Dirac Angestun Gesept

I’ve discovered a number of my favorite authors by finding them interesting, either as panelists at cons or participants in various online arenas. The latter dates back to my time on the FidoNet SF echo, followed by mailing lists, rec.arts.sf-lovers (I wasn’t around USENET when it was still net.sf-lovers), and the current crop of USENET groups, blogs, and the like.

John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War is sort of an odd hybrid of the two. I heard about the book first at a con (the Tor “upcoming stuff” session at Worldcon), liked the sound of it based on their description, and then started reading Whatever and By The Way…and I figured that anyone who can pump out that much blogging goodness on a daily basis and still keep it interesting could probably also manage a good book, especially with editors and whatnot involved.

I wasn’t disappointed.

Everyone compares it to Starship Troopers, including the author. It’s an homage, though, not a pastiche, and despite Scalzi’s not having read The Forever War, it’s also reminiscent of that, as Cory Doctorow’s blurb would have it. I also thought some of the background and attitude echoed James Alan Gardner’s League of Peoples books (which now need to go on my re-read stack). Nothing close, but the tone and feel were similar enough that if you like the Gardner, try this; if you liked this, try Expendable and see if you like Gardner.

I don’t generally buy hardcovers, for the form-factor issues more than the price, but I’ll be picking up Old Man’s War as soon as the mass-market paperback arrives, or an e-book in a format suitable for my Palm (that portability thing, y’know). Sadly, Tor seems to have had sufficiently low sales of the books they did make available electronically that they’ve stopped bothering; I can understand why, but I don’t have to like it.

This is the first in Elizabeth Moon’s new series of not-quite-military SF. Ky Vatta has been kicked out of the Academy and sent home to take a job in her family’s transport company. Her first assignment is to take a ship to the breakers, making a couple stops along the way; after all, there’s no reason to pass up extra profit (however small) if the ship’s going that way anyway.

As you would expect, the “milk run” doesn’t stay that way for long (it’d be an awfully short book if it did), and she soon finds her ship, her crew, and herself in a somewhat more fraught situation than she expected.

There are definite echoes of Moon’s Esmay Suiza books (young woman needs to use her wits and skills to save the day) but not so many that it’s in any sense a rehash. Ky Vatta is a different character, with different skills, in a different situation. Moon also avoids David Weber’s infodump/weapons catalog style, focusing more on the characters and situations than the hardware.

I very much enjoyed Trading In Danger and Marque and Reprisal, the sequel, is on my to-be-read list. Highly recommended to fans of the Esmay Suiza books, or those looking for something a little different from the run of the mil-SF (pun intended).

I haven’t read it yet, but the Wired News interview makes it sound pretty interesting. It’s apparently an expansion of Andy’s folklore.org site, which I have enjoyed immensely.

I originally encountered Andy’s code before the Mac even shipped; I was an Apple II owner, and learning 6502 assembly via the Call-A.P.P.L.E. user group magazine. One of the code examples was a neat routine Andy had written to print text in a particularly elegant way: you put a subroutine call to his routine, then immediately afterwards included the text string you wanted it to print. It popped the return address off the stack, incremented its way through the string, then pushed the address after the string back on before returning. This effectively hopped the flow of control over the string transparently!

The best quote from the interview:

WN: How does writing compare to coding?

Hertzfeld: I would say the key difference is the rigor. Writing you can get away with being sloppy and your book doesn’t crash.

Patrick Smith, author of the Salon column Ask the Pilot and the book of the same name, is appearing at the Somerville Public Library, West Branch (in Davis Square) Thursday night at 7 pm.

As his web site puts it, “Patrick Smith will answer your questions and sign copies at the Somerville Public Library (West branch in Davis Square) on Thursday, November 4th, 2004 at 7 p.m. He will also accept your canned goods, donations, and adulation.”

I’ll be there; I enjoy his column and like the book, even though some of the answers recapitulate stuff I knew already. My favorite is probably his column on the pedantry of airline names.

The National Book Festival is October 9th, in Washington, DC.

Very tempting…even if the PDF map has a location marked “Word’s Are Your Wheels” [sic]. Three cheer’s for literacy!

And it looks something like this:

Note the “Cetagandan Order of Merit” necklace, which includes her various award pins (Hugo nominee pins, et cetera); there are also close-up pictures of it on the artist’s site. My shots don’t really do it justice.

I have some other pictures from the Worldcon-so-far up as well.

BoingBoing recently had a pointer to Ewan’s quest to hit every Zone 1 stop on the London Underground.

This reminded me of the best publisher of books on the Tube and other rail and metro systems, Capital Transport. They have several books done in cooperation with London’s Transport Museum and most of their catalogue is available at the LT Museum Store.

My favorite of their books is Metro Maps of the World, which has maps of all the world’s major urban transit systems, with notes on their history and a frontispiece showing the systems laid out as if they were stations on the London Underground.

There was also a poster of this map available from the LT Museum Shop itself, though it doesn’t seem to be on their web store; I don’t know if it’s still available; I can’t find the book there either, at the moment.

UPDATE: Guardian review of the book, found via a link from Going Underground’s blog.

Paco Underhill explains the mall.

I recently read his Call of the Mall and found it amusing and full of “yeah, I’d noticed that, but never thought about why it was like that” insights. For example, why are perfume counters always near the main entrance in department stores? He asserts that it’s a hold-over from the days when it covered the smell of horse manure wafting in from the street. (I’m not sure I buy that explanation; it smacks a little too much of the sort of folk-etymology explanations of word origins that wind up being too good to be true.)

Other observations he makes are on firmer ground, however. Why are mall entrance hallways always full of such low-value stores? Where did all those kiosks come from? Why aren’t there any stores men care to visit in most malls? (The CambridgeSide Galleria is an exception, having a Sears, a Best Buy, a Borders, an Apple Store, and Cambridge Soundworks; it also has the usual round of mall stores like Victoria’s Secret, Pac-Sun, Abercrombie & Fitch, Benetton, and Ann Taylor.) What possessed the architects and designers to make such an incredibly bleak exterior? Underhill explains it all.

I’ve requested his earlier book Why We Buy from the library; if it’s even half as funny and interesting as Call of the Mall I’m sure I’ll enjoy it.

Underhill will be appearing at the Harvard Book Store in Cambridge (MA) on Wednesday. I’ll probably be there.

The surprise British best-seller by Lynne Truss is, quite simply, the punctuation pedant’s delight. It (humorously) covers such topics as the history of the Apostropher Royal; the misuse of the comma (particularly in the titular joke); the wonders of the semicolon, which was invented by Aldus Manutius the Elder; and, of course, the misplaced comma that was left in the British government’s “dodgy dossier” on Iraq.

Emerald City did a nice review of the book as well; if you buy it, use their referral link, perhaps.

(The US edition is reported to be due in April.)