To glance around the internet is to discover that highly influential people love Seveneves, by Neal Stephenson. Of course, if one pays careful attention, one also notices an undercurrent of something that one does not typically see when one thinks of Stephenson and his fan base–disappointment.
When one embarks upon an epic Sci-Fi novel like Seveneves, there is a definite “warm up” period that one has to observe while the world is being steadily constructed with descriptions and characters. The first half of the book offers quite a lot of build, although the central event–that of the moon blowing up–is never really “answered.” It is more of a existential moon that blows up, and then everyone has to deal with the fall out of its explosion. It is a curious omission that the moon just “explodes” and we never especially learn why. For a Sci-Fi book, not explaining a scientific why to an event is a little like writing a murder mystery with no killer. It is an annoying omission.
The first of the rest half of the book, though, does a reasonably good job explaining the political fallout and various strategies adopted due to this mysterious calamity that is sure to cause a “Fiery rain of rocks” upon the face of the Earth. A lot of creative physics solutions are built into the reading and we see the beginning of a kind of “Space Earth Savagery” begin to unfold where a Darwinian mode of existence is imposed along with the potential for genetic editing to produce certain kinds of characteristics in offspring.
After all this excitement, we flash forward to the future and everything is well–boring. To be sure, there are some unique conceptions of space stations and how they are built along with the mechanics of how certain space suits work and how social stratification has occurred along genetic lineages, but all in all there really is not too much to get excited about until, surprise, the semi-space people discover that the people who stayed on Earth did not all perish in the raining down and subsequent destruction caused by all the moon debris. Needless to say, these survivors are “somewhat pissed” at those who shot off into space and now are trying to return to the surface of the Earth they left.
This, of course, is the prelude to an inter-tribal civil war over the Earth split between the “Red Group”, and the “Blue Group”–like some kind of Planet of the Apes redux. The ending rather trails off along these lines, leaving the possibility of an equally boring sequel, open. One can certainly visualize another agonizing 880 pages titled something clever like “Red Shift” or “Blue Shift.” Wait, the video game series Half-Life all ready beat everybody to that. In fact, the writing in Half-Life is actually much better than that in Seveneves. The mysteries that go unanswered there at least make sense.
Of course, if you happen to be Bill Gates, this book is the best thing ever since it is some kind of wish fulfillment of semi-alien-tech-cyborg-billionaire entrepreneurs. One gets the feeling though that Gates has missed the memo on this being science FICTION and not “something Bill Gates should spend billions on” trying to bring into this world…
Put bluntly, if you have ever seen any Sci-Fi or read any Sci-Fi ever, then Seveneves has nothing to offer you that you have not seen before, and instead presents the chance to be annoyed by what it lacks. It is better to take a hard pass on this one unless you are just a Stephenson fan that wants a complete body of work. While the first half is fairly well done, the second half is more of an exercise in the abilities of tolerance and discipline. The riveting conclusion, civil war being imminent between two dystopian future lineages, is standard Sci-Fi procedure with no conclusion. Who cares?
Note: This review centers on the First Edition of the work as it was later re-released in 1996 with updated declassified material.
The Code-Breakers is a classical work in cryptography circles. The subject matter is fittingly dramatic: A group of code breakers in Britain must break the codes of the Axis powers or else face military casualties and possible defeat. The scope widens after some time in the work to include code breakers from elsewhere in the world.
When reading any specific work which is considered a classic in certain communities, one often wonders how much of the reputation of the work is based on reality. In every circle, there tends to be “that book”, that defines how deeply a person is a part of “the group”. The Code-Breakers is rare in that it actually has earned and retains its reputation whether you happen to know anything about cryptography or not. Part of the allure comes from the subject matter but mostly, one can simply state that it is a well-crafted book that includes details that were probably difficult to come by at the time the book was published. In other words, there are many pieces of data in the book that probably were classified and so the author had to find the right balance between items that could be discussed and lines of interest that could plausibly be disclosed without giving away too much detail that might still be somehow relevant in a modern setting.
Within the pages we find the stories of some of the leading code-breakers of the generation that defined WWII. From Von Neumann, to Alan Turing, many of the well-known big names are present along with some history concerning how the Japanese conducted themselves in cryptography matters and diplomatic relations that are not widely known.
Additionally, we find in these pages certain kinds of codes and how they were broken. We learn about many hobbyists from Edgar Allan Poe to James Joyce who employ various kinds of coding in their works. The basic principle of most of the cryptography in the book involves how to “hide something in plain sight” but also concerns generating the appropriate keys once something hidden in plain sight has been identified such than an intelligible message is the result.
The thesis is advanced throughout the book that the victory in WWII is directly attributable to having a robust decryption apparatus. In the cases of both Japan and Germany, there was a laxity present which allowed their codes to be broken and thereby exploited strategically by the breakers to change the tide of battle. Sometimes these breakthroughs come from the “older method” of code breaking which involves finding a scuttled enemy craft or vessel with the code book still within it. These kinds of finds allow one to begin to eliminate certain possibilities of meaning or outright break a cipher. Of course, within the parameters of war, there is a definitive time limit by which the information is no longer actionable intelligence.
There is also the rather confusing and conflicting practice of sending out “Falsely-encrypted” messages meant to mislead the adversary into thinking they have discovered valid codes with actual plans. Sometimes a false key is planted. Extreme measures up to and including using dead bodies with code books planted on them were employed and the book tells us how and why and what the considerations were concerning the use of such tactics whether one was on the deploying end of it or the receiving end.
The machinery of code breaking and the birth of computing and how it is used is also present within this book. It provides a unique insight as to how and why the computational model that formed became what it is today. In short, the faster a machine could chew through possible meanings, the faster the potential code was broken. This began the kind of permutation computational race that we still see although in a more attenuated form to this day.
Between the history of the book, and the informational content of codes and how they are breaking, The Code-Breakers makes for fascinating reading. Should this book come across your path, plunk down the money for it and do not look back. Just do not expect to have your weekend dedicated to anything other than reading.
People of the Black Sun is in the genre of historical fiction. Really, a better category would probably be “Mythological Historical Fiction”. All of these labels fall under a much larger one, that one might simply call “Plausible.” Why all the caveats?
Well, for one thing, it is certain that the book hits upon what Native Americans believed and practiced. On the other hand, the only people who can really tell us what they believed and practiced are gone, and so one by necessity has to fill in some large blanks. Sure, there are smaller groups and individuals, but smaller groups and individuals are much different than large groups of people and their tribal, collective, history.
Nonetheless, the “Gears” do a good job inventing and extrapolating mythologies that are likely “close” to what the tribes believed. It is certain that a resource change or a “climate shift” caused the indigenous people of the Americas to have a reason to have inter-tribal conflict.
Our book opens nearly in the middle of the end of such a conflict, and tosses us into the gruesome scene of many hundreds of dead bodies and the kind of mortuary practices that took place to ensure that one’s enemies did not return from the “Great Beyond” to enact their vengeance. Along the way, our story centers on one specific Native American individual who survives a particularly extreme storm and seems to be a kind of Native American Prophet. This character, it appears, can see another woman who he knows, but it is not clear as to whether she is among the world of the living, or the dead. In the meantime, there are sorcerers afoot and witches, and issues with genetic authority and chieftains. The entire civilization is upended in the sense that only something like a book out of Revelation in the Bible can come close to describing.
Much of the rest of the book centers on the subsequent warring between tribes and whether the Prophet is in fact a Prophet, and what the exact nature of the woman he continues to see is. The tribes desperately need to stop infighting and find some manner of unity, so they can face the environmental challenges that are threatening to cause their extinction.
It is always a delicate operation for those that are considered to be “non-native” to undertake any work that concerns Native American history. It is likely that these two authors are “given a pass” to write about the subjects because they have PhD’s. Of course, colleges and those affiliated with college have also not been forthcoming about the actual history of many tribes, and so one is left to wonder exactly how much of the book is based on academic research and how much of it is based upon a kind of mythological fill-in-the-blank.
Either way, the book does well in describing a hypothetical Native American history, and does uncover some of the facts about what has been “forgotten”. This forgotten history is not especially described, but we are left to intuit how much of it is is actually the case and how much of it is “invented”. In that sense, one wishes one had the lines drawn more clearly, so one could “remember” whatever it was that was “lost”. One should not expect either of the Gears, however, to make this clear to them. Instead, one should look at their catalog of books which are “fictional” covering such historical topics. Who is it, that does not want our history remembered or deliberately told? This question is one that People of the Black Sun puts forward with a kind of force that only “Sky Messenger”–the main character in the book, might understand.
