Family (Mis)Adventures

So, yesterday my wife and I took our two kids to the water park to celebrate my son's seventh birthday a bit after the fact. It was his first time at the big park.

(On the weekend, we had taken him to see his first movie in a theater, Monsters v. Aliens. It was at one of the local dollar theaters and he did a great job. Stayed in his seat, didn't talk through the dialogue or ask an endless stream of questions, didn't ask to go to the bathroom, etc. His only insistence was that he get some popcorn, because "I know from watching movies at home that people in movie theaters always have popcorn.")

He did a great job, enjoying the large wave pool in particular, going back multiple times. Dad, who isn't quite as big a fan of waterparks as his wife or daughter, did okay outside of the big tube rides. Waiting in line a long time for a ride that ends up being over in a flash just isn't my thing. Maybe it reminds me too much of my early sex life, I don't know.

And naturally at the exit of a ride called the Viper, I ended up coming out of the chute backwards and flipped upside down, smacking my head on the concrete floor of the shallow exit pool hard enough to raise a lump, give me a headache, and make me dizzy--but thankfully not enough to cut my scalp or result in a concussion. I also somehow managed to cut my foot. The next hour or so was not so fun-filled for me, but the kids continued to have a good time.

So, all things considered, I took one for the team and my son had a great time.

That night my daughter was helping her mom prepare dinner when she sliced off part of her fingernail while peeling some ginger. Finger bleed a lot, so there was a bit of trauma as that got squared away with gauze and bandaids.

Then this afternoon my son came screaming into the house. At first I literally thought he had severed an artery or set himself on fire. Turned out it was his first bee sting, on the bottom of his foot. He shrieked in my ear for a good two minutes straight (Ow! OWW! AHHH! OWWW!) as I sat him in a chair and my wife brought me the tweezers to pull the stinger out. Then he howled a bit more when she put the baking soda on the sting, and I put some ice on the sting to calm him down.

This evening he said at dinner, "I can't even remember what the sting felt like."

It has been an adventurous couple of days. Hopefully we will all heal up. :-)

Review: Small Favor

My latest Dresden Files read is the recent novel Small Favor. This one finds Harry unwillingly called upon to pay off one of his debts to the Winter Queen Mab, acting as her Emissary to retrieve the kidnapped gangster Marcone--one of the longest running characters in the series and someone for whom Harry has grudging respect but no real love.

But, in what has become increasingly common in the later novels of the series, the supposed premise isn't really what the novel ends up being about. It's much more about the Knights of the Cross, the demonic Denarians, and the Archive, as well as Harry's relationships with all three. Sure, an unnatural winter hangs over Chicago during the course of the story, and Marcone's henchmen and his special Valkyrie-like bodyguard play a role. But we're mainly dealing with recurring themes of faith, temptation, and the personal challenges of trying to maintain friendships and especially trust when all around you are powers that can warp human minds to their will.

In particular, there are some interesting twists with relationships. There's a hint of a sort of pseudo-family composed of certain characters being a possibility for the future, and it's surprising. There's also a new love interest for Harry--not a new character, actually, but a new (and to me unexpected) perspective on an old one.

As usual, there are a few elements to the plot that are a bit convenient. Not unbelievable, per se, but the bad guys could not have realistically anticipated that certain actions of theirs would lead to the outcomes that they do when they set their plans in motion, yet some of their plans seem predicated on these unpredictable outcomes taking place. But as usual the pacing of the action is fast enough, the humor reliable enough, and the sense of concern for interesting and likable characters palpable enough to keep you reading until late in the night without worrying too much over occasional dramatic conveniences.

Now I think I'm going to take a break before reading the latest book in the series, as this is the third or fourth Dresden novel I've devoured in the last month.

Review: The Confederation Handbook

On my camping trip I finished reading a Father's Day acquisition (another used book purchase from the Rediscovered Bookshop), Peter F. Hamilton's The Confederation Handbook, published in 2000. It's subtitled "The Essential Companion Guide to the Night's Dawn Trilogy: The Reality Dysfunction, The Neutronium Alchemist, and the Naked God."

Ironically, I started reading the first volume of the Reality Dysfunction and couldn't quite wade through it. It's a general problem that I have with Hamilton's longer work--it's really, really long. I find that in stories that immense and sprawling I lose contact and interest with the characters and events taking place. I might try my hand at his work again, as he's a pretty popular writer in the genre, but just as I felt that Alastair Reynolds's first novel, Revelation Space, was easily 100 pages longer than it needed to be, I think Hamilton could use a more aggressive editor. But the market seems to embrace this excess, as least to a degree: it's one reason why I've simply stopped reading Neal Stephenson's novels.

That said, I actually found The Confederation Handbook to be a bit too short. It's an interesting look at some fairly sophisticated world-building. I picked it up as one of the many references I've gathered on fictional worlds as I embark on my own science fiction and fantasy projects.

The book gives a nice overview of the primary human cultures in the books, the Adamist and Edenist cultures. Although frankly the Edenist culture is presented as so powerful, so nice, and so superior with its use of affinity that links everyone together into a collective group mind that also maintains individuality that it grates a little bit even in a presentation as dry and brief as this one. (That said, I think living in an Edenist culture could be pretty cool. But they come off as Mary Sues here, even with the brief mention of the presence of the very rare Serpents.) You do get an interesting mix of technologies and societies here.

I found the section on Starships and Weapons to be a bit too brief. I still can't visualize the structure of the Adamist starships from reading Hamilton's description here. The main focus is on the voidhawks, which I suppose is appropriate. This section is the first one that really suffers from a lack of any kind of artwork to help you visualize what Hamilton is describing (without a great flair for visual description, I might add).

The Members of the Confederation section is hit or miss. The section on Earth is interesting, as is the stuff on Kulu, Tranquility, Norfolk, the Dorados, and Valisk. These are distinctive enough to be cool and have a lot of potential story hooks laid throughout them. The rest left me kind of blah. It's interesting that so many VERY earthlike planets have been sought out for colonization and it fits with the scope of Hamilton's setting. But I would really have liked a simple time line of when various colonies were settled and some sort of reference outlining the basic steps for founding and developing a typical colony. Too many of the details of that process are hinted at vaguely here. I have a hard time understanding how the starting stage for an interstellar colony always begins with a somewhat backwards agricultural society. I'm not saying it isn't feasible, but Hamilton needs to lay out his logic here more clearly to make it believable after all the other high-tech elements. The whole bit about mixed ethnic-religious colonies being a complete failure also strikes me as a pretty high-handed judgment and is presented as fact without much to back it up. Seems like all the technological elements influencing Adamist culture would have made SOME changes to the way people interact and view each other over several centuries.

The aliens section also suffers greatly from lacking illustrations. The Kiint are interesting while the Tyraca aren't--but primarily because the Tyraca aren't fully described here for fear of giving away spoilers. I think that's another shortcoming of the book--it's rather coy with certain facts that you WANT to know when reading something that bills itself as a handbook.

The book's total absence of even the most rudimentary artwork or illustration is a big letdown and seems a bit puzzling considering that it was a mass-market release tied to a a major science fiction series. I can't see why the publisher couldn't have afforded a few line drawings or diagrams to illustrate some of Hamilton's aliens or spacecraft. Sure, it's a slim, mass market paperback. I've got a fairly crappy anthology of the same dimensions from 1986 (Body Armor: 2000) that includes an article called the Warbots reprinted from an old Galaxy magazine that is loaded with fantastic bits of b/w line art (I've posted an example here of what you can do in a plain paperback). So something simpler than this could have been done for this book. Even a map of interstellar space or simple graphic for the various colonies would have been nice.

The writing in general is rather dry but usually fairly clear with the information that it does try to get across. What's startling here is that no one thought to include quotations or vignettes from the novels to illustrate some of the concepts or places described in the handbook. Really? Those wouldn't have greatly improved the readability, illustrated some of the more difficult concepts more effectively, and held my interest to a greater degree? A rather dumbfounding oversight given that the author of the series is credited as being the author of this handbook. Wasn't he willing to permit himself to quote himself?

Overall, I suspect I'm spoiled by the quality of science fiction RPG supplements over the past ten years, such as Transhuman Space, GURPS Traveller, or Centauri Knights. They provide a more thorough background in what amounts to a similar number of words if you strip out the gaming stats (though the layouts are quite different). I'd argue that a supplement like Centauri Knights actually does more than the Confederation Handbook accomplishes in less space.

I think this book could have been improved by either expanding it and adding some illustrations OR by shortening it to a long essay hitting the highlights of the Adamist and Edenist cultures and given away free on a web site.

So, while mainstream setting handbooks like this are interesting to pick up once in a while, the Confederation Handbook is mediocre even given the advantage of having been written by the author of the books whose setting it references. Probably worth getting it used as I did if you are a fan of the six-book "trilogy" (I know the novels were published as three books in Britain, but they were absurdly long in that form). But don't buy the mass-market edition Amazon is selling--by no stretch of the imagination is this book worth $17. I wouldn't even pay full-price for the earlier printing, but that's closer to the true value.

Review: Spade & Archer

Just before I left on my trip I finished reading the hard-boiled mystery novel Spade & Archer by writer Joe Gores. Didn't have a chance to write a review at the time or on the trip, thanks to the incompatibility between my iPod Touch software and Blogger's interface (I can view, but not post blog entries).

So the novel bills itself right on the cover as "The Prequel to Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon" and that's pretty much what it is. Gores begins with Book 1 "Samuel Spade, Esq." This starts in 1921 with Spade solving a simple case in Tacoma before leaving the employment of the Continental Detective Agency and heading back to San Francisco to open up his own private detective agency.

We get a glimpse of his future partner, Miles Archer, enough to see that the guy is a jerk. And we learn that his partner's hot and somewhat trampy wife, Iva Archer, was once Spade's girl before Sam went off to fight in World War I.

To be honest, it has been a LONG time since I read the Maltese Falcon or saw the movie, so this stuff, which sets up events that take place in the later novel, was not that important to me. [And I just learned that there was a 1931 version of the movie before Bogart's more famous 1941 version. The earlier one apparently had more sexual innuendo--both heterosexual and homosexual--and once the Code censors were established it was banned for release in the U.S. until the 1960s.]

But the meat of the book deals with the cases that Spade handles from 1921 to 1928 and the contacts that he makes or re-establishes during that period. The cases are interesting, involving things ranging from the theft of gold bullion from a freighter to the stalking of a young woman friend of Spade's secretary to the mysterious death of a prominent banker and the ensuing coverup. There's some attempted union-bashing and references to the strike breaking of 1919 (Spade is shown as being more sympathetic to the striking union men than to the bosses) to boot.

Each of these cases shows that while Spade is a tough guy who can handle himself in a scrap, he solves his cases through a combination of being a shrewd judge of human character, being willing to take chances to look at things and people first hand, and having a lot of contacts in various places to gather information. He doesn't just strongarm or intimidate people into giving him info. And, particularly early in the novel, Spade doesn't always resolve cases to his satisfaction. It becomes apparent, at least to Spade, that there is a recurring criminal opponent playing a role in the cases he is taking on.

The cases themselves read almost like a collection of novellas. But unlike a collection of short stories, everything in this novel is tied together. For one, you don't get re-introduced to Spade at the start of each new case, nor do you revisit the details of places like his office or apartment unless those have changed in the intervening time.

For another, the resolutions of later cases depend upon Spade's relationships with people that he meets in the earlier cases. I found this to be a satisfying way of linking the stories without pushing the idea of a mastermind criminal behind the scenes too heavily. Spade pursues each case as if it was unrelated to the others, with any connections only surfacing along the way or after the fact. His relationships with the people develop over time in interesting ways.

And just like the Los Angeles of Raymond Chandler's classic Philip Marlowe stories, the Bay Area is clearly a strong supporting character. Gores does a great job of evoking a sense of time and place with his myriad but simple descriptions of locales, clothes, and customs from 1920s San Francisco and its environs.

All in all, I greatly enjoyed this novel. From other reviews that I've read, I suspect that Hammett fans will appreciate how Gores has captured Spade's voice and the atmosphere of Hammett's San Francisco while developing the relationships with key characters who appear in the Maltese Falcon. I liked it as a good hard-boiled detective story that demonstrated that if you have enough style, you don't need to resort to guns blazing and explicit sex scenes to keep the reader's attention, create dramatic tension, and establish your bona fides as a real P.I.

Variable Tech Indices

Once again, my pal Aaron has inspired me with a recent post on his blog (Anecdotal Evidence: One Laptop Per Child: Vision vs. Reality) about the One Child, One Laptop movement and its problems (see this link for the original article in the Communications of the ACM).

For me, the thrust of the article boils down to this key point: even if you could GIVE AWAY laptops, one per child, in developing countries, you cannot ensure that they will result in the same educational benefits in developing that having every kid in a middle class suburban American classroom equipped with a laptop might achieve, much less the educational revolution envisioned by the OCOL's founders.

The problems are manifold, but they center on lack of technical and pedagogical training, insufficient infrastructure, and institutional inertia. To wit:

• Teachers need to know how to use the computers and the accompanying software themselves before they can guide students effectively in its use or TRUST students to use it properly. This means they need to be trained, which means you need the money, facilities, and educators required to train them.
  
• Even free computers need technical support. Again, this requires skilled IT personnel or a training program to produce them.
  
• Someone has to supply the software. Emerging markets often lack the indigenous technical experts and coders needed to create the software locally. This means they have to find outside sources. That means either dealing with licenses for proprietary software or using shareware. Shareware tends to require some technical expertise to get the most out of it, plus it isn't being produced in the local languages of the kids in developing countries.
• You need other physical infrastructure to surround the computer. This can be as simple as needing a printer (and being able to repair and resupply it) or as complex as securing adequate internet connections in remote regions.
• Teachers need to see the computers as tools, not threats to their authority. You can't just get large government ministries to accept the validity of the project's goals; you need the teachers in the classroom to see the laptops or other technologies as means of empowerment that improve their ability to do their jobs rather than simply complicating their lives.
• Brands have considerable power in emerging markets. In other words, if the locals are only familiar with certain very well known versions of high-tech products (the kinds used by the wealthy in their countries), are they going to trust that shareware and off-label brands will provide them with the knowledge and experience they need to integrate into the global marketplace? And might they be right to be concerned about this point?
  

The real world struggles of the OCOL reminded me of the situation in the veteran science fiction roleplaying game Traveller. In Traveller, you have a bunch of worlds with really high technological indexes, capable of building and maintaining some truly staggering technological inventions.

And within a week or two of travel distance you've got planets that are practically preindustrial, where the citizens may use high-tech devices when they can get ahold of them, but they can't build or repair them.

The examples of Africa and to a lesser degree Central and South America seem to bear out the likelihood of this model existing to a greater degree than many people once thought.

I wonder if the introduction of new technologies like the Fab Labs will mitigate this situation to some degree by providing communities in emerging markets with highly flexible, localized, small-scale manufacturing and repair capabilities. But I suspect that what will happen will be somewhat different.

Instead of being able to build or fix the equivalents of current generation technologies in the developed world, locals will be able to buy, copy, and repair outdated bits of tech as well as developing their own innovations (based perhaps on technical specs that are obsolete in the developed world). Over time they might kludge together some very useful but very unique technologies that will be severely lacking in standardization and compatibility but will serve their immediate needs admirably.

But that would still leave a significant divide between the tech used by the dominant cultures and markets and that used by the emerging markets. You'd be much more likely to find really unusual stuff being made by locals, stuff that you'd have to have some talent to fix because it would be a mish-mash of parts. And that would be interesting from a story perspective.

Hide Your Goals

In this post, my friend Aaron links to another blog that basically argues that telling people your goals typically leads to positive affirmation. Sounds good, right? I mean, one of the recurring fears that people express about trying to make big life changes (new career, body transformation, relationship changes, creative pursuits) is that they'll get mocked or criticized for their plans.

But it turns out that this positive affirmation for something you haven't actually accomplished gives you a false sense of satisfaction, as though you have already achieved the goal you shared. When in fact you are just stating your desire and intent to pursue and achieve that goal.

The ironic result is that the encouragement and support of others for your stated goal ends up undermining your efforts to reach that goal. You start acting and thinking as if you had already accomplished the goal you set for yourself. This takes away from your focus and drive. So you are less likely to achieve the goals that you share with people.

A few thoughts.

First, I wonder if these results hold true for goals revealed at different stages of the process. For example, telling people that I got a gym membership and I'm going to be working out three days a week and lose weight right after I get the membership is probably a bad idea. Whereas telling people halfway through the process of reaching that weight loss goal seems a little less likely to derail me, as I've already established some of the work habits needed.

To me the key seems to be establishing and ingraining the habits needed to achieve the goal before you start telling everyone about it. Because by that point you've got a bit of mental fortitude built up to help you resist the urge to pat yourself on the back too much if you get positive reactions from people. And everyone needs some positive feedback at some point.

Second, I wonder how this jibes with the idea I've read in various texts on modern magical thought that acting and believing "as if" a goal has already been achieved is a key to attuning yourself to receive whatever positive potential related to your goal is out there in the world. Maybe the key difference is between being active and passive. Or there could just be a strong disconnect between these two types of thinking about the world.

Third, I wonder how this process relates to the idea of giving yourself daily, positive self-affirmations when working toward your goal. In other words, does giving yourself positive reinforcement also undermine your likelihood of achieving a stated goal, or does the negative impact occur only when you share your goals with other people? I'd be curious to see a study evaluating this aspect of the hypothesis, because positive self-affirmations and visualizations have been shown to have a positive effect on actual, real-world performance. So perhaps only the social aspect of praise--the role played by others in developing our self-image--has the potential to derail our pursuit of our goals.

From my personal experience, I suspect that the broad claim about not sharing your goals with others in order to be more productive about reaching those goals is true. It never pays to tell people what I'm writing about or planning to write about. I never get as good a reaction when I tell someone what I want to write as I do when I actually show them what I have written. It's just too hard to explain an outline or story out loud and I always feel a little embarrassed.

Someone whose name I've forgotten noted in a guide to writing that one should "Tell everyone that you are writing. Tell nobody what you are writing until it is done." If you allow for sharing manuscripts with people for review during the process, which has been very valuable for me, I think this advice is solid.

This is another reason, I think, to break goals down into specific, manageable chunks, because then it takes less time to achieve them, at which point you can tell somebody until you get some positive feedback and encouragement and then set out upon your next goal with some renewed energy and sense of accomplishment. And you don't tell anyone any specifics about that goal until you've reached it.

For writing and physical health, some manageable goals that I've attempted with some success are:

• Write X amount of words a day for Y many consecutive days or until a total of XX number of words have been written.
• Write for X amount of time each day for Y many consecutive days or until a specific target date.
• Lose five pounds in X amount of time and keep the weight off for Y amount of time en route to reaching a bigger weight loss goal.
• Do X amount of cardio exercise Y many days a week.
  
• Improve a particular lift by 2.5 pounds each week until you can lift a desired amount of weight.
  

One of the biggest challenges, of course, remains continued motivation after a goal is reached. That's why I think the most successful approach is to integrate habits and behaviors that support your goal into your daily routine and everyday lifestyle, so that you stop thinking about them and simply grow to appreciate them as part of your life.

That's also why it's hard to focus on too many goals in life--you can only accommodate so many aspects into a consistent lifestyle.

Review: Gentlemen of the Road

Just finished re-reading Gentlemen of the Road, a short swords-and-horses pseudo-historical novel by Michael Chabon. Quite a treat and something any fan of Chabon's or the genre should read for themselves.

The novel follows the misguided adventures of wandering Jewish physician and swordsman Zelikman and the African ex-Byzantine mercenary Amram as they travel eastward past the Crimea and toward the Caucus Mountains. They stumble across a coup in the mysterious nation of Khazar, a state formed by steppe nomads who adopted Judaism instead of Christianity or Islam. And against their better judgment they end up helping one of the sole remaining heirs to the position of war bek (the temporal ruler of Khazar, who is supposedly under the authority of the spiritual leader, the kagan), a person who is not quite what they seem to be, on a lurching, uneven journey toward a kind of justice.

In his afterword, following a lengthy (and for my money completely unnecessary) explanation of why a serious writer is tackling such escapist adventure fare, Chabon explains that he wanted to write a story about Jews with swords that wouldn't be immediately dismissed as an attempt at satire or surrealism. And in the long-lost kingdom of Khazar he found a brief time and place where he could tell a story filled with wild invention and supposition while still retaining a historical element.

Some of my favorite quotes from the novel (bear in mind that all of these are set up by at least a paragraph or two of narrative that I feel are too lengthy to excerpt here but that make them all the funnier or more heartwarming):

"Just when did you acquire a conscience?" Zelikman said.
"A figure of speech. Which will it be?"

and

"I want Hillel. And do not repeat, Amram, that a horse is a horse, because, history, circumstances, and I have disproved that argument many times."

and

"Take care of what you say," Amram advised him. "He healed me of a sword cut to the neck five years ago, and I've been carrying him on my back ever since."

and

It was remarked by one of the eminent physician-rabbis of the city of Regensburg, in his commentary on the Book of Samuel, a work now lost but quoted in the responses of Rabbi Judah the Pious, that apart from Torah the only subject truly worthy of study is the saving of men's lives. Measured by the criterion of this teaching--propounded by his grandfather--Zelikman counted two great scholars among his present acquaintance, and one of them was a horse.

and

Filaq wiped the blade on the flap of his tunic and then handed it back, haft first. "Thank you for saving my life," he said.
"I don't save lives," Zelikman said. "I just prolong their futility."

and

"The offer to join us was a simple one, really," Joseph Hirkanos said when Zelikman tumbled into the basket, looking him up and down from the tips of his curled slippers to his blackened hedgehog of a plaited beard to the clumsy windings of his head wrap. "But I divine that you find a way to complicate everything."

and

"He is in love with a hat," said Flower of Life, frowning at Zelikman through the crook of Amram's arm. . . . "If so," Amram said, somewhat weary of the matter of Zelikman and hats, "it would not be the first time."

and finally

And then they took the first road that led out of the city, unmindful of whether it turned east or south, their direction a question of no interest to either of them, their destination already intimately known, each of them wrapped deep in his thick fur robes and in the solitude that they had somehow contrived to share.