Category: Book review

Red Letter Days in the Time Traveler’s Almanac

The Main Line SF Book Discussion Group (is that the official name Denise?) which meets the third Tuesday of each Month at 7:15pm at Mainpoint Books, is doing the Vandermeer’s Time Traveler’s Almanac at our next meetup March 17th.

I’m pleased with this collection:  I’m a big fan of time travel & try to read  everything on the subject that doesn’t involve a strong yet sensitive woman going back in time to the Scotland of the clans & claymores to help a rough yet sensitive Scottish chieftain find true yet sensitive love.

The Vendermeers have done a good job of getting a wide range of good stuff.  There are some clunkers (avoid getting yourself trapped into Loob’s time loop) but overall average good & some standouts, including several I had not seen before.

The MLSFBDG decided we’d pick a few of the 80 odd stories to focus on.

Herewith my own favorites.  I used a really simple test:  I had already read thru the volume; these are the ones I particularly found myself wanting to read again.

  • Needle in a Timestack — love & time travel, spreadsheet time where you can feel the changes when you personal time line is recalculated
  • The Gernsback Continuum — the glorious futures of the lamented past, and a great addition to my collection of Imaginary Books: The Airstream Futuropolis:  The Tomorrow That Never Was
  • Triceratops Summer — cabbage stealing triceratopses & a meditation on impermanence
  • A Sound of Thunder — the classic butterfly effect story
  • Vintage Season — tourism more fun for the tourists than the tourees
  • Fire Watch — what can’t be changed can be remembered, is it enough?
  • Under Siege — George R. R. Martin shows his usual delicate concern for his character’s well-being
  • Traveler’s Rest — “No one knew what really happened to Time as one came close to the Frontier…”
  • At Dorado — her past is his future
  • Red Letter Day — curiously appropriate title for an almanac, interesting balancing act between free will & the desire to know how it will come out

And some more, likely to be good for discussion:

  • Ripples in the Dirac Sea — reminiscent of the Stevenson’s the Bottle Imp
  • Himself in Anachron — time & self-sacrifice
  • Time Travel in Theory and Practice — good review of the basics
  • The Final Days — Iron Man thinks the time travelers are watching him because he is about to do so well
  • On the Watchtower at Plataea — the time travelers are there to view the Peloponnesian War but get caught up in a war of their own
  • The Gulf of Years — love & bombs
  • Enoch Soames — time travel deal with the devil
  • Palindromic — opposite arrows of time collide
  • Delhi — time ghosts in Delhi, intriguing
  • Terminos — bottled time (see Tourmaline’s Time Checks, Momo) with an interesting narrative method
  • The Waitabits — classic Analog story-with-a-point: slowly, slowly, they get conquered that move fast
  • Music for Time Travelers — non-fiction
  • As Time Goes By — Tanith Lee channels her inner Moorcock, with a bit of Robert Service: “The nature of time, What do we really know about it? Two thousand streams, and us playing about in them like salmon.”
  • Against the Lafayette Escadrille — carpe diem — a frequent theme of this collection: Fokkers, crinolines, & Confederate spy balloons.
  • Palimpsest — Stross does the reductio ad absurdum of Heinlein’s All You Zombies (recently made into a not-bad movie), Gerrold’s The Man Who Folded Himself, Asimov’s The End of Eternity. If you like your absurdum’s reductio’d, this is the tale.

Most of the rest were worth reading as well: the only real clunkers — personal opinion obviously — were Loob & Forty, Counting Down with its companion Twenty-One Counting Up.

If you want to get on the Book Discussion’s list, email Denise who will be glad to add you to the list.  And check out Mainpoint Books, which has provided & new & hospitable home for the group (even staying open late just for us!).

New Hope for Space War

 

I’m on the Space War panel at Balticon, how & why.  Fun topic though in all candor, a bit implausible.

The main problem is that travel in space is likely to be slow, expensive, & a bit dangerous.  Given this, it is likely that space travel itself will be reserved for moving stuff that is light weight & of very high value:  information, pharmaceuticals, experts, embryos, the “unobtainium” that features in Avatar, and so on.  Bullets satisfy neither test & even nukes have a hard time.

And if it takes a century to get over to the enemy’s star, why bother having the war?  And what are you fighting about anyway?  To have a war you have to be close enough to do some damage in a reasonable time frame & similar enough to have common — if opposed — objectives.

I owe the initial observation about the high costs of space travel to Paul Krugman, the Nobel-prize winning economist.  In the spirit of not pointing out problems without also pointing out a solution, he has found an economically viable use for space war:  as a way to generating a badly-needed stimulus, a kind of weaponized Keynesianism.

Given that there is now new hope for space war, and to get me in the right frame of mind for the panel, I list ten of my favorite space war novels:

  1. The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells.  The number one space war novel.  The evil octopi are defeated by our germs. Great idea; two problems:  1) germs have to co-evolve to be effective against a host; ours probably would have no effect on the Martians and 2) real octopi are fun:  they play pranks on their experimenters & are great communicators as well.  With their ability to change skin color at will, octopi are practically eight-tentacled color television sets.
  2. The Lensman series by E. E. “Doc” Smith.  Six deathless volumes, each with at least two space-shaking interstellar battles. Chlorine breathers beware!  The oxygen breathers of the galaxy have found your secret base & are going to reduce it to a glowing pile of molten rock.
  3. Which is pretty much what happens to the lunar military base in Arthur Clarke‘s Earthlight.  Three Federation cruisers duel it out to a jointly fatal draw with a lunar fortress.  The war is about mineral rights & induced by attacks of mutually assured dementia, making the physics (this is Arthur C. Clarke!), the war, & the politics pretty realistic.
  4. Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein.  Heinlein wrote about space suits in his pre-WWII SF, then used ideas from his stories when helping to design pressure suits for our fighter pilots in WWII, then used ideas from those pressure suits for his Have Spacesuit, Will Travel juvenile and for Starship Troopers: a beautiful example of the inter-relationship of reality & SF.  The space combats are a bit less stupid than most; Heinlein understands something of the difficulty of taking a space war to an underground enemy.
  5. The Forever War by Joe Haldeman.  This is partly a reaction to the Vietnam War & partly a reaction against Starship Troopers.  The forever war starts by accident, proceeds by error, and lasts for over a thousand years:  both humans & aliens are restricted to sub-light travel, so the war plays out in slow motion.  One of the few successful space war stories that works with existing physics.
  6. Keith Laumer’s Bolo Series.  Laumer wrote a long series of stories about Bolos, giant sentient tanks that are every adolescent male’s dream weapon.  In practice, they would likely be an economic & military disaster:  witness some of the late stage Nazi vehicles:  mechanically problematic, too heavy for bridges, & absorbing a disproportionate share of the military budget.  See Arthur Clarke’s delightful story Superiority.
  7. Dan Simmon‘s Hyperion series, especially the 2nd volume, The Fall of Hyperion, which concludes with a beautifully realized space battle between two fleets for control of a planetary system.  The inevitable confusion & long delays of such a battle are foregrounded.
  8. Catherine Asaro‘s Skolian Empire series.  Asaro has a physics background, gets existing physics right, & invents as much as she needs to keep the action fast-moving & interstellar.  The space combats are realistic:  long periods of nothing, brief high velocity exchanges of fire & then more long pauses while the surviving opponents regroup & turn around.  They remind me of the lance combats in White’s The Once & Future King.
  9. David Weber’s Honorverse series, starting with Manticore Station.  Weber is another author who tries to “get it right”.  The politics are modeled on the dueling ship combats of the Napoleonic wars, with wormholes to get realtime star to star travel without invoking faster-than-light mechanics (which would imply time-travel & a lot of confusion:  it is very rough on a space navy to first have triumphantly triumphed & then never to have been in the first place!).  He sets up the physics & weapons so that the ships even have broadsides, includes relativistic time dilation, and so on.  Weber’s Honor Harrington owes her “H’s” and general command style to C. S. Forester‘s Horatio Hornblower.  In a video game version of the Honorverse, it turned out that realistic implementing the physics/combat implied a near-planet maneuver (wish I could remember what it was) that invalided much of the combat in the novels.  With the infinite authority of the auteur, Weber passed a treaty that banned the disastrous trick.
  10. And I’ll finish with John G. Henry‘s Lost Fleet series.  The first six volumes reset Xenophon’s Anabasis in a medium-future space-faring context, again with wormholes connecting selected star systems.  A nearly destroyed fleet has to work its way back home in the face of enemy attack, mutiny, and sheer running out of resources.  Henry’s focuses on the many conflicting pressures on his commander, Jack Geary, as Geary balances military requirements, the demands of honor, & the imperatives of law, democracy, and a forbidden love.  The space combat — Henry used to be a ship driver in the US Navy – takes place in four dimensions and with admirable clarity about the command difficulties created by the finite speed of light:  if the enemy is on the far side of a solar system, he will see your maneuver only hours after you make it — and you will see his response hours after that.  You have to factor his response — and the responses of your detached units — into every move you make.  It is like blindfolded chess where you don’t find out the enemy’s move until after you have made three more moves of your own.  And your pieces are moving on their own.

And a couple of titles to avoid:

  • Anything by C. J. Cherryh, as least as far as space combat goes.  I remember reading one of her novels where the defenders had an advantage because they were at rest. In space, both sides are at rest with respect to themselves; the comment & resulting tactics were just nonsense.  Nonsense on stilts.
  • Gordon Dickson’s Dorsai series.  Omni-competent genetically enhanced uber soldiers trash lots of stooges.  The “ho” meets the “hum”.

So, my minimal requirement for space war in science fiction(not counting the golden classics of one’s youth of course) is that the humans, the physics, & the space war should make at least a bit of sense.

A Very Short Introduction to Nothing

Was there a creation or was there always something? Could there even be nothing if there were no one to know there was nothing? The more I tried to understand these enigmas, the more I felt that I was at the edge of either true enlightenment or madness. — Frank Close

I’ve just finished the concise & entertaining “Nothing: A Very Short Introduction” by Frank Close. It’s part of the “Very Short Introduction” series from Oxford University Press. They are generally reliable. The obvious trap is for the author to talk more about his own views/work than his subject in general, but of the 20 I’ve read, only two have made this mistake (Hume & Ancient Warfare, if you must know).

Frank Close, who is a big name in nothing, in the physics of nothing that is, does a nice, very short job of introducing it to us, starting with the Rigveda’s Creation Hymn:

There was neither non-existence nor existence then.

There was neither the realm of space nor the sky which is beyond.

What stirred? Where?

up through the Higgs vacuum, the idea that the vacuum is not empty but is pervaded by the Higgs fields, which is responsible for giving particles mass. CERN was built partly to check this out & the cernistas are now hot on the trail of the Higgs.

I’m suspicious of the Higgs particle myself; it has a slightly kludgy feel to it, at least to my taste. I think particles have had a good run for their money over the last century & and now it is time for emergent phenomena to have a go. For instance, only a few percent of the mass of the protons & neutrons comes from the masses of their constituent quarks; most of their mass is really from the energy (via the familiar mass = E/c-squared) of the quantum dance of those quarks. If most mass comes from the energy stored in quantum interactions, could all mass be the result of such? Certainly an interesting question & and would leave us with one less variable to explain, with a slightly less massive problem.

In fact, I’d go further myself: space and time are difficult to understand, what if they are merely averages over the quantum wave function of the rest of the universe? and all of our universe is merely the friction of one part of the quantum wave function of the universe against another part. No mass, no space, no time, no vacuum, nothing but interactions.

The Large Hadron Collider — Followup

Paul Halpern‘s talk on The Large Hadron Collider at Philcon on 11/21/2009 came off well.  I’ve since had a chance to read his Collider: The Search for the World’s Smallest Particles since.  The talk was basically the book light or, if you prefer, the book is the talk heavy.   Good jobs either way.

Paul had  a lot of fun with the idea that someone (from the future) is maliciously trying to keep us pitiful humans from building a high energy collider; first the money difficulties the Superconducting Super-Collider had in Texas and then the explosion at the Large Hadron Collider.  But now that the LHC is in fact colliding (if not yet at full strength), perhaps the little blue men have given all this up as a bad job.
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