Book Review: Manning, Russ—Magnus, Robot Fighter 4000 A.D., Vol. 3

There are only three comic book series that are any good. The best are Hellboy up until Mignola stopped doing the art and the original TMNT by Eastman and Laird up to and including the “City War” story.

Russ Manning’s Magnus, Robot Fighter 4000 A.D. is in that rarefied air. Written back during the 60s, it was intended as a futuristic Tarzan. It’s way better than the Marvel and DC books of that era.

Magnus is a Luddite with superhuman strength in a fantastically futuristic world where robots do all of man’s drudge work. He relentlessly preaches that by doing so they will make mankind weak and lazy and lead to human extinction.

But the series is full of marvelous paradoxes in addition to the high flying action. Because Magnus has a chip implanted in his skull that allows him to “hear” robot transmissions, Magnus is actually a cyborg. It is a robot that raises Magnus and gives him his powers. Whenever evil robots rise up to destroy mankind, there’s almost always a human hiding in the shadows pulling their strings.

Overall there is a very progressive and positive futurist tone to the books. Sure the future is complex and challenging. But it is also awesome.

Book Review: Aldrin, Buzz—Mission to Mars

I have a fascination with Mars. From Dante’s mystical forays to Kim Stanley Robinson’s terraforming epics, from Burroughs’ pulp to Bradbury’s poetry, I can’t get enough. If the government’s going to spend money on space exploration, it should be with an eye to create a self sustaining colony on Mars. Anything short of that is a failure. I believe solely focusing on unmanned space exploration will lead to waning public interest and minimal funding. The trickle of data will slowly decrease. Scientists may be able to use it to find out a bunch of cool stuff, but it will be increasingly esoteric to the average Joe. We recently did a Pluto fly by, but popular culture has already moved on.

Of course, manned space exploration doesn’t guarantee public interest either. Space has got to be relatively easy and accessible and then it can be profitable. Getting to that point is not easy, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it never happened. But, oh, how I wish it would!

If a pep talk about going to Mars is what you need then Aldrin’s Mission to Mars is the book for you. Unfortunately that’s about all it provides. It’s haphazard, scatter-shot, poorly organized, and poorly argued. It’s three parts raw enthusiasm, two parts self aggrandizement, with a few interesting ideas sprinkled in for flavor.

Among the latter are the “Aldrin Cycler” system of space ships. These are perpetually orbiting ships that never stop. You’d take a shuttle out to the cycler as it comes close to Earth and ride it to Mars. Once there you’d hop off onto a similar shuttle and the cycler continues on it’s way back to Earth.

The other cool idea is his approach to going back to the Moon. In short, he argues that other countries should do that. Instead the US should focus on developing the cycler technology within the Earth-Moon system, and otherwise develop infrastructure — communication satellites, Earth-Moon Lagrange point space stations and fuel depots, etc. — and exchange usage of these resources with other countries that want to develop a presence on the moon. Once the technology is developed we expand it to Earth-asteroid and Earth-Mars systems.

In my opinion notion that this will be any kind of return on investment on space exploration in the near future has to be abandoned.  If space ever become profitable it will be along time from now and will require mining mineral rich asteroids (keep in mind that a space windfall on iron, gold and other valuable resources would decimate the mining economy on Earth) and Helium-3 mining for fusion purposes. But that is dependent on actually creating a viable Helium-3 fusion technology first.

In that sense I think the book is misleading when it comes to economic opportunities.

Mars won’t be a financially profitable excursion. We won’t find extraterrestrial life there. We should go to Mars purely for the thrill of the technical challenge involved. And if we don’t find that challenge worth pursuing, get used to terra firma, because we’ll never leave.

I’ve heard Zubrin’s books about Mars are better. I need to give them a try.

Book Review: Verne, Jules—Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

I first read this book when I was in 6th grade. It was one of the reasons I spent the next five years almost exclusively reading science fiction. There a lot of famous and visually stunning scenes in the book, most of which were incorporated into the Disney movie. But one that wasn't has always stayed with me. When the Nautilus is sailing through the Mediterranean Dr. Arronax sees a man swim up to the observation window in the salon. Nemo tells Arronax that this swimmer lives most of his life floating unprotected in the sea.

How can that even be possible? How can anything in this book be possible? And yet Verne manages to make the reader want it to be possible because it’s just so cool. And he backs it up with enough science so that it’s easy to believe.

I have read that most English translations of 20,000 Leagues were heavily edited and marketed as stories for children. So when I bought a copy to read to my kids I made sure to get the most recent and robust translation I could find.

And I needed to read my kids the real thing because their elementary school only stocks “Great Illustrated Classics” versions, which is to say they are dumbed down and full of pictures. My kids were reading them and spoiling all these great books, including this one, in the process.

In reading this version as an adult, I found that Verne spends a lot, and I do mean a lot, of words detailing the taxonomy of the flora and fauna Dr. Arronax observes while traveling under the sea. And when you’re reading it out loud to your kids it makes for some interesting tongue gymnastics. Some whole chapters are devoted to little more than scientific observations. After a while of reading lists of longitude and latitude coordinates, I asked my kids if they had any idea what those were. They didn’t so we had to discuss what that meant. Also much of the science and speculation of Verne has been superseded by newer developments (the geography of the South Pole, the existence of Atlantis) and resulted in discussion about what people knew then compared to what people know now.

There’s another aspect to the book and that is the adventure. Being trapped in the antarctic ice, fighting giant squids, and exploring the sea floor.

And finally there is the political, revolutionary and even anarchic undertones. These notions are subtle at first but play an increasing role in the story as it progresses. These also led to discussions about everything from the definition of misanthropy to the French revolution.

At the beginning my daughters weren’t to excited to have me read 20,000 Leagues to them. By the end they were begging me for one more chapter every night.

Book Review: Wiest, Andrew—The Boys of '67

I’ve encountered a couple of broad overviews of the Vietnam war before. I picked this book up at the library because I was interested in the day to day experiences of a US soldier fighting in Vietnam.  This book is about “Charlie Company” drafted right at the beginning of the Vietnam war. It goes through their experiences in basic training, the year or so they spent in Vietnam, and  a quick overview of a few of the men’s family they left behind and their experiences after getting home from the war.

When you read about most wars they seem to have some sort of geographical goal. The strategists running things are trying to move the front forward with a final aim of conquering a something. In Vietnam soldiers were sent out to patrol specific areas, kill as many Viet Cong as possible and then come back to camp for a little R&R before going out again. Sometimes they would patrol the exact same area where that they had previously fought a bloody battle only a few months prior.

This aimlessness combined with the normal rigors of war seems to have horrible effects on morale. What is the point to fight and die in order to kill random people in a foreign country that doesn’t really want you there to begin with? Imagine if our police force was tasked, not with sustaining law and order, but with prowling around various neighborhoods and killing as many perceived criminals as possible. The emotional effect on both the police and the people being policed would be enormously traumatic.

The soldiers in Vietnam consequently spent lots of their free time drinking, doing drugs and availing themselves of prostitutes.

On the other hand there seems to be this emotional rush that comes with fighting for your life, and an intense sense of brotherhood for those with whom you fight that can’t be replicated anywhere else and that is extremely compelling. So much so that some men re-enlist because they can’t experience it anywhere else.

The book also describes the bouts with PTSD the soldiers experienced after coming home from the war. One man, once he was diagnosed with PTSD, was kicked out of the army. When he showed up at the VA for PTSD treatment, that same army told him that PTSD was not a recognized condition and therefore they couldn’t help him.

The quality of writing is merely sufficient, and it has a tendency toward being overly sentimental. Nevertheless, it’s a fascinating bit of history from the soldier's point of view.

Book Review: Paolo Bacigalupi—The Windup Girl

I struggle with calling The Windup Girl a good book. And I’m surprised at the acclaim showered on it. The prose is bland and often repetitive. Most of the large cast of characters are completely uninteresting: Emiko, Jaidee/Kanya, and Hock Seng being the only characters that carry any emotional weight. And the plot, while it does finally come to an interesting head, is meandering and tedious. The author presents complications, and not only fails to resolve them, but tosses them aside as though they are irrelevant to the long term plot structure. It’s a bait and switch to artificially heighten the tension. Though the book improves as it progresses and there are scenes, especially toward the end, that are really well done.

But what undermines the book even more is the poorly developed setting. This is a world where you can genehack humans into super powered “new people”,but tomatoes and lemons are extinct? Their seeds have got to be everywhere. Genehack them back from the dead. Considering the technology on display it seems like a much simpler feet then what is routinely accomplished. It feels like the author didn’t take the time to fully develop the repercussions of the technology he is describing.

I think this problem derives from the fact that the author is very much an activist. To him, his message is so important, he will sacrifice his story. The world needs to justify the author’s predefined conclusions, not make sense on its own. Frankly I would expect the events implied by the book’s epilogue to be the real face this world.

And this is unfortunate, because his ideas are really compelling. The “message” is a good one. But over all the quality is definitely that of a first time author.

Book Review: David Mitchell—Cloud Atlas

Is Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell a masterpiece or a gimmick? The novel is composed of six narratives, each with a different setting and written in a different style. The first starts in the South Pacific in the mid 1800s. It cuts off mid sentence so the next story can commence. It too cuts off in the middle for the next story and so on. The sixth story, a tale of the post-apocalyptic future, is told to completion, then the fifth story is concluded and so on until the novel itself concludes with the conclusion of the first story.

I’m am blown away by Mitchell’s ability to shift in style and tone from one story to the next. Each story is its own unique entity, and yet there are curious ties between them. That each story has its own identity is a testament to Mitchell’s writing powers. The only flaw is that I’m not sure each story has the quality to survive on it’s own. It’s only the cleverness of the novel’s construction that makes them great. And so there’s a sense of the gimmicky.

There is a sense of fatalism. After reading the central story, which takes place long after all the other’s have concluded, despite the individual resolutions of the surrounding stories, you know as a reader how it’s all going to be in the end.

It’s interesting to contemplate how history is filtered through fiction and ideology. Our understanding of reality is truly fluid. Our subjective experience has as much to do with our perceived reality as any hard facts. Is this good or bad? Is it simply a hard fact that we need to weave into our world view?

In the end I’ll give Mitchell the benefit of the doubt. The book is amazing. The stories tie together thematically in a wonderful way. It is fun to follow the threads between the stories and contemplate what they say about each other. Cloud Atlas is a masterpiece.

2016.07.11 

Book Review: William Gibson—Burning Chrome

I read this book mainly because I was curious about the short story “Johnny Mnemonic”. There are a couple other Sprawl short stories as well: “China Rose Hotel” and “Burning Chrome”. Having come to these stories after reading a few of Gibson’s novels makes some of the things I’ve previously read fall into place. He’s still developing his style, so the stories are more directly narrated and easier to follow. He also takes some time to explain some of the elements of his Sprawl setting, while in the novels he expects the readers to already know. It’s fun to read the development as the author works out the details of the world he is building. And some of the building blocks are later cannibalized for his novels.

The other stories are interesting in the sense that it’s like reading an alternate universe William Gibson. When Gibson hit pay-dirt with Neuromancer, he became pigeon-holed. You know what you are getting when you read one of his books. But when he was still trying to make it, he wrote short stories in a wider variety of science fiction sub-genres and his distinctive writing style had yet to crystallize.

For me, the most memorable story is “The Hinterlands”. While it is ultimately unsatisfying, the themes regarding how much we can and ought to sacrifice for scientific progress are fascinating.