Arctangential

I finished Moonlight and Vines this weekend, while on vacation in Canada. It was OK, I guess, although I find de Lint’s writing to be repetitive in a cloyingly nonspecific way, and reading a collection of short stories really intensified that for me.

Meg and I spent the weekend in Canada, Saturday in Toronto and Sunday in Niagara Falls. Some highlights:

• We went to see the CN Tower, from the top of which I took three typical pictures.
• We went to the Ontario Science Center, which was pretty cool.
• I finally got to have poutine, at this place called Harvey’s. It was real real good.
• Of course we went to see Niagara Falls, and once again I took the typical picture.
• And finally, we spent some time at Casino Niagara, where I won a not inconsiderable amount of money.

Overall, it was a pretty fun trip.

I am now reading the 5th (and final!) book in Thomas Easton’s Organic Future series, Seeds of Destiny. It’s not really all that good.

This picture was taken in the kitchen at work today.

People often put things in there, like leftover pizza or sandwiches from meetings, or donuts they bought to be nice, or birthday cakes.

This amused me.

I finished Tower of the Gods yesterday afternoon. Not so great.

As before, this book takes place 20-30 years after the previous one, with descendants of the previous heroes stepping in to take their places. It begins promisingly — the bots and genetic engineers have fled the Earth and its oppressive rule by the anti-biotech forces of the Engineers. They’ve traveled to a nearby star and have begin genetically engineering local alien life forms, rising them to sentience. They don’t seem to actually have a good reason to do this, but I guess maybe they thought it would be fun.

The story centers around Angelica Pearl, a bot/human hybrid who lives much longer than normal bots. She was born after the exodus from Earth, but she yearns to go back. Since the refugees forgot to bring bees with them (and thus have to pollinate all of their flowers using artist’s brushes), she decides to go back to Earth to get some. When she arrives at the orbital base where Earth and Orbital people meet in neutrality to trade, she is promptly kidnapped (although this doesn’t seem to bother anybody) and taken to Earth. She’s beaten, kept in a cage and used as ransom to get technology from the Orbitals, who of course decline. Eventually some rebels come and help her escape and she falls in love with one of them.

Eventually they go back to the planet with the genetically engineered aliens.

I don’t even feel like writing about it.

I’m now reading Charles de Lint’s Moonlight and Vines, a collection of his short stories set in Newford.

I finished Kim Stanley Robinson’s Antarctica just now. It was real good up until the end, and then in the last 75 pages or so it reduced itself to merely just kind of pretty ok.

For the record, Kim is a man. Just so there’s no confusion.

Really, this is a book about Antarctica. There’s a plot, involving political machinations, love triangles, cultural collisions, ecoterrorism and survival on the ice. There are characters, like Wade, a congressional aide sent to gather background information on the Antarctican Treaty, X (named after the size of his overalls), a grunt worker in the military machine that runs the continent, and Ta Shu, a Chinese mystic and artist who is making a video of his travels to explore the natural feng shui of Antarctica. There are groups of people, too: the GFAs, of which X is one, who do the grunt-work so that others may enjoy the freezing cold; the Beakers, or scientists, who are forever exploring, measuring and categorizing; the Woos, or artists (like Ta Shu), who come to feel the emotions and spirituality of the vast frozen plain.

The book isn’t actually about any of that stuff, however. It’s about the landscapes of Antarctica: the historical landscapes, carved by explorers like Scott, Shackleton and Amundsen; the physical landscapes, with mammoth glaciers, seas of pack ice, mountains of snow and vast caverns in the ice; and the emotional landscapes — how different people react to the vastness, the majesty and the beauty of the unspoiled and inhospitable land. He takes our various heroes to see how Antarctica was a huge beech forest only 3 million years ago, to see how methane trapped in the ice can be harvested for safe clean fuel instead of being left to evaporate and accelerate the greenhouse effect, to see heated swimming pools carved into the pitch blackness deep in glacial ice and how, in that darkness, you can see Cerenkov radiation deep in the clear ice, the passage of interstellar neutrinos through the planet.

The last bit of the book was just a tacked-on ending resolving some unimportant plot points, but I forgive the author. His editor probably made him do it anyways.

Now I’m reading the 4th book in the increasingly uninteresting Organic future series, Robert A. Easton’s Tower of the Gods.

I finished Woodsman earlier today. It was actually a lot better than I thought it would be, although some of Easton’s own brand of stupidity still showed itself.

Let me first go a little bit into the basic premise of the book: Mankind, having depleted its non-renewable resources through the use of machines, has begin using bio-engineering to grow the food, energy, and devices it needs. for example, airplanes have been replaced with enormous birds, houses are grown from specially engineered squash, and people grow pets on “goldfish bushes”. The story is mostly about a group of anti-bio-engineering bigots called “The Engineers” who want to go back to the non-sustainable mechanical “good old days”, and are willing to exhort others to join them, violently.

One thing I enjoyed about the book was his expansion of themes from the previous book. Instead of directly following on the events of the earlier novel, he instead takes us 20 years further down the line. Things that had been major problems previous are no longer an issue, whereas minor issues in the previous book have grown into larger social issues. For example, the Engineers were just a side note before, a fringe group of radicals mostly ignored by most of society. The main antagonist in Greenhouse was a man fusing human and plant genes to make human-looking plants; by the time Woodsman takes place, those humanoid plants have developed into mobile, intelligent, humanoid beings, and are a social issue of their own.

While generally a good writer, Easton doesn’t seem willing to invest the time to set up things he will need later, so from time to time random dumb shit will crop up. For example, when the protagonists need to escape from an increasingly hostile Earth, it suddenly comes to light that there are extensive space and lunar colonies which are much friendlier. These are not mentioned at any point previous in the books. Later, he invents a drive which works by generating propulsion through the selective modification of the probability of quantum events — this is demonstrated by showing that dice thrown in the vicinity of the field tend to always come up on the same number. A garbage disposal animal, genetically derived from a pig, is accidentally given human intelligence (how this happens is stupid enough) — later he is genetically engineered to be human, but his nose remains slightly porcine. The idea that they can turn a limbless pig into a human, but cannot adjust his nose, it hard for me to swallow.

Overall, I enjoyed the book, and I look forward to the following novels, but from the ending of this one, I wonder how he’s going to get them going. I am now reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s Antarctica.

I finished Fast Food Nation today. Overall I enjoyed it, although it kind of felt like more of the same after having read the very similar (and much larger) They Made America so recently. The author makes some interesting observations about the effects that big business have on the food industry, and the public perception of those things.

Some of the book felt like filler — for example, in the chapter about Ray Kroc and the founding of McDonald’s, he spends almost as much time discussing Walt Disney and the founding of his empire as he does the putative topic of the book. He then ends the section by explaining that Disneyland declined to host a McDonald’s when it first opened. Generally, however, the book is well-written: concise and direct, making the author’s point with statistics, personal observation, and interviews.

I think my main issue with the book is not in the book itself, but rather the impression of the book that I got from so many people before actually reading it. So many people told me how it affected them, how they stopped eating fast food after reading it, how it galvanized them to do something about the state of the country, etc. However, I didn’t really find anything that astonishing in this book — it’s not really news to me that the agriculture business is dirty and disgusting, that multinational companies are amoral and push governments to do things that are directly damaging to their citizens just for a few cents on the bottom line. It really shouldn’t be news to anybody — I’m not sure why so many people took this book as a revelation.

Anyways.

I’m now reading Thomas A. Easton’s Woodsman, the third Organic Future novel.

I finished Greenhouse on Thursday or so. It was OK, although stupid in a kind of incredibly blatant and unimportant way that only Easton seems able to manage. I didn’t post about it earlier because I was out of town on vacation — specifically, in New York City.

We had a good time there. Some highlights:

• Saw Fiddler on the Roof on Broadway, starring Harvey Fierstein and Andrea Martin. Very awesome.
• Attended a screening of that Conan O’Brien show. This was also quite awesome. I learned some interesting things:
  • HDTV cameras are very distinctive.
  • Zooey Deschanel is pretty stupid.
  • That desk he sits at? It’s fucking tiny.
• Went to The American Museum of Natural History. I took a picture of some caribou.
• Visited The Strand Bookstore, which is continually awesome. They put in air conditioning too, which is pretty amazing.

Also other assorted seeings of things and walkings about and eatings of wonderful foods. It was a good vacation, made better by good company. I’m glad to be home now.

I am now reading Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser. It’s good.