The Hugo Award ballot for this year is out. There's a new provisional category for graphic novels. I would like to draw lyceum_arabica's attention to it, in anticipation of her tearing itself apart in indecision. Though maybe she'd just jump at Y or Schlock.

Me, I like Y and Fables less, didn't think Serenity was that good (well, should re-read it) and am innocent of Dresden stuff (besides, it's a spinoff, odds are poor). Girl Genius vs. Schlock Mercenary, though -- both are top tier comics for me. In terms of overall quality, I'd have trouble deciding. GG certainly wins on art, and probably characters. Story is hard to tell; both are good, Schlock has gotten a lot more done, as Foglio like Hodgell is going practically minute by minute. Schlock wins as science fiction, I think.

But I'm just amused that almost all the nominees are things I've read and she's read too.

Finished it. Good. Not sure it was as good -- or inventive -- as Cyteen. Cyteen was this big "whoah" psychology thing, with Emory high-IQ Machiavellian advice and Grant talking about logic vs. flux states. Regenesis was a lot more settling-in, followed by Action! Plot! I was going to make a post about computers -- Cyteen was published in 1988, and there's still a strong mainframe feel, which is sensible for socio-engineering but less so for architectual plans, but there's also signs of personal communicators and maybe even laptop equivalents, and I wasn't reading that closely, so I'll leave it.

Cherryh's still the mistress of non-transparent societies, or at least ones which feel that way. By which I mean not "obscure" or "hard to understand" but "information flow to and among the characters is sub-optimal". Actually this is probably one of the better novels that way regarding the main characters, since people actually talk, and Ari has Base One, but Union itself needs help.

Moving on:

* The myth of the failure of FDR and the New Deal
* GOP governor of Utah reverses self, supports gay civil unions. Unlike 70% of Utahns.
* On RPG.net it was mentioned that mammals have smaller genomes than reptiles and amphibians; it was then said that the explanation for this is our being warm-blooded. We need only one set of enzymes, optimized for our body temperature; they need a wide range of enzymes to match a wide range of temperatures.
* Glaxo to give out cheap medicine. I hear Merck's best success at boosting employee morale was when they provided drugs to the third world at cost.
* Discworld novel motifs
* GOP perks in Albamy, NY
* The Reelfoot Rift, earthquakes in middle America.
* Apparently the flu virus spreads better in dry air, as measured by absolute humidity. And cold air tends to be drier. Voila, winter flu season, and steaming teakettles to stay healthy.
* Racism in Burma, and from the consul
* Austalian wildfires: punishment for abortion

Yep, enjoying reading it. Though 1/3 of the way through, after 3-6 hours of reading (been home for 7, dinner and rpg.net took some time, I didn't track how much.)

I realized that Ariane Emory approaches psychohistory the way Eric Drexler suggested dealing with protein folding, or programmers deal with the Halting Problem: you can't solve the general case, but you can use building blocks you can solve. Programmers write code they can mostly analyze (some languages [Haskell] are easier than others [C, Intercal]), Drexler wanted to find peptides with known interactions, Emory builds societies out of azi and their children. (I'm pretty sure that was in Cyteen but is more urgently explicit here.) What will a bunch of wild humans do? Hard to say. What will a bunch of azi you've designed from the ground up do? A lot easier, plausibly.

Reseune is still an unpleasantly autocratic place to live. It's a lot nicer than it was for most of Justin's adult life, but the basic premise is still a weird cross of the military, the NSA, and a company town. Security supposedly trumps the desires of genius scientists to be free, free!

I expect to enjoy this, since I liked Cyteen (this is the sequel), but man, the political economy of the intro doesn't make any sense to me. "Frontier conditions" on space stations -- stations with no obvious economic import. 3/4 million people in Alliance! Millions in Union! Vs. billions on Earth! Though Union's *trends*, with azi birthlabs and an apparent monopoly on rejuv, make sense.

But if you've got half a million people around Pell, why are you settling tens of thousand in other solar systems? Aaaargh.

Giving your old enemy a trade monopoly in your own space? Especially when you were more or less winning? I hope I don't have to re-read Downbelow Station and Cyteen.

Good god, everyone's insane. Well, not everyone. But both Svetlana and Bella need to be slapped silly. Or slapped sensible. And the rest of the crew, for not keeping Svetlana on a democratic leash.

Hope some readers knows what I'm talking about... I just hit the Buenos Aires passage.

Books I've read recently: Krugman's Return to Depression Economics, Terry Pratchett's Nation, Bujold's Sharing Knife books. All good. The Pratchett isn't Discworld, or even particularly like Discworld; it's in a story-convenient alternate Earth, where history is almost the same, up to Darwin making a fuss, but there's been a really nasty flu, a tsunami in the Indian ocean (that might be historical), and a touch of subtle fantasy and some different biology (tree-climing octopus yay).

You may note my icon is much nicer now, thanks to lpetrazickis and Photoshop, bicubic algorithm instead of nearest neighbor scaling. Contrast with

( Link attack! )

I read Galactic North, a collection of Reynolds stories, half of which I hadn't seen before. Good stuff. I have new appreciation for the Great Wall of Mars, a novel approach to paraterraforming: rather than roofing off an area, *wall* it off, which high walls the atmosphere can't go over (yes, very high), convert the atmosphere in there, and expand the walls as you can. Walls grow linearly with radius, vs. quadratically for roofs, so above some size there's less mass in the wall than in a roof. Probably a big size, given the difficulty of building 10 mile high walls. Lower gravity means its easier to build high walls but also that you need higher walls, since the atmosphere is less bound.

I'd wondered just why human terraforming machines, the greenfly, could be such a threat; I'd missed that "Galactic North" explicitly addresses that, with the machines having apparently adapted and incorporated more advanced techs, like the Melding Plague and Inhibitor weapons. Whoops! I'm guessing the greenfly were run by at least gamma level intelligence.

I speed-read a Data Mining book, and killed a day reading webpages on data compression, encryption, and error correction. Nothing clever to say, but it's neat stuff, and I'm particularly fascinated by correction, perhaps because we just did quantum EC in the quantum information class.

* Supporting the troops
* Hunger among US children skyrockets
* Global heating [sic] denialist debunking.
* Sunshine T-shirt. I contributed "He's not a tame vampire."

( Lots more random links )

Books:

* I found word counts for the Bible: 593,000 OT, 181,000 NT. A novel is 60,000-120,000 words, usually, so the whole Bible is like 7-14 novels. Huh, though it was bigger.
* Recently read: Runaways, a Marvel comic about a group of superpowered runaway teens. Wikipedia points out a bunch of things I hadn't consciously noted as neat: no costumes or code names (they try, then stop), strong girl power (at one point the group is one guy, four girls, and the guy is *not* in charge.) Nico's magic is also an interesting steal for an RPG, it seems to be "cast any spell you want -- once".
* Rome and Jerusalem, Martin Goodman, about the lead up to and consequences of the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD, and Roman and Jewish cultures. Summary of his version: it was all kind of a historical accident. Well, not all, the Zealot Jews were asking for it, especially when they murdered surrendered soldiers. But Imperial politics play a big role in his version: Vespasian wanted a quick glory, so had his son speed things up vs. waiting out a slow but sure siege; the destruction of the Temple was an accident, claimed as deliberate afterwards to not look like incompetent boobs and integrated into the triumph; anti-Jewish policies continued as most subsequent emperors apart from Nerva had reason to benefit from the glory of crushing the rebellious vassals, e.g. Trajan's father was part of the 70 AD campaign. And then there were more rebellions, leading to Hadrian building on the site of the Temple.
* Chalice, Robin McKinley, her latest novel. Classic form by her. Arguably another Beauty and the Beast twist but rather distant from the standard form. World has elements of Jo Walton's The King's Peace, lords magically connected to the land, but more elaborate. Also has an echo of her own Sunshine, with both Rae and Mirasol having unique versions of magic.
* Programming the Universe, Seth Lloyd, read at about the same time as the "Does the Universe Compute?" conference at IU, of which I went to the Lloyd and the Charles Bennett talks. I took notes, but maybe will describe some other time. Lloyd's theme is of the universe as a quantum computer, Bennett's was about information loss. I asked a question inspired by Psychohistorical Crisis which I think he resolved.

Non-election news:
* Sex slaves in the suburbs, either terrifying/depressing or hyped up, or both.
* Three strikes laws make criminals more violent after two strikes. That's so surprising! Wait, no it's not.
* The Economist's Democracy Index (pdf). Once again, Sweden leads the list.
* Somali girl stoned in a stadium for being raped.
* Christian Science Monitor to stop print publication. The CSM has unusual funding, so this may not be a harbinger for other newspapers yet.
* Overseer of military tribunals investigated for abuse of power
* Shin Bet head warns about right-wing settler violence in the occupied territories.
* Bush makes last-ditch efforts to trash the environment.

Election news and related
* The Economist endorses Obama.
* Crappy voting in St. Louis. Yay for partisan election officials.
* McCain panders to coal.
* A description of McCain rallies, plus Arlen Specter's coded language hoping for racism to carry the election.
* Ron Reagan Jr. endorses Obama.
* Arnold campaigns for McCain, jokes about Obama's body. That loses a lot of points with me, and Arnold has respect to lose.
* Student activism at Liberty U. Notable for a couple of quotes: "The expansion of the electoral franchise led to the growth of the
welfare state," (a poli sci prof), and "Ray is so random. I'm not. I do as I'm told. I'm really proper. Liberals are very indie, very emo, just very fun. When we go out, we put on button-downs and Sperrys. I think ahead. I'd rather dress like this now, because when I'm in law school this is how I'll be dressing. Liberals are like, 'Live, take a load off!' My friends at home say I have to be perfect 24 hours a day. It's just who I am."

She pauses. "I should recycle more."
(one of the GOP students.)

I went on a shopping spree recently and bought these two much-recommended (on rec.arts.sf.written, where the first version of this review appeared) and hard-to-find books.

I was introduced to the works of Hodgell by my freshman roommate in college. I don't remember the details, but he raved about God Stalk, while noting she was hard to find. Somehow I got a copy -- Spectre library? used bookstore? -- and read it. I think the first time through, I enjoyed it, but wasn't blown away. But then, for some reason, I re-read it.

After which I had to find a copy of Dark of the Moon, and found out that she was being published by Hypatia Press (some guy in northern California) in fancy expensive editions with nice color plates of her art, and I got sets for myself and Spectre -- the first two books, the third Seeker's Mask which first saw print in fancyedition, plus her short story collection Blood and Ivory. I also found and would snatch up copies of the paperbacks, and lend God Stalk out to lots of friends, who generally enjoyed it though without being addicted. I gave a couple of my paperbacks to two friends, as part of their set of wedding presents. It's the book I've lent out or recommended the most, though McKinley's Sunshine is getting up there.

Well, Hypatia went out of business, but another small publisher, Meisha Merlin, picked her up, printing in cheaper omnibus editions (Dark of the Gods) and an expanded short story book. MM had a whole stable of small-time authors, like the Liaden/Korval books of Lee and Miller, another cult. MM also printed the fourth novel, To Ride A Rathorn -- one novel per publisher.

Then they went out of business. The moon was draped in shadows. Though I note their website doesn't look dead.

Then Baen came! Available as Webscriptions since April, and word now is that they've bought her next book, and will be printing the others, on real paper. I see they've taken in Lee and Miller as well. And The Black Throne, the Zelazny/Saberhagen/Edgar Allen Poe book. Though A Night in the Lonesome October seems to be really out of print, which is very sad.

At any rate, thank you, Baen Books.

Bloomingtonians who want to borrow my Hodgells can.

Yesterday I read Maelstrom, by Peter Watts, the sequel to Starfish and still about the Little Bug That Could, Far Far Too Well. Like Andromeda Strain with references and a bunch of other science, like quantum consciousness (cough) and neurohacking, and a world both advanced and falling into ecological disaster, such that North American can't think of anything more productive ot do with 40 million Indian ecological refugees than to fence them up in Oregon and throw free food with antidepressants at them. Also where I have no idea how the place is governed: governments get mentioned by name but all the decisions seem to be taken by some vaguely accountable crisis management agency, with the word "corporate" thrown around a lot. But despite all that it was a good and fun read, if you don't mind the general darkness of Watts.

Also yesterday, a terraforming thread included someone mentioning indoor ski and surf resorts. So I went googling on [indoor ski resort] and [indoor surf resort] and [indoor beach]. Whee! Such things exist! Dubai's got a big indoor ski resort, along with an underwater hotel (maybe under construction, but some exist elsewhere, at less luxurious levels) and artificial islands. Indoor surf's out there, and Japan and Germany have indoor beaches. Germany's is the biggest freestanding building in the world, a converted zeppelin hangar, at 6.6 hectares. Japan's is 300 meters from a natural beach, which sounds silly until you remember "winter" and "Pacific ocean temperatures at latitudes which have winter". The anime Ouran Host Club had a beach episode at an indoors tropical resort, which I thought was cool fiction but might have been based on the real thing.

All that fascinates me because I *like* the idea of weather and climate control, and if you can't control the planet then, well, control your own. I was charmed to learn of the climate control (heating *and* cooling) termites and honeybees do for their mounds and hives. And while I love the ideas of Jane Jacobs and would pick city over mall, I also think most cities would be improved by a smart roof.

Which (smart matter) leads to today's book, Hacking Matter by Wil McCarthy. Something I'd known about for a while, and the ideas weren't too new. The high level idea is about programmable matter, matter whose properties and functions you can change through simple information. An LCD screen is a specialized form of such, as is, at a crude scale, those advertising billboards which change displays through mechanically rotating their component pixels. Something similar could be done on houses, with a surface composed of triangular pieces with white, gray, and black sides, and rotating those to get a desired reflectivity.

But McCarthy isn't actually talking at such an abstract level; instead he talks about quantum dots and artificial atoms. A qdot is a block of doped semicondutor such that electrons can't get in and out of it easily; also it's small, so the electrons are confined on the scale of an atom. But there's no nucleus, just walls, and you can control the shape of those. Also, you can pump electrons in and out of it. The electron configuration is what causes the chemical, optical, electrical, thermal, luminous and magnetic properies of matter, so by building lots of qdots on a surface, or in a solid, with associated control electrodes, you can potentially control all those properies at will, with a block of silicon changing from being transparent and insulating like glass to reflective and conductive like silver (or, more realistically, an otherwise impossible silver-silicon alloy with the mass of silicon), or shining like an LED, or...

Mass isn't controllable, and there'd be limitations, especially on chemistry and material strength due to the substrate. But you could probably still do some fun catalytic chemistry, and he has a chapter on what a smart house built out of this stuff could be like, with the building changing thermal and optical properties to manage heat. Black in the early morning, to absorb heat and store electricity, transparent panes later when the people get up, reflective at high noon after the capacitors are full, though still black in the shade so as to dump heat. If a refrigerator is part of an outside wall, the section of wall can be conductive in the winter to use the outside to cool off, while insulating and a (silent!) heat pump in the summer. The foundation can exchange heat with the ground, too. By his numbers 3/4 of the energy use of a US household is in heating and cooling things, so this is actually worth all the effort. Which isn't much effort if the stuff can be build cheaply enough; the various changes described are easily automatable.

He does note a drawback of all that: it may actually be antisocial en masse. Yes, it is saving energy, but it can also lead to a pedestrian walking among black or silver buildings, all optimized for stealing or dumping heat... stealing from or dumping into the same space the pedestrian is walking in. Ordinances might control how efficient buildings can be, or at least mandate that tall buildings only dump heat from their upper levels. But it gave me a vision of a gritty cyberpunk techno-noir feel: an unzoned city where the buildings wored to their full selfish potential, and were all mixes of black and chrome for good, functional, reasons.

Of course, if the city managed its climate collectively, via a roof and such, the problem wouldn't even come up. :)

Another cyberpunkish thing was, well. There are magneto-rheological and electro-rheological properies, which simplistically mean you can apply a magnetic or electric field and the material gets stronger. Powered toughness. So if you could sprinkle the right artificial atoms into someone's skin, balanced between not looking weird normally but still being functional, they might be able to turn on the power and suddenly have really tough skin. Instant HIT Mark!

"When technology looks like magic, the world itself becomes a fairy tale."

The grapevine tells me that Meisha Merlin, publisher of P.C. Hodgell one of my favorite fantasy authors, is going out of business.  Orphaned again!  But Baen is picking her up as e-books.

Hmm, I don't actually have a Hodgellian or God Stalk userpic.

Excerpt/summary from everyday math for everyday life

http://www.twbookmark.com/books/15/0446677264/chapter_excerpt16038.html

zosimos said tonight he was really impressed by my having read all 50 books. "What?" I said. "The whole list was bold." "Uh-oh." I have no idea how that happened; some accident with LJ's Rich Text editor, I guess. Anyway, I've fixed the entry, to a more accurate if less impressively comprehensive entry.

Pompe does an analysis of 24 LJ list-posters.

What do we mean by significant? I dunno; let's change the question! What's most influential? Well, influential on whom: giving lots of readers some happiness, giving a few readers lots and lots of happiness, changing the lives of lots of readers, changing the way they read books, changing the way people write books, inspiring lots of games, being arbitrarily required for proper geek culture... anything else? That's already plenty of possibilities; how to weight them? I'll ignore that question and zoom ahead, with a revealed bias toward changing lives and influencing authors.

1. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien -- this hits them all except maybe changing lives, and even that somewhat -- people thinking they're hobbits, people being opened to geekdom... superbig in the 1960s, I've heard. "Frodo Lives!" Definitely big on games and changing writers.

Ordering after this point is kind of arbitrary.

2. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams -- definitely fun, but I think the mindchanging aspect is more significant for a lot of people; at Caltech it seemed everyone had read it, even those you wouldn't expect it to, and old professors would at least have heard of the jokes. Shares some vague "British humor" with Monty Python and Terry Pratchett but I don't know about direct lines of influence.
3. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, J.K. Rowling -- allegedly it made a zillion kids read big books, and has spawned some kid's fantasy knockoff genre. Did the Hugos start going to fantasy books with Harry Potter?
4. Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein -- I'm not a fan but it's often described as Heinlein almost starting a religion by accident, and I know someone who'd started a "nest" in college because of it. Definitely big on changing people's lives -- at least it's not Ayn Rand.
5. H. P. Lovecraft in general
6. Neuromancer, William Gibson -- that whole cyberpunk movement. Vinge was there first in some ways but AFAIK Gibson caused the authors and the games.
7, Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice -- see HPL and Gibson; if you spawn your own genre, you're influential.
8. Stormbringer, Michael Moorcock -- I think has had a big impact on games, and maybe fantasy, and Gaiman had that autobiographical story "One Life, Furnished in Early Moorcock"
9. The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks -- allegedly this catalyzed all those Tolkien imitators and Extruded Fantasy Product.
10. Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card -- Is it that influential? Well, Coyu notes that Card has high sales, and seems to be a favorite of English classes dabbling in SF.

There's probably more which could be said, including the Asimov/Clarke/Heinlein thing in setting up the field, or getting lots of people readng and writing SF, plus Doc Smith's space opera -- but I don't want to spend more time on this, let someone else take up the challenge.

This is a list of the 50 most significant science fiction/fantasy novels, 1953-2002, according to the Science Fiction Book Club. Bold the ones you've read, strike-out the ones you hated, italicize those you started but never finished and put an asterisk beside the ones you loved.

Well, that's the meme.  I'm not sure I hate much of the ones I've read, but I've liked some more than others.  One * for a positive impression, at least, none for "meh".  Standard comment about disagreeing with the list (which IIRC was based on ideas of "influence", not just quality.)   No Cherryh, no *Vinge* excuse me but the Singularity is damn influential, like it or not.  I don't know if Bujold or Brust are significant.  Good, yes.  4x Hugo-winning, yes...