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seekingferretD is for Deadbeat, E is for Evidence by Sue Grafton
This series continues to be great, but E is definitely my favorite so far for personal reasons: the victim worked at a vacuum furnace manufacturer, a field that is adjacent to my own. And there's this scene where Kinsey is sitting in the lobby of the manufacturer waiting to speak to the president and two engineers are arguing about heater design and... the dialogue makes sense. Like, it is a thing two vacuum engineers would debate about, the technical vocabulary is dead on. This has nothing to do with the plot of the novel. If those two characters reappear it's not for more than another scene, their debate does not offer clues to the mystery, and the percentage of readers who would notice if she botched it is infinitesimal. But Grafton went through the not inconsiderable effort of getting it right. I just love how much Grafton's mysteries are about real people and how solving a mystery is about solving people, not just the criminal but all the witnesses as well.
Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson
The overall headline is: way better than I expected a Kim Stanley Robinson novel to be.
Aurora is about the last generation of a generation ship before it reaches its destination star. Their journey has not been an easy one: The tight resource management controls required to keep the ship moving without stopping for refuel have been slipping out of control because of hysteresis effects, despite sophisticated 3D printing technology and powerful genetic manipulation techniques.
Robinson vividly imagines these characters who were condemned by their great-great-great-grandparents to this life, compelled to think of unspeakable privations as being the ordinary course of life, and then he takes us through the joys and sorrows of landfall, which does not go as planned. The story is gripping at all moments as the best of hard SF can be, reminiscent of recent works like The Martian as well as older monuments of our genre like The Fountains of Paradise.
It's also interesting because it reflects an evolutionarily different approach for Robinson to space colonization as compared to his most famous work, the Mars Trilogy. Though the Mars Trilogy has moments of conflict and tension and doubt, it is fundamentally an optimistic work believing in the inevitability of Martian colonization. Aurora is more uncertain about the outcome of our stellar future, more likely to assert that any given mantra of the Space Movement is just wishful thinking and scientism. 25 years of scientific discoveries have led Robinson to believe that a future in space is not foreordained, that just because it's there doesn't mean it's actually habitable, and that there are solutions to the Fermi Paradox that we'd prefer not to think about.
That doesn't stop Robinson from reveling in the sheer adventure of space exploration. If anything, it increases the pleasure- space exploration may perhaps prove foolhardy and ill-advised in the long run: If it does, stories of space will be all we have to substitute.
A narrative of the proceedings of the black people, during the late awful calamity in Philadelphia, in the year 1793 : and a refutation of some censures, thrown upon them in some late publications by Absalom Jones and Richard Allen
Primary source reading on the 1793 Philadelphia Yellow Fever epidemic, a response to the dominant contemporary publication on the subject by a white author. It was written by two black churchmen outraged that their black brethren who had served as nurses during the plague were being accused of charging extortionary rates for their services.
There are levels of fucked-upness here. It was believed without any real basis that blacks were less susceptible to yellow fever, as it was considered a 'jungle fever'. (In reality it was possibly just geography that kept the first wave mostly white, or even worse, the first wave wasn't actually mostly white but nobody talked about the black deaths and therefore everyone thought the blacks weren't dying) Thus the leading physicians of the time encouraged freed blacks in Philadelphia to stay and nurse the while ill. And they heroically did so, and thus a lot of them ended up dying. And since there was thus a scarcity of nurses, and the whites weren't willing to serve as nurses as often, sick white people got into bidding wars for the services of the available nurses, and then blamed the black nurses for jacking up prices.
Incredibly fascinating stuff if you are a history of diseases nerd.
This series continues to be great, but E is definitely my favorite so far for personal reasons: the victim worked at a vacuum furnace manufacturer, a field that is adjacent to my own. And there's this scene where Kinsey is sitting in the lobby of the manufacturer waiting to speak to the president and two engineers are arguing about heater design and... the dialogue makes sense. Like, it is a thing two vacuum engineers would debate about, the technical vocabulary is dead on. This has nothing to do with the plot of the novel. If those two characters reappear it's not for more than another scene, their debate does not offer clues to the mystery, and the percentage of readers who would notice if she botched it is infinitesimal. But Grafton went through the not inconsiderable effort of getting it right. I just love how much Grafton's mysteries are about real people and how solving a mystery is about solving people, not just the criminal but all the witnesses as well.
Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson
The overall headline is: way better than I expected a Kim Stanley Robinson novel to be.
Aurora is about the last generation of a generation ship before it reaches its destination star. Their journey has not been an easy one: The tight resource management controls required to keep the ship moving without stopping for refuel have been slipping out of control because of hysteresis effects, despite sophisticated 3D printing technology and powerful genetic manipulation techniques.
Robinson vividly imagines these characters who were condemned by their great-great-great-grandparents to this life, compelled to think of unspeakable privations as being the ordinary course of life, and then he takes us through the joys and sorrows of landfall, which does not go as planned. The story is gripping at all moments as the best of hard SF can be, reminiscent of recent works like The Martian as well as older monuments of our genre like The Fountains of Paradise.
It's also interesting because it reflects an evolutionarily different approach for Robinson to space colonization as compared to his most famous work, the Mars Trilogy. Though the Mars Trilogy has moments of conflict and tension and doubt, it is fundamentally an optimistic work believing in the inevitability of Martian colonization. Aurora is more uncertain about the outcome of our stellar future, more likely to assert that any given mantra of the Space Movement is just wishful thinking and scientism. 25 years of scientific discoveries have led Robinson to believe that a future in space is not foreordained, that just because it's there doesn't mean it's actually habitable, and that there are solutions to the Fermi Paradox that we'd prefer not to think about.
That doesn't stop Robinson from reveling in the sheer adventure of space exploration. If anything, it increases the pleasure- space exploration may perhaps prove foolhardy and ill-advised in the long run: If it does, stories of space will be all we have to substitute.
A narrative of the proceedings of the black people, during the late awful calamity in Philadelphia, in the year 1793 : and a refutation of some censures, thrown upon them in some late publications by Absalom Jones and Richard Allen
Primary source reading on the 1793 Philadelphia Yellow Fever epidemic, a response to the dominant contemporary publication on the subject by a white author. It was written by two black churchmen outraged that their black brethren who had served as nurses during the plague were being accused of charging extortionary rates for their services.
There are levels of fucked-upness here. It was believed without any real basis that blacks were less susceptible to yellow fever, as it was considered a 'jungle fever'. (In reality it was possibly just geography that kept the first wave mostly white, or even worse, the first wave wasn't actually mostly white but nobody talked about the black deaths and therefore everyone thought the blacks weren't dying) Thus the leading physicians of the time encouraged freed blacks in Philadelphia to stay and nurse the while ill. And they heroically did so, and thus a lot of them ended up dying. And since there was thus a scarcity of nurses, and the whites weren't willing to serve as nurses as often, sick white people got into bidding wars for the services of the available nurses, and then blamed the black nurses for jacking up prices.
Incredibly fascinating stuff if you are a history of diseases nerd.
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Date: 2016-06-03 09:47 pm (UTC)Shabbat shalom.
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Date: 2016-06-09 01:45 pm (UTC)