Atomic Nerds

DisturbedLoyal readers may remember a while back we lost a good chunk of content thanks to some DNS issues and a migration to a new server. A recent post at Kevin’s had me looking for one of those lost posts, and was finally motivation enough to actually go through the raw SQL version of the missing material. Various technical issues prevent an easy splice back into where the article originally appeared, so since we’ve got an early raid tonight and not much time for actual thinky-thinky content, y’all get a rerun of my original thoughts about Yuri Bezmenov, the state of modern education, and the current political landscape. Enjoy, and cross your fingers I can dig out some of the other popular-but-missing posts from this monster too now that I’ve finally dug into it.
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Some time back, Kevin Baker at The Smallest Minority put up a post involving a video clip of a fairly noteworthy Soviet defector, Yuri Bezmenov. Kevin’s point was one regarding our education system, but my Reynold’s wrap beanie is telling me there’s a little more going on here. Wander over and watch the clip and read the post & excerpts.

Earlier tonight, we recorded the first of the New and Improved Vicious Circle (link coming soon). Why new and improved? Probably because Alan is actually going to get around to posting this one (we hope), but I digress. Originally one of the topics for the evening was going to be “why the fuck are the Democrats determined to try socialism when it never worked anywhere else?” It being the Vicious Circle, we of course didn’t stay anywhere near what was originally planned for the most part, and since I actually thought I felt a neuron fire on this topic earlier, I figured I’d trot it out here instead. (Edit: Holy crap! He did it!)

Now let’s just take a minute and think about our elected officials, be they democrat, rino, or pretty much anyone other than Ron Paul, who has his own set of problems anyway. Some senators can’t manage to drive across a bridge without killing someone. Others think their staff sent them an internet. Bluntly put, congressmen and senators are too busy diddling page boys, evading their taxes, drowning their workers, going out with mistresses, explaining that barrel shrouds are shoulder things that go up, and generally demonstrating as frequently as possible that between all 535 of them you could find more intelligence and general competence (in ANY field other than getting elected) in a lightly stunned ground squirrel. Seriously, look at ‘em. They’re really fuckin’ dumb if you hadn’t noticed! And when they flaunt that idiocy, it’s not in an isolated incident! They’ve admitted frequently, especially since President Leave Britney My Presidency Alone took office, that they don’t even read the bills they’re voting into law.

Again, consider their frequent demonstrations of idiocy. I cannot believe this is a new and recent development. Now think about who is writing and reading these bills, if not our dully (sic) elected officials. Why, that would be their staff! People not elected, but hired based on, essentially, their ability to bullshit and look good, and for some specialists, manage the press when the Senator decides to test the float-mode on his car and comes up light one passenger. There’s obviously some degree of oversimplification here, but how much is anybody’s guess. These hired bullshit specialists have been crafting our laws for quite a damn few years, based simply off their ability to get hired.

Kinda like schools have to hire teachers.

Courtesy of FarmDad via Gunblogger Conspiracy, I ran into one of the coolest websites I’ve seen in quite a long while. It isn’t the usual “bacon, guns, beer, boobs” model that normally piques my cool-o-meter, so if you’re looking for the low-bar I usually set around here, keep moving.

Instead, the site is a travelogue of a Russian biker-chick’s travels through Chernobyl. For fun. No, really. The English is a little broken, but perfectly readable, but unfortunately the site exists as one of those “This is here for me ’cause I think it’s cool” things, as disclaimed on the first page, and is prone to not loading quite as reliably as the for-profit parts of the web. The descriptions of the environment, the places still standing, and the few brave or stupid inhabitants still in the area are compelling. And the exquisitely refreshing part where the author realizes that a) not all radiation is created equal, and b) what kinds and levels of doses will do what to you instead of just ZOMG TEH READIATIONS! doesn’t hurt either. The pictures, interesting in and of themselves simply because of the magnitude of what took place, capture an amazing open-air time capsule to 1986, when Communism was not hyperbole thrown around every other sentence, and Thought Police really did exist, willing and capable to murder someone for having the wrong opinions with the full blessing of the state.

There’s some light explanation on what went down in the days surrounding the disaster, and though nothing one couldn’t pick up from a history book, the boots-on-the-ground point of view brings a lot to the party. Naturally, going sight-seeing through one of the worst nuclear disasters in history isn’t the safest of hobbies, but the author knows her stuff, knows how to stay safe, and to my mind has a very healthy attitude to the whole endeavor. I may not ever find myself in Russia, but the notion of taking a trip like that, to a place so utterly and completely empty, and yet so potentially dangerous, is fascinating.

The full link, in the event that the site is inaccessible for a while, is http://www.kiddofspeed.com/chernobyl-land-of-the-wolves/author.html . If it’s down, save that link for later, it’s well worth catching when it’s up.

When I was a relatively young kid, and I don’t remember at one point, I watched once a very weird but to-me compelling little sci-fi/fantasy cartoon when I happened to catch it on TV. It leaped out at me just because of how *different* it was from the eighties crap factory that was normal fare; even when you’re under ten you have some sense of what’s just like everything else on TV (and in that particular era, it was cookie-cutter variations of a particularly pernicious theme. It was set in a prehistoric era, the characters were talking cats and their nemeses were talking saber-toothed cats, it was weird, and to my mind it was wonderful. And I couldn’t for the life of me remember what it was called after I saw it the once. Some years later while bored and hanging out in a library while on vacation, I happened by chance across the book it had been based on; it was even weirder and more wonderful, being specifically set with Miocene-era predators that I recognized from what I knew about mammals of that era, and in retrospect it had some pretty advanced and challenging themes (to then adolescent me) on the nature of intelligence and identity, as well as morality, as the nature of the “good” and “bad” characters was far greyer than I was used to. It also had the weirdest sex scene I had ever read. And once again I promptly forgot the title and the author but not how much I had liked it.

Thanks to the randomosity of the internet- and truly, it is random, for I already can’t remember how I got there- I found it again. The author is Clare Bell, and it’s the Ratha and the Named series. I’m going to order at least the first one; it may not be as good as I remember, but at the very least I can read it again, finally.

Totally unrelated to books or anything nostalgic for me, thank God, have a look at possibly the most disturbing video game series ever created. It’s one thing to have your game be blatantly sexual, and not heterosexual either, but it’s quite another to have one of your characters be a giant naked guy riding in half a planet. Only the Japanese can combine sexuality and sheer weirdness quite like this.

So, by now most of you who are regular readers of any stripe are probably also regular readers of two or three other bloggers who have already reviewed (and raved) MHI, if not actually a regular reader of the author himself. This is not necessarily for you, although if yet another such review will induce someone who is only about 50% convinced he should give it a shot to do so, then hey jollies. This is for people who stumble by on search terms, or who for some reason has absolutely no overlap with the rest of the incestuous little blogging circle.

First off, a confession: I didn’t think I was going to like this book. Not because the genre isn’t my cup of tea, but because it really, really IS, and I was just about certain that a first novel from an author I’d never heard of who had to self-publish was going to be mediocre at best and a reason to question the taste of dozens of people I consider friends at worst. I love the concept and the overall universe tropes of “urban fantasy”, but the execution is often lacking at best and nauseating at worst. There wasn’t a single author writing one of these series, which are about as common as milkweed pollen by now, that hadn’t either severely disappointed me (Laurell K. Hamilton) or managed to have me for more than about a week’s worth of light entertainment (Jim Butcher and Patricia Briggs). I didn’t order it when Larry self-published- Stingray did. And I let him read it first before I’d deign to rest my eyeballs on it. Yeah, at that point I was being more than a bit of a snotty contrarian bitch about it.

As it turned out, I was wrong and everyone else was right. I wound up devouring it- not a stay up all night to read it, but that was because I was trying to stretch it out a bit so I had more time with the book, not because I was unengaged in the story. I’m going to mention first what everyone else has already talked about, which is that the action is fast-paced and extremely well done, that neither people familiar with personal combat nor people familiar with firearms will have a single thing to complain about, and the whole books is above and beyond just an incredibly *fun* read. It is a first novel and occasionally you can detect a few rough edges or stitches where the author maybe wasn’t so practiced at the pacing or at transitions, but compared to Guilty Pleasures (Hamilton’s first) or especially Storm Front (Butcher’s first), it’s fucking Shakespeare. It’s only an issue if you’re actively hunting for flaws- there’ll be a fabulously entertaining action sequence in a minute or two to take your mind completely off it. It’s what a book inspired by guns, B movies, and asskicking should be- fun above all. The only problem with it as a source of entertainment is that eating buttered popcorn while reading it would get the pages all greasy.

But that’s not really what won me over to the degree it did; otherwise MHI would be in my same stack as all my other throwaway road-trip fiction that I bought to give my brain a few hours of the literary equivalent of chewing gum. Lots of authors play with tropes or twist them to whatever angle they please, but for the most part they’re not nearly as original at it as they like to think they’re being. Lookie here folks! In my universe one token vampire is a nerd instead of being terribly sexy and dangerous at once like all the rest of them are! In my universe the werewolves have a complicated political structure as well as being tragic and Native American! Oh look, MY werewolves have a conflict between the cool mystical Native American werewolves and the brutish psychotic European ones!

I’m not going to sit here and claim that MHI is the most fabulously original thing to happen to urban fantasy ever, but its sets of twists were a lot more enjoyable for me than most, especially the ones that weren’t so much tired non-twists as they were stuff played so traditional it’s simply rarely done anymore. His vampires are fucking dead and they’re fucking evil and they’re coming to fucking get you, they’re not going to take you to your high school prom before granting you an eternal existence as a self-absorbed teenager. The monsters are monsters, the good guys are good (though not always who you expect them to be), and the bad guys are really, really bad. The heroes are heroic, but they come off as people; the problem with about half of these protagonists is that they’re either legendarily perfect with some sort of token non-flaw, like being too proud to turn down a challenge no matter how insane (which they then win anyway), or being so endlesssly awesome that every single evil being in the universe is competing over their attentions. The problem with the other half is that the author overcompensated in the other direction, and the hero is capable of being shut down in a worthless ball of angst based on their Tragic Past. (Cue the fridge!)

Owen is by no means meant to be anything other than a straight-up heroic male lead- certainly no antihero, and he enters the world he does specifically by choice rather than just being some calf-eyed everydude dropped into the situation to find his Destiny. He’s mostly what you’d expect real-life people who excel at dangerous occupations to be- tough and stubborn with a skill set that’s much better for blowing shit up and walking away than it is for negotiating business deals. He doesn’t get to charge in and rescue the damsel because there aren’t really any damsels in this book; some attractive women for sure, but that’s not their most relevant characteristic- that would be being dangerous. His female cast is neither a stable of objects to be rescued nor a team of sexy martial arts waifs with +20 leather clothes of monster slaying; like everyone else, they get by on training, gear, and sheer mad determination. In this universe, if you get landed on by a metric fuckton of evil, you’re in the hospital having your bones repaired- you don’t shake it off and lift your chin and confront the evil with your sheer spunkiness.

Oh. And I really like what he did with the elves. Read it if only because you have a thing against elves.

Amazon: Monster Hunter International

Since a benefit of registering with the 2nd Amendment Blog Bash for the recently concluded NRA convention in Phoenix was that we received actual media credentials, I felt it seemed only reasonable that I should attempt some act of actual investigation or reporting. I’d planned on the basic “Ok, here’s the convention, here’s something interesting” that every other blogger was planning on, but when I was looking through the map of the convention floor, I noticed something rather surprising and came up with a better idea.

H-S Precision had a booth on the show floor.

For those who may have missed the kerfluffle the last time around, H-S Precision is a stock maker that has fallen out of favor with large portions of the shooting community. Why has that happened, you ask? Because on last year’s catalog, they included a product endorsement by Lon Horiuchi. The linked wikipedia article is naturally a tad dry, and of course subject to the inherent drawbacks of being a Wikipedia article. LawDog has a more succinct summation of the incident in question, which I strongly suggest you read if you haven’t already. In fact, I strongly suggest you find a longer version as well, because the events surrounding Vicki Weaver’s death at Ruby Ridge at the hands of Lon Horiuchi can only be described, and this is the polite version, as “clusterfuck.” The short-short version is that Lon Horiuchi unlawfully shot and killed an unarmed woman during a standoff. When brought up on manslaughter charges, the FBI basically said “Nuh-uh. You can’t prosecute him.” and whisked him away to let him help foul up the Waco standoff, but that’s a separate fuckup.

After the shooting community noticed this rather galling endorsement, H-S Precision sat on their corporate hands for about a week and a half. Contrast this with Remington, who began responding to emails (as their products used some of HSP’s products) the very Saturday this all hit the fan, and have responded to other controversies with similar speed. After eventually deciding that using a product endorsement from a known and rather despised individual who could fairly be described as a murderer, they removed the endorsement and technically issued an apology. In reality, the apology was a very small graphical link on their website, and nothing else, to a statement essentially asserting “Fine, no endorsements from anyone will appear.” In other words, not actually an apology.

Backstory out of the way, let’s skip back to today. On noticing the H-S Precision booth on the NRA Convention floor map, I was genuinely curious about a few things. How on earth could Horiuchi have passed any company’s vetting process? ANY entry into google alone will bring up countless flags screaming “Not an ideal celebrity endorsement,” let alone the notion that any company would want to actively associate with the government actions at Ruby Ridge and Waco. Why wasn’t there any sort of actual apology? Is Horiuchi still affiliated in any way with the company, just not published as such? Media pass in hand, I felt it appropriate to try to get some answers.

Now before I press on, I have an unfortunate confession. I went into the interview at their booth with a voice recorder going. As it turns out, the recorder was malfunctioning, and while it indicated it was saving the interview for posterity, all it was really doing was creating a zero byte length file and wandering off to have a smoke and coffee. For once having an inkling of common sense spring to my head, I jotted down notes on everything once the interview (all sixty seconds of it) was concluded, but I would very much have liked to have H-S Precision’s own personnel offer their opinions in their own words here.

When I approached the booth, the first person I spoke to was a product specialist, and I was routed to the company PR man standing next to him. Damnably trusting my recorder, I didn’t get names on anybody. I asked if I could ask him a few questions, recorder in plain view, about the company and its policies, and he agreed.

“Sir, I have a few questions about your company’s vetting process. A few months ago there was an incident in which your spokesman was rather inadvisably selected, given the response from the shooting community. How does someone like that make it through your internals and onto the catalog?”

The convention floor was noisy and this took a second to sink in, but once it did his expression shifted instantly from friendly and eager to discuss to angry and downright furtive as he glanced around to see if anyone else was looking or recording.

“No comment. That never happened. He was never affiliated with us. No comment. Move along. We do not include product testimonials.” Added emphasis mine. He continued to chant the “no comment” talisman while making sure the other two H-S Precision employees got the notion that they should keep quiet too.

“What about the apology? Your company didn’t even — ” At this point, a white haired gentleman male stepped forward, visibly angry.

“What about an apology? Did they apologize for killing a US Marshall?”
“Did Vickie Weaver shoot him? Did the baby do it?”
“Well she was there! She knew damn well — ” at this point he was very animated and going red in the face. The original company spokesman tossed a few more “No comment!”s at me and physically removed the other individual to the back of the booth. The product rep I originally spoke to informed me that the interview was over and told me to leave the booth.

“You don’t have any answers for any of this?”
“No comment. You need to leave.”

As the white-haired defender of Horiuchi, who for reference I specifically never mentioned by name, had looked entirely willing and gearing up to physically hit me when the other rep moved him to the back of the booth, we did so. I later stopped by the McMillan booth to ask them about the incident. After waiting about five minutes just to speak to any rep at all, I was introduced to the daughter of the company owner. She very politely declined comment, although the gentleman who introduced me had responded to my questions as we walked around the booth that “Yeah, a lot of people had, um, ‘opinions’ on that incident…” I will point out that he technically said nothing either for or against H-S Precision.

Finally, since I’m not actually a professional journalist and thus not expected to even pretend to be fair and even handed, it’s time for your moment of schadenfreude. Below is a map of the NRA Convention showroom floor. I’ve circled the location of the H-S Precision booth in red, and the McMillan booth in green. Yes, the size disparity was even more striking in person. Click for big, it’ll help.

It’s also worth noting that at the H-S Precision booth all I had to do to speak to a representative was interrupt his coffee and conversation with the other reps. At the McMillan booth, they were popular enough that even though they had roughly four times the staff, I still had to wait about five minutes before it was my turn to get anybody’s ear. I had a good view of H-S Precision’s booth for a solid 20 minutes while standing in a line for something unrelated to this post, and during that entire time I still didn’t see anybody approach them.

And just in case there was any doubt that they missed the point worse than Horiuchi missed hitting any dangerous target, here’s their current slogan:

Chris Muir is, as always, funny, dead sharp, witty, topical, etc, etc, etc. Praise is heaped on him by the tactical wheelbarrow, and for good reason.

Today, I gotta say… he missed. “We beat your old ‘daddy’ party” is a correct assessment, again as always. But really, “No class?” Sure, it works with the whole “school’s out” thing, but shouldn’t someone point out that when that kind of daddy goes away, it’s time for the nanny*?

*Yes I know there’s a mommy, too. Dammit, I’m trying to get some easy filler up so I can frickin’ pack for tomorrow, work with me here.

The contact e-mail address doesn’t see too much action- and by the by, if you do e-mail us, don’t be surprised by a lengthy-ish delay as due to this reason we tend to forget it’s there- but we recently got an interesting reader request there, which was for accessible layman’s reading on modern science topics. It’s a good question; science writing (as opposed to science journalism, an entirely different kettle of fish) is a very tricky balancing act between not losing informational content and not getting too dense and technical. It’s very, very difficult for a writer very well-versed in his or her field to keep track of what a layman can and can’t be reasonably expected to penetrate, and to walk the line between being accessible and informative and treating the reader like a retard. Worse still is if nothing comes across at all but a wall of text.

Compounding the issue is that a great deal of science books aren’t written to provide a “guide to science”, as it were, but are written so that the author can hold forth on one particular aspect of his interest that happens to involve science, such as the impact of infectious disease and parasites on the spread of empires, or the restructuring of urban ecologies, or the problems of conserving top predators. It’s science writing, yes, but it’s for people that are either already very familiar with the science involved and just want to explore this implication or aspect of it, or else the science only needs to be sketched in lightly as interesting background details to some sort of drama. Books that are actually written to explain a field to the layman that aren’t textbooks are exceedingly rare. Such books that are also good are rarer.

So this list will be rather scattershot; I’m focusing more on authors with the skill to explain science on several different informational levels at once than I am on actually filling out a good list of good sources on all subjects. Commenters, feel more than free to kick in your contributions where you see holes.

I’m going to get my most superficially embarrassing recommendation out of the way first: the Science of Discworld series.

Okay, stop laughing at me, goddamn you. I know I’m a shameless fangirl, but I’m recommending these to non-fans for a reason.

Most “the science of (insert show, book, whatever” tie-in titles are discussions of the various correct representations and distortions of science in that show, and are especially popular with science fiction series. The science of Discworld books are a complete inversion of this pattern; instead, the authors- Terry Pratchett provides the framing, the real heavy lifting is done by Jack Cohen, an evolutionary biologist, and Ian Stewart, a mathematician- are using the tropes and illustrations of the fantasy series to illustrate principles of modern science. Since Terry Pratchett is quite fond of taking science and turning it inside out for purposes of plot device or in-joke, this all works far better than it should. The first book primarily covers physics, chemistry, and essentially “why earth looks and acts the way it does”, the second covers human culture and the rise of science as a system, and the third book covers causality, theories of multiple universes, and anti-science movements. One of the major reasons I recommend these is that the authors seem to have worked out a lot of methods of bridging different ways of thinking- I hate to say it was one of these that first made me really understand why just about every damn thing in the universe is either round or round-ish, but it was. The math never got through to me, but the narrative explanation did.

Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart have written several other good books, but these are by far the most generalist- the others are on more specific topics in math, biology, and complexity.

Bill Bryson, a travel journalist, undertook a fairly ambitious project to write a summation of basic science for people like him that zoned out in dry public school classes, and by most accounts succeeded fairly admirably with A Short History of Nearly Everything. I hesitate to recommend something that I haven’t actually read, but I’ve read basically everything else he’s written and he’s always done a very good job of explaining the science involved when he happens to touch on it in his travel writings, as he often did in A Walk In The Woods. Worth a shot if this kind of thing is what you’re after.

One level of complexity and general rigor from Bryson is Natalie Angier’s The Canon, which is a very similar undertaking- but written by someone with a rather more advanced understanding of science and immersion in its worlds. In other words, it’s an overlay of modern science for the layman written by the scientist rather than the layman. It also devotes more time and space to how the business of science actually grinds along and how to see the world through that particular prism, rather than “this is what happened and this is how we know it did”, which is the approach that Bryson takes. Again, Angier has written several other books- I think she improved over time after this one, too.

Quantum physics, as a subject, is an absolute bitch and a half. I never felt I understood a damn thing about it until I read Robert Gilmore’s Alice In Quantumland- which borrows the basic Carroll structures to illustrate guess what. The framing device gets rather annoyingly twee at times, but the important thing about it is that it works- it seems like it would necessitate dumbing down the concepts, but for the most part it doesn’t. The book looks slim and unimposing, but it took me about four times longer to chew through it and feel I’d understood it than most books do, and it was definitely not because it was unclear. It’s just a complex subject. This is the only one I’ve read, but it looks as though Gilmore has quite the body of work taking this approach with various subjects in physics, such as particle physics, topology, and cosmology.

He doesn’t have much in the way of “generalist” books, but one of the biology science writers I admire the most is Robert Sapolsky. His essay collections The Trouble With Testosterone and Monkeyluv are probably the best examples of his talent and skill at taking a complex or unexpected biological phenomenon and writing about it in a way that is comprehensible to laymen but interesting to experts. If you’re at all interested in what exactly stress does to your body and psyche, his much longer book on that topic is extremely recommendable; there’s some slogging for those that are really unfamiliar with hormones and the brain, but the various payoffs are well worth it.

If you want evolutionary biology and the basics thereof explained to you, much as he annoys me nowadays, try Dawkins. His anti-religious polemics are usually theologically illiterate as well as adversarial, but his real talent was always in writing about evolution and science, and those older books are still well worth the read. Have a go at Unweaving The Rainbow, probably his best, or River out of Eden or Climbing Mount Improbable.

Off the beaten path of the standard Big Three of biology, chemistry, physics- and sorry I haven’t got any chem books in here, by the way, it’s just not a subject I ever felt the need to buy such a book on- we have one of Stingray’s favorite areas, the science of cryptography. If you wish to learn yourself up good on this subject, he recommends Simon Singh’s The Code Book. Since secrets and the preservation and untangling thereof are such a very human field, this one is as much history as it is science- so if you’re into fun stuff like the code arms races of World War II and the Cold War, you’ll like this one even leaving the science out.

So, readers- what are your favorites? Speak up! Doesn’t have to be just science- philosophy and epistemology tomes in the same general for-the-layman spirit are also welcome.

So, apparently the South Park Pundit is getting into the Anita Blake novels.

I can identify. I pulled “Lunatic Cafe” off the shelves when I was in my late teens and deeply into my “devourer of all” phase of horror and fantasy fiction, and it was one of the best finds I’d made. I ate it up- I liked then and to some degree like still any bit of werewolf fiction so long as it doesn’t outright and blatantly suck big hairy wolfballs- and then immediately bought the preceding three books. Oh, sure, it was pretty campy and cheesy at points, but if anything that was part of the appeal; it fed right into my B-movie hot spot and made it all the sweeter for having plenty of genuinely intelligent and creative moments plus lots of violence. It was like the book version of Bruce Campbell movies, except all the sweeter because the badass doing the kicking ass and taking of names was a petite woman with a realistically depicted level of strength and ability- i.e., against even a totally unsupernatural large man, very damn little unless she was armed. And she was armed as often as possible. It was great. I waited eagerly for each new book in the series.

Yeah. Those of you who were also fans are nodding and sighing wistfully- or shaking their fist and screaming “HAAAAAAAAMILTOOOOOOOOON!!!!”- at this point.

For Josh, and anyone else who’d like to read the beginning of the series without foreknowledge of future details, I’ll put a cut here so as not to inflict any spoiler worse than “something dreadful happened to the series”. All I’ll say is- don’t read Narcissus In Chains! Seriously, STOP at Obsidian Butterfly. You know every negative trend you can already see developing in the writing? The questionable morality that the author doesn’t seem to realize is questionable? The slightly disquieting obsession with penises and men’s hair? The way Anita’s power keeps growing like a tumor? The way it seems like almost every recurring character that isn’t supernatural just… isn’t getting time anymore, or if they are it’s not in a likeable way? It doesn’t just slide down the slippery slope from there- it launches itself off and plummets down screaming “YEEEEEEEEEHAAAA” like Slim Pickens in Dr. Strangelove.

(more…)

Some bloggers keep their Amazon wish lists public in side tabs. While the primary purpose of such things is to take advantage of the occasional spasm of generosity and general outpourings of love on the part of one’s readers, as selfish bastards we also find that it’s a great way to find books that we ourselves desire, thanks to the Magic of Similar Tastes. It’s also a less-great way to be lazy and not bother to go add such things to our own wish lists because, obviously, that book will never leave the wish list, right?

In the course of searching to re-discover one such errant title, I went clicking around and found Book I Desire Number Three Billion, which I added to the wish list as usual. Book I Desire is this: Encyclopedia Idiotica: History’s Worst Decisions and the People Who Made Them.

Amazon helpfully saw me off with their usual page-of-even-more-stuff-you want, which includes “other people who bought this item also bought…” See if you can spot the one that stood out to me.

1. Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things

2. The Wit of Martin Luther (Facets Series)

3. The Jesus Storybook Bible: Every Story Whispers His Name.

All I can say is that must be one gnarly Sunday School.

I’ve always been a cheerful and shameless appreciator of genre fiction. I like mysteries, I LOVE horror, I like fantasy, I like sci-fi; about the only things in this literary dungeon that I don’t like are romances (ew, mushy stuff) and westerns (tend to be like romances with more horses and guns, but I could be convinced by the right stuff). Growing up, I was a horror fan first and foremost, with a secondary preference for fantasy… which, done right, is often horror with more pointy humanoids. I liked sci-fi okay, but I was a real lightweight- Star Trek, but no Heinlein. I’d poked around some of the giants of the genre, like Arthur C. Clarke, but it never really caught fire with me.

Since I’ve started actually socializing with other people and, through a combination of the intertubes and being able to haunt the science and engineering departments of the university I attended, I’ve met a LOT of science fiction fans. One of the bennies of being a profoundly geeky girl with no major physical disfigurements is that you get to meet tons of cute, smart, geeky men that all seem to want to talk to you; one of the drawbacks is that they will also all want to make a “real” science fiction fan out of you. I spent God knows how many hours in college watching the entirety of the local Blockbuster’s science fiction section. Some of it was probably Blockbuster’s fault for having a truly shitty selection (ZARDOZ, anyone?), but I really wasn’t very impressed. Nightfall in particular sticks out in my memory as one of the outstanding worst movie-watching experiences I have ever had. (I had never, and still haven’t, read the short story.) Dune was another; I never even remotely grasped why I was supposed to be interested in the machinations of rubber croissants, bitchy courtesans, and people who couldn’t be bothered to wipe their faces after eating a popsicle. (I had never realized before now that the version I watched was directed by David Lynch. This explains everything.) Predictably, every single one of these miserable experiences was had in the company and at the provocation of either a boyfriend or someone I would have dated if circumstances had been different. Men, you are not the only people whose hormones make them retarded. What I thought of 2001 deserves its own rant, although since Stingray was the boyfriend at the time and had an even more extreme reaction, I may let him do that one.

So, to make a long story not very short at all, I did not have a good impression of the genre in general nor of its diehard fans. Nonetheless, they seemed to be kin to me in other ways, so I have persisted in haphazard fashion in trying to see the appeal. It’s going better this time around, mostly because I now have a much, much improved ability to sort diamonds from muck. Scalzi’s good. Cory Doctorow’s great. Lois McMaster-Bujold’s Vorkosigan saga is a pretty good read. I’ve had less positive results with the movies, but really good science fiction movies are pretty damn thin on the ground… especially if you hated 2001, which everybody and his brother seems to think is the best one ever made. By the time this post has been up for a few days I expect my Amazon list to have undergone another convulsive growth cycle*.

What really interested me though, was that aside from a few gourmand geeks that liked everything, there seemed to be relatively little overlap between the fantasy fans and the science fiction fans, and even a fair amount of active contempt. This confused me; aren’t they basically the same thing? The entire point of either genre is to tell an interesting new story by creating a universe we can recognize, populating it with characters we definitely recognize as humans we can identify with, and then changing a bunch of the rules we have to work with and seeing what happens. Remove faster-than-light travel limitations and propose many sentient species and you get Star Trek. Make the basic human narrative assumptions about destiny an active law of the universe, propose many other sentient races, and toss a MacGuffin in there and you get the Rings trilogy. For something like the Dune universe, the details that make it science fiction and not fantasy aren’t even all that important to the plot; you can rewrite the entire thing to be a fantasy universe and change nothing except some explanations and background information. (Yes, I did go and look up the structure and relevant details of the Dune universe, if only to make a start on figuring out what the hell I had just watched.)

It all started to make a lot more sense when I realized that for each genre, there are two different definitions of what makes something “sci-fi” or “fantasy”, and not only that, its fans often only really wanted one of the two things out of the genre, whether or not they were aware of it. One definition that works for either with a few stipulations about allowed mechanics is the one I just gave: fiction that uses important differences between the way the world of the story works and the way the rules of the universe we live in work to tell a story or even just explore a what-if idea. Science fiction proposes technological solutions to our universe-imposed limitations, or explores things on worlds whose different conditions make for different rules than Earth; fantasy rewrites the mechanics of the universe itself. Since these are fairly piddling distinctions, there’s a lot of stuff in a grey area; Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern series is science fiction, but dragons are such a hoary old fantasy cliche that I was shocked to look her up and find that all the awards and societies she’s ever belonged to are for science fiction and not fantasy.

The second definitions are much more genre-specific, because they seem to be an amalgamation of all the hallmarks and tropes that the genre accumulates. Some people are sci-fi fans and not fantasy fans because they really dig spaceships, aliens, and space battles but unicorns, elves, princesses, and pseudo-medieval-Europe battles make them throw up. Some people are fantasy fans and not sci-fi fans because they really dig wizards, dragons, magic swords, and barbarians but cannot stand little grey aliens, ray guns, alien babes that are mysteriously attractive to humans, or gee-whiz technoporn. There’s nothing basically wrong with this; any searching look at my book and DVD collections can only lead a person who can recognize patterns to conclude that I simply like ghost stories, and that’s pretty much true. As with other subgenres I find particularly appealing, I’ll forgive a lot more flaws from a story that’s giving me more of what I already enjoy for its own sake. Not everything has to be To Kill A Mockingbird.

Thus, when fans of one genre or another (or those who hate genre fiction in general) attack the one they don’t like, they tend to go for the big, obvious targets: all the bad habits that writers have developed when they mix up the genre tropes with the reason to write science fiction or fantasy in the first place. If you create a big green landscape and sprinkle it with elves and wizards, the result is NOT automatically good fantasy- it’s just functionally identical to every single other terrible fantasy novel out there generated by someone who read Tolkien and missed what made his stories great. (And I say this as a person who hates Tolkien. I just recognize him as vastly less painful to read than his imitators.) Fantasy fans who just can’t get enough elf will forgive this or automatically sift it out of their continuing search for a good story, but the critics have a very good point. However, all tropes exist because they are tools for the writer, that serve the plot in some way or just create a recognizable shorthand for the reader- they aren’t bad in and of themselves, they’re just frequently misused or used in the same old predictable way too many times. Terry Pratchett started writing Discworld novels purely to poke fun at the glut of terrible Tolkien/Robert E. Howard-inspired fantasy fiction on the market, but it very quickly became more than that when he discovered just how flexible said tropes could be in creative hands. Ironically, much of the definitely-fantasy Discworld series IS a form of science fiction: the author has a habit of grabbing real-world science, turning it inside out, and sticking it in a book. Thus, Hex, the wizards’ cargo-cult computer, which the author openly admits is simply magic that has become indistinguishable from technology.

Critics of fantasy fiction often point out that once you invoke magic, you can use this as a sort of all-purpose Get the Writer Out Of A Corner tool, sort of the narrative equivalent of a Leatherman. In their defense, this is absolutely true in many cases. In fantasy’s defense, the authors recognize this pitfall too, and often go out of their way to make sure first that there ARE rules, and second that those rules are internally consistent within that universe. After all, the audience may be perfectly prepared to accept mangled Latin as the functional mechanic of magic, but if you start having people casting spells without it they get pissed- and rightly so. And, as the fantasy fans point out, Clarke’s Law works both ways: any sufficiently advanced technology can get the writer out of just about any inconvenient plot corner. This is in fact true of all genres; get-the-writer-out-of-the-corner principles can be adapted to nearly anything.

There is a subgroup of science fiction fans who are most enthused about “hard” sci-fi, which distinguishes itself by trying as hard as it can to avoid plot Leathermans by adhering as much as it can to extrapolations of current known science. This is, admittedly, one way to avoid this form of lazy writing, and I’ll admit it can produce some of the best SF simply by being the most tantalizingly plausible. However, I would argue that this only applies to stories that would have been good whether or not they made that extra effort; otherwise, it only falls into another lazy-writer’s pitfall, which is a specialization of the same error of assumption that caused so many well-meaning fantasy authors to scatter elves all over the place. Michael Crichton is perhaps the type example of this: the worst of his novels are just several-hundred-page reviews of current science with a few extrapolations tossed in and some entirely forgettable characters thrown in to move the plot along, which only seems to exist itself in order to move us to the next bit of scientific exposition. This kind of sci-fi only begs the question of why the author did not just sit down and write a popular-science book; I know I always wind up asking myself why I didn’t just go find one of those, when in the clutches of this kind of author.

There is, of course, nothing more wrong with this than there is with really digging ghosts and werewolves… but it’s worth remembering, especially when trying to convert someone dubious about science fiction, that it’s the same principle. Good stories, on the other hand, are good stories no matter what.

*This particular prophecy is already proving self-fulfilling. In the course of searching around for a little inspirational kick, I discovered that David Langford has written a number of books whose existence I had not previously suspected but now cannot live without.

For about the twentieth time, I wandered over to Scalzi’s place when spurred by a link from someone else, and wondered why I’d never put him in the blogroll so I’d remember to keep track of him.

Two hours later, I remembered why: because my Amazon wish list starts spreading like kudzu with a Miracle-Gro dripline, going from its normal state of “pushing decency” to “you’ve got to be kidding”. It wasn’t six pages long this morning…

Oh, and Steve? You’re not helping.

The most recent work of nonfiction to go through the Kill My Boredom Machine here was Barbara Oakley’s Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother’s Boyfriend. Although it lingered in the to-read pile for quite awhile before it looked like the most interesting thing to pull out next, it turned out to be a lot more engaging than I expected.

The title, as I said, sucks. “Evil Genes” is eye-grabbing but misleading about both the research the book is rooted in and the book’s own point, Rome and Enron are relatively small supporting parts of later chapters while characters like Mao Zedong and Slobodan Milosevic have long, meaty chapters all to themselves, and the sister whose murky behavior and past tie the book together is far from the most interesting feature of the book.

If The Lucifer Effect is all about the influence of social structure, setting, and environmental cues on the way human morality plays out, this book is all about the biological side of the argument. (Indeed, there’s one or two indirect shots at Zimbardo- and one straight amidships- in Oakley’s book.) The central thesis of the book is not that evil people are simply born evil- as might be fairly concluded from the title- but that the patterns of behavior ranging from mere unscrupulousness to full-blown personality disorders have genetic, neurological, and even evolutionary roots. Your genes won’t make you evil, but various genetic markers and switches can influence impulsivity, how excitable you are just as a ground state and how well you can exert top-down control over your emotions, how readily you can read other people’s emotional states, and more- no “evil” genes, but certainly genetic combinations that can result in more problems (and occasional downright brilliant results) than others. As any sensible approach to the massively complex morass that is genetics and behavior must include, there’s also plenty of discussions of the environmental influences and how drastically they can shape outcome- proteins don’t code for actions, but they can certainly set the neurochemical stage in a way that weights the probabilities for reactions.

Psychology is far from a complete science and the genome sequencing and neuroimaging that this book relies heavily upon are both very new tools, so there are far fewer sweeping conclusions than there are tantalizing breadcrumb trails- although a few old beliefs are trashed by the new tools. If you’re wanting a Complete Theory of Biological Personality, look elsewhere, or better yet, wait. There isn’t one yet and there isn’t enough information for there to BE one. Instead, we get extensive (and remarkably honest) discussions of the artificial psychological constructs for personality disorders like “psychopath” and “borderline” and what kinds of real and political influences have shaped them, with some speculation on how their existence may have shaped history. Better yet, more than merely explaining how such disordered personalities operate, how they might have formed in the first place, and why (and where) they exist with the prevalence they do, it also provides explanations for the chronic human failure to recognize such characters for what they are- the psychology and neurology of appeasement, historical revisionism in the face of massive evidence, and head-in-the-sand behavior. The section for citations of research is longer than some of the chapters- just the way I like it.

Best of all, the author has perspective, broad historical literacy, and wit. I’m pretty sure she won me over from this footnote on page 28:

Robert Conquest’s monumental work on Stalinist horrors, The Great Terror, earned enormous animosity on its initial release in 1968- its graphic depictions of the horrors perpetrated in the Soviet Union under Stalin’s direction were felt by many to be false in nearly every particular. The opening of the Soviet archives, and later verification by a host of Russian historians not only supported Conquest’s findings, but showed that Stalin’s “model state” had been even worse than Conquest had originally outlined. When The Great Terror was re-released in a 1992 post-Glasnost edition, Conquest was asked if he would like to give it a new title. His terse response was: “How about, I Told You So, You Fucking Fools“.

The first few chapters drag a bit, by necessity; the dry subject material of genetics and neurobiology are necessary to understanding the later chapters, though Oakley does her best with them. Persevere: payoff is coming. Perhaps most tantalizing is the increasing body of evidence pointing to all humans using the same set of neural hardware- parts of which are quite ancient- to process moral questions; thus suggesting that human morality is neither an airy-fairy matter of pure socialization nor something so delicate and ephemeral as the grace of God alone.

If you’ve got the time, for best effect, read both Zimbardo and Oakley. Either read is richer for the other.

It strikes us that some of y’all seem to share a touch of our warped tastes in entertainment. So, in the spirit of “get something posted, dammit”, another we-recommend roundup.

Invader Zim

The RT already knows about this one, obviously, but we figure the rest of you should, too. In some sort of act of bizarre fate that may only have been achievable through voodoo or similarly supernatural means, comic book artist and writer Jhonen Vasquez, chiefly popular in gothic and “just plain twisted” circles for such creations as Johnny the Homicidal Maniac (exactly what it sounds like), somehow wound up in charge of a cartoon aimed at children. On the Nickelodeon network.

It went about like you’d expect. The second episode features a kid getting his eyeballs mechanically plucked out. It lasted about a season and a half and spent most of it constantly at war with Standards and Practices for things like their entire focus audience under ten bursting into tears at certain episodes. But it did develop a cult audience of adults and teenagers, and it is wonderfully hilarious- if in a dark, twisted, and more than slightly nihilistic way. We love it to bits, if only for the episode “A Room With A Moose”, which is also exactly what it sounds like and yet somehow hilarious anyway.

The Venture Brothers

This managed to knock Invader Zim out of the top spot in our hearts for animated shows, which we had thought to be impossible. Like most excellent things, it’s impossible to describe it in brief and have it even sound interesting, but I’ll give it a go. It started out as a parody of Jonny Quest and other products of the seventies-era Hanna Barbera attempt to ruin animation (and certain long-running Marvel titles), but its creators surprised the hell out of everyone by taking the basic parody material and actually making complex plot arcs and richly developed characters out of them. Suffice it to say that if you’re like us and have a warehouse of pop culture trivia where half the stuff you learned in school should be, there’s a good chance you’ll love it. If you were or are a comic fan there’s an even bigger chance, as part of the show’s shtick is a delicate balance between applying a little reality to comic-universe tropes without destroying the ones that need to exist for the universe to make any sense at all. It’s definitely several degrees off plumb. Highly recommended.

Glen Baxter

There’s…. not really a lot I can say about Glen, except that he draws single-panel comics, and that he’s essentially what would happen if you melded Gary Larson, P.G. Wodehouse, and Salvador Dali. Surrealist comics usually don’t go so well, because there’s a very fine line between being bizarrely funny and just being weird for weird’s sake. Glen Baxter’s cartoons are very, very weird, and occasionally do venture into the realm of “weird for weird’s sake”. If you thought The Far Side did way too often, then Baxter is probably going to just qualify as flat weird with no funny involved. If you never understood why people seemed to just not get Far Side so often and thought Larson was really pretty conventional, just much funnier than everyone else, give him a go.

The Tick

The Tick started as an offbeat indie comic title, expanded into a small universe of comics, and was picked up for Saturday morning television and became, like Invader Zim, a cult hit that went over better with older teens and adults than it did with the kids it was aimed at. Later on, it became an atrocious live-action series with Patrick Warburton that lasted about ten minutes and deservedly so- the nature of the series rather demands animation or comic format to work instead of just looking stupid.

“A superhero parody” doesn’t really cover it, since there are about forty million of those and most of them are bad. The best way I can think of to describe it is that it takes all the normal superhero tropes absolutely dead seriously, then removes most of the things that make them work out well in comic books. Oh, and the titular character is arguably very much insane, but in a good-natured way that works out well for pretty much everyone except possibly his sidekick. (And it’s not as if traditional superheros aren’t nuts anyway.) Skip the live-action series, even though for some reason they released it to DVD. Try the cartoon. If you like the cartoon, it might be worth your while to search for trade paperbacks of the original comic and its assorted spinoffs, which were stranger and often better. (I particularly liked Paul the Samurai.) It could just be I have such a soft spot for this series because it kicked off comic collecting for me, but I’m pretty sure it’s just plain the good stuff.

Dinner took… somewhat longer than expected. Specifically, about an hour longer. And then I had to try to call my mother back, who called during dinner, which did not work.

And thus, because I encountered yet another benighted individual who has never touched Terry Pratchett and felt the powerful urge to evangelize… Pratchett quote-mania. Yes, this IS a new low for me in work-to-content ratio.

(more…)

I may rightly be accused of being somewhat obsessed with food. God alone knows why; when I was growing up dinner was either a fend-for-yourself situation (mom’s house), or a fraught affair where people who would rather have duelled with pistols at fifty paces ate together in the name of “family togetherness” (dad’s house). In college, I actually managed to give myself anemia a few times and chronically low B vitamins from my incredibly lousy eating habits. When I moved in with Stingray, neither one of us knew how to cook, and given that Los Alamos restaurants are few and far between and have capricious hours, one of us had to learn. He did, for reasons that I’ve forgotten, and I’ve been glad he did ever since- he turned out to have a fair amount of talent for it. Ever since he graduated from “competent” to “pretty darn good”, the subject of what’s for dinner and how good it is has been constantly on my mind, and eating out is more about getting something new, unusual, interesting, or just better than we can do the same dish, not about just getting fed. Since my basic response to any interest is to spend a whole lot of time reading about it, books on food, cooking, eating, and “dining” now outnumber any other subset of nonfiction on our shelves. Here are some of the best ones.

Anthony Bourdain. He’s rude, he’s crude, and his career memoir Kitchen Confidential was a big inspiration for a lot of food writers (and food readers) that food need not to be a prissy subject pursued by soft, snobby aesthetes. Kitchen Confidential itself is entertaining reading about both the man himself- who is an ass, but a self-aware ass- and the world of professional cooking, which is apparently no place for sissies. His subsequent book The Nasty Bits is a hodgepodge of essays about food, life, and travel, after the first one made him famous and he gained his dream career- being paid to go around the world and find out what’s good to eat or drink there. If you get the Travel Channel and you like his writing, check out the show- No Reservations. Anthony has an opinion about everything, including some that make me want to punch him in the face, but he’s the anti- Rachel Ray (or any other highly polished Food Network personality), and that’s a relief. Either way, he’s passionate about food, and quite aware that the best food is equally likely to be found sold from a street vendor as in a high-ticket fine dining establishment. At the very least, as a restaurant customer you’ll learn how to never piss off the kitchen.

Jeffrey Steingarten. Steingarten is polished where Bourdain is gritty, but he’s no pussy. The food critic for Vogue magazine- I know, I know, and I also have no idea how he still has that job given what sorts of people he’s bound to have pissed off by now- he’s dedicated- relentless, really- in the pursuit of really good food, and the truth about it. A dedicated omnivore who set out to rid himself of all food aversions when he took his job, he has no time or patience for the fashionable food faddist- though he DOES have plenty of research with which to beat them. “Lactose intolerance”, food allergies and sensitivities, vegetarians, and the fat-phobic take it on the chin in his books, as does pretty much everyone else who wanders into his crosshairs. It’s far more entertaining to read about than I suppose it is to be in his targeting system. Either way, he’s always informative and frequently hilarious.

Calvin Trillin- The Tummy Trilogy. Jeffrey owes his career to Calvin Trillin, who so far as I know was America’s first food columnist. Not restaurant critic, or cookbook author, just a guy who liked to eat really a lot and could get amazing amounts of mileage out of that. Much of what he wrote is now dated, because at the time there wasn’t much of a food culture in America that wasn’t part of an immigrant group or some subculture, like barbecue masters or fried-chicken monomaniacs; Trillin found them, highlighted them, and ruminated on them at length. He’s witty and interesting- he shares Steingarten’s irritability with people who are paranoiac or puritan about food and urge to research his subjects to death, but he’s a good deal more laid-back overall. Also, I agree with his idea that there should be college subjects like “restaurant Chinese”, so that a person can inform the chef that they want what’s best from the kitchen rather than what’s normally fed to occidentals, and feel it’s a positive crime that this has never been widely implemented.

Jane and Michael Stern. Back in the late seventies, the Sterns did Trillin one better and set out to compile a comprehensive guide to the regional food available to the adventurous traveler in America, and have conducted most of their food writing career from the road ever since. Their “main” book, Roadfood, has been updated into a new edition every few years ever since, with suggestions for local and good around the country. They also have several other books on food, most of them dedicated to specific subgroups (like one on sandwiches and one on chilis), and one dedicated to the stories behind the journeys- with recipes included. If you’re interested in food Americana, don’t pass the Sterns up- it’s also a great way to find a recipe for some obscure delicacy you encountered on a trip. They have a website here for those looking to find the latest gossip about where to eat, recipes, and the conduction of sprawling battles about who REALLY has the best barbecue in Kansas City.

Harold McGee. THE god of kitchen science. Food science wasn’t really of interest to many outside of a few rogues and chemistry students until the first edition of On Food and Cooking was published. It covers the biology, chemistry, physics, and history of the basics of the foods we eat and what’s done to them and why it’s done that way. It helps to have a good scientific background to understand, actually- several other books published on the same themes are basically efforts to present the same material in a way that you don’t need a very long attention span and some college chemistry to understand. It’s very interesting but definitely on the dense side; I’ve never successfully made it all the way through, mostly because I get hungry and wind up craving something obscure he’s just explained in exhaustive detail, like clotted cream. Regardless, if you want to know why things go the way they do in the kitchen- and use the knowledge to improve your recipes and lose kitchen myths- the resource is unparalleled.

I’ve got a very large volume of Elizabeth David sitting in my to-read pile, and I hear some fellow named Michael Pollan has published some good stuff. Any others I’m missing out on?

Some time ago, the fine fellow at Sometimes Far Afield did a bit of a book meme/request. I said I’d reciprocate, and I’m just now getting around to it. We just finally got our fireplace stove-insert thingy installed, and I swear that thing puts out pure lazy along with the heat. It makes the cat melt into the sofa cushions, and it does about the same thing to me, except I want to read before I drift off.

So, following form, I’ll start off by recommending some of my favorite regular reads from the blogroll. These are the people I hit when I’m just doing a skim, and if you share some of my interests, it’d probably be worth your time to give ‘em a look.

On with the books! Because I rarely can remember what I got and read when- if I really like something, I reread it, sometimes a LOT- this is more a general overview of my current favorite authors/titles (the ones that are less famous than Stephen King- by now everyone knows if they like him or not) by genre. This has already gotten way longer than I thought, so I’ll extend the easy blogfodder by breaking these posts up.

Horror/Fantasy/Science Fiction

Terry Pratchett. Theoretically, there might be someone out there reading this who hasn’t already had one of my Gospel of Pratchett lectures shoved down their throat and hasn’t decided that either they like him or they don’t or that if they hear one more word about the sonofabitch they’ll shoot me or themselves, so I’ll throw it out there again. The Discworld series is huge and intimidating, so it’s pretty daunting to get into. Pratchett has done his best to keep the books at least somewhat self-contained, so that you don’t need to have read the previous books in the series to get the latest one, but he has been less and less able to do this as the series grows, although he periodically writes books whose cast of characters don’t go with any of the main arcs. Easy jumping-in points are Guards, Guards, Wyrd Sisters, Reaper Man, and Small Gods; I started with Hogfather, which is technically not so easy, but the book was so damn good it was what hooked me anyway. (I read most of the rest in no particular order other than “the bookstore stocks it and I like the cover” until I caught up with the backlog, so it can be done.) I don’t recommend starting at the beginning of the series; not only has Pratchett improved massively as a writer since he began, the Discworld started as a very straight-up parody of fantasy tropes, and only later developed into its current incarnation, which is a world he’s basically created as a playground for affectionate satire and philosophical exploration of basically everything ever. The Tropes wiki has a good summary of it here, as well as a nice list of the books in the series to date and their general order. Failing all that, you can sample Pratchett’s wit and outlook in Good Omens, which is a one-shot novel he collaborated on with my next favorite.

Neil Gaiman. The only big, elaborate series he’s done is a comic book, Sandman, which is certainly very much worth reading but kind of an expensive way to introduce yourself to this guy. Gaiman is a bit like Pratchett’s shadow; both of them are contemporary British fantasy authors influenced by more or less the same sorts of things, but Pratchett invariably leans toward the comic with a seasoning of dark, while Gaiman does dark fantasy with a dash of comedy. His comics and stories are atmospheric and lovely; his start in comics gives everything a very strong visual component, even when he’s not using any illustrations, and the best of his work gives the reader a series of clear mental pictures to go along with the words. In my opinion, again, the first of his novels aren’t the best place to start with him; I think there was a bit of a transition period where he was learning to paint the same pictures with his words that he used to partly rely on a talented comics illustrator to provide. If you like short stories (I love them), start with Smoke and Mirrors. If you’d prefer a novel to sink your teeth into, try American Gods, the best of his novels to date, with the possible exception of its sequel.

Christopher Moore. I like comic fantasy, but it’s something that’s very often done badly; authors set out to parody tropes so old they’ve grown mossy and wind up relying on them instead, which defeats the point no matter how funny and incompetent your dragons are. Christopher Moore generally doesn’t do this, though he’s happy to give them satiric nods; he writes fantasy stories that happen to be funny as well. I’ve found he’s rather hit or miss- sometimes he’s ON like a neon sign and delivers something hilarious that also happens to be a page-turner of a mystery/fantasy tale, and sometimes what you get is… well, readable… but not something that turned you on or made you stay up late to find out what happens next. Most of his novels are stand-alones; I recommend Island of the Sequined Love Nun (best cargo-cult novel ever) or Fluke: I know why the winged whale sings as excellent starters.

Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child. These guys almost don’t belong here- bookstores tend to get really confused about where to shelve their novels, whether under horror or mystery or general fiction or what. (They could also honestly be shelved under science fiction, but I haven’t seen that done yet.) The truth is that they write thrillers; mysteries with a lot more teeth in them than Agatha Christie, and I’ve found some of their scenes a lot scarier than those written by more traditional horror authors. They also have a hit-or-miss quality, but they have more hits than misses. Avoid their latest three or four books- they’re part of a coherent series with a popular recurring character from some of their earlier books, and frankly, they represent a consistent downturn in quality as well. Go for The Relic (which was made into an atrocious movie bearing almost no resemblance to the book), Riptide, or Thunderhead. The best part about these guys is their devotion to detail; Relic remains the only biologically-based thriller/science fiction novel I can name that actually has sound biology in it. If you speak Biogeek, riches await; if you don’t, it’s no great loss to following the plot. Likewise, Thunderhead contains a high level of accuracy about the Southwest and the logistics of horse-based transportation, mostly because Douglas Preston lives in Santa Fe and has horse-packed all over the region. Add in a good talent for making you genuinely care about peripheral or relatively unimportant characters within a few pages, and you’ve got some good vacation reading.

Cory Doctorow. Yeah, I know, I’m probably the last person with an internet connection to discover him, as he jumped into the possibilities of it with both feet and used it in a big way to launch his writing career. The truth is, I don’t like a lot of science fiction; for a genre devoted to exploring the possibilities of the future and man’s evolution, it sure seems just about as reliant on common settings and tropes as more hidebound genres. I rarely get a new idea from it, and I resent that. (The real reason for this is, as Pratchett has speculated, science fiction is just fantasy with nuts and bolts- there more for exploring human dynamics in a setting where you can change a bunch of rules and see what happens than it is for actual future speculation.) I couldn’t say that that’s NOT what Doctorow does, but he has some of the most interesting new ideas about what could really change the face of human existence I’ve ever read- AND he manages to pull it off without postulating a change in human nature to do it. In a lot of ways, he’s like a 21st century Ray Bradbury, minus the penchant for horror. The very best thing about Doctorow is that he’s a big believer in sharing his ideas and his stories- just about all his short stories are available to read for free online. I recommend “When Sysadmins Ruled The Earth” and “I, Rowboat”. Yes, the latter story is exactly what the title suggests, and it’s my current favorite exploration of the notion of artificial intelligence ever.

Joe Hill falls under this category as well- I finished 20th Century Ghosts and have recently begun Heart-Shaped Box, which is starting out very nicely- but I’ve already gone on about him. Suffice it to say I’d put him up against Stephen King for horror and Gaiman for dark fantasy.

I spent yesterday utterly convinced that I was coming down with the same crud our friends’ baby had a few days ago. I was stricken with aches and pains, sleepy all the time though never actually fully wanting to go to sleep, and oddly entertained by things that normally bore me. Bring on the tingling sinuses and intermittent hacking come evening, and I was sure I was going to be spending the next week or so as an inert object.

Then I slept for thirteen hours, and now I’m fine. Huzzah for the immune system! Hail King Sleep! You, rhinovirus, were no match for my antivirus software!

Anyway. Despite all that, I still don’t have much interesting to say, so I’ll do a book pimp instead.

Last night, feeling thoroughly sorry for myself, I finished the popcorn mystery I was reading and picked up 20th Century Ghosts, a short story collection by Joe Hill. I’d picked it up more or less on impulse the last time I was in Borders; it had a lot of strikes against it- trendy, precious hardcover binding with deliberately roughed page edges and cover, and the New York Times Book Review apparently absolutely loves the guy. All the earmarks of someone who was anointed by the critics and publishers rather than rising up on his own merits. On the other hand, I like short stories best when I’m trying on a new author, I’m always looking for new horror/fantasy guys that have an off chance at fascinating me, and I had very much liked The Cape, a short story of his that wound up in the 2006 Best Horror anthology. So I shrugged and bought it.

It didn’t take me long into the book to be thinking Holy shit, this guy is really, really good. Bear in mind, I was a bit addled yesterday, and I may be thinking otherwise when I finish the collection- I’m about halfway in- but I don’t think so. He plays with the genre conventions, but in a way that let you know he’s familiar with them and appreciates them rather than a way that says “HEY GUYS LOOK I AM DOING AN HOMAGE NOW I AM DOING A PARODY YOU SEE WHAT I DID THERE AREN’T I CLEVER?” He switches styles effortlessly to suit the needs of a story without losing his voice. I haven’t been this thrilled to have bought a book by an author I hadn’t tried before since I opened Neil Gaiman’s Smoke and Mirrors.

I’m only halfway through, but I’m fairly sure I’ll be ordering his novel as soon as I finish.

“If I thought there was some god who really did care two hoots about people, who watched over ‘em like a father and cared for ‘em like a mother… well, you wouldn’t catch me sayin’ things like “there are two sides to every question” and “we must respect other people’s beliefs.” You wouldn’t find me just bein’ gen’rally nice in the hopes that it’d all turn out right in the end, not if that flame was burnin’ in me like an unforgivin’ sword. And I did say burnin’ Mr. Oats, ’cause that’s what it would be. You say that you people don’t burn folk and sacrifice people anymore, but that’s what true faith’d mean, y’see? Sacrificin’ your own life, one day at a time, to the flame, declarin’ the truth of it, workin’ for it, breathin’ the soul of it. That’s religion. Anything else is just… just bein’ nice. And a way of keepin’ in touch with the neighbors….

…Anyway, that’s what I’d be, if I really believed. And I don’t think that’s fashionable right now, ‘cos it seems that if you sees evil now you have to wring your hands and say “oh deary me, we must debate this”. That my two penny’orth, Mr. Oats. You be happy to let things lie. Don’t chase faith, ‘cos you’ll never catch it. But perhaps you can live faithfully.”

- Granny Weatherwax to the Most Reverend Mightily Oats, from Terry Pratchett’s Carpe Jugulum

ETA: I don’t wholly agree to this- and neither does Pratchett, who usually paints Granny Weatherwax as damaged by her own absolutism- but it’s what constantly pops into my head when Christians lament to me that I take the Bible more literally than they do.  To my view, then why have it at all?

Attentive readers may have noticed that we appreciate good snark around here. I’m sure this comes a surprise to some lower members of the intellectual ladder, such as bicyclists, mimes, and politicians, but it’s true. Having devoured, pardon the pun, Jeffery Steingarten’s “The Man who Ate Everything”, we found ourselves craving more of the writing of a man who surprised his wife with bread buttered with non-fat margarine, proclaiming “Such fun we have together!” as she made futile efforts to degrease her tongue. The sequel, “It Must’ve Been Something I Ate” is another collection of essays, one we are churning through with considerable speed.

One such essay, “Cast Party”, details the days following an accident in which Jeffery broke his ankle. By day three, he is still going through his mail and all the various other chores that can be accomplished from bed with a healthy dose of scotch and painkillers. There we find the following passage:

“The Times Literary Supplement reviews two British books on food and ethics. One, The Price of Meat, is about the morality of raising and eating animals for food; it does not appear to say anything that Peter Singer, in his now classic Animal Liberation, did not cover years ago. The other is Food Ethics, a collection of essays that, in true British fashion, gives a host of other reasons to be nervous about eating. One chapter fondly recalls World War II and urges the current government to ration the food supply again so that people will be forced to eat in a more healthful way. Remind me please, did the British win the war, or did the Nazis?”

This brings us to the title of today’s post. I am formally anouncing that I am stealing the last sentence of that paragraph for use in any and all situations concerning the horrible blemish that is modern England. Jailed for self-defense? “Remind me please….” Considering a ban on kitchen knives? “Remind me please…” you get the idea.

Now, I am fully aware that Mr. Steingarten was a lawyer before he turned to the world of gastronomic delights. As such, I have no doubt that should he find this post, and my full admission of intended plagarism, he could reduce me to a small smoking pile of financial rubble. Given his wit and skill with language, I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if he could make me crawl under my desk and cry like a little girl. Mr. Steingarten, should you actually read this and consider either of the above options, I propose a deal instead: Come cook in Los Alamos with LabRat and I. If your visit were to occur in the fall, say late August through early October, we can introduce you to a world of chile the likes of which Bobby Flay cannot even pronounce. Naturally, I would be most appreciative of any pointers you could offer during your stay to improve my own cooking.

This may seem like a shallow, thinly veilied attempt to lure someone of great talent to impart some small measure of skill to my own meager culinary offerings. All right, fine, I can’t argue that. But instead of rolling your eyes and preparing a salvo of briefs, consider the benefit: You will gain a greater palate for chile, and can enjoy an entertaining, possibly column-worthy trip to the southwest to bring light to the difficulties that small-town flyover country cooks have to work with. As I’ve shouted repeatedly at various shows on The Food Network, to the embarassment of wife and pets, not everybody lives next door to Chelsea Market where the shallots are always mold-free (not so here), and the kitchen landscape changes pretty dramatically when water boils at 190F. If none of the above appeals, then consider that at the very least there would be one less mediocre chef inflicting questionable food on the world.

And if that actually happens, someone please remind me to ask him the best way to cook and eat my own hat.

Over here, Chris Byrne reminisces about some of the books of his early childhood, and asks readers to record the first “real” book they ever read, the one that spoke to them and turned them on. (He asks for the first book period too, but I don’t regard it as half so significant.)

Unfortunately, I cannot remember for the life of me.

This isn’t because I wasn’t a reader as a child; rather the opposite. I have an extremely clear memory of the first book I ever read on my own. It was Mama Don’t Allow, I was not quite three years old, and it’s also my earliest substantial memory of anything at all. I remember being very bored and restless, and pawing through the lowest bookshelves I could find, the ones where all my favorite storybooks were kept in easy reach for bringing to Mom to read to me. I didn’t really care which one it was- I’d heard them all a thousand times- I just wanted a story, and I liked the pictures of the alligators. I opened the book to look at the pictures, probably because I knew Mom was busy doing something at her desk that she probably wouldn’t stop to read to me. (This might sound heartless, if you cut that sentence out of context, but the reality is that it was something I’d ask for about four hundred times a day.) Then I realized that I didn’t need Mom, because I could read the story on my own. All of it. I went back and made sure that I could understand all the words, and then I went tearing off with the book to show Mom what I could do. Knowing my mother, she has a beautiful memory of her child’s accomplishment as triumphant as my own, but I imagine it also represented the dawn of a glorious age of a vastly more self-entertaining child.

It’s still one of my best memories; there’s been very little that could possibly complete with that sudden opening of the door of understanding. I’m sure there’s lots I don’t remember, my mother and father alike working hard to help me understand the markings on the page and how they related to the content of the story. It was probably a long, gradual, process.

But I don’t remember it that way. I remember sudden, hot transcendence- the first taste of real independence. It wasn’t, of course, but it was the first time I picked up one of the tools that could give me freedom and was able to use it on my own. After that, it was no more necessary to encourage me to read and improve my skills at it than it was to encourage me to play Nintendo and get better at that, when it came along.

After Mama Don’t Allow, I just don’t remember what came after in what order. I remember lots of picture books, which I quickly outgrew except for the ones with beautiful illustrations- which my mother, being a painter, made sure I had lots of. I remember asking a lot of questions about how things used to be in England so that I could understand Black Beauty, but I don’t remember when. I remember the Missus Piggle-Wiggle books, well enough that I went and found The Egg and I a few years ago, by the same author. I remember not being half so impressed by the Black Stallion books as I had been by Black Beauty, but reading them anyway because they were okay and I was very often running out of things to read. I remember reading just as much in the line of Lad- A Dog, Where The Red Fern Grows, and Old Yeller as I did of the saccharine pony books aimed at girls my age (which don’t get me wrong, I devoured), which probably helped keep me from romanticizing animals as much as I might have. I also remember begging my father to read the opening chapters of Stephen King’s It to me when I was six, until he complied- I was haunted by storm grates for years afterward, though as soon as I got just a little bit older I started devouring ghost stories and then horror stories as fast as I could get my hands on them.

I remember a big, beautiful book of myths and legends and folk tales from cultures around the world. I remember the painted illustrations, and that they were so colorful in part because they were so bloody. I learned about El Cid, the death of Balder (Norse), Orpheus, the tower of Babel, Perseus, and many others. Whoever had put the book together, they didn’t believe that stories about people who never got hurt and always came to good ends appealed to kids, or maybe that they weren’t necessarily good for them. They were right; it was one of my favorites despite being among the least comprehensible to me, since so many of the stories rested on the oldest themes- sex, war, and violent death. I wish I still had it, but I think I gave it to my brother, and since it had been mine, that means the likelihood that it got past my stepmother is only slightly greater than zero.

In any case, all this free-form reminiscing is leading up to something only barely related. See, I have this nasty trait; I’ve got a deep contrarian streak. It’s not rational, but after a certain number of people have told me that I should see or read X or Y movie/book/comic/game, it only makes me more determined NOT to. There have been some notable disappointments from things people have all but cattle-prodded me to try- especially Tolkien in general and the Matrix movies in particular- but mostly it’s just a pure manifestation of pointless stubbornness. More than that, it’s blatant hypocrisy, since it’s basically impossible to know me without hearing at great length of the genius of several authors, especially Terry Pratchett and Florence King.

Which is really just to explain why it took me this long to be reading Heinlein. I know many of the plots and I know his themes, and I know many of the people I like, respect, and frequently share tastes with worship him. I know that theoretically he should thrill me; the long quotes and descriptions of his world-building and worldview tell me that much. But it’s taken this long because there’s a part of me that says “Tolkien all over again, I just know it, DAMMIT”.

I’m a hundred pages into Stranger In A Strange Land. Not bad.