| Read Log, 2024 | ||||
| By Tal Cohen | Wednesday, 12 February 2025 | |||
Fiction Five volumes in Ian Fleming’s James Bond series: Dr No, Goldfinger, Thunderball, The Spy Who Loved Me, and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service; all in the Folio Society’s editions. Dr. No is the first extreme example of an evil mastermind laying out his plan in detail (including his detailed life history), for no good reason, and then gaming with Bond (“testing the limits of human ability to withstand pain” or something), again for no good reason. The girl in that novel, Honeychile Rider, is supposed to have a broken nose, as a result of a fight with a man who raped her (and whom she later killed using a black widow spider); in fact, when Bond first meets her, she is naked, and quickly covers her lower part and her face rather than her chest, because of that. It’s not surprising that the broken nose never made it to the film adaptation; it is surprising that Fay Dalton’s illustrations for the Folio Society edition, including on the slipcase, ignore this completely and give her a perfect face. In contrast, the Folio Society’s slipcase cover-art for Goldfinger is brilliant. Literally. The one thing common among all books, beyond the protagonist, is the author’s blatant racism and misogyny. In Dr No, we learn some “fascinating” facts about Jamaicans (lazy, with the virtues and vices of children), and Portuguese Jews, Syrians, Indians, and Chinese are similarly “classified” with “scientific detail”. In Goldfinger, black gardeners were working “with the lethargic slow motion of coloured help”. Also in Goldfinger, we find that “Bond came to the conclusion that Tilly Masterton was one of those girls whose hormones had got mixed up. He knew the type well and thought they and their male counterparts were a direct consequence of giving votes to women and ’sex equality’. As a result of fifty years of emancipation, feminine qualities were dying out or being transferred to the males. Pansies of both sexes were everywhere, not yet not yet completely homosexual, but confused, not knowing what they were. The result was a herd of unhappy sexual misfits ? barren and full of frustrations, the women wanting to dominate and the men to be nannied. He was sorry for them, but he had no time for them.” Of course, a “real man” like Bond can “solve” this problem. In On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, homosexuality is casually mentioned as something that can and should be treated, like alcoholism and drug use. As for misogyny, Thunderball includes a long rant about women driver (“a mild hazard”), but it’s in The Spy Who Loved Me where we find the real gem, “All women love semi-rape.” This is particularly sad since that book is told in the first person by the Bond girl, Viv Michel, and builds significant empathy for her, especially before Bond arrives (two-thirds of the way into the book). We find more good plot-design in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, where the end is actually moving; but the writing itself isn’t too brilliant, with, for example, too many! Exclamation marks! In rapid fire over short sentences! In action scenes! Like the ski scene and (later) the bobsled scene! No Gnomes Will Appear by Sara Shilo (Hebrew). A reread of a truly brilliant book. A Man in My Image by Elias Khoury. Third volume in the “Children of the Ghetto” trilogy. The book (much like the previous two volumes) is too pretentious, with too much symbolism, and too many references to other works of literature that are neither subtle nor hinted at, but rather bluntly presented: direct references to Anton Shamas and his outstanding Arabesques; to Sami Michael and his works; Huri himself is a character in the book, as is Juliano Mar Hamis; and so on. The race-crossing Israeli-Palestinian love story, done so delicately and intelligently elsewhere (including in Sami Michael’s A Trumpet in the Wadi), becomes a complete cliché here. That the Hebrew translation needlessly insists on making itself present, rather than being transparent, does not help. Translating a translation to a third language (English) is risky, but here’s an example: “The high towers of the city reach the skies (in Arabic we call skyscrapers ’cloud strikers’)”---would have worked just as well by simply being translated as “The skyscrapers reach the skies”, keeping the original’s picturesqueness without introducing clumsiness or calling too much attention to itself. The book did make me add Blessed Are the Peacemakers: The Story of a Palestinian Christian, by Audeh Rantisi, to my ever-growing “to-read” list. The Street of Stairs by Yehudit Hendel. A Hebrew novel from the 1950s, and one of the first Israeli novels to confront the internal conflict and, at times, blatant racism between the different ethnic divisions of the Jewish community. More than seventy years later, the problem persists (and if anything, was aggravated by populist politicians who weaponized the tension). The novel itself, while very dated in style and register, is well-written and enjoyable. The Personal History of David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. I was of course familiar with the general outline of the story, but have never in fact read the book in full. What took me the most by surprise was the unexpected sense of humor. Lots of amusing situations, and keen, often amusing characterization of multiple people. That said, most people (including Copperfield himself; Agnes; Dora; Heep; and so many others) are portrayed in an extremely one-dimensional manner. The only character who has any meaningful depth and is neither clearly good nor evil is probably James Steerforth. I chose to read this now mostly in preparation for reading... Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver. While the first thing that catches your eye is the parallels with David Copperfield---this is nothing less than a modern rewrite---the story stands on its own legs, unveiling the tragedy of the little people in the Apalaches; OxyContin, the tobacco farmers, foster children, children of addicts, etc. And then it goes south with drug use. The main characters have an excuse of sorts (Demon’s wounded knee, Dori’s suffering through her father’s medical condition) which perhaps takes it too easy on them, but the Oxy pharma dealers are clearly presented (through Aunt Jane’s friend Kent) as the cause of harm. At least it ends well, returning to the Copperfield plotline, give-or-take. That said, I actually really appreciate the much more realistic take in this book, compared to Copperfield; in particular, the narrator is not perfect, nor are most other characters. The only ones that are nearly perfect are Angus and Tommy. The Teddy Bear Habit, or How I Became a Winner by James Lincoln Collier. That’s just me chasing childhood memories: this book was the basis for a radio drama I’ve been following in the 1980s on Israeli radio, called “Me, the Guitar, and Everything Else”. The book itself is a good young-adult book, and gives the vibe of Manhattan in the 60s. Literary criticism and theory King Lear by William Shakespeare, Norton Critical Edition, edited by Grace Ioppolo. Includes an interesting introduction by Ioppolo, and a collection of papers of varying quality by Charles Lamb, Peter Brooks, Michael Warren, Lynda E. Boose, Janet Adelman, Margot Heinemann, R. A. Foakes, and Stanley Cavell. Once Upon a Prime: The Wondrous Connections Between Mathematics and Literature, by Sarah Hart. A review of appearances of math in novels, and how math affected writers and plots. Nothing to write home about. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative by Peter Brooks. Not, as I naïvely thought, a justification to read novels in order to enjoy the story, but rather a discussion on how the act of reading creates and builds the plot; an exploration of how plots may work and what may motivate them. Includes an in-depth criticism of several classics. Ho! issue #26: Third millennium, Hebrew: Prophecies, lamentations, and love declarations to a language at a time of crisis, edited by Dudi Manor and Sivan Baskin. I’ve focused on the articles, and skipped (most of) the original poetry and translations. The articles themselves were rather depressing: Hebrew authors and poets, many of them no longer considering themselves Israelies (or at least, no longer living in Israel), generally seem to agree that Hebrew has no chance of survival as a living language outside the state of Israel. Their children will speak Hebrew, their grandchildren probably won’t, their great-grandchildren surely won’t. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens, Norton Critical Edition, edited by Jerome H. Buckley. Not re-reading the text, but rather the accompanying criticism papers about it, by John Froster, Matthew Arnold, E. K. Brown, Gwendolyn B. Needham, Monroe Engel, J. Hillis Miller, Mark Spilka, Harry Stone, Bert G. Hornback, Garrett Stewart, Robert L. Patten, and Alexander Welsh. Ancient Greece and Rome (fiction and nonfiction) The Landmark Arrian: The Campaigns of Alexander by Arrian, edited by James Romm; translation by Pamela Mensch, and introduction by Paul Cartledge; and The Landmark Julius Caesar: The Complete Works: Gallic War, Civil War, Alexandrian War, and Spanish War, edited and translated by Kurt A. Raaflaub. I’m not a huge buff of military history, but it’s the anecdotes, the stories about people, the politics that I find interesting. For example, it was interesting for me to learn that many of the competitions that Alexander holds (to celebrate events, etc.) are competitions in athletics and the arts. Or that Alexander let the army park not near water sources but two-three miles away, to prevent disastrous over-drinking, but also because “he was also concerned to prevent the men who were least able to control themselves from walking into the springs or streams and fouling the water for the rest of the army.”; or that upon sending the aged and wounded home, after years-long campaign, Alexander (who strongly encouraged embedding the Greek culture with the Persian), ordered the veterans heading home to leave behind their Persian wives and children, suspecting they will not be welcomed in Macedonia. Politics aside, it is astounding to what extent both women and children were viewed as disposable assets. Arrian does “not hesitate to assert that he [Alexander] would have planned nothing trivial or insignificant, nor would he have ceased striving no matter what he had already acquired, even if he had added Europe to Asia or the British Isles to Europe. Instead, he would have sought beyond the known for something unknown, vying with himself in the absence of any other rival.” This is probably the closest there is to “And when Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer” (H. Gruber, 1988). (But apparently there are much earlier variants of the Die Hard line, including in Congreve’s The Way of the World (Act 3, scene 2), which I’ve missed when reading.) The Landmark editions are a joy to read, as always; but also as always, it didn’t take long (in either volume) for the first footnote or diagram reference error to pop up. Apparently the editors they’re enumerating and referencing the footnotes manually, like it’s 1455. Aeneid by Virgil, translated by John Dryden, Folio Society edition, based on the 1892 revisited and corrected text by George Saintsbury, and with an introduction by Peter Levi. This is an odd choice of translation; based on the simple examples in the introduction, it is not a faithful one; e.g., Latinus staring at the ground is converted into rolling his eyes. Also, the images are picked from a different translation, and very badly mapped to the text; for an extreme example, the caption provided to the engraving facing page 122 is “Meantime the Trojan cuts his watery way”, yet the image itself shows people on land, and matches nothing of the text in that page. It is probably beyond me to meaningfully review the Aeneid itself; I found the story to be mostly a lame shadow of Homer, mixing in elements from both the Odyssey and the Iliad. Anthology of Ancient Greek Poetry, edited and translated to Hebrew by Aharon Shabtai. Shabtai’s choice of poetry included is too abstruse, and he also recycles too much from texts he has translated and published before (from the Iliad, the Greek plays, and more). The translation itself uses a register of Hebrew which seems too high, while at the same time Shabtai seems to enjoy translating profanities as vulgarly as possible. The First Man in Rome by Colleen McCullogh. First volume in the Masters of Rome series. A well-written novel; some parts of it are clearly unrealistic, but other parts do offer interesting insights and takes into life in that era, and the principle characters. Sulla, for example, comes to life and seems much more interesting than most history books make him to be. As for everyday life, it was interesting to read the author’s vision, for example, of the contrast between the commoners’ and the elite’s versions of the Roman Saturnalia: “In the days when Clitumna and Nicopolis had shared the house with him, this time of holiday and merrymaking had been a wonderful end to the old year. The slaves had lain around snapping their fingers while the two women had run giggling to obey their wishes, everyone had drunk too much, and Sulla had yielded up his place in the communal bed to whichever slaves fancied Clitumna and Nicopolis---on condition that he enjoyed the same privileges elsewhere in the house. And after the Saturnalia was over, things went back to normal as if nothing untoward had ever happened,” whereas in the house of Caesar “everything was upside down---the slaves were waited on by their owners, little gifts changed hands, and a special effort was exerted to provide food and wine as delectable as plentiful. But nothing really changed. The poor servants lay as stiff as statues on the dining couches and smiled shyly at Marcia and Caesar as they hurried back and forth between triclinium and kitchen, no one would have dreamed of getting drunk, and certainly no one would have dreamed of doing or saying anything which might have led to embarrassment when the household reverted to normal.” Some elements of deviation from historic fact are sensible (e.g., the possibility that Julilla was in fact Sulla’s wife); some, however, go too far as flights of fancy. By far the most outrageous one is Sulla becoming a German spy after learning the language so quickly, and within two years rising as far as obtaining “thaneship of a whole group of small tribes,” despite being a foreign newcomer (plus having a wife and twins among the Germans). It is generally entertaining to try and tell fact apart from fiction. For example, Marcus Aemilius Scaurus’s son, in the book, turned out a coward (shat himself and passed out in the face of the enemy), and then, having had to deliver the message of his own failure to his father, was estranged by his father and killed himself. Yet in reality, “the only details preserved about the son are that he held the rank of legate and killed himself after being defeated in battle”, per Wikipedia. Odyssey by Stephen Fry. The last volume in Fry’s Greek mythology series. Well-written and enjoyable as ever, although in some places Fry used versions of the myth that took me by surprise; for example, Agamemnon’s children being eye-witnesses to his murder, and Orestes and Electra growing up together (which also means no recognition scene at their father’s grave). I’m unsure if this is Fry’s own creative license, or based on some source I’m not familiar with. Either way, a highly enjoyable read. Metamorphoses by Ovid, translated (to English prose) and introduced by Mary M. Innes. Not a very good translation, I suspect. A History of the Roman Republic by Israel Satzman. A history textbook. TIL that Lewis’s Narnia is named after a Roman colony in the very center of Italy, known as Narni in modern Italian. But I also learned much more. Myths and Legends of Ancient Rome, edited by Lawrence Norfolk. Not really myths and legends, more like very early history, presented through excerpts from ancient writings, and then from actual historians (Aeneid, Plutarch, Levy, Suetonius, etc.). The Authoress of the Odyssey: where and when she wrote, who she was, the use she made of the Iliad, & how the poem grew under her hands by Samuel Butler. A very interesting theory that was by and large rejected by scholars, namely, that the Odyssey was written by a woman---and she probably wrote herself into the book, as Nausicaä. Includes some very interesting arguments---such as showing that the author(ess) had significant knowledge of “womanly” things like doing the laundry, while being rather clueless about ships and sailing, or the oddity of the whole bit about the holes (or loops) in the axes (in the shooting contest). Also included is apparent proof that the version of the Iliad used by the author(ess) of the Odyssey was the complete text known to us today, including the “controversial” Book 10 (the night mission): this is done by showing how many lines from various books in the Iliad are quoted verbatim or with little changes in the Odyssey, with no book being too far off from the average. Homer’s Daughter by Robert Graves. An elegant, fictionalized version of the story suggested by Butler in The Authoress of the Odyssey, weaving many of the Odyssey plot-points and characters into the life of the authoress, Nausicaa, a princess of a small Greek (Trojan) clan. Many of the plot-points are inspiration for scenes from the Odyssey; for example, “Meanwhile she [the authoress’s mother] would weave me a bridal robe of sea-purple, which I might embroider with needlework pictures in gold and crimson as a proof that I was my father’s obedient daughter. She duly provided the robe, and I busied myself very unbusily on the pictures; and for every three that I completed, I would secretly unpick at least one when nobody was looking”; or how her brother scolds her that he runs the household, placed in the Odyssey as Telemachus scolding Penelope. Another source she uses for her epic poem is legends then-known, which she adjusts to meet her needs. For example, the story The Return of Odysseus, where his nemesis was not Poseidon but Aphrodite, who cursed him by making Penelope irresistible to her numerous suitors, but also unwilling to resist, so in effect a harlot. The book is called “Homer’s Daughter” not because she is in fact the daughter of Homer, but rather because she wants to (conceptually, since she can’t technically) join the company of wandering bards, “Homer’s Sons”, as a way to achieve immortality. Her father the king claims that the Trojan War was in fact a trade war (which explains why it lasted so long, since nobody would seriously care so much about an aging runaway woman, no matter how beautiful). But Homer changed it to what it was because “That is what their hearers expect: songs of love and songs of battle. A fine entertainment a trade-war epic would make! Sing, ye counting-house Muses, of so many talents of copper, So many horse-hide bales, and so many measures of broadcloth: How the monopoly-mad King Priam defied the Achaeans, Charging them fifty per cent on goods from the shores of the Euxine.” Graves nicely integrates various points that Butler highlighted in his research; for example, how Nausicaa’s father forces all the chieftains in his domain to provide gifts to the visitor (in the Odyssey, that’s Odysseus), but fails to actually provide that gift that he himself promised (in fact, Nausicaa’s father is portrayed as a miser). However, the last few pages of the book are a description of a negotiation between Nausicaa and the bard (whom she saved from death when her own evil suitors were slaughtered, in return to publishing her poem), where the highlighting of several of Butler’s points looks like a laundry list. The nicest element of the plot is actually one that is unrelated to Butler or the Odyssey: It is the mystery of the disappearance of Laodamas, her elder brother. Nausicaa does a not unreasonable detective work there. It is sometimes still woven into the Odyssey plot (e.g., a bit about a nurse washing a visitor’s leg and realizing something as a result). Highlighting the unrelated elements, and making the writing of the Odyssey somewhat more secondary, would have improved the novel immensely. Plutarch’s Lives, volume I (Loeb edition): Theseus and Romulus, Lycurgus and Numa, Solon and Publicola and volume II, Themistocles and Camillus, Aristides and Cato Major, Cimon and Lucullus. Translated by Bernadotte Perrin. As the introduction states, “even in Lives, Plutarch is far more moralist than historian.” Imperial Rome by Moses Hadas and The Editors of Time-Life Books (from the Time Life Great Ages of Man series). Software engineering Team Geek: A Software Developer’s Guide to Working Well with Others by Brian W. Fitzpatrick and Ben Collins-Sussman. It was very amusing to read this book, which was waiting on my desk for roughly a decade, and realize that it was written by two of the “founding fathers” of the Google Pittsburgh office — while I’m on a flight from SFO to Pittsburgh to visit the team I manage at that office. This book is aimed at programmers at large, but it is written with a specific image of a programmer in mind: the person who loves programming, and chose programming as a career not because there’s good money in it, but because they enjoy programming. The typical image of a “geek,” a socially-shy, introverted person seems to be the authors’ basic assumption. For example, Chapter 3 opens with “Even if you’ve sworn on your mother’s grave that you’ll never become a ’manager’,” which perfectly fits the subculture of people who view managers as “suits” (hey, that was me!), as opposed to people who chose programming as a career just like any other (in which case switching to management is often desirable). In fact, they assume practically all programmers are geeks: the composition of a software project, for example, is “a group of geeks”. Early in the book we find a quote by Richard Hamming, saying that “By taking the trouble to tell jokes to the secretaries and being a little friendly, I got superb secretarial help”; and then they proceed to say that “The moral is this: do not underestimate the power of playing the social game. It’s not about tricking or manipulating people; it’s about creating relationships to get things done, and relationships always outlast projects”. Well, I have an issue with that. You should be friendly to secretaries (not “take the trouble” to be “a little” friendly to them; be friendly to them) because they are, first and foremost, human beings. The fact that secretaries will often be nicer to you because you treat them as human beings is a sad indication to the fact that many managers (and engineers) do not, in fact, treat them as their equals. But these nits aside, this short book contains a lot of very useful advice for programmers in different stages of their career; from aspiring software engineers to senior managers. I would definitely recommend it to anyone in the industry. (The second, and probably improved, edition is titled Debugging Teams. It is available online.) A Philosophy of Software Design by John Ousterhout. What a delightful read. The principles presented by Ousterhout seem spot-on, and I would gladly agree to most (though not all) of them; but the examples... Oof. These leave much to be desired. The book sometimes provides seemingly-conflicting advice, but in a way that actually makes perfect sense, and with guidelines for when to use which advice. For example, specialization can be pushed upwards (the common case) but also downwards, as in the case of device drivers. Exception aggregation is the opposite of exception masking, but there’s a clear explanation of when to use each: “masking usually works best if an exception is handled in a low-level method. For masking, the low-level method is typically a library method used by many other methods, so allowing the exception to propagate would increase the number of places where it is handled. Masking and aggregation are similar in that both approaches position an exception handler where it can catch the most exceptions, eliminating many handlers that would otherwise need to be created.” Chapter 11 is about thinking about more than one design before making a choice. In my team, I used to require this in every design doc: a section about alternatives considered. If nothing else, this forced the authors to think about alternative designs, and allowed reviewers to review and comment on these (sometimes suggesting additional alternatives). There are also many unorthodox pieces of advice, some of which make perfect sense, some debatable. The problem is that even the good ones come with odd, often wrong, examples. The advice stating that “software should be designed for ease of reading, not ease of writing,” is patently true, to my mind; but Ousterhout’s examples are avoiding generic containers (huh?) and avoiding different types for declaration and allocation (e.g., field of type List, initialized to ArrayList). I actually think this is a good practice in most cases (see Bloch’s Effective Java for rationale). The book contains some excellent arguments against advice (by Martin and others) to avoid comments completely and make the code self-explanatory: “Martin suggests pulling that block out into a separate method (with no comments) and using the name of the method as a replacement for the comment. This results in long names such as isLeastRelevantMultipleOfNextLargerPrimeFactor. Even with all these words, names like this are cryptic and provide less information than a well-written comment. And, with this approach, developers end up effectively retyping the documentation for a method every time they invoke it! I worry that Martin’s philosophy encourages a bad attitude in programmers, where they avoid comments so as not to seem like failures. This could even result in good designers coming under false criticism: “What’s wrong with your code that it requires comments?” Well-written comments are not failures. They increase the value of code and serve a fundamental role in defining abstractions and managing system complexity.” Absolutely true. I also agree with the author’s take on Test-Driven Design: “The problem with test-driven development is that it focuses attention on getting specific features working, rather than finding the best design. ... One place where it makes sense to write the tests first is when fixing bugs. Before fixing a bug, write a unit test that fails because of the bug. Then fix the bug ... If you fix the bug before writing the test, it’s possible that the new unit test doesn’t actually trigger the bug, in which case it won’t tell you whether you really fixed the problem.” Another good advice is around bringing together and eliminating duplication, including an example that uses “goto” in a manner that I actually agree with, as it clearly improves the code. The Programmer’s Brain: What Every Programmer Needs to Know about Cognition by Felienne Hermans, forward by Jon Skeet. This book should have been a (short) email. The editor of this book, to the extent that there was one, should be fired. Other nonfiction The Myth of Multitasking: How “Doing It All” Gets Nothing Done by Dave Crenshaw. I was given this book when attending the author’s talk in a company event. The talk was interesting. The idea in the book is nice, simple, and probably very correct. Yet the whole thing could have been written on a double-sided A4 paper, with room left for pictures. Lowest signal-to-noise ratio I’ve seen in any book, Dr Suess picturebooks included. The experiment Crenshaw uses in class, and describes in the book, to demonstrate the cost of task-switching is nice: write down a phrase (“Multitasking is worse than a lie”), then, on a separate row, count the number of letters by writing the numbers down (1 to 27). Next, do this by task-switching: one letter, then its number, and so on. This takes about twice as much time (Thirty seconds more in the book’s example). True. But: (a) I could claim that this means 53 task-switches cost me 30 seconds in total, or about half a second wasted per switch, so why be concerned about switching tasks at work in a per-5-minutes frequency? The cost would be well under half a percent of my time; and (b) the resolution here is too fine, meaning we rarely switch tasks in the middle of writing a word, which takes more time to “recover” from; so perhaps realistic task-switching is even cheaper. (The answer is that in reality it takes more time to switch back since the context is so much more complex, and was removed from working memory.) Future Shock by Alvin Toffler. Contrary to my expectations, turns out the book (originally published in 1970) is not about how individuals should cope with future shock, but rather about how society should. “Future shock,” the concept, is defined early in the first chapters of the book as the physiological and psychological effect of having to face too-rapid changes in the (social) environment; the number of meaningful changes in a person’s life is drastically higher in today’s “super-industrial” (post-industrial) society, compared to previous ages, and the rate of change is accelerating. Toffler then claims that there’s a limit to our body and psych’s ability to adapt, and people could effectively lose their sanity, or society could derail, unless we “do something about it”. His suggested plan to adapt is more government planning, through various experimental mechanisms like communities tasked with predicting possible futures, etc. It felt to me like a gross underestimation of human ability to adapt; and an amusing-at-best plan for coping. Overall, the book offers interesting insights about how to measure the rate of change, the kinds of changes we’re facing (transience, novelty, diversity), unrelated tying-in of biological reactions to micro-changes (“orientation response” at the neural level), and interesting, often amusing, predictions about the future (although the author explicitly states he is not in the business of future predictions; this is about how to plan for the unknown). Toffler’s writing style is repetitive, to the point of being tiresome; here’s one extreme example from Chapter 8, discussing how communications are getting denser. Toffler explains that we receive a lot of “coded” messages (messages delivered as words); some of them are “engineered”, in the sense that they are “carefully edited in advance.” And then we find that “These engineered messages differ from the casual or do-it-yourself product in one crucial respect: Instead of being loose or carelessly framed, the engineered product tends to be tighter, more condensed, less redundant. It is highly purposive, preprocessed to eliminate unnecessary repetition, consciously designed to maximize informational content. It is, as communications theorists say, ’information-rich.”’ One has to wonder if Toffler was being ironic, or did he completely miss what’s happening here. I’ve read this book, of course, mainly in preparation for reading... Science fiction The Shockwave Rider by John Brunner. I love Brunner’s writing style. People talk without explaining to each other the meaning of their words (for the benefit of the reader), except in rare cases. Explanations come later, embedded in the text; or not at all, if you didn’t pick up the hint. For example, “system rash” is the spoken version of “system rationalizer”, which was mentioned a few paragraphs earlier, but if you miss the connection that’s on you. Also, language evolved, and there’s no apologies or explanations; you’re expected to catch up and understand phrases like “his teener years” or “mental welf”. Not a huge challenge, of course, but it does make the text seem more natural. The book contains many small touches coming directly from Future Shock that I would have easily missed if not for reading that book just now. Examples include tranquilizers “to cushion the shock of moving to a new house,” “bets on today’s football fatalities,” a daughter that “signed up year after year for weirder and wilder courses of study,” a “proposed new amendment to the Constitution which would redefine electoral zones in terms of professions and age groups rather than geographical location,” child-for-hire services for married couples who don’t have time, “utopia-design consultancy” and “hypothetical life-style labs” and “simulation cities” and “paid-avoidance zones” (all concepts suggested by Toffler), and much more. The Delphiniums, or Delphi councils, using “wisdom of the crowds” to predict the futures, are very much like what Tuffler suggested in his book, but even more so like modern information-gambling sites. “It’s rather as though this paradox has proven true: that while nobody knows what’s going on around here, everybody knows what’s going on around here.” And in fact, Brunner suggests gambling based on that, and mentions it’s simply measuring “traditional market forces.” Plot-wise, the way Nick Halflinger eventually beat his interrogator, Paul Freeman, via their arguments-discussions is entirely unconvincing. The whole “tapeworm” story is actually acceptable; I could easily see this as happening with modern software systems (qv ransomware), given some adjustments. As for making all government information public, in a sense Nick is the spiritual grandfather of Snowden and Assange. But the end is weak, effectively declaring communism as the solution. Also on-par with Brunner’s style, the book includes a never-ending, delightful list of inventions and predictions: a dog-like machine that follows you around and carries your luggage for you at the airport; walls that can be freely rearranged, and their color changed by hidden lighting; “olivers”, devices that remind you of your person-to-person contacts so you don’t have to remember details; electric cars, and even electric lift for aircraft (which required static-discharge chapters for passengers once they land); a phone line you call where you can pour your heart out, there is no response except a message at the end, “Only I heard that”---it’s called “Hearing Aid”; “The nation was tightly webbed in a net of interlocking data-channels, and a time-traveler from a century ago would have been horrified by the degree to which confidential information had been rendered accessible to total strangers capable of adding two plus two”; garbage separated into disposable and recyclable; people sleep “on a pressure bed, insulated by a directed layer of air”; “ultrasonic clothing cleansers capable of ridding even the bulkiest garment of its accumulated dust and grime in five minutes”; work from home or office (flexible) for Hearing Aid workers; “upgrading vegetable protein to compete with meat”; “a light-writer, which unlike old-fashioned mechanical printers was not limited to any one type style?or indeed to any one alphabet, since every single character was inscribed with a laser beam at minimum power” (laser printers were already invented by then, and introduced commercially 1-2 years after the book’s publication); a video conference with multiple connections: “These days it was easy to lose track of what features belonged with what names. Therefore there were captions under each of the faces on the four-station secure link”. Below the Root and And All Between, the first two volumes of the Green Sky Trilogy by Zilpha Keatley Snyder. Following my childhood love of the Apple II platform/adventure game Below the Root, I decided to read the original (only to realize that the game is in fact a sequel, a fourth volume in the series, co-authored by Keatley Snyder herself). A bit dated but still enjoyable children’s SF/fantasy.  The Mercy of Gods by James S. A. Corey; volume I in the new The Captive’s War trilogy. This is science fiction where the main science is biology. Yes, there’s faster-than-light travel (described in an amusing way), but that’s not the main point. One key unrealistic part, biology-wise, is that all those creatures breathe the same atmosphere. (Except for some mention of the atmosphere being too high on oxygen for the ape-like Night Drinkers species.) But perhaps the other Ziggurats on that planet, used to host other aliens, have a different atmosphere, for other captive races? Corey’s main miss in The Expanse was lack of AI. Here, they do away with the problem by using human protagonists from a different planet (Anjiin) that was populated by humans thousands of years ago, but while realizing they are aliens on this planet, they do not know their origin, because in the past there was a nuclear war (or accident). In other words, a “technology reset”. If I had to guess, the race that is fighting the Carryx, and had sent The Swarm, is actually humans, from their other planets. (But perhaps not, because in that case the Carryx would have identified the people of Anjiin as their main enemy.) The Soul of Anna Klane by Terrel Miedaner. Two fragments from this book were included in Hofstadter and Dennett’s The Mind’s I; both were highly thought-provoking, which put this book on my “want-to-read” list for a very long time. The book itself is a science fiction novel of sorts, centered around a court drama: a father blamed for killing his daughter maintains that she was, in fact, killed by a (successful) medical procedure (brain surgery), since that operation terminated her soul, and only her body remained. While the initial writing style is good, the book could have probably been much better if the trial was not full of boring lectures, and if it would have ended with the jury out deliberating. As it stands, this is a “scientific religion” text, and entirely unconvincing as such.
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