April
16,
2006
John Scalzi’s The Ghost Brigades
does not suck. This sounds like an awfully weak sort of praise, but considering what I thought of his first book, it’s a pretty dramatic step up.
Like Old Man’s War, The Ghost Brigades is compellingly readable. I whipped through it in less than a day. Unlike Old Man’s War, it’s actually pretty genuinely interesting. The awkward infodump lectures are gone, replaced with far less obtrusive incluing; the smugly awesome protagonists are replaced by characters who aren’t striving for the title of Awesomest Person in the Entire Universe; and the hand of the author-god is much less obtrusively on the scales here. Scalzi appears to have gotten his Mary Sue out of his system entirely.
I’m not saying it’s a perfect book, mind. Some of the conversations still rang a bit artificial; the characters are still more alike (and Scalzi-like) than they’d ideally be; and a few of the plot elements are preposterous. (I don’t care if there’s no direct evidence of attack — if a bunch of enemy outposts happen to get wiped out in the same “accidental” way, they’re going to damn well know they’re being attacked.)
But those are flaws that an adventure story can live with, and they don’t keep this from being a genuinely enjoyable book. And, as a nice plus, the book starts to reveal that things are a bit more complex than we had previously thought. There’s a depth to the story and the world-building here that were just missing in Old Man’s War. I find myself, a bit to my surprise, looking forward to the next entry in the series.
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April
15,
2006
Frederick Brooks’ The Mythical Man-Month
is an odd sort of book. It’s a book about software projects written in 1975, but it’s not entirely worthless today; for a book about software development to be at all relevant 30 years later is a pretty impressive achievement.
But it’s a bit of a patchy one, I’m afraid. The book is a collection of essays, most from the original 1975 edition, but with some updates from the 20th anniversary edition in 1995. Some of the essays — the general, high-level ones — have survived well. Some of the others... well, not so much. Unless you’re still writing COBOL, I suppose. I’m not, so skipped over the dated bits.
The book’s most famous essay is obviously its titular one, the main point of which is that you can’t substitute people for time, culminating in the famous Brooks’ Law: Adding more people to a late project makes it later. Unfortunately for me, this essay was relatively weak. The fundamental insight is one that most people have absorbed, and there’s really not much more there — very little elaboration or supporting evidence. I actually find my faith in Brooks’ dictum weakened by reading this lightly-evidenced essay.
The article that I thought was worth the price of admission was “No Silver Bullet,” which attempts — rather successfully — to make the case that there’s not going to be any magical programming tool that results in a quick order of magnitude improvement in programming productivity. His argument is, essentially, that such improvements used to be possible because 90%+ of programming effort was spent on the accidents of programming (memory allocation, low-level I/O, etc.) rather than on the essence of it (defining the problem in useful detail, defining the solution in useful detail); but that these days, a minority of time is spent on the accidents, and the majority is the essence — and tools are great at removing the amount of crap you need to wade through to get to the core of what you’re trying to do, but they can’t do a thing for the ineradicable complexity of the problem domain and its required solution.
At any rate, this is a book worth browsing; but despite its reputation as a classic of the field, I don’t think it’s a must-read for anyone these days. The state of the art has moved on, and Brooks’ seminal work is the sort of thing that should be cited, not read.
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April
15,
2006
After finishing the Liveship Traders trilogy, I immediately dove into the next set of three, plowing through Robin Hobb’s Fool’s Errand, Golden Fool, and Fool’s Fate
with a certain amount of alacrity.
This trilogy is a more direct sequel to Hobb’s original Farseer Trilogy, though it’s also a semi-direct sequel to the Liveship Traders. As a capstone to a trilogy of trilogies, it succeeds marvelously, integrating two very different works into a well-structured whole, and illuminating events from the past in a different light — the stuff I didn’t like about the Farseer Trilogy is all entirely redeemed here. (This occasionally feels perilously close to being a retcon, but doesn’t cross the line — I managed to genuinely believe that this is what Hobb had in mind all along.)
The nine books Hobb has written in this world comprise one of the best ultra-long-form epic fantasies around, and if you like epic fantasy at all, you should immediately set to reading them.
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