Rating - 3: worth reading once (borrow it from a library)
Showdown at Gucci Gulch defines the term "Darmanesque" as meaning "too clever by half." Richard Darman served under every president from Richard Nixon to George H.W. Bush, and he was best known (to the extent that people know this kind of thing) for his work on President Reagan and Bush's budgets. I found little of the manipulator and game-player here, rather someone focused on policy and the personalities that shape it. His detractors would call that part of his manipulative game.
This political memoir (of sorts) follows an administration insider through the Reagan and Bush presidencies, with observations extending into the early Clinton presidency. It was published during the 1996 presidential campaign.
The book turns on you, with the quality falling in later parts. Richard Darman, as he presents himself, starts out as a trusted aide, the one who fairly presents the pros and cons. He is an effective bureaucrat, a centrist who embodies the public administration ideal by having no discernable ideology of his own but working pragmatically to make the best policy from the elected officials' politics. We are all the heroes of our own stories. Towards the end the Reagan administration, the book turns to self-justification. Does he sound more angry or plaintive as he explains that they did the best they could, that politics stepped in and kept them from fixing the situation any better than they did? Then the Bush presidency starts, and the entirety of Part Two is an extended easing into the violation of "Read my lips: no new taxes." It starts with no intention to keep that pledge, and explains by gradual degrees how that was done. Along the way, a bit of blame is dispersed and some jabs are taken at enemis. Then the daggers come out for Part Three, and Newt Gingrich is described as a politically opportunistic megalomaniac.
That is not an exaggeration, by the way. On page 284, with capitals and italics in the original, Newt Gingrich sets out to become "President of the World." Somewhere along the way, you remember that political memoirs primarily exist to say, "I wasn't such a bad guy, but boy were my opponents." Looking back from the end of the book, I wonder if the lengthy first section about the Reagan presidency was just building up credibility to spend on ducking responsibility in the second and launching attacks in the third. The page count is about right for that, with the balance you would expect from a budget man.
As he protrayed himself, Richard Darman was a man with no identifiable ideology to which he would admit. He advocated centrism, moderation, pragmatism, compromise, and incrementalism. He seemed not to care especially where things were headed, so long as they got there slowly. This made him conservative in the literal sense of the word, standing athwart history shouting, "Stop!" while placing him at odds with his politically conservative companions in the Reagan White House.
It also becomes a bit of a joke over the course of the book. Everything bad is "populist" and/or extremist. Every improvement is a move towards the center. Sure, the Reaganauts were right-wing ideologues, but the country had moved too far left, so the 1981 tax cut was a corrective move to the center. But the early budget deals were a violation of compromise, so the later tax increases were also moves to the center, including the largest tax increase ever, but they were not centrist enough to really fix things. (This is possible, if we assume the original correction was an over-correction.) Bill Clinton ran as a centrist (win!) but governed as a liberal, so the 1994 Republican Revolution was again about centrism (win!), until Newt Gingrich focused on the conservative base. The big political problem for Presidents Bush and Clinton was a failure to create a centrist coalition. The last chapter includes the sage advise that the center must counter populism and extremism, except when it must embrace them.
Just as all good things are in the center, anything political Richard Darman struggled with was "populist." Pat Buchanan, Malcom Forbes, Ronald Reagan, Bob Dole, Ross Perot, Bill Clinton, and Newt Gingrich were all populists. If he had more to say about Democrats, I am sure they all would have been populists too. I think Wikipedia explains his usage best: "the term is often employed in loose, inconsistent and undefined ways to denote appeals to 'the people,' 'demagogy' and 'catch-all' politics or as a receptacle for new types of parties whose classification observers are unsure of." Mr. Darman notes this fuzziness at the end, and I paraphrase his explanation here: "meh."
There is not really an argument for moderation. Anything good is defined as the center, anything bad as not, so of course the center is a good thing. He seems scornful of those around him who really believe things. It is a strangely perfect bureaucratic perspective.
That lack of ideological belief is the great virtue of the early chapters. He says a few idealistic things, but mostly he is a master pragmatist, a creature of policy and not politics. As a writer, Mr. Darman knew not to focus on budgets and items for the pure policy wonk, so personalities and events drive the narrative, but they drive policy. Political questions arise only as barriers that interfere with the policy-making process. This is the reverse of how most political stories are told.
I have read that Richard Darman was a masterful political operator, but I must say it was with administrative politics, not electoral politics. As we would normally refer to politics, he was tone deaf. While Mr. Darman contrasts "populism" with "the center," you would better contrast it with "elitism.". Richard Darman dealt with leaders; the American people appear only as a vague shape in the background.
His political tone-deafness is obvious, and not just in his promiscuous use of "populism." The "yes new taxes" deal is the largest sign. Chris Matthews' Hardball cites David Stockman's trip to the woodshed and Ronald Reagan's second debate performance in 1984 as rhetorical coups for the Gipper, turning negative news cycles into sources of strength for the administration. Who's in Control? cites them respectively as an impromptu afterthought and a death knell for conservative ideology. Richard Darman was brilliant with insiders and useless with the electorate.
We start the book solidly in that tone. For those following the gaming book reviews, President Reagan's "populist" support is characterized like the Wyld from Werewolf: an almost pure embodiment of force and energy, devoid of form or reason, prone to destructive extremes but capable of being subdued to the useful and the good. We see Richard Darman, the honest dealer and pragmatist in a sea of ideologues. He is trying to keep the ship of state on an even keel while everyone else mouths respect for balanced budgets while remaining unwilling to sacrifice anything. He works to shape several policy initiatives into the best they could do under the circumstances. I write as if it were a mock epic, but it really is a good story about working as an effective moderate amongst strong conservatives.
In many ways, this is the story of the fiscal failure of the Reagan Revolution. There were good things, but from 1980 to 1988 the federal government, deficit, and debt all grew. Republicans saw betrayal by the moderates within the administration. The administration moderates saw a lack of political will for fundamental (but moderate and incremental!) changes, particularly in middle-class entitlements.
Which is fair.
See also The Triumph of Politics and Showdown at Gucci Gulch, as Richard Darman recommends. I have read the latter, and both have repuatations as good presentations of their respective Reagan policy narratives.
I note here that a point missing from the Darman narrative is the non-elite aspect of the stories. The bureaucrat demonstrates how staff does most of the work, rather than the figureheads, but it seems that Richard Darman had no staff worth mentioning more than once. Other people occasionally had staff that got in the way, but this is the story of Richard Darman and his Fellow Important Leaders. That is how these narratives go, and he seemed like the sort who did not delegate much, but giving the perspective of the top administrative staff seems like pulling back just one layer of an onion. Not that Richard Darman considered himself "staff" (see Gucci Gulch for choice words on how he viewed his position).
His story of the first Bush presidency is apologetics without apology. "No new taxes" is mentioned early, often, and always as a problem to get around. He elided the details of other debates and negotiations, but he went into great detail here, down to the notes that people passed him during meetings. It still moves along at a good clip, but everyone gets his share of "credit" for the budget development. (For those unfamiliar with it, the usual political narrative is that Richard Darman almost single-handedly elected Bill Clinton via this budget deal.)
The final section brings back that conflict between policy and politics, with a vengeance. And I do mean vengeance. You can see that Richard Darman understood politics in an abstract sense, but that was not his game. While Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton were excellent political gamesmen, you can see Richard Darman in the background, shouting, "fiscal policy is not a game!" And then he goes on the attack, pointing out how all these political opportunists who are injecting their partisan squabbles into government are short-sighted fools who will fail and hurt the country.
Which is fair.
The third section ends with what was presumably a job application for after the 1996 elections. It attempts to be humbly visionary. The mix of banal and unworkable does not succeed.
Have I been positive enough to show why I thought this was worthwhile reading? It is an interesting perspective on a significant political era from a policy insider. I am personally interested in fiscal policy, so this appealed to me. I could have stood more about how Richard Darman got to the story's starting point, rather than opening with him already the President's right-hand man, but I try not to criticize what a book is not.
The most useful insights are things demonstrated but left unsaid. There are great (unexplained) examples of how to work process, such as structuring meetings, drafting talking points, or preparing briefings. Being a great leader can get things moving in your direction, but mastery of process affects those essential details. See also Hardball on those two points.
The least useful parts were posturing. The jabs at political opponents were too blatant. Mr. Darman's brief and completely unsuccessful attempts to be an inspiring speechmaker are noted, apparently just to say, "it was well received by the media," and, "I can be a visionary too!" At all the assorted points where he seems too proud of a tactical maneuver, we note: bureaucratic excellence is not glamorous, even to those of us who appreciate it.
My apologies if I have seemed too harsh with Mr. Darman. His career was everything a government official could ask for. He was instrumental in many important budget policies. The Reagan tax cut was a good thing; the lack of accompanying spending cuts, of course, led to trillions of dollars in debt. Mr. Darman has been described as cursed with cleaning up the mess he caused, and he did a lot of that. Recovery from the Bush recession was well underway by the time President Clinton took office, and to the extent that government can claim responsibility for economic improvements, anything in the early Clinton years must trace back to the Bush presidency; anything President Clinton did on day one would not have had much effect before the 1994 elections. You can argue about the wisdom of some of his decisions, but it was a heck of a career as a public administrator.
I leave you with Richard Darman's New York Times obituary. It seems fair.
Amazon link
Friday, October 31, 2008
Saturday, October 25, 2008
28 Days Later: The Aftermath by Steve Niles, Dennis Calero, Diego Olmos, and Nat Jones
Rating - 2: not worth reading (skip it)
If you really liked 28 Days Later, so much so that you were desperate for more, you will like this. Otherwise, there is not a lot here for you. The tone is good and you might like one of the stories.
This graphic novel has four short stories set around the film 28 Days Later. One leads up to day zero. Two are set during infection. One catches the tail end of infection.
If you have not seen 28 Days Later, it seems to have a popular reputation as an innovative take on the zombie movie that has kick-started the sub-genre. It is not really much of a zombie movie. You have some infected people, but you have much more time with empty vistas and man's inhumanity to man.
This has more straightforward zombie action, less emptiness, and comparable inhumanity. The first story is the origin of the rage virus, notably what kind of people would create such a thing. We follow the early stages of the outbreak in London. We follow a lone figure playing The Omega Man, who has it figured out but has not gotten the point. And then, surprisingly, the last story brings it all together, and brings it to an end.
The tone of the first story is on-key, and therefore too repellent to be enjoyable. The second and third are standard takes on "zombie outbreak"; while the two reflect the first and second halves of the film, the latter creates a better, tighter story. I could not get interested in the second story. The last story is a capstone, fully consistent with the book's sense of life, but there is not enough there to provide satisfaction.
The art is unexceptional. It is at its best in the third story, which may help with the quality I perceived there. Short stories in graphic novels need to have the images carry much of the work. The art does not do much of the heavy lifting elsewhere.
Oh, and the production notes for the third story are included as filler.
Amazon link
If you really liked 28 Days Later, so much so that you were desperate for more, you will like this. Otherwise, there is not a lot here for you. The tone is good and you might like one of the stories.
This graphic novel has four short stories set around the film 28 Days Later. One leads up to day zero. Two are set during infection. One catches the tail end of infection.
If you have not seen 28 Days Later, it seems to have a popular reputation as an innovative take on the zombie movie that has kick-started the sub-genre. It is not really much of a zombie movie. You have some infected people, but you have much more time with empty vistas and man's inhumanity to man.
This has more straightforward zombie action, less emptiness, and comparable inhumanity. The first story is the origin of the rage virus, notably what kind of people would create such a thing. We follow the early stages of the outbreak in London. We follow a lone figure playing The Omega Man, who has it figured out but has not gotten the point. And then, surprisingly, the last story brings it all together, and brings it to an end.
The tone of the first story is on-key, and therefore too repellent to be enjoyable. The second and third are standard takes on "zombie outbreak"; while the two reflect the first and second halves of the film, the latter creates a better, tighter story. I could not get interested in the second story. The last story is a capstone, fully consistent with the book's sense of life, but there is not enough there to provide satisfaction.
The art is unexceptional. It is at its best in the third story, which may help with the quality I perceived there. Short stories in graphic novels need to have the images carry much of the work. The art does not do much of the heavy lifting elsewhere.
Oh, and the production notes for the third story are included as filler.
Amazon link
Thursday, October 23, 2008
Irreducible Mind by Edward Kelly and Emily Kelly, et al
Rating - 2: not worth reading (skip it)
This book was recommended to me with great claims about what it proves. It indeed makes great claims, but it fails to prove them.
The Kellys propose to resurrect the project of F.W.H. Myers and re-establish psychology on an older basis. A primary target is "biological naturalism" and the theory that consciousness and the mind are manifestations of the brain. It argues that various elements of parapsychology and psychic phenomenon prove that the mind must extend beyond the physical body.
It is a bad sign when a book takes idiocy as its guiding principle. The authors repeatedly refer to "Wind's principle": "the commonplace may be understood as a reduction of the exceptional, but the exceptional cannot be understood as an amplification of the commonplace." While this may have a Sphinx-like appeal, it is generally false. The exceptional is most often an unusual, extreme, or misunderstood case of something very common. Normal distributions have tails. If you understand how combustion works, you have a principle that applies to spaceships as well as automobiles.
Maybe there is some compelling reason for using a line from Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance to guide psychological research. And this reason would lead us to believe that exceptional memories are of a different kind, not just degree, than normal memories. Maybe I skimmed past that reason. It must be really compelling.
Just to be clear, exceptional events happen all the time and should be expected from normal random processes. In a world of about seven billion people, there are about seven thousand one-in-a-million cases for each and every one-in-a-million chance. When millions of people have cancer, we should expect some spontaneous remissions, including some very quick remissions. I should also be able to find someone who has won the lottery more than once or who has been struck by lightning a few times.
Coincidence is a description, not an explanation, but that is the point: there is nothing to be explained. If you pick out events after the fact, yes, each is quite unlikely; if you take all the possible unlikely events, it is nearly certain that some will happen. Think of survivorship bias or publication bias: you never hear the millions of times that no one considers the coincidence un-notable.
Have you ever thought of someone then received a call from them? Odds are, neither of you are telepathic. Did you just hear something that reminded you of that one time you two... or something else that might have made you both think of one another? Better yet, have you ever thought of someone and then not received a call? If you think of 100 people over the next hour and none of them call, it probably will not strike you; and if one does call, you had 100 chances. If you can reliably summon phone calls by force of will, you might have something there.
But finding one really unusual case out of millions of people should not be shocking. Go get 10 standard six-sided dice and roll them all, with a firm intention that they all come up 6s. You have about a one in 60 million chance, so good luck. But if everyone in the United States does that, we should expect 5 people to pull it off. Those 5 people are not special. They are the result of dividing 300 million by 60 million. If we all flip a fair coin 25 times, 18 people should get the same result every time (remember: 25 heads or tails would be "notable," so we get twice as many).
The broader your range of "notable," the more successes you get. So if a "staring study" counts it as a success if the subject becomes uncomfortable, comfortable, anxious, relaxed, or aroused, you have many chances to show an "effect." If having a birth defect somewhat like any curse ever placed on the family counts, you get more cases. If you count it as a reincarnation if the child has a birthmark, defect, freckle pattern, illness, or habit like that of any recently deceased person in the family or neighborhood, you find a lot more reincarnations.
Having a paragraph saying, "This can't just be chance!" does not change the probability. Nor does, "I do not think that this would be seriously questioned by anyone, with a reasonably open mind, who had made a careful study of the recorded facts and had had a certain amount of experience of his own in these matters" (p. 283).
This is even before doubting whether the evidence is any good. Add in lies, mistakes, and wishful thinking.
The authors frequently say, "There is a wealth of evidence," without actually presenting it. They just point to 100+ pages of references and wish you luck. They often present claims without showing why we would accept those claims or even how they further the argument. A book that purports to overthrow the orthodoxy needs that.
Several places confuse explaining and explaining away. I would elaborate, but the link does it well enough. Just read the first half of that post, and you will get the idea. Also, some of these things should be "explained away" as hallucinations and mistakes.
Another confusion is the occasional use of "god of the gaps" reasoning. Not all the authors seem clear on the distinction between "this has not yet been fully explained" and "this is impossible to explain even in theory," or between "there is no explanation" and "this has not been explained in a way that satisfies me." It is a bad enough practice to seek permission to keep believing an unlikely premise ("this has not been completely ruled out"), and it is worse to then take that lack of p=0 and treat it as "it has been established that..." (If you are holding the opposing camp to a much higher standard of evidence than your own, you are probably defending a poor belief.)
The arguments are poorly made and poorly evidenced. Some points are so bad that I needed to remind myself that they were true despite the argument. You might be able to use some of the scrap heap to construct something better, but it is not promising.
The best thing I can say is that Ian Stevenson may have been on to something, although it seems more likely that he was just cataloguing the thousands of one-in-a-million cases that happen with a population of billions. Even if a case seems potentially worth pursuing at greater length, its presence amidst such dreck suggests that it is less than it seems. As with Bertrand Russell's crate of oranges, there seems little reason to hope for better if we dig deeper, given the quality of the items most prominently presented for our attention.
I was tempted to give a 1 rating, but this is merely useless rather than doing much to make the world a worse place.
Amazon link
This book was recommended to me with great claims about what it proves. It indeed makes great claims, but it fails to prove them.
The Kellys propose to resurrect the project of F.W.H. Myers and re-establish psychology on an older basis. A primary target is "biological naturalism" and the theory that consciousness and the mind are manifestations of the brain. It argues that various elements of parapsychology and psychic phenomenon prove that the mind must extend beyond the physical body.
It is a bad sign when a book takes idiocy as its guiding principle. The authors repeatedly refer to "Wind's principle": "the commonplace may be understood as a reduction of the exceptional, but the exceptional cannot be understood as an amplification of the commonplace." While this may have a Sphinx-like appeal, it is generally false. The exceptional is most often an unusual, extreme, or misunderstood case of something very common. Normal distributions have tails. If you understand how combustion works, you have a principle that applies to spaceships as well as automobiles.
Maybe there is some compelling reason for using a line from Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance to guide psychological research. And this reason would lead us to believe that exceptional memories are of a different kind, not just degree, than normal memories. Maybe I skimmed past that reason. It must be really compelling.
Just to be clear, exceptional events happen all the time and should be expected from normal random processes. In a world of about seven billion people, there are about seven thousand one-in-a-million cases for each and every one-in-a-million chance. When millions of people have cancer, we should expect some spontaneous remissions, including some very quick remissions. I should also be able to find someone who has won the lottery more than once or who has been struck by lightning a few times.
Coincidence is a description, not an explanation, but that is the point: there is nothing to be explained. If you pick out events after the fact, yes, each is quite unlikely; if you take all the possible unlikely events, it is nearly certain that some will happen. Think of survivorship bias or publication bias: you never hear the millions of times that no one considers the coincidence un-notable.
Have you ever thought of someone then received a call from them? Odds are, neither of you are telepathic. Did you just hear something that reminded you of that one time you two... or something else that might have made you both think of one another? Better yet, have you ever thought of someone and then not received a call? If you think of 100 people over the next hour and none of them call, it probably will not strike you; and if one does call, you had 100 chances. If you can reliably summon phone calls by force of will, you might have something there.
But finding one really unusual case out of millions of people should not be shocking. Go get 10 standard six-sided dice and roll them all, with a firm intention that they all come up 6s. You have about a one in 60 million chance, so good luck. But if everyone in the United States does that, we should expect 5 people to pull it off. Those 5 people are not special. They are the result of dividing 300 million by 60 million. If we all flip a fair coin 25 times, 18 people should get the same result every time (remember: 25 heads or tails would be "notable," so we get twice as many).
The broader your range of "notable," the more successes you get. So if a "staring study" counts it as a success if the subject becomes uncomfortable, comfortable, anxious, relaxed, or aroused, you have many chances to show an "effect." If having a birth defect somewhat like any curse ever placed on the family counts, you get more cases. If you count it as a reincarnation if the child has a birthmark, defect, freckle pattern, illness, or habit like that of any recently deceased person in the family or neighborhood, you find a lot more reincarnations.
Having a paragraph saying, "This can't just be chance!" does not change the probability. Nor does, "I do not think that this would be seriously questioned by anyone, with a reasonably open mind, who had made a careful study of the recorded facts and had had a certain amount of experience of his own in these matters" (p. 283).
This is even before doubting whether the evidence is any good. Add in lies, mistakes, and wishful thinking.
The authors frequently say, "There is a wealth of evidence," without actually presenting it. They just point to 100+ pages of references and wish you luck. They often present claims without showing why we would accept those claims or even how they further the argument. A book that purports to overthrow the orthodoxy needs that.
Several places confuse explaining and explaining away. I would elaborate, but the link does it well enough. Just read the first half of that post, and you will get the idea. Also, some of these things should be "explained away" as hallucinations and mistakes.
Another confusion is the occasional use of "god of the gaps" reasoning. Not all the authors seem clear on the distinction between "this has not yet been fully explained" and "this is impossible to explain even in theory," or between "there is no explanation" and "this has not been explained in a way that satisfies me." It is a bad enough practice to seek permission to keep believing an unlikely premise ("this has not been completely ruled out"), and it is worse to then take that lack of p=0 and treat it as "it has been established that..." (If you are holding the opposing camp to a much higher standard of evidence than your own, you are probably defending a poor belief.)
The arguments are poorly made and poorly evidenced. Some points are so bad that I needed to remind myself that they were true despite the argument. You might be able to use some of the scrap heap to construct something better, but it is not promising.
The best thing I can say is that Ian Stevenson may have been on to something, although it seems more likely that he was just cataloguing the thousands of one-in-a-million cases that happen with a population of billions. Even if a case seems potentially worth pursuing at greater length, its presence amidst such dreck suggests that it is less than it seems. As with Bertrand Russell's crate of oranges, there seems little reason to hope for better if we dig deeper, given the quality of the items most prominently presented for our attention.
I was tempted to give a 1 rating, but this is merely useless rather than doing much to make the world a worse place.
Amazon link
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
In the Palace of Repose by Holly Phillips
Rating - 3: worth reading once (borrow it from a library)
The first two stories are very good. Others are good. Some are not. I credit it with a three because the writing is good and you may find that different stories from the collection reverberate with you better than me.
This collection of short stories flirts with magical realism. Most of the protagonists are young women who dream of something greater than their lives currently offer.
I say "flirts" because it is not committed. Some of the stories are fantasy, modern or pre-modern. Others have slightly fantastic elements. Some are entirely mundane.
That balance of stories creates its own tension. The third-best story is "A Woman's Bones," a story set in an archaeological dig in northern Canada. Based on the stories that surround it, the tomb really might belong to the Conqueror, who waits for man's disturbance to resume her bloody quest for domination. Or it could expose the tribe's superstitions as such. Set against this background, we follow the translator who works with the archaeologists, drawn to the tribal culture that she has tried to escape as a modern adult.
Neither expectation is too strong. In some stories, you might expect it to go one way or the other. Here, it is not clear which would be a twist ending. I do not think you could maintain that tension without the context of the other stories.
The titular "Palace of Repose" is a great start to the book, the second-best story. It is dark, evocative, and moody. It does much with very subtle special effects. It again shows the intersection of the civilized modern and the fantastic past, a British bureaucracy that manages the prison-home of a sleeping god of chaos. I found the plot transparent and obvious from the first, but the imagery and pacing is good.
The best story is "The Other Grace." The Grace we have is an amnesiac, suddenly wiped clear of all history and identity. The other Grace is who was there before, the specter of what was that haunts her and her parents' house. Grace does not think of it as "who she was," more as if someone else used to live in that body. How odd to be living in that other girl's house and clothes. How horrible to think you could be wiped away in an instant, just the same. How horrible to be surrounded by people who hope that will happen, with the other Grace getting her body back.
I found "The New Ecology" very weak. The pacing of the story is excellent, as is the telling, creating mysteries and answering them just enough at each step. The content matter is poor, a mish-mash of evolutionary biology and urban mysticism that sounds like something from a third-tier Mage: The Ascension book. The quality of the structure makes the poverty of its content all the starker.
"Pen and Ink" does not really work. It flirts very hard with magical realism without much deciding whether that represents reality or insanity. That makes it a pale shadow of "A Woman's Bones," with a less interesting character and conflict. The shifting tense, however, works very well, sliding unnoticed into the present tense in emotionally significant moments.
"One of the Hungry Ones" is pretty good, evoking Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death" with a few similar words and a party, while taking the lass's story somewhere else completely. I have less than that one sentence to say about the other stories.
If you read this book, then you already have seen one of her stories from this book, "By the Light of Tomorrow's Sun."
Amazon link
The first two stories are very good. Others are good. Some are not. I credit it with a three because the writing is good and you may find that different stories from the collection reverberate with you better than me.
This collection of short stories flirts with magical realism. Most of the protagonists are young women who dream of something greater than their lives currently offer.
I say "flirts" because it is not committed. Some of the stories are fantasy, modern or pre-modern. Others have slightly fantastic elements. Some are entirely mundane.
That balance of stories creates its own tension. The third-best story is "A Woman's Bones," a story set in an archaeological dig in northern Canada. Based on the stories that surround it, the tomb really might belong to the Conqueror, who waits for man's disturbance to resume her bloody quest for domination. Or it could expose the tribe's superstitions as such. Set against this background, we follow the translator who works with the archaeologists, drawn to the tribal culture that she has tried to escape as a modern adult.
Neither expectation is too strong. In some stories, you might expect it to go one way or the other. Here, it is not clear which would be a twist ending. I do not think you could maintain that tension without the context of the other stories.
The titular "Palace of Repose" is a great start to the book, the second-best story. It is dark, evocative, and moody. It does much with very subtle special effects. It again shows the intersection of the civilized modern and the fantastic past, a British bureaucracy that manages the prison-home of a sleeping god of chaos. I found the plot transparent and obvious from the first, but the imagery and pacing is good.
The best story is "The Other Grace." The Grace we have is an amnesiac, suddenly wiped clear of all history and identity. The other Grace is who was there before, the specter of what was that haunts her and her parents' house. Grace does not think of it as "who she was," more as if someone else used to live in that body. How odd to be living in that other girl's house and clothes. How horrible to think you could be wiped away in an instant, just the same. How horrible to be surrounded by people who hope that will happen, with the other Grace getting her body back.
I found "The New Ecology" very weak. The pacing of the story is excellent, as is the telling, creating mysteries and answering them just enough at each step. The content matter is poor, a mish-mash of evolutionary biology and urban mysticism that sounds like something from a third-tier Mage: The Ascension book. The quality of the structure makes the poverty of its content all the starker.
"Pen and Ink" does not really work. It flirts very hard with magical realism without much deciding whether that represents reality or insanity. That makes it a pale shadow of "A Woman's Bones," with a less interesting character and conflict. The shifting tense, however, works very well, sliding unnoticed into the present tense in emotionally significant moments.
"One of the Hungry Ones" is pretty good, evoking Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death" with a few similar words and a party, while taking the lass's story somewhere else completely. I have less than that one sentence to say about the other stories.
If you read this book, then you already have seen one of her stories from this book, "By the Light of Tomorrow's Sun."
Amazon link
Sunday, October 19, 2008
Legacies: The Sublime by Joseph Carriker, Jr., Sam Inabinet, Wood Ingham, Mur Lafferty, Travis
Mage: The Awakening role-playing book
Rating - 4: useful for any campaign (buy it)
I really like this one. Partly that is because it plays to my personal preferences, but it has some good ideas, and it takes some of them to interesting places. Others, not to my interest, but you cannot please everyone all the time.
This is a collection of thirteen Legacies for Mage: The Awakening. They are all themed around "a kind of grandeur that reaches beyond the merely human scale." Hence, the sublime.
The first eleven legacies are mages who summon their personal demons, mystically transcend to a new level of human evolution, bring fairy-tale justice, transcend the material world through joyful asceticism, embrace the city, inspire great art, costume themselves as the angels they want to become, engage in Dionysian dances beneath the full moon, transcribe the Final Names of the dying, find magic in quantum mechanics, and promote the technological Singularity. The book concludes with two left-handed (i.e. villainous) legacies: mages incarnating the doomsday clock and trying to use the nightmares of abyssal evils bridge the abyssal gap between the worlds of matter and spirit.
Where this book succeeds, it succeeds well and succinctly. I criticized Bloodlines: The Hidden for spending too few pages per bloodline. This has about the same number of pages devoted to each legacy, about ten, but it does so much better. A large part of that is the lack of new disciplines. A legacy's three attainments take up about a page, as opposed to the five pages for a new discipline. So 90% of the legacy description really is legacy description.
I respect the conflicts built into this book. Several of the legacies are diametrically opposed, so if the ones that appeal least to my sensibilities may be exactly what you are looking for. The Pygmalions inspire great art because they see it as humanity's transcendent path; the Transhuman Engineers explicitly scorn art, seeing technology as the path forward. The Daksha are trying to transcend humanity in a different way, by evolving beyond it, while the Fallen Pillars are trying to abandon the evolution game and bodies altogether. While the angel-aspirants are trying to duck being Judeo-Christian, the moon-dancers come pretty close to the Wicca stereotype. The book begins with invoking your personal demons to learn and protect and ends with invoking real demons to learn by destroying. I complemented Bloodlines: The Legendary for the ways its bloodlines embodied contradictions; here, the legacies embody pure ideas, and they contradict each other.
This is where I would usually cite what hearkens back to previous editions. I'm tired of that. You can probably see the links.
Not all the legacies presented fit the theme, which is not to say that they are bad. I don't see how fairy justice is sublime. The Metropolitans could be taken as seeing the city as a kind of multi-human super-entity, but personal demons and true names do not seem to be about getting beyond yourself. What I enjoyed most about this book was the application of philosophies that transcended humanity: if your assumptions include a Supernal World and your ability to make your will manifest, you would think that would have a bigger impact on your philosophy than just power-tripping. For the philosophical, that is; it makes perfect sense to have many groups that do not take the long view of transformative power.
This book brings a bit more "science" magic back to the game, and I think that "science" should keep its scare quotes. You knew that the Sons of Ether were not using real science, but "quantum mechanics" seems to make people think that anything goes. The technological tidbits in the Singularity section are better, since applying tools someone else built seems to be easier than understanding why those tools work in the first place. I'm sure there are others who take the mangled theology personally, notably how Americans treat Asian religions.
Which legacies would be most useful depends on where you are taking your chronicle. Beyond those who are echoes of the previous edition, I think the demon-summoners, fairy-tale hexers, Metropolitans, and Pygmalions are the easiest to fit into an existing game. The radically transcendent tend to take center stage or get pushed quickly to the fringes, although it might be interesting to recreate the Ascension War with legacies trying to take the Sleepers collectively in different directions.
In a fun twist, one of the legacies described is fundamentally accurate. Can you pick it from the crowd?
Amazon link
Rating - 4: useful for any campaign (buy it)
I really like this one. Partly that is because it plays to my personal preferences, but it has some good ideas, and it takes some of them to interesting places. Others, not to my interest, but you cannot please everyone all the time.
This is a collection of thirteen Legacies for Mage: The Awakening. They are all themed around "a kind of grandeur that reaches beyond the merely human scale." Hence, the sublime.
The first eleven legacies are mages who summon their personal demons, mystically transcend to a new level of human evolution, bring fairy-tale justice, transcend the material world through joyful asceticism, embrace the city, inspire great art, costume themselves as the angels they want to become, engage in Dionysian dances beneath the full moon, transcribe the Final Names of the dying, find magic in quantum mechanics, and promote the technological Singularity. The book concludes with two left-handed (i.e. villainous) legacies: mages incarnating the doomsday clock and trying to use the nightmares of abyssal evils bridge the abyssal gap between the worlds of matter and spirit.
Where this book succeeds, it succeeds well and succinctly. I criticized Bloodlines: The Hidden for spending too few pages per bloodline. This has about the same number of pages devoted to each legacy, about ten, but it does so much better. A large part of that is the lack of new disciplines. A legacy's three attainments take up about a page, as opposed to the five pages for a new discipline. So 90% of the legacy description really is legacy description.
I respect the conflicts built into this book. Several of the legacies are diametrically opposed, so if the ones that appeal least to my sensibilities may be exactly what you are looking for. The Pygmalions inspire great art because they see it as humanity's transcendent path; the Transhuman Engineers explicitly scorn art, seeing technology as the path forward. The Daksha are trying to transcend humanity in a different way, by evolving beyond it, while the Fallen Pillars are trying to abandon the evolution game and bodies altogether. While the angel-aspirants are trying to duck being Judeo-Christian, the moon-dancers come pretty close to the Wicca stereotype. The book begins with invoking your personal demons to learn and protect and ends with invoking real demons to learn by destroying. I complemented Bloodlines: The Legendary for the ways its bloodlines embodied contradictions; here, the legacies embody pure ideas, and they contradict each other.
This is where I would usually cite what hearkens back to previous editions. I'm tired of that. You can probably see the links.
Not all the legacies presented fit the theme, which is not to say that they are bad. I don't see how fairy justice is sublime. The Metropolitans could be taken as seeing the city as a kind of multi-human super-entity, but personal demons and true names do not seem to be about getting beyond yourself. What I enjoyed most about this book was the application of philosophies that transcended humanity: if your assumptions include a Supernal World and your ability to make your will manifest, you would think that would have a bigger impact on your philosophy than just power-tripping. For the philosophical, that is; it makes perfect sense to have many groups that do not take the long view of transformative power.
This book brings a bit more "science" magic back to the game, and I think that "science" should keep its scare quotes. You knew that the Sons of Ether were not using real science, but "quantum mechanics" seems to make people think that anything goes. The technological tidbits in the Singularity section are better, since applying tools someone else built seems to be easier than understanding why those tools work in the first place. I'm sure there are others who take the mangled theology personally, notably how Americans treat Asian religions.
Which legacies would be most useful depends on where you are taking your chronicle. Beyond those who are echoes of the previous edition, I think the demon-summoners, fairy-tale hexers, Metropolitans, and Pygmalions are the easiest to fit into an existing game. The radically transcendent tend to take center stage or get pushed quickly to the fringes, although it might be interesting to recreate the Ascension War with legacies trying to take the Sleepers collectively in different directions.
In a fun twist, one of the legacies described is fundamentally accurate. Can you pick it from the crowd?
Amazon link
Friday, October 17, 2008
Lodges: The Faithful by Aaron Dembski-Bowden, Matthew McFarland, and Adam Tinworth
Werewolf: The Forsaken role-playing book
Rating - 2: of use for some campaigns (but not most)
Throw it against the wall and see what sticks.
This book has 31 lodges for Werewolf, along with a guide to using and creating lodges.
Given that, there really is not much space for anything. Each lodge has four pages, plus or minus one. Cram into those 3-5 pages an opening story, an illustration, three story hooks, a sample character, and the lodge's gifts, rites, and fetishes. Whatever space is left has the lodge's background, current state, patron spirit, and rules for admission. It is a credit to the authors that they do this well with such strictures. You will still be doing most of the work if you want to use these as anything more than window-dressing.
Unless you have a lot of packs, visitors, and inter-tribal interaction, you cannot even use that many. It would be better to have a few well-developed lodges that beg to be used, rather than a large number of sketched ideas. That kind of thing is web site filler these days, not a book, and fan sites are surely full of more developed lodges.
The opening vignette is rather good. At four pages, it gets as much development as an entire lodge, and it captures the spirit of the setting well. It is harsh, crass, and bloody. The difference between what the reader and the narrator know about the setting gives you unstated information about the POV character. It has excessive cursing of the posturing teen sort, "Look, we're the World of Darkness, we're badass! See, we curse like every third f-ing sentence!" This is forgivable.
The opening vignette for each lodge does a fair amount of the heavy lifting. Werewolf is an oral culture, a place for storytelling around the fire. The myth tells you how the lodge sees itself, and it might even tell you the true history.
Is it worth pointing out what seems interesting to me? What you take away from a four-page lodge reflects greatly on what you bring to it. It would reflect more of what I consider a neat idea than what is really well-developed. The lodges are generally about how the werewolves relate to tools, combat, spirits, death, or knowledge.
The Lodge of Ashes is an unusual inclusion. It has a dozen members in the world. You are not going to have one as a permanent resident of your area, and you are not going to have your characters' pack be half the members of the tribe. There seems to be no use for it except to bring someone through and destroy the characters' stuff.
How many different "one of the rarest things in the world" can appear before your chronicle becomes either farcical or clearly set over a Hellmouth? You are all special, unique snowflakes of bloody, furry violence. There can be only so many secret societies before you are playing Paranoia or are back in the old World of Darkness.
The non-specific lodges are mostly villainous, and there does not seem to be a lot of reason to join them. Werewolf cannibals, understandable, but a lodge for them, where the benefit for joining is that it slows the moral degradation of the act? Not terribly useful to either a PC or an NPC. Maybe that dot of resources is worth pledging yourself to a greed spirit, but it seems like a poor trade. The Lodge of Unity, seeking to create a werewolf nation, is interesting, as is the Pure lodge seeking to resurrect Father Wolf.
Amazon link
Rating - 2: of use for some campaigns (but not most)
Throw it against the wall and see what sticks.
This book has 31 lodges for Werewolf, along with a guide to using and creating lodges.
Given that, there really is not much space for anything. Each lodge has four pages, plus or minus one. Cram into those 3-5 pages an opening story, an illustration, three story hooks, a sample character, and the lodge's gifts, rites, and fetishes. Whatever space is left has the lodge's background, current state, patron spirit, and rules for admission. It is a credit to the authors that they do this well with such strictures. You will still be doing most of the work if you want to use these as anything more than window-dressing.
Unless you have a lot of packs, visitors, and inter-tribal interaction, you cannot even use that many. It would be better to have a few well-developed lodges that beg to be used, rather than a large number of sketched ideas. That kind of thing is web site filler these days, not a book, and fan sites are surely full of more developed lodges.
The opening vignette is rather good. At four pages, it gets as much development as an entire lodge, and it captures the spirit of the setting well. It is harsh, crass, and bloody. The difference between what the reader and the narrator know about the setting gives you unstated information about the POV character. It has excessive cursing of the posturing teen sort, "Look, we're the World of Darkness, we're badass! See, we curse like every third f-ing sentence!" This is forgivable.
The opening vignette for each lodge does a fair amount of the heavy lifting. Werewolf is an oral culture, a place for storytelling around the fire. The myth tells you how the lodge sees itself, and it might even tell you the true history.
Is it worth pointing out what seems interesting to me? What you take away from a four-page lodge reflects greatly on what you bring to it. It would reflect more of what I consider a neat idea than what is really well-developed. The lodges are generally about how the werewolves relate to tools, combat, spirits, death, or knowledge.
The Lodge of Ashes is an unusual inclusion. It has a dozen members in the world. You are not going to have one as a permanent resident of your area, and you are not going to have your characters' pack be half the members of the tribe. There seems to be no use for it except to bring someone through and destroy the characters' stuff.
How many different "one of the rarest things in the world" can appear before your chronicle becomes either farcical or clearly set over a Hellmouth? You are all special, unique snowflakes of bloody, furry violence. There can be only so many secret societies before you are playing Paranoia or are back in the old World of Darkness.
The non-specific lodges are mostly villainous, and there does not seem to be a lot of reason to join them. Werewolf cannibals, understandable, but a lodge for them, where the benefit for joining is that it slows the moral degradation of the act? Not terribly useful to either a PC or an NPC. Maybe that dot of resources is worth pledging yourself to a greed spirit, but it seems like a poor trade. The Lodge of Unity, seeking to create a werewolf nation, is interesting, as is the Pure lodge seeking to resurrect Father Wolf.
Amazon link
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Bloodlines: The Legendary by Wood Ingham, Christopher Kobar, Mur Lafferty, Dean Shomshak, Travis Stout and Chuck Wendig
Vampire: The Requiem role-playing book
Rating - 4: useful for any campaign (buy it)
This is rather good. There are many pieces you can use, maybe even if you are not playing Vampire.
Nine bloodlines for Vampire, each with a bit more description than the previous book, but each seems so much richer with that little more.
Your new bloodlines are questers after the Holy Grail, carnival freaks, the suicidally depressed (and depressing), Nosferatu of hideous beauty, scent-based Daeva, ascetics, gluttons, hive-queens, and pop-culture poseurs.
First praise must go to Dean Shomshak for getting it. His Children of Judas and Players both embody and deconstruct Vampire. The Children are the Suicide Kings: embraced amidst depression and suicide, they bring it to others and savor suffering. Yes, they incarnate angst, and they are playing it straight. Whether you want to mock or embrace the setting, what could be more fitting than those who want to contemplate the beauty of despair? (They also have interesting theology.) Players take it in the other direction: we are so cool and pretty, everyone loves us. They are Hollywood vampires who are deciding whether to be Brad Pitt or Tom Cruise. This seems perfect for a comic (tragicomic?) foil in your game, allowing some self-aware mockery of excesses. I am not sure how it works in the long-run, but the setting now has an official Take That! at itself and its players. How many layers of irony can you process ay once?
Chuck Wendig's Macellarius just beg to be used. They are the gluttonous Ventrue, portly power-brokers. They have a perfect mix of Epicurean refined tastes, hedonistic excess, depravity, and gentility. They are Baron Harkonnen, with better manners and worse eating habits. They feature in the opening vignette, and I think they embrace the right contradictions for use as a recurring player: the master of Elysium, a refined planner of parties, a dandy, and behind it all a cannibalistic monster. The signature discipline is a bit odd. There are suggestions of how you might alter the bloodline for your campaign, and switching to Protean could be more viable than something to specific as an eating-based discipline.
Mur Lafferty's Kuufukuji seems like an NPC bloodline. You put one on the fringes of the chronicle, an ascetic sage in a secluded spot, one who causes little trouble and can be forgotten until needed. One who also embodies a concept from Kindred of the East: the strength of the humanity displayed reflects the strength of the Beast controlled.
Wood Ingham's Melissidae are another bloodline that I see as NPCs with a limited role. They make great mid-level or master villains, but their abilities will not fit well on the player-side or when they are weak. Maybe you could do a few sessions on keeping a weak one from becoming strong, but their signature abilities are mostly devotions requiring many dots. A moderately powerful one could focus on the beekeeper role, a physical foe who fights with swarms. A very powerful one would have a hive of mind-controlled followers, a queen bee with many drones. Maybe you can think of another direction for the gaps.
The scent-based Daeva have a bloodline weakness like something from Stephenie Meyer, only more so. I would think fixating on the scent of one type of person would be debilitating in play, unless you choose something so rare as to make it irrelevant. In a city of a few million people, there will be one of anything along any minute now.
You may notice some return engagements. The old Caitiff book had something like the Players. The Gluttons are a classic take on the Ventrue, reminiscent of the old Chicago by Night. There have been carnival freaks, and "freakishly beautiful" sounds awfully familiar (also filling some old Tzimisce slots of body manipulation and inhuman beauty).
That is more than half the book cited as good and useful. Your chronicle would be rather crowded if you included every interesting bloodline, so a few really good ones are all you need.
And since I have not mentioned much on the writing, the presentation gives you really good ones. You get background, parables, side-stories, rumors, variants, factions, stereotypes, outcasts, everything you would want. This is more than the clan descriptions in the core book, although those get much elaboration throughout.
Powers and disciplines are secondary, and they hew closely to the bloodline theme. They may hew a bit too closely, encouraging one-trick ponies and NPC specialists.
There is a limited amount positive here, so why the 4? Because it has pieces you can use, and I do not expect anyone to use a lot of bloodlines. It beats Sturgeon's Law, which is all I can ask.
Amazon link
Rating - 4: useful for any campaign (buy it)
This is rather good. There are many pieces you can use, maybe even if you are not playing Vampire.
Nine bloodlines for Vampire, each with a bit more description than the previous book, but each seems so much richer with that little more.
Your new bloodlines are questers after the Holy Grail, carnival freaks, the suicidally depressed (and depressing), Nosferatu of hideous beauty, scent-based Daeva, ascetics, gluttons, hive-queens, and pop-culture poseurs.
First praise must go to Dean Shomshak for getting it. His Children of Judas and Players both embody and deconstruct Vampire. The Children are the Suicide Kings: embraced amidst depression and suicide, they bring it to others and savor suffering. Yes, they incarnate angst, and they are playing it straight. Whether you want to mock or embrace the setting, what could be more fitting than those who want to contemplate the beauty of despair? (They also have interesting theology.) Players take it in the other direction: we are so cool and pretty, everyone loves us. They are Hollywood vampires who are deciding whether to be Brad Pitt or Tom Cruise. This seems perfect for a comic (tragicomic?) foil in your game, allowing some self-aware mockery of excesses. I am not sure how it works in the long-run, but the setting now has an official Take That! at itself and its players. How many layers of irony can you process ay once?
Chuck Wendig's Macellarius just beg to be used. They are the gluttonous Ventrue, portly power-brokers. They have a perfect mix of Epicurean refined tastes, hedonistic excess, depravity, and gentility. They are Baron Harkonnen, with better manners and worse eating habits. They feature in the opening vignette, and I think they embrace the right contradictions for use as a recurring player: the master of Elysium, a refined planner of parties, a dandy, and behind it all a cannibalistic monster. The signature discipline is a bit odd. There are suggestions of how you might alter the bloodline for your campaign, and switching to Protean could be more viable than something to specific as an eating-based discipline.
Mur Lafferty's Kuufukuji seems like an NPC bloodline. You put one on the fringes of the chronicle, an ascetic sage in a secluded spot, one who causes little trouble and can be forgotten until needed. One who also embodies a concept from Kindred of the East: the strength of the humanity displayed reflects the strength of the Beast controlled.
Wood Ingham's Melissidae are another bloodline that I see as NPCs with a limited role. They make great mid-level or master villains, but their abilities will not fit well on the player-side or when they are weak. Maybe you could do a few sessions on keeping a weak one from becoming strong, but their signature abilities are mostly devotions requiring many dots. A moderately powerful one could focus on the beekeeper role, a physical foe who fights with swarms. A very powerful one would have a hive of mind-controlled followers, a queen bee with many drones. Maybe you can think of another direction for the gaps.
The scent-based Daeva have a bloodline weakness like something from Stephenie Meyer, only more so. I would think fixating on the scent of one type of person would be debilitating in play, unless you choose something so rare as to make it irrelevant. In a city of a few million people, there will be one of anything along any minute now.
You may notice some return engagements. The old Caitiff book had something like the Players. The Gluttons are a classic take on the Ventrue, reminiscent of the old Chicago by Night. There have been carnival freaks, and "freakishly beautiful" sounds awfully familiar (also filling some old Tzimisce slots of body manipulation and inhuman beauty).
That is more than half the book cited as good and useful. Your chronicle would be rather crowded if you included every interesting bloodline, so a few really good ones are all you need.
And since I have not mentioned much on the writing, the presentation gives you really good ones. You get background, parables, side-stories, rumors, variants, factions, stereotypes, outcasts, everything you would want. This is more than the clan descriptions in the core book, although those get much elaboration throughout.
Powers and disciplines are secondary, and they hew closely to the bloodline theme. They may hew a bit too closely, encouraging one-trick ponies and NPC specialists.
There is a limited amount positive here, so why the 4? Because it has pieces you can use, and I do not expect anyone to use a lot of bloodlines. It beats Sturgeon's Law, which is all I can ask.
Amazon link
Tuesday, October 07, 2008
Against the Fall of Night by Arthur C. Clarke
Rating - 2: not worth reading (skip it)
Maybe I should stick to his more famous books. I want to like more of Clarke than I do, but when you publish this much, not all of it will appeal to everyone.
Arthur C. Clarke's first novel is set a billion years in the future, in the last city on Earth. Its tower soar for miles, and humanity tries not to think of the desert that covers the rest of the planet. Here men lead millennia-long lives, and they have no thought of change, exploration, or discovery. Alvin is the only child to have been born in the last seven thousand years, and he thinks of these things often.
The language is excellent. Clarke re-wrote the book and re-published it under another name, but I am told that the changes were stylistic rather than plot-based. It hardly seems necessary, given the quality of writing.
The plot is weak. There is not much there. This hits the standard sci fi template of exploring a society and seeing what led to it, even using the standard variation of exploring humanity centuries in the future. There is not much of interest. There are some technical wonders to describe, but they are sufficiently advanced. Humanity is not particularly interesting in this future, so the quest to understand or fix it is not compelling.
The notion of this as humanity after a billion years is also not compelling. It is comprehensible, especially given the later explanation, but one billion years ago things like algae colonies and fungi were new. It is hard to see our distance from there and imagine so little change a billion years hence, especially once you have hyper-advanced technology. Again, the ending justifies much, but still. If I can give a partial cross-spoiler, see After Life for a related story.
Excellent writing with interesting notions late on, but packaged with exploration of a humanity that does not pique interest. Not recommended, and if The City and the Stars is a stylistic variation, I cannot recommend that either. Rama does a much better job of visualizing intelligence and technology beyond the range of mankind.
Amazon link
Maybe I should stick to his more famous books. I want to like more of Clarke than I do, but when you publish this much, not all of it will appeal to everyone.
Arthur C. Clarke's first novel is set a billion years in the future, in the last city on Earth. Its tower soar for miles, and humanity tries not to think of the desert that covers the rest of the planet. Here men lead millennia-long lives, and they have no thought of change, exploration, or discovery. Alvin is the only child to have been born in the last seven thousand years, and he thinks of these things often.
The language is excellent. Clarke re-wrote the book and re-published it under another name, but I am told that the changes were stylistic rather than plot-based. It hardly seems necessary, given the quality of writing.
The plot is weak. There is not much there. This hits the standard sci fi template of exploring a society and seeing what led to it, even using the standard variation of exploring humanity centuries in the future. There is not much of interest. There are some technical wonders to describe, but they are sufficiently advanced. Humanity is not particularly interesting in this future, so the quest to understand or fix it is not compelling.
The notion of this as humanity after a billion years is also not compelling. It is comprehensible, especially given the later explanation, but one billion years ago things like algae colonies and fungi were new. It is hard to see our distance from there and imagine so little change a billion years hence, especially once you have hyper-advanced technology. Again, the ending justifies much, but still. If I can give a partial cross-spoiler, see After Life for a related story.
Excellent writing with interesting notions late on, but packaged with exploration of a humanity that does not pique interest. Not recommended, and if The City and the Stars is a stylistic variation, I cannot recommend that either. Rama does a much better job of visualizing intelligence and technology beyond the range of mankind.
Amazon link
Friday, October 03, 2008
The Riddle of Scheherazade by Raymond Smullyan
Rating - 3: worth reading once (borrow it from a library)
I love Raymond Smullyan. This is not his best book, but there is fun to be had.
Just what it says on the cover: 225 puzzles. Each chapter takes a different bit of logic and creates puzzles that are variations. The earlier sections are more "grab bag," while they become more tightly grouped by the end.
Because of that, sections will have more or less appeal to you. Some parts of the book you will consider re-reading, because you liked those ones. Other chapters you might have considered completely not worth it. I will average those 2.5 and 3.5 bits into a rating of 3.
Mr. Smullyan is most famous for puzzles on the island of knights and knaves, where knights always speak truth and knaves always lie. We have many variations on those. He is also known for meta-puzzles, usually of the following structure: bits of information A, B, and C, then someone is asked a question; you are not given the answer to the question, but you are told that you can solve the puzzle just knowing that he did answer, which lets you figure out his answer. For it to be a perfect Smullyan puzzle, it should be a meta-puzzle where you can solve the puzzle itself but not figure out what that missing bit of information was.
Or, as Melvin Fitting famous put it, "I now introduce Professor Smullyan, who will prove to you that either he doesn't exist or you don't exist, but you won't know which."
Some of the puzzles are trivial but tedious. That is, if you know how to solve them, you will not gain much by going through the motions. Several of the puzzles are just complex algebra story problems; if you are good at algebra, this is obvious, and you move on; if not, you probably do not want to do solve them, but you are exactly the sort of person who could use that mental exercise.
You may find it easier once you recognize the theme in each section. Once a type of puzzle is introduced, the following puzzles will be variations on it. If you understood the first one (even if you did not solve it but read the explanation), you should be able to answer most of the rest. Of course, sometimes they can get rather tricky.
That exhausts what I an coherently say about a book of puzzles. They build on each other, but not the way that a story does. If you like logic puzzles, here you go. If not, maybe you should try some anyway, because you might like them once you develop better logic skills. Being able to reason properly is a good thing.
Amazon link
I love Raymond Smullyan. This is not his best book, but there is fun to be had.
Just what it says on the cover: 225 puzzles. Each chapter takes a different bit of logic and creates puzzles that are variations. The earlier sections are more "grab bag," while they become more tightly grouped by the end.
Because of that, sections will have more or less appeal to you. Some parts of the book you will consider re-reading, because you liked those ones. Other chapters you might have considered completely not worth it. I will average those 2.5 and 3.5 bits into a rating of 3.
Mr. Smullyan is most famous for puzzles on the island of knights and knaves, where knights always speak truth and knaves always lie. We have many variations on those. He is also known for meta-puzzles, usually of the following structure: bits of information A, B, and C, then someone is asked a question; you are not given the answer to the question, but you are told that you can solve the puzzle just knowing that he did answer, which lets you figure out his answer. For it to be a perfect Smullyan puzzle, it should be a meta-puzzle where you can solve the puzzle itself but not figure out what that missing bit of information was.
Or, as Melvin Fitting famous put it, "I now introduce Professor Smullyan, who will prove to you that either he doesn't exist or you don't exist, but you won't know which."
Some of the puzzles are trivial but tedious. That is, if you know how to solve them, you will not gain much by going through the motions. Several of the puzzles are just complex algebra story problems; if you are good at algebra, this is obvious, and you move on; if not, you probably do not want to do solve them, but you are exactly the sort of person who could use that mental exercise.
You may find it easier once you recognize the theme in each section. Once a type of puzzle is introduced, the following puzzles will be variations on it. If you understood the first one (even if you did not solve it but read the explanation), you should be able to answer most of the rest. Of course, sometimes they can get rather tricky.
That exhausts what I an coherently say about a book of puzzles. They build on each other, but not the way that a story does. If you like logic puzzles, here you go. If not, maybe you should try some anyway, because you might like them once you develop better logic skills. Being able to reason properly is a good thing.
Amazon link
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