Category: Books

The Martian, by Andy Weir. An enjoyable book, very good physics feel and plausible problems. It’s a mostly solo adventure, a bit of a shipwrecked feel updated to really hostile environs. There some good internal development and a number of interesting peripheral characters. It’s well done, though it lacked the total Wow! that many reported feeling from it.

Basically, it’s a great disaster repair struggle; lots of competent, creative problem solving. It only goes wrong in the Earth chapters; the sustained attention on his plight struck me as… very surprising. Particularly sustained over so many months. (A 20 day countdown, I could envision getting a chyron, but sustained year plus interest seems… difficult in this distractable world.) The politics of mission control seem reasonable, though the characters feel much thinner.

Girl in the Road by Monica Byrne. A fascinating near future; the world has gently shifted its focus to India and Africa. The cultures are interesting, as are the parallels between the two stories. It’s weird and surreal (particularly the modern Meena story), while Mariama’s story is more steadily straightforward, though from a younger viewpoint.

Actually, this review lends a great pull quote: My experience reading The Girl in the Road by Monica Byrne can be boiled down to: this was an amazing novel until it wasn’t anymore. I loved the world and setup; the characters, particularly the unreliable narrators, were interesting. Meena’s story was the one I most identified with, which makes her breakdown revelation at the end incredibly bitter. Mariama’s story was less engaging, probably because she was so young and (after making the decision to flee) so acted upon.

While this one only mostly worked, I’ll be interested to see what else the author puts out in the future.

Several issues of the Fate Codex. (Mostly a quick reread and skim for my upcoming Fate Deyrni scenario.)

Tigerman by Nick Harkaway. A compelling, interesting read, with a bigger than expected twist near the end that makes you reconsider the whole first 2/3rds of the book. It was well done.

Mancreu is a fascinating place; I’m curious about how much is grounded in reality, and how much is the world specific response to the disasters. It’s a fascinating setting; an idyllic near paradise crossed with a lawless megacorporate protectorate. Lester is a very interesting guy, way over his head, in what feels like a sleepy PR role that spins out of control. His relationship with the boy is the book’s heart. He’s a good man, troubled by difficult past.

Traitor’s Blade by Sebastien De Castell a (reread). The book flowed smoothly, and was difficult to put down at times. It’s a subtle magic setting, with a great swashbuckling feel. The downfall of the Greatcoats is complete before the book begins, but you wince as it takes place in flashbacks concurrent with the advancing plot of ducal schemes.

The next book, Knight’s Shadow is due out next week. I’m looking forward to it!

I recently read three books; here are quick notes that I may later expand.

From the library, Federations an anthology by John Joseph Adams. Skilled, consistent, mostly sci-fi, but the actual Federations/political angle wasn’t as dominant as I expected.

A recent purchase: Fantasy Issue 58, the Women Destroy Fantasy! special issue. This was more mixed, with 4 new short stories, 4 reprints, a novel excerpt, and several discussions, essays, and other non-fiction.

An old book that I stumbled across was Angry Black White Boy or, The Miscegenation of Macon Detornay by Adam Mansbach. While Macon is pretty far out, I understand the stereotype the author is calling on much better now. In some ways, I’ve felt the same strain to belong in a more significant way that being acknowledged as separate but harmless. (Though my experience is usually as a man on the fringes of feminist discussion.)

A solid book, very much about economics and driven by thoughtful examination of formulas and lots of historical data, but not dense in numbers and equations. He writes with a lively touch, occasionally appealing to novels of specific eras to illustrate how commonplace some concepts and assumptions were.

In a way the primary argument is pessimistic; it took two world wars and a great depression to claw 1/3rd of wealth away from the top decile. Unfortunately, the fundamental laws of interest on capital have counteracted that spread of wealth; income on investments is becoming ever more the key to a life of extreme wealth.

It’s also interesting how corrosive the lowering of top marginal tax rates proved. From the 1930s to 1970s tax rate was so high that there was no reason to fight for a multi-million dollar salary–you’d lose most of it to taxes. That kept the boundaries of what was acceptable as income much closer to normal experience. Between hedge fund loopholes and wealth hiding, the wealthy today have every incentive to demand more and more, since they get to keep most of it. (In fact, they do such a good job of hiding their income and exploiting loopholes, that they on average pay less as a percentage of their income than the $50,000 to $250,000 per year set.)

The final few chapters bleakly examine ways to counteract the bare math of r > g, which is the law that interest grows faster than the economy as a whole. The most important element that he advances is a wealth tax, both for the obvious reasons (to shift taxation from workers to those living off of investments), but also for informational purposes. One of the big drawbacks to wealth taxes, at the moment, is that even governments have little idea of what non-land wealth people have. Even a tiny tax (say 0.1 percent) would get academics, researchers, and the government the information they need to design better, more targeted taxes.

The fly in the ointment is coordination. Unless done on a large scale (the US, the whole EU, or globally), paper wealth is hard to pin to a specific location. If Germany implements a wealth tax, the company stock may all be assigned to Ireland to dodge it. For everything but land, it’s easy to evade a single country’s efforts–great wealth is multinational these days.