C. J. Cherryh: Cloud's Rider

0.3

Chris Hibbert

C. J. Cherryh's Cloud's Rider is the successor to her Rider at the Gate, which I reviewed last year. This book was far more psychological than the previous, delving deeply into the reactions of all the characters to the dark telepathic sendings of the rogue nighthorse stalking the village.

In Rider, Danny Fisher teams up with Cloud, one of the telepathic Nighthorses on Finisterre, where a small human outpost seems to have been abandoned on a remote hostile planet. The humans who remain cloistered in the villages try to hide from the power of the ambient telepathy of the native fauna, and as a result are unable to exploit the resources of the world. The riders have allied with the nighthorses, which enables them to travel more freely, which makes them a crucial lifeline connecting the remote villages. But there's a lot the humans don't know about the planet.

In Rider, we see that nighthorses can sometimes go rogue (in that case because its rider died in an accident) with disastrous consequences for an entire village. In the end, Danny Fisher agrees to escort the survivors, the three Goss children, Carlos, Randy, and Brionne. Brionne was at the center of the tragedy, having been the focus of the rogue's attention, but at the divide between the two books, she is in a coma.

Cloud's Rider starts out with the quartet struggling up a mountain road in a blinding snowstorm. They end up walking for a couple of days, dragging Brionne behind them on an improvised travois. They had intended to stop halfway up the mountain at a permanent rider's shelter with provisions that ought to be enough to sustain them for quite a while, but the snowstorm causes them to miss the shelter and end up in Evergreen village--not large enough to stand up to the sendings of the rogue that seems to have followed them up the mountain.

The bulk of the story takes place in Evergreen, where the politics is intense among the villagers, the miners, the preacher, and the doctor who adopts Brionne. Some of the villagers quickly recognize that the now abandoned village at the foot of the hill represents a major source of wealth for whoever can claim it when spring brings an end to the unrelenting winter blizzards.

But the focus is on how Danny, Carlos, Randy, and Brionne react to their circumstances and the malevolent presence in the telepathic ambient. As villagers, Carlos and Randy would normally be expected to be oblivious to the rogue's sendings, but they were in Tarmin when everything came crashing down and took a long trek in the presence of Cloud, so they know it's all real. Randy is drawn to the nighthorses and envies the romance of the riders' way of life. Carlos just wants to get back to Tarmin and make use of his blacksmithing skills. Brionne's outlook has been warped by the sendings of the rogue, and her delusions and paranoia are affecting the villagers around her.

Once again, Cherryh has done a masterful job of developing characters whose differences and similarities are highlighted by the juxtaposition with alien thoughts and alien approaches that are perfectly consistent and highly intriguing. I very much enjoyed this story sequence.

John C. Wright: The Golden Age

0.3

Chris Hibbert

John C. Wright's The Golden Age didn't work for me, though it would seem to have a lot of things in its favor. It's a futuristic high-tech story with a focus on personal enhancement and social interaction technology and little in the way of weapons or overt conflict. There is little in the way of visible government and secures cooperation with the society's mores via social pressure. Since everyone has access to largely unlimited resources, anything short of the ultimate form of ostracism leaves a lot of room for many variations in behavior and personal expression. I think the beginning of the story failed to grab me because of the reluctant hero angle. The protagonist, Phaeton, takes a while to admit that there's a problem and he has to take the responsibility to figure out what happened and why he's not getting what he wants even if he doesn't understand how he could have caused the problem.

Eventually Phaeton realizes that his memory may have been altered, and begins to suspect a vast conspiracy to silence him for something he doesn't remember doing or wanting. He bucks a lot of social pressure to investigate his past and figure out what he must have been trying to accomplish and who would have been trying to stop him. I thought the evidence he found seemed flimsy in the context of the story-with even his ostensible friends urging him to accept the world as it seemed to be, his constant bucking of the system seemed more like a habit of being contrarian than a dogged determination to find the truth. Of course, according to Wright's story, Phaeton was correct to trust his instincts, and there really was a vast conspiracy to suppress the evidence he'd discovered, and the entire society was at risk. But like Cassandra, Phaeton is doomed to be doubted, shunned, and ignored. In a society with serious life extension this is a long-lasting problem. The novel ends inconclusively, to be continued in a later volume.

I liked the technology and the way the society was organized. But from Phaeton's viewpoint, it's presented as an instrument of the society's downfall. No one is in charge, so no one is responsible for battling the external existential threat. The lack of centralized monitoring or control enables Phaeton to continue his investigation, and to amass enormous tools and weapons, but his refusal to cooperate with others leaves him ultimately very weak, and unable to recruit allies to his project.

Alistair Reynolds: Pushing Ice

0.3

Chris Hibbert

Alastair Reynolds's Pushing Ice is a great story, weakened slightly by following the first contact story that justified the initial adventure to a lot of inter-species intrigue. The adventure is a good psychological thriller with lots of interactions among the crew of an asteroid miner that gets unexpectedly diverted to an interstellar chase in the wake of Janus, one of Jupiter's moons that suddenly leaves orbit and heads for the stars. This is a great premise that justifies a good amount of conflict and chaos, as they move from studying Janus, to realizing the implications of effectively being towed at high speed toward distant stars, to finding a way to survive on the surface of a not-quite dormant alien ship.

The crew goes through internal struggles over whether to abandon the chase while there's still some hope of returning to earth, which involves both politics and some violent attempts to overthrow the captain. The hard feelings left behind color all the crew's later attempts to survive long term starting with supplies meant for a much shorter trip. They spend their time studying the star they're heading for and the moribund uncrewed craft they're tethered to.

Eventually they arrive at an immense structure that provides room for ships from several different species. The Fountainheads are highly advanced and provides rejuvenation facilities that restore several of the human crew (including one who had been in cryonic suspension for most of the trip). The humans get conflicting advice from different alien groups about who they can trust and who is dangerous, and not surprisingly, different factions decide to trust different groups. Eventually, Janus itself is the target of several alien species who expect to be able to reap large energy resources from the craft. I thought the interactions with the aliens and the human political machinations occasioned by the aliens to be much less interesting and more poorly motivated than the first half of the story, concerning how the human crew got along and what they had to do to survive the long trip. The first half definitely made the story worth reading, though.

Peter Leeson: The Invisible Hook

0.3

Chris Hibbert

Peter Leeson's The Invisible Hook is a fun read with some serious points to make about economics. Leeson is a George Mason economist who has been a fan of pirate literature and lore most of his life. At some point he realized that he knew enough about the real history of pirates, particularly the ones that have been romanticized in our literature, to say something interesting about how economics drove and shaped them. Of course this also gave him an excuse to spend more time exploring pirate mythology and a way to get academic credit for it.

Leeson's most interesting finding is that the pirates often had written constitutions and elected their captains and other officers, and could remove them when the crew pleased. He also investigates the feedback mechanisms and social forces that reinforced this system and kept it stable. Some of it has to do with the fact that Piracy was a cooperative enterprise, and that pirates had no recourse to the law to enforce their rules. This leads to a need for agreement among the crew on how they are to operate, and consensus that breaches can be punished. The modern pirates off Somalia or South East Asia have a different set of contingencies, since it's easier for individual pirates to quit without endangering their own lives or those of their mates.

A lot of what Leeson talks about falls in the area that economists call signalling, by which they mean actions taken by an agent to convince someone of their likely behavior. The fundamental question about signals is what keeps others from copying the signal in order to fool the signal's target. Leeson puts the skull and crossbones and stories about pirate viciousness in this category.

Pirates cultivated an image of being ruthless killers who would never-the-less not physically harm victims who gave up without a fight. Their goal, of course, was to reduce the amount of fighting they had to do. So they did their best to convince honest seafarers that if you fought with pirates they would treat you harshly. The question this raises is why didn't privateers (who had government charters to act like pirates) also fly the jolly roger, and Leeson's answer was that it was too costly for them, since flying the pirate flag led to easy convictions for being pirates, even if you have the government charter. So Pirates competed for a rough reputation, and their competition had to convince their prey to surrender in more costly ways, since their charters proscribed torture and wanton violence.

There's a lot more than this in the book, and just enough asides of "Avast" and "Aargh" to raise an occasional chuckle. If you still retain your youthful enthusiasm for pirates, and are interested in the economic way of analyzing behavior, this is an entertaining approach to the subject that is also educational.

Outrageously Inhumane

Ken MacLeod has a short post on his recent attendance at a con marking the recent Apollo anniversary. Ken's highlight was a talk by a self-professed techno-utopian, who said, among other things "The idea that we should use less energy is outrageously inhumane and regressive" and "Most reycling schemes are feel-good rather than do-good, condemning us to pre-industrial, manual rooting about in rubbish." Ken has good sense and good tase. That may be why I like his science fiction.

On "Organizational scar tissue"

John Cook blogged about stupid policies within organizations, in response to a quote he saw:

Policies are organizational scar tissue. They are codified overreactions to unlikely-to-happen-again situations.

John mostly agreed and pointed out that policies sometimes arise for good reasons, though the reasons may be hard to reconstruct later. I want to take the conversation in a different direction: How do you design an organization so that the policies can change if the circumstances have changed?

There are policies designed to handle unlikely events and policies designed to handle everyday events. Both kinds can atrophy over time and no longer be relevant. The ones for unlikely situations are harder to set up time-outs for, but the ones for everyday use are the more costly when they outlive their usefulness.

The hard part of the situation John described is figuring out a different approach that leaves you more flexibility. (If you've built a Maginot line, as in his metaphor, you're pretty much stuck.) So the challenge is designing an organizational culture that can identify outmoded policies and change or discard them.

In a small, agile organization I once worked in, we developed a checklist for use by the project manager (me!) during the release process. The reason was that there were things I occasionally forgot to do that came back to bite me or my boss, the CEO. The rule about the checklist was that it was for me to fill out on my own responsibility. There were items that asked for initials from other people, but I was allowed to ignore them on my own initiative. We updated the checklist often enough that I could remove useless items whenever I noticed that their relevance had disappeared.

For a larger organization, you don't want an individual to make those decisions unless there's a way for them to know the original reason for the policy. So writing up the rationale along with the policy makes it possible for the person on the spot to know whether they should ignore or attempt to change the policy. In a small agile organization you don't want the overhead of having to write up the rationale every time you add a process step, but if the organization grows, you'll need the rationale. It's a dynamic tension that organizations have to learn to adapt to as they grow.

ADDED During the ensuing discussion on The Endeavor, someone pointed to NetFlix' internal presentation on their corporate culture. Very impressive. If I wanted a job, that's the kind of company I want to work in.

Charles Stross: Saturn's Children

0.3

Chris Hibbert

Charles Stross's Saturn's Children depicts a post-humanity future in the solar system; all the characters are various forms of robots, and many have recognizable and sympathetic feelings, goals and aspirations. The humans died out a few hundred years ago but neglected to think about how their posterity would get along in their absence.

Stross has created a very interesting society here. Many of the robots (the focal characters, particularly) were designed to be personal servants to the humans, and their drives are very much shaped around the desires of their absent masters. Others, less constrained, use these drives to control and shape them. The basic conflict is over whether it's possible or desirable to bring back humans. If this could be done and they could be managed, then whoever controlled the humans would have immense power because of the drive to serve the humans that is built in to so many of the robots.

The background is fascinating in that any robot that was expected to work in the presence of humans was designed to have strong strictures to honor and obey them, which leaves them in a strangely constrained state now that the humans aren't around. All the apparatus of government is still in place, and no decisions can be made or changed without humans to vote or make an administrative decision. So the government runs on auto-pilot, and many projects that made sense--terraforming to create new habitable territories--are senseless when the robots can adapt to harsh environments much more easily. And robots that are more able to bend their internal definitions of what the humans wanted are less constrained.

The basic conflict sheds light on thoughts about freedom and free will. Freya, the main character, was designed as a sex-bot, but she was first activated long after the humans had died out, so her drive to serve them is unrequited. Her design gives her some special abilities (cosmetic enhancement gives her an innate talent for disguise and her adjustable high-heeled feet (as Laurie Anderson sang) come in handy in combat and escape. But most of the time, she's a free agent, other than having to serve employers and mentors. Self-ownership is a concrete idea in this society. All the robots originally had owners, but the ultimate owners are now gone from the scene, so each robot is owned by some corporation. Being self-owned means controlling the corporation that owns your body. Unfortunately, some of the robots are rich enough that they can sue others into bankruptcy, and buy their corporations, so there's no safety in owning your corporation. In addition to the slave chips that get used occasionally, ownership conveys control by allowing one being to assert "control level nine" and require absolute obedience of another. Of course, if the subservient one can convince herself of doubts about the authenticity of the ownership, she can escape the fetters.

Overall, this is a fun romp. Stross displays a strong sense of humor, and Freya is a joy to watch. Many of the service machines and tools are aware and interactive, and Stross is quite inventive in giving them interesting drives and quirks. The political implications are interesting, but mostly not the focus of the story. It calls itself "A Space Opera" and it is that, with the addition of interesting personalities and new viewpoints on how our robot progeny will live and think. Saturn's Children is a finalist for the Prometheus Award. The freedom orientation is too subtle to win in what has turned out to be a year with some very strong candidates. It's a lot of fun to read none-the-less.

Dean Keith Simonton: Greatness

0.3

Chris Hibbert

Dean Keith Simonton's Greatness is an attempt to catalog all the influences that allow some people to have a larger effect on the world than their fellows. It takes a more wide-ranging and less data-driven approach to the question than Charles Murray's Human Accomplishment. I thought it was less successful, mostly because there were too many sections that were speculative, not well grounded, or inconclusive.

There were, of course, sections that contained important insights, but if one part in three, scattered evenly throughout a 500 page book is unfocused material, the useful portions are harder to identify and lose much of their impact. The most important conclusion I found in the book is that great results are the consequence not just of intelligence, insight, or drive, but that perseverance matters, even for people with huge natural talents. Simonton shows that even for the giants who are widely acknowledged to have remade their fields and outshone everyone else who has worked in the same fields, their masterworks appear in about the same proportion as for others who ended up contributing less overall. Their secret was no secret: they merely worked harder and longer and produced more. Their natural talents sometimes give them a slightly higher batting average, but overall productivity of great works and long-lived impact is a result of starting early and working more hours over more years than their rivals. Great achievers all have mediocre and uninteresting works mixed into their corpus, it's just not so noticeable given their best output. You'll find similar statistics for how long after someone started working that they produced their best work for the great and the near-great. The great simply find more time to be productive, and continue longer. It's possible that early productivity and continuing results enable the greatest producers in any field to continue contributing longer, which adds to their records, but single-mindedness and continuing focus is also crucial.

Simonton covers topics including intelligence, personality, birth order effects, genetics (mostly focusing on the extent to which greatness runs in families), pathology, and what makes some periods more fertile than others. The lack of mathematical models makes most of his speculation hard to trust as he seldom compares the statistics of the successful with those of their surroundings. If you don't know how often familial connections should arise by chance, it's hard to conclude that any particular number of examples demonstrates the existence or lack of any effect. Overall, there were lots of interesting facts and factoids, and the writing is engaging, but it's hard to take many of the conclusions very seriously as anything more than anecdote.

Neal Stephenson: Anathem

0.3

Chris Hibbert

Neal Stephensonhas written another fascinating, grand, opus, Anathem. He's back to writing actual science fiction, and it's pretty impressive. It's somewhat of a surprise that the book wasn't broken up into a few smaller books, since it consists of a sequence of mostly separate adventures by a single hero, each explored in depth. (Actually, now that I look, it breaks easily into three segments of about 300 pages each.) The story starts with Erasmus as a young avout at a sanctuary for intellectuals. The first third of the story takes place as Erasmus is learning the avout way of thinking, and figuring out his place in his world. Stephenson does a good job of introducing in a concrete format several deep philosophical concepts that the reader will want to understand in the final section of the story. The second part of the story takes Erasmus and some of his fellows on a journey around Arbre, their world, after they are expelled from the sanctuary as a result of an emergency in the outside world. I'm not going to talk much about the final section, since it would spoil the story to know what the conflict is about, but lets just say it's a continuation of the journey to further and stranger places.

Erasmus' community is part of a system of monastaries spread around the world that serves to bleed off some of the presure for relentless progress from their society. The outside world still has an irregular cycle of boom and bust, but the mathic communities are isolated and serve to preserve the learning through the tough times. They have a very long view of the changing times--in fact Stephenson developed the ideas while working on some projects for the Long Now Foundation. The communities only have contact with the outside world once a year, and internally, the concents are further divided into subcommunities that only have external contact every decade or century. The more isolated each group, the more deeply they delve into various abstract and theoretical ideas. The less isolated groups treat learning almost as a competitive sport, and their different colleges emphasize different approaches to learning.

Erasmus and his cohort explore the nature of our universe, and some interesting philosophical issues that turn out to be relevant for the finale of the story. The characters explore higher math, philosophical issues such as personal identity, and quantum physics. I found the story very engaging, but I'd expect the depth and detail to turn off many readers. Stephenson is well in his element, exploring many issues in the back story while keeping an interesting story going in the foreground. The foreground story has love and loss, battles and chase scenes, extraterrestrials and high tech, and plenty of fun.

Anathem was nominated for this year's Prometheus award, but isn't a finalist. Libertarians will find it interesting for its exploration of some of the issues of governance of separated societies, and self determination. But it doesn't have the immediate political connection of some of this year's other nominees. I found it to be a fun read, and enjoyed the characters and situations as well as the exporations of philosophy and math.

2009 Hellyer Park Bike Racing

I know I've mentioned my interest in the bike racing down at Hellyer park before, but it's time (apparently past time) for the annual update. They'll be running the Friday night race series in south San Jose on June 19, July 17, August 14, and September 4 and 18. Racing starts at 7pm and includes a variety of events: sprints, points races, miss & out, and scratch races.

There's also a special event (American Velodrome Challenge) June 26 and 27. The Friday night session (also starting at 7pm) includes Miss & Out, Kierin, Madison, points and scratch races. On Saturday, they'll have two sessions. The morning session lasts from 9:30am to 1pm, and the evening session starts at 6pm. The morning seems to be all sprints, while the evening has sprint finals, keirin, miss & out, scratch and points races.

Michael Flynn: January Dancer

0.3

Chris Hibbert

Michael Flynn's The January Dancer is a finalist for this year's Prometheus Award because of Flynn's focus on the corrupting influence of the prospect of absolute power, and some of the characters' attempts to avoid it. Along the way we get a fascinating interstellar romp through a new way of navigating wormholes and get to visit a couple of worlds with some interesting variations on ways of organizing anarchic societies.

The story advances in two parallel streams, which eventually converge. The framework comes from an itinerant storyteller (a seanachy) gathering information about a story she has heard from an old worn-out man who is familiar with a lot of the details. These intercalary chapters alternate with the real action. It starts out with Captain Amos January and his small, but varied crew getting stranded on a small, unpopulated planet off the main trade routes. They know how to forage for the fuel they need without help, but find a treasure room with an inscrutably flowing artifact before they escape the planet.

Their dangerous flight from the planet leaves the ship damaged enough that Captain January must pledge the artifact as collateral to pay for repairs when they reach a civilized port. While they make a cargo run so they can afford to redeem the artifact, rumors start to circulate that the artifact has mysterious powers corresponding to an old legend about an alien mechanism that gives the holder powers of persuasion.

The January Dancer takes us on a tour that includes rebellion, piracy, imperial ambition, quiet guard duty, superhuman secret agents feared and obeyed by everyone, a quiet ungoverned unconquerable planet, and a hero willing to fore-go absolute power because of his concern for what would happen after his custodianship eventually ends: He can see that the artifact will spend more time in the hands of ambitious immoral men than in the care of those with a conscious.

The pacing is good, the characters are strong, and the scenery is varied without being too rushed. We get to spend the most time on New Eireann, a hard-scrabble planet that had hired a commercial firm to

manage their government contract. [The firm] sent in an honest administrator. By all accounts he ran a clean and honest administration though at first the Eireannaughta didn't realize that because they didn't know what one looked like. When they did, they revolted, because an administration that won't take bribes generally won't hand out favors, either.

That firm is replaced with the Interstellar Cargo Company (ICC), which is more amenable to skirting the edges, but seems to do a good job of managing commerce, keeping goods flowing efficiently among all the reachable stars.

The groups Flynn keeps an eye on include January's crew, the government and rebels on New Eireann, and the Hounds' Watch (the previously mentioned small corps of near-supermen responsible for ferreting out momentous plots and keeping the peace). Each has its internal conflicts and clues to add to the developing plot.

<SPOILER>I found it interesting that the ICC is depicted as being accepted by everyone for having cleaned up and regularized commerce while making a reasonable profit. Everyone seems content with this, until someone learns that they've discovered a way of circumventing the wormholes everyone uses, giving them a near instantaneous communications path. For some reason people consider this an unfair advantage, rather than a normal commercial development that benefits all of their customers. In most fiction, the opprobrium would have started with the fact that they were making money without doing anything more than ensuring that goods moved smoothly between planets. The fact that the disapproval didn't start until people found out that they had a secret technology was a little surprising.</SPOILER>

Most of the book is taken up with the adventuring, exploring, and intrigue. We don't find out until fairly late in the story what the artifact is good for, and only one of the characters thinks about any consequences beyond either ensuring the bads guys don't have it or trying to obtain it for themselves. The fact that his concern is expressed after the fact and not telegraphed to the readers or any other characters reduces its impact as a choice. It's a fait accompli by the time we hear about the issue, so there's no time to consider the issue. I thougth this reduced the dramatic impact considerably of what was apparently the core conflict in the story.

Terry Pratchett: Going Postal

0.3

Chris Hibbert

Terry Pratchett's's Going Postal is another in Pratchett's Discworld series. I've only read a handful of these stories, but they've all been fun, lightweight fantasies that explore greater and lesser societal issues in a skew universe.

In this story, Pratchett looks at competition in business and the effect of the competent entrepreneur. Okay, you'd be unlikely to see it that way if you read the book, but those are the themes that I extracted from the story. Lord Vetinari wants to rejuvenate the Ankh-Morpork postal service, and he needs a motivated, creative manager to manage it. He plucks Moist von Lipwig from the scaffold and makes him an offer he can't refuse. Moist turns out to be very creative; his history as a schemer and con artist having prepared him to read people on the spot and make up convincing stories which he can fill in the details of later when he figures out which direction he's going to take the scam.

In this case, Moist is going up against the corrupt monopoly that runs a private semaphore-based messaging system that is closer to a telegraph than a message carrier. The Grand Trunk also has labor relations problems, since their lack of attention to maintenance issues has led to a surfeit of injuries and deaths among the employees. Moist is able to out-compete the Grand Trunk in order to regain the customer base the official post office lost long ago and use an occasional bit of sabotage to reduce the Grand Trunk's ability to stay in the game.

In the end, Moist resurrects the post office by acting as the nimble entrepreneur (with a side of underhandedness) in competition with an entrenched bureaucracy. He has enough obstacles (decades of undelivered mail piled up in the post office, attacks by the competition) and humanity (pursuing a surprising love interest) to be a sympathetic character. Pratchett turns the competitive environment on its head, but I think most readers will see that it's normally government monopolies that are resistant to change, and the story shows that it's the stodginess and resistance to change that lead to poor service. If the competitors have the ability to try new things (normally, not including violence and sabotage), the customers come out ahead, and competition improves all of the enterprises touched by it.