The Entropy Pump

Laughlin’s book has two sides. One is the presentation. Laughlin comes off as an arrogant jerk who easily dismisses other viewpoints as obviously wrong, alternating between condescension and preaching all the time. It’s also not very clear who’s the target audience of the book. While there’s no math, if it’s aimed at a general layman level it misses the mark a bit, assuming too much knowledge with concepts that aren’t trivial. While some of his explanations are concise and clear, the bigger part is confusing, even if what he explains is actually easy. He also has a tendency to use analogies and personal anecdotes to explain things, but these actually don’t help and spread confusion even further. That’s one side.

The other side is the content and the actual reason why I think the book should be read. For all its flaws, once you get the hang of Laughlin’s writing and invest some time to untangle it, there’s some heady and brilliant stuff about the emergent nature of our universe. For all his arrogance, after reading the book I can’t but admit that some if it is earned. The man knows his stuff and what he says can actually change the way how you think about the universe.

The sequel to Watt’s superb second Rifter’s novel Maelstrom falls victim to a number of things. Published in two parts (β-Max and Seppuku), Behemoth, unlike the preceding books in the series, felt more like work than fun. Size is not so much the issue, even if it’s part of the problem. There are two books hiding inside, which has nothing to do with how the book has been published. There’s the story of what happened to the corpses and there’s the story of how to deal with Behemoth. While the first is used to jump start the second, using the two stories that way was detrimental to both. The first book has a good start, but misses an adequate climax, the second has a functioning climax, but misses a good start. In between is a long trudge and many parts that feel much too repetitive.

Another problem is the attempt to replicate typical Hollywood action movies, including a typical stupid bad guy who doesn’t kill the good guys coming after him when he does have the chance. The preceding books were very good about breaking up the typical good vs bad template, there were no easy targets for blame distribution. Behemoth establishes an all too easy target, a bad guy so evil and despicable that its hard not to imagine maniacal laughter whenever he appears (sure, Watt’s makes sure to say that its all neuro-determinism and he’s not really guilty, but that’s hard to buy in the face of another character who managed to control his urges which a similar history).

At times I had the feeling I was reading a six hundred pages epilogue to Maelstrom, not a book in its own right. In parts it’s quite good, but the whole never really worked. I can imagine rereading Starfish and Maelstrom down the line in some years, but not Behemoth. That said, the revelation about the nature of Seppuku and its consequences were very satisfying and exploring them in more depth could be interesting.

A fair warning before you read the book. There were some scenes for establishing how evil the main character is. These are very unpleasant to read, because Watt is so good at making one care or at least emphasize with his characters and seeing them ripped to bits and suffering is rather painful to read. He also does it a tad too often, but I already said that the book is a bit repetitive.

I rarely read a book a second time, even if I liked it. Doris Egan’s Ivory books I’ve read at least five times, which should tell you something about how much I appreciate them. They aren’t some kind of unknown literature masterwork, but they are perfect at providing a certain mix of qualities – characters, plot and some very neat world building – that makes them hard to put down and perfectly suitably to read again and again.

The setting is about a part of space that has been settled with humans who were brought there by aliens. All that happened some time ago and presently there are four worlds populated by humans. The aliens are long gone and there’s no contact to Earth. Space travel is slow and very pricey. At the start of the book, the main heroine is stuck on the world that seems to most backwater of all four (Ivory), where people even believe in magic. As it turns out, that is not entirely wrong (since his is science fiction, the attitude toward magic is – it works, even if we have no idea why – it’s not some some mystic force, some theorize it comes from genetic manipulation on the settlers through the aliens that brought them there).

Trying to earn some money to get back to her (scientific and rational) world, Theodora gets entangled with one of the big families of Ivory, especially it’s leader. The book has its share of romance, but it’s just one ingredient of many. What Egan does well is giving Ivory it’s own character. It’s certainly made up of parts of many human cultures past and present, but the aggregate feels unique in its own way. Not only that, but this book and its sequels present a world at the edge of change, trying to catch up to the other human worlds in its vicinity while not loosing it’s culture on the way.