Obsolete Your Idols

One of my co-workers handed me a pair of books by Jack McDevitt after having asked me a couple times if I’d read his stuff.  I hadn’t and now I have, at least one of them, Polaris.  So what is Polaris?  It’s a locked space ship mystery.

More to the point, it’s a story about a group of people who disappear out in space but leave behind a functional ship.  Years later some personal items taken from that ship are going to be auctioned off and come into the possession of Alex Benedict, an antiquities dealer, and Chase Kolpath, his lovely assistant.  I gather there’s an earlier book by McDevitt with these two characters but I didn’t feel lost or very confused without having read it.  (There was a moment when a character, Jacob, is speaking and I didn’t realize yet that that’s the name of their house AI; just a tip if you find yourself similarly confused).

The two have a relationship a touch reminiscent of Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin if Nero Wolfe were reticent and Archie Goodwin was a spicy spaceship pilot.  This story is like one of the Boy’s SF Adventure stories I read as a kid (YA Heinlein, say) if the active protagonist were female and the nominal male lead were distant and obsessive.  There’s plenty of science flavoring to this tale, with interesting futuristic technology and resourceful juryrigging by Chase.  There is a fair amount of macking on and by Chase but it didn’t divert from the narrative or diminish her capabilities.  Chase Kolpath is badass.  Alex Benedict is truly a fortunate employer.

In the end, I only had one qualm with the answer to the mystery and that is because I felt feinted without cause by one of the scenes along about chapter eighteen.  It seemed to me to undermine one of the needed pieces of the ending.  Even after a re-reading of that scene I still felt tricked, but I can forgive that because the whole rest of it hangs together so well.  You get to figure the mystery out along with the characters and it’s a joy to watch them do so.  This is one of the most solidly put together stories I’ve read in a long time.  Highly enjoyable, strong female protagonist, some nice scenes possible only in science fiction.

Who might like this book

• People who are looking for sf with more than bimbo females, flat-personality rugged-jawed mouthpieces-for-ideas males and hand wavey plot resolutions
• People who like tightly woven mystery plots
• People who are or are likely to become trapped in a decaying orbit with quasars

Who might not like this book

• People who like lurid future sex scenes
• People who think girls are dumb
• People who are sensitive about the money they spend on antiques

One of my original three superpowers after my first superhero origin was the ability to make any source code compile and run on a Unix operating system.  I let that power rust when I became a full time systems administrator but I occasionally like to dabble again in that field.  Towards that end I read a technical book on a related topic recently, Advanced Linux Programming.  It’s been on my shelf for some time, perhaps years.

Despite the age it’s still pertinent to developing in C or C++ in the Linux environment.  It does a decent job of covering the core concepts of different kinds of resources used by processes including threads.  Many code examples make the nitty gritty manifest and it has pointers to even more resources, including a site dedicated to the book.

The target audience of this book is purportedly primarily Windows developers who have decided to develop on Linux.  Right.  Because that happens.  But as it turns out, this book is well targeted for rusty Unix developers and dabblers like myself.

Who might like this book

• C coders who have somehow mysteriously failed to use this ‘looooo-nix’ thing
• Linux system administrators who can shrug off their sick dependency on webmin long enough to look at a command line
• Someone wanting to read about the innards of the Linux environment

Who might not like this book

• Windows users.  It contains no Wizards, bluescreens

I read Commune 2000 AD by Mack Reynolds.  No Powells link to the story because they don’t seem to have ever stocked it.  This is the third book of his I’ve read (others being Ability Quotient and Lagrange Five).  I’m starting to get a feel for how a Mack Reynolds story unfolds and this one is a solid story in that range.

It’s the story of a future (the 2000 AD of the title) where the United States has gotten its act together enough to give (nearly) everyone a living wage though with it comes an almost total lack of privacy and a rather tightly yoked role in society.  That’s the surface, anyway.  Then, this being a Mack Reynolds book, we peel back layers, see some groovy people who are hip to the truth and clue in our protagonist.  This not being a Philip K. Dick story, the revelations don’t destroy the protagonist and all of the drug use is good clean fun used to enhance sex or being alive.

The payoff in this story is all in the Aftermath epilogue at the end but it’s a satisfying wrap on a relatively straightforward story.  Looking back on that future from eight years past it, I’m wistful for how bright the future looked from 1974.  The story is a curiosity and a pleasant read but probably not life changing.

People who might like this book

• Those with an appreciation for retro-futurism.
• Those who like to read politically oriented sf.
• Those looking for old ideas of what newness means

People who might not like this book

• Those who don’t like stereotypes of the early 1970s projected into the future.
• Those who trust implicitly the governors to govern wisely.
• Those who are anti-drug, anti-sex, anti-future, anti-fun.

David Byrne + Brian Eno.