Being that I’m in the process of writing my dissertation (working towards finishing by December), I’ve spent a lot of time this summer reading some pretty dense and difficult academic papers. A few years ago I found that it helped considerably to take breaks from reading for work to read for pleasure. I read two books in the past week and a half that are definitely worth mentioning. I’ll try to talk about them a bit without spoiling them for you, since my intent is to recommend them to youse, and highly.
My favorite writer for a while has been Vernor Vinge on the strength of his newer books, A Deepness in the Sky and Fire upon the Deep, easily the best pieces of fiction I’ve read in the past decade. It surprised me to find that he’s been writing fiction since the mid-80s, so I picked up the Peace War, written in 1984. Science fiction books written during the Reagan administration have amused me for the past several years—the vast majority of writers then seemed to assume that our buffoon of a president would cause the downfall of Western civilization, the Russians were typically the prominent technological innovators in their imagined future worlds.
In The Peace War, the Cold War ends at the hands of a group of scientists working for a top-secret military contractor for the US. This team discovers a high-energy weapon that generates “bobbles”, silvery spheres impenetrable by all known forms of matter and energy. They use the technology to enclose key military installations in the US and Soviet Union and to snag nuclear-armed ICBMs in the air to save the world from the threat of mutually assured destruction and eventually succeed in bringing down all the world’s governments, plunging mankind into a peaceful anarchy. Advanced capitalism and industrial operations are banned by threat of bobbling. The book follows a small and distributed group of revolutionaries seeking to restore mankind to its former glory.
An interesting premise, and a believable one—I’ve known many academics who would agree humanity would be better off without wealth and technology. There’s a sequel out there, too, that I plan to pick up after I get through some work-reading.
The other book is Old Man’s War by John Scalzi. There’s very little I could say about the plot of this story that wouldn’t spoil it, but I’ll try my best. The future Earth in this book is quite a bit like the one we live on now, except that a group of humans had left the planet to colonize the planets and ended up drastically outpacing those who stayed behind technologically. The Colonials developed a faster-than-light drive and the technology to build a space elevator on Earth, which they use to transport the suffering people of overpopulated nations on the planet to the stars to start new lives as colonists. The people of the wealthier nations with stable populations (like the US) aren’t allowed to volunteer as colonists, but they can volunteer to join the Colonial Defense Force once they reach the age of 75 years. This is a popular opportunity, since reason stands that one of that advanced age wouldn’t be of much use on any sort of battlefield and so the Colonials must have advanced technology to make the old young again.
What follows is a deeply philosophical story about the nature of identity, humanity, and the ethics of warfare—a story carried by surprisingly well-written, and at times very funny, dialogue. I was surprised to find that this book was only written a few years ago, and in the intervening years Scalzi has written at least three other books, two of them sequels to Old Man’s War.
I couldn’t recommend these books any more highly, even to those who think they don’t like science fiction.
A few unrelated links to stuff worth spending a few minutes reading:
CC Sabathia, Prince Fielder Keep Imagining Each Other as Giant Talking Hot Dog, Hamburger — the Onion went through a very cold spell for a while until they added a sports section.
Stan Musial — Joe Posnanski’s essay about The Man, which would’ve had me in tears of admiration if my ducts hadn’t atrophied during puberty.
