Category Archives: Reviews

A wild ride through philosophy and danger

Just finished reading Unity by Elly Bangs.

This is great stuff and I highly recommend it. What an incredible debut novel.

On the first level, it’s a fast-moving cyberpunk dystopia about refugees running from calamity as an apocalypse threatens everything. Danae is a fragment of a group consciousness running from an underwater mafia state after a power struggle erupts from a decapitation bombing. She’s on the run with her love and a mercenary they’ve hired not knowing he can no longer kill. They are hunted by a cast of villains including a human-leather wearing psycho, a replicating body borrower, a Christian Confederacy cult and it all happens against a backdrop of impending Gray Goo annihilation.

That’s a banger right there, that’s what that is.

But underneath there’s a deeper set of questions. What does it mean to join together, to be one? Should union imply we are in full agreement? How lumpy and frothy can our coalitions be? How much can we disagree with our allies? How should mercy and forgiveness work? Can I be good if I’ve done bad? What does love mean and how close do we get? How do handle love when we fundamentally disagree with each other’s choices?

In some ways this feels like if Becky Chambers was writing on a really mean coke binge. But I mean that in a good way.

The world-building is delicious and full of tasty treats, but the story and the characters are each truly driven.

A Hungry Journey to Light a Fire

I just finished reading The Dispossessed by Ursula LeGuin.

The planet Urras is orbited by it’s moon Anarres. 200 years ago anarchists inspired by the philosopher Odo left Urras and moved to the harsh frontiers of Anarres to be free and live a life without masters, property or law. They formed a new language without the bloody history of property baked into it. They struggled together and overcame together. But the door is shut. No one emigrates from Urras and no one emigrates from Anarres. Each is afraid of being infected by the other’s ideas.

“And nobody hungry?”

“Nobody goes hungry while another eats.”

“Ah.”

“But we have been hungry. We have starved.”

Shevek is a brilliant physicist on Anarres, who wants to study, to learn, to create and to share the new ideas he’s created. He finds the support on Anarres wanes the further he goes from accepted norms and ideas. He finds that even on Anarres, there are centralized pockets of power. The revolution is never complete. In times of struggle, ideals are tested, power centralizes… And the center often holds.

“I got full rations: I earned them. I earned them by making lists of who should starve.”

He finds that his physics have a more receptive audience on propertarian Urras. We meet him as he climbs, empty handed, aboard a trade ship to spread his physics and his Odonian ideals on Urras.

More plot than most of her books, it still turns back into a person on a journey. Shevek is on a journey from his anarchic home to a capitalist world. What propels him from a simple world of shared struggles? Why leave? When he arrives can he accomplish his goals? Is there something he can do that the people there couldn’t do for themselves? Will he be trapped and neutralized by the soft prison of luxury?

And how can he return home? What awaits an anarchist who is seen to turn his back on the revolution?

I love the deep thinking about language and the practice of mutual aid in a land with few resources. I love the true struggle to stay good when the droughts hit. And the challenge that centralization and coordination always brings. Everything is dealt with in indirect ways that paint larger pictures just out of sight, beyond the edge of the book.

Highly recommend.

Fables Compendium One: Things Happen One After Another

I was always recommended Fables when I talked about how much I liked The Sandman.

This isn’t a grand story about the power of story or a new perspective on old tales. It’s a lot of stories with the names of characters you’ve heard of before.

The characters are only loosely connected to their sources and they change abilities and temperament to suit the plot of the week.

We learn nothing, we don’t grow while reading it and one thing just sort of happens after another. There are real risks and losses though! The author doesn’t wiggle out of death or consequences, which gives some stakes to the conflicts.

I would not recommend this to someone who says they loved The Sandman.

I originally reviewed Fables Compendium One over on BookWyrm, where we could connect and natter about books

Mar 2024 Media Diet

Books

The Status Civilization Robert Sheckley is a weird old SF writer that I very much love. I didn’t love this one.

Continuing to read The Power Broker, but now in conversation with my dad, which is pretty awesome.

Movies

TV

Dicktown

An adult animation about two sad sacks who form a detective agency. Loved it. John Hodgman (known for being a PC) has somehow made a career out being boring. Here he is a private detective who peaked in high school, assisted by David Rees, who used to be his bully. David Rees is so fascinating. I first found him through his web comics about fighting and filing and war. I didn’t follow him as he did deep dives of the mundane, like starting an artisanal pencil sharpening service – but it’s great to see this exploration of maturity and growth in such a silly format.

As I wrote about My 2023 in Books, I realized I want to write more about what I read.

I just wrote up “Why Big Things Don’t Get Done”, a review of Brent Flyvbjerg’s “How Big Things Get Done”.

If the title is a question, Brent has collected data across thousands of large projects and found an answer that he reveals early. Big things get done over budget, late, and deliver less value than people expected. Or they don’t get done. For the most part. Not by a little bit, either – big things fail by a lot. In a database of “16,000 projecgts from 20-plus different fields in 136 countries” he finds that “99.5 precent of projects go over budget, over schedule, under benefits, or some combination of these.”

And it shouldn’t be this way for big things. These are HUGE EXPENDITURES. Stuff like dams, nuclear power plants, healthcare.gov, and similar massive projects that people depend on succeeding. There should be lots of incentives to get it right.

Brent explores why this happens over and over again. He doesn’t duck the question, he has real answers, like:

  • Many projects start without defining why they need to happen. Without a defined why, decisions aren’t always steering to the north star and not everyone will have the same vision.
  • People act too early and don’t plan well before they get started. He goes into how to do that better – pointing out how Pixar did it really well with low stakes small versions.
  • When people get started early, they get delayed on every new emergency, so it takes longer than expected – and every day late is a chance for a new unexpected incident or emergency. Fast is good once you have a tight plan.
  • People estimate poorly because they think their project is special instead of finding a good match of things that have been done before.
  • People lie about the costs so they can use sunk costs to demand more funding when they exceed the budget. (Robert Caro describes how Robert Moses did this repeatedly in The Power Broker). Some “estimates aren’t intended to be accurate; they are intended to sell the project.”
  • The team doesn’t have enough experience so they can’t anticipate that similar problems will show up as happened on previous similar projects. If you’ve never built an underground train before, you won’t know to keep replacement parts for the digging machine ordered in advance.

The stories are numerous and detailed in here. I was also pleased by how many echoes I found with my other reading. I’d read about the building of the Pentagon and the chaos of the the early building of it. So much was done so fast, but so much had to be redone. I’d listened to the 99pi/Cautionary Tales episode about the building of the Sydney Opera house and how it ruined the architect, who fled the country and never saw it completed. I’m reading Robert Caro’s “The Power Broker” and it’s a great peek behind the scenes to see how and why the author thought his 8 years of research/writing would only take a year.

This book was a big eye-opener for me, articulating things my experience had turned into instincts. I was able to use it before I even finished, referring engineers I work with to find “reference projects” to figure out timelines instead of doing the same things that didn’t work for us and don’t work for anyone else.

If you do things that take longer than a month, this is a pretty valuable book to read. If you do things that are new or haven’t been done before, it’s VERY interesting. I’m going to go on about this a lot to other folks about it.

Jan 2024 Media Diet

Books

I started a couple of good ones as well. I track all that over on bookwyrm.

TV

The Brothers Sun – This was really good. Fun, violent, funny. Real challenges and character arcs and good twists. The fight scene at the driving range was incredible. A deftly shot, well choreographed smash. Loved it. Michelle Yeoh is getting what she deserves. Justin Chien is great.

BLUE EYE SAMURAI – Stunningly smart. The twists are vicious. Gorgeous as well. Gets dark.

Over the Garden Wall – a really off-kilter cartoon from one of the creators of Adventure Time. Kids and I liked it a lot. They said it seemed like Centaurworld, which was also very yum.

I rewatched Shoresy because it really helps me SET THE TONE.

And I’ve been slowly working my way through Moonlighting, which is such a treasure from my childhood. Jason Lefkowitz turned me onto this – I love the casual 4th wall breaking, the bits they throw in to fill time, the Christmas episode that pulls back to reveal the whole production company singing. And the actual episodes are also good!

Krapopolis – I love everyone in this and cannot bother myself to watch another episode unless I want to fall asleep.

Chad and JT Go Deep – a heartwarming dumb silly journey. Half dramedy, half hidden camera prank show, funny. A Tim and Eric flavor sprinkled over it all.

Movies

Maggie Moore is a very light dark comedy. Really enjoyed this – Tina Fey is good at being not just Liz Lemon. Jon Hamm is good at being not just Don Draper. Micah Stock steals the show as a very pathetic villain.

Dredd – I was stuck in bed with a bad back and thought I’d check it out. It’s horrible. It’s one of those movies that takes the fascist joke seriously and makes it unfunny. Very violent and gross and well shot.

The Imitation Game – brilliant. Deserves all the praise it got.

Blackfish City – urban ecopocalypse seasteading heist

Just finished Sam Miller’s beautiful book in the wee dark hours and it is a GEM. Qaanaaq is a place – I can see it and feel it’s culture, smell the noodles and the brine, feel the bitter cold. It’s like a long Geoff Manaugh article come to life. The nano-bonded orca-amazon that opens the book is one of the least weird things in it.

This book is start to finish what Robin Sloan calls gold coins, fascinating little surprises. Beyond the end actually – in the acknowledgments I discovered Bradley Silver’s modern tattoo work at white rabbit studio.

I enjoyed this as much as The Fifth Season, which is to say: immensely. Ended up checking it out twice from the NYPL on my Kobo just to savor through it.

Walkaway by Cory Doctorow

Finished Walkaway last night. It’s the hard utopian bit of wonderful you need in dark times. To live in the first days of a better nation, you have to build and believe that you can be in that nation before it is supported.

In Walkaway, the rich keep getting richer, the poor get poorer, the middle class is gutted out of society, fearfully scrambling to keep out of poverty and ignoring how close they are to being out on the street. Automation keeps progressing and the uber wealthy don’t need surplus people.

There’s no death camps, there’s just no jobs and no safety net and no healthcare for the unneeded.

So some folks walk away from money and just do for each other. That’s a threat to the base of a greed-sick society, so that society moves to protect itself.

The police are sent to deal with these terrorists and thieves.

The walkaway road is very hard and very dangerous and some people die.

I’m more energized than before to act to fix the place where I love, because what I do matters.  (You too.)