I'm on a book-reviewing tear! Or something. Actually I decided to make an effort to review any book I read. I read a lot of short fiction these days, but trying to review something like an Asimov's doesn't make sense to me. Read Locus Magazine if you want that. But I think it's probably reasonable to write a review of anything book length, so here we are. Mixed in with my recent splurge of Old Man's War books I read a nonfiction book as well - Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan. You can get the book from Amazon at the link above, but I got my copy by signing up for a three year membership in The Planetary Society. If you think space exploration is worth pursuing there are worse places to throw a few bucks.

Pale Blue Dot is inspired by this photo taken by Voyager 1 in 1990. The bright spot is Earth. Sagan had fought to get the picture taken, it has minimal science value but he felt it was the next step after the "Earthrise" photo from Apollo. and that mankind needed to see Earth from 4 billion miles away.

This book, to put it simply, is a fantastic read. It's a tiny bit dated these days (it talks about Cassini and Huygens as probes on the drawing board and not probes that actually returned increadible images last year), but the science is still pretty intact. This is simultaneously an indictment of current NASA where nothing has changed in the last 13 years, and an endorsement of the gripping prose that Sagan is famous for. Even when I said to myself "well that's dated" it was still a good read. Space exploration lost a great communicator when Sagan passed away, and his is a voice that is sorely missed in this day and age of religious fundamentalism and short-sighed policies.

The book cover both some philosophy of why we should explore space, where we should use robots vs where we need humans, as well as a remarkably current snapshot of what we know about our solar system. As Wikipedia puts it:

Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994) is a non-fiction book by Carl Sagan. It is the sequel to Cosmos and was inspired by the "Pale Blue Dot" photograph, for which Sagan provides a sobering description.[14] In this book, Sagan mixes philosophy about the human place in the universe with a description of what was known about the solar system at the time the book was published. He also details a human vision for the future.[15]

Pale Blue Dot - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The book opens by discussing the wandering nature of mankind but quickly moves onto what Sagan describes as "The Great Demotions" as human science moved from a Earth-centric view to (relucantly) a Sun-centric view, to realizing that even the Sun is really just an "uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the galaxy." (that last bit is from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Some people would say that mixing Sagan and Adamns is odd. Those people are wrong. Some people would say if we understood the connection the planet would overall be a much better place to live. Those people are right.) The Great Demotions took centuries and human culture, human religion, and human nature resisted each one, but here we are today where anybody not wearing blinders will accept that cosmologically speaking there's nothing particularly special about the Earth.

From the Great Demotions he begins to move through the Solar System, discussing what is known about all the planets and all the major moons. The thing that is the most striking is how little of this is dated in the last thirteen years. We know a lot more about Mars where Spirit and Opportunity continue to astound anybody who cares to pay attention, but there's dashed little science being done about Venus, or Mercury, or even Jupiter. I'll give NASA credit for Saturn - Huygens may have returned the most surprising data, but Cassini has done some excellent science, and it's not like Huygens would have even gotten there without Cassini driving the cab. But for the most part Pale Blue Dot will get you current if you have no idea what's happened in the Solar System other than the Pluto brouhaha.

He also covers the major explorations - Viking, Pioneer, and Voyager. Note the timeframe - all of these predate the Space Shuttle and "better, faster, cheaper" over at good ol' NASA. To me this was all recap, but it's recap of things I haven't really paid attention to in years, so it was sort of revisiting childhood friends to discuss the great space probes of the 70's.

After we go through what we know and how we found it Sagan moves to discussion of humanity's future in space. Should we explore with manned craft? Why? What can we gain and what are we risking? Of course, Sagan's conclusion is likely obvious to anyone but it's worth the effort to see his why's and wherefores. The discussion about handling near Earth Orbit asteroids alone is very relevant to today's society and worth the price of admission.

So what didn't I like about this book? The printing I have doesn't have any of the photographic plates. Every image he references is easy to find on the web, but it's odd that Pale Blue Dot doesn't even bother to have the image that inspired the book - at the very least I think it'd make a better cover than the goofy Sci-Fi "rockets & Jupiter" image that it has. The images are so key to the humanist appeals that Sagan makes in the book that it's frustrating to not have the pictures at your fingertips. The text specifically references them so I assume an earlier edition contained the color images and that this one doesn't for cost reasons. But that's a minor issue, the book is well worth reading despite the need for external Googling. And frankly in today's day and age, it's refreshing to read a book that assumes that everything will eventually be All Right(tm). Even if it is missing a few photographic plates.

If you care about the future of the species or if you're interested in space exploration I'd recommend Pale Blue Dot as an excellent read. Even if neither of those strike a chord with you, I'd urge you to read the book anyway and see if Sagan can change your mind. He's a much more compelling author and scientist than I am ;-)

technorati tags:Science, space, PaleBlueDot, CarlSagan, BookReviews

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I thought I had talked about John Scalzi's Old Man's War before but if I have I can't find it in my own archives. So it makes some sense to talk about OMW before venturing on to talk about The Ghost Brigades or The Last Colony. As always, I'll try to stay relatively spoiler-free, although that's going to be trickier in the discussing the later books. But today's topic is Old Man's War, so we don't have to worry about spoiling any prequels (and it's easier to avoid spoiling sequels). Onward!

The first thing to get out of the way is the Heinlein discussion. Scalzi has frequently described how he looked at the sci-fi section of bookstores and determined that military fiction was selling so he set out to write military SF. And honestly once you've made that decision taking Heinlein as your North Star guide for the excursion makes a lot of sense to me. Scalzi went ahead and took it a step further and went for an outright homage - and he really did a good job of it. It's a little hard to explain why or how, but the universe of Old Man's War just feels like a Heinlein story. It's been years since the last time I read Heinlein so it's difficult for me to trace the overt influences, but there's no doubt it's there. This is not some sort of subtle thing where you'd have to be a True Fan™ to notice, it's very overt. Some people have bashed him for this but I don't really see the point. Are we going to carve out a whole range of fiction concepts and styles and say "These are forever the sacred hunting grounds of Heinlein and thou shalt not trangress!"? I kind of doubt Heinlein would have wanted that. So the question becomes one of whether the homage is well done and whether it works. I think it does.

Old Man's War tells the story of John Perry. In this universe Earth is "protected" by an interstellar government that runs humanities colonies and controls spaceflight. Colonies are founded primarily from developing countries. There's only one way for first world citizens to go to space: to enlist in the Colonial Union's army. The quirk is that the CU only enlists 75 year olds. The rumor is that the CU makes them young again with some technology that reverses aging, but nobody on Earth knows the truth. Once you've enlisted with the CU you never return to Earth again.

This is an interesting premise to begin with. The world Scalzi has created is interesting and not crazily improbable. From a narrative perspective it's a neat trick because Perry's POV knows practically nothing about the universe at large, so we get to ride along through his introduction to the Colonial Union. This leads to a tricky point - there's a fair amount of info-dumping in Old Man's War but it makes sense because it goes in the form of orientation briefing or lectures that Perry gets as he goes through what amounts to Basic Training. I noticed it and it got close, but didn't cross over the line to bother me. It's a close edge though and I think it's a good point to remember because I'll talk more about when I get to The Ghost Brigades.

Basic Training ends soon enough and then it's onto battles. And hoo boy there are lotsa battles! Perry ends up in the infantry and he fights a dizzying series of aliens, each one stranger than the last. I have to admit that this is probably my biggest beef with Old Man's War as a standalone book - there's a lot of stuff introduced throughout this part that raises questions. Questions that aren't just of the Comic-Book-Guy/Trekkie fanboy quibbles, but serious "But wait, if that's true that does't that imply something is very wrong over here?" questions about how the Colonial Union works.

It's a little annoying that the characters seem to take a lot of things at face value, things that I think a bright group of experienced people would question. There are some oblique references where the characters ponder things, but it's pretty thin. There's some justification in that the characters are all just infantry grunts so they have limited access to information, but they don't even seem to just sit around having bull sessions about what they do or don't know. This doesn't ring true to me, especially since they have nothing to do onboard a ship but sit around and jabber.

I talked about Scalzi's writing style when I wrote about The Androids Dream and that pretty much covers Old Man's War as well. It's a fun book to read and it's clear and concise. This universe is considerably darker and more violent than the one in The Android's Dream, but the prose style itself reads easily. This would be a great book to read on vacation or on a plane or some other setting where you have several hours to read. I don't feel it's a "Oh I can't put it down until I find out what happens" book, but it's also not a "My brain is full, I must stop reading" book either.

It's also a good read for people who aren't sci-fi nuts. There's nothing in it that assumes familiarity with other genre canon. The Heinlein homage is definitely present, but it's not like you'd need to read Heinlein before being exposed to Old Man's War. There aren't even really in-jokes or references that you'd miss if this was your first genre book. To an old hand it is reminiscent of Heinlein - but perhaps that's a good thing in that Heinlein was in his time a very accessible writer that wrote stories that I think anyone could enjoy. (Well, except for dirty hippies. They'd probably object to the pro-military overtones. Maybe they could stick with the later Heinlein's where there's a lot of free love flowin' around.) Nowadays Heinlein is a bit dated - his men are men and they are fast with the slide rule. Scalzi makes a good run at updating the style to include genetic engineering and computers.

technorati tags:JohnScalzi, OldMan'sWar, BookReview, ScienceFiction

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The number one question I got asked over the last two years is "How's the writing going?" And I usually hemmed and hawwed about it. During the first year I was preoccupied with the Magic novel, and I wasn't really able to talk about that most of the time. Then during the second year there was a combination of the way the Magic project wrapped up, me deciding that I wanted to get some sort of part-time work, getting said part-time work, and getting used to said part-time work. And learning how to stress the "part-time" part enough to keep it true without being a real pain to my coworkers. But here we are embarked on the third year since I "quit the day-job" and just over a year since I acquired the new-and-improved-part-time-day-job and my writing hasn't really been going anywhere. I've had moderate success at writing some stuff in my Moleskine journal, (yes - I actually do some writing longhand now. I'm so old-school my bones ache, but I try to put down a page a day into the little black book.) but the Moleskine pages are fragmentary and I tend to skip around. I'm collecting a lot of little neat ideas and vignettes, but there aren't complete stories coming out of this method.

So a couple of weeks ago I decided I needed to try some sort of changeup. My solution was to add some more writing to the mix, and I'm going to borrow the NaNoWriMo playbook, only with some slight modifications. I enjoyed NaNoWriMo quite a bit, but the output was set high enough that the goal became solely wordcount, with no quality concerns whatsoever. Now, it's important to lock up the Inner Editor when writing because you have to get to the "shitty first draft" stage, but you can go too far and end up with 50,000 words that are a mess. Ideally you have a rough marble block that you can take and carve out a Real Book™, but I think it's also possible that you have a pile of thousands of marble chips and a bottle of Elmer's glue. That ain't gonna work. What I found is that I can write about 1,000 decent words a day in one concentrated shot. After that, things fall off quickly. So instead of NaNoWriMo's 50,000 words I'm going to work for a month at a rate of 1K words a day. I've got a very rough story idea and a few characters kicking around and I turned them loose this morning. We'll see what happens at the end of the month.

If I like this, it would take three months (or so) to hit ~90,000 which is a good target for Sci-Fi/Fantasy these days. The deal I've made with myself is that I'll re-evaluate what I have every month. So we're pressing on to 31,000 words of The Unnamed Fantasy Book, starting today. If I hate it by May 31st I'll try something else!

I don't plan on talking about it a lot, but I figured it would do me good to post the goal publicly. If I miss badly then people should shame me in a month. :-)

technorati tags:writing, NaNoWriMo, TheUnnamedFantasyBook

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So I finally got the box to send my broken 360 back today. (sigh)

The most surprising thing about using the PS3 is that I realized how completely crappy the Dashboard UI on the 360 is. The PS3's UI is the "Cross Media Bar" they used in the PSP, basically you have a horizontal row of icons that indicate modes: Pictures, Music, Movies, Games, Net and so forth. As you select each icon options from that category appear above and below. So left and right change category while up and down selects items. The X button selects the item, and the Triangle button pops up a detailed menu for the item. The PS button on the controller turns the system off. That's it. That's the whole UI. The Playstation Store uses the web browser which is a tiny bit more complex but nothing beyond understanding.

Now the Dash - the Dash is a whole 'nother beast. I'm working from memory here since I can't look at the Dash but I'll give it a spin. It has "blades" which are like tabs, only horizontal. Each blade is a rough category - I don't know what they call that first page, then there's Games, Media, System and so forth. Each blade has a series of on-screen buttons that you drive around with the dpad. There is also a menu along the bottom of the screen listing which controller buttons do what. Want to switch users? Oh that's simple, you just hit Y to sign out, then drive the Dpad over to the "sign in button" on screen, push it, wait for a NEW blade to slide in that lists the accounts available and pick one.

Want to play a downloaded game on PS3? Select game and scroll down until you find the game. Want to play a downloaded game on 360? Select the Game blade, find the Arcade button, push the arcade button, wait for the Arcade "blade" to appear, select the button to pick how you want to sort the Arcade titles, then get a list of titles and select the game you want.

But there's still more. There are two special blades on the 360. One you get by pressing the "Guide" button (which isn't labeled as the Guide button on the controller, mind you) and contains your "user options". This is where you set skinning options, your online status, and play custom soundtracks. Notice that you can play music with only a half dozen presses inside the "Media" blade but you can't start a custom soundtrack there and have it carry to a game.

The other special blade? You get there by HOLDING DOWN the guide button. This is how you turn the console off.

But we're still not done. The 360 has these little popup "toast" messages that tell you when a friend signs on, or when you unlock an achievement or whatever. The Guide button goes to whatever that toast references when you push it. So the Guide button is context sensitive and it's not even your context - the machine changes contexts at will.

So in review - the PS3 XMB has the following verbs - Left/Right, Up/Down, X Button, Triangle Button, and PS3 button. The 360 has Left/Right, Up/Down, A Button, B Button (this backs up from say the Arcade screen back to the top level Game blade), X Button, Y Button, Guide Press, and Guide Hold.

Have you tried to browse the Xbox Video Marketplace recently? It's six levels of menus - Marketplace to TV to Channel, to Show, to Season, to Episodes.

Now in all fairness, the XMB won't scale reasonably. I have 20 or so Arcade titles on my 360, navigating a single list of games will eventually be unreasonable (although I have to note that the 360 STILL gives me that list, it's just buried three levels deep). Already my video list on the PS3 seems long - and I still have plenty of space on my 60 Gig PS3 drive.

But the 360 Dashboard is crazily over-engineered. I've tried explaining it to people. Nobody assume the Xbox button thing is even a button - much less it's the "Guide" button. Nobody assumes it would have two different functions for press versus hold. I once showed Karin that I could use a picture as my Dashboard wallpaper, and then realized the Dash was barely readable over the picture of Heisenberg. It took me 10 minutes (no exaggerating) to find the option to remove the picture - in a completely different tab. (The trick is you pick a picture from the Media -> Pictures interface, but what happens is that it makes a custom "theme" (skin) for you. To get rid of it you have to go to your personal options and select a different theme.)

I went over to Lee's recently and brought Guitar Hero II. I also brought a memory card with my save-game and Live account so we could access songs I had unlocked. Both Lee and I took several minutes to figure out how to sign his account out in order to sign mine on. You have to be on the right blade and hit the Y Button. On the PS3? You go to Users and select "Sign out".

The Dashboard is really a mess. It's flashy, but it's not very functional. Which is very odd, but I'd really expect to hear that Microsoft focus tested the hell out of it. Somebody screwed the pooch though, because it's got terrible usability.

technorati tags:360, PS3, Dashboard

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