Tyson Adams's Blog, page 6

Book review: Sweep in Peace by Ilona Andrews

Sweep in Peace by Ilona Andrews
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Gotta wonder if magic would also work to stop weapons manufacturers perpetuating war?

It’s been slow for the Gertrude Hunt Inn since Dina Demille stopped an intergalactic assassin in her neighbourhood. But on short notice, Dina is called upon to host trilateral peace talks for groups who would really like to kill everyone. From looking after one guest to hosting feasts for dozens, Dina is under the pump to not only look after everyone but see that the talks are a success. She’ll be ruined otherwise.

There are times when I really love my library. After finishing Clean Sweep, I put my name on the reserve list for Sweep in Peace. The queue was a month long, so I started another novel in the interim. Just as I was debating whether to persist with that far less entertaining novel, Sweep in Peace was available. I can only assume the quick turnaround of only a few days to be due to how fast a read this series is.

This was quite an ambitious novel. The premise of the conflict is not an easy one to navigate. I especially appreciated the peace negotiation as it is almost the polar opposite of what most novels would do with a war. Diplomacy? Surely we can just shoot the diplomat full of arrows and then commit a genocide?*

While successfully achieving this ambitious premise, Sweep in Peace still manages to retain its fast pace, humour, and charm. The emergent humour that naturally fits within the scenes is particularly good.

I’m already reading book three in the series, One Fell Sweep. That should tell you everything you need to know about how much I enjoyed Sweep in Peace.

* If you don’t get this reference to one of the least subtle comments on diplomacy and promotion of war being awesome, then I’m glad. Old Man’s War was bad on many levels.

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Book review: Better Than Life by Grant Naylor

Better than Life by Grant Naylor
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The only time watching snooker isn’t boring is when you scale it up.

The crew of Red Dwarf are trapped in the most addictive game of all time: Better Than Life. Most people become trapped because they don’t even realise they are in the game, but Lister, Rimmer, Cat, and Kryten know it. They’ve even thought of leaving. Can they get out before Holly and the Toaster manage to crash into a black hole?

After reading Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers (Red Dwarf #1), I couldn’t help but continue straight into Better Than Life. The former finished with the Red Dwarf crew stuck in BTL, which is something of a cliffhanger. BTL similarly finishes on a bit of a cliffhanger that appears to lead into Backwards (although, Last Human is also a direct sequel to this, because reasons*).

Much like the first novel, this fleshes out ideas and episodes from the first few seasons of Red Dwarf. While it has been quite a while since I watched the show, I think the books do more with the material and rely on less of the banter/insults for humour. And like the first novel, I was pleasantly reminded of just how funny these books (and the show) are.

I’m looking forward to reading Backwards and Last Human soon.

* The reason being that Rob Grant and Doug Naylor had two more books on their contract to deliver and they had decided to separate as a writing team. The exact reasons for the separation are unclear, even to the duo themselves it seems, and Doug Naylor has continued Red Dwarf without Grant.

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Book vs Movie: Doctor No – What’s the Difference?

With a new Bond movie set for theaters, it’s time to look back at the first James Bond adventure and ask, What’s the Difference?

I still haven’t picked up any of the Bond books. Previously I’ve mentioned having vague memories of reading a couple when I was younger. But honestly, they could have been Biggles books.

Side note: as a kid I always thought that Biggles and his friends were gay. I didn’t really know what that was exactly, but they were definitely it. Monty Python agreed. Pity it wasn’t championed a bit more.

Seeing the differences outlined between the Dr No book and film does highlight an issue with plot vs character adaptation. Especially for a series. Change one and you have to change the other.

Although, it would be interesting to see how a cardboard thin character could be slotted into any plot without change. Like say the majority of Jason Statham’s roles.

No Time to Die finds James Bond, Her Majesty’s most infamous double-oh, retired in Jamaica. But we’re going all the way back to the first time Sean Connery as 007 found his way to the Caribbean Island in 1962’s Doctor No. But while it was the first Bond adventure in the film franchise, it was the sixth book author Ian Fleming published. So how did the filmmakers set about adapting the middle of Bond’s novel career for the beginning of his film escapade? Dust off your license to kill because it’s time to ask, “Difference… What’s the Difference?”

Book review: The Tyranny of Metrics by Jerry Z Muller

The Tyranny of Metrics by Jerry Z. Muller
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Measuring contests are also exaggeration contests.

In The Tyranny of Metrics, Jerry Muller attempts to argue that the introduction of managing by metrics had unforeseen consequences. By mandating “progress” against these metrics we forgot about the unmeasured and unmeasurable aspects. Which was bad. The solution is to be less caught up in managing to metrics and have bosses who use experience and judgement.

This book is a real mixed bag. I’m not sure my rating is fair but I will try to explain why I think this book fails to support its own argument which is pretty self-evidently true.

I wanted to read this book after seeing a short excerpt in Aeon magazine. This essay hinted at covering more broadly something one of my university professors had talked about.

My professor wrote a piece about how the introduction of what has come to be termed “publish or perish” was a terrible idea. He pointed out how it favoured some fields of research over others and established researchers over those early in their career. This obviously risked the very future of academia.

The metrics my professor was concerned about was the use of Impact Factor and number of papers published as part of staff performance measures. Sounds reasonable for academics to publish a certain amount in quality publications, doesn’t it? Except, some fields can produce a research paper in a month or two, while others need several years of experiments. That means the longer production timeline results in fewer papers, fewer citations, and the journals in those fields will have lower impact factors.

Of course, the universities went ahead with this anyway. Funny that higher education has become a bit of a factory churning out degree holders, with retention of postgraduates steadily declining.

This is all to say that Muller’s argument is not new, is well acknowledged as true, and is a serious problem. So in reading this book, I was hoping for some further insights and potential solutions. Which is why I found The Tyranny of Metrics so frustrating to read. On the one hand, it was able to articulate the problem, give examples, and prove its thesis. On the other hand, it would often misunderstand its own argument and provide yet another example of failing to grasp the problem.

One example I highlighted whilst reading was Muller’s discussion of how the epi-pen had its price hiked to make more money. Rather than look at the full picture of what this profit metric focus had done, Muller only looked at part of the picture, missing the impact on the people who couldn’t afford life-saving medicine.

This failure to take in the bigger picture then undermines his own argued solution to The Tyranny of Metrics. Muller thinks that wise and well-informed managers will be able to use their judgement to something something how good is Ayn Rand blah blah blah. My two-word rebuttal to this assertion was: bigotry and nepotism.

In fact, throughout The Tyranny of Metrics, Muller is full of apologetics for management in a way that is bordering on delusional. This shouldn’t have surprised me as he is a big fan of conservatism and capitalism, having written extensively on the two. Kinda hard to critique failures of those things when you’re in love with them.

I’ve been so frustrated by this book. It’s like watching a guy sidle up to the point and then furiously dash off into a field of rakes.

Overall, I can’t recommend The Tyranny of Metrics. While its thesis is true and fairly well supported and argued, it undermines itself constantly and offers grossly flawed solutions.

Comments while reading:
In defining the problem, Muller has already hinted at what he thinks is the solution. Hey, let’s replace these poorly thought out KPIs with whatever the boss reckons. That couldn’t possibly go wrong…

I mean, history isn’t littered with countless examples of racial, sexual, gender, and ethnic discrimination by bosses. No sir. And the saying, it isn’t what you know it’s who you know, isn’t still applicable.

One wonders where we will find all these amazing managers. Do we train them up internally as Muller suggests? Well, doesn’t that remove your best staff from their role and place them into management? Do we regard management as a career in and of itself? Not according to Muller.

This review raises this critique of the book as well: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show…

Makes a good point about university and the unmeasurable benefits of attending, like meeting friends and spouses. Yep, that is a big one that no one even thinks to measure but are probably a big factor in how people view their university experience.

In talking about health care in the USA, he tries to point out factors that drive health outcomes that aren’t part of health care. One example was gun ownership and how “we need to keep guns out of irresponsible hands”… That’s a very American statement. Most any country would just admit that gun ownership is the problem. End of story.

Another very American moment: the epi-pen cost hike example. Interesting that this was framed in terms of the cost of share price and market value, along with confidence in the company. HOW ABOUT THE PEOPLE WHO DIED BECAUSE THE EPI-PEN WAS TOO EXPENSIVE!?!?!

I’m finding the apologism for senior management, CEOs, etc, with regard to the dark side of performance metrics a little on the nose. There’s an element of “how were they to know?” or “employees rewarded for gaming the metrics” statements that are either untrue or a fraction of the story. And when this is used to explain things like the GFC it kinda makes you want to take the entire segment of the population who got shafted by the GFC round to Muller’s place for a little game of dilly twacking.

There are several assumptions built into this apologism, not least of which is the idea that management can’t be expected to know what’s going on in their organisations. But that isn’t incompetence… somehow… The worst aspect of this to my mind, however, is the direct evidence we have from post-GFC investigations that have shown complicit and explicit knowledge throughout the organisations. It’s a little to easy to blame the metrics and a little too easy to say that these were unintended consequences.

Ugh. Book written in 2018 dead names Chelsea Manning who transitioned immediately after her trial, the thing Muller was discussing. This shouldn’t surprise me as it appears Muller wrote a very academic essay saying “gay people should stay in the closet”. Bigotry isn’t okay. https://www.firstthings.com/article/1…

The point about transparency being bad is bonkers. He’s literally talking about war crimes being covered up and how exposing that is somehow bad. This is probably the worst point he makes in the book and shows how little he understands his own subject.

His argument about transparency isn’t without merit. Muller is correct that being too transparent can be detrimental. FOI requests are often weaponised, often the information released is deliberately misconstrued, especially with cherry-picking. But he misses the point about why we have FOIs and transparency. If governments, companies, and other organisations aren’t held accountable then they can literally get away with murder. This requires transparency so that we can create the checks and balances that are often lacking internally (deliberately or otherwise).

Oh, and the irony of writing a book about how metrics have lead us down a dark path but transparency is too idealistic is amazing. How exactly did we learn about metrics being bad without some transparency there Jerry?

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Why Do People Think Huck Finn Is Racist?

This month’s It’s Lit is going to talk about one of the most controversial classics of literature.

I read Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn when I was very young. The former was an easy and entertaining read, but the latter I remember being a slog to get through. When I revisited Huck Finn as an adult I came across some history of the book which suggested Twain had battled to write the book over many years. This was certainly how the novel felt in reading.

Both times I read Huck Finn, I was struck by just how infantalised Jim’s character was. It felt wrong. And giving it any level of thought leads you to conclude that this was the way white people viewed African Americans at the time the book was written.

You could argue that this is to draw the reader in and have them empathise with the plight of African Americans. But then wouldn’t you also have Jim grow to become an adult equal to other people by the end of the novel? Or was that something Twain struggled with, as it may have not being judged “realistic” to his audience?

Previously, I’ve discussed banned books and Huckleberry Finn. Something this video raised is what I had said about schools teaching Huck Finn, and that is the idea of complex discussions. It’s hard to teach an older text, provide the context, provide the complex subject matter, and do it all justice. Especially when that subject and context is something like racism.

People might say they are no longer teaching or will attempt to ban Huck Finn because of the N-word. But realistically, it’s because they aren’t willing to put the effort into teaching a complex topic and text. Double that unwillingness if they are someone who wants to pretend racism doesn’t exist.

I’m still a fan of old Samuel Clemens. But as noted in the video, this book isn’t without flaws and there are plenty of other authors and books who probably need highlighting more than Twain and Huck Finn.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by American author Mark Twain is both considered one of the great American novels and one of the most frequently banned and contested novels due to its use of the N-word and racial stereotypes. This has launched many debates as to if the work should even be taught in schools.

Today we are going to attempt to crack the case: is Huckleberry Finn an anti-racist work? Or is it just plain ol’ racist?

Hosted by Lindsay Ellis and Princess Weekes, It’s Lit! is a show about our favorite books, genres, and why we love to read. It’s Lit has been made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities: Exploring the human endeavor.

Book review: Red Dwarf by Grant Naylor

Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers by Grant Naylor
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book review will avoid the temptation to use the word smeg.

When Dave Lister gets drunk, he gets DRUNK. Which is how he ended up on a foreign planet with no money, a passport in someone else’s name, and only a storage locker to sleep in. So when a menial job on the mining ship Red Dwarf comes up, he jumps at his chance to get back to Earth. Pity it is going to take a bit longer than he expects.

It’s so nice to revisit an old favourite and appreciate it all over again. I was a little afraid that too much of the Red Dwarf book series would have dated badly. When I read this and when it was published was, after all, when I was in high school. Not to speak poorly of my younger self, but I can remember enjoying all sorts of trash. Red Dwarf was the good stuff.

The first thing that jumped out at me was the humour. I’d forgotten just how funny these books were. I’ve read too many novels that managed to be joke adjacent instead of decently funny.

The other highlight was how this book didn’t hate its characters. At times, particularly in British humour, satirical and humorous novels focus on having us laugh at the loser or inept protagonists. Even Rimmer, someone who is incompetent and useless, is treated as part of the odd-couple rather than the heel.

I enjoyed this so much that I continued straight into Better Than Life (Red Dwarf 2).

NB: if you get the chance, listen to the audiobook narrated by Chris Barrie. He obviously does a great job bringing the book to life, but he also nails every single character’s voice from the show.

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Book review: Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Religion is a mental virus… Going with the uncontroversial plot ideas:

Hiro Protagonist is a pizza delivery boy, hacker, spy, and master swordsman living who meets the courier YT during a last-minute delivery. They team up to try and uncover the secret behind a new drug/computer virus called Snow Crash after Hiro’s friend falls foul of it. Between Uncle Enzo’s mafia franchise, Mr Lee’s Greater Hong Kong franchise, and the Reverend Wayne’s Pearly Gates franchise, there is about to be a war for the future of humanity.

I have been meaning to read Snow Crash for over a decade after purchasing a copy cheap in a sale. It was recommended to me in high school and has been off and on my TBR since then. I’m glad I finally read it.

The opening had me hooked. Somewhere in the midst of the frenetic action and heapings of satire was a world that offered some interesting ground to explore. Stephenson’s cyberpunk world of anarcho-capitalism felt ready for something big.

The big thing that Stephenson poured into this world was the idea of language as a program and religion as a virus. As I was reading, this idea was solid and kept the plot going, gave everything stakes, and was pretty satisfying. But now after finishing, I’m left reflecting on the idea and this world.

What was being satirised here? Cyberpunk? Anarcho-capitalism? Or was it just meant to be absurd for a bit of fun? If the latter, why not keep the absurdity going for other aspects of the novel? If either of the former, I’m not sure Snow Crash managed to say anything. And the language as a program idea felt like a huge plot point to just kinda resolve with a wave. Where was the fallout?

In other words, this could have been better.

That said, this was a highly enjoyable novel. I’m glad I finally read it. I’ll have to dive into some other novels from Stephenson.

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Book review: Clean Sweep by Ilona Andrews

Clean Sweep by Ilona Andrews
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

When Tripadvisor reviews could literally kill your Inn.

Dina Demille runs an out-of-the-way inn catering to a very special clientele. The kind that want safety, neutrality, and for the local Texans to not suspect they are aliens. This is threatened when something starts killing dogs in the neighbourhood. She tries to get the local werewolf to deal with it but finds herself roped into the problem. Before she knows it, Dina is fighting a powerful intergalactic assassin to stop a war between vampire clans.

As a fan of the Kate Daniels series, I’ve been meaning to read more from Ilona and Gordan Andrews. My wife’s family had recently devoured the Innkeeper Chronicles and wouldn’t shut up about it. So it seemed like a safe bet that I’d probably enjoy this one.

Yep. It was great.

When my wife first mentioned Clean Sweep, I thought it sounded like Tanya Huff’s Keeper’s Chronicles. Innkeeper vs Keeper’s Chronicles… Young magical woman… Pet that isn’t really a pet… Magical inn… Love interest… And I enjoyed Summon the Keeper, so this totally not a rip-off should be good.

This was such a fun novel. It was fast-paced, plenty of action, the characters bounced off each other well, and everything felt earned. And in a book full of highlights, the Twilight joke at the end was a great touch.

Despite the superficial similarities between the Innkeeper and the Keeper’s series, they are very different. Clean Sweep has a faster pace and more action. Summon the Keeper has more humour and puts all the pieces in play for the final act. I enjoyed both, but Clean Sweep was easily better.

Can’t wait to read the next in the series.

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Book review: Ack-Ack Macaque by Gareth L Powell

Ack-Ack Macaque by Gareth L. Powell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Is a monkey with guns better or worse than a monkey with a handful of poo?

Victoria Valois has returned to Great Britain after the death of her ex-husband. She immediately realises that something is up when the killer comes back to murder her as well. Meanwhile across the pond, the prince and his girlfriend break into his mother’s labs to free the sentient AI of Ack-Ack Macaque. Things do not go according to plan. Victoria barely survives her attack and finds her path crossing the prince and Ack-Ack Macaque as they try to stop a cabal trying to wipe out humanity.

One of Gareth L Powell’s novels came up as a recommendation so I tried to find it at my local library. Instead, I found Ack-Ack Macaque. It was a pleasant surprise.

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect after seeing the cover art. Are monkies with revolvers dressed in WW2 flight gear representative of sci-fi novels?

Then the first chapter didn’t exactly grab me.

But the novel picks up after that sluggish start and doesn’t let up. This was fast-paced, enjoyable, and toyed with some of the ideas around sentience and what makes us who we are. At 300-odd pages, this was also a very quick read.

My wife also enjoyed Ack-Ack Macaque, although somewhat less than myself. Probably because there is a reasonably large amount of action and all the elements (characters, themes, etc) can feel superficial.

I’m looking forward to reading some more from Powell.

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Book Review: The Patterning Instinct by Jeremy Lent

The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity’s Search for Meaning by Jeremy Lent
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This isn’t a book about seeing shapes in clouds. Especially not that shape.

In The Patterning Instinct Jeremy Lent argues that we humans like to create “patterns” which informs the way we think about things, which in turn shapes the way the world works. But, hey, did you know that those patterns could be wrong, we could think about things in different ways, and that would change the way the world works?

An interesting book with an interesting thesis.

I decided to read The Patterning Instinct after reading Lent’s rebuttal of the “Everything is Fine” nonsense you see trotted out by agents of the status quo. I was expecting that the book would be something similar to The Divide by Jason Hickel, but it was something quite different.

To summarise the book: why don’t we do better by thinking differently?

There. 600 pages summarised.

Obviously there is a bit more to it than that. Lent goes through our history of thinking, patterning behaviours, how those are shaped, have been shaped, and continue to be shaped. His argument is then that our current patterns of thought are kinda stupid (see problems like systemic racism, environmental destruction, and wealth inequality) and we should change the way we think about things.

For example, instead of thinking that the cost of fossil fuels is the price of extraction plus a little something something for the company, we should instead think of the cost of the extraction, the pollution, the remediation, the deaths caused, the tax evasion, and the political manipulation involved in fossil fuels. If we did this we’d act differently and want a different way of powering our society.

Overall this was a very interesting book.

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