Weasel Words

June 30, 2003

Keanu Reeves has a lot to answer for. The entire time I was reading Plato's The Death of Socrates (a Penguin edition collecting Eurythphro, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo), my Bill and Ted-influenced mind is saying "SO-kraytz." Great.

As you'd guess from the title of the book, this collects Plato's writings about the trial and death of Socrates. Allegedly, Socrates' death is a great tragedy, and I know when I read "Crito" in high school, I was a little broken up about it. Coming to it now, though, I can't help but think that Socrates got what was coming to him. It's not just that he's a smug, cocksure asshole; it's not just that he derides sophists at the same time he's deploying his own questionable logic; it's mostly that he clearly has no interest in pragmatically working within society.

Socrates didn't have to be executed. In any of a dozen ways, many of them perfectly honorable, he could have walked away from his troubles. But no, he'd staked himself out on an untenable ideological position, and wouldn't back down. I've read a lot of texts about Christian heretics in the late medieval period, and reading Socrates verbally dig his own grave was familiar.

More often than not, the Church was highly reluctant to actually kill heretics, and would do everything it could to get them off with a slap on the wrist -- and the sensible heretics took the Church up on the offer. They'd tone down their writings a bit, maybe change a particularly controversial point, and carry on. But there were always the ones who wouldn't moderate their fiery speeches, and eventually the Church would have no choice but to off the stubborn buggers.

The execution of heretics isn't a practice I generally favor, but after a while, I started to sympathize with the Church. I mean, sheesh, given prevailing social norms, what can you do? Well, in the same way, I sympathized with the court that condemned Socrates. When you're given a death sentence and a chance to offer an alternative sentence, you plead for mercy, you idiot; you don't come back with a smug counter-proposal that you be rewarded for your great services to the city.

But I did experience a moment of genuine horror/anticipatory sadness while reading this book. In "Phaedo", Socrates starts talking about the division between the physical and spiritual worlds, and how the Ideals dwell in the spiritual world, and we ought to seek to ignore the physical as much as possible. His speech is, in many ways, the beginning of a narrative thread -- and I've read the later chapters in that story. Socrates' pre-death chat is a prelude to the Cathars, the wasted brilliance of the Scholastics, Creationism, and millennia of misguided thinking; in a whole bunch of ways, the errors that Plato's Socrates started talking about are still haunting our thought today.

The tragedy isn't that Socrates died. It's that he didn't die soon enough.

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June 22, 2003

Much to my dismay, Lawrence Watt-Evans' Ithanalin's Restoration is the last Ethshar book; apparently, sales for the latest few have been poor, so the planned future volumes will never be written. Since all the books stand alone, this isn't an enormous tragedy; but it's nevertheless disappointing.

Because Ithanalin's Restoration was never intended to be the final volume of a long series, I'll refrain from reviewing it that way -- which is just as well, because it's a slight installment that wouldn't hold up to the series-capping strain. The story here is that the wizard Ithanalin screwed up a spell and dispersed his mind amongst his now-animated furniture; because all the real wizards are occupied with the events of The Spell of the Black Dagger (which takes place contemporaneously), his apprentice has to retrieve all the furniture and set things right.

There are no world-shaking events here; just a lot of furniture collection and minor magic use. In retrospect, it's surprising that events this insignificant could really be the entire plot of a novel; but taken on its own terms, it's an enjoyable read, one that quickly bounces along from event to event to conclusion. As the mid-series divertissement this was intended to be, it works well, but never rises to any great heights. If you've read this far in the Ethshar series, it's worth reading Ithanalin's Restoration, but particularly critical readers won't want to pay hardcover prices to get it.

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June 21, 2003

I'm going to come right out and say this upfront: Martin Fowler's Refactoring is the single best software development book I've read yet. What is refactoring, you ask? I'll let the subtitle answer that: "Improving the design of existing code." Essentially, refactoring is an organized, controlled, and safe way of making code better; the book contains a large and useful catalog of refactorings.

But that's not all it has. The sizable first portion of the book explains the motivation behind refactoring (including convincing rebuttals to the "if it ain't broke, leave it alone" argument); it talks about when you should consider refactoring; it also goes into some detail about unit testing, which makes refactoring (and development in general) safer and easier.

Software development texts tend to fall into one of two camps: Either dry and soporific (the Gang of Four Design Patterns text; Jacobson, Booch, and Rumbaugh's The Unified Software Development Process), or gushing and hyperbolic (Shalloway and Trott's Design Patterns Explained). Far more rare is the book that's pragmatic, readable, and informative -- but Fowler's written just such a book.

If you're a working developer (particularly if you develop or maintain object-oriented frameworks), get this book. The people who maintain your code when you're gone will thank you.

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June 19, 2003

'Round about the time that people started making non-sucking movies based on Marvel comic books (which is to say, the first X-Men movie), a thought occurred to Marvel executives: These movies could potentially bring in a whole bunch of new comic fans, but those neophyte readers would have no idea what was going on in any of the comic books, lacking the requisite grounding in 40-50 years of oft-contradictory backstory. So, the execs reasoned, why not make a new line of comics with no backstory at all? And thus was born the Ultimate line.

The flagship Ultimate title is Brian Bendis' Ultimate Spider-Man , available as a monthly comic, trade paperback collections, and hardcover collections-of-collections; I'm reviewing here the first two hardcovers, which is roughly the first five-ish trade paperbacks and thirty-ish issues. I'm guessing on the precise numbers, but that's the ballpark. I've long been a believer in the graphic novel format, both for economic reasons (it makes more sense to buy a well-bound $20 book than five cheaply-bound $3 magazines) and literary ones (longer formats encourage longer, more involved, story arcs), so I fully applaud the de-emphasis of traditional monthly issues.

(Interesting aside: I actually started reading Ultimate Spider-Man on Marvel's dot.comics site, which has nice Flash presentations of comic books. At the time, the first dozen or so issues of USM were available for free; I'm not sure if that's still the case, but if you're interested, it's worth checking out.)

Anyway, Ultimate Spider-Man brings Peter Parker back to his roots as a high-school student, and starts his story from the beginning, with an origin story that owes more to the movie than the original comic. Bendis quickly introduces familiar characters from the "classic" Spider-Man mythos (the Green Goblin, Kraven the Hunter, Doctor Octopus), but with twists: Everything in the book has been modernized, slightly de-absurd-ized, and made more realistic -- Kraven, for instance, is now a TV personality a la The Crocodile Hunter guy.

Ultimately (pun unavoidable), the series has two audiences: comic book neophytes, who want to read an interesting Spider-Man comic without having to know endless trivia; and long-time Spider-Man fans, people for whom the death of Gwen Stacy is an iconic and historic moment. I can speak for the second group as a member (though I quit reading comics during the dark years of the '90s), and say that the Ultimate conceit works very well: the original series had become weighted down with too much (often silly) history, and rebooting it has allowed a lot of the cruft to clear out.

For the neophytes... well, I can't say for sure. My guess is that those who are disposed to liking superheroes will enjoy this series, though. The art is attractive, the writing is snappy (with Sorkin-esque banter), and the concept is appealing as it was fifty years ago. This won't have any crossover appeal to non-superhero fans in the way that Watchmen or Astro City could, but as a straight superhero book, it's pretty darn good.

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June 14, 2003

Superheroes, edited by John Varley and Ricia Mainhardt, is a big ol' anthology of superhero-related stories from various SF writers. Shocking, eh?

Essentially none of these are straight-up superhero stories, which is just as well, as I have difficulty envisioning pure superhero stories working well in a written-only form. Instead, they're stories that take an angle of superhero mythology and play with it. There are a bunch of stories that explore the relationship between law enforcement and superheroes; several that touch on the symbiotic relationship between superheroes and supervillains; a couple that intersect superheroes with history and mythology; and so on. Most of the stories are good, but with twenty-six stories in the anthology, there's a certain amount of repetition.

The highlights of the book are probably Lawrence Watt-Evans' "One of the Boys", which explores what it really means for a Superman-figure to be an alien; John Varley's "Truth, Justice, and the Politically Correct Socialist Path", which imagines a Superman-figure landing in Soviet Russia and embracing heroically the political ideals of his new country; and Roger Zelazny's "The Long Crawl of Hugh Glass", which barely seems to be a superhero story at all.

Overall, Superheroes is a nice, fluffy anthology that's original enough to be an unguilty pleasure. It could probably stand to be a third shorter than it is, but it's not painfully overlong or anything. This would probably be a great airplane book.

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June 10, 2003

Jack Vance's The Book of Dreams is the final installment of the Demon Princes series, and thus needs to be evaluated on two levels -- as a book in its own right, and as the culmination of a five-book series.

As a book, it's very good; the writing and world-building are typically excellent, and the plotting here is tighter and the pacing more suspenseful than in the previous books. This is one of the better of the Demon Prince books, and none of them have been bad.

But as the series finale, it disappoints. There were several big themes running through the series, the most interesting of which was: When you've devoted your life singlemindedly to a fixed task, what happens when you finish it? The book ends without even considering the aftermath that had been hinted at strongly throughout the series. Similarly, the chapter-intro stuff about the Institute never lead to anything big. (Is this series, perhaps, set in a larger Vanceian universe, and other novels address that theme?)

But mostly, it just didn't feel final enough. Simply by changing a few paragraphs here or there, this could have been the second, third, or fourth book in the series. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, since each book was essentially standalone, but... well, to put it into Oprah-ese, I wanted more closure.

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