December 2021 update

Complete with hard-to-see honest progress bookmark

Well - it’s been a minute, hasn’t it? In the second half of 2021 a few things happened personally, professionally, and in the world at large. My postdoc contract ended in June and I took a new job in rover operations at ASU. While I was pretty excited about the opportunity, it also meant that I was working full time on campus for basically the first time ever. I also was joining a Mars mission early on enough that operations were still happening seven days a week and at craaaaazy early start times. In the meantime everyone seems to have decided that the pandemic is over and we can all go about our business (despite Delta, and now, Omicron). While I’m still being cautious I have definitely had more pressure to meet with people in person, entertain out of town guests, etc. that has been radically different from the way we lived for over a year.

The result of all this was I didn’t have a lot of time/energy to read in the latter half of 2021, much less blog about it. I feel a bit guilty about that, given how much I enjoyed reading in 2020 and early 2021, but it is what it is. Given that operations schedules have mostly calmed down, I hope to get back to it more in 2022. But who knows.

Here’s a short tour of the rest of the books I read in 2021:

The Paper Menagerie - Ken Liu (2016), short stories/science fiction

Oof. I was really hoping to like this one. A few of the stories are quite good! The title one especially. But on the whole, no, this did not do it for me at all. You 100% lost me at “fragments that had broken off the [asteroid headed for Earth] were headed for Mars and the moon”. No. Just no. I can suspend disbelief to a point but if you’re going to write science fiction at least pretend to understand orbital dynamics. Also, ending the collection with ‘The Man Who Ended History’? I mean I guess where else could you plausibly put it, but also, yikes? Going out on a torture note made me enjoy this book even less.

To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf (1927), literary/historical fiction

This is some goddamned good writing. It’s difficult, for sure - the sudden shifts in point of view, the asides, the period references. I didn’t originally intend to order the annotated version and yet I ended up glad that I did - the introduction gave a lot of context that was actually important, and the references were insightful. Truly, not much really happens in this book except some of the characters (spoiler alert) die off stage and yet.. and yet. It’s a lovely set of meditations on families, femininity, humanity, etc, and I’m better for having encountered it. The dinner scene is wonderful. That said, it was a read that required some dedicated time set aside to process. I read the bulk of it on my birthday vacation/retreat in July and the rest not until Thanksgiving gave me a few days off.

(close) Blue Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson (1996), science fiction

Meh. To be completely fair, I am still ~150 pages from completing this, so I can’t rule out the possibility that it suddenly gets amazing. After Red Mars I have really struggled with Green Mars and this. I’ve had a really hard time accepting that the original characters are a bajillion years old, and somehow the later generations are just not as interesting. This book in particular gets so far from first book’s premise of settling on Mars and lets its artificially ancient characters flit about the solar system. I literally have been abandoning and returning to this book for a year and hope to finally finish it soon. (See sad progress book mark above). But I spent enough time with it this year that I feel justified in including it.

The Liar’s Dictionary - Eley Williams (2020), contemporary/historical fiction

This was fun, but to be honest, not as fun as I’d hoped. It suffers mainly from a lack of side characters and plot. There are two alternating protagonists, but all that’s going on is their existential crises. Neither one has any friends?! Mallory has a girlfriend and her boss but seemingly no parents or friends. Peter only has only his random crush and his co-workers. I liked the two poor insecure protagonists but they live in such a constrained world. Also, there’s a bit about factory explosion that’s really unclear that it’s not a train crash and doesn’t do anything for the plot?! Maybe I just missed the mark on this one. The invented words are fun! I just wish it had gone somewhere.

Old Man's War

I refuse to go back and try to figure out which alien race the flying things are supposed to be

Author: John Scalzi

Publication: 2005

Genre: Science Fiction

Once again, something recommended to me by a friend some time ago. What a romp. Old Man’s War is a good old-fashioned space adventure slash worldbuilding exercise obviously setting up for a series. It borrows heavily from (and dutifully acknowledges) Heinlein with appropriate modern twists.

The narrator, also named John, has reached age 75, at which point he’s contracted to join the interplanetary army. Nobody on Earth really knows what that entails, they just assume it’s better than dying of old age. John’s wife has already died, so he overly calmly severs the remainder of his earthly connections and launches to space. Without getting overly spoiler-y, the space army equips him to be a good soldier and then flings him around the galaxy for the rest of the book.

Even at 15 years old, the text rings mildly sexist. Even when some of the troops are women, they’re all “men”. The leadership skews male. The narrator’s male gaze is obvious. Race or nationality doesn’t enter in any meaningful fashion, other than some backhanded swipes at overpopulation consequences in Asian countries (yikes). It’s implied that the soldiers are mainly white and American.

The narrator is a relatable everyman (at least if you’re a white dude). He has no real personality other than 1) infallible natural aptitude for war games and 2) being the only old person still in love with his spouse. My copy had a few noticeable typos. It’s a first novel, and I understand that it was serially self-published at first, but it could have used stronger editing in places. Scalzi tends to repeat words in close proximity to one another, which is jarring in otherwise pleasantly well-written verbiage.

All these caveats aside, it’s a fun read. It goes down easy with a heathy dose of snark. The story has just enough twists and turns to keep it interesting. I enjoyed it; probably even enough to pick up some of the sequels.

This Is How You Lose the Time War (9/10)

I don’t have anything witty to say about this one - can you tell I’m running out of new backgrounds?

Author: Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

Publication: 2019

Genre: Science fiction

Again it’s been awhile! since I finished this one. I’m going to try to catch up on the backlog a bit. There have been some good ones lately, but this might be the best of the bunch. Time War deserves all of the praise that has been heaped upon it (including, most recently, a Hugo award).

In summary: two time-traveling agents of futuristic powers are locked in battle with each other. Each belong to their own kind of hive mind. Red is the agent of a hive-mind robot (AI?) entity. Blue is the agent of an edenic garden world. They travel through time and possibility, wrecking havoc on the strands of history that will lead to the other side’s future dominance.

In the aftermath of a battle, Blue leaves an encoded “letter” for Red and they begin a correspondence. Throughout the first 2/3 of the text letters fly back and forth between disparate locales in time and space. The format evokes Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and the (derivative, imho) Sum by David Eagleman (and probably others) in its short, descriptive hops between settings. Unlike its predecessors, though, in Time War there is a love story brewing. Most of the short sections alternate between letters written by the two protagonists, and scenes in which they place the “letters” in various forms in their surroundings, while being chased by an unexplained figure known only as “the seeker”.

In my reading, at least, the twist became clear somewhat before it was actually put in to play, but it was still brilliant executed.

My only criticism, perhaps, is that the authors spend too much space hinting and describing rather than telling the reader what the hell is going on, necessitating in a very closing (re-) reading of certain passages. Or maybe I’m just slow. On the whole, though, Time War is a delight, and one that I won’t hesitate to revisit.

Green Mars (7/10)

My copy is a little worse for wear after an airplane beverage incident.

Author: Kim Stanley Robinson

Publication: 1993

Genre: Science Fiction

Let’s start off. Green Mars is the second book in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy. I’d never read any of them before last year, despite making a joke with the titles in my winning submission to a Science as Art competition in grad school. I picked up the first book, Red Mars, last year on a whim and rather enjoyed it. It’s been slow going, since all three paperbacks weigh in at 500+ pages. But it’s well worth it.

Summary: The First Hundred Martian colonists are now mostly in hiding after the failed revolution of 2051. They’re ridiculously old as the result of some fancy-dancy anti-aging treatments and have several generations of descendants born on Mars. The planet is in the control of powerful enormous corporations, which are also consolidating power on a struggling Earth. Martian terraforming has accelerated and adapted life forms are spreading. The First Hundred, younger generations born on Mars, and newer immigrants all have different opinions on how (or if) developing the planet should proceed. They have to figure out how to work together to decide what a free Mars would look like and how to achieve it.

My take: This book was some work to get through, in large part because I enjoy some narrators much more than others. I love the sections focused on the workings of people, particularly the ones focused on Nadia. I cannot stand Sax. I took multiple breaks from reading because I got so bogged down in the hundred-page section where he goes on and on about lichen and baby bonsai trees. Spare me.

As a planetary scientist, the geographic content is really interesting to me. Robinson was writing these books in the early 90s before most of the modern orbital cameras had arrived at Mars. Most of the non-human-constructed locations in the book are very large features. Major sections of the book takes place in Isidis, and yet there’s no mention of the yet-to-be-named Jezero Crater! Regardless, I will admit I learned a little geography following along.

Some miscellaneous complaints: These characters were clearly conceived of in a much earlier era. The author isn’t *fantastic* at character development across the board, but he’s way worse at writing believable women. He’s hardened each of the major female characters in the First Hundred into stereotypes, many of them unflattering. In particular, the Maya/Jackie characterization and dynamic is cringey. Tell me again about the beautiful crazy women everyone can’t help falling in love with, yeah, sure. And Robinson could really lay off the overdetailed color descriptions. If I had a penny for every time he took a full paragraph to describe the sky….

However, the world he builds is fascinating enough to put up with all that. It’s fun to think about the ways that we could transform another planet, and what colonizing one would mean for our own. Robinson does a great job linking the each individual character to the overall social and physical issues facing Mars. I see why this is a classic. The last hundred pages were beautiful, and I’m looking forward to seeing where these characters go next.