Embarrassingly for someone who claims to be fan of science-fiction, it’s been a while since I last read a sci-fi novel. Most of my fiction reading these days are on the web, either web-based originals or fanfiction. I picked Charles Stross’s Halting State to read recently both because I’d previously read his Accelerando and thought it interesting and because this particular novel’s tie-in with online gaming worlds seems like a good fit for my own interests.
Every year at around this time, I make a summary post about the winners of the scientific Nobel Prizes because I feel that insufficient attention is paid to them. I always ignore the Peace Prize and the Literature Prize. Here are the winners for Physics, Chemistry, Physiology / Medicine and Economics categories.
The physics prize seems unexciting to me but I guess it is practical and useful. It goes to Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura for discovering how to produce blue light beams from semi-conductors. This is what enabled modern LED lamps to be a reality as it is not possible to create white lamps without blue light.
The chemistry prize goes for to Eric Betzig, Stefan W. Hell and William E. Moerner for the invention of nanoscopy. Previously, optical microscopes were limited to a resolution of about half the wavelength of light, or about 200 nanometres. This prize is awarded for two separate developments: STED microscopy which uses two laser beams, one to stimulate fluorescent molecules to glow and another to cancel out all fluorescence except for that within a nanometre-sized volume, and single-molecule microscopy which relies on turning the fluorescence of individual molecules on and off and superimposing all of the images thereby gained into a single super-image. Both techniques bring microscopy into the nano-scale.
The physiology / medicine prize goes to John O´Keefe, May-Britt Moser and Edvard I. Moser for research into the positioning system in the brain. As would be obvious, many animals have a sense of location and an internal map of the locations that they know and how paths lead from one place to another. O´Keefe realized that a specific type of nerve cell in the brain of a rat always activated when in a specific location. The two others discovered another type of nerve cell that together generate a coordinate system that allows for positioning and pathfinding. Together these constitute the essential elements of what is effectively an internal GPS.
The economics prize goes to Jean Tirole. This is for a body of work rather than any single significant discovery so it’s harder to summarize. Apparently his most important work lies in clarifying how to understand and regulate industries that are dominated by a few powerful firms. He also showed that regulation needs to be adapted to the conditions specific to each industry.
This last book of the Mars trilogy is the most epic in scope, covering some one hundred years worth of events and extending the saga to the rest of the Solar system and even beyond. At the same time, it feels frustratingly parochial, with its strong focus on the same old set of characters who are forced to deal with new iterations of familiar problems. As much as we readers have grown to love these characters over the course of the previous books, it’s hard to shake off the feeling that this book isn’t just a retread of what has come before with added proviso that many of the characters are now so mature as to leave little room for additional character development.
When I first read the second book of the Martian Trilogy, I was immediately struck by the epic sense of history it embodies. Set fifty years after the end of the first novel, it shows how the real Martians are the children of the settlers who have never known Earth. Standing over two meters tall, they move with a grace that those born on Earth can never achieve. Moreover, their profound disinterest of all things Terran and unselfconscious Martianness marked the passing of an era.
I first read Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy not long after it first came out. Like everyone else, I was left gobsmacked not only by the multi-generational scale of the epic but also by the eerie sense that the scenario was all too plausible. It felt like we could wake up one morning and discover that it all came true.
I’m still slowly working on reading the great classics of science-fiction that every fan of the genre should read at least once. I’ve been a fan of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea series ever since high school but I’ve read precious few of her more substantial Hainish Cycle novels. The Left Hand of Darknes, originally published in 1969, is perhaps the most well-known of these and was the big book that made Le Guin a great SF writer so it’s well past time that I got around to reading it.
I have read The Dispossessed, published in 1974 but judging from the events in the books apparently set thousands of years before The Left Hand of Darkness. There are obvious stylistic and thematic parallels between the two books. In each of the two books, two different societies that are rivals to each other are described. The reader takes the role of tourist to compare and remark upon the differences and similarities between the two rival societies. In The Dispossessed, the contrast is between the capitalist Urras and the anarcho-communist Anarres, obvious allusions to the United States and the Soviet Union.
The Gripping Hand is the sequel to The Mote in God’s Eye. In some markets, it is also sold as The Moat around Murcheson’s Eye, which is a mouthful for a title but perhaps makes more sense. It was released in 1993, a full eighteen years after the first book was published. (George R.R. Martin fans might want to take note.) That’s almost as long as the time that has passed in-universe between the events of the two books.
The sequel centers around two characters from the first book. Kevin Renner who was navigator on board the INSS MacArthur during the mission to Mote Prime and Horace Bury, the trading magnate who initially saw the Moties as a tremendous money-making opportunity but later became terrified of them. The two are now agents of Navy Intelligence, with the responsibility of ferreting out rebel threats to the Empire while the Imperial Navy concentrates its resources on the Motie blockade.