You Don't Have to Be Crazy to Shape the World, But It Seems to Help (June Reading)
You may all mock me, because the first thing I finished in June was the Revenge of the Sith novelization (Matthew Stover). No real comments, other than noting extended universe nods (and I actually noticed. Paraphrasing other people's words, I have hit the rock bottom of embarrassment and am drilling for humiliation oil) and admitting I was still desperately trying to force a convergence on the movie in my head and Lucas' script and failing miserably.
The novelization is slightly kinder Padme's character than the movie, because Padme gets to do a little - a very little - backstage political maneuvering, and sort of encourage the nascent Rebellion. But she's still a fool for love whenever Anakin's around. Also, the opening battle takes even longer than it does in the movie. At least, it feels that way.
(Do you know what's kind of ironic? The natural pool of rebel talent is - the Separatists. Who many of those high-level someday-Rebel leaders just spent two or three years fighting. That this isn't noted at all in the movie or novelization is an interesting oversight.)
To expiate my trashy novelistic sins, I plunged back into Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder (Richard Dawkins), Dawkins' attempt to explain the beauty of science. Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy totally got that point across to me when I was young and feckless - okay, younger and feckless - so the book sort of undershot me*. Rainbow still a rainbow after Newton, gotcha. I'm still likely to remember this book fondly for Dawkins' candor about statistical analysis and errors: the common type 1 and type 2 and Dawkins' type 3 error, "in which your mind goes totally blank whenever you try to remember which [kind of error] is of type 1 and type 2." (Chapter 7, "Unweaving the Uncanny", p171 HC). So been there.
*KSR has a talent for describing things in ways that mesh with how I make the text visualize. Red Mars made me desperately want to see sunset on the red planet. "The Scientist as Hero" in Green Mars just makes me happy. Science = things making sense.
"However many ways there may be of being alive, there are almost infinitely more ways of being dead." (Chapter 8, "Cloudy Symbols of a High Romance", p206 HC)
I was pretty bored by the end, because I know this stuff, but if you were any sort of geek other than a science or science ficton nerd this might be a more enlightening and entertaining book.
Then the library called to say Reading Lolita in Tehran (Azar Nafisi) was on hold for me, and would I like to pick it up sometime in the next seven days? I went to a talk Nafisi gave last October, and decided I sort of had to read her book. I really liked it. Nafisi is an English professor at Hopkins, and loves the field so passionately even I begin to appreciate its merits. The narrative's discussion of what it's actually like to live under a crushing totalitarian regime is also enlightening.
Continuing my penance for my earlier novelistic sins, I jumped into Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA (Brenda Maddox). Franklin gets a fairly bum rap in The Double Helix, James Watson's account of the heady DNA days, and Maddox tries to redress things. (Am I the only person who thinks Wilkes suffered the greatest character assassination in tDH? There are parts that could totally be summed as, "and then Wilkes moaned at us about intolerable Rosy Franklin, and between groans Francis and I pumped him for information about the King's College DNA research. Especially Rosy Franklin's.") It's a reasonably good biography, to my inexperienced eye - Maddox is fairly harsh toward James Watson, but the book seems thoroughly researched, and it does not reduce people to caricatures. I think it could have been improved by a little more emphasis on how tough it was to be a working woman at that time - it's my observation that the first generation of working women developed a very defensive and bitter attitude while trying to earn the respect their male peers didn't give them. I think that if Franklin hadn't been involved in DNA, or if she hadn't died of cancer at 38, she would be remembered as a superior scientist and - I'm sorry - a horrible person to work with if she felt you were slighting her. I think not mentioning that reduced the bio a bit. I also think a little more emphasis on the importance of collaboration and building on previous efforts would have been useful - wait, stop, science rant.
The myth of the One is tough to break, but please. It's not how science works. Newton invented calculus, but Leibniz was working in the same field. If Watson and Crick had been smashed by a careless bus driver early in 1953, Linus Pauling would probably have come up with a double helix within a year or two. He'd already made one stab at a model, even if it was wrong. (And Franklin called him on it, in a letter. The woman did not lack for chutzpah when she thought she was right.)
The Great DNA Story is a lot more complicated than, "Watson and Crick discovered DNA was a double helix, and the scales fell from the eyes of scientists around the world." That's the easy, elementary school version. The middle school version is, "Watson and Crick correctly modeled the structure of DNA using experimental data from Wilkins and Franklin, especially Franklin's lovely X-ray crystallography data. Which they used without really asking her." The high school version is, "Watson and Crick created a correct model of DNA, opening the door for a comprehensive understanding of how the 'stuff of life' copies itself almost flawlessly. They built on more than 80 years of solid research in the physical and biological sciences, including the work of Rosalind Franklin."
Who said that he stood on the shoulders of giants? Newton? Einstein? Not a stupid or small man. That's science. It is a profoundly collaborative - even social - effort. You do experiments to generate data, interpret the data, and present your interpretations to your colleagues, who then either agree with you or tell you that you're dead wrong. And then everyone goes back to their labs for another round.
By Watson's own assertion in The Double Helix, the famous Cavendish duo were nearly beaten to the punch by Linus Pauling. Brenda Maddox's biography of Rosalind Franklin suggests that she was also on hot on Watson and Crick's heels. Lone geniuses do not have multiple competitors for scientific glory. Which says something about science: it's as collaborative as building a skyscraper! Researcher A finds something that Researcher B realizes is important for B's research, and they take advantage of the new information. This is why we have whole archives devoted to who cited whom. (Also, it makes it less onerous to trace the original research. I think. Scientific types, discuss amongst yourselves.) This is not an accident. Science does not work in isolation. It's as social as the social animals who practice it. One of my favorite examples of this is PCR- but that's for another time.
Thus ends the science rant. Back to the bio.
Maddox convincingly draws a picture of Franklin as a tough, complex woman - a meticulous scientist, a loving daughter and sister, a fierce opponent. I think some of her evocations of other personalities are a little weaker (at least, I occasionally forgot who someone was), but she does a great job of fleshing out a scientist who seems to have been at her most unhappy during the DNA years. I'd recommend the bio in a flash.
Work Clothes: Casual Dress for Serious Work (Kim Johnson Gross, Jeff Stone, text J. Scott Omelianuk, photos Robert Tardio): Useless fluff. I wanted a book on how to keep ironed shirts unwrinkled and what a basic work wardrobe should include, and I got fashion advice circa 1996. Pretty clothing pictures, but not a good resource.
City of Diamond (Jane Emerson/Doris Egan/tightropegirl): reread. Not quite as clever as I recall, but still good stuff. If you haven't read it, CoD is a fun little 500-odd page novel of political intrigue and romance as two religious city-state starships search for a McGuffin that will give the owner major points with the general population. This lets the good guys prove their goodness, the bad guys torture people and be self-serving, and the reader enjoy the ride. Stands alone well, for the first of a never-completed trilogy.
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (Susanna Clarke): Clarke revels in novel-expanding tangents and embedded stories. Somewhere within JS&MN's 782 pages, a really excellent 500 page novel is struggling to get out. There are fantastic moments, but the book entire needs someone to edit it with a machete. Possibly I missed some subtle, clever play on Regency novel conventions, but the first quarter of the book dragged. I was gratuitously slashing Drawlight and Lascelles to thicken the action and keep myself interested. I was wondering if Childermass was the Raven King in disguise. I was wondering if Norrell could really be as fusty as he seemed.
Once Strange is onstage, things move much more nicely. Norrell and Strange are foils, so this is as it should be. It's a shame it took Clarke 250 pages to even introduce the guy. And after that the magic system is clever in vague ways, the visual moments of magic at work are startlingly clear, and I like the novel much more.
But I still miss that editorial machete.
Finally, I skimmed large parts of Cyteen (C. J. Cherryh) after getting some paperwork from my mother. Cyteen has held a special place in my heart since the events preceeding the 2000 Chicago Worldcon, when I got to a stopping point, put the book down, and thought, "I'm not letting my mother screw up my Worldcon plans." And since then, it's been my dealing-with-craziness book. It's dense, distracting and speaks to my Inner Bitch. Other than that, almost everything that can be said about Cyteen has been said elsewhere: anyone who thinks it's a murder mystery isn't paying attention (and that said, we'd still like to know who the murderer was), intelligence vs. happiness, wow those are some screwed up interpersonal relationships (why don't more characters try to run away to Novgorod and get away from their parents?), character studies of Amy Carnath might be interesting. Nevertheless, comments encouraged, because I missed most of the rec.arts.sf.* discussions. Darnit.
The novelization is slightly kinder Padme's character than the movie, because Padme gets to do a little - a very little - backstage political maneuvering, and sort of encourage the nascent Rebellion. But she's still a fool for love whenever Anakin's around. Also, the opening battle takes even longer than it does in the movie. At least, it feels that way.
(Do you know what's kind of ironic? The natural pool of rebel talent is - the Separatists. Who many of those high-level someday-Rebel leaders just spent two or three years fighting. That this isn't noted at all in the movie or novelization is an interesting oversight.)
To expiate my trashy novelistic sins, I plunged back into Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder (Richard Dawkins), Dawkins' attempt to explain the beauty of science. Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy totally got that point across to me when I was young and feckless - okay, younger and feckless - so the book sort of undershot me*. Rainbow still a rainbow after Newton, gotcha. I'm still likely to remember this book fondly for Dawkins' candor about statistical analysis and errors: the common type 1 and type 2 and Dawkins' type 3 error, "in which your mind goes totally blank whenever you try to remember which [kind of error] is of type 1 and type 2." (Chapter 7, "Unweaving the Uncanny", p171 HC). So been there.
*KSR has a talent for describing things in ways that mesh with how I make the text visualize. Red Mars made me desperately want to see sunset on the red planet. "The Scientist as Hero" in Green Mars just makes me happy. Science = things making sense.
"However many ways there may be of being alive, there are almost infinitely more ways of being dead." (Chapter 8, "Cloudy Symbols of a High Romance", p206 HC)
I was pretty bored by the end, because I know this stuff, but if you were any sort of geek other than a science or science ficton nerd this might be a more enlightening and entertaining book.
Then the library called to say Reading Lolita in Tehran (Azar Nafisi) was on hold for me, and would I like to pick it up sometime in the next seven days? I went to a talk Nafisi gave last October, and decided I sort of had to read her book. I really liked it. Nafisi is an English professor at Hopkins, and loves the field so passionately even I begin to appreciate its merits. The narrative's discussion of what it's actually like to live under a crushing totalitarian regime is also enlightening.
Continuing my penance for my earlier novelistic sins, I jumped into Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA (Brenda Maddox). Franklin gets a fairly bum rap in The Double Helix, James Watson's account of the heady DNA days, and Maddox tries to redress things. (Am I the only person who thinks Wilkes suffered the greatest character assassination in tDH? There are parts that could totally be summed as, "and then Wilkes moaned at us about intolerable Rosy Franklin, and between groans Francis and I pumped him for information about the King's College DNA research. Especially Rosy Franklin's.") It's a reasonably good biography, to my inexperienced eye - Maddox is fairly harsh toward James Watson, but the book seems thoroughly researched, and it does not reduce people to caricatures. I think it could have been improved by a little more emphasis on how tough it was to be a working woman at that time - it's my observation that the first generation of working women developed a very defensive and bitter attitude while trying to earn the respect their male peers didn't give them. I think that if Franklin hadn't been involved in DNA, or if she hadn't died of cancer at 38, she would be remembered as a superior scientist and - I'm sorry - a horrible person to work with if she felt you were slighting her. I think not mentioning that reduced the bio a bit. I also think a little more emphasis on the importance of collaboration and building on previous efforts would have been useful - wait, stop, science rant.
The myth of the One is tough to break, but please. It's not how science works. Newton invented calculus, but Leibniz was working in the same field. If Watson and Crick had been smashed by a careless bus driver early in 1953, Linus Pauling would probably have come up with a double helix within a year or two. He'd already made one stab at a model, even if it was wrong. (And Franklin called him on it, in a letter. The woman did not lack for chutzpah when she thought she was right.)
The Great DNA Story is a lot more complicated than, "Watson and Crick discovered DNA was a double helix, and the scales fell from the eyes of scientists around the world." That's the easy, elementary school version. The middle school version is, "Watson and Crick correctly modeled the structure of DNA using experimental data from Wilkins and Franklin, especially Franklin's lovely X-ray crystallography data. Which they used without really asking her." The high school version is, "Watson and Crick created a correct model of DNA, opening the door for a comprehensive understanding of how the 'stuff of life' copies itself almost flawlessly. They built on more than 80 years of solid research in the physical and biological sciences, including the work of Rosalind Franklin."
Who said that he stood on the shoulders of giants? Newton? Einstein? Not a stupid or small man. That's science. It is a profoundly collaborative - even social - effort. You do experiments to generate data, interpret the data, and present your interpretations to your colleagues, who then either agree with you or tell you that you're dead wrong. And then everyone goes back to their labs for another round.
By Watson's own assertion in The Double Helix, the famous Cavendish duo were nearly beaten to the punch by Linus Pauling. Brenda Maddox's biography of Rosalind Franklin suggests that she was also on hot on Watson and Crick's heels. Lone geniuses do not have multiple competitors for scientific glory. Which says something about science: it's as collaborative as building a skyscraper! Researcher A finds something that Researcher B realizes is important for B's research, and they take advantage of the new information. This is why we have whole archives devoted to who cited whom. (Also, it makes it less onerous to trace the original research. I think. Scientific types, discuss amongst yourselves.) This is not an accident. Science does not work in isolation. It's as social as the social animals who practice it. One of my favorite examples of this is PCR- but that's for another time.
Thus ends the science rant. Back to the bio.
Maddox convincingly draws a picture of Franklin as a tough, complex woman - a meticulous scientist, a loving daughter and sister, a fierce opponent. I think some of her evocations of other personalities are a little weaker (at least, I occasionally forgot who someone was), but she does a great job of fleshing out a scientist who seems to have been at her most unhappy during the DNA years. I'd recommend the bio in a flash.
Work Clothes: Casual Dress for Serious Work (Kim Johnson Gross, Jeff Stone, text J. Scott Omelianuk, photos Robert Tardio): Useless fluff. I wanted a book on how to keep ironed shirts unwrinkled and what a basic work wardrobe should include, and I got fashion advice circa 1996. Pretty clothing pictures, but not a good resource.
City of Diamond (Jane Emerson/Doris Egan/tightropegirl): reread. Not quite as clever as I recall, but still good stuff. If you haven't read it, CoD is a fun little 500-odd page novel of political intrigue and romance as two religious city-state starships search for a McGuffin that will give the owner major points with the general population. This lets the good guys prove their goodness, the bad guys torture people and be self-serving, and the reader enjoy the ride. Stands alone well, for the first of a never-completed trilogy.
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (Susanna Clarke): Clarke revels in novel-expanding tangents and embedded stories. Somewhere within JS&MN's 782 pages, a really excellent 500 page novel is struggling to get out. There are fantastic moments, but the book entire needs someone to edit it with a machete. Possibly I missed some subtle, clever play on Regency novel conventions, but the first quarter of the book dragged. I was gratuitously slashing Drawlight and Lascelles to thicken the action and keep myself interested. I was wondering if Childermass was the Raven King in disguise. I was wondering if Norrell could really be as fusty as he seemed.
Once Strange is onstage, things move much more nicely. Norrell and Strange are foils, so this is as it should be. It's a shame it took Clarke 250 pages to even introduce the guy. And after that the magic system is clever in vague ways, the visual moments of magic at work are startlingly clear, and I like the novel much more.
But I still miss that editorial machete.
Finally, I skimmed large parts of Cyteen (C. J. Cherryh) after getting some paperwork from my mother. Cyteen has held a special place in my heart since the events preceeding the 2000 Chicago Worldcon, when I got to a stopping point, put the book down, and thought, "I'm not letting my mother screw up my Worldcon plans." And since then, it's been my dealing-with-craziness book. It's dense, distracting and speaks to my Inner Bitch. Other than that, almost everything that can be said about Cyteen has been said elsewhere: anyone who thinks it's a murder mystery isn't paying attention (and that said, we'd still like to know who the murderer was), intelligence vs. happiness, wow those are some screwed up interpersonal relationships (why don't more characters try to run away to Novgorod and get away from their parents?), character studies of Amy Carnath might be interesting. Nevertheless, comments encouraged, because I missed most of the rec.arts.sf.* discussions. Darnit.