A More Perfect Heaven: How Copernicus Revolutionized the Cosmos Dava Sobel I read  A More Perfect Heaven  eleven years ago, 31-Oct-2011. In my memory it disappointed, because it was about the personalities who kicked off the Copernican revolution more than the science. I realize that to many readers, that is the book's principle recommendation -- they find people more interesting than science, and scientists are interesting only in their personal triumphs, disappointments, and rivalries. In my opinion, such story telling fundamentally distorts science. Science is a process for arriving at truth, and to the extent it works, the truths arrived at do not depend on the personalities who do the job. Thus we see, over and aver again through history, two or even three scientists arriving at the same result independently. For the individuals, who naturally want credit, this may be an annoyance, but for Science itself, it is a triumph. In fact,  Copernicus   was not the first...

His Dark Materials: The Collectors Philip Pullman, (Tom Duxbury, illustrator) Despite the title,  The Collectors  is not really part of  His Dark Materials  proper, by which I mean the story as told in Books 1-3,  The Golden Compass ,  The Amber Spyglass , and  The Subtle Knife . It doesn't even, strictly speaking, include any of the characters from that story. It doesn't take place in Lyra's universe. Readers of  His Dark Materials  will not be surprised to learn that it takes place at Oxford. It begins with two art collectors, Horley and Grinstead, in the common room of Horley's college, discussing two art works: a painting of a young lady and a bronze of a monkey. It is immediately obvious to readers of  His Dark Materials  that these are Marissa Coulter and her demon Ozymandias. Horley and Grinstead, however, live in a universe like ours, where ones soul is not a separate being from oneself. How a portrait of Mrs Coulter and a b...

Artificial Condition Martha Wells In filmmaking, there is something called an "establishing shot". It is a brief shot shown before the action begins, to let the viewer know the background of the story about to take place. I think of  All Systems Red  as the establishing shot for  the Murderbot Diaries . The film analogy is not great, because there's a lot of action in  All Systems Red . But what did it establish? Well, Murderbot (her own name for herself -- on the issue of pronouns, see  my review of All Systems Red ) was a Security Unit (SecUnit) owned by a company that insures miners and explorers. She is a construct of poorly defined nature. Her brain -- the thing she thinks with -- has both organic and inorganic components. She is by nature extraordinarily good at fighting and surveillance and almost impossible to kill. She is also very much a person with her own motivations and desires. Her motivations and desires are, by and large, those of a Good Person. ...

xkcd volume 0 Randall Munroe The first thing to know about  xkcd: volume 0  is that it consists mostly of comics that are available free online at  Randall Munroe 's  XKCD website .  Randall Munroe  points this out in the first sentence of his Introduction. (I am not counting "Hi!" as a sentence.) You'd have to be either an XKCD superfan or a fiscally irresponsible idiot (these may not be disjoint sets) to pay for a book whose contents are available for free. Or maybe you think it will one day become a super-valuable collector's item that you can sell for thousands of dollars on eBay. I personally count myself a member of the superfan set, and also at times as someone whose actions mimic those of a fiscally responsible idiot. Published in 2009,  xkcd: volume 0  is about the earliest days of XKCD, which began in 2006, and is still going stronger than ever in 2022. Still, it includes my all-time favorite comic: #162: Angular momentum: This is perhap...

The Search for Symmetry Brett Salter I like books. I can read almost anything with pleasure. However,  The Search for Synergy  defeated me. There are four main characters in  The Search for Synergy . Rome Lockheed and Julian Rider are two generic middle-school boys who have secret magical powers. Mr Jones is a librarian who mentors the two boys. He's basically Mr Giles from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. (To be clear -- I am not suggesting that  Salter  got the idea for Mr Jones from BtVS, merely that they are similar characters.) Mr Rider is Julian's father and is a pompous, pretentious tool. ("Tool" is a word Julian himself uses to describe his father.) He is clearly set up to be completely unlikeable. My biggest problem with  The Search for Synergy  was that I felt I knew nothing about any of the characters and cared less. We never get to know them at all, not even Rome, from whose point of view the story is told. The blurb describes Julian as 'an oddbal...

Winter Marissa Meyer Let's start with a little statistical analysis. (Not enthusiastic? Don't worry. This will be quick.) Cinder : 345 pages Scarlet : 332 pages Cress : 398 pages Winter : 603 pages Notice something?  Winter  is the biggest of the four books, weighing in at 200 pages more than  Cress . I used the word "biggest" rather than "longest" because biggest is how it feels -- it's a big story -- lots of people, lots of action. Like all the novels of  the Lunar Chronicles ,  Winter  is based on a Grimm fairy tale, in this case  Snow White , or  Schneewittchen  in the original. To prepare for  Winter  I read  Schneewittchen . I was surprised to find how long and complex it is. The Grimm version of the fairy tale is not much different from the Disney version. (The dwarves don't have names in Grimm, and Snow White is not awakened from her enchanted sleep by a kiss, but those were almost the only conspicuous differences.) The...

A Brief History of Time Stephen Hawking As a physicist,  Stephen Hawking  had two major accomplishments. First, he did a preliminary calculation that suggested that the formation of a black hole might be inevitable when a big enough star burned out and collapsed.  Roger Penrose  confirmed this suggestion and put it on a rigorous mathematical basis. Later,  Hawking  did a similar favor for Jacob Bekenstein. Bekenstein suggested that black holes have entropy. This, as Bekenstein (and every other physicist) understood, implied that a black hole must emit light, which contradicts the name!  Hawking  thought Bekenstein's idea was nonsense and set out to prove him wrong. To his credit, he proved that Bekenstein was right, putting Bekenstein's speculation on a firm basis. As a result of these accomplishments  Hawking  became the world's most famous living physicist, a position he held for ten-twenty years. During that time he was the go-to exam...

Into the Windwracked Wilds A Deborah Baker (Seanan McGuire) Let's start with the question, "Who is  A. Deborah Baker ?" Well,  Baker  is a pseudonym of  Seanan McGuire , But that is not all she is.  Baker  is a character in  McGuire 's splendid novel  Middlegame . She ( Baker ) is an alchemist who, in the late 19th and early 20th century, put in motion a plan to rule the world (as one does). This plan involved  Baker  becoming inconveniently dead (but perhaps only temporarily) and constructing embodiments of Alchemical doctrines. In order to propagate her plan forward through this incapacitation,  Baker  publishes a series of fairy tales about two children, Avery and Zib, and their quest to travel the Improbable Road to the Impossible City. So  The Up and Under  began life as a fictional series written by a fictional author. It is a mistake, I believe, to consider the Up and Under to be a series written by  McGui...

Into the Riverlands Nghi Vo It is now 2:07 am. This book, pre-ordered, appeared on my kindle at 12:20 am. So eager was I to read it, that I got up from sleep to do that. Into the Riverlands  was quite different from  When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain  and  The Empress of Salt and Fortune , which are very different from each other. In  Riverlands  we learn the story of a journey through the Riverlands undertaken by Chih and their talking eidetic bird Almost Brilliant (Yes! She's back!) with a small company of fellow travelers, first introduced as Wei Jintai, Mac Sang, Lao Bingyi, and Mac Khanh. As they travel they tell stories of the bandits and fighters of the Riverlands. The novellas of  The Singing Hills Cycle  all have this in common -- they play with the nature of story-telling. The story you realize you've read when you get to the end of one is not the story you thought you were reading when you started. Therefore, there is not much I can...

And Deeps Below and Sacrifice Your Tears Seanan McGuire And Deeps Below  is  Seanan McGuire 's November 2021 Patreon reward and  Sacrifice Your Tears  is the February 2022 reward. They are really just the two parts of a two-part story, so I am reviewing them together. She warned us that they should not be read before  A Killing Frost , and thus I had to hold off until finishing that (which I did yesterday) to read them. The two stories recount some of the events of the end of  A Killing Frost  from Simon's point of view. Specifically,  And Deeps Below  is about his rapprochement with Dianda and Patrick, learning that Patrick loves him in a more than Platonic fashion, and their proposal that he become the third wheel in a three-way marriage.  Sacrifice Your Tears  is about the marriage itself and surrounding events. Simon has become very poor company since Toby restored his way home to him. He is droopy, and full of self-pity and se...

The City We Became NK Jemisin I have a problem that will make it difficult for me to appreciate  The City We Became . I have never been able to see a city as a thing. I lived in Dallas, Texas, for 21 years. I remember the schools I studied at, Brookhaven Community College and Southern Methodist University. I remember the school I taught at, UT Southwestern Medical Center. I remember the hospital area of Dallas, Harry Hines Boulevard and the businesses and institutions along it. I remember the functionally nonexistent public transport. I remember the highways -- I-635 circling the city, east-west roads I-30 and 114 and north-south roads 75 and the Tollway crossing to form the crosshair whose bullseye was Downtown Dallas, and I-35 striking out diagonally toward Denton and Houston. I remember the velocitous terror of driving through the Mixmaster at 60 mph, hoping not to be flung off in some random direction. I remember timing my trip home in the evening so as to see the reflection of...

The Briar King Greg Keyes I read  The Briar King  eleven years ago (23-Oct-2011). I don't remember it at all. However, I bought the rest of the four-book series ( Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone ). At the time I was a new professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, having just moved there from UT Southwestern Medical Center. The point is, I was VERY busy. If I took the time to read four books, I must have liked it a lot. On that very thin basis, I'm rating it four stars. Amazon review Goodreads review  

Patreon Year One Seanan McGuire I will begin by clarifying what I am reviewing here.  Seanan McGuire  has a Patreon Creator page. Patreon is a website where artists can share their work with subscribers. Subscribers pay a certain amount (usually monthly, but that varies from artist to artist), and in return get access to things ("rewards" in Patreon-speak) that the artist posts on Patreon. "Things" can mean images, videos, or (most relevantly in this case) eBooks. Typically there are multiple reward tiers -- the more you pay, the more you get.  McGuire  set up her Patreon page in June 2016 and has posted a story every month since then, which makes 62 now (July 2021, when I am writing this), plus a few one-time extras. These "stories" can be pretty substantial literary works. For instance, the reward for July 2021 was a short novel. The way Patreon works, if you subscribe to a tier, you typically get access to everything that was posted for that tier at any...