William Gibson and Agency

Willam Gibson's latest novel, Agency, was published last week, and it's sitting on my Kindle waiting for me to finish a couple of other things first. In the meantime, I've been reading some of the reviews and articles about Gibson. For my own future reference and your enjoyment, here are some of them.

As I noted in a post recently, I will say that I thought his previous novel, The Peripheral, was the best book of the decade, and I am going to re-read it before diving into Agency. 

• List of Gibson's upcoming appearances. 
• Discussing Agency with William Gibson. An email conversation between Gibson and Randy Rucker. 
• In William Gibson’s new novel, AI is actually the good guy.
• From the Guardian, Agency by William Gibson review – a world in an instant. An extremely perceptive review by SF author M. John Harrison.
• From the New York Times, The Darkness Where the Future Should Be. "What happens to a society that loses its capacity for awe and wonder at things to come?"
• Tracking Reality's "Fuckedness Quotient": An Interview with William Gibson, from the LA Times.

William Gibson's Agency and the Apocalypse

I finally finished reading William Gibson's new novel, Agency, last week. In preparation for that, I re-read his previous novel, The Peripheral, which is a prequel to Agency. 

I had thought about doing a full review of Agency, but I don't have the time or inclination right now. Suffice it to say that of the two books, I think The Peripheral is superior; in fact, I think it's the best science fiction novel of the last decade. It's not that Agency is a bad book, but it didn't hold my attention the way The Peripheral did. When I was reading The Peripheral, I found myself highlighting passage after passage that struck me, and that didn't happen as much in Agency. And the ending felt rushed and a bit contrived. I'm glad I read it, but I doubt that I'll go back to it. 

The Quietus has published a long interview with Gibson that focuses on one of the key aspects of these novels – the slow motion apocalypse that Gibson calls the Jackpot. 

“There’s never been a culture that had a mythos of apocalypse in which the apocalypse was a multi-causal, longterm event.” William Gibson speaks in the whisper-soft drawl of a man who for a long time now has never had to speak up in order to be heard. Though a certain edge had crept into our conversation by this point, watching him stretch out on the leather chaise longue of this hotel library (“my second home,” he calls it, as we make our way up from the lobby), it struck me that few people are able to seem at once so apprehensive and yet so intensely relaxed about the prospect of the end of the world as we know it.

“But if we are in fact facing an apocalypse,” he continues, getting now into the swing of this particular riff, “that’s the sort we’re facing. And I think that that may be what makes it so difficult for us to get our heads around what’s happening to us.”

When I met Gibson back in early February, the slow-cooked nightmare of the coronavirus was still very much in its infancy here in Europe. The word ‘pandemic’ had not yet been uttered by the World Health Organisation and nor did it come up in our conversation. But it does appear in Gibson’s (2014) novel, The Peripheal, the first part of a trilogy split between two timelines: one taking place before and one somewhat after an event known as the ‘jackpot’. “No comets crashing, nothing you could really call a nuclear war,” future Londoner Wilf Netherton explains of this ‘jackpot’. “Just everything else, tangled in the changing climate: droughts, water shortages, crop failures, honeybees gone like they almost were now, collapse of other keystone species, every last alpha predator gone, antibiotics doing even less that they already did, diseases that were never quite the one big pandemic but big enough to be historic events in themselves.”

Even if you don't read The Peripheral or Agency, I recommend reading this article. Gibson has hit a nerve with his concept of the Jackpot. It hasn't quite hit meme status, yet, but it is now a term that's become part of our culture. 

William Gibson Profiled

William Gibson is one of my favourite authors. I have been reading him since his reading "Johnny Mnemonic"story in Omni in 1981. His most recent novel, The Peripheral was, IMHO, the best novel of the last decade, and I have it's sequel, Agency on pre-order with Amazon.

He was recently profiled in The New Yorker, and it's one of the best articles about an author that I've read in a very long time.

Suppose you’ve been asked to write a science-fiction story. You might start by contemplating the future. You could research anticipated developments in science, technology, and society and ask how they will play out. Telepresence, mind-uploading, an aging population: an elderly couple live far from their daughter and grandchildren; one day, the pair knock on her door as robots. They’ve uploaded their minds to a cloud-based data bank and can now visit telepresently, forever. A philosophical question arises: What is a family when it never ends? A story flowers where prospective trends meet.

This method is quite common in science fiction. It’s not the one employed by William Gibson, the writer who, for four decades, has imagined the near future more convincingly than anyone else. Gibson doesn’t have a name for his method; he knows only that it isn’t about prediction. It proceeds, instead, from a deep engagement with the present. When Gibson was starting to write, in the late nineteen-seventies, he watched kids playing games in video arcades and noticed how they ducked and twisted, as though they were on the other side of the screen. The Sony Walkman had just been introduced, so he bought one; he lived in Vancouver, and when he explored the city at night, listening to Joy Division, he felt as though the music were being transmitted directly into his brain, where it could merge with his perceptions of skyscrapers and slums. His wife, Deborah, was a graduate student in linguistics who taught E.S.L. He listened to her young Japanese students talk about Vancouver as though it were a backwater; Tokyo must really be something, he thought. He remembered a weeping ambulance driver in a bar, saying, “She flatlined.” On a legal pad, Gibson tried inventing words to describe the space behind the screen; he crossed out “infospace” and “dataspace” before coming up with “cyberspace.” He didn’t know what it might be, but it sounded cool, like something a person.

 I will undoubtedly have a review of Agency here but it may be a couple of months. I intend to finish Ian Macdonald's wonderful Luna trilogy first, then re-read The Peripheral, one of the rare books that deserves a re-read.

The Guardian has just published an interview with Gibson in which he talks at length about the process of writing Agency.

William Gibson On the Apocalypse

William Gibson has been getting a lot of well-deserved publicity for his new novel, Agency. Here's another interview with him in which he talks about the genesis of the book and reveals some surprising details about Russia.

Gibson has a surprising story about Russia. In the late 1980s, a little-known but highly influential think tank, the Global Business Network, started bringing together experts on the future to advise governments and corporations on the decades ahead. Gibson was one of its seers. Its annual meetings would be accompanied by tours of places its futurologists wouldn’t otherwise see; one year they visited the headquarters of Visa, which Gibson was told had “tighter security than the Pentagon”. Gibson says the GBN arranged for him to meet with FBI agents who were involved with the Russian security services, and that they told him about their plan for dealing with corruption in the post-Soviet economy, a plan they called the “self-cleaning oven”. “They were simply going to let it run, let these guys kill each other off, and when things had calmed down, they’d step in.” According to Gibson, while Boris Yeltsin was in power US intelligence blithely assumed that the turf war would play out with no clear winner. “I think, in retrospect,” he says with a wry smile, “it wasn’t a very good decision.”

Read Mirroshades For Free

Mirrorshades is a seminal anthology of cyberpunk science fiction edited by Bruce Sterling and first published in 1986. It contained stories by William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Greg Bear, Pat Cadigan, and several other well-known writers. 

Rudy Rucker has made the anthology freely available to read online or download as an ebook.

Okay so NOW this FREE cyberpunk collection (which is so old you can see on the cover that it was only $3.50 for a paperback copy), is available as an #ebook download (FREE, I said!) as well as just opening it to read on your device. If you want it in that format, you can go there and try out the two ebook download systems it's offered on, let me know if it's not working. 

It's a credit to the authors and Sterling's editorial talents that these stories have held up so well over the intervening decades. Here's the table of contents.

• PREFACE
• THE GERNSBACK CONTINUUM by William Gibson
• SNAKE EYES by Tom Maddox
• ROCK ON by Pat Cadigan
• TALES OF HOUDINI by Rudy Rucker
• 400 BOYS by Marc Laidlaw
• SOLSTICE by James Patrick Kelly
• PETRA by Greg Bear
• TILL HUMAN VOICES WAKE US by Lewis Shiner
• FREEZONE by John Shirley (Two Versions)
• STONE LIVES by Paul Di Filippo
• RED STAR, WINTER ORBIT by Bruce Sterling and William Gibson
• MOZART IN MIRRORSHADES by Bruce Sterling and Lewis Shiner
• CREDITS

Some Science Fiction Links

Here are a few articles about science fiction and fantasy.

• Publisher's Weekly reviews John Scalzi's next novel, Starter Villsin. If it's anything like The Kaiju Preservation Society, it should be a lot of fun. And the cover will certainly grab a lot of readers.
• Add June's New Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Horror Books to Your Summer Reading List. "Start summer off with 42 new releases from authors like Charles Soule, Ann Leckie, Brandon Sanderson, Fran Wilde, and more."
• 2022 Analog AnLab Award and Asimov’s Science Fiction’s Readers’ Award Winners. The results from the readers' polls for the two digest science fiction magazines.
• William Gibson on how he coined the word "cyberspace" (video). "In William Gibson's classic 1984 cyberpunk novel Neuromancer, he coined the word "cyberspace" as the "consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators" jacked in to the digital network. In this clip from a 1993 Toronto TV program, Gibson tells how he came up with the term."
• Wheel of Time Season 2 Teases Mystery, Intrigue, and Dragons Reborn. "Prime Video has released first-look images from the second season of its epic Robert Jordan fantasy adaptation, premiering September 1." I am looking forward to the second season. WoT was much better than either Rings of Power or House of Dragons.

2021 Locus Award Finalists

The finalists for the 2021 Locus Awards have been announced. "These results are from the February 1 to April 15 voting, done by readers on an open public ballot. Congratulations to all! The Locus Awards winners will be announced June 26, 2021, during the virtual Locus Awards Weekend."

I am impressed by the finalists for the Science Fiction Novel award. It's a very strong list.

Machine, Elizabeth Bear (Saga; Gollancz)

Attack Surface, Cory Doctorow (Tor; Ad Astra)

Unconquerable Sun, Kate Elliott (Tor)

Agency, William Gibson (Berkley; Viking UK)

The Relentless Moon, Mary Robinette Kowal (Tor; Solaris)

War of the Maps, Paul McAuley (Gollancz)

The Ministry for the Future, Kim Stanley Robinson (Orbit US & UK)

The Last Emperox, John Scalzi (Tor; Tor UK)

Network Effect, Martha Wells (Tordotcom)

Interlibrary Loan, Gene Wolfe (Tor)

Out of the ten books, the only one that I've read is Agency by William Gibson. I have purchased three others and will probably get a couple more if they go on sale at some point. 

Many of the short fiction finalists are available to read online. See links in the Locus announcement.

The TV Adaptation of The Peripheral Is Shooting

 I've made no secret here about how much I enjoyed William Gibson's novel, The Peripheral, which I consider to be the best science fiction novel of the last decade. So I was glad to see this article about the television adaptation being produced by Amazon Prime Video. It is currently shooting in London, where about half of the story is set, and will being filming in Marshall, NC in the fall. 

MARSHALL - The county seat will serve as a filming location for an upcoming Amazon Prime Video show, the show's location manager announced during May 17's Marshall Town Board of Aldermen monthly meeting. 

The show, "The Peripheral," is based on William Gibson's 2015  futuristic science fiction novel of the same name.

Bass Hampton, the location manager for the project, debriefed members of the board on the show's plans. Hampton has also served as location manager for films such as "Get Out" and "The Conjuring," according to his IMDB page. 

Hampton said he started scouting locations for the show about a year ago.

... 

According to Hampton, the show is currently filming in London. The crew has already built the ReClaim Madison storefront, just one of the few locations to be used in the production, on its stage.

The Peripheral: First Impressions

I've made no secret about how much I like William Gibson's novel, The Peripheral. IMHO it's the best science fiction novel of the century to date. So I was more than a little apprehensive when I heard that it was being adapted for streaming; I've seen too many promising projects turn into crap. 

Based on the first two episodes of Amazon Prime's adaptation, I needn't have worried. It's brilliant. 

First, it's true to both the basic storyline of the novel and to the characters, especially that of Flynne, ably played by Chloë Grace Moretz. She's exactly as I had imagined her from the novel. And the other characters are just as well done. The showrunners (interviewed here) have done a great job of both portraying the future setting and technology that Gibson envisions while adding new plot elements that aren't in the novel but still feel just right. 

The show could still go off the rails in future episodes, but I'm very happy about what I've seen so far. And from what I've read on Twitter, Gibson likes it too. 

I am very much looking forward to the rest of the season. If you've watched it, what do you think?

 

Featured Links - November 24, 2019

Links to things that I found interesting but didn't want to do a full post about.

• Electric cars are changing the cost of driving. If you want a forever car, buy a Tesla. . 
• Death In Paradise Is All Too Frequent For Visitors To Hawaii. It's a beautiful place but it can be deadly if you aren't careful. 
• Why the world is running out of sand. And all the sand in the deserts won't help. 
• Ticketmaster's Anti-Scalping Technology Actually Helps Scalpers, Not Fans. Unfortunately, the article doesn't suggest any real solutions.
• What If Space-Time Were 'Chunky'? It Would Forever Change the Nature of Reality. It may be possible to test if space-time is quantized. 
• Some notes on Project Medusa, a variant of the Orion nuclear-pulse spaceship that works by firing bombs ahead of the spacecraft.
• The Future, Unevenly Distributed: William Gibson's Neuromancer At 35. Gibson's classic novel has aged well. 

Tales From the Loop Is Good

My family has been watching Tales From the Loop on Amazon Prime, and we are all enjoying it, which is unusual as we all have differing tastes (that do overlap sometimes) in TV shows. Tales is very good, understated science fiction that, if I had to come up with an elevator pitch for it, I would describe as "Ray Bradbury meets Stranger Things".

There are no aliens or monsters, although there is some weird tech that's never really explained, and sometimes bad things happen to people. But there's a pastoral feeling to the stories, reminiscent of Ray Bradbury at his best, that is quite unusual in modern SF&F television. Each episode stands alone, although are there are some links between them, and the stories are very much driven by their (often young) characters, again unusual today.

It reminds me of the excellent Years and Years that I reviewed earlier this year; although they're thematically very different, both shows dump you into their world and proceed with their stories without much explanation. It's a technique that William Gibson uses to great effect in his novels; a technique that some viewers (or readers, in the case of Gibson) may find difficult to follow, but that I like very much.

Book and Film Review has a highly favourable review of the show that echoes my feelings perfectly.

As a whole, Tales from the Loop lets its messages come through by understatement. That goes along with its overall feel. The setting is a lived-in small town, almost feudal in its social structure, surrounded by stubble fields and overgrown woods. The phones are mostly rotaries, but there are robots you can control via a pair of well-worn gloves. Even the mysterious Loop complex, source of the wonders that feed the plot, is all tube monitors and dirty concrete. There are few, if any, orchestral swells in the soundtrack telling you how to feel about what you’re seeing: it’s mostly subdued piano and recorder and strings, courtesy of composer Philip Glass (in his first television score). Unlike its most obvious predecessor, The Twilight Zone, there’s not much in this show that’s going to manipulate you into reacting to it one way or another.

That’s what makes it brilliant. In contrast to other current science fiction shows, it creates a world where human decisions matter. Take for instance Devs or Westworld, each of which falls into some version of determinism. Both shows feature an all-seeing computer that reduces humanity to bits of data, so much so that in Devs even the one choice beyond the computer’s reach leads to the literal reduction of two personalities to zeros and ones. They don’t seem to mind: better conscious simulacra than dead. The shows’ assassinations, international intrigue, and techie slickness are fun to look at, but they amount to no more than a gloss over a misanthropic tableau. Tales from the Loop is a show about people grappling with the implications of technology, not about people becoming indistinguishable from technology. Watch it if you want a little help rekindling your hope for humankind.

Featured Links - January 3, 2021

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about:

• 8 Fantastic Uses for the Files by Google App. "Files by Google is more than just the best Android file manager. Here are some of the other useful things you can do with it."
• William Gibson: ‘I read Naked Lunch when it was still quasi-illicit’. "The sci-fi author on Cormac McCarthy, and the influence of William S Burroughs and Kurt Vonnegut."
• What Is ‘Normal Climate’ Where You Live? - The Answer Changes In 2021. "What's "normal" climate where you live and why is it about to change in 2021?"
• To exhausted healthcare workers like me, Covid conspiracies are a kick in the teeth. "Coronavirus deniers demanding proof of the pandemic in our hospitals are lucky they have never experienced it first hand."
• A Monster Wind Turbine Is Upending an Industry. "G.E.’s giant machine, which can light up a small town, is stoking a renewable-energy arms race."
• MZTV Museum of Television. If you like old TVs, this is the site for you.
• Tony Rice In Memoriam: Punch Brothers’ Chris Eldridge Salutes the Greatest Guitar Hero of Bluegrass. "One of the foremost younger guitarists in roots music pens an appreciation of the man who showed him how it was done."

American Science Fiction: Nine Classic Novels of the 1950s

Science fiction used to be looked down on by the so-called literati, but times have changed. If you want proof of that, then look no further than the publication of American Science Fiction: Nine Classic Novels of the 1950s by the Library of America. This is a two-volume set containing nine classic novels from the 1950s, a decade where science fiction became something to be taken seriously. Out of the nine novels included in the set, I've read eight, several of them more than once, and I think the "classic" approbation is deserved. 

On the Library of America's website, you can read the introduction to each of the books. The novels and the authors who wrote the introductions (in brackets) are:

• The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester (William Gibson)
• A Case of Conscience by James Blish (William Morrow)
• The Long Tomorrow by Leigh Brackett (Nicola Griffith)
• Who? by Algys Budrys (Tim Powers)
• Double Star by Robert A. Heinlein (Connie Willis)
• The Space Merchants by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth (Michael Dirda)
• The Big Time by Fritz Leiber (Neil Gaiman)
• The Shrinking Man by Richard Matheson (Peter Straub)
• More Than Human by Theodore Sturgeon (Kit Reed)

The website also includes short articles by editor Gary K. Wolfe about the 1950s that put the books in their historical context, as well as bibliographies and other material by and about the authors. For example, the page on Double Star includes links to audio version of five of Heinlein's stories that were broadcast on the radio show, Dimension X. 

It Looks Like the Jackpot May Have Started

I've been re-reading William Gibson's excellent 2014 novel, The Peripheral, in preparation for reading his new novel, Agency. One of the ideas in The Peripheral that is especially striking right now is the Jackpot, which (as described in Wikipedia) "begins in the middle of the 21st century as a combination of climate change and other causes, followed by a series of droughts, famines, pandemics, political chaos, and anarchy. 80% of the global human population dies off. "

So now here's a long and well-researched article from Australia about the current state of climate change and its likely effects over the next few decades. It makes a good case for thinking that we are at the beginning stages of the Jackpot. 

Schellnhuber, one of the world’s leading authorities on climate change, said that if we continue down the present path “there is a very big risk that we will just end our civilisation. The human species will survive somehow but we will destroy almost everything we have built up over the last two thousand years.”

Schellnhuber said in a recent interview that the IPCC report stating we could stay below 1.5°C of warming was “slightly dishonest” because it relies on immense negative emissions (pulling CO2 out of the air) which was not viable at global scale. He said 1.5°C was no longer achievable but it was still possible to stay under 2°C with massive changes to society.

If we don’t bend the emissions curve down substantially before 2030 then keeping temperatures under 2°C becomes unavoidable. The “carbon law” published in the journal Science in 2017 found that, to hold warming below 2°C, emissions would need to be cut in half between 2020 and 2030.

Steffen told Voice of Action that the three main challenges to humanity – climate change, the degradation of the biosphere and the growing inequalities between and among countries – were “just different facets of the same fundamental problem”.

This problem was the “neoliberal economic system” that spread across the world through globalisation, underpinning “high production high consumption lifestyles” and a “religion built not around eternal life but around eternal growth”.

Given the current state of world affairs, I do not see any likelihood that we can cut carbon emissions by half in ten years. So then we are faced with a wild, downhill ride.

Steffen told Voice of Action he believes collapse “will likely not come as a dramatic global collapse, but rather as overall deterioration in many features of life, with regional collapses occurring here and there”.

“For example, it appears that the USA is entering a long period of decline in many aspect of its society, with a potential for a more rapid collapse in the coming decade,” said Steffen.

Samuel Alexander, a lecturer with the University of Melbourne and research fellow at the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute, told Voice of Action that the coming collapse would not be a single black or white event.

“With respect to civilisations, what is more likely is that we have entered a stage of what JM Greer calls ‘catabolic collapse’ – where we face decades of ongoing crises, as the existing mode of civilisation deteriorates, but then recovers as governments and civil society tries to respond, and fix things, and keep things going for a bit longer,” said Alexander.

A Couple of Interesting Book Lists

 I've come across a couple of interesting book lists recently.

The first is from the New York Times which has compiled a list of the 100 best books of the 21st century as "voted on by 503 novelists, nonfiction writers, poets, critics and other book lovers — with a little help from the staff of The New York Times Book  Review."

I took the time to scroll through the list and found three books that I've read (and a fourth that I tried but couldn't get into) and maybe another half dozen that I still might want to read. Out of the 100 books, I recognized maybe 20. Half a dozen or so were science fiction or fantasy. So I guess I'm really out of touch with the modern literary world (or they're out of touch with what people are reading these days).

A more interesting list was compiled by Esquire: The 75 Best Sci-Fi Books of All Time. Out of that list, I've read about 35, and recognize most of the rest, though there are a surprising number of titles I've not heard of. (I say surprising considering that most of my reading is science fiction or fantasy and I read a lot of reviews). It's a reasonable list and would make a good start for anyone wanting to get more exposure to the field. I could quibble with some of the choices, but the only change I'd really like to see is replacing William Gibson's Neuromancer with The Peripheral, which I think is a much better book, if not as influential. 

2020 Locus Recommended Reading List and Poll

Locus, the newsmagazine of the science fiction and fantasy field, has published its recommended reading list for 2020. The list includes novels, short fiction, collections, anthologies, non-fiction, and illustrated and art books. 

The list is generally regarded as a guide to award nominations. File 770 reports a few interesting things about this year's list.  

The number of Novellas listed dropped to 19, after the 2019 list had 32. (The 2018 list had 13, 2017’s had 26.)

For first time since 2016, one of the recommended books is identified as self-published, (One self-published work made the 2016 list, an art book, and the 2015 list had three.)

Baen broke its drought, placing a book on the Locus list for the first time since 2017 — The Eleventh Gate by Nancy Kress – but only one.

On the list for novels, I've only read one (William Gibson's Agency), but have purchased four more, and there are another half dozen or so that I am likely to read if I ever find the time.  

Locus has also opened its annual poll and survey, which will be used to decide the winners of the annual Locus Awards. You don't need to be a Locus subscriber to vote.

Tor.com's Most Anticipated Books of 2019

The good folks at Tor.com have published a list of the books they're most looking forward to in 2019. I haven't checked, but I assume that most, if not all, are published by Tor or its affiliates. It's quite a list, dominated by fantasy, which seems to be the trend in publishing in recent years. There are also many new authors, which is a good thing.

These are the books that I am looking forward to reading:

• Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James (February 5)
• The Best of R.A. Lafferty (February 7)
• The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders (February 12)
• Ancestral Night by Elizabeth Bear (March 5)
• A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine (March 26)
• Agency by William Gibson (April 2), This is probably the book of the year for me. 
• Exhalation: Stories by Ted Chiang (May 7)
• The Future of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz (September 24). If this is anywhere near as good as Autonomous, it should be a great read.

The Rise and Fall of Steampunk

If you read much science fiction or fantasy, you've probably encountered steampunk. Think of it as Victorian era history with Zeppelins and possibly steam-powered Babbage engines (mechanical computers).

I'm not a big fan though I did enjoy some novels: William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's The Difference Engine and Ian McDonald's YA Planesrunner series come to mind. I like it more as a visual metaphor; it works better for movies than novels, I think.

In Whatever Happened to Steampunk, John Brownlee looks at the evolution of steampunk and offers some reasons why it seems to have faded in popularity.

In other words, steampunk is a bit of a power fantasy: not of the technologist, but of the maker, the tinkerer, the engineer. The guys who can rebuild an engine from scratch, but who are as powerless to fix the iPhone that they just dropped in the toilet as the rest of us.

And that is exactly why steampunk took off when it did, starting around early 2003. According to Rob Beschizza, an editor at Boing Boing — one of the web’s oldest and most popular fringe culture blogs, which reported on the rise of steampunk firsthand — steampunk became popular alongside the internet’s maker movement, which itself was a response to technology’s rapid evolutionary clip.

What I Read In 2020

It was a tumultuous year, and as a result, most of my reading was online news and articles. I am embarrassed to admit how few books I read in 2020. Perhaps I'll do better next year, if there's less political drama from south of the border, and we finally get the pandemic under control. 

So these are the few books I managed to finish this year. 

Neil Gaiman: The Sandman. I have been wanting to read The Sandman series for some time. I finally managed to read the first five books (Overture, Preludes and Nocturnes, The Doll's House, Dream Country, and Season of Mists) by downloading them from the library and reading them on my Samsung tablet. (I had tried to read the print editions and could not as the print was just too small). I enjoyed Overture the most, because the artwork was so spectacular, and found the stories in some of the third and fourth books hit or miss. I will get back to the series at some point.

William Gibson: The Peripheral and Agency. I decided to reread The Peripheral before starting Agency, and I am glad I did, as I enjoyed it more than the first time I read it. I liked Agency, but it didn't have the impact that The Peripheral did. The ending felt rushed and left me somewhat disappointed. 

Peter F. Hamilton: Salvation. This is the first book in a new trilogy by Hamilton. If you like his books, I'd recommend it, but it's probably not the place to start if you are new to his work; try Pandora's Star or Fallen Dragon instead. I enjoyed it, but was aware that there it would take a long time to get moving. Once it did, I couldn't put it down. 

Ian McDonald: Luna: Wolf Moon and Luna: Moon Rising. McDonald is one of my favourite writers and his Luna trilogy didn't disappoint. I doubt that a lunar civilization would work the way he described, but it's still a powerful and action-packed story. 

Robert J. Sawyer: The Oppenheimer Alternative. This is an alternate history written largely from the point of view of Robert Oppenheimer. It's deeply grounded in historical fact and doesn't diverge too much from our history until about halfway through the book. It's certainly one of Sawyer's better books and should be a must for anyone who likes alternate histories or historical novels, but it's not as much of a thrill ride as his previous book, Quantum Night.

Greg Rucka and Leandro Fernadez: The Old Guard.  I read this after seeing the movie on (I think) Netflix, figuring the graphic novel might be enjoyable. I preferred the movie and never finished the book. 

I tend to have several books on the go at once. This is what I'm reading now:

• Peter F. Hamilton: Salvation Lost
• Joel Selvin: Fare Thee Well
• Farah Mendlesohn: The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein
• Gardner Dozois: The Year's Best Science Fiction, 34th Edition
• Benjamin Dreyer: Dreyer's English
• Michael D. Leimbach: Bringing Columbia Home
• Brian Herber and Kevin J. Anderson: Dune, the Graphic Novel, Book 1

Featured Links - September 7, 2021

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

The west shore of Frenchman's Bay

• How to Turn Your Favorite Web Apps Into Desktop Apps. "Want to access Twitter and Google Chat in a single click? Here’s how to think outside the browser."
• Understanding the E-Reader Global Supply Chain. This may explain why we haven't seen a new Kindle from Amazon in a while.
• ‘Catastrophic’ supervolcano eruption much more likely than previously thought, scientists warn. "Event could affect global climate to the point of ‘tipping the earth into a volcanic winter’, resulting in ‘famine and population disruption’."
• The Global Supply Chain Crisis, as Told by One Stuck Box of Fertilizer. "This is the tale of one humble shipment and its arduous journey across the world. While some of the barriers keeping it from its final destination may be specific to this particular case, the journey is emblematic of the inertia that has gripped global trade during the pandemic."
• To Get To Space, You Must Go Through the Panama Canal. "But before the Webb telescope can take its place in the firmament and the future, it must face hazards more familiar a century ago than in the present, namely a lengthy sea voyage from Long Beach, California to its launch site at Kourou in French Guiana — with the risk of piracy thrown in for good measure."
• Why William Gibson Is a Literary Genius. "Forty years after his breakout story, “Johnny Mnemonic,” the father of cyberpunk remains one of the best writers around."
• The Red Warning Light On Richard Branson's Spaceflight. This was a serious anomaly and the FAA has grounded Virgin Galactic.