John > Recent Status Updates

Reading the 20-year-old introduction to a 40-year-old book about science, I'm stuck by the theory on the origins of HIV advanced in the introduction. Apparently from 1997 it looked like "a recent transfer from some African reservoir of HIV infection no longer seems necessary or even probable" (which I believe is the current theory) but rather "AIDS was in fact a longstanding human infection, widely dispersed..."

I was surprised to see they restart the page numbering at 1 for the short story collection. I was wondering how page 404 could be halfway through a 500-page book.

I feel they should have started with the short stories instead of the novels. After the polish of the novels, some of these stories feel pretty quaint and rough.

I thought I remembered a warmer relationship between Daneel and "Partner Elijah." Maybe that comes in the third novel. But so far, Baley's a jerk and Daneel is an unfeeling machine, if a polite and considerate one.

That's the second time Baley suggests testing poison on a farm animal. It doesn't make sense that he'd think that way, since his Earth has so few of them. Also these high tech Solarians are remarkably low tech.

And that's the intro. Ok, so the theme here is going to be justice boners, or the frustration thereof.

"[T]o prosecute only those defendants ... deliberately and consciously crossing the line from immorality into felony" seems like an exceptionally high bar. It's a far cry from "ignorance of the law is no excuse."

Huh. That's not the ending I expected.

I also wasn't expecting to read a book about communism.

Onward to The Naked Sun!

I'd forgotten how young Daneel is in this first adventure.

I'm also less certain I've read Caves of Steel before. So much of it is unfamiliar I'm starting to wonder if the familiar parts ate just pings from flashbacks and callbacks in later novels.

I feel like I missed a lot the first time around. Bailey is a lot more hard-boiled, full of class resentments and antipathy for robots, not to mention his society's pervasive agoraphobia. Daneel is so Data it's not funny.

I'd also forgotten this was set 3,000 years in the future. The population numbers seem silly... Earth depleted by 8 billion souls? We have that now.

"The cross-cultural psychiatrists and anthropologists [...] I've come to think of them as psychology's version of botanists I the rain forest, desperate to document the diversity while staying only a few steps ahead of the bulldozers."

I don't think I'd object to this metaphor if we were talking about something like language. But for illness or seems ghoulish.

I read 50 pages of this? I vaguely remember buying it, but i have no memory of cracking the cover. Unless this is the one about physics that sounds like Douglas Addams?

Whoa... I didn't know this was a buddy cop novel!

Slow start, but it's growing on me.

So far this feels brain-bending but superficial. I don't feel like I understand any of these ideas well enough to judge them. Fun stuff, though. Seriously heady.

Are there any nice people in this book?

Holy hell, that ending...

All that material at the beginning with the whole family as the main character instead of the narrator really pays off.

The politics seem strikingly (depressingly?) modern, 20 years later.

And finally, we get into the inner life of the narrator! I'd started to think this book was about everybody else but her.

I can see how this won the award. It feels solid, enticing.

In which we are reminded that racial politics are complicated.

Short but well done, for the second story.

Puppies!

I feel cold just reading it. Also, it seems really familiar... I'm sure I'd remember if I'd read it before. It must have been from the first few episodes of the tv show.