Book Review: Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang

This collection of stories has two big award-winners. I was floored by one (5 stars!) and only merely impressed by the other (3 stars). The other stories fall in between those extremes -- which means the collection as a whole is impressive. Chiang has a gift for taking an original, plausible, intriguing idea to its logical conclusion -- then blowing past mere logic to fully realize the implications, both scientific and personal. His science is prescient and creative, but it's in combination with its effects on people that it really shines. Each story is at least as good as a good sci-fi novel. And "Story of Your Life," the basis of Arrival, is one of the best stories I've ever read. This is my fifth time experiencing it (third time reading and have watched the movie twice), and it opens up new depths of meaning each time. This time the theological implications fell out, and the deep connection between mother and daughter. The other award-winning story, "Hell is the Absence of God," on the other hand, took an excellent idea but showed how science takes religious concepts and ossifies them into idols, and I think it showed a lack of theological sophistication, which would have been fine if that had been the point. I still think it's far better than most sci-fi depictions of faith, but it felt as wrong and dystopic as The Hunger Games. God is not like that, and this story contains really good reasons why God is not like that. Even that of course has distinct value. Each story is intellectually provocative and this book by itself makes me want to read more short stories. Chiang's newly released book is going in my queue now.

Book Review: The End of Certainty

This is the book by Ilya Prigogine that I will send people to. It's genuinely for a general audience and seems to have been influenced by the success of A Brief History of Time. I actually think this book is more interesting than Hawking's, but I'm a chemist, so of course I would. Even here, fascinating connections are made and not fleshed out: I'm particularly intrigued by connections to music, and his frequent insistence that non-equilibrium dissipative systems allow matter to "see." Most of his argument from On Being and Becoming is recapitulated here, and its later publication date allows for more interaction with the scientific community (although he doesn't really engage with critics significantly, I guess when you've got a Nobel prize you don't worry about that so much?). This is a book with an argument that catches fire and makes connections you never saw coming. Time itself is reformulated. I haven't had time yet to be completely convinced, but I do want to think more about how the cosmos is musical from the description Prigogine gives.

Book Review: From Being to Becoming

This seems like Ilya Prigogine's post-Nobel victory lap book. It claims to be written for a general audience, but, no, it's not. Prigogine is challenging the very way physicists and physical chemists do calculations, and that's not going to be accessible to a general audience. This book lays out his case in one place for chemists and physicists, and it's probably not enough to convince skeptics, but it worked for me to see a bird's eye view of his argument from outside the field. I'd say it requires at least a BS in Chemistry or Physics to read this book and recommend his other books for people who actually want to read an argument rather than deduce it from equations and figures.

Book Review: Circe by Madeline Miller

Madeline Miller is in the same league as Eric Shanower (Age of Bronze) and Kate Tempest (Brand New Ancients). Circe's perspective as a mother is the most compelling part of this book. The parts about her relationship with her parents and siblings, and about her sorcery, all feel like something I've heard before, but her relationship with her son feels urgent and vital. Maybe I've just had too many isolated underdog stories lately, but I'd prefer to know more about her positive relationships than her negative ones. Of the other characters, Odysseus is particularly well drawn: it's a long time before he's named, but it's clear he's a magnetic and brilliant (and cunning) personality. Telemachus is fascinating, too, and is very different from his father. Come to think of it, the brief role Icarus plays in the story is another standout moment, so parents and children are a strong theme here. The story itself avoids the problems of pacing that go with a story of exile, although the conclusion feels faded, just like the myths do at that point. I prefer Tempest's mix of today and yesterday, and I think myth isn't quite represented by Miller the way it really works, but as a novel set in a mythical context, this worked.

Book Review: One Day in December by Josie Silver

In my quest to read interesting books off other people's best-of lists regardless of genre, I recently listened to One Day in December. I don't know what section it would be in at Barnes and Noble, and that's probably for the best. It's a story about a woman who sees a man at a bus stop, falls in love, then a few months later her best friend brings him home as her new boyfriend. This could definitely go either way, and it definitely does. Some scenes verge on plot contrivance and romance-novel purple prose. However, those scenes are few and far between, and there's more originality and strong writing here than I expected. One of the strengths of the book is Silver writes (mostly) convincingly from the man's perspective too, and flips between the two perspectives expertly to hide things and create tension as well as to reveal. Most of the central plot points are driven by character and logical progressions rather than coincidence. I especially like how the conflicts between characters are set up with that inevitability that you see coming but hope won't happen nonetheless. It's hard to write a story in which a relationship is developed for more than a decade, revealing, advancing, putting up barriers, people changing, etc. That's something only a book can do convincingly, and I think this book does that. Silver is also aware of ALL the movies and tropes (Love Actually is referenced in the first few pages), and while I would prefer it challenges more of them, I think it at least captures the zeitgeist so that someone could analyze and challenge the tropes from the outside (don't get me started on the Girardian rivalry of the best friend duo). So, yes, I can see why this was on someone's best-of list. Though it's not in the center of my own Venn diagram, it had its moments and told its story well.

Book Review: The Stone Sky by NK Jemisin

No spoilers here, but it's nice to be blown away again. I found the second book in this trilogy underwhelming, but the third one is outstanding but in a different way from the first. If the first book plunges you into three converging stories about a post-apocalyptic world with an allusively thermodynamic kind of magic, then the third book finally shows you the pre-apocalyptic world with an allusively magical kind of science. (Note that you could actually shift the labels "magic" and "science" and get almost the same sentence I just wrote.)

This third book is apocalyptic in the real, deep sense of the world, that of pulling back the veil to show you that an apparently wonderful world is built on exploitation and cruelty. There's a real question of whether this world is even worth saving. The harrowing bloody foundations of the world cut deep and linger long after the story is done. In this dark context, the simple acts of love do stand out (though I wish there was more of it, but I wish that in real life too).

Halfway through, Jemisin writes "If you love someone you don’t get to choose how they love you back." If the book had reflected or expanded more on this astounding quote, if it had been set in a world in which that truth was baked into the bones of its universe, as I believe it is in OUR universe, this book might have climbed up to one of my all-time favorites. As it is, it follows the strands in its own sort of fallen, silent universe and adds everything up well.

Even now I ask, is this a sci-fi or fantasy novel? I continue to think of it as sci-fi, but in practice it ends up working like fantasy. And the stubborn insistence of my brain to call this sci-fi may account for my misgivings about the world. I'm frustrated by the ways in which this world is impossible, because it's so realistic in so many other ways, and its revolutionary message is diluted by the fact that it's ultimately a dualistic, even Gnostic world, and it is definitely not our world. Because I don't think creation really works that way deep down, I can't completely enter into the world or its characters. Because the way the world works is a fantasy, I think I must classify this as fantasy deep down. (Though there are some interesting parallels in the ways in which Jemisin and James S.A. Corey both embrace a sort of panpsychic universe when explaining consciousness. I don't think that works in the end but I absolutely allow that it's the second-best philosophical option over simple materialism.)

This gives enough detail and history that I think some day I'd like to sit down and compare this series, The Expanse (by Corey), and our actual universe, to show just how I think our universe is truly "very good" relative to the other options and philosophies ... but that will have to wait for another day. For today, I will affirm that this book is very much worth the hype, even if I don't know exactly which shelf to put it on.

Book Review: Tiamat's Wrath by James S.A. Corey

My spoiler-free review can be summed up in one image: I received this 531-page book on paper at a very busy time in life, and yet somehow still finished it in less than a week. It's a satisfying continuation of the story of The Expanse, and keeps the pace up after a previous book that was a little slow. It also sets up Book #9 very nicely. The science in the sci-fi reveals a few more things about the overall arc of the story, and I like how they do it. Even the aliens are super-weird but in a way that's consistent with quantum physics and what we know about the universe. The mystery of consciousness is one of the fundamental themes, and now that I see where they're going, I admire what they've done (though I disagree on philosophical and theological points). Not to mention one of My Favorite Things, convergent evolution, makes more appearances than it has since Book #4. This book is about the underdog vs. the (sort of) evil empire and there's two indelible scenes I will remember long after I've put down the last book: the empty space ring scene and the woman vs. machine scene both wowed me as much as anything in any of the books. More than anything, I found myself admiring the craft of how the authors dole out information: they out-splash the best final splash pages of comics in chapter after chapter. Even as they telegraph the future to the attentive reader, it doesn't feel predictable, it feels like you're in on the joke. This story has a fantastic shape so far, and even if they don't quite stick the landing in the upcoming ultimate volume, The Expanse is going to be one of my all-time favorite epics.