Absolution
In the years since I finished reading Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy, I’ve never stopped thinking about this world.
VanderMeer unites biophilic cosmic horror like HP Lovecraft; furnishes passionate descriptions of the majesty of nature like Jane Goodall or Sir Richard Attenborough; unmoors the reader with paranoia and conspiracy like Philip K. Dick; and stuns with affect-blunted narrators like Camus.
Fans had assumed that VanderMeer was done with the series after the third book in the trilogy. But I was surprised and intrigued that a fourth book was coming, some six years after the last volume appeared: Absolution.
Having listened to the audiobook narrated by Bronson Pinchot (yes, him!), I can say that Absolution was a worthy addition — perhaps the best in the series — to the Area X universe. The book works well in audio format and Pinchot in particular was an inspired choice.
Pursuit of Humane Computing
Recently via my Mastodon friend Paolo Amoroso, I was informed about the existence of a Lisp book called “A Programmer’s Guide to Common Lisp” by Deborah G. Tatar. As often happens, when I find a good book (and her Lisp book is really good), I find myself looking them up to see where their research went. After Deborah’s auspicious beginnings in and among the Xerox PARC thing, she appears to have relocated to the Eastern region and is now professor emerita at Virginia Tech. As I stepped through her CVs and research interests; as I crossed web pages that clearly hadn’t been updated since the last Mideast “excursion,” I noticed that she recurrently talked about programming as social endeavor falling apart. In this, she recalled Naur’s “Programming as Theory Building.” The phrase that really stood out in my mind is when she claimed that many programming teams were hamstrung by the inability of programmers to display the necessary resilience and adaptive capability that they ought have learned on the playground.
Fall of Hyperion
Hyperion Cantos is a four book set. Hyperion gets a lot of press because of its device of a Canterbury Tales structure: tales of the main protagonists as told by themselves. As a single book that is remarkable, unusual, and stands as a testament to Dan Simmons’ skill at characterization and plot-by-indirect narration. But in its sequel Fall of Hyperion, we see why he made that choice. Having crafted beautiful sci-fi dollies with backstory and motivation and conflict, he puts them into an Armageddon doll house with a boogeyman called The Shrike.
So while the second book is more of a plot-driven sci-fi story (and, to be fair, it’s a really interesting plot), the book gets to ride on the rich characters established in Hyperion. Simmons originally wrote the first two novels as one book, and it shows. I can see the cut-and-paste operation that must have turned a single manuscript into two well-wrought books. Hyperion loads potential energy into the universe by winding the springs of the principal characters; Fall of Hyperion lets loose the sweep of history and then releases the characters whose kinetic actions can, hopefully, master events.