April 12th, 2012
At the Edge of the Solar System
Alain Doressoundiram & Emmanuel Lellouch
205 pages including index
published in 2008
In 2006 the International Astronomical Union demoted Pluto, long the ninth and last planet in our Solar System from being a planet into a socalled dwarf planet, a new category not just meant for Pluto, but also a half dozen other planets that had been recently discovered at the edge of the Solar System. With the number of planets rapidly rising and estimates raging from a 200 to 2,000 more to be discovered as well as the general feeling that Pluto, only one fifth the mass of the Moon just did not fit in with the rest of the classical planets, this new categorisation was needed, halfway between true planets and asteroids or comets, now classified as small Solar System bodies.
Surprisingly for such a dry subject, the reclassification of Pluto led to a huge amount of media coverage and some controversy; many people, including myself, saw the argument as somewhat specious or had a sentimental attachment to the idea of the classical nine planets. They now were confronted with the reality of the Solar System being massively more complex than they had suspected, with our knowledge of the very edges of it having expanded massively since even the late seventies. Which is where At the Edge of the Solar System: Icy New Worlds Unveiled comes in: an introductionary text book about these discoveries and how they were made.
Though a relatively short book, the main text only being 178 pages long, it packs in a lot of material. It’s a good overview not just of what we know is in the trans-neptunian Solar System but also how we got to know this. Much of what oressoundiram and Lellouch talk about I knew at least a bit of already, but the way they have put it all together made me understand it better. It’s laid out as a text book, with frequent explanation boxes to go deeper into scientific concepts or astronomical techniques mentioned in the main text, without breaking up its flow.
The book starts with a very short history of how our ideas evolved from antiquity to the year that Pluto was discovered, 1930, focusing on how measured inaccurancies in the predicted orbit of each successive outer planet led to the discovery of Neptune, Uranus and ultimately Pluto. In the second chapter the focus lies on Pluto itself and what eighty years of observation taught us about it: not very much, due to the huge distance it’s from us. It was only in 1978 that somebody actually noticed that Pluto, which we thought had a mass greater than Mercury, was actually a double system with a moon almost as big as itself, Charon. As we slowly got to know more about both Neptune, especially its moon Triton and Pluto/Charon, the more something seemed off about calling Pluto a planet.
From there it’s a logical step to look back at how the Solar System might’ve started and what that may imply for trans-neptunian space, as well as where comets come from. Then it’s back to the outer rim and the Kuiper Belt, originally a theoretical concept for the origin of comets, a huge second asteroid/cometoid belt of icy worlds which Pluto is in the middle off. As more and more objects, comets, plutinos and other exotic worlds were being discovered, the belt moved more and more from theory into reality, the more so as more proper, Pluto like planets were being discovered in the nineties and early twentyfirst century.
In the fifth chapter the writers go deeper into those newly discovered worlds, what they look like (as far as we know) and what else we can tell about them from Earthbound observation. The sixth chapter meanwhile is all about the Pluto controversy. As the discoveries detailed in the previous chapters undermined Pluto’s uniqueness the need for a reclassification grew and ultimately ended as I described above. There is something to say for this, even if you can’t help but suspect part of the motive for it is to keep the number of proper planets down, as there indeed isn’t any good reason to keep Pluto one, but none of the other worlds, when some are barely smaller, some as big as and some even are maybe larger than Pluto itself.
Finally the book ends with a short chapter on the history of the outer Solar System as far as we know it and what we don’t quite have figured out yet about it, the biggest of which is why the Kuiper belt ends so abruptly. Is that just a question of more observation or could there be a true mechanism in the history of the early Solar System present that could explain this. The very last chapter then takes a quick look at the near future and the projects that are under development to give us a much better view of the outer Solar System and which might help us solve these problems.
I read At the Edge of the Solar System: Icy New Worlds Unveiled in just a few days, mainly while commuting to and from work. Reading any scientific book that way can be a recipe for disaster as you can’t get in the flow of it, but the way Doressoundiram and Lellouch have written it made it a breeze to get through, while still keeping a relatively large information density. If you’re interested in Pluto and the outer Solar System but not that familiar with it, this is a good introduction.
Categories: Science
Tags: Alain Doressoundiram, At the Edge of the Solar System, Emmanuel Lellouch
April 5th, 2012
Star Hunter
Andre Norton
96 pages
published in 1961
For a lot of American science fiction fans my age or older, Andre Norton was the first “real” sf writer they ever read, largely because she was hugely prolific and specialised in what we’d now call young adult novels. For some reason however she was never all that popular in the Netherlands so I’ve read little of her work so far. But that’s changing, thanks to Project Gutenberg, who have a fair few of her books available, those on which the original US copyrights had not been renewed. Star Hunter is one of them, originally published as an Ace Double. I read it during a couple of lunch breaks at work.
Ras Hume is a pilot for the Out-Hunters Guild who on a trip to the newly discovered planet of Jumala has made a discovery that could make him incredibly rich, but to exploit it he needs to make a deal with Wass, the biggest crime boss on Nahuatl. What he found was the lifeboat from the Largo Drift, a space ship which disappeared six years ago, taking with it the heir to the Kogan estate. He also has a plausible candidate to play the part of Rynch Brodie, the teenage heir. What he needs Wazz for is to condition this boy to actually believe he is this heir, then he will be let lose on Jumala for Hume to discover him when he brings over the safari party he’s scheduled to pilot there. It’s an almost foolproof plan, surely nothing can go wrong.
But there wouldn’t have been a story if something didn’t go wrong. The patsy Hume has chosen, Vye Lansor, an orphan plucked from the foulest bar in Nahuatl’s spaceport, was conditioned and dropped on Jumala, but the condition wasn’t good enough and he remembers flashes from his true life. Worse, while Jumala was deemed fit for human visiting and free of intelligent alien life, something has been woken up by the safari party and Hume and Lansor/Brodie find themselves as grudging allies against this alien menace as this attempts to herd them towards imprisonment in the hills of Jumala.
Since Andre Norton has only ninetysix pages in which to tell her story, it obviously has to be tight. Which means that while we do get a resolution to the central plot line, the mystery of the aliens and why they attacked the safari party is never followed through. Hume and Lansor bond, fight their way out of the alien traps and survive and that’s it. A bit unsatisfactory, but not the end of the world.
In the same way, there’s little room to develop the settings, Nahuatl and Jumala, very much. Both are solid pulp sf settings, feel more like small towns than whole planets, but are deftly sketched in by Norton with a few neatly chosen details, especially Jumala. There are the watercats for example, dangerous aquatic ambush predators lurking in creeks and rivers, and the scavengers that come out of the water to finish off their kills — or the watercat, if it’s unlucky. Clearly some thought has gone into setting up the planet, even if it’s only a stage for a pulp adventure.
As science fiction Star Hunter is of course incredibly dated, of the rockets and blasters school of adventure sf. The scheme that drives its plot, to substitute some lookalike for the heir of a vast estate, has long ago been made impossible by the development of cheap DNA testing, while most of the technology on display that isn’t part of the standard sf furniture doesn’t really look all that advanced either. But these are just quibbles. Taken on its own terms, this is a tight, fun, enjoyable little story. Ideal for reading in some stolen moments at work…
Categories: science fiction
Tags: Andre Norton, Star Hunter
April 1st, 2012
Rule 34
Charlie Stross
358 pages
published in 2011
It’s only thanks to Christopher Priest’s tirade about this year’s Clarke Award shortlist that you remember that you haven’t reviewed Charlie Stross latest novel, Rule 34 yet. You know that, like Halting State, which it is a sequel to, it’s written in the second person and you briefly toy with the idea to write your review the same way. But then you come to your senses and decide to write the rest of the review in a less irritating way.
Not that I minded the second person point of view in Rule 34, as Charlie Stross made it work and it fit the central metaphor of these books, reality as a massive multiplayer immersive game. At the same time I can see where Christopher Priest is coming from when he writes:
Stross writes like an internet puppy: energetically, egotistically, sometimes amusingly, sometimes affectingly, but always irritatingly, and goes on being energetic and egotistical and amusing for far too long. You wait nervously for the unattractive exhaustion which will lead to a piss-soaked carpet.
It’s funny because it’s true, if mean spirited. As a writer Charlie Stross does bring a kind of geeky enthusiasm to his novels that can be wearing if you don’t share his interests. Stross’ writing style is snarky rather than witty, more interested in conveying information than in a mellifluous turn of phrase and he can be prone to a bit of infodumping. As with using second person point of view, it is not to everybody’s tastes. And if that’s the case for you, as it seems to have been for Priest, it would be a slog to get through Rule 34.
Yet neither his writing style nor his choice of the second person viewpoint is a flaw in Rule 34; instead they’re deliberate choices made to enable Charlie Stross to tell the story he wanted to tell with this novel. Like its predecessor Halting State this novel is an attempt to create a plausible near future Scotland by looking at various contemporary trends and extrapolating them a couple of decades into the future. As fitting an “internet puppy”, most of these changes are technological, extensions of current computing trends a few years down the road, but Stross looks beyond what might technologically be possible and embeds these developments in a political and sociological context.
The central idea at the heart of Rule 34 is that of the panopticon singulary, the way in which technological developments, commercial pressures and the law come together to kill privacy. The second person viewpoint in which it is written drives this home, because it makes the reader complicit in the panopticon: the characters become the reader’s avatars, as if this is a videogame rather than a novel. At the same time, Stross’ writing style, detached & snarky distances you from the characters as well which again reinforces that sense of complicity, of voyeurism.
For the people caught in Rule 34‘s plot, Detective Inspector Liz Kavanaugh, banished to the Rule 34 Squad, the one dealing with all the pervy crimes, Anwar Hussein, a Scottish-Pakistani petty criminal turned honorary consul for a small, new Central-Asian state and “John Christie”, point man for The Organisation, having to negotiate their way through life with this sort of omnipresent surveillance is just part of their daily routines. So Liz spents her entire working life in CopSpace, through which she both has access to all data the Scottish police forces acquire and the system can keep taps on her. Hussein meanwhile is expected to keep his smartphone on and with him everyday so the polis can snitch on his location 24/7, while “Christie” has to take pains to avoid areas with too high a surveillance level, like airports.
Rule 34‘s story starts with Liz being called out to a crime scene, a suspicious death of an ex-criminal, who died while getting a colonic irrigation from an old Soviet machine that used to belong to Ceasescu… A true double wetsuit job, it at first just seems a regretable accident, but of course there’s more going on. Anwar Hussein meanwhile is beginning to wonder why exactly he has been made honorary consul for Issyk-Kulistan for. “John Christie” finally knows exactly what he’s in Edinburgh for, to recreate the Scottish branch of The Organisation. Each of these three protagonists thinks they’re at least somewhat in control of their own lifes, even if they’re now clearly been caught up into something bigger, but this turns out not to be the case.
Instead through the course of the novel it becomes clear that they are each being nudged in some way or another to perform certain actions, by somebody who knows how to do this for each of them individually and without their knowledge. Nudge theory is quite popular with the current British government, who see this as a cheap and easy way to get the hoi polloi to behave themselves and the more data you got on people the easier it becomes to find the right nudge. Current implementations are still primitive, in Rule 34 Stross imagines what it would be like if the people doing the nudging had perfect methods and all the data needed to use them, thanks to the panopticon. None of the protagonists ever quite catch up with the fact that they were being nudged or the overarching plot these nudges served, but the reader does get to know who is behind everything that happened and why.
As said Rule 34 sets out to create a plausible near future world which we could concievably get through from where we are now. Charlie Stross has done the most difficult job any sf writer can undertake, try and predict not just what new technology could do, but how it will be used and how the law, government and societies as a whole will handle it. As such then it is a worthy novel to be on the Clarke Awards shortlist.
Categories: science fiction
Tags: Charlie Stross, Clarke Award, Rule 34
March 28th, 2012
Laurels Are Poison
Gladys Mitchell
237 pages
published in 1942
Whereas my fiction reading mostly centers around science fiction and fantasy, Sandra was always more interested in other genres, especially that of the classical cozy detective story. Her alltime favourite was probably Margery Allingham, but Gladys Mitchell was a strong second. Now while Mitchell was as prolific as any of the big name writers, averaging one novel a year, she never was as popular as an Agatha Christie or Ngaoi Marsh and her books weren’t reprinted as often, which meant they’re much harder to find than those of her more famous counterparts. Which is why Sandra had only a small number of Gladys Mitchell novels, but she read and reread them at least once a year. Of that small number, I think Laurels Are Poison was the one she reread the most, certainly the one she had read the most recent before she died. Which is why I decided to read it as well.
Laurels Are Poison stars Mrs Bradley, Mitchell’s version of the noisy old biddy detective ala Miss Marple (Christie) or Miss Silver (Patricia Wentworth). Mrs Bradley has been hired as head warden of one of the houses of a women’s training college. That’s her cover, but she’s really here to investigate the disappearance of the previous year’s warden, Miss Murchan, who was last seen at the end of term dance and never came back. As soon as she arrives at the college, it’s clear somebody doesn’t want her to start her investigation, as amongst a flood of not very funny but innocent practical jokes some not so innocent traps are set for her…
From that description this may sound like a bog standard detective story and in some sense it is, but the mystery of Miss Murchan’s disappearance honestly isn’t the reason you keep reading. Instead it’s the setting and characters that make this book. Mrs Bradley is the usual, sensible, almost omniscient older woman detective, but for once she’s not a spinster, but instead a modern career woman, well known in her field and who has been married several times. Her physical appearance as described by Mitchell through the viewpoints of her other characters is not flattering, “the old crocodile” being the mildest.
Alongside Mrs Bradley, several other characters are followed: Deborah Cloud, the sub warden and three students Laura Menzies, Kitty Trevelyan, and Alice Boorman, the “three musketeers”, all four of which will wittingly or unwittingly help Mrs Bradley solve the mystery. Deborah Cloud, or “the Deb” as the students call her is mostly there as the innocent bystander there to ask the questions the readers might have, while the three musketeers, especially Laura, play a more active role in the resolution.
For long stretches of the book the mystery itself disappears to the background as we instead follow the daily lives of the three students and the sub-warden, all done in a jolly hockeysticks, slangy tone of voice which took me some time to get used to; some examples can be found at the Gladys Mitchell website. Overall the tone of the book is light, amusing, slightly tongue in cheek. What surprised me was the date of publication: 1942, which you wouldn’t have known from the story, with no mention of war whatsoever. Instead it reads as if it was written in the 1930ties.
On the whole I found the book a bit of a mess; entertaining but not very focused. I think I will read more Gladys Mitchell, if only because Sandra rated her so highly, but this wasn’t as good as I expected it to be.
Categories: Detective & crime
Tags: Gladys Mitchell, Laurels Are Poison
March 24th, 2012
Genius, Isolated: The Life and Art of Alex Toth
Dean Mullaney & Bruce Canwell
324 pages
published in 2011
If you’re not a hardcore comics nerd you’ve probably never heard of Alex Toth, one of the greatest cartooning geniuses American comics have ever seen. That’s because he never really had a comics series or character that he made his own, but instead had his art scattered over hundreds of seperate assignments for dozens of publishers, often wasted on formulaic, throwaway stories. His true genius lay in his approach to the art form, the way he stripped down cartooning to its essentials, never putting down one more line than was needed. Once you see his artwork you can understand why he’s so revered by his peers, a true “artists’ artist”, but first you needed to find his artwork, which has long been difficult to find other than by hunting through back issue bins.
This has changed in the last decade or so, fortunately, as the American comics field in general has become more aware and interested in its heritage, leading to a flood of high quality reprint projects as well as art books/biographies focusing on individual artists. Toth has had some attention paid to him before, but with Genius, Isolated: The Life and Art of Alex Toth, the first of a trilogy of books devoted to Toth’s life and career there finally is a book that does true justice to Toth’s genius.
It does so by being more than just a lavishly produced, gorgeous looking coffee table book and biography but also a showcase for Toth’s artwork. As many or more pages are devoted to reproducing Toth’s art, including a huge selection of complete stories as there are to talking about his art; there are only a few pages entirely devoid of his artwork. It’s this that makes Genius, Isolated such an important book, a demonstration of Toth’s artistic genius as well as an archive of stories that haven’t been seen since their first publication decades ago. Such showcases are important to establish an artist’s reputation, as they provide both a convenient sampler for people new to them, as well as a signal that yes, this artist is important enough to merit a fifty dollar art book.
There is a downside to publishing so many complete stories in this book, as I explained a few days ago at Wis[s]e Words, which is that you can’t help but notice how many of the stories Toth did his best work on were, to be honest, not nearly as well written as Toth illustrated them. If, like me, you tend to focus more on the story than the art when reading comics, it can be a handicap in appreciating Toth’s work.
Fortunately Toth’s art is strong enough to overcome this handicap; you can’t help but fall in love with it. What characterises it is his use of strong, angular lines to sketch his figures, the use of black shapes, silhouettes and shadow both to create mood and to compose his pages and panels, the economical way in which he conveys emotion with just a few lines and how he places his characters to guide your eye over the pages. Composition is the key word with Toth; at each level — panel, page, story — he excels in creating a holistic experience and make it look natural. Apart from that, his artwork at his best is drop dead gorgeous, the kind of art that leaves you staring at it open mouthed in sheer admiration.
The text that goes along with Toth’s artwork concentrates on the artist’s life and career, providing a decent biography, though not really much more than that. It’s good enough as it goes, but I would’ve liked to see more discussion of Toth’s art and how he created it. There is some of that, but not enough for my liking. Hopefully we’ll see more of that in the next two volumes in the series.
Categories: Comix
Tags: Alex Toth, Bruce Canwell, Dean Mullaney, Genius Isolated
