3000 MPH In Every Direction At Once (2003)

This collection of stories and essays has a nice rhythm to it while reading. Non-fiction and fiction alternating and the song title from the Bad Religion album of the same title always in the back of your mind, making you wondering whether reality really is stranger than fiction or Mamatas merely playing with your fucking mind. Sure, his non-fiction seems more mundane than his fiction, but even there he deploys the high-octane word-attack that makes all pieces in this collection seem kind of restless, always on the move and as if the writer can’t rest for a minute. The title of the collection is really well chosen.

As for the fiction, this is actually the first time that I’ve read some of Mamatas fiction, despite having read his blog for years and reading various essays and his biting comments on the net for years. I wasn’t sure whether I would actually like his stories, and sure enough most of them feel overdone and just a little bit the side of meta and weird for its own sake. But every time I can walk away from a collection of stories where I really liked one that it was worth reading all the rest, is a good collection.

Here I actually liked two: Impression Sunrise about aliens stealing human art, which despite Mamatas jittery and satirical style actually gave a better reason for aliens coming to Earth than most alien invasion fiction does and on the whole was fun to read. But the real winner of the collection, which makes it worth seeking out just for that, was Time of Day. It’s about a highly connected world (headware with countless software agents and constant net access) and a main character who has to deal with a defective mind-jack that turns out to be much more. It’s really hard to describe without giving much away. Fascinating read, thought whether the ending will conform to expectation from readers of hard sf is disputable, but overall I think the story shows that Mamatas can write science fiction like the best.

I always had the idea that he was more a horror writer, but most of the pieces in this collection disabused me of that notion, possessing a clear sf bent. Thought its nice to see a writer with a seemingly different set of sensibilities than most sf writers I read who still knows how to write SF well.

Starve Better (2011)

As a longtime lurker on Nick Mamatas blog I thought I give a little bit back and bought his essay collection Starve Better. While it’s a nice guide for those trying to write and then publish stuff, it’s also a hilarious read for those who aren’t interested in becoming a writer. Alongside Mamatas usual snark and bite there’s insightful stuff into the writing process, how to end a story, how to start one, helpful advice here and there. And then there’s his golden rule, that there’s actual no golden rule at all and the best you can do is get successful with finding a way that works for you.

In many ways, it’s a guide to writing and getting paid for your writing, but even if you aren’t interested in that, its still funny as hell. Mamatas could probably write about peeling apples and I would be entertained by it. I’m sure I don’t ever want to be at the receiving end of his attention and get dissected by his razor-sharp wit, but I do enjoy it when his uses his powers to demolish certain conceptions about how to become a good or even a great writer. Not because its funny, but because its funny and rings true at the same time. Best delivery of hard truths about writing I’ve seen for some time.

Starship[s] (2010)

I discovered Manchu through the French cover for Glen Cook’s The Dragon Never Sleeps. He’s the French equivalent of the likes of John Harris or John Berkey, thought since he his art sports very clear lines and no expressionistic elements, the best fit is actually Chris Moore. And like the latter one, I like him stupendously when he does space art, but his more common covers or even his fantasy art leaves me mostly cold.

The Starship[s] art book from Delcourt is quite nice, but like most art books I have seen, I really can’t say I completely satisfied with some of the decisions they made. But first where they did good: a big (31,4 x 24,8 x 1,4 cm), sturdy hardcover with excellent paper quality. And often the cover art is page sized. But, sadly often you find three covers squeezed onto one page. Now, I don’t have a problem if these are minor covers, but when you title your art book Starship[s], I expect the spaceships to be featured as the premium content. There’s no logic behind which cover got it’s own page and which not, and sadly some of the small sized covers are much better than those later in the book that have their own page and often aren’t spaceships or even space art. Also, thought this doesn’t happen to often, some of the bigger covers bridge the gutter. Which should be an obvious no-go in any art book, but it seems people who do art books can’t wrap their head around this.

I don’t really want to complain about the few written texts in the book, that offer gushing praise for the artist and lack any interesting critical insight into his work. But I expect those. What I really can’t stand is when you’re already halfway there quality wise and still manage to fuck some important things up. This art book could have been great, instead of merely good (and that mostly because Manchu’s space art is so fantastic). But since so many art books I’ve seen makes all the same mistakes I wonder if I should lower my expectations. Nah.

Hardware: The Definitive SF Works of Chris Foss (2011)

As far as art books go, this is the definite way how to publish the work of any artist. Hardcover binding and a near exhaustive sample of Chris Foss whole ouvre (ca. 240 pages) with excellent reproduction quality. Sure, like anything there’s a few cons: a stylish but hard to read font, picture descriptions printed horizontally instead of vertically and a few pictures that go over the gutter (deadly sin for any art book, but I’ve seen it far too often in professional publications that I have to wonder why they don’t get that this is a very bad idea). But apart from those few drawbacks, it’s really one of the best collections (if not the best) of any SF cover artist I’ve seen in recent years. It has both quality and quantity and an unbeatable price.

That said, while I do like Foss’s art, I rate a few other cover artists with similar subjects higher. Often there’s too much going on in his pictures and the design of the ships is often either too loose or too rigid to really please the eye. But due to the number of pictures in the book, there was enough I really liked. And the rest is neat too. Even if they aren’t as perfect as, say, John Harris’s covers, they are pretty close most of the time.

The Black Swan (2007)

The Black Swan feels like a sequel to Taleb’s book on randomness, which a more narrow focus on a specific subject of the broader theme. It’s about the human folly of trying to predict the future to have a better grip on it, which goes wrong when the models used fall apart when colliding with events that are without precedent and hence unforeseeable. It’s about these rare events that fall by the wayside in the Gaussian models of reality (like those used in finance to calculate risk) as negligible, but whose impact is so tremendous that they are anything but (thus showing how pointless and dangerous it is to use these models in the first place).

The book goes also in the meaty parts of why, despite this happening again and again, we still cling to models that don’t work. It’s all part of the grand theme of how faulty our minds really are and how effects like hindsight bias, domain specific mental tools and the ludic fallacy compound the acceptance of the situation. In the end, it comes down to the fact that we, as human beings, rarely want or can accept that we don’t know what will happen, and take any crutches to feel more secure. But those crutches are only making it worse.

Like his previous books is a fascinating read, thought his style is pretty biting in places and not for those easily irked.

Quantumscapes (2006)

I’m a big fan of Stephan Martinière’s science fiction and fantasy covers, like so many others. I thought nothing could make go meh on an offering with his stuff inside. That said, I had only a lukewarm reaction to Quantumscapes, the second collection of his artwork.

First, while I love his covers like nothing else, the stuff he did for gaming, like the creature designs, hasn’t the same WOW-factor. It’s competent and very well done, but it’s not like I haven’t see similar stuff from countless other artists. Also, from the ca. 100 pages of the book, only 30 have cover art, which makes this a little too lightweight on the stuff I bought the book for.

Secondly, like everything that is enlarged too much, the cover art actually revealed flaws I hadn’t noticed before. Sometimes the positioning of objects seemed out of whack, sometimes his semi-hyperrealism makes the elements of the cover look downright ugly. It’s not that I went from loving those covers to hating them, it’s just that they didn’t look as impressive as they did before.

And lastly, as odd as it may sound, I hadn’t realized until now what an integral part the rest (everything beyond the art itself) of the cover design was, at least for me. Without the book title, quotes and all the other stuff you generally see, the art itself looked naked and just not as cool. Like movie music that fails to leave the same impression once you hear it uncoupled from the movie itself.

Masters of Doom (2003)

The first computer game I ever played on my very first PC was the first shareware episode of Commander Keen. Wolfenstein I played later to exhaustion and the first time I saw and played Doom, I felt like having a religious experience. Games have come a long way since then, but those memories will always remain with me. There’s no way I can look at those games even remotely objective. I was less enamored with the later output of id Software, but that doesn’t change that I’ll always remember those early ones with delight.

Masters of Doom chronicles these years – the humble beginnings, the rise to fame and the slow decline – all from an insight perspective. It’s part business history, part biography (mostly about John Carmack and John Romero, but also biographical data on all the other id employees) and part game history. What I really like about the book was how it managed to bring those involved alive with all their weaknesses and strengths, without demonizing anyone.

One aspect that really stood out for me was a later part that described John Carmack’s thought process during his work on later games I thought were less successful. For me, with an outsider view, this was a disappointing period with mostly lackluster games. For Carmack, it was a intense period of learning where he reached new levels of insight and competence in 3d-programming. It makes for a fascinating discrepancy. Also, it’s a perfect example for the way being more important than the goal.

Which is a good way to tie this one up. Whatever id Software is today and wherever any of the past employees are now, it was a fascinating journey and it was fun to be able to follow it from an insider POV. There’s this saying you can’t go back, but at least in this case it felt like I could walk again on the same path as my younger self.

Fooled by Randomness (2001)

I’m deeply fascinated by how humans can err. I find the topic of human biases, the modes of self-deception, the way our mind malfunctions, especially in the many cases when we aren’t even aware of the defects in our mental architecture, irresistible.

Taleb’s book just presents one of theses cases, how we humans handle (or not really handle) randomness. Which in itself is a rather broad area, that includes many aspects, like how we do not anticipate very rare events with a very big impact (a topic later explored in detail in his book Black Swan), how we faultily generalize, how we misinterpret noise as signal, how we can’t handle probabilities, how survivorship bias distorts our perception and so on.

Even knowing all that, he goes on to show that knowing doesn’t really help. While we may think we act rational, what we really do is react emotional and later find a convincing story why we did it. We see patterns where there are none, because we have been evolved to find patterns. We don’t want to or can’t (emotionally) accept the fact that we live in a universe where luck has at times a much bigger impact, where there are no other explanations aside from randomness.

One strength of the book is just how concrete everything Taleb presents feels. He himself mentions that humans don’t do well with abstract stuff, but stories have a highly catalytic effect that makes it easier for us to get something, so he wraps all the information into an ongoing narrative. His style is pretty lucid and clear, and yet insightful and full of depth.

He’s also very scathing, abrasive and impulsive, but always to get his points across. If you think he’s too hard on certain people, think again. We’ve just barely survived (or are still trying to survive) the impact of a global financial crisis, and yet nothing has changed. The systems in use haven’t been made more robust to handle future catastrophes. All we see is lip-service and a universal shrug of the shoulders. Makes one want to believe in conspiracies, but that’s just another idiocy. We’ve just been fooled by randomness.

Vital Lies, Simple Truths (1985)

I recently read Stumbling on Happiness, which explored self-deception with a very narrow focus. While a pretty good book in itself, I wanted something more broader. I’m more than happy to say that Goleman’s book completely fulfilled my expectations. I remember reading some study results that showed that human life is filled with all kind of lies, deceptions and so on, on a daily basis.

The idealistic, and not very realistic depiction of humans as truthsayers most of the time, with a few of us telling big lies as rare events is pretty much not how it works. But every smartass who assumes that we have to merely be a little more truthful misses the point of why we lie in the first place, why we deceive and in the end deceive ourselves.

Goleman explores self-deception within a broader framework of the human mind and of how consciousness works. While the subtitle of the book is the psychology of self deception, Goleman integrates research from a far wider area, paramount among them biology and its many sub-categories.

What I really like about the book is the absence of any normative and didactic elements. There’s none of the non-sense about how to be a better human being by avoiding lying or self-deception, or why lying and self-deception is a bad thing from a moral viewpoint (there is from a merely practical viewpoint, but that’s different).

Goleman primary sees self-deception as a means that evolved to cope with anxiety. This goes a long way to explain the why (we do it), the how (it works) and finally the reason why normative and didactic approaches completely miss the point. We won’t change our behavior because self-deception is an essential element of how we function.

Goleman does mention the pitfalls (extensively even), since self-deception is such a crude mechanism that can lead to many negative outcomes. But one simple truth is, we won’t stop deceiving ourselves because it’s the right thing. Deeply ingrained, learned pattern of self-deception can’t be erased by just doing the right thing. That takes a little more work.

Stumbling on Happiness (2006)

This is not a self-help book, at least not in the conventional sense. As the author himself mentions in the introduction, this is the kind of book you seek after countless self-help books to achieve personal happiness just haven’t born out. During the course of watching the 2010 movie Inception I became interested in reading about self-deception, and this is one of the books I turned to.

SuH should be compulsory reading material for any self-proclaimed futurist and any science fiction author who is interested in imagining believable futures, not just shallow reflections of the present. The human mind is an ingenious creation of nature, using countless hacks and heuristics to remember the past, perceive the present and imagine the future. Albeit, it’s exactly how our mind achieves these feats that errors creep in, errors we aren’t aware of and who limit our ability to correctly do either of these things.

We don’t really remember the past, we safe a few details and then weave around them a convincing but fictional narrative that could have been, but wasn’t (at least not in that exact configuration). Once checked with other less error-prone recordings than the human mind, these difference come out. And the fun is, we change your own remembrance every time we activate the memory. Similarly problematic is present perception or how we imagine the future.

This is a book about failure modes, not about how to solve any of the problems that arise from our mind machinery. Sure, the author mentions a few ways we could try, but these are rarely practical (imagine all the things that didn’t happen) or we just won’t do them, because we are who we are (or believe to be: a completely unique being).

This may sound like a horrible book, belaboring the point of just how far our self-deception goes again and again, but personally I find more enjoyment in understanding how we humans don’t work all that well than in wrongly assuming we’re are perfectly capable of seeing past, present and future (my powers of rationalization are strong).