I’M READING AS FAST AS I CAN (NOVEMBER 2011 EDITION)

[defrog]

I read stuff. I blog about it. The end.

Or rather ...

JUST FINISHED

The Other End by John Shirley
In which Shirley concocts an alternative Judgment Day for humanity. Rather than the right-wing Dominionist Christian vision of the Apocalypse – where the right-wing Christians all get Raptured to Heaven and everyone else is left behind to suffer through the ensuing Tribulation until Jesus comes back – Shirley imagines a secular Judgment Day that deals a more liberal brand of justice to humanity for crimes against each other and the Earth. Shirley wears his liberal politics on his sleeve, but admirably devises a judgment process that doesn’t automatically grant salvation to liberals or whatever. The narrative gets clunky at times, and perhaps necessarily relies on stereotypes for some of the characters. But as thought experiments go, it’s quite well-done and thought-provoking. If nothing else, it's one of the more original books I’ve read in awhile.

JUST STARTED

My Friend Maigret by Georges Simenon
In which Chief Inspector Maigret looks into the murder of a crook who was last seen in a bar on a small village island boasting about Maigret being his good friend. I need to read more Simenon, but not a lot of his books are in print, so I take it when I can get it. Like now.

RECENT TITLES

Iron Sunrise by Charles Stross
Loose sequel to Stross’ debut novel Singularity Sky. A G2 star blows up, taking the planetary system Moscow with it, and the survivors – who falsely believe the explosion was caused intentionally by rival plant New Dresden – send an attack fleet in response. UN operative Rachel Mansour is assigned to find out who really destroyed Moscow before New Dresden gets flattened – and the answer lies with a disaffected Goth teenager. It’s a classic case of a basic spy thriller dressed up as a high-tech space opera, but Stross pulls it off quite well. 

Modesty Blaise: Sabre-Tooth by Peter O’Donnell
The second Modesty Blaise novel, in which she and Willie Garvin look into a crackpot group advocating the overthrow of Kuwait at a time where the world’s mercenaries are suspiciously dropping off the map – and, as it happens, the leader of the group’s army wants to recruit Blaise and Garvin to help lead it to victory. As espionage thrillers go, it’s pretty standard, but as always, the key draw is Blaise and Garvin and the way they work out the whole scheme. 

The Great Crash 1929 by John Kenneth Galbraith
The classic account of the 1929 stock market crash, which isn’t something I’d normally read, but given current events, it just seems like some historical perspective is in order. It’s a pretty good and reasonably balanced documentation of the events and circumstances leading up to the Crash, and while it doesn’t have all the answers as to what exactly caused it, Galbraith does a good job of narrowing down the factors that contributed to it. Naturally, opinions of the book will differ depending on whether you follow the Keynes or Friedman schools of economics (and I’ll admit the former has always made more sense to me, albeit with the caveat that everything I know about both schools could be written on a bumper sticker). But if nothing else I came away from it thinking of the Great Crash as more than just a famous event in a history timeline. 

Love + Sex With Robots: The Evolution Of Human-Robot Relationships by David Levy
Artificial-intelligence expert Levy makes a case for a future in which – once humanoid robots become a common reality – humans will f*** them, love them and marry them (possibly in that order). It sounds funny on paper, but Levy makes a pretty good case, breaking down the technological requirements for creating humanoid robots that can feel and express emotion, and the psychological processes of how people make emotional attachments (with objects as well as other people), and of course, the sex angle (think: dildos and RealDolls). In short, all of that is further along than you might think, and will likely become commonplace by the middle of this century. 

Killing Castro by Lawrence Block
Hard Case Crime reprint of one of Block’s earliest books about five people hired to, yes, kill Fidel Castro. By Block’s career standards, it’s obviously the work of someone building his writing chops via the pulp-fiction trade, but by early-60s pulp standards it’s pretty good. The actual assassination plot – which runs on the theory that you can kill a well-guarded dictator if you hire enough people to try and kill him – is oddball but strangely plausible. Credit too for Block coming up with a relatively unobvious ending. .

I will survive,

This is dF