stillhq.com : Mikal, a geek from Canberra living in Silicon Valley

Isaac Asimov's Foundation Series

Sun, 06 Jul 2008 15:13:00 GMT

I'm getting really into reading second hand science fiction from the 1950s onwards. I read a few (but nowhere near all) of the Foundation series as a child, and I remember liking them a lot. Stolen from Wikipedia, here is a list of the books in The Foundation series in Asimov's suggested reading order:

C	Year	Title	Notes
	1950	I, Robot	Robot short stories. First collection, which were all included in The Complete Robot, though it also contains binding text (Mind and Iron), no longer in The Complete Robot. Stories: "Robbie" (also in Robot Visions) "Runaround" (also in Robot Visions) "Reason" (also in Robot Visions) "Catch that Rabbit" "Liar!" (also in Robot Visions) "Little Lost Robot" (also in Robot Visions) "Escape!" "Evidence" (also in Robot Visions) "The Evitable Conflict" (also in Robot Visions) Purchased from Bookbuyer's
1	1982	The Complete Robot	Robot short stories. Collection of Asimov stories written between 1940 and 1976. Stories: "A Boy's Best Friend" "Sally" (also in Robot Dreams) "Someday" "Point of View" "Think!" "True Love" (also in Robot Dreams) "Robot AL-76 Goes Astray" "Victory Unintentional" "Stranger In Paradise" "Light Verse" (also in Robot Dreams) "Segregationist" "Let's Get Together" "Mirror Image" "The Tercentenary Incident" "First Law" "Satisfaction Guaranteed" "Lenny" (also in Robot Visions) "Galley Slave" (also in Robot Visions) "Risk" "Feminine Intuition" (also in Robot Visions) "—That Thou Art Mindful of Him" "The Bicentennial Man" (also in Robot Visions) + those from I, Robot (without the binding story)
	1986	Robot Dreams	Robot short stories. Anthologised in a book with the same title. Stories: "Robot Dreams" "Little Lost Robot" (also in I, Robot) "Breeds There a Man...?" "Hostess" "Sally" (also in The Complete Robot) "Strikebreaker" "The Machine that Won the War" "Eyes Do More Than See" "The Martian Way" "Franchise" "Jokester" "The Last Question" "Does a Bee Care?" "Light Verse" (also in The Complete Robot) "The Feeling of Power" "Spell My Name with an S" "The Ugly Little Boy" "The Billiard Ball" "True Love" (also in The Complete Robot) "The Last Answer" "Lest We Remember" Purchased from Canty's Bookstore (no website)
	1990	Robot Visions	Robot short stories. Anthologised in a book with the same title. This collection contains Mirror Image, which is referenced in The Robots Of Dawn and occurs after The Naked Sun. Stories: "Robot Visions" "Too Bad!" "Robbie" (also in I, Robot) "Reason" (also in I, Robot) "Liar!" (also in I, Robot) "Runaround" (also in I, Robot) "Evidence" (also in I, Robot) "Little Lost Robot" (also in I, Robot) "The Evitable Conflict" (also in I, Robot) "Feminine Intuition" (also in The Complete Robot) "The Bicentennial Man" (also in The Complete Robot) "Someday" "Think!" "Segregationist" "Mirror Image" "Lenny" (also in The Complete Robot) "Galley Slave" (also in The Complete Robot) "Christmas Without Rodney" Purchased from Leigh's Favorite Books
	1992	The Positronic Man	Robot novel based on Asimov's short story The Bicentennial Man, co-written by Robert Silverberg Purchased from Canty's Bookstore (no website)
2	1954	The Caves of Steel	Robot novel. Purchased from Leigh's Favorite Books
3	1957	The Naked Sun	Robot novel. Purchased from Canty's Bookstore (no website)
4	1983	The Robots of Dawn	Robot novel. Purchased from Leigh's Favorite Books
5	1985	Robots and Empire	Robot novel. Purchased from Bookbuyer's
	1993	Isaac Asimov's Caliban	Caliban trilogy by Roger MacBride Allen. Purchased from abebooks.com
	1994	Isaac Asimov's Inferno	Caliban trilogy by Roger MacBride Allen. I have this one in large format, and still need it in paperback. Purchased from abebooks.com
	1996	Isaac Asimov's Utopia	Caliban trilogy by Roger MacBride Allen. I have this one in hardcover, and still need it in paperback. Purchased from abebooks.com
6	1951	The Stars, Like Dust	Galactic Empire series. Purchased from Bookbuyer's
7	1952	The Currents of Space	Galactic Empire series. Purchased from Bookbuyer's
8	1950	Pebble in the Sky	Galactic Empire series. Purchased from Gaslight Books
9	1988	Prelude to Foundation	Foundation novel. Purchased from Bookbuyer's
10	1993	Forward the Foundation	Foundation novel. Purchased from Rasputin's Books
11	1951	Foundation	Foundation trilogy.
12	1952	Foundation and Empire	Foundation trilogy. Purchased from Rasputin's Books
13	1953	Second Foundation	Foundation trilogy. Purchased from Bookbuyer's
	1997	Foundation's Fear	Second Foundation trilogy by Gregory Benford. Purchased from Bookbuyer's
	1998	Foundation and Chaos	Second Foundation trilogy by Greg Bear.
	1999	Foundation's Triumph	Second Foundation trilogy by David Brin. Purchased from Bookbuyer's
14	1982	Foundation's Edge	Final chronological Foundation books. Purchased from bookstore in a basement, Curtin
15	1986	Foundation and Earth	Final chronological Foundation books.

Next step, read them.

Update: this amazon list is also useful as it has a guide to the short story books and how they overlap, as well as a bunch more robot books written by other authors.

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Isaac Asimov's Utopia

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 22:49:00 GMT

Utopia is the third and final Asimov universe book from Allen. It centers around an attempt to accelerate the terraforming of a planet by drastic measures which drive third law robots wild... The measures are so drastic that they endanger humans, whilst protecting a large number of humans. Unfortunately three law robots have trouble seeing the difference between the two.

I don't think this book is as well written as the earlier two Allen books (Caliban and Inferno) and therefore not as good as the Asimov books set in the universe. It was however reasonably engaging and I'm not offended that I spent time and money on it. An ok book, but nothing special basically.

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The Stainless Steel Rat Series

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 10:15:00 GMT

I am increasingly becoming obsessed with science fiction from 1950s and 1960s. Again stolen from Wikipedia, here is a list of all the Stainless Steel Rat books:

Year	Title	Notes
1985	A Stainless Steel Rat Is Born	Purchased from Powell's Books
1987	The Stainless Steel Rat Gets Drafted	In poor condition. Purchased from bookstore in a basement, Curtin
1994	The Stainless Steel Rat Sings the Blues	Purchased from bookstore in a basement, Curtin
1961	The Stainless Steel Rat
1970	The Stainless Steel Rat's Revenge	In poor condition. Purchased from bookstore in a basement, Curtin
1972	The Stainless Steel Rat Saves the World
1978	The Stainless Steel Rat Wants You	Purchased from Bookbuyer's
1982	The Stainless Steel Rat for President	Purchased from Bookbuyer's
1996	The Stainless Steel Rat Goes to Hell	Purchased from Bookbuyer's
1999	The Stainless Steel Rat Joins the Circus
1993	The Golden Years of the Stainless Steel Rat

Additionally, there is:

Year	Title	Notes
1993	Stainless Steel Visions	Contains one Stainless Steel Rat shortstory. Purchased from bookstore in a basement, Curtin

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Raymond E Feist's Serpentwar Saga

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 10:06:00 GMT

(I went book shopping in Canberra yesterday).

C	Year	Title	Notes
	1994	Shadow of a Dark Queen	Stored in Australia (Box 1). Purchased from a garage sale
	1995	Rise of a Merchant Prince
	1997	Rage of a Demon King	Stored in Australia (Box 1). Purchased from a garage sale
	1998	Shards of a Broken Crown

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Raymond E Feist's Empire Trilogy

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 10:06:00 GMT

(I went book shopping in Canberra yesterday).

C	Year	Title	Notes
	1987	Daughter of the Empire	Stored in Australia (Box 1). Purchased from a garage sale
	1990	Servant of the Empire	Stored in Australia (Box 1). Purchased from a garage sale
	1997	Mistress of the Empire

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Katherine Kerr's Deverry Series

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 10:06:00 GMT

(I went book shopping in Canberra yesterday).

C	Year	Title	Notes
		Act one: Deverry
	1986	Daggerspell
	1987	Darkspell
	1989	The Bristling Wood - US title; issued in the UK as Dawnspell: The Bristling Wood	Stored in Australia (Box 1). Purchased from a garage sale
	1990	The Southern Sea - US title; issued in the UK as Dragonspell: The Southern Sea	Stored in Australia (Box 1). Purchased from a garage sale
		Act two: The Westlands
	1991	A Time of Exile
	1992	A Time of Omens
	1993	Days of Blood and Fire
	1994	Days of Air and Darkness
		Act two: The Dragon Mage
	1997	The Red Wyvern
	1998	The Black Raven
	2000	The Fire Dragon
		Act two: The Silver Wyrm
	2006	The Gold Falcon - US title; issued in the UK as the fourth book of The Dragon Mage
	2007	The Spirit Stone - US title; issued in the UK as the fifth book of The Dragon Mage
	2008	The Shadow Isle - US title; issued in the UK as the sixth book of The Dragon Mage
	2009 (not yet released)	The Silver Mage

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Isaac Asimov's Inferno

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 16:05:00 GMT

Inferno is the second Asimov universe book written by Roger MacBride Allen. Much like Asimov's Robots and Empire and Caliban, its what I will call an "issue book". In Robots and Empire the issue at hand was that having a long life results in risk adversity and therefore the stagnation of society as a whole. In Caliban the issue was the over protection of humans by robots, and the ultimately corrupting nature of living in a society built on slavery (even of machines), as well as stagnation caused by the risk adversity of the robots themselves. In this second Allen book, the issue is the exploitation of the "new law" robots who ultimately become the new slaves in return for a chance at freedom later. This exploitation is a criminal offence, so of course they end up with a society in which pretty much everyone has dirty hands of some form.

Overall this was a good read, and probably a better book than Inferno. I certainly found it easier to read and more enjoyable. I read the majority of the book on a single set of flights between the US and Australia because it was such a good read.

Its interesting that the Amazon reviews for this book are mostly negative, and I can see the point they're trying to make. There are certainly opportunities for Prospero's psychology and the overall political situation created by the massive disruption of the society to be explored more. Additionally, the murder mystery is resolved very rapidly at the end of the book after crawling progress during the majority of the book. Then again, that's just like Caves of Steel and Naked Sun, which both are resolved rapidly at the end of the book and gloss over issues which aren't core to the story. I guess you can chose to tell a story many different ways, and just because Allen didn't chose to tell it the way that the Amazon reviewers thought he should doesn't make his choice incorrect.

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Isaac Asimov's Caliban

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 13:59:00 GMT

This is a "robot mystery" in the style of Asimov, but actually written by Roger MacBride Allen. Wikipedia assures me that Asimov approved the outline for this book, as well as the other two by Roger:

"Shortly before his death in 1992, Asimov approved an outline for three novels (Caliban, Inferno, Utopia) by Roger MacBride Allen, set between Robots and Empire and the Empire series, telling the story of the terraforming of the Spacer world Inferno, and about the robot revolution started by creating a "No Law" Robot, and then New Law Robots."

Roger is an interesting author, and appears to have written quite a few books, with a strong tendency for basing them in other author's universes. Its interesting to meet an author who is so seemingly willing to base his work on that of others.

This book didn't strike me as well written as Asimov's, but that's a pretty high bar to meet. It should be noted that Amazon reviews disagree with me on this point. Its rendition is certainly competent though, and the story is a good one.

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Robots and Empire

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 14:02:00 GMT

I find the newer Asimovs harder to read for some reason -- I think it might be because they are more inclined to introspection that the earlier ones, but that might not be all of it. Overall I enjoyed this book, although I did find that I lost enthusiasm briefly in the middle. Overall, worth the effort though.

You can tell that Asimov was getting old at the time that he wrote this book, as he dwells extensively on the importance of living an interesting and worthwhile life, instead of necessarily a long life. Overall he makes the argument that this is what is wrong with Spacer society -- life is so long that its inconceivable to take risks early in life that might shorten that life. Later in life its too late however, as you are by then trapped in your comfortable rut. Its an interesting concept, and one which bears further consideration.

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Bill the Galactic Hero Series

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 13:40:00 GMT

This series is a set of parodies of militaristic science fiction, and is excellently bad.

Year	Title	Notes
1965	Bill The Galactic Hero	Purchased from Bookbuyer's
1989	Bill, the Galactic Hero On the Planet of Robot Slaves	Harry Harrison Purchased from Leigh's Favorite Books
1990	Bill the Galactic Hero On the Planet of Bottled Brains	Robert Sheckley and Harry Harrison
1991	Bill the Galactic Hero On the Planet of Tasteless Pleasure	David Bischoff and Harry Harrison Purchased from Leigh's Favorite Books
1991	Bill the Galactic Hero On the Planet of Zombie Vampires	Jack C. Haldeman and Harry Harrison Purchased from Leigh's Favorite Books
1991	Bill the Galactic Hero On the Planet of Ten Thousand Bars	David Bischoff and Harry Harrison (Was also published under the title: "Bill, the Galactic Hero on the Planet of the Hippies from Hell")
1991	Bill the Galactic Hero: The Final Incoherent Adventure	David Harris and Harry Harrison

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Robots of Dawn

Thu, 29 May 2008 01:55:00 GMT

This book is the third in the third in the Robot mystery series, and is once again set on a Spacer world. This one was written 30 years after the first two, and Asimov's style has noticeably changed between the 1950s and 1980s.

The book starts off slowly, with a lecturing tone which I found quite annoying. For example, devoting an entire page to a discussion of whether the deliberate death of a a robot (even a human shaped on) is murder. Often the first part of the book feels like it is going excessively slowly.

However, its only the first third of so of the book which suffers this flaw. Its as if Asimov realized after a while that he also had a story to tell, and got on with it. The book then improves massively and has a good story.

So, overall I liked this book, although the first part of the book wasn't as good as the rest of the Asimov I've read.

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Naked Sun

Sat, 17 May 2008 14:45:00 GMT

Bill Clarke was kind enough to lend me a compendium of Asimov that contained the next book in the series I'm reading at the moment. I've had to skip over some of the earlier collections of robot short stories, because they're quite hard to find. Specifically, I haven't been able to find anyone with a copy of The Complete Robot for sale, even new.

This book is the next in the Robot series, and the second which features Detective Baley. Again Baley is solving a murder, although this time its occurred on a Spacer world instead of his own Earth. Along the way he has to confront his own fear of open spaces, as well as other's fear of proximity to other humans.

This was again another excellent book. I enjoyed it a lot.

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Caves of Steel

Wed, 14 May 2008 10:00:00 GMT

Caves of Steel is interesting because it is a murder mystery set in the future, which at the time this book was written was a novel concept. It also presents an interesting almost-communist view of the future, where individual liberties are surrendered one by one in order to improve economic efficiency in order to support Earth's ever growing population. Implicit in that is the assertion that capitalism is inherently inefficient, but I'll leave that discussion alone.

This book is a really quick read. It took me a day (including actually going to work) to knock it over, which was fun. The book is a good, light read.

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I, Robot

Mon, 12 May 2008 05:32:00 GMT

The 1950s must have been a great time to be a science fiction author. WW2 was finally over, and seemingly massively stupid ideas like mutually assured destruction, nuclear rifles so powerful that they were as much a danger to those firing them as those who were on the receiving end, and Brylcreem were all the rage. Into this atmosphere of run away idiocy comes Asimov's I, Robot, the book which defined the three laws of robotics, and some how managed to not suggest that humanity should nuke each other all into submission. This book is still an excellent read almost 60 years later, and I think still shows us some of the future. Its a little depressing to think how little we've achieved towards Asimov's proposed future world, given the time line laid out in this book.

One of the interesting aspects of this book is Asimov's failure to predict things which seem so mundane now, but must have not been obvious to an observer in 1950. For example:

The commonness of computers now. One of the short stories revolves around a secret batch of robots, and the need to debug them. The protagonists can't use a computer though, because that would draw too much attention. Why not use a laptop? Because Asimov failed to predict them.
The use of wire recorders to record sound. No optical media (or whatever we'll have in the future) here.
The assumption that robots contain vacuum tubes.
The failure to account for inflation. This one should have been obvious! A batch of 63 robots for instance is valued at $2 million dollars in one of the stories, a sum so great that no one can conceive of deliberately destroying the batch.

A good book.

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Bill The Galactic Hero

Sat, 10 May 2008 14:19:00 GMT

This book is an interesting read, but for unusual reasons. Its as if Harrison sets out to write a terrible book, and learns new techniques to achieve this terrible along the way. An example of his mastery of the art:

A hundred bucks a month was good money, though, and Bill saved every bit of it. Easy, lazy months rolled by, and he regularly went to meetings and reported regularly to the G.B.I., and on the first of every month he would find his money baked into the egg roll he invariably had for lunch. He kept the greasy bills in a toy rubber cat he found on the rubbish heap, and bit by bit the kitty grew.

It seems to me that this book is so terrible it has to be deliberate, and its good to see that Wikipedia agrees:

Bill, the Galactic Hero is a satirical science fiction novel by Harry Harrison, first published in 1965.

It is a response to Heinlein's controversially militaristic Starship Troopers. The overall plot is similar, the details rather less so; and Harrison makes the most of an opportunity to spoof the work of other authors including Isaac Asimov, "Doc" Smith, and Joseph Heller. Harrison reports having been approached by a Vietnam veteran who described Bill as "the only book that's true about the military".

This book is a study in bad writing, and that's what makes it great. This book is entertaining, stupid, and funny. You wont to be a better person at the end, but you wont be bored while reading it either. To be clear -- I loved this book and its paranoia-like universe.

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The Complete Hammer's Slammers Volume 1 and 2

Wed, 07 May 2008 12:21:00 GMT

It occurred to me over the weekend that it was odd that I was updating books I had recently read on a book site like goodreads, given that all I'm doing by entering data on their site is blogging someplace that not even I remember to read. I'm therefore going to move all of that stuff over to here, and then try to remember to blog about books I've read recently in the future. Don't worry though, I don't get much time to read in between work, study and kids, so it wont be too many posts.

Dad got me these books for my birthday last year, and they were awesome. The books are about a future tank squadron which takes on mercenary jobs, none of which ever seem to be clean or simple. Along the way you end up learning that they're all just misfits who haven't managed to find any other job which is a better fit for them. Worse than that, I'm left with the impression that in the back of their minds they all realize that they're running on borrowed time. David Drake has a unique position to comment on what its like to fight in a war, given he is a Vietnam veteran. These stories are fantastic science fiction, and often leave you with a realization that war often isn't simple, or fair. I first encountered David's writing when I was a kid reading a remaindered anthology called "Battlefields Beyond Tomorrow", which was a collection of short war science fiction stories. Luckily for me 15 or so years after I first encountered them I still think they are great stories. These books are highly recommended. [isbn: 1892389738]

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A Stainless Steel Rat is Born

Wed, 07 May 2008 12:19:00 GMT

This was another book I read as a kid and had fond memories of. When I found it at Powell's books for under $4 I just had to pick it up. Harrison seems to focus on "pulp science fiction" -- all of the stuff I have seen from him has been short and easy reading, as is the case with this book. What do you do if you're stuck on a farming planet, smart, and bored out of your brain? Apparently the answer is to turn to a life of crime for entertainment. That's what James DeGriz does, and he is a great anti-hero while he's at it. Great book.

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Exciting news

Thu, 29 Jun 2006 12:48:00 GMT

Today email arrived with the contract for my second book (following on from The Definitive Guide to ImageMagick). This one is a still-secret project hatched with Stewart Smith, and I don't want to mention the topic in public just yet. There are two reasons for that -- there's always a risk that the whole project will be a massive train wreck, and because Stewart and I haven't talked yet about how we want to do the announcement. This book will be done with Apress, which I guess means that I thought they were pretty good to work with the first time.

Anyway, just keeping you up to date on the gossip...

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Trying out the Apress e-book system

Mon, 08 Aug 2005 11:32:00 GMT

Full disclosure: I am currently writing a book for Apress.

As an Apress author Apress asked me to check out the Apress e-book online catalog thingie. They threw in a free e-book as an incentive, so I thought I should give it a try. I've done a fair few book reviews for AUUG / Woodslane over the last couple of years, so it seemed like a good idea to look further into this e-book thing anyway. Especially as I have a garage full of books that I occasionally need as references, but don't have the space to store in the house, especially with two small kids who like to draw in books around.

So, I picked a book in their online catalog, and said I'd like to buy it. I entered the discount code, and was good to go until they noticed that I didn't have an online account in their system. So, I had to stop my "purchase" and make one. Which meant that my place was lost in the purchase, as I had to wait for a confirmation email to arrive, and then click on a link in that email which didn't have the stage I was up to embedded into it.

The email by the way set off my somewhat aggressive spam filtering, by not having any of my addresses in the delivery headers. I had to go digging in the probably spam folder to find it. You can read about my mail list filtering rules over here if that kind of thing excites you.

So a couple of warts. After all of this I went and found the book again, entered the discount code, and "bought the e-book". What this gives me is an entry in the list of books I have access to on the Apress site, which means I can download the e-book more than once (if for instance I delete it in error or something). The book is a PDF file, with the slightly annoying name of "book143.pdf". The book in question is quite long, and is about a nine megabyte download.

Oh, all of this webby stuff was with Firefox on Debian Linux, which all worked fine. The PDF file opens fine with xpdf, with a password on the file which matches the email address I signed up with. This just means that you need to remember the email address that you used when you signed up with Apress, which seems reasonable in a world with fairly permanent email addresses now. It also means that if I put the e-book up on kazaa or something, that they can tell which account did it I suppose.

xpdf seems to think that printing works by the way, although I don't have a printer configured to actually test with.

Overall, I think it's quite good. The e-book was very cheap ($15 US if I'd paid), I can download it lots, I don't have to remember a crappy password, and the PDF doesn't seem too crippled. Cool.

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Herm. Jeremy Wright's book eats my printer driver

Wed, 08 Jun 2005 19:45:00 GMT

Windows Server 2003. Epson Stylus CX3100. Microsoft Word. Page 9 of Chapter 6 consistently eats my printer driver and causes all print outs until the printer is rebooted to be bogus. Strange.

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