I’ve read a lot of crappy short stories lately. Many were in a stack of anthologies by little known authors I bought at random, and there you expect that writing class air of having laboriously learned how to write, but not having anything to say. But what excuse does Haruki Murakami have? Every story in Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman starts out walking cheerfully towards brilliance, but Murakami’s artsy affectations derail them towards the merely clever. What a waste of talent.

And then .. Ray Bradbury. The Golden Apples of the Sun. Perfection. Now, maybe the contrast between this and the previous books has skewed my judgement, but I’ll tell you how I felt when I read it, and then you may decide for yourself if I’m trustworthy or not. Bradbury’s stories have the delicate structure of an origami. They convey emotions that have no name, insane ideas that make sense. Done with less skill the origami would tear, there is no “almost” in this territory, but these, miraculously, never do. The authors I mentioned before all walk in Bradbury’s genre-bending footsteps, and they all fail, but he’s hardly to blame for that. I bow for Ray Bradbury. Ray Bradbury is God. Okay, that really is the contrast speaking. Then again, maybe one occasionally needs to read bad books, in order to better appreciate the good ones?

Teenagers don’t talk and act like they do in Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother, but who cares? Veronica Mars-teens make more interesting characters. And everything here apart from that is either real or plausible. The technology is real. Little Brother is the best beginner’s introduction you’ll find to privacy and surveillance. And if you wonder why privacy should matter to you, it explains that too. The politics are thriller-plausible, reality exaggerated for story purposes. So maybe the Department of Homeland Security wouldn’t turn San Francisco into a police state because of a second 9/11, but there’s still an important message here about the friction between being free and feeling safe, about the merely symbolic value of many anti-terror measures, and about the two faces of information technology: One takes our freedoms away, the other gives them back. The main character’s aliases hint at Doctorow’s twin inspirations: W1n5t0n, from Orwell’s 1984, and M1k3y, from Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Little Brother is very similar to The Moon.., with the same mood and the same educational purpose. Doctorow’s message of hope, that a bunch of teenagers can use technology to defend their civil rights from authoritarian grownups, is actually depressing when you think about it. Doctorow implies that in tomorrow’s world you’ll need to be a tech geek to have any privacy. That’s not the argument he wants to make, but it’s not far from the truth: Our governments are sleeping surveillance giants. Everybody be very, very quiet now.

This is how to write pop-sci: Select a theme, a Big Idea, but let it flow naturally from the subject. Dumb it down, but not enough to give the reader a false sense of understanding. Keep your anecdotes few and relevant. After too many Wisdom of Crowds-type books that violate all of the above, it is refreshing to find Fearful Symmetry – The Search for Beauty in Modern Physics by Anthony Zee. Zee aims to present not the details but the flavor of 20th century physics. His two central concepts, symmetry and group theory, are both simpler and more difficult than the formula-oriented physics most of us remember from school, allowing a randomly educated amateur like me to enjoy the book without giving me the idea that I know the first thing about physics. Which is how it should be. Written in 1986, Fearful Symmetry says almost nothing about string theory, and that’s not really a weakness. One step at a time. In line with the Blake reference, Zee refers liberally to Him (the ultimate creator) and Her (mother nature) throughout the book, which is an unintrusive figure of speech, but it also reflects a deism that evades the question of why there are such beautiful patterns in physics in the first place. When all your explanations for a Mystery are bad ones, (“somebody just made it that way”), it may be best not to explain it at all.

A few pages into Halting State by Charles Stross, you realize that a novel written entirely in the second person has a fair chance of being tiresomely intimate. Your relationship with Stross is a bit strained as it is, a mix of admiration for his alpha geek approach to writing, and annoyance with same. Accelerando and The Glasshouse were smart and funny, The Jennifer Morgue was hip and empty, and you realize that it’s now up to Halting State to decide your continued interest in Stross. It doesn’t take long for your fears to subside, and you even find yourself enjoying the second person gimmick. This near-future MMORPG bank heist story, an attempt to bring cyberpunk tropes into the age of World of Warcraft, is the good old Stross. It reminds you why you came to like Stross in the first place: Because all his characters talk like hyper-caffeinated tech geeks who read all the science journals you wish you had time for. Then again, you dislike some of his other books for exactly the same reason. It’s hard to explain – Stross is like the subcultural equivalent of the town you grew up in: It’s a nice place to visit once a while, familiarity greets you everywhere you turn, but it grows tiresome if you stay too long, and it’s hard to explain its peculiar charm to out-of-towners.

Kluge by Gary Marcus should have been just right for me. As someone who’s had more than my share of mistaken beliefs, I’m interested in the psychology of bad reasoning and irrational behavior, and so is Marcus. A kluge is an inelegant, but cheap and effective solution to a problem, a bit like a MacGyverism, and Marcus’s Big Simple Idea (can one write pop-sci without one?) is that the human brain is full of evolutionary kluges. Memory, belief, language, decision making, all our effective but flawed abilities reflect nature’s quick-and-dirty approach to the problem of survival. Evolution aims for good enough, not perfect. This is a good pretext to summarize interesting psychological research, but I’ve read it all better and more insightful elsewhere. Marcus’s commentary adds little to the research he cites, and his attempt to connect everything to evolutionary advantage is strained and irrelevant. The nicest thing I can say of Kluge is that it summarizes good books on important subjects, with the intention of helping people think smarter. What you should read instead is How We Know What Isn’t So by Thomas Gilovich, and Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, and then just follow the thread from there. (Do it! Please! Help decontaminate the meme pool one person at a time.)

This is it, the missing piece: Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon by Spider Robinson. Do you ever have the feeling that there was something you were supposed to have discovered long ago, a movie or book you should have found at age 16 that would have been with you ever since? Me neither, but here it is, the one I missed. The funny thing is that this is not among the best novels I’ve read recently, as quality of writing goes. I can see the flaws, and I would be more comfortable writing a snarky put-down of its sentimentalism, (it wouldn’t be difficult at all), but that wouldn’t be honest. The honest, ugly truth is that Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon sucker-punched me. I didn’t know you could do these things in a way that didn’t come off as fake. Now before you ask me what the plot is, I’ll review books the way I want to, thank you very much, and in any case this isn’t a book review, this is a “welcome to my library Spider Robinson, make yourself at home”. If you must have a TV executive’s summary, it’s Cheers meets Neil Gaiman’s Worlds’ End. Genrewise it’s science fiction in the same way that its politics are hippie-libertarian: Laid-back and very, very casual about it. And it’s full of groan-inducing puns. Is that a recommendation? Maybe, kind of, but that’s not really the point. Good or not, this one is mine.

Like a Tarantino movie written by Grant Morrison, Steve Aylett’s Slaughtermatic goes nowhere in a confusing and violent way. When I read Lint, Aylett’s biography of a non-existent SF author, I didn’t realize just how much of himself he had put into Lint. Jeff Lint is a master of absurd one-liners, and so is Aylett. You approach each sentence as if it were an undetonated bomb, (“the idea broke like a bone, hurting and useless”). Reading Slaughtermatic at normal speed is to miss the point. It will make your head hurt either way, but at quarter speed, and with repeated rereadings of unusually strange paragraphs, you may also enjoy it, though I offer no guarantees. A satire of hyper-violence, from a world of casual murder and philosopher criminals, Slaughtermatic makes about five aborted detours on every page, dropped into the story to derail the reader, (“Specter was an expert in fractal litigation, whereby the flapping of a butterfly’s wing on one side of the world resulted in a massive compensation claim on the other”). It’s hilarious, and proof that you can be absurd (“there were four dead guns on the floor, one still twitching”) without being obscure – which is why I now regret the comparison to Morrison, who is both.

[The cops] had escalated internal cover-ups after the crime strike embarassment four years ago – the only people conspicously unaware of the strike were the cops, who had gone on killing and looting as usual.

Alfred Bester’s own titles for his novels were always better than the ones they got from the publishers. The Stars My Destination (1957) was originally known as Tiger! Tiger!, from Blake’s poem, which sets the tone for both Bester’s writing style and the main character. Bester’s title for The Demolished Man (1953, no relation to the Stallone movie) was Demolition! Apparently you can’t have exclamation points in novel titles. I guess it would be tiresome if everyone did it, but if anyone deserved the privilege it would be Alfred Bester. Bester used words in the same playful and violent manner that a thug wields a baseball bat. His novels just skip along, brimming with energy, jumping erratically in new directions on every other page. The Demolished Man (no, Demolition!, with a greedy glint in your eye, as in: power!, ambition!, wealth!) was Bester’s first novel, and not as good as his masterpiece The Stars My Destination, but its treatment of telepathy was solid enough to be stolen in its entirety (along with the author’s name) by Joe Straczynski for Babylon 5. It won the first Hugo Award, and was among the first of the great modern science fiction novels. The Freudianism feels dated, but – Jesus – look at the way he writes.

There are two novels called The Apocalypse Door, as I found out when I accidentally bought the wrong one. I saw a recommendation for the one by James D. McDonald, but bought the one by William Todd. Todd’s novel is a piece of crap. The world does not need more self-published Lovecraft imitators. McDonald’s Apocalypse Door is not great, but interesting. It’s the kind of good, concept-driven novel that is a bit more fun to describe than to read: Catholic demon-fighting told as hardboiled crime. It’s all there – an intricate multi-twisted plot, underground dealings with dangerous powers, a Maltese McGuffin, and most importantly that hardboiled style, but instead of Philip Marlowe or Sam Spade you have two Knight Templars and an assassin nun saving the world from an unholy race of mushroom people. Sounds fun? It is, (“the hairs were standing up on the back of my neck, and I’d been working on the rough side of the scholastic method long enough that I couldn’t ignore that kind of feeling”), but it’s more clever than good. I feel like politely applauding the worksmanship, and that’s not what I’m looking for in a book.

I am not going to recommend Doris Lessing’s 1971 Briefing For a Descent Into Hell, to anyone, ever, probably, or at least not without a word of warning. I liked it, I’m impressed by it, and moved, it’s one of the strangest novels I’ve read in a while, but it’s not the sort of book you just hand to someone, “here, read this!” It was only the quality of the writing that carried me through the uneventful first third, and I was beginning to worry that it would all be nothing more than this: a mildly peculiar journey made by a madman in his own mind while undergoing psychiatric treatment. And then it transforms into a mystical experience that combines ancient mythology, science fiction and pantheistic ecology. It’s kind of the written equivalent to prog, which is another reason not to recommend it: people have mixed feelings about that sort of thing. Now I like prog, in small doses, and I also like this novel. Lessing is ambitious, but her ambition is matched by her skill. And if I ever go on a cosmic journey to find my true self, I’d want Doris Lessing to document it with her beautiful, hypnotic writing. But I’ll respect your decision to stay at home, (you brainwashed materialist zombie!) Now where did I put those Eloy records?