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You are here: Home / Archives for Books / Recommended Reading

Recommended Reading

Hogfather Reading Club: Talk Amongst Yourselves

by Major Major Major Major|  December 20, 20203:00 pm| 98 Comments

This post is in: Books, Recommended Reading

Hello and welcome to a special holiday edition of Recommended Reading! Today we’ll be talking about our Light Solstice Reading Club selection, Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather. I’m so happy we could share this reading experience together. I didn’t remember much from my prior read, so this was almost like reading it for the first time. And what can I say? Pratchett is almost always good, but when he’s transcendent, he’s transcendent.

A drawing of Death as the Hogfather
I even made a fanart! Click to embiggen–WordPress made the preview look all mushy.

Hogfather tells the story of the time Santa Cl the Hogfather is, for lack of a better term, killed. By the assassin Mr. Teatime, which is of course pronounced the-ah-tim-eh, though everybody mispronounces it immediately, even if they’ve never seen it spelled. Death must step in and deliver  the presents. Meanwhile a surplus of belief is sloshing around the Discworld, giving rise to the Oh God of Hangovers, the Eater of Socks, and more. We follow various heroes and villains as they navigate this new reality. In the end, balance is restored, reality’s humorless scolds defeated (for now).

Hogfather hits a real sweet spot for me: I’m a sucker for holiday specials, and like Neil Gaiman I think Death is Pratchett’s best character. This book is a pile of contradictions, a god-riddled argument for secular humanism, a rationalist’s paean to irrational belief, where Death is the only character who seems to understand the meaning of life. And it’s so well-engineered that it actually works. In the hands of a lesser author, so many things could go wrong. But they don’t, because this is Pratchett at the top of his very considerable game. Everything comes together in the end for a denouement that I’m not ashamed to admit made me cry a little. Especially Banjo’s fate.

When I read a paperback I dog-ear the bottom corners for favorite passages. I ended up with a lot for this one, sometimes on facing pages. So much to love in this book. As somebody who’s attended his share of Episcopal, Jewish, and Neo-Pagan solstice celebrations, I think Pratchett does a great job capturing the true meaning of Hogswatch–fire and blood, annoying relatives in paper hats, ancient rituals to chase away the smothering darkness with lights and pretty pictures. And big, stupid myths we tell our children. The tiniest worm in the ocean, a red flame in the crushing black depths, speaks volumes in this story. Its life is so irrational, striving against oblivion, and why?

Because otherwise, the universe is just a bunch of rocks moving in curves. Without our sometimes ridiculous applications of the anthropic principle–personified here as a professor–when the sun rises after the darkest day of the year, it’s just a ball of flaming gas. Without the Hogfather–or that silly, pointlessly red worm–we forget ourselves.

And that is why, at this time of the year, we light things on fire. Happy Hogswatch, everyone! What did you all think? Opening discussion question: what does Death sound like in your head?

Hogfather Reading Club: Talk Amongst YourselvesPost + Comments (98)

In Need Of A Good Book?

by Major Major Major Major|  June 22, 20208:00 pm| 162 Comments

This post is in: Books, Recommended Reading, TV & Movies

In late February/early March, when everything was juuust starting to fall apart, I read a lovely book that enveloped me in a comfy fantasy world, much like the warm honey that is one of its motifs. The Starless Sea, Erin Morgenstern’s sophomore novel, tells the story of… well, it tells a good number of stories. The throughline is Zachary, graduate student and son of a fortune teller, who is pulled inexorably towards The Starless Sea, a mysterious land full of stories, every story, all the stories.

Each of the book’s sections alternates chapters between Zachary and another text, often a storybook he has found. While it first seems like these are exposition dumps or thematically-appropriate asides, in the end it all weaves together to be a meditation on love, narrative, and the nature of stories. At its core, it is also a romance. Here is one example of an interleaved text, which should give you a good idea of whether you want to read the other pages; click through to see the end:

🔥

(from The Starless Sea by @erinmorgenstern) pic.twitter.com/xxfmuit7ue

— ꧁Tynan꧂ (@TynanPants) February 22, 2020

Looking at reviews to jog my memory, now, I’m seeing that some readers found it weird, pretentious, and too intertextual. But I won’t let that stop me! Besides, I have a feeling there are more than a few weird, pretentious lit-crit types here. I can see where the reviewers are coming from, though. And it does take a little work, as with any non-linear narrative. So if you find such things off-putting… you have been warned. I’ll file this one under “it’s not for everyone, but it is for me.”


Consider this a recommendation thread for all your book, TV, movie, etc. needs! I’ve been watching Bosch, which one of you yokels recommended, and it’s pretty good. Going to start Homeland and Upload soon. What about you?

In Need Of A Good Book?Post + Comments (162)

Artificial Intelligence & You: Some Light Reading

by Major Major Major Major|  May 13, 202012:22 pm| 79 Comments

This post is in: Books, Recommended Reading, Science & Technology, Tech News and Issues

Part three of a series on artificial intelligence.

My earlier posts on this topic dealt with some fairly sophisticated text-generation AI’s from the present and (likely) near future. But most of the AI you experience is very mundane, and often slips under your radar. AI is more ubiquitous than you may hope… and significantly stupider than you may fear.

So goes the thesis of Janelle Shane‘s newish book, You Look Like A Thing And I Love You: How Artificial Intelligence Works And Why It’s Making The World A Weirder Place. It’s an easy-to-read, fun introduction to what AI is, what it is not, how it works, and how it doesn’t. And it has very cute illustrations. Here is a brief introduction to some of the concepts in the book, told much less accessibly than Shane does, alas. Please bear with me for a moment.

What we call AI is many different things doing different tasks in different ways. Much of the time you hear about AI, it’s about deep learning. What is deep learning? It’s actually just a highly lucrative rebranding of multilayer perceptron neural networks, which have been around in one form or another since the 1960’s. What is a perceptron? Inspired by neurons, perceptrons convert a series of inputs to a single output via a weighting function. Let’s imagine a shape-classification perceptron with inputs like ‘number of corners’, ‘ circumference:area ratio’, and for some reason ‘color’. This would begin with random weights–let’s say it thinks ‘number of corners’ is very very important. But each time it calls a diamond a square, the weights are adjusted, just a little, so that it will be less wrong in the future (or so we hope). Where can this go wrong? Let’s say that the data this perceptron is trained on contains a lot of shapes from playing cards. It would end up learning that color was highly predictive. In the future, when you showed it a red circle, it would probably tell you it was a heart!

A multilayer perceptron is simply when perceptrons feed into each other. So the next one in the chain would consider the output of our ‘which shape?’ perceptron, alongside other data, when performing its own task. You can probably see how this compounds errors in odd ways. Most of the time an individual perceptron’s rules are ineffable, so these things can be rather hard to debug.

Take the example of Microsoft’s image-classification AI, Azure. It was very good at identifying pictures of sheep while it was being trained. But when it was put to the test, it identified any green pasture as a picture of a sheep! It also saw giraffes everywhere. It learned that ‘giraffe!’ was often a better answer than ‘I don’t know’, probably because there were a few too many pictures of giraffes in the training data. And if you asked it how many giraffes there were, it would give you a weirdly high number–because the training data didn’t have any pictures of individual giraffes. This stuff can get very weird, very fast. As Shane illustrates in her book,

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Artificial Intelligence & You: Some Light Reading

AI’s are also lazy, lazy cheaters–or rather, they optimize for exactly what you tell them to optimize for. One time, researchers wrote an evolutionary algorithm tasked with designing robots that could move, from a pile of parts. The training judged how good a robot was at moving by how quickly it could reach a goal at the other end of a virtual room. So the AI ended up making robots that were just big towers of parts, which then fell over in the direction of the goal. In another experiment, researchers asked an AI to design a circuit that could produce oscillating waves. The AI instead evolved a radio that picked up and reproduced oscillating waves from nearby computers.

Well don’t get mad–they did what you asked.

We all deal with AI’s every day, and surely we are encountering errors like this all the time, whether we can recognize them or not. And these errors can have significant repercussions. Let’s look at some examples of biased training data (like in the above hypothetical about playing cards). Facebook and Apple (and many, many others) have made facial-recognition algorithms that didn’t work on black people and/or women because the training data didn’t have very many of them. A self-driving Tesla that had never encountered a stopped perpendicular trailer thought it was a billboard, ignored it, and then crashed into it, killing the driver.

If you’d like to learn more stuff like this, along with many entertaining and illustrative examples (like telling an AI trained on Harry Potter fanfiction to write recipes), I highly recommend checking out this book! It’s great for everyone from beginners to semipros, and possibly beyond.

Artificial Intelligence & You: Some Light ReadingPost + Comments (79)

Recommended Reading: 2019 Retrospective

by Major Major Major Major|  January 4, 202012:52 pm| 92 Comments

This post is in: Books, Popular Culture, Recommended Reading

‘Tis the season for best-of-2019 lists. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the books I read aren’t shiny and new, so I can’t really make one of my own. But fret not! We can still talk about the best books that were new to us in 2019. Without further ado, here are mine.

Best of the Best:

Without question, the most memorable book I read in 2019 was The Incal (1980-1988), a graphic novel written by Alejandro Jodorowsky & illustrated by Moebius. After failing to adapt Dune for the big screen, cult director Jodorowsky wrote this weird-as-hell space opera epic instead. Legendary French illustrator Jean Giraud, aka Moebius, inked it. Just a transcendent “what on earth did I just read?” experience.

Recommended Reading: 2019 Retrospective

It was also a good (reading) year for LGBT graphic novels. Specifically, My Brother’s Husband (2014-2017), by Gengoroh Tagame, and Fun Home (2006), by Alison Bechdel. The former tells the story of a Canadian widower visiting his late husband’s estranged brother in Tokyo. The latter is a memoir of Bechdel’s early life growing up in rural Pennsylvania with a closeted father. Both won Eisner Awards.

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I was also a big fan of the Broken Earth trilogy, which I wrote about here.

Finally, some honorable mentions:

  • A Memory Called Empire (2017), by Arkady Martine. Part 1 in a series, this tells the tale of an impressionistic young ambassador, who represents an independent space station at the court of a ravenous interstellar empire.
  • Salvation (2018), by Peter F. Hamilton. I’m as surprised as you are that he made the list. But this well-wrought page-turner is worth picking up if you’re looking for the first part of what I’m sure will be a sprawling epic space opera.
  • The Goblin Emperor (2014), an award-winning story of race and class, told through the lens of a minor half-breed heir becoming the ruler of the elven empire. If I had to describe it in one word, it would be ‘kind’. (I picked this one up from one of your recommendations.)

Well, that’s my list. Very interested in seeing yours!

Recommended Reading: 2019 RetrospectivePost + Comments (92)

Recommended Reading #6: Audio Drama Edition

by Major Major Major Major|  September 14, 20191:57 pm| 71 Comments

This post is in: Books, Recommended Reading

I’ve been a sucker for a good audio drama ever since middle school, when my dad introduced me to the old classics. He’d bought some sort of anthology collection on tape, and took to playing it during long drives. I have a fond memory where we were driving through the mountains at night listening to Suspense and The Shadow. Later, in high school, a friend introduced me to the inestimable Nick Danger, Third Eye, which I still think about more than is probably healthy.

So I have absolutely no idea why I waited until 2019 to start listening to audio drama podcasts. It turns out there are a lot of good ones! Some are so good, I wanted to share them. They’re 100% free, so check them out at no risk to your pocketbook:

Steal the Stars (from Tor Labs, written by Mac Rogers) tells the story of Dakota Prentiss, security chief at a secret facility to study a crashed alien ship. It’s set in a recognizable near future, where such things are done by indentured servants at a defense contractor megacorporation, and the employees are forbidden to fraternize. One day, new hire Matt Salem joins the team, and you can probably see where this is going. Taped in a warehouse, Steal the Stars has the distinction of actually sounding like it takes place in its setting. Tightly-written, easy to follow, very well-executed. Available as fourteen 40-ish minute episodes. (Warning: the link contains some spoilers in its description.)

"TANIS" is filled with images of nature, on a black background.Tanis (from the Public Radio Alliance) is an odd duck. It’s told in the format of a public radio podcast, like Serial or Radiolab. In it, fictional podcast host Nic Silver investigates the fictional myth of Tanis, a legendary locale known only from a few cryptic references. Aided by a team of irregulars he picks up as he digs deeper, he aims to uncover the truth behind these bizarre stories, which seem to gravitate around the woods of the Pacific Northwest. The first season of twelve 45-ish minute episodes works as a standalone, and I highly recommend it. Each episode seamlessly blends strange real-world events with the story’s developing mythos, in a manner I would characterize as Borgesian. Recommended especially for fans of weird fiction.

If you’re looking for something lighter, check out StarTripper!! (from Whisperforge, written by Julian Mundy). This zany space opera follows Feston Pyxis, a bored bureaucrat who sells his belongings, buys a starship, and starts a podcast narrating his adventures. Each 25-ish minute episode finds him at a new locale, within which hijinks ensue. Think Buck Rogers meets Futurama. It’s an indie production, so the audio isn’t as good as the above two, but don’t let that stop you.


What sort of audio dramas do y’all enjoy? I know it’s a niche genre, so feel free to talk about books and stories, too! I’m reading This Is How You Lose The Time War and Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, both of which are great. I think the latter was a recommendation from one of these posts…

Recommended Reading #6: Audio Drama EditionPost + Comments (71)

Open Thread: Time Travel As Cultural Barometer

by Major Major Major Major|  August 9, 20191:30 pm| 159 Comments

This post is in: Election 2016, Open Threads, Politics, Recommended Reading

Leon Trotsky once wrote, “Art, it is said, is not a mirror, but a hammer: it does not reflect, it shapes.” I suspect that this phenomenon is more intense in works of speculative fiction* than, say, spy thrillers. These stories are well-positioned to plumb and amplify the pressing issues and paranoias of their times; more to the point, they often offer high-concept utopian solutions, be they progressive or reactionary.

So I was amused to see the Guardian ask: Why are there so many new books about time-travelling lesbians?

In 2016, I sat down with my co-author Max Gladstone to write our novel This Is How You Lose the Time War, which follows two time-travelling female spies as they fall in love. That same year was also when I first heard people speaking earnestly and frequently about feeling as if they were in the wrong timeline, as the Brexit referendum results rolled in and Donald Trump was elected US president.

[…] But our novel is just one of several recent stories of queer women time-travelling. There is Kate Heartfield’s Nebula-nominated novella Alice Payne Arrives and its sequel Alice Payne Rides, which see two 18th-century women – lovers – become embroiled in a war. There are also Kameron Hurley’s The Light Brigade, Kate Mascarenhas’s The Psychology of Time Travel, Kelly Robson’s Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach and Annalee Newitz’s The Future of Another Timeline.

[…] I wrote to each of these authors in anticipation of this piece and it turns out we were all drafting our books in 2016.

The article is a quick and a good read. I haven’t picked up This Is How You Lose the Time War yet, but it’s near the top of my list. I did read two books last year that featured time-traveling lesbians, though, just chewing through a random pile of space opera.

This article reminded me of a fun piece on Doctor Who**, which found that the Doctor was significantly more likely to overthrow the government during the Thatcher era.

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More recently, interviews revealed that this was quite intentional:

[Script Editor] Cartmel said it was almost a job requirement to detest Thatcher.

When asked by John Nathan-Turner, the producer, what he hoped to achieve in being the show’s script editor, he recalled: “My exact words were: I’d like to overthrow the government.

And right now, in the show’s thirty-eighth season, the Doctor is a woman for the first time.

I’ve touched on the alt-right attempts to ‘reclaim’ speculative fiction before; may their number of victories continue to be zero.

Open thread!


*I will once again not apologize for using this industry umbrella term, which refers fantasy, sci-fi, most horror, “weird”, magical realism, etc.

**Written by trans spec-fic author Charlie Jane Anders, incidentally.

Open Thread: Time Travel As Cultural BarometerPost + Comments (159)

Recommended Reading #5: Armageddon, With Social Justice & Rock Wizards

by Major Major Major Major|  June 9, 201912:37 pm| 166 Comments

This post is in: Recommended Reading

Welcome back to Recommended Reading! I hope your Sunday is going well. I woke up to a short story rejection, so I lopped off 350 words and sent it in to another place. Excelsior!

To some, today’s trilogy needs little introduction. Each book won the Hugo Award, three years running, the first time an author had accomplished this feat. And the author, N.K. Jemisin, has been central in the fight to get the vocal alt-right trolls in the speculative fiction* community to shut the fuck up**.

In an acceptance speech that’s being hailed as one of the best ever made at the Hugos, Jemisin defiantly raised a “rocket-shaped finger” (a reference to the rocket-ship design of the massive Hugo statue) to the racist rhetoric that positions the recognition of her work as being about identity politics rather than her own talent.

“It’s been a hard year, hasn’t it,” she began. “A hard few years, a hard century. For some of us, things have always been hard. I wrote the Broken Earth trilogy to speak to that struggle, and what it takes to live, let alone thrive, in a world that seems determined to break you — a world of people who constantly question your competence, your relevance, your very existence.”

The Broken Earth trilogy takes place in a world called the Stillness, where geological cataclysms periodically decimate the population, through both the initial events and the ensuing nuclear winters. Some people, called orogenes, are born with the power to harness and redirect the earth’s energy. They are hated and feared, and the dominant imperial power collects them as children, to break them and train them to serve the empire.

One day, after deciding such a civilization is unfit to continue, an orogene of immense power rips the continent in half.

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The story begins that day, following a handful of orogenes and their associates as they try to survive. For a fantasy epic, it’s very intimate; as with all the best stories, the conflicts are between individuals with different goals, each for understandable reasons.

I ordinarily would pick something less famous to write about, but this one is just so good. You should check it out! The first book is called The Fifth Season, and is probably available wherever books are sold.

What have you been reading lately?

*I know some of you love to hate this umbrella term for stories about worlds other than the one we live in; I don’t care.

**I was chatting with my friend about this the other day. I said, “I guess I could see how your stereotypical libertarian reader might disagree with some of the themes, but it’s a very nuanced take on prejudice and empire.” He said, “You’re acting like these people opened the book after they saw a picture of a black woman on the back.” Touché!

Recommended Reading #5: Armageddon, With Social Justice & Rock WizardsPost + Comments (166)

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