Smithology

After about four months I’ve finally finished crawling my way through The Algebraist by Iain M. Banks. Not that it was a bad book or particularly long – I suppose 690 pages is longer than average but more that I have been so dog tired at night with the kids staying up due to daylight savings and all the business that goes with moving interstate that I’ve only been reading an average of a couple of hours a week which is just not enough.

I’ve read a few of Iain Banks’ novels now and I remain ambivalent about his story telling. By all rights I should be really enthused: his stories have some really cool settings and memorable characters, there is humour and sometimes deeper reflection on the human condition. Yet, I never seem to click with his stories, there is a certain bleakness and coldness that always pushes me away. Maybe it’s the way he almost predictably kills off the most loveable characters just when you’re really digging them, or the way his bad guys seem to always be able to go the extra evil mile. Possibly it’s a matter of what I’m needing when I read – I’m looking for escape and mental stimulation but usually not looking to be confronted with the impartiality and inevitability of death.

But now that I’ve got that out of the way, there are some really fun aspects of The Algebraist that I’ll take away. The setting being mostly in the atmosphere of a gas giant (think Jupiter) is a challenge because the mental picture is just brownish yellowish gas, but Banks brings it to life with the floating cities, the specialised gas craft that populate it and the stars of the show: the Dwellers.

The Dwellers are big kind of floaty aliens that live in the gas giants. At first they are depicted as ancient and super advanced, living in slow time and only communicating with other species through seers whom they sponsor and train. As the book unfolds we get to know some of these Dwellers more closely and come know that there is a lot more to them than meets the eye – and that they are unexpectedly fun!

The journey into the world of the Dwellers is conducted through the main protagonist Fassin Taak. Fassin is charged with the task of finding a certain artefact amongst the Dwellers that will, if it even exists, be of immense value. At the same time a massive army led by the spectacularly evil Archimandrite Luseferous (warrior priest of the Starveling Cult of Leseum9 IV and effective ruler of one hundred and seventeen stellar systems, forty-plus inhabited planets, numerous significant artificial immobile habitats and many hundreds of thousands of civilian capital ships, Executive High Admiral of the Shroud Wing Squadron of the Four-Hundred-and-Sixty-Eighth Ambient Fleet(Det.) and once Triumvirate Rotational human/non-human Representative for the Cluster Epiphany Five at the Supreme Galactic Assembly) is approaching the Ulubis solar system (where the story takes place) bent on finding the same thing. This plot gives the story a kind of brooding race-against-time feeling as the dread lord comes closer and you can’t begin to imagine the nasty things he’s going to do when he arrives judging by the sport he engages in on the way.

During Fassin’s story we get a tour of the Ulubis system and some nice world building diversions as Banks lays out some pretty neat galactic history and galactic politics. There’s also a side story that made absolutely no sense to me and was possibly a whole other story that ended up being rolled into this novel for some reason (I’m talking about Saluus and Taince for those who’ve read the book already).

The final confrontation and wrap up of the book was pretty satisfying for me and not too over the top as these epic kinds of books often are.

I think I would have enjoyed this book a lot more if I’d read it in more concentrated doses so I could keep more of it in my head as I went. Now I am skimming bits of it I realise I forgot a lot of the stuff in the earlier chapters that are referred to towards the end.

Apart from my criticisms at the start of this post, on an overall view of things, this is a great read and worth looking at if you’re interested in getting a feel for Iain Banks before delving into his darker culture novels.

Uncategorized books, iain banks, scifi

I don’t get to listen to podcasts as much as I used to. When I worked full time and drove forty minutes to work, I used to actually plug my macbook into an iPod dock in the car and listen to them. (My colleagues used to joke that the Macbook was a giant iPod)

I’ve got a bit of a new routine now where I can listen to podcasts while I do a bit of housework and also while I put Flossy to sleep. In the latter case, we retreat to her bedroom where we have a comfy chair and I put the headphones in while she has her milk and then drifts off with her head on my chest.

I recently went back to Cory Doctorow’s podcast where he has been reading a short story called Martian Chronicles. It is worth a listen if you also find some time in your day for podcasts and enjoy science fiction. It’s about a teenager going to Mars to be a colonist but also acts as a launching pad (good pun eh?) for a discussion of the nature of success and failure with a focus on economics and society.

I like the way Cory is able to weave his political ideals and thinking into his stories and still keep them entertaining without the feeling that you’re being lectured to too much. It’s something I also admire in Ken Macleod.

At this stage I haven’t finished listening to the story but there has been an interesting twist which is going to force our main character to decide which side of the fence he sits on and how he’s going to live with that.

If anyone else has a listen, I’d be keen to hear your thoughts on it. To listen, you have to get it from his podcast

Uncategorized cory doctorow, scifi

Sol and I have just finished watching season 1 of Clone Wars which we had to borrow as two separate DVDs from the video shop (and they wonder whey people pirate stuff). I wasn’t expecting much from this, not being a fan of the three prequel movies but I was pleasantly surprised by this cartoon series.

I put the DVD on for Sol so I could do some other stuff and then found myself wandering into the room and standing in front of the TV and getting hooked by the episodes.

Clone Wars is very much pitched at children and has a kind of nostalgic voice-over intro in sixties-newsreader style that sets up each episode. The writing is actually pretty good though. To me, good writing is all about setting up believable relationships between the characters and keeping the right pace of story progression. I really hate stories that are over-complicated and rely on characters who you thought were good guys suddenly revealing they are secretly bad guys.

So the things that annoyed me about the prequels were the way Qui Gon and Kenobi and later Anikin and Kenobi were just so cool all the time. Cracking jokes in the middle of being shot at just doesn’t do it for me and wrecks any sense of peril. As for the plots of those films, I could never figure out what the hell the bad guys were actually trying to do. It was a big complicated plot to destabilise the republic and take control but it just was too hard to follow on first viewing.

Anyway, the Clone Wars which is set between the second and third prequel does a good job of keeping the stories simple whilst working within the framework of Dooku being a bad guy who is trying to get planets to leave the republic and sign up to his separatist movement while the jedis and clones are engaging the separatists in war and trying also to win back planets that have defected to the separatists.

The series introduces some new characters who we see briefly in the third film being assassinated in another stupid plot twist where apparently clones can be given a secret order to slay all jedi. There is Anikin’s apprentice Ahsoka Tano and Dooku’s apprentice Asajj Ventress. Also a few other jedi masters who join in such as Plo Koon and Luminara Unduli.

And of course there are the old favorites, R2-D2, C3PO, Padme and (not so favorite) Jar Jar Binks.

The stories also focus on some of the clones and interestingly touch the surface of some philosophical questions about identity and the sanctity of all life. This is touched on in an early episode where Yoda and three clones must fight their way out of an ambush. The clones question why Yoda refuses to leave a wounded clone and Yoda points out that each of them has a slightly different personality and preferences and each of them perceives their own unique identity. The clones are used to being treated as dispensable resources.

The episodes tend to focus on values such as team work, use of power / ethics, thinking for yourself, loyalty (even to droids!), self sacrifice for a greater cause and friendship.

The action scenes are actually fun to watch even though it is a cartoon. Sure there is the usual million-lasers-that-miss-the-good-guys stuff but some of the light sabre duals are quite fun with the use of the force and the quips and sledging thrown in but also the space battles and clone trooper action is well done.

There is some good humour in the episodes too. I particularly laughed at the one where Jar Jar Binks pretends to be a jedi. He is much less annoying than in the movies but still a buffoon.

I definitely recommend this series for kids because the values are there without the puke-making moral lectures at the ends of the episodes and they are quite watchable for adults too.

Uncategorized clone wars, scifi, star wars, tv

Last Sunday, Steph suggested I get a bit of nerd time and go see Avatar so I hopped in the car and drove two minutes into town and filed into Sale’s dinky little cinema. I really like our cinema, it lacks all the neon lighting and flashy carpet of city cinemas and instead has a kind of charming excitement in the foyer which is generated by the buzz of people gathering to see films: lining up for tickets, buying popcorn, being ushered into the darkened theatre to be whisked away to another world.

And whisked away I was! At first I wasn’t sure the movie had started, it was just some guy talking about his brother and the next thing I knew, it was all space ships, a planet, a shuttle and as soon as that shuttle landed, they had me and I couldn’t take my eyes off the screen. Wow! What a visual feast. Apparently it’s mostly animated but there was hardly a trace of the uncanny valley here. I’m sure when I rewatch it, I’ll start to notice bits that are obviously animated but on first viewing it all just looks real.

I’ve read a few places people criticising the plot saying it’s too simple and cliched but that’s another thing I liked about the film. The story is refreshingly simple and uncluttered, no stupid about-faces in characters and clunky hidden twists that so many movies hit you with. It’s all written up in the first ten minutes and you just know what’s going to happen but the thing that hooks you is you need to see it, the movie looks so good you sense what’s coming and just think “hell yeah, I want to see that”. The predictability of the story just creates anticipation.

Another thing I appreciated about the film was the amount of context. The expense of this film is all in the details. There are no plastic ferns in this film, every plant you see on the screen seems to have been created with some amount of thought. The wildlife is both alien and familiar and there are recurring similarities between the different species of animals on the planet so that you can imagine that they evolved from common ancestors.

When it finished, I wanted to go home, eat some dinner and then come back for the next session, it was just so enjoyable. Perhaps I enjoyed it so much because I haven’t seen a film for awhile or I’ve been stressed out with the move or whatever but from the reaction I’m seeing elsewhere on the net, people are really excited about this film and it’s going to go on a lot of people’s DVD shelves next to Star Wars and Lord of the Rings.

Uncategorized avatar, movies, scifi

Look, do you really want a detailed description of two sex robots going at it like a pair of bonobos on day release from celibacy camp in front of an audience of jaded aristocrats? What was that? You’ll have to speak up. I can’t quite hear you, you’ll have to try not to breathe so hard.—What are you—some kind of voyeur? Fuck Off!

I’ve finally caught up on the much talked about and slightly hyped Saturn’s Children by Charles Stross. It was listed on a Tor list of kinky scifi sex and I seem to recall seeing it mentioned elsewhere as putting the Barbarella back into scifi. Then there’s the eye-catching cover.

So is there anything more to this book than just an excuse for sex in microgravity? Well, yeah, of course! It’s Charles Stross so it’s packed full of awesome original world building and mind blowing ideas. And an excuse for sex in microgravity. But it’s very funny sex in microgravity and in fact I think Stross might have held back on where he could have gone with the robot sex gags and managed to keep things reasonably decent.

So anyway, Saturn’s Children is set in the twenty-fourth or twenty-fifth-ish century a couple of hundred years after humans mysteriously went extinct. However, in their wake is a civilisation of robots continuing to kind-of do the work of their masters – when they’re not enslaving each other and getting up to no good.

Freya Nakamachi-47 is a femmebot who sadly seems to have missed out on carrying out her primary function which was to – you know, ahem, do it with human men. Instead she roams listlessly around the solar system until she is recruited by a butler-bot and finds herself in the middle of a conspiracy of galactic proportions, fighting for her life while she tries to piece together what’s going on. Along for the ride are the memories in her sibling’s soul chip, various dwarves, a couple of mining robots, some nasty robotic dominatrixes and anime-aristocrats and countless other sentient fixtures, some of whom have unusual sex lives.

The premise for the robot sex stuff is that robot brains are electronic facsimiles of human brains, complete with many of the autonomic responses of humans. Apparently, it was the only way we could manage to manufacture anything approaching a human consciousness in a machine (seems reasonable to me). So as a result, the robots are a little bit more human than we might expect.

As you might guess, the whole thing is a little tongue-in-cheek and Stross has a lot of fun playing with the idea of horny robots but also inevitably does reflect a bit on human nature. I enjoy some of his more absurd moments like the mental image of Freya earnestly playing the bouzouki during a Hungarian folk revival.

Anyway, as usual I recommend yet another Charles Stross book. This one is a real original and very enjoyable.

Uncategorized books, charles stross, saturns children, scifi

Let’s fast forward history by about twenty years. America and it’s allies have won¹ what is now known as the Faith Wars and religion has been expunged from all matters of state by laws that prohibit recognition of any religion at all, it’s not illegal, just completely unsupported by government. The Israel / Palestine issue is kind-of solved by the fact that the territory is now uninhabitable due to radioactivity and global warming has been circumvented by the deployment of giant space mirrors in low orbit that block out a proportion of the sunlight. The space mirrors are serviced by two enormous space elevators.

This is the setting in which we find Detective Inspector Adam Ferguson and his sentient robot partner Skulk as they investigate the murder of a Catholic Priest and quickly find themselves submerged in a conspiracy that threatens to reignite tensions that were thought to have been laid to rest.

The book is The Night Sessions by Ken Macleod and is the second near future novel that he has written (the first being The Execution Channel which is really an alternative-earth-present-day but still counts as near future in the broader sense)

This is a pretty bleak and dry book by Macleod’s standards. The Execution Channel was also quite bleak. I think part of what contributes to this is that the characters are all very cerebral. When we get a look at what’s going on in their heads, it’s a lot of exposition and anxiety and not much to comfort us. The characters in The Night Sessions are not likely to inspire you or evoke feelings of admiration, the impression is of a society that grimly remembers recent war and atrocity.

Some of the main characters in this book are Christians and as a once fundamentalist leaning Christian myself, I think Macleod does a pretty good job of capturing the experience of being in a moral minority and feeling the conflict of mission and judgement. On his blog, Macleod doesn’t pull any punches when it comes to his atheism and feelings about creationists and fundamentalist Christians but this book shows a certain amount of sympathy for people of faith and must be the result of a lot of reflection on his part. He could have easily gone for the soft target and presented the Christians as mindless psycho lunatics (much as Nazi’s are often portrayed) and most of his readership would have gone along with it.

The main Christian character in the book is John Richard Campbell, a kiwi robotics engineer who works on animatronics for a creationist theme park. By making his character sympathetic, Macleod invites the atheist reader to take a walk in Christian shoes. Of course, knowing Macleod, we know that Campbell’s faith is going to take a shocking beating throughout the book and that actually makes for some great drama.

If I have one qualm about the treatment of Christianity in the book, it’s that most of the characters are pretty radical Christians in that their beliefs tend to dominate their lives. Many Christians today are not so engaged but tend to use their faith as a social vector and just subscribe to the beliefs by default without too much thought about them between Sundays (at least that is my understanding). On the other hand, Macleod points out that since the faiths have been systematically marginalised, it’s had the effect of radicalising the few remaining adherents.

Other interesting stuff in this book? Let’s talk gadgets. Apart from giant space elevators and low orbiting soletas, there’s the robots. The police robots are seven foot tall tripods (H. G. Wells style) but there are also military robots and quite a disturbing account of what it was like for these robots to accidentally become sentient on the battlefields of the faith wars. Like Halting State, there are contact lenses that project virtual overlays onto the world. It seems some corporation called ‘Ogle’ has managed to make everything in the world searchable through these lenses, e.g. OgleFace allows you to search for online information about a face you’re looking at and OgleEarth allows you to see realtime video of practically anywhere on the planet at the blink of an eye. There’s also some descriptions of a kind of virtual dance club that uses the lenses for transcendental effects.

I found the ending of this book just a little underwhelming but preferred it to the more extreme far-out endings that some books always end up in (like The Execution Channel for example). The wrap-up is pretty intellectual so you don’t feel terribly emotionally wrought by the ending but it hangs together quite well and resolves the story so I should just be happy with that.

Next cab off the rank: Saturn’s Children by Charles Stross.

¹ Apart from the fact that their economies are crippled and several major cities are radioactive holes in the ground.

Uncategorized books, ken macleod, scifi

After I finished Anathem, I still had a hankering for some Neal Stephenson so I decided to revisit Zodiac, his “eco-thriller” from 1988. Apparently Neal’s concept for the book was to write a hardboiled crime novel in contemporary times. Set in Boston, the gangsters are the Industry bosses and their favourite crime is to dump toxic chemicals into the harbour.

The protagonist Sangamon Taylor is a natural born rebel: too smart for his own good and contemptuous of a world that promotes dumb people to high places. He chooses to live outside the system, exposing toxic criminals using trial-by-press with extravagant media stunts. At the same time he has a soft spot for the little guys: the not-so-old men dying of cancer after working in chemical plants, the Vietnamese and lobster fishermen who scrape their food and livelihood from the bottom of Boston harbour. Speaking of Vietnamese, there are also lots of references to Agent Orange as Sangamon’s arch-nemesis is a family run business named Basco (fictional) who got started making the stuff for the U.S. government during the Vietnam war. They are now a major corporation based in Boston.

Things turn ugly for Sangamon when some very bad things start turning up in the harbour just as Basco’s CEO decides to run for president. Who is behind this mysterious poisoning, are there links to Basco and will Sangamon survive to find out?

One of the things that struck me about this book on the re-read is just the amount of drug use. Sangamon has a belief that all molecules bigger than just a couple or atoms are very bad so his drug of choice is Nitrous Oxide on which he binges in just about every chapter including the first page of the book. When things get really bad, he drops acid and at one point resorts to taking speed. It just seemed a bit over the top that just about everyone he meets just happily joins in on this drug use, no worries.

It’s unusual (for me) to come across a book that depicts drug use in this way. In his later book Cryptonomicon, a main character Sergeant Shaftoe develops a morphine addiction but in this habit, the negative aspects of drug use are well represented. For Sangamon, they are always a positive experience: helping him have fun and get through mundane work.

I wonder if the positive drug thing is just one of those little literary taboos that you learn to avoid if you want your books to be popular? Maybe that’s why it seems rare to see depictions of positive drug use.

Apart from this, the book suffers no ill affects from 20 years of time warp: I can imagine the whole story taking place this year except instead of listening to Pöyzen Böyzen cassettes not bad for a two umlaut band, they might have it dialed up on the iPod.

There are a couple of references to PCs running CP/M, an ancient operating system but these are in the context of referring to them as ancient so it still works – they are just implausibly ancient as I doubt that there would be any surviving media that could boot CP/M. I tried to boot a CP/M disk once at work in 1999 but the media had degraded in the filing cabinet and that was after I’d hunted through the junk-pile to find a 5.25” floppy drive.

So Zodiac holds up pretty well on re-read and has maintained its worthiness to remain on my bookshelf. Give it a read if you get a chance.

Uncategorized books, neal stephenson, scifi

Actually, I don’t think there is any such thing as a review that doesn’t reveal something about the story but let’s not be too picky ok?

Anathem is Neal Stephenson’s latest offering since “System of the World” in 2004. Since his very popular “Cryptonomicon”, Stephenson has been writing historical style fiction. In cryptonomicon, he followed characters in modern day times with parallels to those people’s ancestors in WWII. E.g. the main character, Randy is a massive nerd and it turns out his great granddaddy was also a massive nerd in WWII when they getting serious about cryptography. The Baroque Cycle (three very thick volumes) then kind of prequelled Cryptonomicon by tracing some of the same characters ancestors through the late 17th and early 18th century. (It turns out Randy’s great great great great grandaddy was a friend of Newton and Leibniz)

Anyway, Anathem breaks away from this line by taking place on another planet. Yet it still kind of fits in by dealing with the same subject mater: history on a broad scale, sociology, politics and religion and how it all affects those caught up in it. The book is set on planet Arbre which has a history roughly analogous to our own except that almost 4000 years have elapsed since our time. Notable is that in the Arbre equivalent of our near future is a period known as The Terrible Events during which civilisation collapsed. Seeing as technology played an integral role in this cataclysm, there was a movement against technological advance which led to the creation of walled communities similar to monasteries as the only place where intellectual activity could continue.

Our hero Fraa Erasmus is an avout which is the name given to one who lives in one of these communities called a concent. The book traces his journey from a small fry fraa to playing a part in saving the world from certain destruction (or at least some bad stuff). Along the way we discover many secrets of Arbres history and some of the mysteries that go on behind the walls of the concents.

As I mentioned, while the book is about aliens on another planet, it is also about our own history and spends a lot of time exploring the history of human thought through many philosophers. Many of the philosophers in Arbre’s history seem to have an equivalent in our history such as Plato (for his belief in a more pure plane of existence above our own), Descarte (for his development of Cartesian geometry) and even William of Occam who brought us Occam’s Razor (called The Steelyard in Arbre). Having studied a little philosophy I enjoyed reading through the book and vaguely recognising many of the ideas.

But the book is not just about ideas and history, all science fiction needs to have gadgets and action. On the gadget front, we get introduced to the idea of New Matter pretty early on which is where the particles in the nucleus of atoms in a substance have been somehow changed so that they have amazing properties. The avout carry a magic new matter sphere, cord and bolt (a rectangle of material) which can be made to change many properties by rubbing and twisting them certain ways. The sphere can grow and shrink and be made hard, soft and even glowing. The cord can be long and flexible or stiff, the bolt can be woolly or thin and is generally worn wrapped into a habit with a hood. Outside the concents (extramurous), technology has stalled so most of the tech resembles our own: jeejahs are basically iPhones, the Reticulum is the Internet etc… Maybe not very exciting but these technologies play a major role in the story and I don’t want to mention some of the others because it will give away the plot a little bit.

On the action side, we get a bit of martial arts courtesy of the Concent of the Ringing Vale: a group of avout who devote themselves to the study of warfare, tactics and strategy from hand to hand combat to commanding armies.

But really as I think about it, this book is not very devoted to gadgets and action, it is mostly dialogue and Erasmus’s confused attempts to make sense of what is going on. It is relationships and day to day life but not in an overblown emotional way like a soap opera. Neither is it dry and lifeless: I think Stephenson strikes the right balance of drawing the reader into the lives of the characters he’s invented so that we want to spend time reading about them and getting to know them more. I suppose it’s a mark of a good book when you feel like you’ve said good-bye to some old friends when you finish it.

But then again, this book doesn’t really finish at the end. Due to the nature of the internet and fan culture, the book has spawned a wiki where fans of the book discuss the philosophical ideas and references that appear in it.

So is the book worth reading given that it’s almost 1000 pages? Yes definitely because you will get a little introduction to philosophy and even some maths thrown in for free as well as some commentary on that nature of society and politics that hits home quite well. On top of that is an epic adventure with likeable characters and lots of interesting corners to look around.

Uncategorized anathem, books, neal stephenson, scifi

I finished First Lensman a while back or should I say I finished with it because I didn’t actually read to the end, I got bored and skimmed.

The thing is that these books were written for teenage boys fifty years ago and they have dated rather fatally in terms of entertainment value. The main thing that got to me was that the bad guys were really really evil and the good guys were incorruptibly morally pure and the books just fail to build up any tension around how the characters will be changed or challenged as people. The books are pure plot and idea, the feeble attempts at portraying human relationships fall into either manly men slapping each other on the back and admiring each other’s abilities and moral fibre, men admiring young women’s pluckiness, women insisting on having adventures and then being grateful to men for being rescued when they inevitably end up tied up in the bad guy’s lair and women winking at each other as they are approached by a man. There is the occasional narrative discussion of a man grappling with being torn between going out and shooting guns with the boys or staying back and commanding the battleship.

Having said that, the scale of the writing reminds me of reading Larry Niven’s Ringworld and even Iain Bank’s Culture novels where you are required to get your head around a couple of alien cultures and their peculiar sociology, psychology and history.

[tags]first lensman, books, scifi, e e doc smith[/tags]

Uncategorized books, e e doc smith, lensman, scifi

I’m basking in the glory of having read the second half of Little Brother last night despite the knowledge that I would be sorry today. I’m in a sleep deprived, coffee driven euphoria and joyfully letting my mind digest the book.

So what is Little Brother all about then? Little Brother is a young adults spy thriller set in the near future and like Macleod’s Execution Channel, it explores ways in which the war on terror could escalate. Set in San Francisco, a group of school kids end up in conflict with the Department of Homeland Security over their increasing surveillance and suppression of liberty. This conflict divides the community down lines of class, age and race. The book takes a libertarian stance and can almost read as an apologetics course as our protagonist is drawn into ideological debates with his teachers, parents, friends, police and the DHS itself.

Some truly shocking passages describe the psychological trauma of abduction, imprisonment, interrogation and torture used by the American Government already in the War on Terror.

The book is also a bit of a howto guide to beating electronic surveillance, how the internet can be used to connect dissidents and the dangers of online surveillance. As the book progresses, we are exposed to various techniques used to hide identity online in a kind of birds eye view of symetric key cryptography, onion routing and trust networks.

Mainstream media plays a big part in the story as we see how the news spins what really happened to suit the mainstream agenda. We also see the importance of alternative media (ie. blogs) for being able to provide eye-witness accounts and a sort of counter-surveillance (hence the title of the book).

Part of the intensity of the book is that it covers some quite dodgy territory: is it really ok to be encouraging teenagers (the audience for this book) to be skilling up in these areas? The book challenged my beliefs about that, I mean I know all the techniques used in the book, they’re not big secrets but I was left questioning how much privacy is healthy and when does it become an effective cover for those wishing to harm others?

However, I can commend how the book leads the reader to understand how non-violent dissidence can work and that sometimes just embarrassing your opponents by peacefully illustrating what you think are flaws in their ideology are better than dissident actions which can be mistaken for terrorism.

Finally, the book is a bit of a tour of some of the history of human rights struggles in America and San Francisco especially, from the writing of the constitution to gay rights to the legalisation of encryption in the nineties.

As I said, I thoroughly enjoyed this book and found it very convincing as well as challenging. You can read it online at Cory Doctorow’s Website if you like. Big Brother is watching you, are you watching back? Stay free!

[tags]book, cory doctorow, cryptography, fiction, liberty, little brother, terrorism, war on terror, young adult[/tags]

Uncategorized books, cory doctorow, scifi