Gilbert M. Stack's Blog, page 25

The Psychology of Online Behavior by Nicola Fox Hamilton

The Psychology of Online Behavior by Nicola Fox Hamilton

I wasn’t certain about this Great Courses text when I decided to read it. I spend a lot of time online and frankly, like most people, I figured I already knew most of what anyone could tell me about doing it. That was basically true. Nothing in this book really surprised me. What Hamilton does is organize all of those things you and others do online and talk about the evidence for what is good and bad. Is it addictive? Are games bad for you? What about misinformation and disinformation? (That was especially interesting as one of her major examples of misinformation is now thought to be a credible theory, which also says something about online information dissemination.)

 

I thought the weakest part of the text was when Hamilton talked about the prevalence of conspiracy theories and seemed to indicate that this was a problem for the credulous, but the Great Courses has a text on conspiracies in which the author says that research shows that a huge proportion of the population (I think it was 90%) including every group in society believe at least one conspiracy theory. Strangely for me, the best section was on online shopping—a chapter I almost skipped—where Hamilton detailed strategies to get people to rush their purchasing process and therefore buy things they might not really want. Overall, I am glad I read this one.

 

Zoomers vs. Boomers by Sawyer Black

Zoomers vs. Boomers by Sawyer Black

It’s becoming a new subgenre. Take a bunch of teenagers. Put them in an isolated location and either get them to kill each other or start killing them all off with traps and hunters. The twist to this novel, if you can call it a “twist”, is that the teenagers are all social media influencers, and the hunters are baby boomers who hate the younger generation.

 

I’m not clear if it was intended or is a sign of my own age, but I disliked almost all of the zoomers. (I disliked almost all of the boomers too, so make of that what you will.) The novel starts slow for several chapters while the scene is being set and then people start dying horribly and it doesn’t let up until the last page. It’s exciting and its simultaneously frustrating, because almost all of these zoomers seem to think that even though the organizers have set traps that kill or maim the contestants, and even though there are hunters actively trying to kill the contestants, they still have a chance to win a million dollars. So, they don’t try to escape and they refuse to help each other.

 

This may explain why the audiences of these social influencers refuse to believe that their heroes are really being murdered.

 

Whose Body? By Dorothy l. Sayers

Whose Body? By Dorothy l. Sayers

This is the first book in the Lord Peter Wimsey series. I admit freely that I went into it with a bias in favor of the novel because many years ago I had watched Peter Davison (fifth Dr. Who) play Lord Peter in this series on Mystery. I can still hear the theme music in my head.

 

Overall, this is a fine mystery with an unusual beginning. A man discovers a body in his bath opening a peculiar case. No one knows whose body it is (thus the title) but fairly quickly there are some ideas based upon missing people. Lord Peter is an amateur sleuth who sees the investigation as a chance to indulge in a hobby. He’s likeable enough and extremely well connected.

 

Most of the fine details of the crime are provided in a confession at the end—which Sayers makes bizarrely credible.

 

Into the Mist by Lee Murray

Into the Mist by Lee Murray

Dinosaurs, or something very like them, are coming to New Zealand. Deep in a national park, people have been disappearing and the government unofficially looks into the problem by sending some special defense force soldiers to escort some civilians looking to track down a new gold deposit. The civilians are part of a plot to seed the area with gold to create the excuse for largescale exploration on native land, but the dinosaur has its own plan.

 

This book is a lot of fun. The bad guys are bad enough for the reader to cheer for their demise and the good guys are likable enough you want them to survive. The monster does a particularly good job of being, well, monstrous and creepy as well as appropriately terrifying. I’m not certain that it is realistic for something the size of a T-Rex to sneak silently through the forest, but it certainly gets the blood pumping when the heroes turn around and it’s there.

 

My favorite part of the novel, however, was the attempts to connect the T-Rex to native legends to see if the soldiers could figure out a way to kill it that didn’t involve their low caliber guns.

 

A good tale.

 

Might As Well Be Dead by Rex Stout

Might As Well Be Dead by Rex Stout

A midwestern man accuses his son of stealing $26,000 from him 11 years ago and the son disappears to New York City. Now proof has been found that the son was not the thief and the man’s wife and daughters coerce him into making things right with the son. The problem? He can’t find him. Nero Wolfe enters the case and almost immediately determines that the missing man (living under an assumed name) is a poor fellow who has just been convicted of murder. The greedy side of Wolfe wants to simply inform the father that he has found the boy and collect his fee, but the young man is so upset at the idea that his parents will see him under these conditions that Wolfe hesitates and ends up committing himself to proving that the convicted man is in fact innocent even though the young man won’t help him save himself.

 

And that’s just the setup. This is one of Stout’s best mysteries. There is murder, murder, and more murder—but the only clue is that people keep dying. I guessed the right villain, but once again I did it mostly from my familiarity with how Stout’s mind works. I had no evidence, but boy was it satisfying when Wolfe finally produced it.

 

Number the Stars by Lois Lowry

Number the Stars by Lois Lowry

This is a touching book about the courage and compassion of a young girl and her family as they seek to protect their Jewish friends during the Nazi occupation of Denmark. It’s really a remarkable achievement—finding a way to make a ten-year-old a believable heroine in the face of the Nazi evil. And Annemarie is a highly credible character who stands up for her friend in a way we all wish to believe we would as well. It’s quite an amazing feat to make a ten year’s old courage the crux of such a book, but then, Lois Lowry is clearly an extraordinary author.

 

Sherlock Holmes vs. Cthulhu: The Adventure of the Deadly Dimensions by Lois H. Gresh

Sherlock Holmes vs. Cthulhu: The Adventure of the Deadly Dimensions by Lois H. Gresh

It seems that more and more authors are anxious to pit Sherlock Holmes against the elder gods. I thought this one started out stronger than most because it focused not on eldritch creatures but on a perplexing impossible machine that seems like it should be explainable (it is, after all, a machine built by a man in London) but that doesn’t seem to work according to any rules that Holmes can understand.

 

That was a cool problem. In investigating it, Holmes comes across a cult that leads towards what I think of as more typical Cthulhu-esq problems. Holmes always felt like Holmes, and Gresh gives Watson some serious problems with his wife and son that added some depth to the character. I wasn’t particularly enthralled with the villains, but overall I enjoyed the story.

 

Count Zero by William Gibson

Count Zero by William Gibson

This is one of my favorite William Gibson novels (behind The Peripheral and neck and neck with Neuromancer). It focuses on Bobby (the Count Zero of the title) a teenager who is set up to fail as a deck cowboy but who doesn’t die because of the interaction of a mysterious woman on the net. Her intervention pulls Bobby into a group who are trying to discover who she is and whether or not she is one of the entities moving around in the net appearing to be voodoo spirits but probably in reality AIs.

 

It's a fast-moving novel which showcases one of Gibson’s favorite structural techniques—moving several (three in this case) storylines independently through the novel until they all link up at the end for the conclusion. It also contains Gibson’s trademark focus on imagery that gives his books their distinctive flavor.

 

This is the first time I’ve reread the novel since it was published. The two scenes that I remembered most, Bobby’s first and last appearance in the book, intrigued and satisfied me just as they did thirty-five-ish years ago. If you enjoyed Neuromancer, you should definitely read this one too.

 

The Plane of Dreams by William L. Hahn

The Plane of Dreams by William L. Hahn

William L. Hahn’s first novel, The Plane of Dreams, is an excellent introduction to his Lands of Hope and is packed with appearances by the characters who drive his later stories. From the opening paragraph, I was sucked into this tale of danger haunting a group of adventurers—a cursed item which threatens to corrupt the world. Hahn attacks the problem from multiple angles—storylines which do not initially appear to be related but which intertwine seamlessly by the end of the novel. The Plane of Dreams is a hard driving adventure novel set in a world rich with history and excitement and unlike any other fantasy world I have ever read about.

 

Harbinger, P.I. 2 Buried Memory by Adam Wright

Harbinger, P.I. 2 Buried Memory by Adam Wright

After taking the time in the first novel to introduce the small rural town in Maine which appears to be the heart of the series, Wright pulls Harbinger over to England for most of the second novel. There he has to interact with a father who can best be described as a self-centered jerk and despite not liking him, immediately does everything daddy asks every time he asks. It lessened my respect for the private detective who is supposed to be tough and unyielding. Yes, I get it that our interactions with family are often different from our interactions with the world, but when dad calls and says I’m sending the private jet for you tomorrow and hangs up, I think the proper response would be to ignore the arrival of the jet until dad has the courtesy to explain why he needs you to drop everything and fly across the Atlantic to see him.

 

Overall, this book was focused on Harbinger’s missing memories. It turns out that there are more of them missing than he thought and I suspect that more and more of them are going to pop up as the series progresses.

 

The best thing about the book was the nine witches who have a gift for prophecy. Prophecy is a challenge for any writer as they need to be vague but interesting. Wright solves this problem by having the nine witches each give little phrases of the prophecy so that it comes out so disjointed that you just want to ignore that they said anything. But it worked for me.