If a book starts out just right, I’ll keep going back and rereading the first few sentences long after I’ve finished the book. Here are a few that did that to me. Fagles’ translation of the Odyssey: Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns driven time and again off [...]
I enjoy it when science fiction has something useful to say about computer security. Towards the end of Iain M. Banks’ Matter, there’s a big space battle and we find this passage: “Compromised,” Hippinse told him. “Taken over by the other side. Persuaded by a sort of thought-infection.” “Does that happen a lot, sir?” “It [...]
Basically anything Vernor Vinge writes will get reviewed here; he’s one of my favorite SF authors and certainly the best CSF (computer science fiction) writer working today. His latest book, The Children of the Sky, is a direct sequel to A Fire Upon the Deep and a cousin to A Deepness in the Sky. A [...]
Over the last few weeks I read A Fire Upon The Deep, surely one of the top five works of computer science fiction. The proximate reason for the re-read was the upcoming release of a sequel, Children of the Sky, which I am impatiently awaiting. I read the “special edition” which contains about 1500 of [...]
This book, like the one I wrote about yesterday, is a horror story for engineers. Idaho Falls is about the SL-1, a prototype nuclear reactor in the desert in Idaho. Although it had been designed for a 3 MW thermal capacity, in early 1961 its output briefly reached something like 18 GW when the single [...]
Space Systems Failures is like a horror novel for engineers: years of people’s lives and hundreds of millions of dollars are wasted because somebody crossed a wire or skipped a test. The real reasons for failures of launch vehicles and their payloads, however, are more interesting: Margins are slim because adding margin is expensive System [...]
An important function of science fiction is to help us understand sociological, technological, and other aspects of our future. A really good SF novel — like some of those produced by Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, Le Guin, Niven, and Vinge — is so full of ideas and possibilities that the reader’s mind is expanded a little. [...]
The Trinity test occurred on a calm morning. Enrico Fermi, one of the observers, began dropping bits of paper about 40 seconds after the explosion; pieces in the air when the blast wave arrived were deflected by about 2.5 meters. From this crude measurement, Fermi estimated the bomb’s yield to be ten kilotons; he was [...]
Pale Fire is a 999-line poem written by John Shade. It is also a novel by Vladimir Nabokov that contains an introduction by Charles Kinbote, the poem, and Kinbote’s extended commentary on the poem. On the surface, Pale Fire is straightforward. The poem is a touching — but not, it would seem, terribly good — [...]
Good jobs have barriers to entry. Sometimes these barriers are natural (not everyone is capable of writing a novel or being a leader) and sometimes they are artificial (not everyone is born in the right place or to the right parents). Many well-paid jobs requiring very specialized skills are protected by — among other mechanisms [...]