kids
once Oher became famous, and one has to wonder how that might change
the narrative for the school's administration and parents. There's a
story there that's left untold, and might not be as positive as Oher's
reception.

Don't get me wrong: these aren't truly flaws in Lewis's book, because
he's not even trying to tell that story. He's telling the story of one
exceptional young man who reached college football through a truly
unusual set of circumstances, and he tells that story well. I just
can't help but look for systems in individual stories, to look for
institutions that should have been there for Oher and weren't. Once I
started looking, the signs of systemic failures sit largely unremarked
beneath nearly every chapter. Maybe this is a Rorschach test of
political analysis: do you see an exceptional person rising out of
adversity through human charity, or a failure of society that has to be
patched around by uncertain chance that, for most people, will fail
without ever leaving a trace?

The other somewhat idiosyncratic reaction I had to this book, and the
reason why I've put off reading it for so long, is that I now find it
hard to read about football. While I've always been happy to watch
nearly any sport, football used to be my primary sport as a fan, the
one I watched every Sunday and most Saturdays. As a kid, I even kept my
own game statistics from time to time, and hand-maintained team regular
season standings. But somewhere along the way, the violence, the head
injuries, and the basic incompatibility between the game as currently
played and any concept of safety for the players got to me. I was never
someone who loved the mud and the blood and the aggression; I grew up
on the west coast offense and the passing game and watched football for
the tactics. But football is an incredibly violent sport, and the story
of quarterback sacks, rushing linebackers, and the offensive line is
one of the centers of that violence. Lewis's story opens with Joe
Theismann's leg injury in 1985, which is one of the most horrific
injuries in the history of sport. I guess I don't have it in me to get
excited about a sport that does things like that to its players any
more.

I think The Blind Side is a bit of a mess as a book, but I'm still very
glad that I read it. Oher's story, particularly through Lewis's
story-telling lens, is incredibly compelling. I'm just also wary of it,
because it sits slightly askew on some of the deepest fault lines in
American society, and it's so easy for everyone involved to read things
into the story that are coming from that underlying mythology rather
than from Oher himself. I think Lewis fought through this whole book to
not do that; I think he mostly but did not entirely succeed.

The Tuohys have their own related book (In a Heartbeat), written with
Sally Jenkins, that's about their philosophy of giving and charity and
looks very, very Christian in a way that makes me doubtful that it will
shine a meaningful light on any of the social fault lines that Lewis
left unaddressed. But Oher, with Don Yaeger, has written his own
autobiography, I Beat the Odds, and that I will read. Given how
invested I got in his story through Lewis, I feel an obligation to hear
it on his own terms, rather than filtered through well-meaning white
people.

I will cautiously recommend this book because it's an amazing story and
Lewis tries very hard to do it justice. But I think this is a book
worth reading carefully, thinking about who we're hearing from and who
we aren't, and looking critically at the things Lewis leaves unsaid.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Reviewed: 2018-11-28

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

From eagle at eyrie.org  Sun Dec  2 20:24:52 2018
From: eagle at eyrie.org (Russ Allbery)
Date: Sun, 02 Dec 2018 20:24:52 -0800
Subject: Review: Linked, by =?utf-8?Q?Albert-L=C3=A1szl=C3=B3_Barab=C3=A1s?=
 =?utf-8?Q?i?=
Message-ID: <87k1kr9qzv.fsf@hope.eyrie.org>

Linked
by Albert-László Barabási

Publisher: Plume
Copyright: 2002, 2003
Printing:  May 2003
ISBN:      0-452-28439-2
Format:    Trade paperback
Pages:     241

Barabási at the time of this writing was a professor of physics at
Notre Dame University (he's now the director of Northeastern
University's Center of Complex Networks). Linked is a popularization of
his research into scale-free networks, their relationship to power-law
distributions (such as the distribution of wealth), and a proposed
model explaining why so many interconnected systems in nature and human
society appear to form scale-free networks. Based on some quick
Wikipedia research, it's worth mentioning that the ubiquity of
scale-free networks has been questioned and may not be as strong as
Barabási claims here, not that you would know about that controversy
from this book.

I've had this book sitting in my to-read pile for (checks records) ten
years, so I only vaguely remember why I bought it originally, but I
think it was recommended as a more scientific look at phenomenon
popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point. It isn't that,
exactly; Barabási is much less interested in how ideas spread than he
is in network structure and its implications for robustness and
propagation through the network. (Contagion, as in virus outbreaks, is
the obvious example of the latter.)

There are basically two parts to this book: a history of Barabási's
research into scale-free networks and the development of the
Barabási-Albert model for scale-free network generation, and then
Barabási's attempt to find scale-free networks in everything under the
sun and make grandiose claims about the implications of that structure
for human understanding. One of these parts is better than the other.

The basic definition of a scale-free network is a network where the
degree of the nodes (the number of edges coming into or out of the
node) follows a power-law distribution. It's a bit hard to describe a
power-law distribution without the math, but the intuitive idea is that
the distribution will contain a few "winners" who will have orders of
magnitude more connections than the average node, to the point that
their connections may dominate the graph. This is very unlike a normal
distribution (the familiar bell-shaped curve), where most nodes will
cluster around a typical number of connections and the number of nodes
with a given count of connections will drop off rapidly in either
direction from that peak. A typical example of a power-law distribution
outside of networks is personal wealth: rather than clustering around
some typical values the way natural measurements like physical height
do, a few people (Bill Gates, Warren Buffett) have orders of magnitude
more wealth than the average person and a noticeable fraction of all
wealth in society.

I am moderately dubious of Barabási's assertion here that most prior
analysis of networks before his scale-free work focused on random
networks (ones where new nodes are connected at an existing node chosen
at random), since this is manifestly not the case in computer science
(my personal field). However, scale-free networks are a real phenomenon
that have some very interesting properties, and Barabási and Albert's
proposal of how they might form (add nodes one at a time, and prefer to
attach a new node to the existing node with the most connections) is a
simple and compelling model of how they can form. Barabási also
discusses a later variation, which Wikipedia names the
Bianconi-Barabási model, which adds a fitness function for more complex
preferential attachment.

Linked covers the history of the idea from Barabási's perspective, as
well as a few of its fascinating properties. One is that scale-free
networks may not have a tipping point in the Gladwell sense. Depending
on the details, there may not be a lower limit of nodes that have to
adopt some new property for it to spread through the network. Another
is robustness: scale-free networks are startlingly robust against
removal of random nodes from the network, requiring removal of large
percentages of the nodes before the network fragments, but are quite
vulnerable to a more targeted attack that focuses on removing the hubs
(the nodes with substantially more connections than average).
Scale-free networks also naturally give rise to "six degrees of
separation" effects between any two nodes, since the concentration of
connections at hubs lead to short paths.

These parts of Linked were fairly interesting, if sometimes clunky.
Unfortunately, Barabási doesn't have enough material to talk about
mathematical properties and concrete implications at book length, and
instead wanders off into an exercise in finding scale-free networks
everywhere (cell metabolism, social networks, epidemics, terrorism),
and leaping from that assertion (which Wikipedia, at least, labels as
not necessarily backed up by later analysis) to some rather overblown
claims. I think my favorite was the confident assertion that by 2020 we
will be receiving custom-tailored medicine designed specifically for
the biological networks of our unique cells, which, one, clearly isn't
going to happen, and two, has a strained and dubious connection to
scale-free network theory to say the least. There's more in that vein.
(That said, the unexpected mathematical connection between the state
transition of a Bose-Einstein condensate and scale-free network
collapse given sufficiently strong attachment preference and permission
to move connections was at least entertaining.)

The general introduction to scale-free networks was interesting and
worth reading, but I think the core ideas of this book could have been
compressed into a more concise article (and probably have, somewhere on
the Internet). The rest of it was mostly boring, punctuated by the
occasional eye-roll. I appreciate Barabási's enthusiasm for his topic —
it reminds me of professors I worked with at Stanford and their
enthusiasm for their pet theoretical concept — but this may be one
reason to have the popularization written by someone else. Not really
recommended as a book, but if you really want a (somewhat dated)
introduction to scale-free networks, you could do worse.

Rating: 6 out of 10

Reviewed: 2018-12-02

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

From eagle at eyrie.org  Mon Dec  3 19:26:20 2018
From: eagle at eyrie.org (Russ Allbery)
Date: Mon, 03 Dec 2018 19:26:20 -0800
Subject: Review: The Winter Long, by Seanan McGuire
Message-ID: <8736redlb7.fsf@hope.eyrie.org>

The Winter Long
by Seanan McGuire

Series:    October Daye #8
Publisher: DAW
Copyright: 2014
ISBN:      1-101-60175-2
Format:    Kindle
Pages:     368

This is the eighth book in the October Daye series and leans heavily on
the alliances, friendship, world-building, and series backstory. This
is not the sort of series that can be meaningfully started in the
middle. And, for the same reason, it's also rather hard to review
without spoilers, although I'll give it a shot.

Toby has had reason to fear Simon Torquill for the entire series.
Everything that's happened to her was set off by him turning her into a
fish and destroying her life. She's already had to deal with his
partner (in Late Eclipses), so it's not a total surprise that he would
show up again. But Toby certainly didn't expect him to show up at her
house, or to sound weirdly unlike an enemy, or to reference a geas and
an employer. She had never understood his motives, but there may be
more to them than simple evil.

I have essentially struck out trying to recommend this series to other
people. I think everyone else who's started it has bounced off of it
for various reasons: unimpressed by Toby's ability to figure things
out, feeling the bits borrowed from the mystery genre are badly done,
not liking Irish folklore transplanted to the San Francisco Bay Area,
or just finding it too dark. I certainly can't argue with people's
personal preferences, but I want to, since this remains my favorite
urban fantasy series and I want to talk about it with more people.
Thankfully, the friends who started reading it independent of my
recommendation all love it too. (Perhaps I'm cursing it somehow?)

Regardless, this is more of exactly what I like about this series,
which was never the private detective bits (that have now been
discarded entirely) and was always the maneuverings and dominance games
of faerie politics, the comfort and solid foundation of Toby's chosen
family, Toby's full-throttle-forward approach to forcing her way
through problems, and the lovely layered world-building. There is so
much going on in McGuire's faerie realm, so many hidden secrets, old
grudges, lost history, and complex family relationships. I can see some
of the shape of problems that the series will eventually resolve, but I
still have no guesses as to how McGuire will resolve them.

The Winter Long takes another deep look at some of Toby's oldest
relationships, including revisiting some events from Rosemary and Rue
(the first book of the series) in a new light. It also keeps, and
further deepens, my favorite relationships in this series: Tybalt, Mags
and the Library (introduced in the previous book), and of course the
Luidaeg, who is my favorite character in the entire series and the one
I root for the most.

I've been trying to pinpoint what I like so much about this series,
particularly given the number of people who disagree, and I think it's
that Toby gets along with, and respects, a wide variety of difficult
people, and brings to every interaction a consistent set of internal
ethics and priorities. McGuire sets this against a backdrop of court
politics, ancient rivalries and agreements, and hidden races with
contempt for humans; Toby's role in that world is to stubbornly do the
right thing based mostly on gut feeling and personal loyalty. It's not
particularly complex ethics; most of the challenges she faces are
eventually resolved by finding the right person to kick (or, more
frequently now, use her slowly-growing power against) and the right
place to kick them.

That simplicity is what I like. This is my comfort reading. Toby looks
at tricky court intrigues, bull-headedly does the right thing, and
manages to make that work out, which for me (particularly in this
political climate) is escapism in the best sense. She has generally
good judgment in her friends, those friends stand by her, and the good
guys win. Sometimes that's just what I want in a series, particularly
when it comes with an impressive range of mythological creations, an
interesting and slowly-developing power set, enjoyable character
banter, and a ton of world-building mysteries that I want to know more
about.

Long story short, this is more of Toby and friends in much the same
vein as the last few books in the series. It adds new depth to some
past events, moves Toby higher into the upper echelons of faerie
politics, and contains many of my favorite characters. Oh, and, for
once, Toby isn't sick or injured or drugged for most of the story,
which I found a welcome relief.

If you've read this far into the series, I think you'll love it. I
certainly did.

Followed by A Red-Rose Chain.

Rating: 8 out of 10

Reviewed: 2018-12-03

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

From eagle at eyrie.org  Mon Dec 17 19:00:31 2018
From: eagle at eyrie.org (Russ Allbery)
Date: Mon, 17 Dec 2018 19:00:31 -0800
Subject: Review: Grand Central Arena, by Ryk E. Spoor
Message-ID: <87woo7k08g.fsf@hope.eyrie.org>

Grand Central Arena
by Ryk E. Spoor

Series:    Arenaverse #1
Publisher: Baen
Copyright: May 2010
ISBN:      1-4391-3355-7
Format:    Mass market
Pages:     671

Ariane Austin is an unlimited space obstacle racing pilot, recruited at
the start of the book for the first human test of a faster-than-light
drive. She was approached because previous automated tests experienced
very strange effects, if they returned at all. The drive seems to work
as expected, but all AIs, even less-intelligent ones, stopped working
while the drive was engaged and the probe was outside normal space. The
rules of space obstacle racing require manual control of the ship,
making Ariane one of the few people qualified to be a pilot.

Ariane plus a crew of another seven are assembled. They include the
scientist who invented the drive in the first place, and a somewhat
suspicious person named Marc DuQuesne. (Pulp SF fans will immediately
recognize the reference, which makes the combination of his past
secrets and the in-universe explanation for his name rather
unbelievable.) But when the drive is activated, rather than finding
themselves in the open alternate dimension they expected, they find
themselves inside a huge structure, near a model of their own solar
system, with all of their companion AIs silenced.

Ryk E. Spoor is better known to old Usenet people as Sea Wasp. After
all these years of seeing him in on-line SF communities, I wanted to
read one of his books. I'm glad I finally did, since this was a lot of
fun. Grand Central Arena starts as a Big Dumb Object story, as the
characters try to figure out why their shortcut dimension is filled
with a giant structure, but then turns into a fun first contact story
and political caper when they meet the rest of the inhabitants. The
characterization is a bit slapdash and the quality of the writing isn't
anything special, but the plot moves right along. I stayed happily lost
in the book for hours.

As you might guess from the title, the environment in which the
intrepid human explorers find themselves is set up to provoke conflict.
That conflict has a complex set of rules and a complex system of rule
enforcement. Figuring out both is much of the plot of this book. The
aliens come in satisfyingly pulpish variety, and this story has a
better excuse than most for the necessary universal translator
(although I do have to note that none of the aliens act particularly
alien). There are a lot of twisty politics and factions to navigate, a
satisfying and intriguing alien guide and possible ally, political and
religious factions with believable world views, a surprisingly
interesting justification for humans being able to punch above their
weight, a ton of juicy questions (only some of which get answered), and
some impressively grand architecture. Spoor's set pieces don't do that
architecture as much justice as, say, Iain M. Banks would, but he still
succeeds in provoking an occasional feeling of awe.

One particular highlight is that the various alien factions have
different explanations for why the Arena exists, encourage the humans
to take sides, and are not easily proven right or wrong. Spoor does a
great job maintaining a core ambiguity in the fight between the alien
factions. The humans are drawn to certain allies, by preference or
accident or early assistance, but those allies may well be critically
and dangerously wrong about the nature of the world in which they find
themselves. As befits a political and religious argument that has gone
on for centuries, all sides have strong arguments and well-worn
rebuttals, and humans have no special advantage in sorting this out.
This is not how this plot element is normally handled in SF. I found it
a refreshing bit of additional complexity.

The biggest grumble I had about this book is that Spoor keeps resorting
to physical combat to resolve climaxes. I know the word "arena" is
right there in the title of the book, so maybe I shouldn't have
expected anything else. But the twisty politics were so much more fun
than the detailed descriptions of weapons or RPG-style combat scenes in
which I could almost hear dice rolling in the background. Spoor even
sets up the rules of challenges so that they don't need to involve
physical violence, and uses that fact a few times, but keeps coming
back to technology-aided slug-fests for most of the tense moments. I
think this would have been a more interesting book if some of those
scenes were replaced with more political trickiness.

That said, the physical confrontations are in genre for old-school
space opera, which is definitely what Grand Central Arena is. It has
that feel of an E.E. "Doc" Smith book (which is exactly what Spoor was
going for from the dedication), thankfully without the creepy gender
politics. The primary protagonist is a woman (without any skeevy
comments), Spoor is aware of and comfortable with the range of options
in human sexuality other than a man and a woman, and at no point does
anyone get awarded a woman for their efforts. He didn't completely
avoid all gender stereotypes (all the engineers are men; the other
women are the medic and the biologist), but it was good enough to me to
not feel irritated reading it. For throwback space opera, that's sadly
unusual.

If you're in the mood for something Lensman-like but with modern
sensibilities, and you aren't expecting too much of the writing or the
characterization, give Grand Central Arena a try. It's not great
literature, but it's a solid bit of entertainment. (Just be warned that
most of the secrets of the Arena are not revealed by the end of the
book, and will have to wait for sequels.) I'll probably keep reading
the rest of the series.

Followed by Spheres of Influence.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Reviewed: 2018-12-17

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

From eagle at eyrie.org  Tue Dec 18 20:34:40 2018
From: eagle at eyrie.org (Russ Allbery)
Date: Tue, 18 Dec 2018 20:34:40 -0800
Subject: Review: Revenant Gun, by Yoon Ha Lee
Message-ID: <871s6ei17j.fsf@hope.eyrie.org>

Revenant Gun
by Yoon Ha Lee

Series:    Machineries of Empire #3
Publisher: Solaris
Copyright: 2018
ISBN:      1-78618-110-X
Format:    Kindle
Pages:     400

This is the third book of the series that started with Ninefox Gambit,
and it really can't be read out of order. Each book builds on the
previous one and picks up where it left off in the story.

Jedao wakes up with the memory of being a first-year Shuos university
student, in a strange room, with nothing to wear except a Kel uniform
(wearing a Kel uniform when you aren't Kel is a very bad idea), and
with considerably more muscle than he remembered. The first person he
sees identifies himself as the Nirai hexarch, which is definitely not
the sort of thing that happens to a first-year Shuos university student
(even putting aside that the heptarchate is apparently now the
hexarchate). The odd bits of knowledge he shouldn't have only make
things stranger, as does the hexarch's assertion that his opponent has
made off with most of his memories. And now, apparently he's expected
to command a battle fleet in support of the last remaining legitimate
hexarch.

The main story arc of Revenant Gun picks up nine years after the
shattering events of Raven Strategem, although the chapters focusing on
Kel Brezan are intermixed flashbacks sketching out the subsequent
history. Given how much the political universe shifts in the first two
books, I have to avoid most of the plot summary. But the focus shifts
here from the primarily combat-oriented Ninefox Gambit and the Kel
politics of Raven Strategem to broader-focus political maneuvering. Lee
left a lot of broken pieces on the floor at the end of the last book;
Revenant Gun is largely about putting them back together while taking
care of a few critical remaining threats.

But, despite the political rumblings and continued war, I thought the
best part of this book was a quiet thread about servitors (essentially
Star Wars droids with roughly the same expected place in hexarchate
society, except in smaller and less human forms). This follows Hemiola,
one of three servitors stationed on an isolated moon and tasked with
watching over the secret archives of one of the main players in this
story. Over the course of the story, Hemiola's horizons expand
drastically and unsettlingly, something it tries to make sense of by
analogy with the episodic dramas it watches (and creates fan videos
for, not that it shares those with anyone). The quietly subversive way
that Cheris treats servitors from the start of this series is one of
the best themes in it, and I was delighted to finally see the world
from a servitor's point of view. I'd happily read a whole other book
about Hemiola and the servitors (and there is a possible hook left for
that at the end of this one).

The rest of the story involves more of the high-stakes strategic
maneuvering that's characterized the series so far, this time (mostly)
three-sided. We find out quite a bit more about what was behind the
shape and political structure of the universe, a lot more about Kujen,
and at least a bit more about the plan behind the upheaval in Raven
Strategem, but most of the book is Jedao and Brezan trying to keep up
with events, struggle through ethical challenges, and find the best of
a very limited and unpleasant set of options. One thing I like about
Lee's writing is that all of the characters are smart and observant,
and very little of the plot is driven by stupid mistakes or poor
communication.

I liked Revenant Gun better than any of the other books in this series.
I think it almost came together as a great book, but didn't quite
manage it, although I'm not sure what didn't work. One thing I can put
a finger on is that Jedao's situation has a sexual dimension that's
in-character and that fits the world but felt weirdly sudden and
intrusive in the story. This may have been intentional (there's some
reason to believe that it felt weirdly sudden and intrusive to Jedao),
but it was disconcerting in a way that knocked the plot off-kilter, at
least for me. The ending also felt oddly incomplete in some way,
despite dealing with the major villain of the series. There are so many
loose ends left: how to stabilize the government, how the new calendar
would be managed, and what is going on with the servitors (as well as a
new and nicely-handled addition to the political scene). The ending
leaves them mostly unresolved, instead focusing on Jedao and his
psychological state. I was somewhat interested in that, but more
interested in other characters and in the politics, and wanted more of
a higher-level conclusion.

Despite those flaws, though, this is still good magitech, with some
interesting characters, some great bits with the servitors, good use of
multiple perspectives, and a story that I found easier to follow and
more straightforward than earlier books in the series. If you liked the
previous books, you'll want to read this too. I'm hoping for a sequel
someday that focuses entirely on the servitors, though.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Reviewed: 2018-12-18

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

From eagle at eyrie.org  Fri Dec 21 21:24:16 2018
From: eagle at eyrie.org (Russ Allbery)
Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2018 21:24:16 -0800
Subject: Review: The Phoenix Empress, by K Arsenault Rivera
Message-ID: <87imzmp20v.fsf@hope.eyrie.org>

The Phoenix Empress
by K Arsenault Rivera

Series:    Their Bright Ascendancy #2
Publisher: Tor
Copyright: October 2018
ISBN:      0-7653-9256-9
Format:    Kindle
Pages:     544

This is a direct sequel to The Tiger's Daughter and entirely pointless
to read if you haven't read the previous book. This is not a series
that one can start in the middle.

The Tiger's Daughter was one of my favorite novels of 2017, so I've
been waiting eagerly for this book for nearly a year. I had no idea
where Rivera would go next with the story after the glorious triumph at
the end of the last book, but I was hoping for more of the same.
Unfortunately, The Phoenix Empress was something a bit different, at
least for me; while some of the elements I loved are still there,
Rivera went in a somewhat different direction in the series than I was
hoping.

The character names mentioned below are arguably spoilers of a sort
below for the end of The Tiger's Daughter, although I don't think it's
knowledge that would come as a surprise.

The Tiger's Daughter was mostly a letter written from Shefali to
Shizuka, telling the story of their past and occasionally embedding in
it letters in the other direction so that one gets a bit of Shizuka's
voice. In The Phoenix Empress, Shizuka tells a story to Shefali,
intermixed with more conventional narration (from Shefali's
perspective) of ongoing events. It retains a bit of the same structure,
but it's a story of a time when Shizuka was alone, so it misses the
delightful and shameless drama of the pair's mutual love and devotion.

The story is also dark, depressing, full of dread at the knowledge that
it's going to get even worse, and the source of Shizuka's drinking and
(although the term isn't used in the story) PTSD. It also contains some
horrific demons and a bit of maiming (which bothered me way more than I
had expected it to).

The Tiger's Daughter had some of these elements as well, but it coupled
them with a furiously optimistic tone and a sense that the characters
would defeat any horror through overwhelming love and sheer audacity.
With this book as contrast, I see that was a huge part of what I loved
about it. It was aggressively, unapologetically melodramatic, and the
result is glorious. The Phoenix Empress is mostly just melancholy, and
is often painful to read.

The parts outside of Shizuka's story are a bit better, but sadly not
that much. The parts of the previous book I liked least were the
near-hopeless struggles against demonic infection, which is most of the
companion narrative here. Rivera also has the two main characters
struggle to talk to each other and be honest with each other, and while
they're mostly not idiots about it (and Rivera writes it well), this is
my least favorite trope in romance and reliably makes me grumbly. The
story felt like a holding pattern: by the end of this book, we know a
lot more about Shizuka, the arch-villain of the series, and the
political changes that happened during the frame story of the previous
book, but the overall plot has barely advanced from the end of The
Tiger's Daughter.

This is rather negative, so I should note there are some parts of this
I really liked. Shizuka and Shefali together continue to be a delight;
they're so very different, yet fit together so well and support each
other's weaknesses. They're also passionately in love with each other
through good times and bad, in a way that makes me smile to read about.
And several of the supporting characters are great, particularly
Sakura, who is probably the highlight of this book. There wasn't much
in Shizuka's story that I enjoyed, mostly due to the ever-present sense
of creeping dread, but I still love Shefali's voice, her persistence
and practicality, and the way she brings out the best in Shizuka.

The very end of The Phoenix Empress does promise something better to
come, and succeeded in getting me excited for the next book in the
series.

As much as I loved the melodrama of The Tiger's Daughter, Shizuka
probably did need to grow up and stop being quite so eager to rush into
anything. This was a hard and painful lesson for the reader to read
through, at least for me, but I can see where Rivera is going in the
deepening and strengthening of both characters. I just want her to get
there already, since the road along the way is painful and depressing,
and I was reading this series for the glorious confidence and sense of
invincibility.

There will certainly be a sequel to this, since it ends on a sort of
cliffhanger, but the next book has not been announced at the time of
this review.

Rating: 6 out of 10

Reviewed: 2018-12-21

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

From eagle at eyrie.org  Mon Dec 24 20:12:58 2018
From: eagle at eyrie.org (Russ Allbery)
Date: Mon, 24 Dec 2018 20:12:58 -0800
Subject: Review: The Million, by Karl Schroeder
Message-ID: <874lb2nt11.fsf@hope.eyrie.org>

The Million
by Karl Schroeder

Publisher: Tor.com
Copyright: August 2018
ISBN:      1-250-18541-6
Format:    Kindle
Pages:     192

Gavin Penn-of-Chaffee should not exist. He lives on his family estate
with his father and his brother (who suffers from brain damage from an
accident), commands the household bots, and tries to keep is brother
out of trouble, but no one can know that he is there. Only one million
people are allowed to live on Earth, one million caretakers of the
cities and wilds, one million people who are richer than any human has
ever been but bound by treaties to very strict rules. One of those
rules is that they never strain the carrying capacity of the Earth's
ecosystem by allowing their numbers to increase.

Unfortunately for Gavin, his family is about to become involved in
something far larger than his hidden existence. When the auditors
attack their family mansion in force, it's reasonable to think someone
may have tipped them off about Gavin's existence. But it quickly
becomes clear that something else is going on, something murkier. With
his father presumed dead and his brother arrested for his murder, Gavin
stumbles into pretending to be a dead man to join the auditors, try to
free his brother, and understand what's going on.

Schroeder is perhaps my favorite idea writer in science fiction, but
he's not a very prolific one. This is his first book since Lockstep in
2014, and it's more of a novella than a novel. It's set in the Lockstep
universe, although that's not immediately obvious at the start of the
book, since Schroeder begins in media res and doesn't go back to fill
in the bones of the world until Gavin ends up in Venice and auditor
training. (Training classes are a good excuse for infodumps.) Gavin's
world is the Earth of the Lockstep future, and the treaties the great
families are following are (primarily) with the billions of humans
sleeping away the years in cicada beds.

Schroeder does explain the world background here, but I'm not sure it
would be a good idea to read The Million without reading Lockstep
first, primarily because it's such an odd world setup that a bit more
time to get used to it and think about the ramifications is useful. The
concept is fascinating: what if we could drastically reduce the
effective population without killing anyone, and use sophisticated
automation and computer systems to let those people who are awake live
like gods? Sadly, the technology is a bit less convincing. I'll give
Schroeder a pass on the utterly reliable cicada beds that can be
trusted to operate continuously for years or centuries, since a lot of
science fiction stories need one piece of semi-magical technology, but
Schroeder also assumes a lot in terms of near-instance manufacturing,
vast arrays of bots, and rather magical acquisition of construction
material with no sign of the material acquisition or recycling systems
that must be in play. It's possibly believable given such a low
population and thus low resource demand plus centuries of further
technological development, but I would have liked to have seen more of
the bones of that technology.

That's not the story Schroeder is telling here, though. Instead, it's a
fairly simple story of political intrigue, stumbled across by two young
adult protagonists. Elena, who we meet after Gavin, is far richer than
his family is, one of the ruling Hundred elite, and is joining the
auditors for family political reasons plus a dash of personal ethical
idealism. The story and protagonists are mostly an excuse for numerous
set pieces showing off what one million unbelievably rich and idle
people might do to pass their time (answer: specialize in and attempt
to become the best at some historic human activity), and the pageantry
they create in the process to amuse themselves. It gets more
interesting plot-wise towards the end, when Gavin finds some evidence
of what's really going on, but it feels like a brief prelude for a
larger story rather than a full story on its own.

All that being said, and despite the simple characterization and plot,
I liked Gavin, enjoyed the second half of the story, and liked that the
auditors were shown with a lot of nuance. They're not just villains,
and Schroeder hints that Gavin's world may be based on a more complex
foundation than he had expected.

This is more something to whet one's appetite between larger books than
a stand-alone story. I mildly enjoyed it, but it's missable if you're
not a Schroeder completionist. Hopefully it's prelude to a deeper and
more complex novel in the same universe. I want to hear more about the
AIs who represent natural resources! (Although I suppose I could just
re-read Ventus.)

Rating: 6 out of 10

Reviewed: 2018-12-24

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

From eagle at eyrie.org  Tue Dec 25 18:50:54 2018
From: eagle at eyrie.org (Russ Allbery)
Date: Tue, 25 Dec 2018 18:50:54 -0800
Subject: Review: A Red-Rose Chain, by Seanan McGuire
Message-ID: <87lg4dxapd.fsf@hope.eyrie.org>

A Red-Rose Chain
by Seanan McGuire

Series:    October Daye #9
Publisher: DAW
Copyright: 2015
ISBN:      1-101-60178-7
Format:    Kindle
Pages:     368

This is the ninth book in the October Daye series and continues to not
be a series you should start in the middle, given how much the story
depends on the texture of relationships that have been built over time.

It was inevitable that the events of Chimes at Midnight would have
further fallout, even though they didn't come up much in the previous
book. This is that fallout: a threatened war by a neighboring kingdom
against the Kingdom of the Mists, in which all of the previous books
have been set. Under the law of faerie they have three days to try to
come to terms before the war starts. The queen sends Toby as an
ambassador.

Toby is about as good of an ambassador as she was a private detective,
and knows it.

While the politics in this series are enjoyably entertaining and much
of what keeps me reading, I would never claim they're realistic
examples of real negotiations and political intrigue. Real life is more
complicated and a lot more boring than this. But I do like that Toby
realizes, with some help, that there are different types of
negotiations, and that sending a dangerous and violent wildcard under
the protection of diplomatic immunity may accomplish things unrelated
to traditional diplomacy, as long as she can hold her temper and her
manners just enough to not give the opposing court an obvious excuse to
remove that immunity. Behind that could have been layered some complex
trickery, something that shows that the rest of the court isn't reliant
on Toby and her growing power to solve all their problems. One of the
disappointments of this book is that, despite the characters talking
about it, McGuire doesn't do much with that idea.

Another disappointment is that McGuire is a little too dependent on a
standard plot structure in these books, and it rears its head again
here. Something bad happens, Toby gets involved, Toby makes everyone
uncomfortable and pokes in lots of corners and finds things out while
people try to kill her, something awful happens to her or her friends
or both, and Toby musters enough resources in one form or another to
resolve the situation. Some of this is three-act structure, but in a
long series some variation on that structure is needed, or it can start
feeling like old episodes of The A-Team. I thought there were some
missed opportunities here for one of the other characters, perhaps May,
to take a more central role. Hopefully in a later book.

That said, I continue to love McGuire's imaginative construction of
faerie and the way she overlays it on west coast politics and
geography. This is the first time in this series that Toby has traveled
outside the Bay Area (at least in the mortal world); as an Oregon
native, I'm glad that trip was to Portland. The scenes with Ceres were
the best part of the book, and not just because McGuire fittingly
incorporated roses into the faerie landscape of Portland. Ceres is a
marvelous character who strikes the balance between alliance and
neutrality that the best of McGuire's major powers do, but does so in a
way that's much different from the Luidaeg. I hope we see more of her.

I also liked the character banter throughout, as always. Toby and
Tybalt have settled into a new routine that I like almost as well as
their old routine, but the highlight of this book was May, with both
Jazz and Toby. That made it a bit more disappointing when May spent so
much of the tail end of the story off-camera.

I'm afraid this isn't one of the best books of the series. The plot
structure is a little too stock, the ending too abrupt, and the
villains, while sadly entirely believable, were over-the-top evil in a
way that I think makes the story less interesting. (The previous book,
The Winter Long, had a bit more interesting nuance.) A Red-Rose Chain
felt episodic in a way that the best books in this series aren't. But I
still enjoyed it, and I think other readers who have gotten this far in
the series will as well.

I do want to see more plots resolved via something other than Toby
being a hero, though.

Followed by Once Broken Faith.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Reviewed: 2018-12-25

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

From eagle at eyrie.org  Wed Dec 26 21:42:39 2018
From: eagle at eyrie.org (Russ Allbery)
Date: Wed, 26 Dec 2018 21:42:39 -0800
Subject: Review: I Beat the Odds, by Michael Oher & Don Yaeger
Message-ID: <87y38b34q8.fsf@hope.eyrie.org>

I Beat the Odds
by Michael Oher & Don Yaeger

Publisher: Gotham
Copyright: 2011
Printing:  February 2012
ISBN:      1-101-56003-7
Format:    Kindle
Pages:     250

Michael Oher is the high school football star who's fascinating life
story took over Michael Lewis's The Blind Side, prompting a movie based
on the book. The book was published in 2006; the movie in 2009. The
Tuohys, Oher's adoptive parents, wrote their book (with Sally Jenkins)
in 2010. That's a lot of writing, acting, and story-telling about Oher.
I Beat the Odds is the first time he told his story himself.

Despite his struggle with the shape of his material, Lewis's The Blind
Side is a better-written book than this one at the level of literary
technique. This is not surprising; Lewis is one of the great
journalistic story-tellers of our era and provides a strong
introduction to this story. Lewis frames it and provides the football
context, gets the reader engaged and fascinated by Oher's life, and
gives you all the tools to understand the shape of the story.

I Beat the Odds is the better book.

This is not because Oher and Yaeger are better story-tellers. It's
because they have a better story to tell. This is the story Lewis never
got to (for reasons that remain a bit murky to me, and which I'll touch
on in a moment). It's the payoff that I spent all of The Blind Side
hoping for, but which Lewis never quite delivered: the full context and
background of Oher's life, how it felt, and how he reacted to it.

Where Lewis balances a story of football with the story of a person and
dances around Oher's chronology using the framing of the Tuohys
learning more about his life, Oher and Yaeger lay out the full story in
simple chronological order. I Beat the Odds grapples directly with
issues of poverty, foster care, family, love, child services, schools,
and role models. And while it's always hard to judge as a reader
triangulating between different versions of the story, this book rings
as true and honest and forthright as a bell in places where I think
Lewis was reaching for dramatic tension.

A brief sketch of Oher's life for those who have not yet seen any
version of this story: he grew up in a huge family in one of the worst
parts of Memphis with a mother who was an off-and-on drug addict. He
and his siblings were put into foster care, and he bounced through
several families until he ran away from the system and rotated between
various places he could sleep for a few nights. He was always an
incredibly gifted athlete who studied multiple sports deeply and
intensely (this is one of the bits that Lewis got wrong, probably
unknowingly), but no one really noticed until one of the families he
occasionally stayed with insisted that he would only send his son to a
private school that would also take Oher. That was Briarcrest Christian
School, which led to Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy, Oher's discovery by a
high school scout, and (the main thread of The Blind Side) the push to
get him eligible for NCAA football.

The Blind Side stops with Oher playing college ball. I Beat the Odds
continues through his drafting by the Baltimore Ravens and his first
seasons of professional play, providing somewhat more satisfying
closure. But what it adds the most to Lewis's story is the details of
Oher's early life, which Lewis keeps obscure for most of his book and
then summarizes in a later chapter.

This omission is not exactly Lewis's fault. As Lewis admits, and Oher
confirms, Lewis barely talked to Oher while writing The Blind Side and
Oher was not particularly interested in talking to him. Lewis did have
some conversations with him at the end of his research, but Oher at the
time was unwilling to dig into and try to remember much of his past.
For I Beat the Odds, Oher went back to where he grew up, met with his
child welfare case worker, and reconstructed pieces of his life he'd
forgotten or suppressed, none of which Lewis had access to. The story
that results is so much better for being more complete.

There are other things, though, that I do blame Lewis for a little:
places where I think he slipped into some standard narrative lines that
just weren't true. One of them is that Lewis portrays Oher as a raw
natural physical talent who barely knew how to play football and was
far more interested in basketball. Oher quietly puts this idea to rest
by describing how intensely he studied both sports. He still had to
learn how to translate his knowledge into physical action, but his
description rings far more true than Lewis's. The hours and hours of
street basketball and other physical training are also a more
satisfying explanation for Oher's unusual speed despite his size than
Lewis's focus on freakish physical accident, as is Oher's far more
sensible explanation for why he played outside positions in basketball.
Lewis said it was due to an obsession with Michael Jordan; Oher
explains that, due to his size, he was constantly being called for
fouls he didn't commit.

I mentioned in my review of The Blind Side that Lewis had to walk a
precarious tight-rope over the fault lines in US society around race
and class to tell his story. Oher, since he's speaking for himself and
not about someone else, avoids those pitfalls, but had the universal
challenge of a success story: how much to attribute to his own innate
drive and how much to attribute to external circumstance or luck. He
and Yaeger deftly address that challenge by giving I Beat the Odds a
purpose and explicitly named audience. This is a book written for and
about kids in foster care. It's the story of one kid in foster care who
made it out to a life of great success, and how that happened, and what
he was thinking while it was happening, and what in retrospect was
important to him in that process. And it's also a book that tells those
kids they're not alone, that other people felt and feel what they're
feeling, and that some kids just like them broke out of the cycle.

I think that focus makes this book so much better than a pure
autobiography would have been. Oher is telling this story to an
audience he knows well, and tells it comfortably and honestly and with
as much advice included as he can. The rest of us are lucky enough to
get to listen in. Oher says in the afterword of this edition that he
thought people would be tired of this story and uninterested in another
version, but that if he could get the book into the hands of a few
thousand foster kids, it would be worth it. He was surprised by its
popularity, but then starts talking about the letters from foster kids
that he got after its initial publication (and reprints excerpts from
some of them), and some of that had me in tears. I think it's safe to
say that he achieved his goal.

This focus does mean that you won't find much analysis of the overall
social conditions here, much focus on systemic problems, or many
suggestions for reform or structural changes. Oher mentions, somewhat
in passing, the dire state of Memphis child welfare when he was a kid,
but has nothing but praise for the individual case workers even though
he hated and feared them as a kid for breaking up his family. He is as
positive and generous towards Briarcrest as Lewis was, saying that he
always felt welcome and included despite being one of the few black
kids at a former segregation academy. (I still find this hard to
believe, but perhaps my cynicism really isn't warranted.) If you're
looking for a sociological analysis of poverty, child welfare systems,
and racial divides, this is not the book.

If you're looking for a truly amazing case study of a remarkable
person, told with fair-minded empathy and thoughtful reflection,
though, read this. And if you have read The Blind Side or seen the
movie, I think you truly owe it to yourself to also read this book and
get the rest of the story (and corrections to bits of the movie, and to
a lesser extent the book, that Oher found frustrating or inaccurate).
You need not fear being bored by reading the same story twice. There is
so much more here, so many new details and time periods Lewis is
entirely quiet about, that it never felt repetitive.

I don't know how well this book would read on its own. Lewis hooked me
on this story while making me not quite trust his telling of it, and I
thoroughly enjoyed grappling with both versions, deciding which pieces
I believed, and studying the ways they diverged and why they might have
done so. Reading only I Beat the Odds loses that complexity, although
what remains is still a lucid and heartfelt story of a person in whom I
found a lot to admire. Read together, this is a fascinating view of how
stories are told and shaped and molded, and how different they can look
from different perspectives. This was the intellectual highlight of my
vacation reading.

I may have to read the Tuohys' book (In a Heartbeat) after all, just to
get one more piece of the story, although I'm worried I'm going to be
allergic to the way in which I fear they'll tell it.

Rating: 8 out of 10

Reviewed: 2018-12-26

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

From eagle at eyrie.org  Thu Dec 27 20:29:24 2018
From: eagle at eyrie.org (Russ Allbery)
Date: Thu, 27 Dec 2018 20:29:24 -0800
Subject: Review: The Consuming Fire, by John Scalzi
Message-ID: <87r2e2qnob.fsf@hope.eyrie.org>

The Consuming Fire
by John Scalzi

Series:    Interdependency #2
Publisher: Tor
Copyright: October 2018
ISBN:      0-7653-8898-7
Format:    Kindle
Pages:     320

The Consuming Fire is the second book of the Interdependency series and
is part of a single story with The Collapsing Empire. This is not a
good series to read out of order.

The Collapsing Empire was primarily setup: introductions to the
players, the story of Cardenia Wu-Patrick becoming emperox and what she
learns about the empire in the process, and of course revelations of
the fragility of her empire that culminate in a cliff-hanger ending.
The Consuming Fire is unambiguously the middle book of a trilogy, which
includes kicking that cliff-hanger along to the next book. The events
of the first book left Cardenia clear on both the threat and the
necessary response, but the status quo has substantial momentum and the
rest of her government doesn't want to believe things that might
disrupt it. Everything slows down from the climax of the first book,
political complications multiply, and some parts of the plot enter a
waiting game.

This type of middle-book slowdown can be frustrating, but here I
thought it worked. It also made this an interesting book to read in the
current political moment, where US (and, for that matter, UK) politics
seems to be going through that middle-book tension.

During the time period of The Consuming Fire, thoughtful people (and
insiders) have figured out the broad outlines of what's going to
happen, but it hasn't happened yet. This is the time when one can be
fairly certain of the meaning behind previous events but there's still
a bit of uncertainty left, so people who have substantial incentives to
come up with alternative explanations still have maneuvering room. It's
the tense and frustrating middle period where one is trying to head off
a slow-motion train wreck, or at least minimize the damage, but still
have to deal with the people claiming there is no wreck and no train.

This probably makes the book sound miserable: a bit too on the nose,
and thus likely to bring up unwelcome echos of current political
messes. It's not, though. Partly this is due to political wish
fulfillment: Scalzi is telling a story of smart and engaged people
finding ways to change the world, including some very satisfying
victories over their cynical opponents, so the reader is spared the
sense of futility real-world politics more often brings. Partly it's
due to Scalzi's comfortable, fast-moving style. But much of its
avoidance of middle-book tension is use of another middle-book
technique: the side exploration mission that crops up between chapters
of the main plot, and which opens up surprise revelations for the
world-building. I won't spoil that; suffice it to say that Scalzi is
doing some interesting things with history, how it is recorded, and how
that recording process can change the emphasis.

I think this series is still more of a speedboat than a submarine. It's
determinedly headed towards its plot destination, and while that path
is well-supported by an underlying lake of world-building with some
occasionally interesting scenery, Scalzi rarely stops the boat to dive
below the surface and explore in detail. That said, I grumbled a bit in
my review of the first book about interchangeable characters, but
didn't feel that here. Either I was too grumpy when reading the
previous book or the characters are carving out their own territory as
the series continues. Marce is still a cipher to me, but Kiva was my
favorite surviving character in the first book and didn't let me down
in the second. (And Scalzi makes an excellent choice in showing a key
scene from her perspective. It benefits tremendously from her acerbic
commentary.)

Something else I've liked about both books of this series so far is
that Scalzi portrays all sides with intelligence. Some of the villains
are cynical, self-serving scum, but they still make coherent,
reasonable plans and anticipate their opponents' strategies. Neither
the heroes nor the villains fall for obvious ploys. Scalzi does
hand-wave some of the details, and I'm sure one could nitpick the
tactics, but the books never made me want to. So many stories like this
involve inexperienced protagonists blundering into obvious danger and
then saving themselves through desperate heroics. It's nice to read a
story that gives its characters more credit for advance planning.

The Collapsing Empire ended on a cliff-hanger; The Consuming Fire ends
on essentially the same cliff-hanger, except complicated by subsequent
revelations. Readers who dislike waiting for a story's conclusion may
want to hold off until the third book is published (currently scheduled
for early 2020). I'm enjoying the series and will certainly keep
reading.

Followed by an as-yet-unnamed third book.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Reviewed: 2018-12-27

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

From eagle at eyrie.org  Sat Dec 29 22:47:37 2018
From: eagle at eyrie.org (Russ Allbery)
Date: Sat, 29 Dec 2018 22:47:37 -0800
Subject: Review: Clockwork Boys, by T. Kingfisher
Message-ID: <87y387bjee.fsf@hope.eyrie.org>

Clockwork Boys
by T. Kingfisher

Series:    The Clocktaur War #1
Publisher: Red Wombat Tea Company
Copyright: 2017
ASIN:      B0783P29QP
Format:    Kindle
Pages:     230

Clockwork Boys starts with Slate picking a man out of the Dowager's
prisons to the overpowering smell of rosemary. It's an uncomfortable
situation for everyone: the warden, the prisoners, and Slate herself,
although on the positive side she'll probably be dead soon and then it
won't matter. That said, she was not expecting to find the infamous
Lord Caliban, who murdered eight nuns (okay, technically three nuns and
five novices) while possessed. He's either exactly the person she was
looking for or a total disaster she should stay as far away from as
possible.

Slate is a forger. Caliban is the third member of an improbable crew,
joining her and Brenner, an assassin. With the scholar-priest who joins
them later, their goal is to cross battle lines, infiltrate an enemy
city, and discover how their enemy is making nearly-indefeatable
mechanical soldiers. It's a suicide mission, of course, which is why
the Dowager is sending convicted criminals and adding the incentive of
carnivorous tattoos.

If this sounds like a D&D party, that's not an accident. This is the
first half of Ursula Vernon's paladin rant in story form (T. Kingfisher
is the pseudonym she uses for books for adults), which she has
mentioned and given partially on Twitter. However, Clockwork Boys is
mostly setup, introductions, and a few road adventures to flesh out the
dynamics of the group. You (and I) will have to wait until the second
book for (presumably) the meat of the rant.

What we get in the meantime is a protagonist who can detect danger and
significance through the supernatural scent of rosemary. Since this is
an Ursula Vernon novel, that means Slate goes into danger sneezing
uncontrollably, with her eyes watering so much she can't see. Magical
premonitions have no sense of proportion. You can tell the paladin is a
paladin because he always has a spare handkerchief.

I thought the best part of this book was that Slate and Brenner (who
already knew each other) go into this adventure with a far more mature
and competent attitude than Caliban or, later, the scholar Edmund. The
latter two have great difficulty understanding Slate's attitude, her
decisions, or her role in the party. However, and this is the very
critical point, none of Brenner, Slate, or the narrator consider it
particularly important to argue with them about their misconceptions.
This book is full of Caliban making some stupid assumption about Slate
and Slate then doing exactly what she was going to do in the first
place without caring one whit about Caliban's assumption. It's
absolutely glorious.

Clockwork Boys is somewhat driven by Caliban and his past and his
emotional reactions to losing his connection with his god (not to
mention being possessed and being kicked out of his order). It is part
of the paladin rant, after all. But much of the focus is on Slate,
which I approve of because Slate is the most interesting character in
this book. She's cynical, sarcastic, and certain this expedition is
doomed, but she's never done something incompetently in her life and
isn't about to start now. Also, full points for a book about people who
know how to talk to other people and how to stop conversations they
don't want to have without having random angst explosions.

And the banter is wonderful.

This is only the first half of what's really a long novel, so it's
worth withholding some judgment before seeing the second half. But it's
a great Ursula Vernon take on D&D-inspired fantasy, I thoroughly
enjoyed it, and am looking forward to the other half of the story.

Followed by The Wonder Engine.

Rating: 8 out of 10

Reviewed: 2018-12-29

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

From eagle at eyrie.org  Sun Dec 30 19:48:29 2018
From: eagle at eyrie.org (Russ Allbery)
Date: Sun, 30 Dec 2018 19:48:29 -0800
Subject: Review: All Systems Red, by Martha Wells
Message-ID: <87y386s6eq.fsf@hope.eyrie.org>

All Systems Red
by Martha Wells

Series:    Murderbot Diaries #1
Publisher: Tor.com
Copyright: May 2017
ISBN:      0-7653-9752-8
Format:    Kindle
Pages:     150

  I could have become a mass murderer after I hacked my governor
  module, but then I realized I could access the combined feed of
  entertainment channels carried on the company satellites. It had
  been well over 35,000 hours or so since then, with still not much
  murdering, but probably, I don't know, a little under 35,000 hours
  of movies, serials, books, plays, and music consumed. As a heartless
  killing machine, I was a terrible failure.

So begins the first of a series of novellas by Martha Wells (four to
date) called The Murderbot Diaries. It's told in the first person by a
murderbot (the name it gave itself; the officially bland and
non-threateningly corporate term is SecUnit) with a defective governor
module who is therefore not enslaved to the commands of the humans
around it. The story opens with Murderbot half-heartedly doing its job
of protecting a human exploration team while pretending to be just like
any other SecUnit, deftly covering up the deficiencies in its governor
module. Unfortunately for the humans it's guarding, the planet is
rather more dangerous than they had expected, and not only due to local
conditions. Thankfully for the humans, Murderbot is rather better at
protecting people than it likes to claim.

I'm going to say the same thing that everyone else who reviewed this
multiple-award-winning novella said: the first-person narrative voice
is what makes this story. The plot is corporate interstellar
skulduggery following mostly predictable lines, and by itself wouldn't
be anything special. But Murderbot tells that story with a brilliant
mix of cynicism, dark humor, clipped precision, and violent competence,
overlaid on a slightly flat tone that reminded me of computerized
record-keeping and automated analysis. It's wonderfully evocative. It
also does serious character work in a short 150 pages, particularly
once Murderbot starts interacting with the well-meaning, open-minded,
and rather naive humans that it's trying to protect.

That leads into the second remarkable thing about this story, which is
the quietly nuanced and fascinating way that it talks about oppression,
justice, and well-meaning people who want to help.

This is, obviously, a story about a member of a sentient slave race.
Murderbot is made of augmented biological components, including a
rather human brain, and is clearly as capable of independent thoughts
and desires as anyone else in this story. This is an old and well-worn
setup with obvious resonance with the slave trade and a habit of
turning into soaring, passionate fights for freedom.

Murderbot cares very deeply about no one discovering its defective
governor module, but is not interested in the soaring and passionate
fight for freedom. Murderbot wants everyone else to fuck off and leave
it alone so that it can watch serial dramas. It is particularly
horrified at the idea of being stared at by a bunch of humans, or
having emotionally searching conversations about its free will and how
it feels about slavery.

There's certainly nothing inherently wrong with courageous and moving
fights for freedom, but I think Wells is doing something very
interesting here instead. The humans are all well-meaning folks who (in
various ways) are horrified at the concept of SecUnits and how they're
treated, and also have a noticeable tendency to treat Murderbot like a
child. One starts cringing a bit at the earnest gentleness with which
they approach it, particularly with the running hints from Murderbot's
acerbic commentary that they're missing the point entirely. Wells packs
a rather deep idea into a short space: freedom isn't about being an
amazing role model or following some expected, scripted path. It's
about having the space to live your own life and do what you want,
whether or not that fits anyone else's preconceptions. Someone in
Murderbot's situation may be quite matter-of-fact and tactical about
their own circumstances, which can include not wanting even the best of
people to take over their decisions. And can include a very complicated
reaction to sympathy.

I liked all of the people in this story (well, except for the villains,
but they're mostly there to be villains and are barely sketched in).
But Murderbot itself steals the show, and the ending was perfect. And a
great setup for the sequels.

I've been meaning to read something by Martha Wells for years and kept
not getting around to it. I'm glad I finally fixed that, and will
definitely be reading the rest of this series. Recommended.

Followed by Artificial Condition.

Rating: 8 out of 10

Reviewed: 2018-12-30

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

From eagle at eyrie.org  Mon Dec 31 20:11:01 2018
From: eagle at eyrie.org (Russ Allbery)
Date: Mon, 31 Dec 2018 20:11:01 -0800
Subject: Review: The Dragon's Path, by Daniel Abraham
Message-ID: <87pnthvwyy.fsf@hope.eyrie.org>

The Dragon's Path
by Daniel Abraham

Series:    Dagger and the Coin #1
Publisher: Orbit
Copyright: June 2011
ISBN:      0-316-13467-8
Format:    Kindle
Pages:     579

I read this book as a free bonus included in a Kindle edition of
Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey (a pen name for Daniel Abraham and
Ty Franck). The ISBN information is for that book.

Cithrin bel Sarcour is a ward of the Medean Bank branch in Vanai and
has been since she was four years old. She's a teenager,
half-Firstblood and half-Cinnae and therefore not entirely welcome in
either group, secretly in love with Besel, and being trained in
economics by Magister Immaniel. War is coming to Vanai and with it
demands from the prince of Vanai for the bank's money. When Besel is
murdered, Cithrin is the only one left to secretly smuggle the bank's
riches and account books out of the city.

Captain Marcus Wester is working as a caravan guard. Some would
consider this a huge step down from his past as a military leader and a
killer of kings, but after the death of his wife and daughter, he has
no interest in war. He particularly has no interest in being drafted by
the prince of Vanai into fighting for the city, even though he can't
hire men to fill out his company. That's how he ends up guarding, with
only his long-time lieutenant and a hired troop of actors, the same
caravan that secretly includes Cithrin.

The war between the Severed Throne of Antea and Vanai is just part of
larger political maneuvering between several adjacent kingdoms and the
Free Cities (which seem modeled after Italian cities). The reader sees
that part of the story through the eyes of Dawson, a member of the
royal court, and the hapless Geder, a minor noble who is an officer in
the Antean army but who would much rather be searching out and
translating speculative essays. These separate strands do cross
eventually, but they don't merge, at least in this book.

The reviews I saw of this book were somewhat mixed, but I decided to
read it anyway because I was promised fantasy based on medieval
banking. And, indeed, the portions with Cithrin are often satisfyingly
different than normal fantasy fare and are the best part of the book.
Unfortunately, the reviews were right in another respect: The Dragon's
Path is very slow. There are pages and pages of setup, pages more of
Cithrin being scared and uncertain, lots of Dawson's political
maneuvering and Geder's ineptness, and not a tremendous amount of plot
for the first half of the book. Things do eventually start happening,
but Abraham is clearly not interested in hurrying the story along.

The Dragon's Path is what I'll call George R.R. Martin fantasy, since
The Song of Ice and Fire is probably the most famous example of the
style. There's a large, multi-threaded story with multiple viewpoint
characters, each told in tight third person. Chapters cycle between
viewpoint characters and are long enough to be a substantial chunk of
story. And, with relatively little narrative signaling, several of the
viewpoint characters turn out to be awful, horrible people. Unlike
Martin, though, Abraham doesn't pull off sudden reversals of
perspective where the reader starts to like characters they previously
hated. Rather the contrary: the more I learned about Dawson and Geder,
the more I disliked them, albeit for far different reasons.

I'm not sure what to make of this book. The finance parts, and the
times when Cithrin was able to show how much she learned from spending
her formative years in a bank, were fun and refreshingly different from
typical epic fantasy. But then Abraham sharply undermined Cithrin's
expertise in a way that is understandable and probably realistic, but
which wasn't at all pleasant to read about. I enjoyed the world
backstory, with its dragon wars and strangely permanent dragon jade,
apparently magical draconic genetic engineering that created multiple
variations of humanity, and sense of hinted-at history. I'd like to
learn more about it, but the details are so slow in coming. The writing
is solid, the details believable, and the world vivid and complex, but
Abraham keeps pulling the rug out from under my plot expectations, and
not in the good way. Characters showing unexpectedly successful
expertise is an old trope but one that I enjoy; characters unexpectedly
turning out to be self-centered asses isn't as fun. Abraham repeatedly
promises catharsis and then undermines it.

Dawson and Geder are excellent examples of my mixed feelings. Abraham
writes Dawson as a rather likable, principled person at first, a close
friend and defender of the king. His later actions, and the details of
his political positions shown over the course of this book, slowly
paint a far different picture without changing the narrative tone. I'm
fairly sure Abraham is doing this on purpose and the reader is intended
to slowly change their mind about Dawson; indeed, I suspect it's subtle
commentary on the sort of monarchy-supporting characters show up in
traditional fantasy. But it's still disconcerting. I wanted to like
Dawson, and particularly his wife, despite disagreeing with everything
they stands for. That can be an enjoyable and challenging reading
experience, but it wasn't for me in this book.

Geder is a more abrupt case. It's hard not to be sympathetic to him at
the beginning of the book: he just wants to read and translate
histories and speculation, and is bullied by other nobles and miserable
on campaign. I thought Abraham was setting up a coming-of-age story or
an opportunity for Geder to unexpectedly turn out to be more competent
than he expected. I won't spoil what actually happens but it's... not
that, not at all, and leaves Geder as another character who is deeply
disturbing to read about.

The Dragon's Path is well-written, deep, realistic in feel, and caught
my interest with its world-building. I'm invested in the story and do
want to know what happens next. I'm also rooting for Cithrin (and for
Wester's lieutenant, who's probably my favorite character). But it took
me a long time to read this book, and I'm not sure it was worth the
investment. I'm even less sure that the investment of reading another
four books in this world will be worth the payoff. If I had more
confidence that good people would rise to the occasion and there would
be a satisfactory conclusion for all the horrible things that happen in
this book, I'd be more tempted, but the tone of this first volume
doesn't make me optimistic.

I still want to read a series about banking and finance set against an
epic fantasy background. I want to learn more about the dragons and the
jade and the wars Abraham hints at. But I suspect this will be one of
those series that I occasionally think about but never get around to
reading more of.

Followed by The King's Blood.

Rating: 5 out of 10

Reviewed: 2018-12-31

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>