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Recent Reads

Cixin Liu: The Three-Body Problem, The Dark Forest, and Death’s End

A friend recommended I read this trilogy because there was a much talked-about TV adaptation, and it’s our general rule to always read the book before watching a film adaptation of a book, so we can be book snobs and criticize the adaptation and enjoy it less.

This story is quite different from what I’m used to in SF. It’s very fast-paced, has a huge cast of characters, is epic in scope and very long – not a combination you usually see outside long-running serials.

To be honest, I had a hard time getting through it despite its attempts to hold my attention. The first book was decent, but the middle one lost my interest and I took extended breaks from it a couple of times. The third made up for it though, and I finished that one quickly.

Liu makes liberal use of deus ex technology and wild physics speculation here, but despite that nothing is a conclusive fix – instead there are frequent reversals like a long chain of Frogurt sequences throughout the series, and the reader (and the entire human race) gets something like adrenal exhaustion as this progresses.

I don’t not recommend this trilogy; in the end I’m glad I read it. But I also don’t give it a great recommendation.

I haven’t watched the TV miniseries yet. Maybe I’ll make another post when I do.

I also have a bit of a beef with the main premise of the whole story – maybe skip down to the next section from here if you don’t want any spoilers.

The central premise is what’s referred to in the story as the Dark Forest theory, which is one explanation of why we don’t see signs of other intelligent life in the universe. By this theory, life is out there but most species realize that they’re in a deadly competition for resources in the long term, and in order to survive they must exterminate everyone they see and avoid being seen by others. Thus any species that naively reveals itself by sending signals of friendship will promptly get wiped out by whoever is in the neighborhood with sufficient technology to do it.

The problem with this theory, at least in this story, is that the more advanced species are using weapons that destroy the resources along with the species holding them. Rationally their strategy is counter-productive in the very long term, and they should be smart enough to realize it. Instead they don’t smarten up until it’s too late; they’re thus assumed to have similarly stupid short-term thinking to humans despite having vastly more advanced technology and longer terms of existence.

There’s also a plot hole in that the effects of these weapons are unique and visible over significant interstellar distances yet none were ever witnessed in human history. You can fill in the obvious excuse for that but I feel it should have at least been mentioned to cover the hole.

John Brunner: The Dramaturges of Yan

I wanted a quick, classical-style SF short story as a palette cleanser following the Liu trilogy and semi-randomly selected this one. It was a good choice and a pleasant surprise. Not at all what I expected.

Well, the first half of the story was pretty much what I expected and unremarkable, but about halfway through a single word instantly added an unexpected dark overtone, and in the second half there were several completely unexpected turns. It quickly went from a conventional SF short to something quite unique and delightful.

Unique (or at least early examples of) thoughts inspired by the story are: societies can have their own goals independent of the beings comprising them; can the societies themselves become conscious of those goals and manage them? Can the beings within the society steer these goals in any way? What do you do if your society is self-destructive?

Highly recommended. It’s a short and easy read.

Recent Readings

The last few books I’ve read:

Leonard Mlodinow: The Drunkard’s Walk

This non-fiction talks about some of the ways probabilities are often very different from expectations when it comes to various kinds of randomness, and some of the reasons for it. It talks about the origins of mathematical probability theory, and several common cognitive biases such as the Gambler’s Fallacy. It also explains some very unintuitive statistical effects such as regression to the mean, which have caused some famous screwups in the past.

This is a very approachable book and a fun read if you’re interested in such issues.

Tony Rothman: The World is Round

A surprisingly refreshing take on the Big Dumb Object genre, and one I surprisingly only learned of recently. When starting into this book it felt like it was going to be a bit muddy, but it developed pretty quickly and coherently, mostly making sense all the way through. The big reveal turned out to be pretty much what I expected, but with an additional surprise that I think could have just as well been left out.

It does do a good job capturing the size of the featured world and the difficulties of living in an extreme and variable environment. Quite enjoyed this one in the end.

Charles Stross: The Rhesus Chart

It’s been a long time since I read any Laundry novels. One of the previous ones I read kind of put me off as I found it a bit tedious. But I knew I’d have to give the series another chance, and this entry, while not completely redeeming the series, at least will have me trying the next one as well.

I was also kind of put off at first when I learned that vampires were the big bad for this story, because that’s boring, but it ended up being a decent adventure after all.

I think the main issue I’m having with this series lately is Stross’s heavy-handed attempts to load it down with programmer, sysadmin, pop culture and general nerd jokes. Those are the humor of my people, and I employ them all the time myself, but maybe because of that it’s very predictable and overly constant to me.

John McLoughlin: Toolmaker Koan

An interesting an unusual first contact novel that manages to avoid most of the cringe common to that type of story. I only cringed a little bit.

Unfortunately I fully predicted the big surprise backstory bit shortly after the nature of the aliens was revealed. Despite that there was good adventure and the climax and resolution had surprises.

Not bad; I don’t regret reading it, but also not a book I’ll re-read.

Recent Reads

Nathan W. Pyle: Strange Planet and Stranger Planet

Totally delightful. This being thinks in manners pleasingly similar to my own. I originally stumbled over this comic on Instagram, which is a great medium for online comics now that a post can have multiple images. I was immediately taken by the manner of speech of the characters, which has a formality and accuracy that just plain makes sense.

Richard Littler: Discovering Scarfolk

The pamphlets, posters and other pleasingly skewed civic media associated with the Scarfolk phenomenon made this a tempting buy, but it was a little disappointing in the end.

I still love all the visual media and elegant turns of phrase to be found within, but the story constructed around the fictional adventure of a visitor to the town of Scarfolk didn’t really grab my interest. The story does a great job of providing a setting in which the imagery fits, and provides more opportunity for the kind of writing we see in the text of the posters and pamphlets, but for some reason I found it a bit tedious to read. Maybe that’s intentional though, and part of the charm, since there is a heavy focus on the trappings of bureaucracy.

For more information, please re-read this section.

Peters and Waterman: In Search of Excellence

I only skimmed this book at first, but then got increasingly interested towards the end. I made the assumption that this book from the distant past world of 1982 would be regurgitating a bunch of antiquated corporate nonsense that has since been cast aside, but some of what it says is still surprisingly relevant.

Relevant in that it feels like only today are the lessons from that world starting to be applied in practice. The interesting parts are about company culture, what motivates workers and what makes large companies succeed. They mention trusting employees, empowering them with responsibility and autonomy, taking risks on side bets, avoiding stagnation by always coming up with new ideas, and keeping business unit size small to cut down on red tape.

It’s not until the last decade or so that I’ve been exposed to companies that are actually doing some of these things. It’s refreshing, but why did it take this long?

Frank Gasking: The Games that Weren’t

This book is about assorted famous and unknown video games that failed to reach market for various interesting reasons. It covered the whole range of history from almost the beginning right up to the date of publication.

I found the book very inconsistent in the amount of information presented on each game – many pages for some relatively uninteresting ones and almost nothing on some of the more tantalizing ones. I suppose this is inevitable given how difficult it must be to obtain this kind of information, especially in cases where the developers have died, disappeared from public life, or are legally bound not to comment.

There were a few stories that were particularly interesting to me. I learned of the existence of Akka Arrh, a novel game that was pushed out of the crib by Robotron – but I think the unpronounceable name would have killed it anyway. I learned what happened to some arcade-to-home ports that were promised in the gaming magazines I loved as a kid but never materialized. There were even bits about console hardware that never hit shelves. Now I know why Carmageddon 3 ended up being so terrible.

The book has a website (linked in the title above) that continues to add new entries that weren’t in the book.

Daniel Konstanski: The Secret Life of Lego Bricks

I contributed to the kickstarter for this book and it was well worth the money and the wait. There isn’t really any need for other books about Lego history – this one is amazingly thorough and answers a lot of the questions I had about Lego the company and their processes.

It’s mainly about the history of Lego themes and related pieces, how they came to be and how Lego learned to understand the popularity of various sets and get out in front of what customers wanted.

Jerry Pournelle: King David’s Spaceship and Jennifer Pournelle: Outies

Prequel and almost-sequel to the Mote in God’s Eye series by Niven and Pournelle, which is required reading for any science fiction fan. These two stories have a similar theme built around using the Empire of Man’s own rules against it. In the former book it’s humans doing it and in the latter it’s Moties.

They’re both decent. My only complaints were that the former book shows its age in its treatment of the one token female character – some but not all of which can be excused by the story being set it a very patriarchal society, and the latter book is a big slow getting started but really picks up in the second half.

Stephen Baxter: Proxima and Ultima

Did Not Like. I tend to find cross-time and alt-history stories tedious because I read SF to learn about the future, not the past. The anachronistic Roman and Inca civilizations depicted here managed to be not completely boring, but I also didn’t like the conclusion of the story arc – it was a downer to me.

Autumn Cthulhu

Picked up on a whim when browsing a book store, and it was worthwhile. Given the distinct lack of new, original stories coming from Lovecraft himself (death is no excuse!), one must make do with stories set or potentially set in the same universe. While few of the short stories in this volume fully captured the Lovecraftian flavor I like, they were close enough.

Benford & Niven: Glorious

The anticipated third book in the Bowl of Heaven series, which I mentioned in an earlier post. It introduces another new type of macro-engineered habitat, and was interesting and entertaining. I liked this best out of the three books in the series, I think.

Alastair Reynolds: Inhibitor Phase

I was absolutely delighted to stumble over another Revelation Space book that I didn’t know was coming, and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. This puts a nice cherry on top of a universe that still inspires my imagination.

James Martin: Calgary the Unknown City

This was recommended to me but I found it a disappointment. I was hoping for some insight into the history of the city and some little-known facts. While there was some of that, the bulk of the book is more like a tourist guide advertising present-day popular businesses and tourist spots, which a never-ending stream of snide and sarcastic comments and jokes so obvious they could go without saying.

The Berserker Saga

At the beginning of 2021 I decided to make a project of reading Fred Saberhagen’s entire Berserker saga, in as close to chronological order as possible. I had been accumulating the books for years already and only had a few left to find.

For those unfamiliar, the basic premise is that one of the very rare warlike species in the galaxy built a fleet of intelligent, self-replicating war machines as an ultimate weapon to overcome their bitter enemies. It worked, but random events eventually let the war machines turn on their creators. These berserker machines then proceeded to continue to eradicate all life down to bacteria around the galaxy until they ran into humans, who were the only other intelligent life violent enough and well-placed to fight back. This setting yields a universe for war and adventure stories spanning a large volume of space, and thanks to carefully balanced environmental factors around space travel, also somewhat expansive in time. It’s a shared universe too, with other authors occasionally invited to play.

Overall I enjoyed the series. It’s a similar universe in scope and wonder to Larry Niven’s Known Space, though I do much prefer Known Space.

Saberhagen’s writing style is a bit odd, especially in the early stories. He repeats bits of exposition too frequently, has some awkward phrasing and never made much headway towards having female protagonists. A friend suggested to me that this awkwardness results from editing together the originally serialized stories, and that may account for some of it but I find it had to believe it’s all from that.

He also has an unusual convention, perhaps meant to be thought-provoking, of referring to all intelligent lifeforms as “human” and our particular variety as Earth-descended human. I have a little trouble accepting this as non-accidental because I’ve seen far too much abuse of such terms in science fiction (though admittedly mostly in film). Perhaps his point is that all intelligent beings should consider themselves kin based on that property alone, which I certainly agree with. It’s just weird to abuse the term that way.

That said, the writing improved noticeably in the later (non-serialized) stories and the adventure is there and there are enough mysterious artifacts and natural wonders to fire the imagination.

If you choose to follow this path, be aware that there are lots of volumes that contain reprinted short stories. Here’s my reading order, with repeats crossed out. You might be able to find a more optimal combination of compilations than I did.

• Berserker
  • Fortress Ship
  • Goodlife
  • In Temple of Mars
  • Mr. Jester
  • Masque of Red Shift
  • Patron of the Arts
  • Peacemaker
  • Sign of the Wolf
  • Stone Place
  • The Face of the Deep
  • What T and I Did
• Brother Assassin (also titled Brother Berserker)
  • Stone Man
  • Winged Helmet
  • Brother Berserker
• Berserker’s Planet
• Berserker Man
• The Ultimate Enemy
  • The Smile
  • Pressure
  • The Annihilation of Angkor Apeiron
  • Inhuman Error
  • Some Events at the Templar Radiant
  • Starsong
  • Smasher
  • The Game
  • Wings out of Shadow
• The Berserker Wars
  • Stone Place
  • The Face of the Deep
  • What T and I Did
  • Mr. Jester
  • Winged Helmet
  • Starsong
  • Some Events at the Templar Radiant
  • Wings out of Shadow
  • The Smile
  • The Adventure of the Metal Murderer
  • Patron of the Arts
• Berserker Base
  • Itself Surprised (Roger Zelazny)
  • Teardrop Falls (Larry Niven)
  • With Friends Like These (Connie Willis)
  • Deathwomb (Poul Anderson)
  • What Makes Us Human (Steven R. Donaldson)
  • Pirates of the Twilight (Ed Bryant)
  • Prisoners’ Base
  • Friends Together
  • The Founts of Sorrow
  • The Great Secret
  • Dangerous Dreams
  • Crossing the Bar
  • Berserker Base
• Berserker Throne
• Berserker: Blue Death
• The Berserker Attack (all stories duplicates)
• Berserker Lies
  • Introduction
  • The Machinery of Lies
  • Masque of Red Shift
  • In Temple of Mars
  • Brother Berserker
  • Smasher
• Berserker Kill
• Berserker Fury
• Shiva in Steel
• Berserker Prime
• Berserker’s Star
• Rogue Berserker
• Berserker Death (all stories duplicates)
• Berserkers: The beginning (all stories duplicates)
• Berserker Man (anthology) (all stories duplicates)
• Berserkers: The Early Tales (all stories duplicates)
• Berserkers: The Later Tales
  • Berserker’s Prey (alternate title: Pressure)
  • Starsong
  • The Annihilation of Angkor Apeiron
  • Inhuman Error
  • Wings Out of Shadow
  • The Game
  • The Smile
  • Smasher
  • Some Events at the Templar Radiant
  • The Metal Murderer
  • The History of the Galaxy
  • Introduction to The Machinery of Lies
  • Machinery of Lies
  • The Bad Machines
  • Servant of Death (co-author Jane Lindskold)
• Earth Descended
  • The Adventure of the Metal Murderer
  • Patron of the Arts

Book Report: The Clean series by Robert Martin

I recently finished reading a trio of books of software development best practices by “Uncle Bob” Martin. The books are:

• Clean Code – this one is about the nuts and bolts of making your code readable and maintainable.
• Clean Architecture – this is about system-level design; how to modularize systems properly to make them flexible and maintainable.
• The Clean Coder – how to behave professionally as a programmer, assuming you want to. This was was the most interesting to me, because nobody ever tells you this stuff.

Because I also wanted to turn this into a presentation for my colleagues at work, I’ve taken extensive notes and shared them as a slide deck here.

If you’re interested in knowing what’s in the books but aren’t sure if you want to read them, I encourage you to have a look over my notes. They’re all in order by chapter and summarize what I consider the important points. If they catch your interest, you’ll be able to find the relevant section in the book easily from this.

I agree with much of what Martin says in these books, but by no means all. Architecture and professionalism are areas wherein I want to improve myself, and I intend to continue reading this type of book.