Redshirts John Scalzi Let me start by asking you a question. Is Spock (science officer of the Enterprise, played by  Leonard Nimoy  in the original Star Trek) real? Here's the answer given by a Cornell philosophy professor (probably  Max Black ) Whenever anyone asked him whether something was real, he always gave the same answer. The answer was "Yes." The tooth fairy is real, the laws of physics are real, the rules of baseball are real, and the rocks in the fields are real. But they are real in different ways. --  Max Black  (?), quoted in  Sokal's Hoax, by Steven Weinberg So, yes. If you buy  Black 's ontology, Spock is real. Hermione Granger is real, ghosts are real, money is real, the Presidency of the USA is real, SO(3), the group of three-dimensional rotations -- all of them are real. They are real, even though they exist only in people's minds. Now, I admit that if someone asks me with no context, "Are ghosts real?", I will answer "No.&quo

Northanger Abbey Jane Austen Of  Jane Austen 's six novels (I'm not counting  Lady Susan  or the fragments), there are two that, IMHO, are not as good as the other four. Those two are  Mansfield Park  and this book,  Northanger Abbey . Fanny, the heroine of  Mansfield Park  is such a drip that it's hard to like her. Northanger Abbey  has a different problem.  Austen  is always a very funny author, but in  Northanger Abbey  she set out to be more broadly humorous than in her other books, and she doesn't quite pull it off.  Northanger Abbey  is in part a satire of other novels of the time, particularly those of  Ann Radcliffe , whom  Austen  refers to as "Mrs Radcliffe". Catherine, the heroine, is a fan of  Radcliffe 's novels, which are indeed somewhat ridiculous.  Austen 's joking is good-natured and in my opinion not unkind. And I have to feel that  Austen  did  Radcliffe  a favor. I doubt that anyone would still be reading  Radcliffe  now, if it were

The Hero with a Thousand Faces Joseph Campbell I read  The Hero with a Thousand Faces  around 2001, I believe. I was in business school at the time, and for some reason one of our books mentioned Grateful Dead drummer  Mickey Hart , I read his  Drumming at the Edge of Magic , which I enjoyed greatly. (Sadly, it appears I was the only one, as it is now out of print.) In  Drumming   Hart  mentions his conversations with  Joseph Campbell .  Campbell 's name had come up in other things I have read, of course, and that was enough to make me read the book. I found  The Hero with a Thousand Faces  exceedingly long and dull. This opinion is, of course, not uniquely mine. You will easily find large numbers of reviews that say the same.  Campbell 's point is that there is one story that all human cultures tell in some form or another. The insight that the same stories come up again and again is one that has come to more scholars than I could count.  Campbell 's thesis in its stronges

Parliament of Whores: A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government PJ O'Rourke I read this book twelve years ago, so it gets only a brief review of distant impressions. I remember my reaction to the book better than I remember the book itself. It was described to me as the only book of conservative political humor that was actually funny. Well, I'm here to tell you that it IS, slightly, in places, funny. But mostly not. It is perhaps unfair to evaluate  Parliament of Whores  as political philosophy, which would be a convenient excuse for  O'Rourke , since the political philosophy is puerile. He hates government and is turned on by the idea of big weapons. The verb is chosen intentionally,  O'Rourke 's lust for big guns has a distinctly sexual feel. If that makes your last meal want to come back out the way it went in, may I respectfully suggest that  PoW  may not be the book for you. In case anyone is unfamiliar with the quote: This is not a novel

The Drift CJ Tudor I read a bunch of reviews praising the originality and creativity of  C.J. Tudor 's new novel  The Drift . So I was disappointed when I began reading to find that it was a bog-standard  zombie  apocalypse novel.  Yes, there are zombies, although the characters use a different word for them.  The story unfolds in three threads told from three points of view: Hannah, Meg, and Carter. Hannah and Meg were on their way to a place called "The Retreat" (Carter is already there) when a mishap halted their transportation and trapped them inside in a snowstorm. Hannah is trapped in a crashed school bus. Meg is trapped in a stalled cable car suspended above a mountain. There are several other people in the bus and the cable car. This was my first, relatively minor problem  with  The Drift . The  Hann ah and Meg threads were almost interchangeable. In each vehicle we have our intrepid point-of-view narrator, our take-charge young man, and our annoying whiny young w

The Lightening Thief Rick Riordan I read this book in 2006. I was not very impressed. I posted the following review on Amazon What a disappointment! After seeing the reviews, I had high hopes for this book. Alas, I was not prepared for the extraordinary similarity to Harry Potter. Percy Jackson, as you will have read in the other reviews, is the young teenage son of a Greek god and a mortal woman. He's a boy with extraordinary powers, of which he's initially unaware, living among muggl..., excuse me, ordinary people. He goes to halfbreed camp (Hogwarts), where, with other demigods (wizards and witches), he studies the things a demigod has to know. (No Quidditch, I was relieved to find, although "capture the flag" seems to more or less play that role.) Then he goes on a quest with a satyr (Ron) and a teenage girl (Hermione). There's a even a Voldemort-like evil  eminence gris  behind all the trouble, who we are assured will become more important in sequels. So, it&

Starship Troopers Robert A Heinlein I read this as a high school student, roughly 1970, working my way through the canon of so-called Golden Age (mainly John Campbell-inspired) science fiction:  Asimov ,  Clarke ,  Heinlein , ... (Never  Hubbard  -- somehow I escaped that particular awfulness.) I never liked  Robert A. Heinlein  as much as  Asimov  and  Clarke . I think what particularly bothered me about  Heinlein  is that he didn't actually understand the "science" part of "science fiction". I remember being especially annoyed by a book (no longer remember which one) in which he butchered relativity. (It's OK to not understand relativity, but if you don't, then for Gawd's sake don't write a novel in which it is a key element of the plot!) Also, his writing had the usual weaknesses of most Golden Age science fiction: two (at most)-dimensional characters, almost all male (although  Starship Troopers  has women characters, too), pew-pew plots, etc

Reminiscences of Los Alamos 1943 1945 Lawrence Badash, Joseph O Hirschfelder, Herbert P Broida (editors) Towards the end of 1938 German and Austrian scientists Otto Hahn, Fritz Strassman, Lise Meitner, and Otto Frisch showed that when a uranium nucleus is struck by a neutron, it may split into two smaller nuclei, an event Frisch called "nuclear fission". Frisch at the time was in Stockholm working with Niels Bohr. Within a few weeks Bohr made the result public at a meeting in Washington, DC. Even before the meeting's end, physicists were sneaking back to their labs to confirm it themselves. They were excited because they immediately realized that nuclear fission would release HUGE amounts of energy. Most of them also quickly realized that a fission event was likely to release a few neutrons*, meaning that a self-sustaining chain reaction was possible -- imagine a pandemic, where every dying uranium nucleus infects three more. This was exciting! A brand new source of energ

Dragonfall LR Lam Everen is a dragon. Dragons live in a dying world. Hundreds of years ago they lived in a green, growing world in partnership with humans. But the humans betrayed the dragons and exiled them to this dying world. That, at least, is the story as dragons tell it. Humans have a different story. Everen falls into the human world, where he finds he is magically bonded to Arcady, a thief in the city of Vatra. Everen's sister Cassia tells him he can use this magical bond to allow dragons to escape their dying world --Yes, she said, as she faded from view. Make your little human love you. Do what you must. And then kill it. Her gaze was unblinking. Bring us home, Everen. Give us our world. This immediately reminded me of something I read long ago in  Glory Road  by  Robert Heinlein , You tickle trout by gaining their confidence, and then abusing it. (Trout tickling is a way to catch trout with ones bare hands.) So, it transpires that Cassia has sent Everen on a fishing expe

Rewards and Fairies Rudyard Kipling Puck of Pook's Hill  and its sequel  Rewards and Fairies  are, in my opinion, among the very best of  Rudyard Kipling 's books, and that is saying a great deal. They are Kipling's presentation for children of the early history of England.  Rewards and Fairies  begins on Midsummer's Eve, one year after Una and Dan broke the hills and released Puck to begin  Puck of Pook's Hill . Puck appears to them and their memory of their dealings with Puck a year ago returns. Una and Dan are a year older now, and in a sign of approaching maturity, wear boots rather than going barefoot. Perhaps recognizing that they're growing up, in this book Puck now shows them a tiny, tiny bit of the seamier side of English history. In fact, in the very first story, "Cold Iron", Una and Dan face England's history of slavery. We also face plague and tuberculosis and, in Neolithic England, wolves. In my review of  Puck , I mentioned that all t

Puck of Pook's Hill Rudyard Kipling Puck of Pook's Hill  and its sequel  Rewards and Fairies  are, in my opinion, among the very best of  Rudyard Kipling 's books, and that is saying a great deal. They are  Kipling 's presentation for children of the early history of England. It starts like this: brother and sister Dan and Una play scenes from  A Midsummer Night's Dream  in a fairy ring on a hill near their home. This act summons Puck, the oldest of the Old Ones of England. (Puck, by the way, objects to being called a "fairy", preferring the terms "Old Ones" or "People of the Hills". I will respect his wishes.) Puck, from gratitude to Dan and Una and the original Puckish sense of humor, makes them an offer, if you care to take seizin from me, I may be able to show you something out of the common here on Human Earth. You certainly deserve it. Thus begins a series of stories from Old England. Puck tells only a few of the stories himself.

Der Besuch der alten Dame: Eine tragische Komödie Friedrich Dürrenmatt ** spoiler alert **  I lived in Germany for a year, in Bremen and Göttingen, May 1983 - July 1984. One of my goals during that time was to become fluent in German. To do that I read several books. When I started, I looked for brief, easy-to-read books, and one of the first was  Der Besuch der alten Dame . Playwright  Friedrich Dürrenmatt  is (or was at that time) regarded as one of the foremost German-language writers, and  Der Besuch  was a thin book. When you're new to reading in a foreign language, you read VERY, VERY SLOWLY, so thin books are attractive. The story is fairly simple. It takes place in the fictional small city of Güllen. The alte Dame of the title came from there. In her youth, she was badly treated by one of the men of the town and was driven out. Now old and fabulously wealthy, she returns to town intent on revenge. She tells the people of the town that she wants her old enemy murdered, and t

Normal Accidents: Living with High Risk Technologies - Updated Edition Charles Perrow I'm struggling to write a fair review of  Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies . It's what I sometimes call a "I have a new hammer -- look at all these nails!" book. That is, someone has a new idea and writes a book explaining all the ways it applies. These can be very good books,  Plagues and Peoples ,  Private Truths, Public Lies , and  The Strategy of Conflict  come to mind.  Normal Accidents  had the potential to be one of these, and if I'm fair, it probably IS one. The problem, though, is that, although it starts off very well, every successive chapter is weaker than the previous one, and the last three are dreadfully tedious. By the time I emerged from the end of the last, I was yelling to  Charles Perrow  in my mind (as Biden said to Trump), "Would you just shut up, man?" The temptation, given my state of annoyance with the author, is to nitpick t