2024 Books I Read
Jan. 1st, 2025 11:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
studio1009Started/Continued
The Penguin History of New Zealand - Apple Books - Started in 2019 to provide background for our trip to New Zealand for the Worldcon. That trip didn’t happen because of the COVID pandemic. We did make a trip in 2022. 90% complete
Hawaii’s Story, by Hawaii’s Queen Liliuokalani, 1898 - paperback. Started in 2022. I bought the book from a bookstore in Hawaii while visiting. It is a fascinating account of the history of Hawaii from the view of the last monarch. It is basically a memoir. The parallels and intersection with New Zealand’s history are remarkable. It is good to read this and the New Zealand history book at the same time. Currently on Chapter 20 She visits US – I am avoiding reading this because I know it ends badly her and Hawaii.
Imaginative Realism by James Gurney of Dynotopia fame, Started reading 8/12/23, Lots of practical advice for artists. This is meant to be read a chapter at a time for study and reference.
The Language of the Night by Ursula LeGuin, This was originally published in 1979, issued in Great Britain in 1989 and again 2023 with an intro by Ken Liu. I saw it on the display table in Queen Takes Book Jan 2024, started reading December 2024. Interesting to see how she is willing to change her mind about approaches and opinions she had earlier in her career. For example, the use of the pronoun he as an inclusive pronoun to refer to either sex. That is how I was trained. She was used only when referring to female people exclusively, such as mothers, or an individual known to be female. The people in the Left Hand of Darkness were he even in their non-sex state. She realized that practice made women invisible. She updated some of her essays, but just put footnotes in others so as not to lose the original. Too bad English does not have a sex-neutral pronoun. I would use “it” but that tends to remove personhood.
Started and quit:
ShockWave Rider by John Brunner (reread?) too dark for me at this time.
Completed
1/1/2024: Triangulation: Appetites, 2017 - PARSEC INK Annual Short story collection. I don’t remember when I started reading it. A nice variety. Some whimsical. Some horror.
1/9/2024 Purakau: Maori Myths Retold by Maori Writers , 2019 - Kindle. I received this as a New Zealand Worldcon volunteer perk. I enjoy reading the folklore from different cultures. So different from European fairy tales. I finished the stories and read all the author biographies. A bunch of very smart and creative people. All of Maori descent some with Pakeha mixed in. Very interesting to learn the different backgrounds of writers. The twists and embellishments they put on their folklore.
1/15/2024; Fluency by Jennifer Foehner Wells. Kindle. Turns out this is a reread. Not certain why I got this book. Hope it was free. Linguist joins a crew for first contact to an alien ship in the asteroid belt. I thought I probably won’t finish, but I did. The writing is terrible and the premise is flaky. I’m kind of interested to see how bad this is going to be. I’m at ConVivial and need something to read in my down time. That is the only reason I finished. There are notes in the text on the poor writing. I guess I already start this and mercifully forgot. Highlights are other readers. I rated it as 2 stars. I am not as embarrassed by Claire’s plot. Claire’s writing is better. Wells needed me to edit it. The computer stuff was shit. A NASA hardware engineer would NOT know all about computer languages and be able to reverse engineer code written by aliens. It would be compiled, or even if it were interpreted, he doesn’t know their language well enough to parse a scripting language. Imagine encoding those heirglyphs in a coding language. The flipant; it’s only ones and zeros. Assumes their automata are binary digital. Could have been quantum, qu-bits, , or built on neural networks in the silicon (or whatever base mineral). The depiction of a NASA first contact mission was awful. Walsh and Bergen would never have made it through selection, unless the 10-month transit discombolulated them. Bergen would have been trained not to interrupt the pilot during approach. And Walsh would have shut him down immediately. Also the communications was straight out of Star Trek. One does not open a channel. You have assignment frequencies for your mission. Turn on the transmitter and call. Then the romance. Yuck and yuck. Jane, you can do better. Bergen is a total pig. Treats woman like objects instead of people with their own agenda that does not include looking nice for you. Also his Othering of the navigator, Ei’Brai, by thinking of him as Squid. And the navigator character knowing everything about the history of the scintililians (I have this wrong because the alien race name is Latinized) and having access to ship specs, etc. when his only job is to navigate. Also, he killed the slugs creatures with gas only after they terrorized the crew a bunch and got Jane in the healing pool. I never liked Chosen One stories and Humans are special saviors of the galaxy stories. She brings the ship to Earth. Figures out the military will betray her. And then ends with the intension that she’s heading back out alone. Then ending was abrupt. There are sequels. So somebody likes them.
2/9/2024 Reread The Galaxy and the Ground Within by Becky Chambers. book for the Columbia SF book discussion group, February meeting. Apple Books. I read it for the 2022 Hugos. Reading it more critically for discussion. What I recalled was that it was another story where nothing happens and people are painfully afraid of offending others. Slice of life in space with non-humans. I feel like I need to draw the beings based on the descriptions. I’m having trouble remembers who is who. I did some sketches I think her description of the Akarak as spindly is wrong, if they are swinging from their arms, they should be muscled. But think of rhesus monkeys, not gorillas. And they are not mammals. They have beaks? like pteradactyls without wings and with longer legs. As I get farther in, there is more conflict. Again, no villain drives the story. Just a catastrophe that forces 5 people from 4 species to live together for an uncertain number of days. There are conflicts and even yelling. Especially between the mother and the child. Poor parenting. I really didn’t like her tone with Topu. Then everyone pulls together to save Topu. It was fun to have Rovek the bug be the rich, refined gourmand. I found it unlikely that Oouloo didn’t know the Akarak were methane-breathers. That should have been on the manifest. Environment requirements. Of course, they weren’t planning to stay, just refuel. There was little physical description of the Auleulon, just enough to get that they are humanoid, and lay an egg instead of gestating.. 3 egg-laying species and one marsupial. Akarak physiology is not clearly described. Beak, wrist hooks but not whether they are on the front of the wrist or the back. The Akarak no longer live on the surface of a planet. I’m sure there are plenty of methane worlds. GC is Oxygen-centered. Glad that Pei chose her guy over reproduction. Cool that she pulled strings to help Roveg see his children. Lots of interesting ideas. Most of the story is a lecture on various social problems. Not much of a story, but that is what she writes. Four strangers are delayed in a rest stop and are changed by the encounter. We’ve seen that story done in airports, etc. She makes each character appealing. Even Mom when she’s not bitching at her kid. I’m glad each of the characters got some sort of closure. Every one was affected by their forced closeness with strangers that Oouloo encouraged. Too bad Becky Chambers isn’t writing in this world any more.
3/2/2014 Superposition by David Walton; This was on our TBR pile. Dave bought it at Capclave in 2015 and it is autographed! Deals with quantum mechanics. Parallel universes. Walton likes his female characters to be thin, fit and/or athletic, also to eat healthy. Grrr. Jacob has a fit, healthy wife, but is overly attracted to his oldest daughter. His young son has a malformed arm, but that doesn’t bother him. Ignores the second daughter. His friend Brian visits him at home. Rambles about a break through in quantum mechanics and beings in other dimension are communicating with him. He demonstrates a few things, then shoots at the wife with his gun. The bullet goes through but diffracts or something. Jacob punches Brian and Brian runs away. Police are called. Later Jacob and his friend Marek goes to the supercollider to find Brian. He finds a letter and then He finds his friend’s body. First thought is to look at his experiment. I guess it wouldn’t help to call the police at the moment. What is so special about mirrors? Monster from the nth dimension. But it fixes Marek. Then the monster disintegrates the second Brian and the letter. I’m letting the quantum stuff be hand waving because I don’t want to take the effort to understand it. Then he realizes the monster (varcosek? After a Czech supernatural being) is going after the letters. The letters contain computer code that let’s the reader manipulate quantum space; hands waving madly. How can reading code from smart paper cause it to execute in your brain ? Whaaat? So we’ve got Jacob on trial for the murder of Brian, and a thread with Jacob prime running around trying to find out what happened to his family. He describes men as tending to fat, or something, in a disapproving way (I looked at your photo David, describing yourself?) A former coworker Jean (also thin) has a baby with Down Syndrome. She is deeply disappointed by this. [So just try for another baby, he will likely be normal.] She wants to use the Brian’s research to find a dimension where her child is normal. She killed Brian because he didn’t want to cooperate with the plan. That was a twist I didn’t see coming. Still doesn’t explain the Varcosek torturing and killing people in one case but repairing Marek in another. They wanted to destroy the research and the extra copies of people. Makes sense. And extra copy of the second daughter remained. Jacob prime repaired their relationship, even after he recombined with Jacob. I wonder why the Varcosek didn’t fix Sean. Some inconsistencies with the bunker- the family entered it even though only Jacob and Brain had the code. Maybe that changed when the crime scene was investigated. It was a little refreshing to read a story with no same sex couples, no they pronouns. Everyone was definitely one sex or the other. It was a little woke regarding handicapped people, Downs and Sean’s deformity. And had one Asian heritage person but that was just a name. The supercollider should have been full of East and South Asian names, Jacob’s attraction to his beautiful Claire was creepy. What did Elena think about that. Alessandra was made to feel less. Did Elena have a job? Though raising three kids is enough work (and keeping fit and eating healthy food) Sheesh. Now I’m not sure I want to read another book by him. This is called a techno-thriller. The court room scenes were a bit of a waste. Didn’t really advance the plot beyond the first scene. I finished it more out of curiosity in how he was going to wrap it up than really being interested in the outcome. Alex survived the voltage through her body. I don’t believe that, but at least she was very badly hurt. And the problem of getting identity documentation for her was a fun idea. He did extrapolate on user interfaces – and social media; Apple and Google merger.
4/9 Reread - The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien – March 25 was Tolkien day in which we were encouraged to read Tolkien. March 25, Shire-reckoning, is the day the Ring was destroyed. I haven’t read The Hobbit in a while so I started reading a paperback. It is the perfect fairy story. Great pacing. Relatable reluctant hero. It is a shame Peter Jackson butchered this delightful story in his ham-handed cash-grab films. I cannot watch them again. Martin Freeman was a good Bilbo, though. And Thorin was fairly true to character. Bilbo was not the helpless person he is often considered. He is basically a lord of a manor. He has to deal with trades people, neighbors. He is not a coward, but was just taken aback by suddenly having to entertain a large number of strangers. He wanted to be a hospitable host and his staff had gone home. The Dwarves end up relying on him to solve the problems. They had no real plan on how to get their wealth back which is why they needed to hire a burglar. The dwarves, especially, Thorin, are untrustworthly and Bilbo is not afraid of putting him in is place, reminding him when Thorin forgets the services that Bilbo has supplied. It was Bilbo that noticed Smaug’s weakness. And it was Bard, with the word of this weakness via the thrush, who slew the dragon. The dwarves don’t really deserve any of the riches. The scene with the Elf king and Bard, a man descended from kings. Bilbo holds his own and proposes a solution to the impasse, giving them the Arkenstone for leverage. He could have just stayed, safe and warm, but because of his contract and promise to Bombur, he returns to the mountain and Thorin’s wrath. Then gets kicked out again. But he wisely hides during the battle itself. He knows his limits and it is not his fight. Bilbo is now famous in the wide world among dwarves, the men of the lake, Forest elves, and Rivendell elves. He returns to his home only to find he has another challenge and his reputation is ruined in his home town while being highly respected in the wide world. This theme is repeated in LoTR. The side plot with the politics of Lake-town was interesting too. Tolkien’s commentary on the Master of Lake-town. And how Bard was the one who organized relief while the Master sought his own comfort. Shows who the true leader of a community is. Such a great story.
6/9 System Collapse by Martha Wells, Murderbot series #7. They were fun at the beginning, but barely got through the first chapter before I wanted to take a nap. Got more fun. But this would not have been understandable as a standalone. Creating the propaganda video was brilliant. Still a bit frantic rather than exciting. Good guys win. Partly because SecBot shared the governor hack code with the bad guy SecBots. And partly because of corruption within the bad guys. SecBot continues to heal from the incident in the previous book. Character growth. All the humans are still hard for me to sort out their character traits, but that could be mirroring SecBots’ limitations. It is easier for me now to think of SecBot as an it with no gender. I had a more feminine view of it at the beginning of the series probably due to it being a first person POV and the author being female, SecBot watches soap operas which I code at feminine and is protective (its job). As it develops relationships with other sentient non-humans/machines, I see interactions that are more stereo typically masculine. Name calling, ego-trip. But it is still open to learning about feelings and maybe they are useful. I suppose if I saw it from the outside, I’d probably think of SecBots as he because of the shape of the body, shoulder/hip ratio, no breasts.
7/5 True Names by Vernor Vinge, 1981 novella. Kindle. Republished in a collection of essays. It is on the list of the Columbia SF Book Discussion group, I love everythjng by Vinge. I can’t remember reading this. Lots of introductions and essays I’ll read after. Wonderful story. Very visionary. I had to read it from the point of view of 1980 when it was written, the technology available and the extrapolation in CS and SF at that time. Also the Marvin Minsky afterword. Then I need to read the essays from the POV of 1996 for the essays. Add in my reactions from 2024, where more of his extrapolations/predictions are real or close to being real. Virtual reality, MMPGs, brain controlling electronics for paralyzed people, LLM. AI theories from the early 1980s that I learned for my Master’s degrees, Winograd, et al I need to summarize the story and the things I liked about it later, see notes in the Kindle copy. Nice that he had the female character invent the key technology for the Other Plane (EEG interface) There was a sexual thing going on, but no misogyny. Some notes about the world. Some Computer games are called participation novels. Present day, there is a Hugo category for game writing. Pollack views himself as a novelist. Department of Welfare controls the internet. A data set is a 40 x 50 cm screen, a few thousand Mb of storage, an OtherWorld gate, a set of electrodes. Basically a Games interface. Other interesting ideas:
Data vandal, what we call hackers. I prefer vandal. Using the terms of magic, coven and warlock and spells by the vandals.
SIG, Special Interest Group. A professional computing society I belonged to (ACM) had special interest groups for graphics, or programming languages)
on the development of the Mailman. He touched on the dangers of generative AI, “only the decision modules in the older departments could be directly checked” You cannot verify the answer or tell how the AI came up with the answer.
Psylisp; I have a vague memory of LISP in college.
I thought is was quite a leap of logic to think that the Mailman was extra terrestrial. Assuming the alien found and understood the Other Plane, interacting through a text device like a teletype made sense. I didn’t buy it. And neither did Mr. Slippery
Call out to a data center in Laurel Maryland, I wonder if he had a place in mind, APL, NSA, Goddard?
Data commuters – predicting remote work before we had a world wide internet. Though connecting dial-up to main frames and Compuserve was common back then.
interactive EEG programming- we are getting there. I was working for the Air Force in 1979 and they knew I was an SF fan, they were trying to think of future user interface concepts for pilots. I suggested something like a computer port to the pilot’s brain.
Talking about the remnant of the Mailman code kernel. “if it ever started executing” Programs cannot start themselves, so unless this kernel has a timer to wake itself up or some interrupt in the operating system decides to execute code at the address the kernel is stored in, it’s just data in memory.
I did like the romance and that it couldn’t be consummated IRL. Pollack wasn’t turned off by the fact Ery was so much older. Even though Ery was beautiful in the Other Plane, he was still attracted because he respected her. On the other hand the disparaging femcop bit got old. Femfan was in use in the 70s, but sexist terms were on their way out
8/19 The Mimicking of Known Successes by Malka Older, 2024 Hugo Novella Finalist, I got it from the Hugo packet, but I didn’t have the interest to vote for Hugos this year. Thornhenge by T. Kingfisher won in this category. This work is science fiction as it takes place in a human colony on the “surface” of Jupiter (which they call Giant, just to throw the reader off for a few chapters) Humans are refugees who fled several hundred years ago from a spoiled Earth, living on platforms on metal rings just above the atmosphere of Jupiter. There is agriculture, and saved genetic specimens. No electronics or data processing is evident; except telegrams. Possibly due to Jupiter’s radiation field. Research is all books and writing. A rail transport system connects different platforms on the rings. Why? The purpose of the colony is to stay alive and figure out how to restore Earth. Attempts to colonize Mars failed for an unclear reason. Our protagonists are involved because one, a woman, Mossa, is investigating the disappearance, possible suicide of a man., an academic The other is a college friend and former lover, Pleiti, she enlists to help research.
The world is intriguing but not plausible. The rings could not be in ‘orbit’ at those locations. The caravel attack is silly. No real purpose. The last minute rush to the launch facility. How would an academic happen to recognize a certain type payload capsule unless she were working on a project to reseed the Earth? Coincidentally that they would arrive just a few minutes before launch and that one or two people would be able to initiate it, given the lack of automation and the physics of propellant loading. Even the head of NASA can’t launch a rocket by himself. Much less initiate it with the turn of a key and run to the ship and get strapped in before launch. Has the authorever watched a manned launch countdown? These are descendants by only a few hundred years of our current technology!
I wanted to like it but I can only suspend disbelief so much. I enjoyed the character development and the Sherlockian sleuthing, but a little less of that and more effort toward smoothing out the plot holes would have helped. And she had multiple people look at this. I would have liked a little chat about the design of the world. I discussed it with the Columbia SF Book Discussion group. They also agreed the SF was sacrificed for “coolness” but they enjoyed the mystery.
11/15 Reread Wool by Hugh Howey; Because Season 2 of “Silo” TV series is restarting I thought I’d reread “Wool” It is gripping. Great world building. Hard to put down. The bad guy IT head/Mayor is sleazy and bigoted against other classes of workers in the silo, especially the Mechanicals. Despite IT’s dependecet on them for power. But he believes he is saving humanity and sacrifice is necessary. Despite the crappy reason they are stuck in the silos. But he is a little tin god. There are some flaws in the premise; It is a closed ecosystem, but not entirely; there is mining. The Silos are grouped close together. So an enemy could wipe them all out if any survived. The author doesn’t have the idea of radios quite right. A handheld wouldn’t have the power to go through that much rock, even if the silo are, I’m guessing, a mile apart. The normal inter-silo communication looks to be wired. Also a special radio that can be dialed to any silo frequency, so there must be a repeater. The limited biodiversity. No birds. Largest animals are pigs and dogs. But maybe that is the flaw in The Order. The Order’s goal of a homogenous population. I wonder if that means racially homogenous, or just philosophically. Though Juliette is described as having olive skin (TV show, she is Brown haired, white.) Interesting to see a society where a woman’s primary purpose is NOT popping out babies. However, it gave me major spoilers for Season 2. There are major plot changes in the TV show, such at Judicial having a surveillance and enforcement arm separate from the sheriff’s department. So, there is no guarantee that the show is going to follow the book and I will be surprised. I may need to add the other books in the series to my TBR.
11/23 Station Eternity by Mur Lafferty; Autographed. I bought this from The Last Word because the Columbia SF Book Discussion group is going to discuss it, and Mur Lafferty was on my mind for some other reason; maybe winning an award or Hugo nomination. The synopsis is Mallory Veridian is constantly embroiled in murder cases only she can solve. This really messes with her personal life because people think she somehow causes the murders. First Contact happens the way I always thought it would. Space tourists show up. Governments can’t control it at first. Then the story has secret government agencies trying to develop defenses against the aliens, who have been benign so far. The aliens have space stations, but one recently allowed humans to visit. So the story is a coming together of threads that join Mallory and another Earthling, Alexander (Xan) Morgan, who was on the station after being “abducted” after a murder at a party that Mallory also attend. The aliens have a “babelfish” that they surgically implant in humans so they can understand all languages, even other human languages. (The book doesn’t call it a babelfish, but it functions similarly to the creature in Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) thus overcoming the communications problem, mostly. All the aliens are symbiotes and think humans are inferior because they can’t bond with another species. Lafferty does interject some nice feminist statements in a humorous way. The one I remember is about using “pussy” to describe a weak man. A pussy goes through a lot, giving birth, etc. it’s tough. She didn’t say male genitals were delicate, but that is the implication. It is not a ground breaking novel. Just some fun. A bunch of character studies. A lot of messed up childhoods. Turns out that humans CAN bond with other species. Xan inadvertently bonded with the shuttle that abducted him (Infinity, which happened to be the space station’s “daughter”) Also it turns out that Mallory bonded with the insectoid Sundry when she was young, before the official First Contact event. Since the Sundry’s superpower is data collection and correlation, that it how she was able to pick up details that led to solving the murders. It was fun and kept my interest in the mystery. Wow. Aunt Kathy, the serial killer. I’m glad there wasn’t an overt romance between Mallory and Xan, I was afraid this was going to be an enemies-to-lovers situation. Too busy or broken to fall in love, but at least able to learn to trust. The main thing that I didn’t buy in this story (other than the babelfish) was the telepathic visit between the station and the incoming visitors, or telepathy between Xan and Infinity. There is no physical basis for a signal in our brains getting out, unless there is a quantum thing going on with neural activity. No scientific basis for telepathy is just one of my things, especially long distance telepathy. (It was as believable as Alastair Reynolds novels.)
12/16 Road to Roswell by Connie Willis; checked it out from the library when I was there for a needle work group meeting. Started December 12, 2024. It was fun. The idea than an alien species looks like the flora of the American Southwest, tumbleweeds, mesquite, silly. They evolved to communicate through photoluminece symbols on their leaves. This is also an alien tourist contact story. Aliens are not invading and in fact have a sort of Prime Directive like Star Trek. The tumbleweed-like alien, dubbed Indy, wasn’t hearing them, he was reading their thoughts? Telepathy is one of the things I find very implausible. See Station Eternity. But it fits in the UFO lore. Willis stories have to have labyrinths. Like Passages. All the driving and turning different directions for no reason. At least there was less of people interrupting and ignoring the protagonist, That annoys me so much. Serena, focus! You are talking to your best friend. Nice mix of characters, not all cooperative. Lyle! But most got onboard with helping Indy even tho he coerced them and hurt them. Western movies, UFO cult, so much research. I did figure out Wade was not there by chance. Love story was thin, but foreshadowed a bit with Serena wanting to fix Francie up with FBI employee, Henry Hastings. Solitaire gag was a hoot, even the alien was suggesting plays. Tho I thought it was odd that a solitaire player would hold cards in her hands. You typically deal all the cards out. I stayed up late to finish reading because I could not wait to find out who Indy’s friend was and why he was running from the Monument Valley posse. Goes to show I can read a novel quickly if it is interesting and I will prefer a book over watching TV shows. I just can’t stop sometimes when it’s time for bed. If you are a Connie Willis fan or a UFO enthusiast you will love this book.
12/26 American Christmas Short Stories, edited by Connie Willis.2021. Started Jan 2024. Connie Willis loves Christmas. All the customs around it. I eagerly awaited her annual Christmas story in Analog. Lots of famous classic American authors that I’ve heard of and read some. I thought a collection of Christmas stories are going to be a little sappy. Some of the stories were but other were gross, shocking and tragic due to racism. While Willis’own story “Inn” is amazing. Just Wow!
