Homeland

Posted on June 15, 2018 by smellincoffee

Homeland
© 2013 Corey Doctorow
400 pages

Two years ago, an innocent teenager was swept up on the streets and thrown into a blacksite prison run by the Department of Homeland Security. Initially a suspect for being near the scene of an explosion, Marcus Yallow’s refusal to unlock his phone or give DHS his access codes for his computer and email made him an object of special abuse for the people running this illicit site — and their abuse turned him into a revolutionary, determined to  throw a light on government malfeasance and restore privacy through technological and political means.   Now Marcus is approached by an old ally under tense circumstances, and handed a drive that contains a key unlocking 4 gigs of explosive information  — information that she wants shared if she happens to disappear.   Her paranoid proves to have been justified, and Marcus finds himself with a choice.  What dark secrets are buried in those 810,000 files — and what will happen when &; if he lets them lose on the internet?

Since the events of Little Brother,  martial law in San Francisco is over, but the city is still deteriorating. Unemployment, foreclosures, and bankruptcy plague the city,  even affecting Marcus’ own parents.  His new job  as the resident tech guru for an independent political candidate is one of the few bright areas on the horizon, but being linked to some new WikilLeaks-style dump might spell the end of that. Homeland addresses most of the same issues as Little Brother in the same way,  including the passages where Marcus explains his security precautions to the reader — how he partitions a drive, creates virtual machines to run programs without exposing his files,  that sort of thing. The greatest difference between Little Brother and Homeland is that in in the first book, Marcus  believes the problem can be solved politically, that the wrong people are in office. In Homeland, however, Marcus has seen the “good” president since elected prove himself an ally, not an enemy, of the surveillance & police state.  Although Marcus never in as dire straights as the first book — despite being  kidnapped by goons once, arrested once, and nearly stampeded several times as he participants in an Occupy San Francisco protest that grows ever-bigger by the day — this is still a thriller, one with some interesting side trails like the Burning Man event and a guest appearance by Wil Wheaton. As with Little Brother, the book has a couple of essays at the back — this time on the importance of activism, and for the same reason that Marcus continues struggling even though there’s no winning. To do nothing is to cede the field to complete subjugation and defeat.

If someone were curious about this series, reading only Little Brother would be safe. Homeland does teach its readers to put not their trust in princes, a lesson anyone should take to heart.  I’m personally ten years sober from believing in any politicians. There are a few I admire — chiefly, Rand Paul, who doesn’t just criticize FISA and unlawful drone assassinations, but has actively filibustered against them — but even if he were put into the office of president I would expect him to be immediately warped by it.

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Rebel Dawn

Posted on June 14, 2018 by smellincoffee

Star Wars Han Solo Trilogy Vol III: Rebel Dawn
© 1998 A.C. Crispin
400 pages

Rebel Dawn is the final volume in the “Han Solo” trilogy, a volume that stands more as an immediate prequel to the original Star Wars movie than a novel solely about Han.    At its beginning, Solo is on top of the world;  his new ship has him ahead of the other smugglers,  he can’t walk into a room without gathering female attention, and he’s raking in the cash. At its end, Solo has  been betrayed and unwittingly duped, made into an outcast with a bounty on his head, desperate for anything that will pay off his enemies and keep him alive.   And in the middle…well, that’s mostly someone else’s story.   Rebel Dawn takes side trails in previous novels and brings them front and center here – -chiefly,   competition between two major Hutt clans that threatens to turn into civil war, and Han’s old flame uniting disparate groups into one Rebellion — one whose seed money can be had by sacking the place where she was once a slave, the place where she and Solo’s love was as they fought an insidious slave racket, one that used ecstatic drugs and religion to keep captives working of their own free will.  But Brea loves the fight more than she loves Han, and that will put him into a seedy cantina looking for fares.

Rebel Dawn conlcudes a series which is mostly light-adventure, not to be taken too seriously. The writing definitely had weaknesses in the form of awkward dialogue.  I enjoyed the character of Brea — Han’s old flame and the leader of the rebellion — the most, and Crispin’s treatment of the Hutts and Boba Fett were also appealing.  Imagine Jabba the Hutt as a sympathetic character!

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The Hutt Gambit

Posted on June 12, 2018 by smellincoffee

The Han Solo Trilogy, Vol II: The Hutt Gambit
© 1997 A.C. Crispin
352 pages

At the end of The Paradise Snare, Han Solo was a heartbroken man moving on with his life, doing his best to forget  about the woman who left him with a “Dear John” letter as he entered the pilot academy and the service of the Empire.  As The Hutt Gambit opens, readers realize how short-lived both Solo’s tenure in the Imperial Navy and his determination to avoid romantic entanglements were: not only has he been cashiered from the service and blacklisted from commercial piloting, but he can’t move to a planet without falling in love again.  Turning again to that faithful standby, a life of crime, Solo begins working for the Hutts and acquiring the money and reputation he needs to make it as as first-rate smuggler. Too bad the Empire has decided to slag his and other smugglers’ favorite retreat, Nar Shadaa.   The Hutt Gambit serves a steady course of light action-adventure that builds Solo’s character, introducing him to Jabba, Lando, the Falcon, and even Boba Fett, and ends with a desperate attempt by the smugglers to stave off an Imperial attack fleet. Fortunately it’s one of older ships, left by a man who is both hesitant to commit genocide and very susceptible to bribes.  I thought the ending was contrived, to say the least, but enjoyed the characterization given to both the Hutts and Boba Fett, who — in a nod to Return to the Jedi — does a low pass over the Sarlaac pit while visiting Tatooine, unwittingly walking over his own grave.

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Little Brother

Posted on June 9, 2018 by smellincoffee

Little Brother
© 2008 Corey Doctorow
380 pages

Following the destruction of the Bay Bridge in San Francisco, a nightmare begins for a high school student who is scooped up by police in the aftermath. Not only has one of his friends been seriously wounded, but Marcus’  presence near the bridge and his suspicious computer equipment make him a person of interest to the authorities, doubly so when he refuses to unlock or decrypt his devices and information for them.  If he’s innocent, he has nothing to hide, right? But Marcus has been rebelling before this,  mostly to elude his school’s draconian security measures. and his initial stubbornness turns into revolutionary resolve when he realizes  that the authorities are not merely mistaken: they are malevolent. He seems doomed in the police state that San Francisco has become overnight, where the demonization of any dissent alienates Marcus from his family and friends,  but there are other allies waiting in the wings, and they and his own resolve will spur him on.

So begins Little Brother, a man vs state story that combines the alienation and surveillance of 1984 with modern cybersecurity tools.  At its best, Little Brother is a technologically savvy thriller,  a defiant championing of civil liberties amid the war on terror,  and a call to arms to readers to get serious about learning to defend themselves against abuse.  This continues after the novel: there are several essays included after the story on the nature of security. At its worst,  the arguments are one-sided, with only one attempt at mutual understanding.  The security apparatus of the State is so extensive, however – both in the story in real life – that I can’t seriously begrudge Doctorow just wanting to fire up righteous indignation.  Easily my favorite aspect of Little Brother was the pervasive cybersecurity information: Marcus doesn’t just do things, but as a narrator he’s conscious that he’s speaking to an audience, and explains how encryption or whatever is he’s doing at the moment works.  Winston’s intelligence as cyberpunk rebel extends not only to tech, but to the nature of resistance: he realizes that certain tactics will only strengthen the government’s hand against him, so the trick is to find ways to keep them off balance — sometimes by appearing to retreat.

Little Brother is an exceptional read, a smart thriller that takes its teen readers seriously. If you are concerned about the status of civil liberties across the world, the surveillance state,  or curious about how tech can both amplify and mitigate the problem, it’s one to take a look at.

The story’s use of a couple of young dissidents who fall in love underground reminded me strongly of a song called “By Morning” by folk-punk songwriter Evan Greer. He wrote it in tribute to several young people who were imprisoned on charges of terrorism for  harassing an animal testing lab. The song begins at 1:15.

And if they come for us by morning, with that “knock knock” on the door —
I’ll hold you a little closer as they reach the second floor
And if I have to give my name, know I won’t be giving yours
I’ll run my hands through your hair, say it’s them that’s really scared
Because they know love is stronger than their bars can ever be.


Related:

  • 1984, George Orwell. Little Brother is commonly referred to as “1984 for the 21st century”, which is a gross exaggeration. Even so, Little Brother makes numerous hat-tips to Orwell’s dystopia beyond the surveilliance state:  one of Marcus’ online pseudonyms is pronounced “Winston”, for instance. 
  • No Place to Hide, Glenn Greenwald.  The story  of Edward Snowden and the surveillance apparatus of the NSA. 


Posted in Politics and Civic Interest, Reviews, science fiction | Tagged , , , , , | 6 Comments

Replay

Posted on June 8, 2018 by smellincoffee

Replay: The History of Video Games
© 2010 Tristian Donovan
501 pages

Video games emerged in the late 20th century as a completely novel form of entertainment.  Replay recounts the history of how programming experiments and text-based adventures were transformed first into a new hobby with widespread juvenile appeal, then a serious platform for storytelling, and then ..became ubiquitous.

This Replay is comprehensive, covering consoles, arcade machines, and home computers; it is also international, examining games/platform developments in Japan, Korea, Russia, France, and England. Donovan moves chronologically through the development of early computers and game programs associated with them,  their spinoff invention of gaming consoles, and the establishment of video games as art and entertainment. By the early nineties, video games encompassed such a wide variety of genres that the author examines the development of different genres — role-playing games, first-person shooters,  simulations, etc —  as they emerged and grew popular. He pays special attention to particular machines and games that transformed the industry —   Ultima and GTA3,  the Atari and the Wii, and also includes information on business rivalries (Nintendo v Sega) and the drama of software firms falling out with one another. It culminates with the arrival of games on smartphones, though that era — the current one — is only introduced, not delved into itself. Many more games and platforms are addressed in the book, of course, and it is appended with an extensive list of influential titles.

While Replay is a straightforward history of how the software and hardware developed,  it also steps back and looks at the larger picture, pointing out how the games grew with their users: successive platforms advertised themselves to teenagers and adults, trying to shed the image of videogames as merely for kids.  Gaming in general has gone back and forth on plot vs action:   while one might dismiss DOOM and Wolfstenstein 3D as primitive shoot-em-ups  that were later surpassed by shooters with more developed plots, like Half-Life,  in reality DOOM’s designers  were rejecting a tendency in earlier games to take themselves too seriously by returning to sheer, unbridled action. DOOM guy  didn’t have a personality: he existed to mow down demons from hell. Users also grew with their games: part of the interest for game designers was that they could rewire players brains by putting them into positions and confronting them with choices that they would never encounter in their real lives.  Will Wright, for instance, co-founded a company whose original intent was educational games — but he did so through “software toys”, games that were fun, but also taught players how intricate systems like an antbed or a city functioned.  Wright’s company promoted a feature of PC games that made them especially popular: customization.   DOOM allowed players to create their own maps, but even before The Sims had shipped, Maxis had already made tools available for people to create their own clothing, wallpaper, and floors in the game. Later the game was opened to custom objects (for the homeowner who wants a decorative cannon, say), and both the original game and all of its successors have promoted user-created content through their Sims Exchanges. Customization isn’t merely about expanding the game:  as a teen, I marveled at the stories of people who became interested 3D modeling because of their tinkering with The Sims mods or crafting Civilization III units.  Donovan mentions that games have also become the stuff of independent creative ventures: people use video taken from gameplay to create stories, and function as “actors” in the game to get the shots they need.

While its subject is games, Replay is fairly serious about the subject — it’s not a “fun” read like Masters of Doom, but those who have a real interest in games as an industry and hobby will appreciate its heft. I noticed minor errors sprinkled in (a reference to “Richard” Heinlein as a prominent SF author, say), but nothing too substantial.

Related:
Masters of Doom, David Kushner

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Ready Player One

Posted on June 6, 2018 by smellincoffee

Ready Player One
© 2011 Ernest Cline
354 pages
Audible presentation read by Wil Wheaton,
runtime 15 hr 46 min

Who knew that School House Rock could save the world?  When an eccentric genius dies and leaves a will laden with eighties pop culture references, the entire world is called to an epic adventure. The mission: to find an Easter Egg within his creation, the world’s most popular massively multiplayer experience, the Oasis. Completing the quest — deciphering clues to find keys that will lead to other clues and finally to the prize itself — will earn the winner half a trillion dollars as well as control over the game itself.   The premise is intriguing; the execution is a glorious triumph of geek culture starring a poor orphan who unwittingly becomes a global hero.

We enter a future where the ‘real world’ is increasingly dismal, decaying under  a Great Recession that has lasted decades, largely fueled by…the lack of fuel, because the oil age is over. Poverty and overpopulation are both extreme,  forcing people to live in cobbled-together skyscrapers made of stacks of trailers. That’s where our main character Wade Watts is from.  But there is an escape — the Oasis, a kind of communal holodeck in which different planets allow people to have adventures in different kinds of worlds: there are fantasy environments for swords-and-potions questing as well as science fiction ones in which players might do their adventures from the Starship Enterprise. Wade, for instance,  goes by the Oasis name of Parzival and does his questing in either an X-Wing or Serenity. There are user-created worlds, too: imagine the Oasis not only as a mass gameworld, but one like the internet which is constantly being expanded by its users.  People lose themselves in it utterly through haptic suits that allow them to ‘experience’ what they’re seeing in-game; one character doesn’t leave his real-world apartment for over six months, because he doesn’t have to. He can order real-world food delivery through the Oasis.

Although there is appeal in seeing the technological developments of this world, Ready Player One’s attractive genius lays in the sheer abundance of geekery. It’s incredible that so many references to various classic video games, eighties movies and music, and science fiction can be worked into to so small a book without becoming distracting, but it somehow works. One minute players are dancing to eighties music, the next they’re being assaulted by a hit squad with laser weapons and then rescued by a wizard named Og the Great and Powerful. This book isn’t just fun: if you’re a gamer who also shares some of the creator’s interests (and they are many), it’s a ball.   The quest’s actual demands and latent demands are both incredible:  not only does a player have spend years watching eighties movies, listening to music, and playing games like Zork , but in the actual quest they might be called on to  navigate through a TRS-180, then jump through a movie poster and play the lead role in Wargames, reciting every line perfectly.  And the author isn’t just dealing with the top-heavy cream of geekery,  Star Trek geeks and LOTR readers:  his references are obscure. At one point a character searches a house for boxes of Captain Crunch to blow the toy whistle buried inside at the exact pitch used by John Draper to fool AT&T’s phone system into doing his bidding. There’s even a School House Rock moment, in which singing the opening bars of the song is crucial. (If you’re unfamiliar with SHR, check Youtube. It’s basically the series that taught me the Preamble and what a preposition is.)

Beyond this, Ready Player One is also a tightly plotted adventure novel. The main character is not alone with his friends in seeking the Egg: a powerfully evil corporation is also in the hunt, using all of its resources to bribe and threaten players into helping them, and their malicious will isn’t just effected in-game. The main character spends half the novel in hiding after an attempt on his life,  at its darkest point — when the corporation is seemingly at the threshold of winning — he has to execute a real-world plan to stop them from taking over.  Throughout the book, Klein subtly plays with the fact that the Oasis is both attractive and insidious: it offers players unlimited experiences at the cost of their real-world lives, a fact not lost on the characters. Doubtless many readers of the novel will share that experience, in part, having spent hours in virtual environments with friends, so much so that the game map seems to be a physical place in our minds. (Andy Weir, author of The Martian, wrote a short story called “Lacero” based on RPO’s Oasis, and wells more on the insidious aspect.)

Although I’m admittedly an ideal audience for this book —  the only references that went by me were the anime/manga/Transformer ones —   I’ve rarely been as enthralled by a novel as I have been with this one. This is definitely one to buy so I can re-read!

A note on the audiobook:  you get to hear Wil Wheaton refer to himself as “an old geezer”.  Wheaton is as usual a solid voice actor, and his presence adds geek appeal to a novel already brimming over with it. The only hitch is that some things don’t lend themselves well to being read, like chatlogs or a scoreboard.

Related:
Night of the Living Trekkies, Kevin Anderson.
Redshirts,  John Scalzi. Read by Wil Wheaton.
Masters of Doom, David Kushner.  Read by Wil Wheaton.

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The Paradise Snare

Posted on June 3, 2018 by smellincoffee

The Han Solo Trilogy: The Paradise Snare
© 1997 A.C. Crispin
338 pages

Han Solo easily has the most personality of any of the original trilogy’s characters, but where did he come from? A.C. Crispin’s Solo Trilogy was the first to try and answer that question. The Paradise Snare opens on a young orphan impressed into a gang, who has been brought up hustling and conning wealthy marks — but longs to escape, and be a pilot.  Just getting away from the gang is a great challenge, and there’s no easy path forward. Solo seems to jump from the frying pan into the fire into a swollen pit of molten lava,  eventually angering even the Hutts. Happily A Paradise Snare is Solo’s book, with no early appearances of other major characters — and Solo himself is a work in progress. The Paradise Snare takes a hopeful young escapee and throws him around like a rag doll until the more cynical gunslinger of A New Hope seems to taking shape before us. Crispin’s approach in working Solo gives readers an idea as to why Solo is so easy with Wookiees, and why he is loathe to trust others — especially a woman who’s he’s falling for.  The Paradise Snare is a solid first step in the trilogy.

Interestingly, Crispin also wrote a background novel for the character of Sarek, from Star Trek TOS and The Next Generation.

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9 Dragons

Posted on June 2, 2018 by smellincoffee

9 Dragons
© 2009 Michael Connelly
544 pages

Harry Bosch doesn’t know who they are.  He doesn’t know what they want.  If they’re looking for ransom,  he doesn’t have money, but he does have is a very particular set of skills, acquired over a long career, skills that make him a nightmare for people who might have abducted his daughter to threaten him away from a case involving a Hong Kong gang.  If they don’t let his daughter go, he will look for them, he will find them,  and he will kill them. And he’ll still close his case, because that’s what Harry Bosch does.  He takes down baddies and then he sits in the dark and listens to jazz.

9 Dragons is an unusual Harry Bosch novel in that it begins as a police procedural before quickly becoming an international action-adventure thriller. Usually, Harry is dealing with pedestrian scum of the earth — rapists, robbers, etc —  but this time his investigation of an apparent robbery and homicide turns him on to a Chinese gang, one that imperils his ex-wife and daughter living in Hong Kong. He’s definitely out of his element, away from his usual resources and forced to rely on people he would otherwise distrust: like an Asian Gang Unit cop who talks too much and  his ex-wife’s mysterious Chinese valet.  Although the book is bookended as a procedural, with respect paid to the chain of evidence, laws, that sort of thing, the great in-between is a rip-roaring  manhunt as Bosch tears through Hong Kong’s underbelly looking for his daughter — and adding to the pile of bodies he finds with his own freshly-minted ones. It really isn’t smart to kidnap a street detective’s daughter and try to sell her for organs, it really isn’t.

I enjoyed 9 Dragons well enough as the action thriller it was,  especially with the little cameo played by Mickey Haller (Connelly’s other novel series character), but the intrigue of the initial case was quickly sidelined by the action itself. Still, Connelly kept my attention, and it can’t be said that he gave Bosch a quick and easy shoot `em up solution:   Bosch has to surrender his pound of flesh before all is said and done.  The greatest appeal of this novel for me — as someone who always imagines Liam Neeson in the role of Bosch — was the ability to quote Taken while reading it.

Harry Bosch. He likes brooding, jazz, and fighting with FBI agents over jurisdiction. 

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How Microsoft’s Mogul Reinvented an Industry

Posted on June 1, 2018 by smellincoffee

Gates: How Microsoft’s Mogul Reinvented an Industry-and Made Himself the Richest Man in America
© 1994 Stephen Manes and Paul Andrews
560 pages

 

I recently watched Pirates of Silicon Valley, a questionably-acted movie based on the rise of  Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, and found myself curious about the facts. Did a young Bill Gates really race bulldozers and ram his buddy’s sportscar?   Gates is an astonishingly detailed biography of not just Gates himself, but of the computer industry as it developed throughout the seventies, eighties, and early nineties. The book culminates with the release of the then-revolutionary Windows 95, an OS that merited even Rachel and Chandler from Friends pitching it.  The evolution of computing hardware and software overshadow Gates himself, not surprising given that developing software was his singular obsession from high school on.   This mix of biography and technical history makes itself more attractive as computer history than personal, but it still presents a more interesting Gates than “Brilliant, Nerdy Billionare”.  He really did race bulldozers, and they weren’t his.

Gates is not a rags to riches stories, as young William Gates started off fairly comfortably: his parents sent him to a private school that exposed its older students to computer programming, and one of Gates’ classmates there would become his partner in founding Microsoft later on — Paul Allen. Both were enthusiastic members of a student club called the Lakeside Programmers Group,  who were allowed free computer time — back when computer users could be billed on how many seconds of computer processing they used —  in  exchange for helping debug programs and and machines.   Being both self-confident teens and curious about what they could do, Gates and his friends also found ways to cheat the billing cycle outside their arrangement — and when Gates took on the challenge of creating student schedules,  he somehow found himself the only boy in a class otherwise filled with girls.

Even before they were out of high school, Gates and Allen were making a name for themselves as programmers, and exploring the possibilities of this for their future. Their first huge coup was writing a language to use with the first consumer-marketed microcomputer, the Altair.  The Altair was amazing popular considering it had to be assembled, component by component, by the buyer, and that the finished product was initially only capable of blinking its lights. Programming was done not with a keyboard, but by flipping toggle switches.   Although Gates and Allen did attempt building their own computer, one pitched at municipal governments for managing traffic,  their talents lay in software.  Gates was both obsessive and aggressive:  he had no objections to working eighty hours a week trying to iron out bugs, and expected that from whomever he hired later on.  Gates hated to lose, and if that meant selling products he hadn’t even built yet– hadn’t even planned yet —  to prevent someone else from making the pitch, he would.  (Hence the reason for those eighty hour workweeks..)  Gates’ success came not just from his gifts with programming language, but because he and his partners were so intent on making sales: one of Gates’ tricks was to use one product to sell another.  His dream was a computer in every home, on every desk, running Microsoft software. It didn’t matter who the manufacturer was: Microsoft did work for both IBM and Apple, as well as smaller computer companies which have fallen away, and Gates’ goal was to create a hardware ecosystem where everyone was using a common software, with the effect that devices would be cross-compatible.  A monitor made by one manufacturer — IBM, say — would be compatible with a computer made by another firm, like Hewlett Packard.

Gates  delves into an astonishing amount of detail both on the technical hurdles and on the business deals that Gates made: there’s an entire chapter on a font battle with Adobe, for instance.  Readers do see the man behind the machine, however: Gates the crazy-competitive, Gates the parsimonous executive who regarded hotel rooms and first class as decadent,  Gates the teenage millionare, Gates the spectacularly reckless driver, Gates the bellicose boss who liked people who stood up and yelled right back at him.    Although Gates is not necessarily the ideal book for someone merely curious about the man, its depth of technical and business history would recommend to those interested in the  microcomputer revolution.  Oh, and the bulldozers? Gates literally saw them sitting in a rural construction yard, discovered the keys were in them, and decided to figure out how they worked. Then he and a buddy drove them around and raced, because that’s what you do when you’re twenty and it’s 3 am.

Related:
Pirates of Silicon Valley, trailer below
CYBERPUNK: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier

“I got the loot, STEVE!”
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Stuff Matters

Posted on May 29, 2018 by smellincoffee

Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World
© 2014 Mark Miodownik
272 pages

Stuff Matters begins with a photo of the authorhaving coffee on the roof of his London flat, the table before him scattered with papers and the unremarkable clutter of everyday life.  That clutter, however, is composed of stuff that makes modern life unimaginable without it.  Stuff Matters scrutinizes each object in turn, and is thus a bundle of microhistories with  strong scientific undercurrent.  Mark Miodownik combines a history of how a material like porcelain came into being with an analysis of why they work — why glass is transparent, why stainless steel can effectively repair itself,  how prosthetics can fool the body into thinking they’re just part of the gang.  Miodownik often adds a personal touch, as he has a genuine obsession with materials science: if he’s stabbed or thrown through a window, his first thoughts are about the feel and wonder of the materials he’s passing through (or which are passing through him).   He would share Carl Sagan’s conviction that the beauty of a living thing — in Miodownik’s case, just a thing — is not the atoms that go into it, but the way they’re put together.  After all, diamonds and graphite have the same atomic core, being made of pure carbon, but they’re fundamentally different substances because of the way their carbon atoms are connected. 

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