Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie

Started: May 8

Finished: May 12

Pages: 356

Ancillary Justice won both the Hugo and Nebula awards for Ann Leckie, which is quite an accomplishment for a first novel.  Ancillary Sword is the sequel.

Has there every been an outstanding "first" book that was outdone by its sequel?  That's an interesting question, and not one that I propose to answer from my own reading experience.  

But in thinking about the question, I was reminded of Scott McCloud's take on creativity and "great works" from Understanding Comics.  He suggests that are two types of great artists:  those whose greatness comes from mastery, and those whose greatness comes from innovation.  The first type of artist creates their greatest works in the fullness of their careers.  Earlier works are like practice runs for their greatest work, which comes as the artist develops full mastery of message and technique.   The second type of artist is a revelation:  they seem to spring from nowhere to astonish the world.  They often provide something radically new.  Subsequent work by that artist may not seem as original or as interesting, and later artists may well build on that innovative artitst's originality,and create more polished versions of what made the innovator great.  There are innumerable examples of artists of type 2:  Jane Austen, for one.  

In a science fictional context, any author who wins the Nebula and the Hugo with their first novel must be in category 2, right?  They must be an innovator.  But ......what was new about Ancillary Justice?  The main character of that novel is an embodied artificial intelligence: a starship's intelligence in a human body.  This isn't novel.  If I could be bothered to pick through the stacks on the shelf behind me I could give you the title and author of a book more than 15 years old that features an artificial intelligence that assumes human form.  (Although that info would definitely be a spoiler for the book).  Is the universe that Leckie creates novel?  Nope, it's a standard space opera universe: a multi-solar-system human empire with faster-than-light travel and powerful and inscrutable aliens on the fringe. 

So, why did Leckie win?  Basically, good writing.  She uses a limited viewpoint/unreliable narrator to tell her story, while doing a whole lot of showing rather than telling.  She provides a novel viewpoint on the story she chooses to tell, and animates her plot, characters, and themes in a compelling way.

Ancillary Sword continues the story told in the award-winning Ancillary Justice, to much the same standard as the first book.

Does either book provide anything totally new?  Nope.  Are the books interesting?  Yes.  Are they good reads?  Yes again.  So while I wouldn't consider either one a classic,  I was happy to read them.  I'd recommend Ancillary Justice to any SF reader.

Relaunched book blog

Yes, I've decided to relaunch the book blog, but I'm going to do it a little differently than I did it before.  Rather than blogging about every single book I read, I'm going to write about some of them.  Most of them even.  But I'm going to feel free to omit talking about anything that I didn't find particularly interesting.  I may periodically list the ones that come "between" the books I actually review though.

In that spirit, I've read the following books since I last reviewed one:

The Secret Adversary by Agatha Christie
May 2015
Pages: 383

The Second Confession by Rex Stout
May 2015
Pages: 197

Mansfield Park by Jane Austen (skimmed)
April 2015
Pages: 344

A Duty to the Dead by Charles Todd
May 14-20
Pages: 329

Late April and May were a stressful time, hence the generally unchallenging comfort reading.  

11/22/63 by Stephen King

April 2015
Pages:860?  (read the ebook version, so I'm not sure of the paper book length)


I've never read a book by Stephen King before -- I'm just not at all interested in horror.   But I when I saw the reviews of this one a few years back I was a bit intrigued.  As far as I could tell, it was a straight time-travel story that was focused around the Kennedy assassination. It got good reviews.  But I was suspicious that it would end up being horror-themed in some way, so I relegated it to the "maybe try it sometime if I can get a copy from the library" category.

I can report that the reviewers didn't omit (much) horror.  I suppose the sense of creeping dread and wrongness that the protagonist found endemic to two of the cities he visited might qualify as a horror element, as might the mutilation that another character endures.  But King doesn't dwell on either unduly (as I've found in other SF or mysteries with "horror" elements).  So the book didn't come across as having a pervasive horror theme.

I can also report that Stephen King is skilful at characterization and plotting.  He writes an engaging book. This is not at all surprising -- generally popular authors are popular for a reason.  (Although I do wonder about John Grisham).

But, as a time travel story....it's kind of dull.  Time travel stories are difficult to do well.  The ground is awfully well-trodden.  And King doesn't add anything particularly new to the equation.  History doesn't want to be changed.  Yawn.  The past is a different country -- interesting, but King's take on that perspective is banal.  Using a white, well-educated middle class man as the viewpoint character made the 1950s/early 60s look awfully "Leave it to Beaver".  The book would have been a lot more interesting if his main character had been black. Or even a white woman.  Plot points:  I had a much more interesting plot twist in mind re: the Yellow Card Man than what King came up with.

Anyway,  I did finish the book, though I did do some skipping in the middle sections.  It's a pretty good read if you're looking for something long but not too challenging and/or want to learn more about Lee Harvey Oswald and the assassination.  

Neptune's Brood by Charles Stross AND Debt: the First 5000 Years by David Greaber

Dec-January 2015
Debt: the first 5000 years.
Pages:462

April 2015
Neptune's Brood
Pages: 352

What does a space opera written by one of the most prolific and popular SF authors have in common with a weighty discourse on the nature of debt written by an anthropologist (who also happened to be an active participant in the Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011)?  Quite a lot actually.  In the tradition of the best SF,  Charles Stross uses Neptune's Brood both to entertain and to explore some Big Ideas -- in this case, the economic ideas explored in Debt.

So, what are those ideas? I picked up Debt in the Saskatoon airport on the way back from a visit to my Mom in late November 2014, and started reading it on the plane.  I called it weighty,  but that description doesn't really do it justice.  Debt is actually quite readable and engaging, especially in its opening chapters where it answers a fundamental question.  Where did money come from?  That is, how and why was money invented?

What do you think?

Nope, you're almost certainly wrong, particularly if you took Economics 101.

The standard account dates back to Adam Smith, who told a "just so" story to explain why money was invented.  I'm sure you're familiar with it.  The story goes something like this.  Back in some unspecified "olden times", people farmed and fished and made their own clothing.  But sometimes a farmer would need something that he didn't have himself or couldn't make  for himself.  So off to market he would go to barter for the goods he needed.  But bartering was difficult and awkward.  Farmer A had chickens, but what he really needed was leather for shoes.  Farmer B had leather.  If Farmer B needed chickens, then all was well.  He'd negotiate with Farmer A and come to an agreement on how many chickens to exchange his leather for.  But what if Farmer B didn't need chickens?  What if Farmer B needed seed corn?  Or a calf?  Conundrum.  Would Farmer A first have to find Farmer C, who had seed corn and needed chickens?  What if Farmer C hadn't chosen to go to market on that particular Saturday?  Things quickly became complicated, and money was invented as a medium of exchange to work around the obvious difficulties.

All makes sense, right?

Actually not.   Anthropologists have been telling economists an inconvenient truth for at least a hundred years.  They have never found any human society based on barter, although they have found many societies where money is either never used or is used only for ceremonial exchanges. Money as we know it seems to have been invented....to pay taxes to a strong central government that needs to raise armies or maintain temples and priests.  Societies without strong central organization and coercive institutions get along quite happily on informal systems of social debt.  Farmer A has known Farmer B all of their mutual lives because they live in the same village.  Farmer  B will "loan" Farmer A the leather until Farmer A's cow has a calf next spring, at which time Farmer B will get the calf and also owe Farmer A some overage in grain in exchange to make up the difference in agreed value between the leather and the calf.  Unless of course Farmer B hates Farmer A's guts because Farmer A's father cheated Farmer B's uncle at competitive hopscotch two seasons ago.  In which case Farmer B may well refuse to give the leather to Farmer A, who will have to resort to asking his sister (Farmer C's wife) to talk to her close friend Farmer B's wife to see if there might be some way to get Farmer B to get over his grudge....the point being that until recently, economic exchange was embedded within social exchange.  And debt was the glue that held societies together.

Why did Adam Smith invent his story about the genesis of money?  What is the impact on societies of moving away from informal debt systems into money economies?  How has the meaning and impact of debt changed over time, and how has this played out in various societies over the last 5000 years?  For all of that and more, I'd encourage you to read Debt. 

Charles Stross did.  And he was so taken with the concepts that he plays with them as he tells a story of the adventures of an inter-stellar accountant on a quest to find her missing post-human clone sister.   No, it's not A Taxing Woman (the only other piece of fiction I know that features an accountant as its protagonist), but the book is classic Stross, or at least, classic "better Stross".  There are interesting characters, interesting ideas, and a strong plot driving a lot action.  It's not as interesting as Glasshouse or Iron Sunrise, but it has more weight and is more entertaining than his Merchant Princes series.

So, could you skip Debt and read Neptune's Brood instead? No, because Debt doesn't really come together as a compelling single narrative about debt and the role of money in societies.  So even if he wanted to, Stross couldn't have made that narrative a central part of the story in Neptune's Brood.  But in a lot of ways that's okay.  Debt is sparking with ideas and will give you lots of unexpected insights into economic and social history.  Charles Stross selected the ideas that intrigued him to work into the narrative of Neptune's Brood.  Your mileage may vary.  Not to mention thatyou might not be as interested in visiting a colony of intelligent squid or travelling with bat-form pirate insurance agents as Stross assumes his readers will be. So if you're interested in debt, I'd suggest you read the non-fiction.

Back again?

April 2015

Hello Readers

After a long absence, I'm back.  I blogged about every book that I read from March 2012 to March 2013.  And after that, at least according to my blog, I planned to blog intermittently.  My personal plans were to wrap up a couple of personal projects, and then launch into some other types of writing in parallel with the time and energy freed up from the book reading and blogging.

Sigh.  Best laid plans o' Mice and Men....

Well, there were some successes.  I did *finally* finish the book of family photos that I slowly built from my maternal grandfather's pictures.   And I had copies made for various members of my family.   Maybe I can post it at some point, and you can see it too.

And I did draft a submission to the National Energy Board regarding the Kinder Morgan application to twin their existing pipeline and build a new heavy oil terminal at Burnaby Mountain.  One day that submission will be a part of the public record, and you can feel free to read it at your leisure.  (Sadly, I chose to write about the terminal itself, and the impact of the terminal and increased levels of shipping on the Maplewood Flats wildlife refuge.  Which means that the last minute choice by Kinder Morgan to explore redesigning the route through Burnaby Mountain and the terminal itself is directly relevant to my submission -- so I haven't finalized and submitted my comments yet. )

I even prepared and delivered a talk at the CIDM Best Practices conference in September 2014.  (Based on my reading of Switch: how to change when change is hard, and the work that I and my colleagues did to implement some of the lessons of the book for a documentation project.)

And I haven't stopped reading.  

There conclude the successes.  So, back to the blogging, at least intermittently.  And welcome to my first blog entry of 2015.  Stay tuned for my first online book review since 2013.  

Switch: How to change things when change is hard by Chip Heath and Dan Heath

May 2013
Pages: 294

Yet another in a series of "work books" that I've read in the last year or so.  This is another good one, despite or perhaps because it could also be classified as a self-help book.

Switch talks instead about to make change happen either personally or professionally, using a very generic framework.  Basically, you need to align your intellect, your emotions, and your environment to enable changes to happen and to stick.  In the words of the central analogy of the book, to make changes you need a rider (the intellect) directing an elephant (your emotions) along a smooth path (the environment).  If any one of these elements is out of sync, you may fail to make the change you plan.

And that's it really, except for an explanation of how to effectively direct the rider, motivate the elephant, and shape the path, along with a number of illustrative stories.  For an example of how to direct the rider, consider the fact that we're all prone to analyzing failures when we're thinking about how to move ahead.  But that can lead to paralysis....try  "following the bright spots" instead.  That is, what has been going right, and is there a way to replicate that?  The authors give an example of a researcher trying to figure out how to attack child malnutrition in Vietnam.  It was obvious that poverty was the root problem, but were there poor children who did better than others? As it turns out, yes, some poor children were much better nourished because their parents fed them in non-traditional ways.  It was far easier and faster to get those parents to educate the others about preparing yam greens and rice-paddy caught shrimp than it was to raise all of the children out of poverty.  Following the bright spots allowed an immediate solution to a pressing problem.

The book is filled with similar striking examples, as well as guidance about which kinds of situations lend themselves best to an approach that leads with emotions, the intellect, or the environment.

I liked the book.  It is simple, and practical, and appears to be based on sound research.  I've already started using the framework at work, and so far it seems to be working.  Weird:  a change management book that might actually be worth reading!

To love and be wise by Josephine Tey

June 2013
Pages: 223


This is my second mystery by Josephine Tey.  And like Daughter of Time, this one is hard to discuss without giving spoilers.    But if you enjoy classic British mystery fiction, read this one.  It both exemplifies and violates the conventions of the British country house mystery in an entertaining way.