Book Review: Spook Country

After finishing another book by Gibson with a few of the same central characters, I decided to read Spook Country. This was a mistake.

The characters and plot are both confused, disjoint and incomplete. Short of taking notes there is slim hope of tracking what is going on with the characters, but I shouldn't have worried about it because most of them are irrelevant and the few that are relevant never gain any sense of closure. The interactions between characters are like a political-correctness-gone-crazy dystopia where giving a damn about anyone would result in a harassment lawsuit. There are some interesting settings described, however not so interesting that they compensate for the cardboard cutout characters, all of whom keep one another at more than an emotionally safe distance throughout the whole story.

The last 50 pages are very chaotic. It reads as if the author had hit his deadline for turning in the manuscript and scribbled together a plot outline that tied off a few of the threads of the story and then walked away. I found Pattern Recognition passable, but this book, set with some of the same characters, really seems like the effort was phoned in and was a disappointment.

Finished Reading

Cryptonomicon was an interesting read. It is quite a long read, but a couple of recent trips I took gave me an opportunity to finish it off. Stephenson’s style of weaving 2, sometimes 3, fairly orthogonal storylines with shared character names took some bit of adjustment to get used to reading. It also meant that I couldn’t really read it late in the evening when I was feeling tired, as my brain just couldn’t follow along any more. The story itself was good and reasonably topical for those that fiddle with things like Tor and PGP/GPG. I’m a bit skeptical of the kid gloves that the governments in the story seem to have toward what the end of the story, but that’s why it’s fiction.

It would be hard to call the story science fiction, given that the technology described was well-established when the book was written.

This last week I picked up a copy of the decidedly-nonfiction Beyond Fear by Bruce Schneier. I’ve made some progress on it and will write more when I finish it. My impression at the moment, about half way through, is that it is a bit ponderous and self-contradictory in places. But then when it comes to describing a need for a more realistic evaluation of threats, I’m the choir and don’t need much preaching to agree.

Reading List

A trip to a transnational bookseller yielded a variety of books for us today. I’ve been working through Collapse after having finished Guns, Germs and Steel. They both aren’t exactly light-reading, and at least so far have left me somewhat depressed for the future of humanity. But then so does watching the news segment of The Daily Show most days.

• A Brief History of Time
  Somehow we didn’t have a copy of this on the shelf anymore. This is the layman’s guide to 20^th century astrophysics. Apparently Eileen’s knowledge of physics is underappreciated by her coworkers and this book may help alleviate some of that.


• The Universe in a Nutshell
  A plain-spoken review of the big questions (circa 2001) about how the universe is put together. I think it may be worth looking for an equally plain-spoken guide to what’s changed in physics since the publication of the book somewhere on the internet.


• Marooned in Realtime
  The sequel to ”The Peace War” which I read and enjoyed in the last several months.


• Cryptonomicon
  The premise seems interesting and apparently I’m going to finally get around to reading this. This author (and this book in particular) is widely read among computer-oriented folks, so I should probably read it too. Baaa!


• The Statistical Analysis of Experimental Data
  This book has seemed to have a good review of statistical math with some example applications. My day-to-day work is starting to demand that I remember things that I haven’t used since the two weeks of the college course that covered it. The goal here is to help jog those 8 year old memories.


• Death March
  I saw this while browsing and it seemed applicable to every technology job I’ve held at one point or another and every software development group on one project or another. Having some understanding about how a locomotive works will instruct you on how best to keep from getting crushed by one, and if you’re smart (and lucky) how to make it a little bit better.