Sufficiently Advanced Exchange

I'm finally feeling mostly human after being down with a cold for about a week; serves me right for being a judge at the regional science fair and exposing myself to all those middle school germ factories. Well, I read a lot, anyway.

Shroud by Adrien Tchaikovsky - first-contact with a very alien alien species on the tidally-locked moon of a gas giant. Earth is (FRTDNEATJ*) uninhabitable, humans have diaspora'ed in spaceships under the iron rule of corporations who cynically consider only a person's value to the bottom line, and the Special Projects team of the Garveneer is evaluating what resources can be extracted from the moon nicknamed "Shroud" when disaster (of course) strikes. The middle 3/5 of the book is a bizarre roadtrip through a strange frozen hell, as an engineer and an administrator (both women) must navigate their escape pod to a place where they might be able to call for rescue.

When I'd just started this book I said that it reminded me of Alien Clay, and it really does have a lot in common with that book, especially since they are both expressions of Tchaikovsky's One Weird Theme, i.e. "How can we see Other as Person?" He hits the same beats as he does in that and other books that are expressions of that theme (for example, the exploratory overture that is interpreted as hostility, the completely different methods of accomplishing the same task) but if it's the sort of thing you like, you will like this sort of thing. It also reminded me a bit of Dragon's Egg by Robert L. Forward, in the sense that it starts with an environment which is the opposite of anything humans would expect to find life on, and reasons out from physics and chemistry what life might be like in that environment. Finally, it (weirdly) reminded me of Summer in Orcus by T. Kingfisher, because the narrator, Juna Ceelander, feels that she's the worst possible person for the job (of survival, in this case); the engineer has a perfect skill-set for repairing the pod and interpreting the data they receive, but she's an administrator, she can do everyone's job a little, even if she can't do anybody's job as well as they can. But it turns out that it's important that she can do everyone's job a little; and it's also important that she can talk to the engineer, and stroke her ego when she's despairing, and not mind taking the blame for something she didn't do if it helps the engineer stay on task, and that's very Summer.

I enjoyed this book quite a lot!

[*] for reasons that don't need exploring at this juncture

How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming by Mike Brown is what took me through most of the worst of my cold, as it's an easy-to-read micro-history-slash-memoir, which is one of my favorite nonfiction genres. Brown is the astronomer who discovered a number of objects in the Kuiper Belt, planetoids roughly the size of Pluto, which led to the inevitable question: are these all planets, too? If so, the solar system would have twelve or fifteen or more planets. If not - Pluto, as one of these objects, should not be considered a planet.

I really enjoyed the tour through the history of human discovery and conception of the solar system, and the development of astronomy in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. He manages to outline the important aspects of esoteric technical issues without getting bogged down in detail, so it's very accessible to non-scientists. Interwoven in this was his own story, the story of his career in astronomy but also his marriage and the birth of his daughter. It's an engaging, chatty book, and one must forgive him for side-stepping the central question of "so what the heck is a planet, anyway?"

Don't Stop the Carnival by Herman Wouk, which B had read a while back when he was on a Herman Wouk kick. I'd read Winds of War and War and Remembrance, and Marjorie Morningstar, but that was it, and I remembered he had said it reminded him a lot of our time in the Bahamas and Caribbean when we were living on our boat.

The best thing about this book is Wouk's sharp, funny writing - his paragraphs are things of beauty, his characters drawn crisply with description that always seems novel. The story itself is one disaster after another, as Norman Paperman, Broadway publicist, discovers that running a resort in paradise is, actually, hell. It's funny, but the kind of funny that you want to read peeking through your fingers, because you just feel so bad for the poor characters.

On the other hand, this book was published in 1965, and it shows. I don't think the racist, sexist, antisemitic, pro-colonization attitudes expressed by the various characters are Wouk's - he's Jewish, for one thing, and he's mostly making a point about these characters, and these attitudes. The homophobia, I'm not sure. But the book's steeped in -ism and -phobia, and I cringed a lot.

I enjoyed this book (for some value of "enjoy") right up until near the end, where a sudden shift in tone ruined everything.

Don't Stop the Spoilers

Two characters die unexpectedly; a minor character, and then a more major character, and everything goes from zany slapstick disasters ameliorated at the last minute to a somber reckoning in the ashes of last night's party. In this light, the ending feels jarring: the resort's problems are solved, the future looks rosy, and Norman realizes he is not cut out for life in Paradise and, selling the resort to another sucker, returns to the icy New York winter.

Reflecting on it, I think this ending is a better ending than the glib alternative of the resort's problems are solved, the future looks rosy, and Norman raises a glass and looks forward to dealing with whatever Paradise throws at him in the future. But because everything has gone somber, it feels not like he's learned a lesson and acknowledged reality, but that he's had his face rubbed in horror and decided he can't cope. If he'd celebrated his success and then ruefully stepped away, it would be an act of strength, but he runs back home, defeated, and all his experience along the way seems pointless.

Generation Loss by Elizabeth Hand - I got this book in a fantasy book Humble Bundle, so I was expecting fantasy, which this is very much not. It's a psychological thriller, following the first-person narrator Cass Neary, a fucked-up, drugged-out, briefly brilliant photographer who has been sent by an old acquaintance to interview a reclusive photographer - one of Cass's heroes - on a Maine island.

I kept reading because the narrative voice is fabulous and incredibly seductive, even though the character is a terrible person who does terrible things in between slugs of Jack Daniels and gulps of stolen uppers. It feels very immersive, both in the sense of being immersed in the world of the novel's events and in the sense of being immersed in the perspective of a messed-up photographer. But overall it's not really the sort of book I typically read, and it's not something I'd recommend unless you're into this type of book.