Books

Thalen Reads The Martian

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Hell yeah I'm a botanist! Fear my botany powers! - Mark Watney
When a massive sandstorm endangers the third manned mission to Mars, astronaut Mark Watney is tragically killed during the evacuation and his crewmates are forced to leave his body behind. There's just one thing. Mark's still alive.
Thalen Reads The Martian
The Martian, by Andy Weir, opens shortly after Mark wakes up alone on Mars and follows him as he deals with the difficulties of being stranded, not just on a deserted island or in the harsh wilderness, but on another planet. When the crew evacuated they left everything apart from the MAV (Mars ascent vehicle). So Mark has a pressurized habitat with working oxygen and water reclamation equipment as well as enough food to last him about 400 days. Too bad the next Mars mission isn't scheduled to land for four years, and nobody on Earth has any idea they need to rescue him in any case. The primary communication equipment was destroyed by the storm, and the backups were in the MAV.
On the up side, Mark's areas of expertise are botany and engineering. He'll need both as he tries to find a way to supplement his food supplies, come up with a way to alert someone that he's still alive, and figure out how he would rendezvous with a rescue mission even if one did arrive. For a book with no antagonist apart from the environment, this was an often tense page turner. Not everything goes to plan, and Mark has to think fast on more than one occasion.
Considering that we're pretty much following Mark as he fights alone against a hostile environment, it's a good thing that he's a very likable character. He's clever and willing to take calculated risks without being unbelievably hyper-competent. He's also a smartass and deals with stress by cracking jokes, so what could have been a relatively straightforward (and dry) survival tale is in fact often very funny. The majority of the book is presented as log entries over the course of his time on Mars written in a very conversational tone.
Weir made a special effort while writing The Martian to ensure that everything in it was scientifically accurate. No bug-eyed aliens or future technology here; everything is within the reach of modern science. The book actually started as a thought experiment by Weir to plan out a manned Mars mission and consider the ways things could go wrong and the contingency plans that would need to be in place.
I tore through this book in just a couple of days; it was that good. I absolutely and unreservedly recommend The Martian to any science fiction or outdoor survival fan. If you've seen the trailer for the upcoming movie version, everything in there is remarkably accurate to the book. Believe me, it's worth your time.
Next week's book is going to be a rough one. Not because it's terribly long or because I expect to dislike it. It's a book I've been anticipating for most of two years. It's also the last book by one of my all-time favorite authors. Next up, I'm reading the last novel of Discworld, The Shepherd's Crown by Terry Pratchett. Tune in next Saturday to see if I can make it through the whole thing without crying (Spoiler: I can't).

#Blaugust Day 29: Thalen Reads To Your Scattered Bodies Go

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Burton did not believe in miracles. Nothing happened that could not be explained by physical principles — if you knew all the facts. - Philip José Farmer
This week I read another classic work of science fiction, the Hugo award-winning To Your Scattered Bodies Go by Philip José Farmer. This is the first book in the Riverworld series, in which the entirety of humanity from throughout history find themselves simultaneously resurrected on the banks of a world-long river. We follow the famed explored Richard Francis Burton as he works first to build a new life and then to uncover the mystery of humanity's resurrection.

#Blaugust Day 29: Thalen Reads To Your Scattered Bodies Go

As we've seen before, this is another book that started life as a series of stories published in a periodical and later turned into a novel. In this case two novelettes were expanded and combined, each making up about half the book. In the first half we're introduced to the Riverworld and learn how it works. All those who died on earth throughout history have been resurrected simultaneously in new bodies at approximately the age of 25 (or younger if they died younger). Each wakes entirely naked and hairless with only a strange cylindrical device in their possession. These devices, which come to be called grails, turn out to be a source of ongoing supplies; when placed on a large mushroom-like stone at the appropriate time food and other sundries are generated within.

Burton becomes the de facto leader of small group that includes a neanderthal, a 20th century man, an alien who visited earth in the near future, and Alice Hargreaves, among others. Dissatisfied with the thought of simply settling down in one place, he decides that they will build a boat to sail up the river that dominates the land and explore this new world. This exploration leads Burton to begin uncovering more about the Riverworld and the beings who created it. Along the way his path becomes entangled with that of Herman Göring, who has set himself up as the power behind a tyrannical ruler.

To Your Scattered Bodies Go is a fascinating novel that takes a sometimes depressing but entirely believable view of humanity. Brought forth on this new land and provided with food, some groups institute 'grail slavery' where slaves are kept so that the greater part of what their grails provide can be taken by their masters. When someone dies in the Riverworld, they are resurrected the next morning at a random spot along the river. With no need to hunt or farm for food and death not being final, war between groups becomes common in part as a means of creating excitement.

The Riverworld is a sandbox MMO.

In 1971 Farmer predicted the behavior of MMO players with remarkable accuracy before MMOs even existed. I'm actually very surprised now that there is no Riverworld MMO, as it basically writes itself. The sheer number of people (36 billion) would take some work, but the early days in Riverworld are very reminiscent of survival/crafting games like Don't Starve or Rust and the later period, once states have formed, feels a lot like stories I read of EVE Online's null sec (with fewer spaceships).

By the end of the book some questions have been answered, but a lot more are left hanging. There are a few sequels, the first of which follows Samuel Clemens as he hunts for the means to build a riverboat. My interest is definitely piqued.

For next week we have more SF, but a modern book this time. Join me next Saturday for my thoughts on The Martian by Andy Weir.

#Blaugust Day 23: Sound and Fury

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The Hugo Awards were presented last night at WorldCon, and a lot of people were waiting to see how it would all shake out. If you haven't been following the whole Puppies mess, the short version is that a group of SF authors who have been previously nominated for Hugos but didn't win decided to run a nomination slate to try to get things they like on the ballot. They've tried this for a couple years without much success, but this year the combination of a racist, loudmouth author running a related slate and gaming's own 'organization' of reactionary misogynists getting involved did the trick. The Hugo nominations were gamed.

A lot of people freaked the hell out and declared the Hugos destroyed, or ruined, or what have you. Last night proved that wrong. A number of categories had no award, but that's happened before and will again, just possibly not in the same numbers. The big award (Best Novel) was awarded to a book that is by all reports amazing, and basically none of the slate nominees got a thing. The main result of this whole thing was to highlight just how few people bother to nominate for the Hugos and to sell a heck of a lot more supporting memberships to this year's convention than any previous (though the total number of people voting was apparently only about half the number of memberships; about 11,300 memberships were sold, and just short of 6,000 ballots were cast.)

#Blaugust Day 23: Sound and Fury


The part that really fascinates me comes from the voting and balloting statistics that are released each year once the awards have been handed out. Going through the nomination numbers, it looks like a little over 200 people voted a Puppies slate, and about 160 of those voted the racist asshole's version. 6,000 ballots were cast in the final vote, but only 200 or so people were able to game the nomination. Admittedly this year's vote total is skewed by people who specifically voted either in support or protest of this whole nonsense, so let's look at the 2014 totals. 3,587 total ballots were cast last year. So about 6% of last year's total vote. That's all it took.

And that's the lesson of all this. Angry assholes are really good at being loud, puffing themselves up, and making themselves look bigger than they are. The jerks on your game's forum or on Twitter or wherever? They're a minority making themselves look like the majority through volume (in both meanings of the word). They only win if we stand aside and let them.

#Blaugust Day 22: Thalen Reads Choke

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We can spend our lives letting the world tell us who we are. Sane or insane. Saints or sex addicts. Heros or victims. Letting history tell us how good or bad we are. Letting our past decide the future. Or we can decide for ourselves. - Victor Mancini
#Blaugust Day 22: Thalen Reads Choke

Choke is a book about salvation.

It's also a book about sex addiction, dementia, suffocation, rocks, and chocolate pudding. But the over-arching theme is salvation. The power that saving someone gives you over them, but also the power the saved has over the person that has, in saving them, taken a measure of responsibility for them.

Victor Mancini is a sex addict and a med school dropout. He works at a colonial village with his friend Denny, who he met through an addiction recovery program. He never knew his father. His mother was in and out of jail throughout his childhood for 'acts of social rebellion' of the Project Mayhem sort; swapping colors of hair dye in store, giving LSD to zoo monkeys, and so forth. Now she's slowly wasting away in a home for those with dementia. To support her, Victor chokes in restaurants.

What Victor has learned is that he can pretend to choke in a restaurant and when someone 'saves' him, they feel a responsibility to him. They keep in contact with him, send him a card with a check on his birthday, ask how he's doing and if there's anything they can do to help. He's choked thousands of times and uses the income from that to pay for his mother's care.

At the care center, other patients with dementia keep mistaking him for someone who wronged them in the past. He ultimately plays along, accepting those sins onto himself and giving the patients a kind of closure. He meets a doctor who claims she can cure his mother. The doctor just needs Victor to have sex with her. He learns that his mother has a diary (written in Italian) that contains some shocking secret about his heritage. And Victor begins to question who he really is and what he can do both for himself and for others.

If you've seen or read Fight Club (and seriously, you should do both) then you should have a pretty good idea of the type of book this will be. By turns hilarious and disturbing, and often both simultaneously. Loaded with sex, but almost never sexy. Ultimately it's a book about a man learning the truth about himself and taking some control of his life. I think I actually liked Choke a little better than Fight Club. It was a bit more optimistic in the end; with a 'we could go anywhere we want from here' feel.

Next up I'm going back to the classic science fiction; Philip Jose Farmer's Hugo-winning To Your Scattered Bodies Go, the first book in the Riverworld series. Come back next Saturday to see how I like it!