The Other Don Kelly

December 7th, a day that lives in infamy. It’s also the second day in a row for snow in the morning. Nothing is sticking, it’s still too warm, but it sure does look nice. Anyway…

I spent a good portion of November fighting with recurring colds, sinus infections and the like. Just before the wedding trip I went to the doctor and got some antibiotics; the doctor said that there was probably some underlying virus causing the recurrent secondary infections, so she advised rest and fluids. I was pretty aggressive about the “rest” before our trip, and that (plus the antibiotics) pulled me through the weekend, but I still had a lot of rest/recovery to get done…

I filled my downtime, at home and in Boston, with a few e-books:

Angelmaker, by Nick Harkaway: This is the same author who wrote Titanium Noir, and our library has most, maybe all, of his books so I thought I’d check him out a bit more. (Fun fact: “Nick Harkaway” is a pseudonym for Nicholas Cornwell; his father David Cornwell was also a novelist — and his pseudonym was “John le Carré.”)

Angelmaker is not science fiction; it’s more like a gangster story, with fantasy elements but set in our world, modern London in particular — the story world was well built, and a very pleasant place to visit. The story itself (no spoilers) moves pretty quickly to a very satisfying ending.

I liked this enough that I took out another of his novels from the library.

Tigerman, by Nick Harkaway: Tigerman is complicated, and a bit darker/sadder than either of the other Nick Harkaway books I read, but like them it was also a fast moving semi-thriller, a sort of murder mystery that spins wildly out of control. It’s set in the present time on a fictional island, without too much science fiction — though there is an industrial pollution apocalypse looming over the island — but it uses comic book themes as framing, something I don’t know much about so I may have missed a few nuances along the way.

Like I said, this novel was darker, but it was also more complicated and emotionally deeper than either of the other two, with a somber but still satisfying ending — it was the best of the three.

Echopraxia, by Peter Watts: This is sometimes called a “sidequel” to Blindsight, not quite sequel or prequel but set at about the same time as the events in the first book. So it’s a hard sci-fi story with a lot of biology overtones, set in a post-human, near future dystopia. The cast features an escaped vampire, a hive mind, the father of the previous book’s protagonist, and a somewhat hapless “baseline” human biologist along for the ride to near-solar orbit, where they are again up against that enigmatic alien civilization.

This is very much a “careful what you wish for” tale about the Singularity, and was a harder, meatier, slower read than the Nick Harkaway books, which sometimes means “better,” but while it was a great read I think the Harkaway books were better.

Journey To The Edge of Reason: The Life of Kurt Gödel, by Stephen Budiansky: My usual MO with library e-books is to really get into it with one or a streak of fiction choices, search for more and find myself overwhelmed by unfamiliar authors and titles, and go select instead some non-fiction that looks interesting. Then I either get bored or annoyed, and I drop the book. I took out this book half expecting the same thing to happen, but I forgot that biographies, though non-fiction, are stories and can hold my attention as well as any novel…

Kurt Gödel was a member of the Vienna Circle, or some Vienna Circle, and was the brilliant mathematician who proved that mathematics could not be reduced to rote logic — there would always be true mathematical statements that could not be proved. (This raised a bit of a stir, needless to say, just as the attempt to finally get mathematics on a rigorous, purely logical basis seemed to be reaching its culmination.) That much I knew about him, but this fleshed him out quite a bit more: his colleagues, friends and rivals in Vienna and the academic world, his marriage, his escape from Nazi-occupied Austria, his years at the Institute for Advanced Study and his friendship with Albert Einstein, his struggles with mental illness, and his eventual death from self-starvation.

The book was based on a lot of recent research (by the author) in Gödel’s papers and archives, and did a great job describing the man, his work and his world. I was pretty happy with this one.

I’m currently feeling better and I’m more active, and I am now on the hunt for my next book. I just downloaded John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. I’ll let you know.

PS: WXPN is doing the “885 Best Songs by Women (As Chosen By You)” this week. Right now they are somewhere in the low 600’s and the ladies are killing it. Groove is in the heart, baby!

Blindsight, by Peter Watts I saw a mention of this book somewhere on the Internet recently, and was intrigued enough — I think that there was a picture of an octopus involved — so I got it on Kindle. A good read: it’s a dystopian, “hard sci-fi” story about first contact, with a lot of speculating and philosophizing about consciousness and awareness in intelligent beings — the story’s premise is built on the possibility that awareness is an evolutionary drag on intelligence.

The crew is post-human, with various enhancements meant to interface with each other and with the equipment they use; their leader is a resurrected “vampire” (that is, a member of an extinct superhuman subspecies that once preyed on humans), and “the Captain” is the ship AI, which really does not talk with anyone but the vampire. They are sent out to study and make contact with an obviously extraterrestrial artifact orbiting a nearby rogue planet, and things go from there…

This book did not read as fast as, say, Titanium Noir — it took a long weekend rather than a day — but it was engrossing, and kind of creepy, and well worth reading.