Friends, Enemies, Giants

January book reviews

First, most important: next week on the 28th, I have a Zoom call for paying subscribers. We can talk about books we’re reading, what we’re writing… Ask Me Anything.

If you already pay for your subscription, save the date and click the link at the bottom of this post at 7:00 p.m. Sofia time on February 28. If you’re not, upgrade, my friend.

Five Million Watts¹ by Fenton Wood

We begin with a young man arriving in a city (not quite New York), talking to a coin-operated head made in the likeness of a beautiful woman. The original woman is, it turns out, the daughter of an inventor…but that story line doesn’t go anywhere. Boy, do we go somewhere else!

I usually like my fiction to be “tight” and “workmanlike,” where every scene works toward the goal the author had in mind for the novel. Five Million Watts does not do that. It dashes like an excited beagle from ancient DNA to folk music, classical music, mythology, and, most importantly, electrical engineering. How could you make an AM radio station broadcast at 5 million watts? Just imagine how big that antenna must be. Imagine cleaning ice off it.

A Preface to Paradise Lost by C. S. Lewis

I need to track down C. S. Lewis’s other lecture series. As the best teachers do, he doesn’t just impel you to read the source material, he points out things in it that you were too inattentive to catch.

My standout is the demons, newly fallen into hell, who rationalize “like a man who has cheated on his wife.” They can fight to get home! No, they can’t, but they can hide until they feel better. No, but they can make hell just as good as heaven. No, but what they can do is go and ruin Earth.

Hacking Galileo by Fenton Wood

I picked this up at a Based Book Sale (keep an eye out, there’s one every six months or so), but I sat on it for a while because the cover looks boring and the book description has too many layers to send a clear signal. So let this be the signal: read this book. It’s a blast.

A gang of teenage boys pull pranks with electronics and get in trouble. That produces a couple of fun little anecdotes, but then they try to bounce a radio signal off Mars and we really start cooking. Because it’s not Mars that returns their signal. It’s something older, and worse.

Return to the Whorl by Gene Wolfe

There were parts of The Book of the Long Sun that didn’t make sense until The Book of the Short Sun, and some of The Book of the Short Sun didn’t become clear until this, the last book in the series. For example, the narrator is a different person from the main character. Or rather, he was different in the first two books, before Horn woke up in Silk’s body, with Silk’s soul. That was my favorite part, maybe, in the whole series. That groping in the heated dark between friends, enemies, giants, and Wolfe’s ever-present hyena.

A World is Unfinished Without God : Half Made World

Here’s my review of Copernican’s review of The Half-Made World: they’re both worth reading. The sequel to The Half-Made World is not worth reading, however, and Copernican can tell us why: A World is Unfinished Without God. The Half-Made World gives us our Gun-man and our Bug-man, but where is our Preacher-man? That would have made the story work because it would have given us a good, third choice.

Best Of Moltbook

You’re probably sick of reading about Moltbook, but this was written the day after the social media site’s debut, and it’s funny.

I’ve ordered my copy. Have you?

Nothing Earth-shattering here, but it’s a good introduction to an interesting aspect of language change: fortition or “strengthening.”

Another space-battle animation!

So that’s how they got those “you can see the light waves propagating” ultra-slowmo videos. Cheating!

Plump, chilly turtles. It’s everything spec-bio should be.

I love the idea of kinetotrophy, and I love even more to see it developed so beautifully.

I’ve been listening to this song on repeat.

This one makes me tear up. Those grandchildren.

All right, here’s the expensive part. $3. Oooh.