en-US Mon, 24 Feb 2025 05:02:29 -0800 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Review7350671888 Mon, 24 Feb 2025 05:02:29 -0800 /review/show/7350671888 Rod gave 5 stars to Autonomous (Hardcover) by Annalee Newitz
A SOLID cyberpunk. Examines gender, sexuality and autonomy while delivering a great story (and without going much above PG-13, maybe an R scene or two -- definitely not X rated, if you care about such things). SF is (like all art) always a product of its time, and certainly gender and sexuality are hot topics in the mid-2020s. Some fiction I have read recently has felt very forced on that front, and unlikely to age well. This one incorporates it without being overbearing, and I think will better stand the test of time than some of those others.
The characters (including the nonhuman ones) are richly drawn, and the villain is largely a rational actor within his own environment. Most of the characters have good back stories that are developed at pace with the story, without a lot of awkward flashbacks; beginning writers could learn from Annalee's technique here. It starts out feeling perhaps a little shallow, but just keeps building until everything is in place.
Highly recommended. ]]> Review7350658598 Mon, 24 Feb 2025 04:55:05 -0800 /review/show/7350658598 Rod gave 5 stars to A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal (Hardcover) by Ben Macintyre
Hooooleeee COW, this is a wild ride. HIGHLY recommended. It's the era of tuxedoed spies, and Kim Philby slowly built a great career inside Britain's MI6, as an expert running spies from the Soviet Union.
Only, it was all a sham. As a Cambridge student, he had been radicalized and decided communism was the way to go. He became the most important mole inside British intelligence for the Soviets, doing incalculable damage.
The story is absolutely wild. If you know only vaguely of the era and of Philby himself, I can't recommend this strongly enough.
I listened to the audiobook.
]]> Review7350640548 Mon, 24 Feb 2025 04:45:14 -0800 /review/show/7350640548 Rod gave 3 stars to Elder Race (Paperback) by Adrian Tchaikovsky
I listened to the audiobook. I know Tchaikovsky's popular, and I love a good space opera, but this one seemed to me to be sort of pedestrian. ]]> Review4043343820 Mon, 24 Feb 2025 04:44:47 -0800 /review/show/4043343820 Rod gave 5 stars to Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journey (Paperback) by Michael Collins
Often called the best of the astronauts' autobiographies; Collins wrote this himself, not ghost written. Fantastic and thoughtful. We learn almost nothing about his family, though, not even how he met his wife and what she is like. I think that's deliberate, but it may also simply be his own myopia, not sure. There's a comment or two about how it's a shame there aren't Black astronauts, but he does seem to take it as given that equipping a spacecraft for women would be harder than equipping it for men, let alone that men and women would have to share cramped, stinky quarters and be unembarrassed by bodily functions. ]]> ReadStatus4539941266 Mon, 24 Feb 2025 04:44:17 -0800 /review/show/4043343820 Rod has read Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journey by Michael Collins
]]> Review7157963121 Thu, 02 Jan 2025 04:29:10 -0800 /review/show/7157963121 Rod gave 4 stars to Piranesi (Audible Audio) by Susanna Clarke
Solid fantasy, but hard to describe without spoilers. The main character is in a strange world, a palace of many rooms populated by statues and inundated by tides that come and go, and almost but not quite entirely alone. I'll say that it nags at me that it reminds me of something, and I can't remember what, which (you will find after reading this) is suitably ironic.
The reading of the audiobook edition is fantastic. ]]> Review7157905532 Thu, 02 Jan 2025 04:11:14 -0800 /review/show/7157905532 Rod gave 4 stars to Deke ! U.S. Manned Space From Mercury to the Shuttle (Hardcover) by Deke Slayton
Reading Deke! is like reading a NASA report without the equations. Very matter-of-fact. Even his own near-death events are reported calmly. "Nobody had ever been in an inverted flat spin in this aircraft before, so there was no known procedure for getting out of it. I tried, A, then B, then C finally worked." That kind of thing. He even makes volunteering to fly bombers over Italy in WWII sound like catching the bus. But for all that, it's a great read.
One thing that comes through clearly is how COMPLEX crewed spaceflight is. Pretty much everything has to work perfectly, but even when it doesn't there are many people on the ground trying to find workarounds. For that reminder alone it's worth reading. Deke was one of the original Mercury Seven, though he didn't get to fly until Apollo-Soyuz due to a health problem. While unable to fly, instead, he became one of the most important and influential people in defining the procedures and selecting and training the crews that did fly, as well as working to make sure the pilots' voices were heard in the spacecraft design process.
He wasn't, by modern standards, a progressive. He didn't mind the idea (he says) of women and minority astronauts, but he definitely wasn't going to go out of his way to get them. He figured that his job was to take the best from the top "feeders" (meaning mostly test pilot schools, in this case), and that if they didn't include women and minorities, well, that was their problem, not his. (Which, of course, is why things don't change, but that's a separate rant, not part of the review of this book.)

Given how big a fan I have always been of the crewed (nee "manned", through the first couple of decades), I have read surprisingly few of the (mostly ghostwritten) books by the astronauts themselves. This is an oversight worth correcting. ]]> Review7157884235 Thu, 02 Jan 2025 04:04:07 -0800 /review/show/7157884235 Rod gave 5 stars to The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War (Audible Audio) by Ben Macintyre
This is edge-of-your-seat stuff all the way through. I listened to the audiobook, and found it, well, hard to put down. Unfortunately since I was listening, I'm going to mangle the names of the people. Purebred, inter-generational KGB officer Oleg Gordievsky became disenchanted with communism, and tries to connect to the British MI6 to offer to spy for them. Then later, he's found out; will he be able to escape the clutches of the KGB and the counter-intelligence people who doubtless have a painful and very final end in mind for him?
A great deal of this purports to be directly what the principals were thinking at various times and places. It must come from archival material. Unfortunately the audiobook, at least, doesn't go into detail on the sources.
Highly recommended. ]]> Review7065751892 Sat, 07 Dec 2024 19:35:42 -0800 /review/show/7065751892 Rod gave 4 stars to Translation State (Hardcover) by Ann Leckie
This is the least amazing Ann Leckie novel I have read to date, which is to say it's only very, very good. Set in the Radch universe but a different culture than Ancillary X, gender and gender fluidity play big roles, whereas gender is... unimportant? Repressed? Ignored?... In the earlier novels. Those earlier novels feel timeless, whereas this one feels like a very contemporary comment on today's society. And, of course, this one features coffee instead of tea.
Definite echoes of Vinge's [[A Fire Upon the Deep]], which I reread this year. ]]> Review7065767114 Sat, 07 Dec 2024 15:14:10 -0800 /review/show/7065767114 Rod gave 4 stars to Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present (Hardcover) by Fareed Zakaria
A sweeping view of the last 0.42 millenia, downplaying the importance of the American Revolution while playing up the English and Dutch revolutions as well as the industrial and information revolutions.

Mostly very good, at least as best I can tell, and a good perspective if not wildly divergent or original compared to contemporary views of history.

But the description of the birth of the Internet is misleading and very close to outright wrong. Tim Berners-Lee did not invent the modern Internet, including domain names.

And...did he actually *SEE* the first "Rocky"??? That ending should be seared into the mind of anyone who saw it, and Zakaria gets it wrong. Also, while Rocky's Italian heritage is a key part of who he is, but I don't think race competition was really the point.

I listened to the audiobook, narrated by the author himself, who did a good job, if occasionally feeling just a shade rushed. ]]>