At the Halfway Point

Time to check in with how everyone’s doing in the Major Leagues, much as I did after the first week of the season. Take a look at the All-Star Break standings, and read on:

The Good:

  • Can anyone catch the Red Sox? With a 10-game cushion, it seems unlikely, although it’s never wise to entirely count out the Yankees. The Sox have had their troubles – J.D. Drew has been awful, Curt Schilling is hurt – but they’re still in a comfortable place.
  • The Tigers, Indians, Angels and Mariners are within 2.5 games of each other, and only 3 of them can go to the playoffs. I expect the Mariners will get exposed as the season goes on, but the other three are genuinely good teams.
  • The class of the National League is, uhh… no one. The NL looks like a strong, balanced league this year. The Padres have the best record (also by a nose), but there are eight teams within 6 games of them, including 3 in their own division – that’s more than half the league within easy striking distance, and only four of them can make the playoffs. I figure the Brewers will still win the Central, and the other three teams will come from the Mets, Braves, Padres and Dodgers – I think I’d pick the Braves to be the odd-team-out at this point.

The Bad:

As I said before, I think it’s a lot harder to overcome a bad start than to lose a good one, and halfway through the season that means the bad teams are just about out of it now:

  • The Nationals are bad. We knew that. Let’s move on.
  • The Astros are on their way down, after a decade of success and a World Series appearance. It may be a few years before they return to contention, but their fans have to be pretty happy with what they’ve gotten in the recent past – except for the lack of a title.
  • I wonder if the Reds know what they’re doing? They threw away Felipe Lopez and Austin Kearns last year and now have a middling offense and bad pitching.
  • And then there are the Giants, which consist of 42-year-old Barry Bonds and his pursuit of the career home run record, and… uh… Barry Zito’s large contract, and… Matt Morris is having a pretty good year, and… geez… But seriously, like the Astros, the Giants are paying the price for years of excellence and a World Series appearance (which they, too, didn’t win), but the Giants’ flameout is going to be more dramatic and probably more prolonged. The Rockies don’t suck this year, so the Giants are going to finish last in their division, and despite the team signing GM Brian Sabean to a 2-year extension, it wouldn’t surprise me if he doesn’t survive the off-season.

The Rest:

  • The Phillies overcame their 1-5 start and are now at .500. They’re not a good team, though: Their offense is good and their pitching is bad, and they tossed Brett Myers into the bullpen for no good reason and then he got hurt. The Phils have been directionless for years, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon.
  • Up-and-coming teams? They’re already here: I think the Brewers are probably going to win their divison, the Diamondbacks are probably a year or two away, and the Indians need to figure out the rest of their rotation to have staying power. But all three are contending right now, and all of them could continue to do so into the fall.

I think the Wild Card sucks a lot of drama out of the season (even if it was partly responsible for the Red Sox winning it all in 2004), but there are enough good teams this year that there could still be some great races into September. Really, no one looks like a clear favorite to go to the World Series – even the Red Sox look great mainly by comparison with the rest of their division.

Why Terrorism Doesn’t Work

Bruce Schneier summarizes an article on correspondent inference theory and why it helps explain why terrorism doesn’t work: Basically, because targets and observers of terrorism tend to believe that the object of terrorism is to kill people, rather than as a means to political goals, and therefore they disregard those goals when deciding how to react to the terrorists.

I’ve been enjoyed Schneier’s blog for several years now. I think what I enjoy about it is that although it’s a blog about security (in many forms), much of it concerns motivations: Why people act the way they do, and how their behaviors lead to interesting security issues and trade-offs. The principles that arise in the blog often seem appropriate in other avenues of life, or at least they’re worth keeping in mind.

This is analogous to why I feel my baseball fandom of the last 15 years has been not just fun, but useful: It’s given me a better understanding of statistics, and – maybe more importantly – a recognition that humans are very bad at recognizing statistical patterns without doing in-depth analysis. That’s definitely been a lesson I’ve been able to apply elsewhere.

This Week’s Haul

Comic books I bought the week of 5 July 2007.

I couldn’t wait for Wednesday, so I went and picked up last week’s comics last night. I walked in on the gang processing thousands of comics they’d just bought. I told them I expected the store to be spotless when I came back on Wednesday. Good thing they like me, ’cause they outnumbered me.

  • All-Star Superman #8, by Grant Morrison & Frank Quitely (DC)
  • Countdown #43 of 52 (backwards), by Paul Dini, Jimmy Palmiotti, Justin Gray, Manuel Garcia, David Lopez, & Don Hillsman (DC)
  • Welcome to Tranquility #8, by Gail Simone, Neil Googe, Jason Pearson, Chriscross, & Georges Jeanty (DC/Wildstorm)
  • Ms. Marvel #17, by Brian Reed, Aaron Lopresti & Matt Ryan (Marvel)
  • Thor #1, by J. Michael Straczynski Oliver Coipel & Mark Morales (Marvel)

Both Greg Burgas and Chris Sims were disappointed in this month’s All-Star Superman, and I’m with them: Devoid of the madcap zaniness of the classic Bizarro stories, saddled by the bleak imagery of Quitely’s artwork, and with nothing particularly deep or insightful to say about the Bizarro world, the whole issue just feels like a pointless aside to the already rather loosely-assembled story which comprises the series. All-Star Superman has certainly had its high points, but this is its nadir.

Ms. Marvel #17 actually has enough stuff in it to get me interested again: A.I.M. undergoes a transformation, Ms. Marvel turns blue and speaks with a different voice and then wakes up normal and has no idea what happened, her S.H.I.E.L.D. team is decimated and she faces a crisis of confidence, her would-be boyfriend is up to something, and a couple of A.I.M. wackos concoct an odd-looking scheme which is surely not going to end well.

If only the first 16 issues had had this much story. I just hope all this goes somewhere over the next few months.

And lastly:

J. Michael Straczynski’s comic books drive me crazy.

There’s always the germs of some really excellent stuff in there: The metaphysical underpinnings of Spider-Man’s powers. The spot-on handling of Peter Parker’s wit. The complex world of Rising Stars. The characterization of the Thing.

But Jesus, his stories take so-fricking-long to develop. It took years for the relatively-simple story of Spidey’s powers to play out, and while that stuff was really good, the stuff in between wasn’t. Fantastic Four never really went anywhere (but arguably got shanghaied by Civil War). And along the way he often hits as many wrong notes as true ones: The inevitable-yet-tedious battle for domination in Rising Stars, or the stilted and cringeworthy characterization of Mr. Fantastic. Really, only Midnight Nation – probably his most personal book – worked all the way through.

Thor brings the god-turned-hero back to the Marvel Universe after an absence due to, well, I really neither know nor care what happened to him, but apparently the other Norse gods are gone, and Thor is back to being bonded with Donald Blake. Straczynski provides some interesting theoretical backbone to Thor’s return and the nature of godhood, and some nice grounding to Blake’s humanity. And then, the questions lurking in the background are just as interesting: What will Thor think about the Civil War that occurred in his absence, and the role his closest human friend – Iron Man – played in it? How will Donald Blake pick up the pieces of his life after years of absence?

But the book noodles all over the place, starting with someone (Blake?) picking up Thor’s hammer in the middle of the desert (a scene set up in Straczynski’s Fantastic Four run), followed by a lengthy encounter between Blake and Thor in the limbo they’ve been lingering in for the last few years, followed by their return to Earth. But it’s all set-up: There’s hardly any actual story here. Straczynski’s Supreme Power played out excruciatingly slowly (I gave up after two depressing years), and I worry that that’s what’s going to happen here.

Still, it’s a first issue, and it’s got some promise. And Coipel’s art gets prettier with each new project: Remember how quirky and grim his style seemed back in Legion Lost, with those severe, undifferentiated faces? Oh yeah, he’s come a long way, that never would have worked on Thor. But as with most comics these days, I just hope that Straczynski’s got a plan, and that Thor is going to go somewhere. Because this sort of meandering will get boring by about issue #3. I also hope he lightens up on the gravitas a little (and boy is it unusual for me to be wishing a book were a little lighter), because it often feels like his books should have a funeral dirge as their soundtrack.

Greg Burgas seems to agree, but says so in fewer words than I do. So, there you go.

Workin’ Vacation

Last year we took a long weekend trip to Portland and returned the night of the Fourth of July. This year I suggested we turn it around, flying up on the Fourth so we could catch the fireworks in the evening, and then have a vacation in Portland with our friend Karen.

We flew in Wednesday afternoon. Karen threw a barbecue party in the late afternoon, with us, her mother, sister, and some friends coming by. I was elected grillmaster, and did my best with Karen’s charcoal grill. Well, okay, it wasn’t the grill’s fault, it was fine; I just have a gas grill at home, so when I do use charcoal I always have to remember just how it all works. This time around, I should have left the grill uncovered so the coals could breathe and heat up. Instead they just sort of smouldered for a while. I was actually able to get everything cooked through, it just took about twice as long as it should have. Go me!

But seriously, we all had a good time, and the food was good. Can’t ask any fairer than that.

Thursday we had a quiet day: Karen went to work for a bit, since she had an appointment, and Debbi and I hung around at home. When Karen came back, we worked to get her wi-fi set up.

So here’s the thing: I have this habit of visiting Karen shortly after she moves. I think this is the fourth time in seven years. Go figure. No, I don’t help her unpack, but I do help her with some projects around the house. It’s fun, really: I feel like I get some things done, and leave her house in better shape than when I arrived.

Back to her wi-fi: Last time I set it up she had DSL. This time she has Comcast cable. I figured: It’s a modem, it probably works just the same. And it almost does, except for one thing: The modem apparently records the MAC address (nothing to do with Apple, it’s the built-in identifier for the ethernet card) of the device it’s plugged into, and in order to plug it into a different device you have to power-cycle the modem. Which would be fine (if stupid) if Comcast actually told us this, but in fact it came with no documentation, and their help line wasn’t much help, either. So a 5-minute project turned into a 40-minute project. Sheesh.

Anyway, we did get the wi-fi set up, and I didn’t even have to reset the base station. Woo-hoo!

Friday we hit a couple of my favorite places in Portland: Fat Albert’s breakfast cafe (home of awesome biscuits and gravy), and of course Powell’s books.

In the evening we went to a baseball game, the Portland Beavers hosting the Tacoma Rainiers. Ah, minor league baseball, even of the AAA variety. The Beavers – the Padres’ affiliate – is a pretty weak team these days, staffed with some borderline prospects and some decent backup or former Major Leaguers. The Rainiers features some guys who look like real prospects, like Jeff Clement and this guy, Adam Jones:

Adam_Jones.jpg
(click to view full-sized)

The game was a laffer from early on and the Rainiers won 10-4. We did get to see some nuns watching the game from some good seats, but I’m sure you’re more interested in seeing us enjoying the game:

At_The_Park.jpg

When I say this was a “working vacation”, I mean the projects I undertook around the house, and mostly those were Saturday and Sunday. We picked up some shelves which I installed in the bathroom:

Shelves.jpg

And some flowers which I planted in pots on the front porch:

Front_Porch.jpg

And tomato plants and herbs which went in the back yard:

Garden.jpg

The owner of the house had planted some heirloom tomatoes, some of which self-seeded, so Karen’s got some mystery tomato plants lurking around, and who knows what those will produce! But I caged several of them, so she’ll get a chance to find out.

In between it all I was able to make a run to Excalibur Comics, and Saturday evening we met my friend J.D. and his wife Kris for dinner and dessert. We had a great time, like we did last year. I got to ask J.D. what the size of a medium box is. Less flippantly, we talked comics (I’m scandalized that J.D. is going digital with his comics reading), Magic (he used to play, too – in fact, his period of playing almost exactly covers my time away from the game), and various other things. A nice, relaxing evening.

I even surprised everyone by eating a clam!

I think the vacation was about a day too short, as I would have enjoyed one day of just lying around or going to see some sights. But Sunday afternoon we headed to the airport (okay, after one more trip to Fat Albert’s) and came home. The cats were very happy to see us, although Roulette expressed her unhappiness by avoiding me all evening.

But she forgave me eventually!

Mixed Blessing

I’m enjoying my return engagement with Magic: The Gathering lately, but it is sometimes a drag to have to organize draft sessions, and although I could conceivably go play at a nearby store, I doubt Debbi would want me vanishing for, say, every other Friday evening to do so.

So then, there’s Magic Online, which supports drafts and constructed and all that good stuff. So I could conceivably play while sitting around watching baseball or having a quiet afternoon.

Except, of course, according to the FAQ it’s not supported on the Mac. So I’d need to run Windows to play it. And besides my fundamental distaste for Windows, I don’t want to lay out money to get Windows just to be able to play Magic.

Besides which, I could probably spend a lot of money and time there, both of which are arguably better spent elsewhere. At least playing Magic with actual cards is a social activity.

Sigh.

On the bright side, Starcraft II is going to be released for both Mac and PC. And it’s probably at least a year out (no release date has been announced), so sinking time into it is not imminent.

Karl Schroeder: Sun of Suns

Review of the novel Sun of Suns by Karl Schroeder.

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Sun of Suns

I read Sun of Suns over a year ago when it was serialized in Analog and neglected to review it. Which ain’t right, since I think it’s Schroeder’s best novel to date. It the first of a series, and with the second, Queen of Candesce, having just wrapped up its own Analog serialization, I decided to revisit this one.

Sun of Suns takes place in the system of Virga, which is an unusual system indeed: It’s a giant balloon, several thousand miles wide, with a small artificial sun (Candesce) at its core. Virga is mostly pressurized, so people can travel throughough the balloon at will, although at some risk, as the air quality is not consistent. Candesce lights and heats the center of Virga, but the outer reaches are too far away. Humans live in rotating cylinders which are slowly drifting throughout the system. The small “worlds” at the outer reaches light their own small suns to make them habitable. Tech level is middling: Peculiar warships and small jet-cycles propel people throughout the system.

Hayden Griffin grew up on Aerie, a world attempted to build and light its own sun when its larger neighbor Rush, capital of the nation of Slipstream, attacked it and prevented the project from being finished. Griffin’s parents died in the attack, so he focused his young life on infiltrating the house of Admiral Chaison Fanning of Rush, intending to kill him. Griffin rises to the level of a jet cycle pilot for Fanning’s wife, Venera.

Slipstream is at its own crossroads, as Admiral Fanning has learned that two of its neighbors plan to attack it, and that Slipstream’s leader, the Pilot, is heading into their trap. The Admiral assembles an expedition of a few ships to head towards Virga looking for a lost treasure with which he hopes to be able to defeat their enemies.

The book is primarily an account of their voyage, as well as an exploration of the unique environment of Virga: Small worlds, weightlessness, empty space between the worlds, yet still crossable in fairly creaky vessels. Hayden befriends Aubri Mahallan, a woman from outside Virga, who briefly describes the post-singularity universe from which they are insulated. Just as the travellers are getting adjusted to one another, they suffer a difficult encounter with pirates, and later on they search for clues to the treasure they seek in another world elsewhere in the habitat. These elements display both the relationships among the characters, and the political machinations of the story, as everyone wants something, and some people are more manipulative than others in trying to get it.

The book is filled with adventure and swashbuckling, thus making it very unlike Schroeder’s earlier novels, which are generally far more cerebral. It’s very much to the good of the story, as Schroder’s stories often seem to get overwhelmed by their ideas content, and here the balance is much closer. The combat with the pirates is vividly depicted, as is the climactic battle in the floating ships, while ample attention is also paid to hand-to-hand combat in zero gravity. The book weaves its way between high-tech and steampunk, but it stays relatively grounded, which is crucial in bringing such an exotic locale to life.

Although Hayden is the nominal hero, Venera Fanning is the most interesting character: Having been shot by a long-travelling bullet when she was younger, she hopes someday to find who fired that bullet. She also loves her husband, but is as machiavellian as he is, sometimes to his frustration. She’s the character which drives the book’s events more than Hayden is, and she certainly grabs the reader’s attention more readily.

Characters besides Venera are a mixed bag: Both Hayden and the Admiral feel somewhat generic. Of course, Hayden’s been pursuing a destructive obsession for several years, so that’s not a big surprise. Aubri is a bit of a cipher, on purpose, but she gains Hayden’s romantic affections, which only sort of works in the story: The gulf between their backgrounds is a nifty idea, but I didn’t think it played out well on paper. Then again, Aubri is one of the keys to the story’s resolution, so she’s certainly worth paying attention to.

I enjoyed Sun of Suns best of Schroeder’s books to date. It’s more accessible than his earlier novels, while still being chock-full of interesting stuff. My recommendation comes with the reservation that the ideas content might still feel overwhelming to some readers, but if you felt like Schroeder’s earlier novels weren’t quite what they should have been, I think you’ll be pleased with Sun of Suns.

Coming Soon: Full-Text Syndication Feeds

An entry to read if you read FP via its syndication feed (especially the LiveJournal feed).

I’m planning to upgrade FP to use full-text syndication feeds sometime soon. Although my reasons for using partial feels are still relevant, I’m thinking there’s some chance of getting more readers if I use full feeds, and the more I think about it, the more the chance of that seems like a compelling reason.

If you read FP via the LiveJournal syndication account, you might find your friends list get flooded with entries when I switch over. My impression is that LJ syndication accounts aren’t very sophisticated, and that they sometimes re-post a feed entry when only the text of that entry has changed. If this happens, well, I apologize, but there’s not much I can do.

(What I do hope is that LJ won’t re-post a feed entry just because I make an edit after the initial post, which I sometimes do, usually to correct a spelling or grammatical error. That would suck. But again, nothing I can do. At least, not to my knowledge.)

I know this’ll make J.D. happy! 🙂

John Scalzi: The Android’s Dream

Review of the novel The Android’s Dream, by John Scalzi.

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The Android’s Dream

After finishing John Scalzi’s The Last Colony, I was excited to launch right into this one, which is unrelated to the Old Man’s War trilogy. Unfortunately, The Android’s Dream really wasn’t my cup of tea: It’s a very light action-adventure story with heavy dollops of farce

In the near future, mankind has joined a community of worlds, and one of its closest allies among the many alien races is the caste-bound Nidu, who communicate in part by sense of smell. One human diplomat harbors a long-standing grudge against the Nidu and sparks a diplomatic incident in a first chapter which is basically a long fart joke (with an equally-unfunny aside about meat consumption). Besides just not enjoying the chapter, it made it hard for me to take the rest of the book seriously.

Following that, Secretary of State Jim Heffer and his aide Ben Javna try to find a resolution to the dispute – the Nidu having Earth over a barrel due to the circumstances – and negotiate a deal to try to find a special breed of sheep needed for the upcoming Nidu coronation ceremony. Failure could lead to a breaking of the alliance, a result which some factions on Earth think would be a perfectly fine thing. Javna farms out the sheep-finding job to his friend Harry Creek, a low-level functionary in the government who’s actually a tremendously capable ex-soldier, and who is the book’s protagonist. Creek has the help of a cutting-edge computing resource, and in his search he meets Robin Baker, owner of a pet store with an unexpected relationship to Creek’s search. Creek and Robin are pursued by hired guns whose employers have different designs on the coronation, and there are a couple of other interested parties as well. The problems are solved with a little deus-ex-machina mixed with a little Gordian-knot-slicing.

Some of what I enjoyed about Scalzi’s other books is present here: Creek and Robin facing their pursuers in the middle of a mall is smartly written and inventively engaging. Creek’s background in the army is well-thought-out. The dialogue is sharp.

But the book is weighed down by its many frivolous and farcical elements. The Android’s Dream is filled with the sorts of ridiculous touches which turned me off of books such as Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash or Max Barry’s Jennifer Government: The extreme conclusion of mixing our meat-consuming culture with our conservationist attitudes; a church created as a scam and self-consciously maintained in that spirit (sort of the anti-Scientologists); the endless parade of rather silly aliens. It all feels more dreary than funny.

Scalzi also employs the time-worn technique of giving many of the major characters – as well as the Church of the Evolved Lamb – a lengthy expository aside in which their backstory and motivations are explained, often for humorous effect. For some reason, this technique never works for me: The backstory, even if relevant, feels extraneous, and also falls into the trap of being a big “tell-don’t-show” exercise.

And, I was disappointed that, well, there isn’t anything in the book about androids dreaming; the title refers to the breed of sheep that everyone’s trying to find. (The cover features sheep, although it also features an android. It really has almost nothing to do with the story, and thus seems a little misleading.) Of course, the title plays off the title of Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and some have said that the book has some stylistic similarities to Dick. I’ve only read a little of Dick’s writing (The Man in the High Castle and A Scanner Darkly), neither of which I enjoyed, so that’s not a selling point for me.

The book moves along fairly well after getting through the first several chapters, which set up the scenario and introduce Creek and his world, but the story just didn’t work for me. I really wanted to like this book, having enjoyed the Old Man’s War series as much as I have. But those books feature a light, bantering narrative set against a serious background with serious themes, while this book was a veneer of serious story set against a mostly-silly background with few serious themes. Not my thing.

This Week’s Haul

Comic books I bought the week of 27 June 2007.

Brian Hibbs says this is a big week, but it was a small week for me as a buyer, and not a strong one, either:

  • Countdown #44 of 52 (backwards), by Paul Dini, Adam Beechen & Carlos Magno (DC)
  • Wonder Woman #10, by Jodi Picoult & Paco Diaz (DC)
  • Hellboy: Darkness Calls #3 of 6, by Mike Mignola & Duncan Fegredo (Dark Horse)
  • Castle Waiting #7, by Linda Medley (Fantagraphics)

Countdown is getting so slow that it’s dreary. Unlike 52 where the characters had clear problems to deal with from the outset, Dini’s story is plodding along with various mysteries surrounding the characters, but not much that seems threatening. The core of the story is the Monitor cabal, but that storyline is developing at a glacial pace. Honestly, the “History of the DC Multiverse” backups are more interesting than the main story at this point, even though I’ve already read all the stories it’s recounting.

Even worse than that, though, is Wonder Woman: Jodi Picoult’s run on the title limps to a halt (but not a conclusion – no, for that you have to read Amazons Attack, which I’m not going to bother with) in rather pointless fashion. Has any title in recent memory been less focused and more frustrating than this Wonder Woman relaunch? I’m so fed up that I’m not even going to bother with Gail Simone’s run, as she’s the next sacrificial lamb on the book. (Simone seems to have the bad luck of being assigned to books after I’ve become so disspirited with them that I’m not even willing to give a new writer a chance. Birds of Prey, for instance.)

Somewhat brighter, Castle Waiting this month has the character interplay which is what I enjoy most about the book. The current story is dragging on a bit, and to no apparent conclusion, but at least some of the bits along the way are fun. I do wish Medley would get back to writing shorter, more focused stories, though. The first volume of the title was great fun until it went off the rails with “Solicitine”, a lengthy story about the story of Sister Peace, the bearded nun, which I wished had been condensed down to about half its length.

Okay, I guess I’m just a grump about comics this week.