The Chronoliths
Wilson, Robert Charles
I finished this quite a bit earlier in the year, but only now have had time to catch up and document the fact. A different take on the time travel theme. I didn't find the main characters especially appealing, but I did stay with the story and did decide it was worth the effort.

8:21:30 PM •  • comment  

The Zenith Angle
Sterling, Bruce
Sterling tries his hand at a bridge between techno-thriller and social satire. Sometimes it works really well, other times not. I certainly raced through it; so it succeeds on the techno-thriller aspect quite well. On the social satire/social commentary, I think the results are more mixed. Some of it is very funny, some of it is very provocative. Overall, this struck me as a moderately successful experiment. Certainly worth the time and effort. But a bit short of what it promised it might be.

8:19:11 PM •  • comment  

The Curve of Binding Energy
McPhee, John A.
One of McPhee's earlier books. I think I picked it up from a blog recommendation somewhere. While McPhee makes a good argument for why we should be worried about the risks of nuclear weapons made from stolen materials, the world has gone 30 years without that event occurring. It's probably worth thinking about why that should be. No obvious answer occurs to me.

8:16:26 PM •  • comment  

Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity
Lessig, Lawrence
This got lots of coverage when it came out, including AKMA's interesting efforts to create a distributed audiobook version of the text. I enjoy Lessig on many levels. One in particular is the chance to watch how he assembles an argument. The one particular takeaway from this book is that Lessig finally helped me understand why there is an important role for public policy (mainly by showing how badly it's breaking down in the current instance).

8:14:01 PM •  • comment  

The Sheep Look Up
Brunner, John
As a long-time fan of Brunner, I'm not quite sure how it is I had never read The Sheep Look Up until now. It's a very dark and disturbing tale in the "if this goes on..." school of science fiction. Dave Pollard in his excellent weblog, How to Save the World, makes compelling and persuasive arguments for why each of us should strive to reduce his or her footprint on the planet. Brunner skips past the rational arguments and goes straight for the emotional hooks. What I found especially disturbing about The Sheep Look Up is how closely aligned it feels with today's news and headlines. Written in the 1970s, some credit it with encouraging the more radical wing of the environmental movement. Reading it now, I wonder how much the inevitable may have only been postponed for a short while. Disturbing.

8:10:31 PM •  • comment