April
22,
2005
For some reason, I had Walter Jon Williams on my mental list of “worthy” authors — people who write books that you’d like to have read, and which you’d enjoy reading, but which you’d have to really get yourself motivated to tackle, and would spend most of a month slogging through. Based on the evidence of Walter Jon Williams’ Aristoi
this is a blatant misrepresentation of Williams.
Aristoi is a remarkable book in a lot of ways. It’s a book about posthumans that’s not eye-rollingly trendy; it’s a book about highly artsy people that’s not eye-rollingly precious; it’s a book that plays textual formatting tricks without being eye-rollingly pretentious; and it’s a book that tells a rollicking galaxy-spanning fate-of-humanity adventure story without being eye-rollingly silly. The intersection of hard SF, literary SF, and space opera is a small, small space — but Aristoi is snuggled firmly in the center of it, carving out an enviable little niche. Aristoi is what Bujold would write if she were more imaginative, what Simmons would write if he had a sense of humor, and what Niven would write if he were less pulpy. It is, in short, damn fine SF in every way.
Now, the obligatory nit-pick: Lots of name-dropping references to philosophers, writers, and artists, every single one of which is historic to the author, even though these people belong to an artistically rich post-human civilization apparent millennia in the future. In all the planets of human space, in a culture which aims people toward the production of great cultural works, you’ve got nothing worth referring to since the late twentieth century? Nuh-unh!
But, like I say, that’s a nit-pick. Recommended highly for all fans of SF. I’m going to seek out Williams’ other work, now.
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April
16,
2005
Well, this is ironic. I liked Robert Charles Wilson’s Spin
so much that I wanted to think up some really interesting stuff to say about it, rather than just dashing off a hasty little slap-dash entry that wouldn’t do it justice; but I got busy with other stuff, never got around to writing the booklog entry, and now I’ve forgotten a bit more than I’d prefer. Alas.
I really liked Wilson’s earlier novel, The Chronoliths, so it’s not surprising that I’d like this book — especially because they’ve got a lot more in common than just the author. Both books deal with time manipulation, a multi-decade countdown to the inevitable end of the world, and the personal relationships of the protagonist. These are the rare books that use a science fictional setup as both an interesting mystery in its own right, and as an impetus to set off character arcs that wouldn’t have occurred in a more sedate period.
This is well-written, quality SF that sacrifices neither literary nor science fictional virtues, the sort of book that could win either a Hugo or a Nebula without it being a surprise. Highly recommended.
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April
10,
2005
Time for another graphic novel round-up.
First, Mike Carey’s Lucifer, vol. 7: Exodus
. This
is, obviously, the continuation of the Lucifer series about which I’ve
already said highly positive things. It seems to be on par with the
rest of the books, but it’s hard to tell, because reading this single
volume alone is like reading a chapter of a book in isolation. It
seems to still be going along nicely, though.
Next, we get Mike Carey’s The Furies
, his other
(single-volume) Sandman spinoff. This one is far, far less successful
than Lucifer, though. The art is attractive — it’s in that
Alex Ross painted-photograph style — but the story is bland and enhy.
It turns out that Lucifer is a far more interesting character to base
a spin-off on than the Furies are.
Continuing with the Sandman spinoff theme, we get Bill
Willingham’s The Sandman Presents: Taller Tales
, which is a
collection of short stories based on random Sandman characters.
Willingham’s signature work, Fables, is pretty much the
definition of bland competence; he brings the same talent to this
volume. It’s not bad, but it’s not good, either. It’s just pretty
much there.
Finally, totally unrelated to Sandman, we have Warren Ellis’
Ultimate Galactus, vol. 1: Nightmare
. Hey, it’s a big ol’
crossover Event book in the Ultimate universe, featuring the
planet-devouring Galactus. Or at least, promising to someday
feature him, inasmuch as he doesn’t appear in this first volume at
all. This is entirely setup, and gets the X-Men and the Ultimates
into Siberia to investigate a strange mystery whose resolution is
given away in the title. Despite that, it’s reasonably enjoyable, in
a totally generic superhero comic book way.
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April
3,
2005
Jeremy Siegel’s Stocks for the Long Run
is a bit of
an odd duck. The cover makes it look like one of those “GET RICH
QUICK WITH OPTIONS” books (though the words “Long Run” in the title
ameliorate that impression a bit), but it actually reads pretty dry —
this feels more academic than Malkiel’s book did, certainly. Oddly,
though, while you’d think that an academic dryness would make a book
more credible, the effect it had on me was the opposite — I
occasionally got the feeling that Siegel was struggling hard to make a
point, and data-mining up evidence to support his contentions.
Oh, not his primary contention — it’s pretty clear that the title
is correct and that stocks have historically been the asset o’ choice
for long time horizons (though how useful this knowledge will be in
the future is unknown — past performance really doesn’t
guarantee future results, and even Siegel has a chapter about how we
should reasonably expect stocks to underperform historical averages in
the future). The dubious part is the elaborate sub-contentions he
makes about what the ideal portfolio of stocks and bonds is over
particular medium-term time horizons, how this changes in the presence
of inflation-protected bonds, and so forth. When you run a few
calculations, and end up with a result that says “buy stocks and TIPS
and short bonds on margin,” well, maybe it’s right, but it sounds more
like one of those “can’t fail” hedge-fund calculations that end up
needing massive bailouts than a rigorously proven fact.
But at any rate, that’s not such a big deal, because only a chapter
or two of the book are actually taken up by the ostensible central
premise. In a very real sense, a more accurate title for the book
would be How Financial Markets Operate, because Siegel goes
into elaborate detail about the actual intricacies of the day-to-day
workings of the stock market in a surprisingly interesting way. It’s
one thing to know what program trading and futures markets are; it’s
another thing to read about how the futures markets started out, how
their influence grew, and how program trading is largely driven by
futures arbitrage. (The take-away point for me is that our financial
system is a series of hacks and kludges, and that it’s a bloody
miracle anything works at all, but that might just be my software
developer mindset, there.)
Overall, an interesting and informative book hampered by the
occasional feeling that the author is trying to oversell his point and
dazzle us with so many footnotes we won’t notice. If you read this
booklog entry attentively, you should probably read the book.
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