Fuzzy Nation by John Scalzi

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Personal Enthusiasm: Loads of Fun

I really should know better than to underestimate John Scalzi. After all, I still think Old Man’s War was one of the best books I’ve read in the past 7 years. But, I did. I didn’t expect Fuzzy Nation to be all that good.

I had my reasons too. Fuzzy Nation is a remake of H. Beam Piper’s book Little Fuzzy. Movies are remade all of the time in Hollywood. And most of those remakes are poor imitations of the original. How often are books remade? Never? I should have taken a clue from Tyler Cowen and realized if something is done that’s never done, that’s likely to mean it’s of higher than average quality. And, boy, is that ever true here.

Scalzi took a good but dated 1950′s story and updated it into a very good, and fresh, story for the 2010′s. The broad, general, structure of the original is still here. Jack Holloway is a prospector working on Zarathustra XXXIII, looking for sunstone gems. He discovers an immense cache of them, enough to make his fortune several times over. Then he meets a small, fuzzy (of course), cute creature. Then he meets the creature’s family. Soon, he’s involved in determining whether these cute creatures are super smart animals or sentient people.

Scalzi modifies the story a good bit too. His book is every bit as much of a page turner as the original was, just in different ways. He manages to make a series of court cases far more interesting than the original did. But I find the most interesting changes to be the way that the story revolves around Jack Holloway.

Scalzi’s version of Little Fuzzy is really about Holloway. The fuzzys are there and central to that story, but Holloway is the focus. He’s a complex character and Scalzi progressively reveals him to us. Is he merely the galaxy’s biggest jerk? Or is there more to him than that? Scalzi continually gives us more insight into him as the story moves along, but still manages to keep his character ambiguous until the end. It’s not character development, exactly, but it’s character revelation, which I find just as interesting.

After reading this book, I’ve very definitely moved from “I’ll read it because it’s from Scalzi” to “I’d definitely recommend this book”. If you’re looking for an entertaining read, pick this up. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.

Sir Dominic Flandry: The Last Knight of Terra by Poul Anderson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book contains three complete Flandry novels. (Books were a lot shorter, in decades past.) Here, collected in one volume for the first time, is The Plague of Masters (aka Earthman, Go Home), Hunters of the Sky Cave and A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows.

The Plague of Masters had an enjoyable setup. Flandry lands on a planet where the air itself is deadly and prolonged exposure will lead to a torturous death. The only hope of a survival is to take a specific drug, every 30 days. It’s not even enough to flee the planet—without a final dose of the drug, you’ll die from the delayed effects of the air. Of course, the planet is under the thumb of a dictatorial group of scientists, who tightly control access to the drug. Anyone whoever stops playing along, stops getting doses. The setup and development of the story is wonderful. The ending is almost confusingly abrupt, lessening what would have otherwise been a very good story.

Hunters of the Sky Cave has Flandry confronting some invaders that he finds personally likable. Unfortunately, in order to complete his mission he has to smash not only their invasion but also their societal structure, just to keep the Terran Empire alive for a few more years. This was a well told story that showed Flandry doing what he does best but also recognizing that his efforts would have limited impact on the larger picture.

A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows is the best story of the bunch. Flandry finds the son he didn’t know he had as well as a woman he can actually love. In the end, he completes his mission but at a staggering personal cost. As the story ends, you know the Empire will live on but you wonder if Flandry, personally, sees any point to it anymore.

These stories are uniformly good because they feature an older, wiser Flandry. He still cracks wise, he still dresses well and loves fine women. He’s still a staunch defender of the Terran Empire. However, he’s increasingly more aware of how decadent, corrupt, and unworthy that Empire is. It’s the best thing going, but it’s failing fast and not even he can keep it together much longer. He does everything he can to push back the arrival of The Long Night, even knowing that everything he does will ultimately prove futile.

That underlying emotional tension drives the stories and forced me to sympathize with Flandry to a much greater degree than I have previously.

Digital Rights Management (DRM) is the name for a software lock that publishers apply to movies and e-books that you’ve purchased. When something is “protected” by DRM, the publisher is protected from the risk that you’ll copy it or use it in any way that they don’t like.

DRM prohibits you from doing bad things, like distributing something to 1 million of your closest friends. It also prohibits you from doing good things, like copying your new DVD to your iPad or loading your Kindle e-book into your Barnes & Noble Nook.

It’s worse than that though. It gives the publisher veto control over your devices—if you can’t transfer your existing library to a new device, you’ll be much less likely to buy it. With DRM, your e-books last only as long as the publisher does. If the publisher goes out of business (or leaves the market, as Wal-Mart did with digital music), you’ll lose the ability to load your DRM files onto new devices. For the customer, there’s absolutely nothing to like about a DRM lock.

With Tor’s announcement, the e-book industry finally begins a move that I’ve been predicting for a couple of years now.

It’s a move I’ve been predicting because of what I observed with digital music. In 2003, when the music publishers first made songs legally available through iTunes, they insisted that Apple wrap each track in a DRM lock. Their goal was to prevent widespread music piracy. Given the overwhelming popularity of the iPod, they succeeded in making Apple’s store practically the only legal source of music for most customers.

For six years Apple gobbled up an increasing share of the music market. The music labels finally realized that their insistence on DRM was making them dangerously dependent on Apple. In January of 2009, the publishers agreed to let Apple—and other online retailers—sell music tracks without any DRM wrapper whatsoever.

For the first time, customers were able to legally buy digital music from Apple and play it on a non-Apple device. And, for the first time, Apple customers were able to legally buy digital music from Amazon and play it on their iPods. It took six years but the music labels finally realized that digital music without a DRM lock was better both for them and for their customers.

A similar situation has been playing out in the e-book market. Amazon was the first company to produce a mass-market e-book reader, introducing the Kindle in 2007. Publishers were slow to embrace the new platform but gradually began putting more of their catalog into Kindle format. As they released Kindle versions of each book, they insisted that Amazon wrap the e-books with a DRM lock.

The firs true competitor, the Nook from Barnes & Noble, wasn’t introduced until 2009. At this point, digital music had already been DRM free for most of a year. E-books, however, were still DRM locked. As a result, Amazon was able to leverage their early start, large customer base, and solid hardware into a commanding market lead.

As Amazon grew, the publishers grew increasingly dependent on sales from Amazon. Each Kindle customer had a library that was locked to their Kindle device, through DRM. As long as those customers were locked to the Kindle hardware, they were also locked to the Kindle bookstore, making it hard to grow sales elsewhere. Amazon continued to grow Kindle and Kindle e-book sales, through aggressive pricing and discounting of e-books.

The publishers were aware of the trap that the music labels had fallen into with Apple. They were determined to avoid it but they were equally determined to ship e-books with DRM locks. The publishers decided to neuter some of Amazon’s advantages by removing Amazon’s ability to compete on price. In April, 2010 the publishers forced Amazon to purchase e-books through an “agency model“. Amazon would no longer be free to price e-books as it saw fit. Instead, the publisher would set the price and Amazon would get to keep a flat 30% fee.

From now on, e-books would be priced at $7.99, $9.99, $12.99, $14.99, $16.99, or even $19.99, as the publisher dictated. These prices would apply identically across all stores (Apple iBooks, B&N Nook, Amazon Kindle). The publishers hoped that by removing Amazon’s price advantages, they could entice customers into other stores and prevent Amazon from gaining an effective monopoly over the e-book market.

It was an interesting tactic but one that I didn’t expect to succeed, long term. Eventually one publisher would undercut another and the lock step pricing would fall apart. I continued to predict that publishers would eventually be forced to remove their DRM locks, if they wanted to have an open market with lots of sellers.

The agency model gambit hung together for 2 years and largely worked, until the publishers got sued. On April 12, the Department of Justice sued five publishers, under anti-trust law, alleging a conspiracy to fix prices. The DoJ sued HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, Macmillan, and Penguin. All but Macmillan and Penguin immediately settled and agreed to stop using the agency model.

Macmillan, one of the two holdouts, is the parent to Tor Books. Tor publishes science fiction books. These books are written and purchased by tech-savvy people. Both groups have been begging for DRM free e-books for years. Tor has wanted to oblige them, but Macmillan has always set the rules and Macmillan has always said no.

Yesterday, watching the agency model go down in flames, Macmillan apparently relented, and Tor announced that, by early July, their entire catalog would be available DRM free. They’ll continue to sell e-books through Amazon and B&N but those e-books will now be DRM free. In addition, Tor will look to expand their reach by selling through additional retailers. (Until now, those other retailers have been off-limits because they only sell DRM free e-books.)

This policy shift will open up new opportunities for Tor. Because I believe it signals the beginning of an industry wide shift, it will also open up new opportunities for customers as well. No longer will you be locked into one e-book reader or one e-book store. You’ll have the freedom to buy e-books from any store and read them on any reader. You’ll have the freedom to switch readers, without needing the publishers to approve of your new device. You’ll have the freedom to loan the e-book to a friend, without that friend needing to use the same device as you.

I’m excited about the shift and I’m excited about what it means for the future growth of the e-book industry.

Now, when is the movie industry going to finally going to catch up and quit putting DRM locks all over their DVD and Blu-Ray discs? Are we going to have to wait another 3 years for that shift to occur? Or another 10?

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Caro began “The Years of Lyndon Johnson,” his multivolume biography of the 36th president, in 1976, not long after finishing “The Power Broker,” his immense, Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Moses, and figured he could do Johnson’s life in three volumes, which would take him six years or so. Next month, a fourth installment, “The Passage of Power,” will appear 10 years after the last, “Master of the Senate,” which came out 12 years after its predecessor, “Means of Ascent,” which in turn was published 8 years after the first book, “The Path to Power.” These are not ordinary-size volumes, either. “Means of Ascent,” at 500 pages or so, is the comparative shrimp of the bunch. “The Path to Power” is almost 900 pages long; “Master of the Senate” is close to 1,200, or nearly as long as the previous two combined. If you try to read or reread them all in just a couple weeks, as I foolishly did not long ago, you find yourself reluctant to put them down but also worried that your eyeballs may fall out.

That about sums up the books. This is from a New York Times Magazine profile of Robert Caro. He’s a very interesting man and a tireless biographer. If he had another 50 years to live, I’d love to see who we’d profile next—and what we’d learn about them from him.

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Means of Ascent by Robert Caro

My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Personal Enthusiasm: A Great Book

I loved the first volume of Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson, The Path to Power. I’d ever read a better biography. I’ve still never read a better one but I’ve now read one that’s just as good.

This book really succeeds because it’s essentially four stories in one book.

Chapters 1-5 are the story of Johnson’s later years in Congress and what he did during World War II. (Johnson spent most of the war avoid danger and then flew into danger, literally, at the last minute in order to have some record to present to his increasingly restless constituents.) This first section of the book is crucial. It portrays the absolute desperation that Johnson felt both to get out of the House and to gain wealth.

I feel that this section of the book is the slowest and repeats the most information from The Path to Power. (Sometimes entire paragraphs are listed from the previous book.) Caro did this to remind the reader of crucial aspects of Johnson’s character but, when reading the books back to bad, it really feels repetitive and slows the pace.

Chapter 6 is a terrific look at crony capitalism. This is where the book really begins to pick up, in my opinion. It’s the story of how Lyndon Johnson acquired the KTBC radio station. He used the power of politics to turn a money-losing business into an insanely profitable business practically overnight. If you’ve ever wondered how crony capitalism works or how a politician can become wealthy just from “serving” in Congress, this is your chapter. After reading it, I don’t think I’ll ever look at the intersection of business and politics the same way again.

Chapter 8 is an utterly fascinating mini-biography of Coke Stevens, a forgotten figure in Texas politics. Prior to the 1948 Senate race, he was a living legend. During the race, Johnson and his partisans slimed him mercilessly. Today, he’s remembered only as another reactionary conservative in a long-line of reactionary conservatives.

Robert Caro corrects the historical record and shows a man who lived an incredible life as a self-taught lawyer, accountant, architect, and rancher. He ran a one-man “freight line” when he was just 17, transporting goods in and out of the most inhospitable regions of Texas. He drove the horses during the day and taught himself law at night, by firelight. He scrimped and saved to buy his own books, always saving a a tiny amount for the ranch that he wanted to one day buy.

When he did finally start to buy land for his ranch, he did all of his own branding and shearing. He taught himself architecture so that he could build single handedly build his ranch house. He dug his own post holes and set his own fence posts. He nearly singlehandedly built the entire ranch, from the ground up.

He was a politician only reluctantly but was the most successful politician in Texas history. In his second gubernatorial election, he received 85 percent of the vote (the highest ever total in a contested Texas primary) and won all 254 Texas counties. “He was also the only man in the state’s history who had held all three of the top political posts in state government: Speaker, Lieutenant Governor, Governor.” And he served an unprecedented two consecutive terms as Speaker: the only man in Texas to ever succeed himself as Speaker.

This mini-biography alone is nearly worth the entire purchase of the entire book.

Chapters 9-16 chronicle the 1948 Senate election. Caro definitely investigates allegations that Johnson stole the election—and finds them to be true beyond a reasonable doubt. The fraud was breathtaking in both its sheer audacity and scope.

More than that though, he chronicles the entire election. Johnson, a mediocre vote getter, was running against Coke Stevenson, the most successful vote getter in Texas history. Johnson had very little hope of beating Stevenson in a fair fight. So, he did the only thing he could: he relentlessly slimed his opponent. He used an unlimited fund of money, coming from crony capitalists dependent on him, to blanket the radio airwaves, to cover newspapers, and to stuff voter mailboxes with dishonest rhetoric and accusations. It was the most rotten and contemptible form of campaigning imaginable and Caro reports on every aspect of it.

I can’t recommend this book highly enough. It was a fascinating and enlightening look at modern American politics and a pivotal player in them.

The Peace War by Vernor Vinge

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Personal Enthusiasm: A Great Book

In 1997, scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory developed a device that could generate a persistent, spherical force field of arbitrary size and project it almost anywhere. The resulting “bobble” will completely cut off whatever is inside the field from the rest of the world. These scientists quickly act to use the bobble to encase nuclear weapons, military bases, cities, and governments. They declare themselves the Peace Authority and enforce peace by threatening to bobble anyone who rejects their authority.

The Peace War starts 51 years later, in 2048. The world has been at peace for as long as most people can remember. Not everyone is happy with the Peace Authority’s limitations on technology and freedom. Small bands of Tinkers have been clandestinely developing new technologies, in an attempt to overcome the Peace. And the original inventor of the Bobbler is still alive, a Tinker himself, and working hard to defeat the scientists who took his invention and used it to enslave the world.

Vernor Vinge does exactly what a good SF author should do: he poses a new technology and examines how it might change the world, for good and bad. I liked his depictions of how American society would change after the last year and enforced peace. I liked his depictions of how technology would progress in the face of severe restrictions against innovation. And I liked his depictions of how an insurrection might work when facing an enemy that not only had superior firepower but also had the ability to completely take pieces off of the map.

This was a very imaginative book and a great example of what “hard science fiction” should be. I highly recommend it.

Fool Moon by Jim Butcher

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Personal Enthusiasm: A Solid Follow-Up

This is the second book in Jim Butcher’s “Dresden Files” series. After the events of the first book, PI Harry Dresden has found it hard to drum up work. Actually, it’s been impossible. The police don’t trust him and the underworld isn’t certain it wants to work with him. That’s true up until dead bodies start showing up. Dead bodies that look suspiciously like the result of werewolf killings.

This was a pretty solid follow-up to Storm Front. The first book in the series dealt the magic side of the supernatural world. This book dealt with the hairier side of the supernatural world. It was well written but I didn’t think that it had as much tongue-in-cheek humor as the first book. I missed that.

Butcher incorporated many different variants of the werewolf legends. It made for a more complex story, as it involved a mix of characters, each with different motives, abilities, and weaknesses. On the other hand, it made the story more complex and I’m not entirely sure that that was such a good thing.

Overall, this was a solid, but not a great, follow-up to Storm Front. Dresden remains interesting as a character and his relationships with the people around him continue to evolve. Ultimately, any story is about people and this story, whatever minor flaws it may have, succeeded in making me continue to care about Dresden and to cheer the progress he’s making in his relationships.

One Jump Ahead by Mark L. Van Name

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Personal Enthusiasm: I Loved It

Take one jaded, burn-out mercenary. Jon Moore. Give him an AI-enhanced Predator-Class Assault Vehicle. Lobo. One desparate to live a quiet life, in an out of the way spot. The other itching to leave the quiet, out of the way spot and get back into action. Mix in some corporations eager to gain an edge and some corporate officials willing to lie and cheat to gain an edge. The end result is an angry mercenary with a lot of weaponry and a burning desire to both gain revenge and set things right.

All of that by itself would make a decent military novel. What makes this novel really stand out, and what makes it a great SF novel, is Mark L. Van Name’s use of nanotechnology and biotechnology. Jon Moore is loaded with nanotechnology that he can use to break in, break down, or confuse. Van Name, knowingly or not, keeps Sanderson’s Second Law in mind. The nanotech doesn’t make Moore invincible or omnipotent. It merely gives him a different set of tools. He still has to use his ingenuity to survive and win.

Moore also uses various bioengineered animals to achieve his goals. As with the nanotech, these animals are impressive for what they can do as well as what they can’t do. It’s a close look at another technology that’s currently beyond our grasp but close enough to be convincingly portrayed.

This book was very well written and Van Name revealed some impressive worldbuilding skills. I especially liked the planet name of “Pinkelplonker” (named by the 5-year old son of the captain that discovered the planet) and the jump system used to travel between worlds. I very much look forward to reading the rest of the novels in the series.

A Rising Thunder by David Weber

My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Personal Enthusiasm: I Shouldn’t Have Bothered

This is the 13th book in David Weber’s Honor Harrington series. When the series started, back in 1992, it was pretty easy to follow. Sequel followed sequel and each book picked up where the last left off. More recently, in 2002, Weber approved the creation of two sub-series. The result is that the plotline and scope of the “Honorverse” expanded dramatically

The first sub-series was “The Wages of Sin”, starting with Crown of Slaves, which follows book #10, War of Honor. The second sub-series was “Saganami Island”, starting with The Shadow of Saganami, chronologically following both book #10 War of Honor and Crown of Slaves.

Later mainline novels, such as At All Costs and Mission of Honor, incorporated elements of both sub-series. The plotline of the sub-series’s increasingly started to drive the plotline and direction of the main series. This book, A Rising Thunder, is Weber’s attempt to fully tie the main series into the elements and events of the two sub-serieses.

The resulting book is a bit of a boring train wreck. It does include characters and plot elements from both sub-series. What it doesn’t include is a lot of action. Given that all 3 serieses are built around action, this is a glaring omission. Mostly what we get is a lot of talking, as officials in 3 or 4 locations talk about how recent events will affect future events. I remember one main battle, out of 464 pages. Given how action packed the previous books have been, this was a major letdown.

In some respects, a slow book was almost inevitable. Given how much things have changed over the last several books, there needed to be an attempt to tie everything together and then to re-launch the series in its new direction. But I feel that the relaunching could have been achieved with a greater economy of words and a bit more action.

Perhaps the most damning indictment I have is that most fans would be best served by reading a plot summary of this book rather than reading the book itself.