The year in books #19: The City & The City

It is not at all unusual for a novel to be as much about its own setting as about the characters within it, and because of the genre's focus on exploring novel concepts, the science fiction genre is particularly rife with books in which the planet, nation or city in which they take place is not the background but the entire point. Some classic examples include Herbert's Dune, Niven's Ringworld and Varley's Titan, which are also some of my all-time favorite novels. It amused me to realize that, of the six novels nominated for this year's Hugo award, three of them are of this type, each of them taking place in a city that is itself one of the most important characters in the book. In Palimpsest, the city that lends the book its title is both the motivating force behind, and the setting of, the great majority of the action. Steampunk Seattle is the setting of Boneshaker, as well as the only thing in the novel with an interesting personality. And my nineteenth book of the year, China Miéville's The City & The City, takes place in the sister cities of Besžel and Ul Qoma, brilliantly rendered and utterly believable invented cultures which provide a fascinating backdrop to a murder mystery that is, if not as brilliantly constructed as the setting it is solved in, certainly interesting enough to keep the pages eagerly turning.

Like Palimpsest, the discovery of Besžel's and Ul Qoma's nature is one of the great delights of the novel, and I'll not ruin it by delving too deeply into the book's premise. What I will say is that that premise seems, on the face of it, laughably ridiculous. What Miéville does with remarkable mastery is to present that premise in such a natural, fluid and consistent way that the reader is able to utterly suspend disbelief, and to craft a very entertaining story on the basis of that premise.

Most important to me, The City & The City goes a step beyond crafting a clever world and an entertaining story. Miéville has things to say, and he says them well. Things about the nature of the Other, of the malleability of human perception, about the nature of culture, about divisions between rich and poor, even about peace in the Middle East (I cannot be the first reader to see the novel's setting as an allegory of Palestine, can I?). The reason I am drawn to science fiction is its exploration of the human meaning of new ideas. The City & The City is not properly science fiction, but it does the same work using different tools. If science fiction is a study of the social impact of technology, then The City & The City might be best described as social fiction, exploring the social impact of societies themselves.

I can definitely recommend this one to you - barring a remarkable performance by Wake, the only Hugo-nominated novel I haven't read yet, The City & The City is my favorite to win the prize. It's only about a micron ahead of Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl, though, which I'll likely review next so that I can explain why I want the prize to go to Miéville.

The year in books #18: Boneshaker

The second Hugo nominee I read this year was Cherie Priest's Boneshaker. I was hugely excited to read this book, a steampunk alternate history of mid-19th century Seattle containing zombies and airships - a Hugo-nominated novel built entirely of awesome. How could you go wrong?

As it turns out, Boneshaker manages the remarkable feat of turning a premise that had me gripped by the story before I'd even opened the book into one of the least interesting stories I've read in years. The world itself is wonderfully constructed, with a backstory that riffs delightfully on Seattle's fascinating history and explains in a tolerably plausible way why the city is now a walled-in, zombie-infested hellhole ruled by a mad scientist. Unfortunately, by the time the book actually begins, all of the interesting things seem to have long since taken place.

The tale at the center of Boneshaker is of a mother attempting to rescue her teenage son from the above-mentioned hellhole, assisted by a series of bland characters whose behavior seems driven much more by the needs of the narrative than by their own motivations. The zombies spend the vast majority of the tale lurking threateningly in the background, then prove themselves utterly uninteresting when they do get the chance to chew on the occasional character or provide one of the better-armed side characters with a chance to get splashily violent.

The story itself is also horribly unreasonable. I am willing for the sake of a story to accept any premise, no matter how unrealistic or unreasonable, but the events that flow from that premise must do so naturally. In Boneshaker, the zombies are relatively limited in number (I think the number quoted somewhere was 6,000), can be killed by bullets, and are unable to climb. The humans are armed not only with guns but with an EMP-like device that knocks the zombies senseless for a brief time. And in all the years that Seattle has been infested by these horribly dangerous creatures, no one ever thought to either (a) sit a few guys on the rooftops with rifles to take potshots at them or (b) lure a few hundred zombies at a time into a swarm, stun them, then kill them in great numbers while they lay twitching? Also, as I mentioned above, none of the characters' behavior seems consistent with what we are told about their circumstances. The Seattlites' anger toward the mad scientist who 'rules' is rooted in the fact that... he does things for them so that they are always indebted to him? And they're so horribly angry about this that they're ready to stage an almost instantly successful rebellion, but for some reason restrain themselves until the rebellion becomes useful for the purposes of the novel that they find themselves in. And... and... and...

I was horribly disappointed by Boneshaker and am frankly confused as to how it made it to the Hugo short list. I feel like it was nominated on the strength of its premise rather than on the actual story it contains, which utterly fails to compel.

The year in books #17: The Little Prince

I somehow managed to make it through more than twenty-seven years of life without ever reading Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's classic novella The Little Prince. I finally sat down with Rose's copy a few weeks ago and was astounded that I'd been missing out on such a gem for so long. The tale follows the titular diminutive royalty as he sets forth from the tiny asteroid where he makes his home, finally ending up on Earth, where he encounters the narrator, an aviator stranded in the desert following a crash landing. En route, the prince experiences a series of morally-edifying encounters in the style of Gulliver's Travels with the inhabitants of other asteroids: the king who is careful to give only commands that were going to be followed anyhow; the businessman who wants to establish ownership of the stars so that he can use them to buy more stars; the drunk who drinks to forget the shame of his drunkenness. On Earth, his conversations with the narrator are both thought-provoking and wonderfully sweet.

Ostensibly, The Little Prince is a children's book, and I can absolutely imagine a small child loving it, but a great deal of the story deals with philosophical concepts like the nature of property, the meaning of life, the definition of love, that make the story worth a read for adults, as well.

Something that amused me terribly when I started reading The Little Prince (in fact, seeing the cover was what did it) was that I immediately recognized it as the basis for a cartoon I watched as a small child. All I could remember of the series was that it featured a boy who lived on an asteroid and traveled about with his bird-like companion by catching shooting stars in a butterfly net. And that I had an episode on cassette tape at one point; my father, wanting to nap for half an hour and then go to work, told me to wake him up when the episode was done. I, being a thoughtful boy who wanted to let his daddy sleep, pressed rewind at the end of every scene and watched it a second time. Daddy was not pleased. In any case, now that I knew where the cartoon came from, I was very quickly able to track it down on YouTube for a quick blast of nostalgia. Unfortunately, like most cartoons from my childhood, it doesn't hold up well.

Top Secret America

The Washington Post is running an amazing series on the explosion in clandestine information gathering that has taken place since 9/11 in the United States. I've only had a chance to scan a few of the articles and graphics they've put together (I'm at work), but this is a massive undertaking that's so far occupied a team of reporters for two years, and what I've seen of the reporting is very impressive work.

The year in books #16: Palimpsest

As a sub-quest for this year's 50 Book Challenge, I have undertaken to read all of the novels nominated for this year's Hugo Award. The Hugo is the most prestigious award for science fiction, created in 1955 to fill a glaring hole created by what was most likely a copy-editing error in Alfred Nobel's will (he clearly meant to write "for advances in science fiction"). During the ten (dear lord) years that I spent attending university, I had so little money and time to spend reading books of my choosing that I've felt detached from the world of sci-fi, and picking up the six best-received novels of the last year felt like a good way to get back into the genre I love so much.

The first of this year's nominees to hit my bedside table was Catherynne M. Valente's Palimpsest, which immediately and then repeatedly blew my mind. Holy crap can the woman write! Palimpsest's hauntingly evokative prose is so gorgeous that I repeatedly found myself reading passages three and four times just to savor the language. Writing so powerful could easily lift a mediocre story into the realm of readability, but the fairytale that Valente weaves is itself an incredible piece of work.

I find myself at this point, as so often when reviewing good stories, deeply reluctant to spoil the fun of discovering the world in which this book takes place, because so much of the fun of such a novel is in the "ah hah!" moments that punctuate it. Let me reveal as little as possible: Palimpsest is about four people from all around the world (one, to my delight, from Kyoto) who stumble into the secret of the cryptic, magical city from which the book derives its name. The four are a locksmith, a train enthusiast, a book printer and a beekeeper, and the exploration of their personalities and the manner in which they experience and influence the city of Palimpsest is as fascinating as the city itself.

Palimpsest shares with a great many novels I've read the hook of the unknown; as you read such books, it is your curiosity about the world that provides suspense, and the revelation of aspects of the world that provide the pleasure of the reading experience. A great many such books are disappointing for various reasons: often, the reveal is unbelievable or not compelling, or the story is driven so much by its world and so little by its characters that it simply ceases to be interesting once the mysteries have been exposed. In Palimpsest, though, the reader is drawn in as through an onion, with each layer exposing another, the mysteries explained in rapid, believable and satisfying succession, but always leaving the reader primed for more.

I have only one complaint about this book, and it's so minor and nitpicky that I'm slightly ashamed for even calling your attention to it. One of the characters, as I mentioned above, comes from Kyoto, and visits Ginkakuji, commenting on the appearance of the silver coating the pavilion's walls. Unfortunately, Ginkakuji rather famously has no silver on its walls; its name ("Silver Pavilion") comes from the fact that its builder intended to have it coated in silver when he planned it, but that plan was never carried out. The occasional such error is unavoidable and completely forgivable, and I mention it only because I can't think of a single other thing to decry in the book's pages, but having visited Ginkakuji any number of times, I found myself jerked quite entirely out of the story for a few moments by the error.

Anyway, I can wholeheartedly recommend this book. Go read it. Seriously. It's good.

The year in books #15: Der Richter und sein Henker

The first book I read during my absence was Der Richter und sein Henker (available in English as The Judge and His Hangman or together with Suspicion in the recently-published Inspector Bärlach Mysteries), by the highly regarded Swiss author Friedrich Dürrenmatt. I read it at the recommendation of my wife, who read it in Gymnasium (high school for the college-bound) and remembered it fondly.

The story is of the final case of Commissioner Bärlach, who is investigating the murder of his best officer, found shot in his car. The case is to be Bärlach's last because he is suffering from an ailment of the stomach which is never explicitly named but is clearly meant to be a terminal cancer.

This book is a bit difficult for me to render a verdict on. I am not terribly familiar with murder mysteries, and the book is written in a very literary German that, combined with my new fatherhood, caused me to need more than two weeks to get through its mere 118 pages. I honestly didn't enjoy reading the book terribly, but upon finishing it, I had to admit that it was a very compact and cleverly-written story. I suspect that, had I brought it along on a vacation, or at least not begun reading it the day of my first child's birth, and simply read through it in a single sitting, I would have rather liked it. It takes sixty pages to figure out what the real point of the story is; when those sixty pages take a week to get through, that feels like a tortuously slow pace, but if I'd chugged through them in an hour, the same opening might have felt like a simple introduction to the characters.

Six weeks after having read this book, I can at least say that the plot and characters have stuck quite firmly in my mind, which to me is a valuable trait in any story. Beyond that, I'm afraid the circumstances of my reading have left me unable to render a clear verdict for or against reading Der Richter und sein Henker.

We now return to our regularly scheduled programming

The Umlaut is back!

I've spent the last two months gradually growing into the realization that I am now the father of the beautiful little creature pictured above. Being a father has left me with very little time for anything else, but I'm making an effort now to reintroduce the component parts of my life. The American Umlaut will thus resume its irregular broadcast schedule beginning immediately. Like everything else in my life, the Umlaut will be losing timeshare to poopy diapers and Giggly Snuggle Time, but if you point your browser in this direction from time to time, there will be entertaining morsels to be found here.

Things to look forward to in the next few weeks: Four new book reviews, thrilling tales of fatherhood, cute baby pictures, and an account of my installation of a LinuxMCE-based media center. Don't touch that dial!

I am Papa

It was a very long, very happy day. Welcome to the world, my little loaf.

A matter of perspective - part II

This is part II of a series of posts I am writing about perspective. As I mentioned in my previous post, the subject captured my imagination for several weeks, and I've decided to share my learning process here. I hope you enjoy it!

Step 3: Doodling

Whenever I get the itch to grok something new, I end up covering endless napkins and filling my little pocket-sized notebooks with doodles. I'm a visual thinker, and so to understand anything complicated, I have to either see a picture of it or, even better, draw one myself. When I finally came up with a picture that seemed like a reasonable model of perspective, it looked something like this:


In the picture, d is the distance between the observer and the object, s is the size of the object, and θ is our measurement of perceived size: the arc that the object fills in our field of vision. Of course, this simplifies the problem quite a lot; it ignores the fact that parts of the circle are closer to the eye than the line we've chosen for s (I'll write about the consequences of this later), and it pretends that all of this is taking place in two-dimensional space. As a starting point, though, I think it's a good doodle.

Our question now is, what happens if we start changing the values of our variables? If our hypothesis is right, then multiplying d and s by the same number should leave θ unchanged (in our Moon/Sun example, the number would be about 400). The problem is, all of the tricks I know with triangles only work with right triangles. Fortunately, you can turn any triangle into two right triangles by cutting it in half. And this is an isosceles triangle, which means both of the resulting right triangles will be identical; they will be mirror images of each other. That means that (a) anything we deduce about one half of the triangle will be the same in the other half and (b) toilets flushed in the two halves will spin in opposite directions. Scientific fact.

Now the triangle's gotten a bit too small, though; let's doodle it again, only a bit bigger.


Technically, θ and s should be θ/2 and s/2, since they're halves of our original triangle, but let's just call them θ and s for now, and we'll remember that they'll need to be doubled later to get the values for the original triangle.

Getting back to our question, we're curious to figure out what happens to θ if we change d and s by multiplying or dividing them both by some number. Let's change d first; we'll divide it by two:


If our hypothesis is right, then to get the object represented by our new triangle to have the same apparent size of our original one, we should have to make it exactly half as large. s with d/2 should be exactly half what it is with d. We could use trigonometry to work this out (that was actually my first approach), but there is a more intuitive way that becomes obvious if you draw the triangles on top of each other:


As you can see the original (blue) triangle is exactly half as wide as the new (orange) triangle when it reaches the new triangle's base. And if you think about it, this is obviously the case; the two triangles have identically wide bases, which means the hypotenuse (the diagonal line) has to travel the same distance from the tip of the triangle to the base in both triangles. Since the old triangle is twice as tall as the new one, the old triangle's hypotenuse will move from right to left at exactly half the speed of the new triangle's hypotenuse.

And so, as represented by the second object I've drawn in the picture above, we can see that an object that is exactly twice as far away from an observer and is exactly twice as large must have the same perceived size. And through logical reasoning, we've proven that that will be true for any set of objects with an equal size/distance ratio.

Technically, we've proven our hypothesis. Yay for us! But I still had lots of questions at this point. What actually happens to θ when we double the size of an object? You'd think it would double, but if you consider the case of a flat object that takes up 100 degrees of your field of view, that would result in the new object needing 200 degrees - it would have to curve around you!

And so, in part III we'll begin exploring some of the interesting wrinkles that turned up when I was working out the math up to this point. I have to warn you, though, that it might take a while to get out, as I could literally become a father at any moment. I hope you're enjoying the series so far, and I'd love to hear from you in the comments if anything I've explained is unclear or if you have any questions.

A matter of perspective - part I

Image by Luc Viatour.

A very long time ago, I read an argument that the peculiar nature of solar eclipses might be seen as a proof of God's existence. The argument went as follows: the dramatic effect of a full solar eclipse is the result of the Moon appearing to be almost precisely as large as the Sun from the surface of the Earth. This is incredibly improbable, and wouldn't work if the sizes of the bodies involved, or their distances from each other, were even just a smidge different. The argument continues that, because this phenomenon is very improbable and also very beautiful, it must have been designed by an all-powerful being who created and rules the whole universe and has also found the time to be very picky about who I have sex with and the shape of my food's feet.

The alert reader will have noticed that I find the eclipse->God logic somewhat less than compelling (though rather superior to the "no, really, I read it in a really old book" line of reasoning), but the math associated with the perceived sizes of the two bodies really fascinated me. The fact that particularly stuck, and that has been floating around in my head for years, was that the Moon and Sun seem to be the same size from here because the ratio of the distances was nearly identical to the ratio of their sizes. A few weeks ago, though, it occurred to me that, though I'd memorized the fact, I really didn't understand why it should be the case.

As is so often the case, once my brain had noticed this hole in its understanding of the world, it wouldn't leave me alone until I had filled it. It started harassing me at the most inopportune times: waking me up at midnight, compelling me to doodle on paper stolen from waitresses at restaurants, boring my poor wife with musings on trigonometry at the dinner table. Over the course of a few weeks, though, I was able to summon up enough of my high school geometry to grok the basics of why perspective works the way it does, and I thought it might be fun to share my learning process with all of you here.

Thus, over the next few days, I will be uploading posts that explain my learning process. Putting this together has been a really silly amount of work for what will probably end up being three or four posts at most, but forcing myself to describe and illustrate my logic has given me a much better understanding of it, too, so it was definitely worth it. I hope some of you enjoy reading this series as much as I've enjoyed preparing it for you!

Step 1: Checking my numbers

The brain is a marvelous thing, capable of storing vast quantities of data. Unfortunately it tends to use pretty lossy compression algorithms, so before I went off on a wild goose chase, attempting to prove a "fact" that I'd misremembered from years before, I thought it wise to do a bit of research to confirm that the ratios of the Moon's and Sun's sizes and distances really are about equal. A bit of google-fu gives us the following numbers:

Distance to the Moon: ~384,000 km
Distance to the Sun: ~150,000,000 km
Diameter of the Moon: ~3470 km
Diameter of the Sun: ~1,390,000 km

So the ratio of the Sun's size to the Moon's size is ~401:1, and the ratio of the distances to the two bodies is ~390:1. That's close enough that it's plausible to assume that my memory is right, especially since the Moon actually wobbles a bit in its orbit (which means that some eclipses don't completely obscure the Sun, when the Moon is a bit further away than usual). Let's accept the rule as a working hypothesis and then try to prove it; hopefully proving it true will help us understand why it's true.

Step 2: Formulating our hypothesis

Before we can start testing whether our hypothesis is right, it would be helpful to define it more formally. That makes it easier to check whether we've proven or disproven it later. I came up with this: Consider objects a and b. We'll call their sizes S_a and S_b, and their distances from an observer D_a and D_b. Our hypothesis is that the observed sizes of the two objects will be the same if S_a / S_b = D_a / D_b. If S_a / S_b > D_a / D_b, then a will seem larger than b, and if S_a / S_{b <} D_a / D_b, then a will seem smaller than b.

I hope that's fairly understandable. In Part II, we'll use awesome doodles and the power of trigonometry to test our hypothesis. See you then!