Book: "Solaris" by Stanislaw Lem (2/5 stars)

This 1961 novel is listed in "100 Must Read Science Fiction Novels".

Stansilaw Lem is the most read science-fiction writer outside of the English language. Previously, I've read "The Cyberiad", a brilliant collection of short stories translated from Polish by Michael Kandel.

"Solaris" doesn't really live up to the expectations I had on it after reading about it in "100 Must Read Science Fiction Novels", or from my experience with "The Cyberiad".

Maybe it's because it was translated by a different translator (from French no less, which means 2 translations), or maybe it's the nature of the novel itself, which is heavy and dark.

And yes, there is a movie based on this book with George Clooney in it!

The book follows Kelvin to the base on the planet Solaris. Kelvin is a scientist who dedicated his life to studying the planet and the possibly sentient living ocean that covers most of the surface. However, the novel is very much Lem's exploration of the alienness of alien life, and there are many questions that just remain unanswered. He goes on for pages and pages about previous expeditions and the complex shapes and structures created by the living ocean.

Much of the book is spent following Kelvin as he explores the base's vast library of books by other scientists and researchers who study Solaris as well. Lem puts on display the various fads and trends of his fictional universe. I think he's somehow intending to mirror the real world's tendency to do the same with science, but the parallel is lost on me.

I'm willing to accept that book is a classic and has some redeeming qualities, but it's mostly a curiosity for me, and not a particularly good one.

Book: "Six Easy Pieces" by Richard Feynman (2 of 5 stars)

I made the mistake of viewing a set of lectures from Auckland University when Feynman was there in 1979 at the same time I was reading this book.

The books is good, but the lectures are SO MUCH BETTER.

This book is based on The Feynman Lectures, classic books in the field of educating young physicists. Being much, much shorter, lots is left out, like equations and any mathematics. This is fine for a pop culture science book and I didn't mind, but found Feynman's voice doesn't shine through here. Also, the editor of this book decided to keep several pieces of text that say "I cover this in more detail in the next chapter" or "we continue with this in more detail", when there is obviously nothing more coming. This happened on the 2nd to last page and then the book just ended. It felt somewhat poorly put together.

Still, I consider it a gentle introduction to everything about science and how a few simple ideas can be used to derive all the rest. If you need to cover all of science in a book that is only 150 pages long, this is about as good as you can get, certainly content-wise.

If you read and like this book, I highly recommend listening to Feynman's 1979 lectures in Auckland as well as reading James Gleick excellent biography of him, "Genius".

Book: "The World Gates" by Holly Lisle (2 our of 5 stars)

I just read Holly Lisle's "The World Gates", 3 books called "Memory of Fire", "The Wreck of Heaven" and "Gods, Old and Dark" about two woman named Loren and Molly (sounds like Holly, is probably meant to be the author in some shape or form).

Molly and Loren are sisters and each independently discover that there are magical gates leading from earth going to other worlds, upworld, downworld and side worlds etc... In the downworld, humans have magical abilities and are considered gods there. Consequently, beings from our upworld have magical abilities on earth and are considered gods here (Zeus, Thor, Ra etc... were all originally from upworld somewhere).

The premise is good, lots of potential for interesting story lines, cool fantasy and so on. Lisle seems to write about interesting things and most of the books content is interesting to read. Having read many of the author's writing tips, and listened to her podcast "On Writing", I assumed that she'd be a cut above the rest, since she obviously cares about her writing, world building and characters a great deal.

Despite this, what I read was a completely average, pulp, fantasy novel with underdeveloped villains (to the point of ineffectiveness) and annoying, unsympathetic main characters whose troubles are bashed over the reader's head again and again. Writing was passable, but often awkward in places and in need of more editing.

Whenever it comes down to a battle between good and evil, somehow, the bad guys never know how to use magic as well as the good guys do... no reason, just the way that it works. Some of these bad guys are ancient gods, with ten thousand years of experience crushing pissants like the main characters, yet in the end, while it looks hard, it ends up being so damn easy that it's not worth reading. There was one scene in the middle novel where "A group of dark gods..." were "pinned down" by fire from good guys. The dumbness of the phrase completely pulled me from the story and left me shaking my head. There are many scenes like this.

I will only read more work by this author on recommendations from friends. I think I'll stop reading her writing tips and listening to the podcasts too.

book: "Way of the Cheetah" by Lynn Viehl (4/5 stars)

This is a book about writing. It is about how to be a more productive writer. She compares each of her strategies to the life and hunting strategies of a cheetah, sometimes to comic effect (imagine a cheetah being patted on the head by its cheetah friends that think his hunting is a nice little 'hobby')

I loved the book and even though it's only 72 pages, I though it was well worth the $9.95 I spent on line for it. The shortness is part of the appeal, and I finished it in about an hour and got lots out of it. It's an e-book, so you get it right away in pdf format (zipped) from Holly Lisle's writing resource page.

Lynn Viehl is the author of 36 novels in 5 different genres and writes over a million words per year. She is well worth listening to if you are interested in success as a writer. She also finds the time to share information on her popular and almost daily Paperback writer blog - I'm not sure where she finds the time.

Highlights for me included:
1. Strategies for upping your word count
2. Her own change of habit and how it helped her become more productive
3. That is ok to write for money
4. Her editing strategies and that she edits daily (a no-no in [[Nanowrimo]])
5. The constant and consistent cheetah analogy (it just works)

If you are interested in writing and have no clue how you could ever finish a novel or short story, and wonder where you'd ever find the time - this book answers all of those questions. If you are a writer by profession and want to be more productive, this is a must read.

Book: "Axiomatic" by Greg Egan (5/5 stars)

This is a book of short stories by Greg Egan, one of the most successful Australian sci-fi writers of all time.

I'm already a fan, having read "Luminous", another book of short stories, as well as "Permutation City" and "Quarantine". I also have "Diaspora" on my shelf, but I haven't read it yet. Shortly. Shortly.

I thought that "Luminous" was great - there were at least three or four really good short stories in there, including "Reasons to be Cheerful", probably my favorite ever short story, and "Mitochondrial Eve", a close second.

Because "Axiomatic" is older, I expected it to be less polished and less interesting. I was completely wrong. Almost every story was amazing in some way.

I highly recommend this for intellectual sci-fi fans. Don't miss Egan, we aren't going to see anything this good for a long, long time.

Book: "Freakanomics" by Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner (3/5 stars)

In many ways, a brilliant book. If the 2nd half was as good as the first half, I'd have given it a 5 star rating.

Steven Levitt knows how to look at data, and better than that, he knows how to find interesting results in the data that anyone can access. He asks the right questions, he finds the best way to get the answers that he wants, and fortunately for the rest of us, the facts he finds interesting are interesting for the rest of us.

His big revelation was the effect abortion was having on the crime rate, but there are lots of other things that he looked at that were immensely cool and interesting. How do you know if sumo wrestlers are cheating? We've got all this data to look at, what would a sumo wrestler cheating look like? How about teachers cheating on standardized exams? How about real estate agents selling their own houses? How are crack organizations like McDonald's franchises?

Levitt knows exactly how to look at his data sideways, and how to eliminate irrelevant factors that might confuse anyone else. It really is a remarkable display of setting up an experiment, even if it is with events that have already happened.

Unfortunately, by the middle of the book, it felt like Levitt had hit a limit and didn't have anything quite so interesting to say. Sure it was pretty cool - but not nearly as mind blowing as the first half. After the 1/2 way point, he simply took lots of data and did correlation analysis of the results and how one variable was related to another (do the names people get affect their success in life for example). Still - the ultimate causes to the effects remained unknown, and we're left with Levitt's speculation. As insightful as his speculation is, it's still just speculation.

Still - well worth your time, especially for the first half. A truly original book.

Book: "Coraline" by Neil Gaiman (3.5/5 stars)

A creepy children's fantasy novel about a precocious girl who finds a door that opens into an alternate bizarro world, where all the people she knows exist in parody, including her mother, father and neighbors.

Fresh and enjoyable, the novel/novelette is paced well, has a great main character and cast of quirky, fun, side characters and their strange and disturbing other-selves that made this an easy, quick read that I can recommend to almost anyone.

Despite being a children's story, it's worth a read for any fan of fantasy, or even just interesting fiction.

If you've read "Neverwhere" or "American Gods" and want more of Gaiman's work, you won't go wrong with this. Unfortunately, you'll be done in no time and probably wanting more.

The reason that I don't give it more stars is that it is so short, and I'd love it to be a full novel, rather than just a side project for Gaiman. I didn't think he gave it the attention it deserved. Still, it's well worth your time.

Book: "A Talent For War" by Jack McDevitt (2/5 stars)

"A Talent for War" is a science fiction novel, almost, but not quite a space opera.

200 years before the events of this novel, there was a great war with an alien race colloquially known as "the mutes", and the hero, the human hero, is Christopher Sim. He's the household name, the subject of novelizations, of operas, of plays, and speculative histories. Everyone in this world knows him and the basic roll he played in the war.

McDevitt mentions more than one of these novels and operas. He goes into great detail about stories done about each and every character in the war, the lieutenants, the Benedict Arnold, the love interest, the side stories and so on. While I realize that it's necessary to show just how ingrained the roll of Christopher Sim is in this fictional society, it just isn't that interesting. The main story is, but the many, many sidelines in a novel just 300 pages long don't hold my interest. I found myself counting the pages and struggling to get back to the novel when I'd put it down. I almost gave it up a couple of times, but managed to finish.

I won't be reading any more McDevitt without a solid recommendation from someone I trust.

Book: Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson (4/5 Stars)

I love this book. It is about the history and strangeness of English. From English names to English words, statistics of how many people speak English worldwide and so on.

A few things I took away from this book and quote quite often - 1) English is strange 2) adding s isn't the only way to make a word plural (i.e. brethren and children) 3) people never pronounce the "t" in soften, even though people do with often 4) more people are learning English in China than speak English in the United States

And so on and so on. This is a real winner and I highly recommend it. It is quirky and looks at the subject from a sideways position giving many interesting and insightful views. If you've ever been interested in why English is the way it is, and why we say deer and not deers, sheep and not sheeps, spoke not speaked etc.. etc... then look no further.

Book: "No Plot? No Problem!" byt Chris Baty - (4/5 stars)

I love this book. It's written by the founder of Nanowrimo, and is more about completing 50,000 words in one month than anything about writing a novel, i.e. voice, point of view, characterization etc...

Still, that being said, from having done the 1 month novel, I realize that just sitting down and writing has more to do with writing than any of those other things, and in the end, that makes this a fantastic book for writers.

I love the humor of this book - Baty is a real wit, which makes it fun to read. He has tons of ideas from various nanowrimo participants, many of whom have written published novels, as well as great section on how to edit your novel, and something from publishers etc.

You have to know going in that it isn't really about the mechanics of writing, and when you do, you will find it exactly what you need to get that novel finished.

My only regret with this is that I bought it after starting Nanowrimo and only had the time to read it once I was finished my 50,000 word 1st draft. When reading it after, I felt that my novel could have been a lot better if I'd read this first.

Book: How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy by Orson Scott Card (2/5 stars)

I read this during the November Nanowrimo month while trying to write my own novel. I didn't incorporate a single bit of this book into my novel.

This is quite an exciting title for would be writers of Science Fiction and Fantasy. Card is one of the greats with what I consider two real masterpieces of science fiction ("Ender's Game" and "Speaker for the Dead") and three masterpieces of Fantasy (The first three books of the "Alvin Maker" series), I thought that he'd have a lot to say.

Not really. He points us a lot towards another book he's written called "Characters and Viewpoints" as well as other books in that series. In that way, quite a lot of the content of this turns out to be an advertisement for other books about writing. That also means that he's deliberately left out quite a lot that a writer would find useful and are left with quite a small amount of information.

There was this strange thing about how science fiction readers take metaphors literally and that we have to worry about this while writing. There is also a lot about hyper-drive and space travel in general and how it should work in your story (Warp drive is bad since it's Star Trek speak and will get laughs from readers). There is a lot about the price of magic as well, as all magic should have a cost.

The two best parts in the book are 1) the author lists - who are the writers to pay attention to - all worth a read and 2) What to do after you've written something. How to deal with agents and publishers etc... Note - these have nothing to do with the title "How to write...", but actually add to the value of the book.

Quite a poor attempt for such an esteemed author. I would have liked to see better.

Book: Wild Seed by Octavia Butler (3/5 stars)

I heard about this book from Orson Scott Card's book "How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy". It is being held up as a shining example of good writing. I read it in the middle of Nanowrimo month in November.

I have to agree with Card, the writing is very well done. There is a lot implied in each sentence and you can infer much about each character by their actions. I don't know if Butler does this on purpose, or has gradually internalized the process, but the more I look at it, the more impressive it is. She is a real master of point of view and implying important points without actually saying it directly.

We see an immortal man, Doro, who has been around for more than three thousand years who wanders the planet breeding a new race. Through this book, we get to see many of the results of the breeding program. We see ordinary, we see extraordinary, we see strange and even stranger.

Doro, our immortal, finds another immortal, a woman. They have several disagreements over the morals of the breeding program and how Doro treats his seed. This tension builds over the century and a half of the story. I found the characters well developed and deep.

That being said, if you were to graph the excitement versus time on this book, it would remain mostly flat. It is a subtle book in more than language, and I found it interesting, but mostly dull.

I'm still glad I read it, since it taught me that great books are more than just nice language and even an excellent premise. There is something more that I have yet to identify.