I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life by Ed Yong

I just got back from an eight-day vacation and I’m frantically trying to catch up, so instead of writing an actual blog post I’m just going to echo what I said on Twitter:

Tweet #1:
This is not a good day to talk about great books, but if I don’t mention it now I’ll forget. So…

Tweet #2:
I just finished the audiobook of I Contain Multitudes by Ed Yong. It’s about microbes: their ubiquity, their variety, their chemistry, and their interactions with the web of life that is Earth, including all of us.

(Hat tip to Vonda N. McIntyre for bringing this title to my attention.)

Tweet #3:
Highly recommended, and lots of ideas for you near-future SF writers. The world we live in is fascinating! Respect it, cherish it, preserve it.

Tweet #4:
Also, if you haven’t already, read KSR’s Aurora which has much to do with microbes and their contributions to ecosystems.
/end

After On: A Novel of Silicon Valley by Rob Reid (audiobook)

OMG, I loved this audiobook!

After On was published last August and I have to confess that I didn’t hear anything about it when it came out and I was not familiar with its author Rob Reid. I decided to check it out because it kept appearing in the “also bought” recommendation list at Amazon, and because it was near-future and sounded like it was going to engage in themes similar to my own work — you know, near-future manipulative AI, that sort of thing.

I listened to the sample and I was still sort of “Hmmm…” But if I didn’t like it, I could always return it, so what-Ev-er!

And yes, so to-tally worth it. (I’m trying to capture the voice of one of the characters here.)

This is a smart, funny, ingenious, and informative novel. As the title suggests, it’s set in Silicon Valley and follows several entrepreneurial (OMG, I spelled that word right on the first try!) characters as they try to stay afloat in their highly competitive world while striving to come up with the NEXT BIG THING.

There is lot of informative discussion in this novel. EULAs and privacy and Pascal’s Wager, venture capital, how to make a fortune while your company fails, the implications of “Super AI”, Twitter lynch mobs, fiction as thought experiments that might be applied to life, Fermi’s paradox, people-people, and people who aren’t so good with people, just for a few examples.

It’s possible some of this might be a little tedious to read, I don’t know. I found it all fascinating to listen to.

The audiobook is read by a large and very talented cast. They put a lot of effort into their performance, and I found the story fun and fascinating.

Highly recommended.

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life by Mark Manson

You’ve probably seen this book around. It’s classified as a self-help book. I read an excerpt from it sometime ago and liked what the author had to say, but I felt like I’d already applied a lot of his principles in my life, so I didn’t pick it up.

Recently though, the subject of the book came up again so I decided to listen to the audiobook — and I really enjoyed it! It’s profane but humorous, it tells engaging stories to illustrate its points, and the narrator is excellent.

“Not Giving a F*ck” in this context is about seizing the power to choose what you “give a fuck” about. In other words, making the choice only to care about the things that really matter in life and “Not Giving a F*ck” about the rest of it, or about what others think of your choices. Of course there’s a lot more to it, including an interesting discussion of entitlement and a chapter on the effect of social media on our psyches. If you’re looking for a relatively short, smart, and humorous listen, check it out.

Set in the 1990s, Daryl Gregory’s Spoonbenders is the story of a family of psychics who live in the Chicago area. I’d heard it was really good and, wanting to try something different, I listened to a sample of the audiobook — and decided at once to pick it up. I’m so glad I did.

This is a terrific novel. It’s amazingly well plotted, the characterization is fantastic, it’s fun, it’s funny, and it’s utterly engaging. The narrator, Ari Fliakos, does a fantastic job. As is usual for me, I won’t try to describe the plot, but you can check it out at Audible.

I hope Spoonbenders proves to be a huge success for Daryl. He deserves it.

Highly recommended!

This is the first novel by Daryl Gregory I’ve read. I’m looking forward to reading more!

I’ve been waiting for the audiobook to release — I was hoping to include an announcement in a newsletter I sent out yesterday — but I’d had no word on the release date and when I last checked Audible it wasn’t there. I guess I missed it by a few hours, because in an email last night someone told me he had picked up the audiobook.

So it’s available! Narrated by Liisa Ivery. The sample sounds good and I’m looking forward to listening to the full story.

Click here to find it on Audible.

Click here to find it on Amazon.

The full title of Trevor Noah’s childhood memoir is Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood. I picked this audiobook because it had been named a best book of the year by several publications, and because the sample I listened to hooked me immediately.

I can’t say I was a fan of Trevor Noah before this. Really, I knew almost nothing about him except that he was the new host of The Daily Show. But I’m a fan now.

Trevor Noah reads the audiobook himself. He has a wonderful voice and is multilingual, speaking not just the various accents of the characters in the story, but also speaking brief sentences in native languages as he narrates incidents.

The title, Born a Crime, refers to Trevor himself. He was born under apartheid, the son of a black woman and a white man — his very existence evidence of an illegal act — and for the first several years of his life his parents hid him from officials and nosy neighbors.

The quality of the storytelling in this book is amazing. Trevor relates many experiences, beginning in his childhood and progressing through the start of his career as a comedian. Throughout, he reflects with great insight, intelligence, and empathy on what he’s seen and what he’s done. He speaks truths without outrage, but rather in a “let’s talk, let’s get real” style that is easy to listen to, but still powerfully communicates the hardships and the challenges faced by those who endure bigotry, poverty, and destructive cultures. He delves into issues of misogyny and the rights of women, and the incredible strength, independence and stubbornness of his own mother. He discusses racism, skin color, apartheid, poverty, education, the police, life in an abusive home, and making a living when your options are few.

Despite all that, this book is in no sense a downer. Quite the opposite: The strength of spirit and determination that exists in every story that Trevor tells is both inspiring and uplifting.

Highly recommended.

Thomas Mullen is the author of Darktown, a novel set in Atlanta shortly after World War II, in a time when black police officers were first allowed to work in the Atlanta Police Department.

Darktown succeeds on multiple levels. First, it’s very well written, with gorgeous detail in both setting and characters, without ever going overboard.

It also works as a straight-up crime novel as police officers attempt to unravel the mystery behind the murder of a young woman.

But the most powerful aspect of the novel for me was the immersion into the violently segregated culture of the deep south during this period of history. The oppression and brutalization of black communities is rendered in detail, but what’s also made clear is how difficult it is to change the status quo when ordinary citizens, including law enforcement, fully support the authoritarian culture and are thoroughly trained to crush any dissent. Yes, this novel is a well-timed reminder of what authoritarianism and bigotry mean for a society.

Despite this, Darktown is not a “downer.” It’s a fascinating, well-told tale of courage.

I listened to the audio edition. I really enjoyed the narrator’s voice, finding it both pleasant to listen to and easy to understand, with the drawback that the voices of the different characters tended to sound the same, and at several points I wasn’t sure who was speaking.

In my own writing, I’ve begun using more speech tags – he said / she said – since I started listening to audiobooks. Speech tags aren’t always necessary if you’re reading text. If two characters are in conversation, a paragraph break indicates when a different character is speaking. But a listener can’t see this, so additional speech tags can be necessary for clarity. Something to keep in mind, for those of you who write.

Links
It’s easy to tell when I’m trying to catch up on my nonfiction reading — that’s when I start posting links here.

At USNI News, Megan Eckstein has an article titled “CMC Neller: Marines Now Training to Battle Drones, Fight Without Comms”, which is a pretty interesting look at exactly what the title says, and has some intersections with events in The Red trilogy — particularly the last action sequence in Going Dark.

And on a completely different subject, “The Cost of Holding On” is a short post at The New York Times by Carl Richards, offering some excellent advice on letting go of grudges:

“There is an actual cost to holding onto things we should let go of. It can come in the form of anger, frustration, resentment or something even worse. The question is, can you really afford to keep paying the bill?”

I’ve seen people hold on tight to the memory of slights, and to grudges that are twenty, thirty, forty years old, or more. It’s not worth it, folks. All that energy spent on resentment could be so much better spent in positive ways.

Recommended Audiobook
My latest audiobook rave is Bruce Schneier’s Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Capture Your Data and Control Your World. This is a nonfiction read, exploring the remarkable extent of government and corporate surveillance and data collection in the modern world. The book was originally published in 2014. In the realm of technology a two-year-old book might be suspected of being dated, but this one felt utterly relevant. I found it fascinating.

News
The Nanotech Succession Omnibus is an ebook that includes my first four novels, all taking place in a shared story world. The omnibus has been available at my webstore, but it can now be purchased from Kobo if that’s your preferred vendor. Find it here.

The Red now has its second translated edition. The first was Italian. This one is a Polish-language edition by the publisher Rebis. I like that red font on the cover!

Work-In-Progress Report
I haven’t been posting much lately, have I? That’s because I’ve mostly been writing, with time off for workouts — but even the workouts stopped a few days ago as other chores intruded.

Anyway, as noted in the title, this is my last work-in-progress report for the new novel, because that novel is officially “done.”

Of course, in this business there are many phases of “done,” and there will certainly be more revisions to come, but it’s now with my agent, so that’s a draft!

John W. Campbell Memorial Award
The Hugo Awards, given out at Worldcon this past weekend, were casting shade, but the winner of the John W. Campbell Memorial Award was also announced during the convention — and no, it wasn’t me. The award went to Eleanor Lerman for her novel Radiomen. Congratulations to Eleanor! As it turns out, Going Dark was tied for second place alongside Adam Roberts’ The Thing Itself.

Follow this link for details.

Recommended Audiobook
Malka Older’s Infomocracy is a near-future look at politics and the way a global system of “micro-democracies” might work — and of course how people, being people, will attempt to game the system. The story takes place during a world-wide election, held every ten years, in which “centinels” — geographic divisions of a hundred-thousand people — are each choosing new leadership, and there is a lot of competition among the various political groups to pick up these new centinels.

The world building behind Infomocracy is absolutely brilliant and at times some of the observations made in the story are quite funny — but be aware that there is a lot of detail as the characters discuss statistics, voting, and political platforms. Think of Infomocracy as a bureaucrat’s thriller. I won’t be at all surprised to see it on next year’s Campbell Memorial list.

The audio narration is by Christine Marshal and I thought it was very well done.

Thank you to everyone who entered to win a set of The Red trilogy audio CDs!

As you may recall, I was giving away one set of audio CDs to a current subscriber to my newsletter, and one set to a new subscriber, who signed up during the contest period.

Twenty-five current subscribers let me know they wanted to participate, and the twelve new subscribers who signed up during this period were automatically entered.

Today I determined the winners. The process I used was to first assign numbers to entries, following the order I received them. Then I sent my son to Random.org and had him generate two random numbers, one for each group.

Josh was the winner for new subscribers, and Barry won among those who are already subscribed. Congratulations to both, and your CDs are on the way.