Reviews and Comments

Give Dan Simmons credit — he tried. He tried to answer every question raised by his Chaucerian space pilgrimage in "Hyperion."

Do the answers make sense? Largely they do not.

Does Raul Endymion — the trapped narrator-protagonist in the final two books of the Hyperion Cantos — become increasingly sympathetic as the series finished? Largely he does not.

In the final book of the series, Simmons does his best to tie together all of the loose threads scattered around the Cantos to tie the convoluted space-time plot together into something coherent. In many respects, this was likely a mistake — reality never comes together neatly, so presenting every event in time and space across a vast, infinite universe as coming together towards a conclusion would stretch belief under the best of circumstances.

Frustratingly, Simmons decided to strap the sprawling conclusion to the back of Raul Endymion — a man chosen by a poet to protect the reluctant young female Messiah he's told repeatedly (by her when she's 11 and he's in his 20s) that he will eventually fall madly in love with. In the previous book, Raul seems generally competent and affable, if not especially bright; "Rise of Endymion," however, quickly turns him into a petulant and clueless brat who spends most of the novel whining to or at someone while the Smartest And Most Attractive Human In The Universe seduces him.

Charitably, this may have been on purpose. The book's message, beyond "Choose again," is that love is a source of energy, and the relationship between Raul and Aenia is supposed to signify the ideal of this novel energy source. With this in mind, turning Raul into a man who's only capable of an obsessive all-consuming codependent love for Aenia, one capable of scouring time and space for every trace of her so that her entire story can be told,.makes a certain kind of narrative sense.

I'd be lying if I said I found it to be an especially satisfying read, however, especially by the end.

Much as Hyperion set the table for The Fall of Hyperion, Endymion leaves a cliffhanger for The Rise of Endymion to settle.

Endymion is largely told in the voice of Raul Endymion, a man captured in a high tech space prison who is effectively dictating his last will and testament. The book is the first half of the story behind how he ended up in his predicament — his near-execution, followed by his assignment to protect Aenea, a 12-year-old girl who emerges from the Time Tombs and speaks fondly of their future romantic relationship.

Raul, it should be noted, is 27 when he meets Aenea — but to Simmons' credit, he writes Raul to be appropriately chaste and protective in a fatherly way towards the young child.

The Catholic antagonists are more reliably interesting and believable than the protagonists, who are largely relegated towards being set pieces for Aenea's precognitions. Having said that, Raul and the rest of Aenea's party makes the most of whatever free will they have within the constraints imposed upon them by her visions of the future —and the story moves at a steady pace overall.

Picking up from the end of the cliffhanger of "Hyperion," "The Fall of Hyperion" tells of what happens after the pilgrims finally reach the Shrike.

Unlike the previous book, which adopted the structure of the "Canterbury Tales" to tell the backstories of each pilgrim, "The Fall of Hyperion" has a somewhat more straightforward but still creative narrative style — one which shifts between multiple first person views while consciously granting one narrator a bit more omniscience than the rest. The result is a generally enjoyable and linear read.

That said, at least for me, I found that some of the plot developments require a fair amount of faith. It wasn't always clear how each character's actions affected the future that sent the Time Tombs into the past — to say nothing of the larger supernatural forces at play. Even so, the story itself was much more enjoyable than not and I had no difficulties reading to the end, even if I felt the need to suspend disbelief on several occasions.

"Character Limit" is an in-depth look into how and why Elon Musk bought Twitter (now X), along with what he did with and to the social network afterwards.

The first half of the book does an excellent job detailing the state of Twitter before Musk's buyout — its ethos under Dorsey, its struggles to grow and turn a reliable profit, its inability to innovate past its original 140-character product, and its sprawling multinational moderation team. The book then goes on to detail the choices Twitter's board faced when Musk offered to buy the company, including their legal responsibility to maximize shareholder value — and how that responsibility overrode any loyalty to the original mission of Twitter. The remainder of the book then details Musk's early reign at Twitter, including a neverending cascade of layoffs, declining advertising revenue, and increasingly erratic behavior from the company's poaster-in-chief.

The book is well structured and tells its story well. The authors do an excellent job of describing the events that led to the buyout of Twitter and Musk's subsequent behavior.

Even so, I liked this book more than I loved it. Since the book came out before Trump's reelection, it leaves the story at the nadir of Twitter/X's influence — and consequently misses Musk's reemergence (and likely subsequent fall). The book consequently prematurely dances on Musk's and X's grave.

I hope the authors consider writing a sequel.

In the 1960s, American liberals faced a crisis. After three decades of New Deal liberalism, which wedded government, labor and business together towards large common goals, it was becoming increasingly clear that there remained large gaps in class, race, gender, and other social issues. Additionally, many of the government agencies responsible for regulating corporations had become cozy with them, using their regulations to stifle competition while benefiting incumbents.

Ralph Nader wanted something different.

To his credit, he saw the need for more voices in government, more chances for input and participation, and more accountability for all parties. To provide those things, he started the public interest movement, which would fight in courtrooms across the country to protect and preserve the rights, safety, health and environment of Americans.

This book is the story of that movement — and how many of the strategic and tactical choices he made set the stage for the dysfunction we see today.

There's something about James C. Scott's writing style that makes his books easy for me to put aside while also providing moments of deep insight.

In this book, Scott discusses the history of Zomia — a geographical zone centered near Southeast China and the hills of Thailand, Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam. In the history he presents, the people of Zomia are largely the castoffs of "civilized" padi-rice society, with all of its conscription, taxes and central authority. To escape the control and deprivations of central authority, the people of Zomia organize themselves into various groups (Hmong, Miao, etc.). Since many of the people of Zomia are refugees from Thai, Chinese, and other fixed agriculture societies, the corresponding ethnicity of any group of people in Zomians is consequently fluid, in much the same way "Californian" could ethnically be just about anything.

Makes one wonder how fixed ethnicities truly are anywhere else.

The book contains several insights about the nature of state-building, which are generally compelling if a little "just so" at times. Many of the claims in the book are somewhat grandiose and binary, however, and it seems somewhat ungrateful to openly disdain state creation in a book that couldn't exist in an illiterate society.

It was definitely thought provoking, albeit difficult to grip.

"Hack Your Bureaucracy" is written as a series of short chapters (usually less than 10 pages), each providing a specific tactic that can be used to work within a bureaucracy. Each chapter, in turn, is followed by a "How Can I Use This" section that summarizes what was covered in the preceding chapter. The structure of the book thus lends itself to either classroom-style teaching or to reading each tactic individually and reflecting upon it for the rest of the day. This is a methodical read, like reading an auto repair manual or technical how-to guide.

The authors -- Marina Nitze, former Chief Technology Officer of the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs, and Nick Sinai, former U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer -- are part of a small but growing cottage industry of former Obama staffers and appointees with increasingly public thoughts on how to best manage bureaucracy. Bloodied by the initial failed launch of HealthCare.gov and other high-profile technology projects during the '10s, a number of former Obama technologists have written books or articles detailing how things should have been different in the first place -- and how they successfully overcame the obstacles in front of them to achieve some wins after all.

Given their failures and successes of deploying technology solutions within the confines of the U.S. federal bureaucracy as it existed in the '10s, there are many lessons to be learned. Though the exercise in sharing those lessons feels somewhat self-serving ("Look at all we had to struggle through to do the simplest of things!" "Look at how much we accomplished despite it all!"), it also serves as an insightful lens into what working with the federal bureaucracy feels like to those who don't have the luxury of dedicating their lives towards optimizing their professional behavior to it.

The advice itself is well written, easy to follow, and is reasonably sensible.

Given the nature of programming languages in the late '60s, it's understandable why a writer might believe learning one could drive you insane.

Babel-17 was written almost sixty years ago and, in many places, it shows. The future has intergalactic space travel alongside punch cards, payphones and paper files. There are references to now-dated programming languages, such as Algol and Fortran. Rydra Wong — an East Asian female protagonist written during a time when sci-fi protagonists were usually white and male — is a Mary Sue who knows everything and charms everyone, but look, so was Heinlein's Lazarus Long.

Underneath the uneven pacing of the action and the inescapable sense that the heroine is the only one who could possibly know what's going on, however, is an interesting question: Can learning a new language shift your perspective of the universe? Could learning a specific language radically shift your sense of time and sense of self? If so, by how much? What would the consequences of that shift be?

Babel-17 is full of interesting questions and ideas — or, at least, questions and ideas that were interesting and radical when it was published in 1966. To its credit, it doesn't waste hundreds of pages and hours of the reader's time to raise them.

If you're thinking of reading this book for its philosophical insights, I recommend playing "Disco Elysium" and then reading David Chapman's Meaningness.com. Both hit the same beats with better precision and entertainment value.

As a cultural slice of life, it has considerably more value. The book captures the spirit of the early '70s — an era in which top-down systemic thinking had passed its zenith, yet the childish nihilism of the hippies offered no useful alternatives. The author, a former technical writer, tries his best to synthesize the zeitgeist, blending half-remembered pieces of Buddhism, bits of misremembered Greek philosophy (Lycus, not Phaedras, is named after the wolf), and a rebellion against academia into the world's first LessWrong post.

It would be the longest until HPMOR was authored decades later.

Given everything I said above, it may seem odd to give it three stars instead of two or only one. As I said earlier, however, it accurately captures the spirit of the '70s. It was popular — incredibly so. The bits of philosophy, musings on mental health, and surprisingly sparse instructions on how to maintain a motorcycle (they don't build them like they used to and thank goodness for that) are a snapshot of an age that still echoes into the present day.