Martin's Booklog

The End of the Bronze Age – Robert Drews

Published on December 15, 2009

Cover of The End of the Bronze Age

The End of the Bronze Age
Robert Drews
252 pages including index
published in 1993

Sometimes pickings are slim at the library and you just have to take what you can get rather than what you want. This is especially true for the history section, which is why I took out this book, as it looked the best of a sorry bunch. Luckily it turned out a blessing in disguise. The Bronze Age is not a period I know little more than a very few basic facts about, so any reasonably well written book about it is welcome. Even if, like this, it’s a decade and a half old and therefore likely to be out of date.

There is a catch however. The End of the Bronze Age is not a pop science book but a proper academic study, arguing a thesis and it assumes a certain background familiarity of its readers. I can usually fake this reasonably well, but of course I can’t really judge whether or not the conclusions its author Robert Drews reaches are justified by the evidence, only whether they sound plausible. And when you’re ignorant of a given subject, even abject nonsense can sound plausible — which has tripped me up before…These days I use Wikipedia as a sanity check: it’s not perfect, but on most subjects it’s a good indicator of mainstream opinion.

The Hubble Wars – Eric J. Chaisson

Published on December 13, 2009

Cover of The Hubble Wars

The Hubble Wars
Eric J. Chaisson
386 pages including index
published in 1994/1998

Having worked on a somewhat troubled project for the past few years, it’s a great comfort to know that even big science projects like the Hubble Space Telescope can suffer from similar problems. In Hubble’s case, bad project management and quality control meant it was only discovered after the space telescope had been launched that its main mirror had a serious flaw in its grinding which meant that it couldn’t focus properly. But that was only the most *ahem* visible of the Hubble project’s problems, as Eric J. Chaisson explains. And he should know, as he was a senior staff scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute when these problems occurred and hence had a first rank seat for them.

The Hubble Wars was originally published in 1994 and based on notes Chaisson made during Hubble’s commisioning period after launch, when the problems with the lens, as well as several others first cropped up. This then was largely written in the heat of the moment, without the benefit of hindsight, even if the edition I got out of the library was the updated 1998 one. This update was largely confined to a new foreword, an attempt to correct some of the misconceptions and hyberbole in the news coverage of Hubble discoveries. The rest of the book was largely left unchanged, though every now and then new developments are alluded to — and they’re not always well integrated. But that’s just a minor quibble. What remains is an important insight in how a big science project can go wrong, as it happened.

Buy Jupiter – Isaac Asimov

Published on November 14, 2009

Cover of Buy Jupiter

Buy Jupiter
Isaac Asimov
238 pages
published in 1975

It’s hard to know for sure at this late date, but Buy Jupiter, together with I, Robot, was probably the first science fiction book I’ve ever read. one of the. I must have been seven or eight years old or so and this and the few other adult science fiction books the local library had in its childrens section instilled a lifelong love of the genre. It was therefore with some sense of nostalgia that I reread this book for the first time in years — these stories were like old friends to me. Nostalgia can be a dangerous guide of course, as so many books can turn out to have been visited by the suck fairy since you last time you’ve read them, not to mention the racism or sexism fairy. Luckily none of them have been busy on Buy Jupiter, the stories were just as good as I remembered.

This despite the fact that Buy Jupiter is a bit of a strange collection, filled with twentyfive years of leftover stories. There isn’t any classic in this, no one story you would put in a Best of Asimov collection but this might actually its strength. Because it’s a filler collection, because most of the stories are short or very short, you get a huge variation of stories and subjects, a smorgasbord of Asimov’s fiction. A good introduction to science fiction as well, though even at the time I first read those stories they were already dated — you don’t pick up on that as a child anyway.

Old Twentieth – Joe Haldeman

Published on October 25, 2009

Cover of Old Twentieth

Old Twentieth
Joe Haldeman
272 pages
published in 2005

If there is such a thing as a baby boomer generation of science fiction writers, Joe Haldeman is the type specimen of them. Born in 1943 he was just old enough to be drafted at the height of the War on Vietnam after finishing college, got wounded in action and wrote his first book as a straight up retelling of his war experiences. His most famous novel is of course The Forever War (1975), which is often read as an allegory of the war and its impact on the people who fought it, a not completely unjustified view. Since then, the Vietnam war has cropped up again and again in his books as well as a more general grounding in sixties pop culture, often coupled with an encroaching sense of his own mortality as he has gotten older and obsession with the promise of evading death by becoming immortal (as e.g. The Long Habit of Living). This isn’t unique to the baby boomers of course, but this was the generation that promised themselved they’d stay young forever and then found out even they weren’t immune to entropy…

The Old Twentieth is a showcase for all these themes. It is not a good novel, if entertaining enough to finish. It’s not a good novel not just because the plot is dull, the resolution is trite, the characters are barely twodimensional and the setting is uninteresting, but because there just seems to be no point to this novel. It’s just 272 pages of not very interesting things happening, before they come to an unsatisfying conclusion and no clue as to why this story needed to be told. It reads reasonably enough on a sentence and paragraph level, but the overall story is so thin that Haldeman’s obsessions shine through it, bringing them to the foreground.

Supercontinent – Ted Nield

Published on October 5, 2009

Cover of supercontinent

Supercontinent
Ted Nield
288 pages, including index
Published in 2007

I’ve read other good books on geology and the history of the Earth, notably Richard Fortey’s books, but this is the best one volume introduction to the idea of continental drift and the underlying dynamics driving it that I’ve seen. Nield is very good at explaining difficult concepts to a lay reader without simplifying them into incoherence. I took a gamble on Supercontinent when I saw it in the Amsterdam library just because Nield chose to introduce his subject with a short science fiction story about what would be left of us if aliens visited Earth 200 million years from now, when our current continents have all recombined again to form one Supercontinent. A catchy way to get my attention and fully justified by the rest of the book.

Supercontinent is both about the geological history of Earth as expressed through the ways continents have drifted apart, collided and fused together and broken up again and the history of the intellectual discovery of this history. As you might expect from the relative shortness of this book, barely 270 pages not counting index and notes, Nield provides only a broad overview, but he has an eye for the telling detail and manages to pack a lot of explanation into few words. For example, below is how he explains the recurring opening and closing of the “Atlantic Ocean” in the process called introversion and how this leaves parts of mountain chains on different sides of the ocean:

In other words, oceans can open and close, like a carpenter’s vice, more than once. Imagine that you open a vice, put the carpenter’s lunch (cold lasagne) into it and squeeze it tight. The lunch will ooze out and up, forming a mountain chain, which we shall call the Lasagnides. You then leave it until the lasagne has gone hard before opening the vice again. By now agents of erosion — mice — have scoured the once mighty Lasagnides back to bench level; but their roots, within the vice itself, remain. If you now reopen the vice to start the process again, some of hose olde Lasagnide remnants will stick to one jaw and some to the other/ but the vice reopens along the same basic line. That is how you get some parts of the same mountain chain in Europe and others in America.