I see the light and it's made of lasers!

Book: The Ascent of Wonder: The Evolution of Hard SF

Authors: Lots (edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer)

Published: 1994 (collection; Tor)

Pages: 988

Holy shit was this book ever difficult to get through, guys.

Let me clarify right now that I don’t mean because of the quality; it was purely a size thing. Almost 1000 pages crammed with tiny type about physics and biogenetics and astronomy and advanced mathematics and, weirdly enough, more than one whirlpool. Plus dragons.

I’ve been chipping away at this collection since the beginning of July, and it really helped to take two, several-smaller-books-sized breaks. Even then, finishing it still gives my brain that way-too-full sensation of going to a museum and reading every single plaque next to every single exhibit. Ow.

And that is what this gi-fucking-normous book functions best as: a very complete history of sci fi. (Well, up to a point. The youngest story in here is older than I am.) I read it because I want to learn more about the genre, and it gave a really thorough tour through a lot of different trope origins, teaching by showing off examples. Which was the best way to learn, because here you get all the lasers and moon colonies where people have already gotten cynical about the wonders of space and deep-sea aliens and sentient monkeys who escape wearing orange Bermuda shorts and carrying their typewriters and children’s games that lead into another dimension and Asimov computers compiling information about life’s biggest question until the end of time.

It’s all blended together, in case you can’t tell. I think partly because I read all the intros to the stories, too, which each boiled down to “This guy is awesome and [chose one] severely under-appreciated” OR “recognized as one of the leading writers of the genre and a bunch of people still copy him.”

(Regarding that last adjective, there are a relatively decent number of female authors represented here, which is to say two more beyond Anne McCaffery [dragons!] and Ursula K. Le Guin. The collection was also co-edited and compiled by a lady.)

I thought the one they chose for Poe was weaksauce because it’s a sailor describing how he got out of a whirlpool, which, while still affecting, was the most conventional Poe story I’ve ever read. Also, maybe I’m just not appreciating historical nuance, but H.G. Wells’s “Hey, Tanks!” (actual title: “The Land Ironclads”) was also not nearly as good a representation of that author as they could’ve picked. And I can’t really get over McCaffery’s dragons getting put into a collection dedicated to hard sci fi when the definition of the subgenre specifically eliminates magic as a reason for anything.

But once I got into the rhythm and let my eyes skim the passages with incomprehensible engineering equations in them, I had a great time. I’m struggling with the decision about what to do with this physical book now, though. To the pros and cons list!

It throws my spine out of whack whenever I try to lug it around in my shoulder bag, and I automatically deduct major points from any reading material I can’t carry with me at all times.

As a city girl whose pedestrian ways has grown a healthy wariness of potential muggers, I appreciate having a blunt object that will stun but not kill and look completely innocent while doing so.

I can’t see myself ever plowing through the whole thing again, like, ever.

But it’d be great to have to spot-check and keep as a future readings list for authors I would never come across again.

Oh, hell, I’ll just keep the damn thing so I’ll have an excuse to either weed my crowded fiction bookshelf or build another one that looks like the TARDIS. 

Predictions of the digital age

Book: Digerati: Encounters with the Cyber Elite

Author: John Brockman

Published: 1996 (HardWired)

Pages: 335

Irony is reading a physical book all about how the world is going digital and how we should adapt or risk getting left behind.

What Brockman did was gather up all his influential friends and acquaintances from the industry, sat them down one by one, and interviewed them about where they thought the Internet and the World Wide Web were headed and what they and the world at large needed to do about it.

And then he typed it and sent it off to get bound in paper and glue and cardboard and to sell on one of the platforms most of his interviewees predicted would be dead by now (to be fair, they’re getting sort of right).

Reading fifteen-year-old predictions about the Internet feels a little like reading Nostradamus; it’s a faddish way of retroactively proving that psychics really do exist. Although the people interviewed for this book were far more actively engaged in the innovations they talked about, their projections were still vague enough to apply correctly to what the Internet has become without knowing if 2011’s Internet is exactly what they were thinking in 1996.

A good bit of why I liked reading this was so I could nod my head and mentally mark off what we’ve innovated from these Suggestions of the Future.

• Interaction and personalization will always be king in a medium that’s simultaneously broadcaster and audience.
• As long as we have such a thing as technology, we will have people worrying about whether or not we’re spending too much time on it.
• Ease of access, cheapening of speed, and building of communities are the steadiest foundations on which to build Internet interest.
• Nobody will ever care about interactive TV.

I really, really wish Brockman had hosted round table talks/arguments and just recorded those verbatim, or at least left his questions in so on the page his interviews would get some of that interaction action they all yap on about. That way he would’ve caught some great arguments that would have taken all these sentiments, which were thought-provoking but difficult to get through in big chunks that said basically the same thing.

“You sly dog! You’ve got me monolouging!”  

Anyway, this was a sort of interesting book, but it’s by no means necessary.