Which book are you reading now? Volume XIV

[Birdjaguar]

I had never checked out 2 books at once and I figured it would be a stretch but things really got away from me. I'm within 50 pages of finishing the Korolev book so I might just make it after all.

I try to check out no more than 3 at a time.

 

[Arakhor]

And I haven't needed to visit a library not to read books for years and years.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Weird flex but ok ;-)

 

[Arakhor]

By which I mean I've patronised my local charity store so much over the years that I still have scores of unread books.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

WEIRDER FLEX but OK

 

[Ajidica]

WEIRDER FLEX but OK

Isn't OT one big 'weird flex, but ok'?

 

[Traitorfish]

WEIRDER FLEX but OK

Humblebragging about the size of your "to read" pile is a pretty routine nerd flex. My supervisor pulls this one at least once a week.

and mine is pretty huge guys just putting it out there

 

[yung.carl.jung]

going with the flow of this thread.. I've read a lot this new year. some really good stuff. much of marx's early work. completely different from capital. he writes in the weirdest way, most of the time just quoting mill and his gang and applying hegelian dialectics to their ideas. I'm glad I read it in a course because otherwise I wouldn't have understood much of it. a good chunk of it is in french, too, god damn. but he exposes some really brilliant ideas, what stuck with me most are his thoughts about human recognition, savour (americans don't really have a word for it, the German is "Genuss"), and needs. Much of his critique of capitalism feels now more relevant than ever. Brilliant, especially on monopolies and cartels, housing, loans.. If anyone's interested in Marx I would definitely recommend to read this, perhaps before the capital, since the texts are literal manuscripts, quite short, and expose an incredible amount of ideas in their brevity. Just skip the one about Jews. It wasn't horrible, just bad. Not really that interesting to me, even from a historical perspective.

I've been reading lots of Haiku stuff. Pretty much everything by Issa. He's fantastic. Lots of stuff about pooping animals and prostitutes and depression. Certainly unexpected. Also read all the travel stuff (I think it was 3 short books total) by Matsuo Basho. They're great, but should be read in a slow pace, otherwise one is overwhelmed by the amount of cherry blossoms and plum trees. All the travel-related stuff was incredibly cool and certainly interesting both as literature and a historical document.

Read Kuhn's "structure of scientific revolutions" for another seminar. He fleshed out a lot of the things that earlier writers, like Ludwik Fleck, hat already imagined, but did it in such a convincing and coherent way that it really stuck. His view of science is certainly socially-tinged, his idea of incommensurability (I hope its spelt right) is one that kind of breaks with a lot of common sense though about the development of the natural sciences. Kuhn sees scientists as adherent to a paradigm, which dictates the way scientists work methodically, develop ideas, but also see the world, in an empirical sense. In his view a person from an Einsteinian paradigm not only views the world differently, but is actually looking at a different world, so to speak. Scientists mostly work in "normal science" which according to him is "cleanup work" and the solving of puzzles, by applying method, having a shared set of axioms, thinking in the same terminology et cetera. But since "reality" doesn't adhere to our imperfect methods, scientists discover anomalies. Things that, under the current framework, simply don't work out. If these accumulate, and are seen as grave by the community (again, social aspect), there is a time of unrest and the paradigm is questioned. Different new theories emerge and a discourse breaks out. Kuhn notes here that it often isn't rational arguments that lead the debate, but that propaganda, psychology, money, power, even aesthetics (so, too, say Fleck and Einstein) are more often that not the reason why one theory triumps in popularity over the others. In a revolution a new paradigm is chosen, and afterwards scientists again research according to "normal science".

I'm also reading Feyerabends reply to Kuhn, but am not quite done yet.

 

[Birdjaguar]

I've been reading lots of Haiku stuff. Pretty much everything by Issa. He's fantastic. Lots of stuff about pooping animals and prostitutes and depression. Certainly unexpected. Also read all the travel stuff (I think it was 3 short books total) by Matsuo Basho. They're great, but should be read in a slow pace, otherwise one is overwhelmed by the amount of cherry blossoms and plum trees. All the travel-related stuff was incredibly cool and certainly interesting both as literature and a historical document.

Yozakura yields Hanaakari!

 

[AmazonQueen]

I try to check out no more than 3 at a time.

I've never taken more than 50 out of 1 library at a time.

 

[EgonSpengler]

Finished Station Eleven (2014). Outstanding writing. Best use of flashbacks I can remember.

Onto Daisy Jones & The Six (2019). At first I thought the interview-style structure would wear on me, but I'm warming up to it.

Spoiler :

I keep picturing Billy in my head as Russell from Almost Famous, even though I know that isn't totally accurate (and stupidly unimaginative, to boot). I'm trying to cut it out, but I keep doing it.

EDIT: Finished Daisy Jones. Good stuff. I also read Artemis, by Andy Weir. Pretty good. Not as good as The Martian, but that's obviously a high bar. I haven't decided what to read next.

 

[tjs282]

Nemesis Games did not disappoint, and Babylon's Ashes has started well.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

EDIT: Finished Daisy Jones. Good stuff. I also read Artemis, by Andy Weir. Pretty good. Not as good as The Martian, but that's obviously a high bar. I haven't decided what to read next.

I think that Artemis could have benefited greatly from the ghost-writing-by-public treatment that The Martian got. He published The Martian bit by bit on his blog and got a ton of feedback that he used to tighten the narrative and the technical explanations. Artemis was good, but it was not as tight. He also dipped his toes into that weird libertarian pasttime of portraying pedophilia as potentially only wrong if the kid is unwilling. In the end, of course, the pedophile in question was made to suffer, but he still flirted with the idea anyways and for no real reason that I could make out other than he could. A charitable explanation is that it was just character development but it wasn't particularly good character development although it sort of fits in with the whole libertarian ethos of the moon city.

On the technical side, he was also a bit disappointing. The bit with the protagonist having to memorize the plumbing layout of a life support system by looking at a diagram and then going outside and working on the real-world tubes was really, really dumb. Those diagrams are purely abstractions and you cannot stare at them and memorize them without some sort of training, and no one can do it in 5 minutes even with training. And then to translate that mental schematic onto the real world tubes which won't be laid out as they are in the schematic - purely absurd. Thing is that minimal feedback from non-lit editors would have sorted all that out pretty easily.

 

[Truthy]

The Periodic Table by Primo Levi

 

[hobbsyoyo]

James Harford is (was?) a pretty high-up guy in the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) since before that leading center of American aerospace was even formed. He was a front-line participant in the space race and an expert in Russian space technology from the beginning. After the fall of the USSR, James reached out to his contacts in the ex-Soviet space industry and was able to do a lot of research and traveling in Russia to put together this biography of Sergei Korolev in the mid 90's. The book is filled with a ton of anecdotes about his research that open a window into this unique time when the Russians opened up a lot of archives and materials to western researchers which they then locked back up in the 2000's.

Spoiler Soviet space program origins :

The biography explains how rocketry and socialist revolution grew up together in Tsarist Russia. Days before he was executed for the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, Nikolai Kibalchich wrote a letter defending his ideas on rocket travel and explaining that his work in this area would ultimately benefit the country even after his death. Rocket development was deeply intertwined with the political situation in Russia and the advancements and let-downs of the Russian space program would closely track with political developments within Russia. While this is obviously true of the US as well, in the early Soviet era, the character of the political entanglement with rocket science in Russia would see many prominent Russian engineers and scientists thrown into gulag arbitrarily.

Spoiler Korolev's education and imprisonement :

Sergei Korolev was one such victim and he spent much of the 1930's in various Soviet gulags, then the war and early postwar years as only a partially rehabilitated ex-con in service of the state. It was not until the 50's that his rehabilitation was complete and even then his identity and his contributions to Soviet space science and engineering were censored completely until he died.

Before gulag, Korolev worked his way through secondary and tertiary education as a working-class child of divorce without access to the privileges and material comforts of most of his peers. For one 12-year stretch, he lived in his grandmothers kitchen, which really shows how hard times were. At that time, higher education was mainly reserved for the upper strata of Soviet society so he entered that system as an outsider. He received hands-on experience in designing and building aircraft while in school and eventually built a glider which smashed previous records for time aloft. After graduation, he went to work at a leading aircraft bureau and was eventually arrested and sent into the prison labor system for no reason during one of Stalin's great purges.

Spoiler Korolev's Rise :

During the war, Korolev worked on aircraft engine design and had some forays into rocket engine development. He eventually joined the military as a major and was sent to live in occupied East Germany as the Germans retreated. Even before V-E day, Korolev was an active participant in the Soviet's version of Operation Paperclip, where the Allies scrambled across Europe to plunder the best Nazi scientists and technologies. While the Americans got von Braun and the cream of the German engineering crop, the Russians got most of the technicians, many lower-level engineers and the production facilities for the V-2 and other weapons. The Germans that the Russians captured were happy to have steady access to food and generally went along with being relocated back into the USSR proper. There, Korolev and others effectively sucked them dry of experience and information and eventually sent them back about a decade later.

It was at this time that Korolev really began to come into his own. He was put in charge of various efforts to first re-engineer the V-2 and then to build upon it. Almost immediately, Korolev understood the drawbacks of the German design and outlined a technical path to develop bigger, better missiles. Also, like von Braun, Korolev also immediately began to lobby the powers that be to be allowed to produce civil applications (i.e. manned space travel and satellites) for this new rocket technology. Eventually, Korolev was put in charge of almost all space efforts and most of the rocket development efforts across the entire Soviet Union.

Comparisons between Korolev and von Braun are very unfavorable to the latter. For one Korolev was never a damned Nazi war criminal. For another, von Braun never came close to the level of power and responsibility that Korolev enjoyed.

Korolev's work had a more practical approach than his American counterparts. There is an amusing anecdote where a couple of engineers spotted a small liquid oxygen leak on a rocket ground system before launch and one of them pissed on the leaking joint and the frozen piss sealed it off. At the same time, Korolev knew how important his work was for human development and was aware of the legacy he would leave behind. In one showcase of this, a worker was conducting a test on an engineering model of the first Sputnik satellite. This engineering model did not have the surface finish that the flight model had as it was unneeded on the ground. Korolev admonished the worker and told him that this engineering model would end up as a museum piece and thus it must perfectly match the real unit.

Korolev frequently rode people hard and could have an explosive temperament. Unlike most leaders with this trait, however, Korolev would always go out of his way to make things right with whoever he had yelled at, even if he didn't admit fault. Korolev rode himself the hardest though. He worked insane hours and was always busying himself with fairly low-level details of all of his products. He would often go onto factory floors for inspections - something von Braun never really did.

Spoiler The failed Soviet moon program and Korolev's death :

Korolev made a valiant effort at putting cosmonauts on the moon but lack of funding and the constant backbiting and fighting of the other design bureaus meant his effort - the N1/L3 rocket and lander system - never really got a firm footing. They devoured funds at a rate comparable to the Apollo program but there was never enough funds and there was never a central, unifying drive behind the program that there was behind Apollo.

Korolev died during a surgery in 1966 (there are conflicting reports on the surgeon's competence) and after that, his moon program was scrapped after some failed tests and his bureau was taken over by his biggest rival. Injuries he had sustained in gulag directly contributed to his death, which is truly tragic.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

One thing I would l would add to that is how absolutely thoroughly the Soviets buried their moon project and thus much of Korolev's legacy. The museum in the Korolev design bureau still wasn't displaying N-1 artifacts in their collection as of the 90's when the book was written. One of the rocket stages was turned into a pig trough and they tried to pretend they never competed with the US when in fact they had spent as much of their GDP on their project as the US did on Apollo and in fact employed more people in the effort.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

I really like this style of Sci Fi cover art. I found that The Expanse covers were too abstracted and I generally don't like the spaceships to be too vague and undefined.

Weird flex: I finished this book in 2 days. This series is definitely a change of pace from some of the denser books I've been reading and a welcome change at that. It was a good sequel and I can't wait for the last to book to be released this year.

Spoiler :

This book sees the beginning of the collapse of the faster-than-light, inter-dimensional flow network. The new emperox is also forced to assert her dominance as political intrigue threatens to take her down. As the flow collapses, they discover that it also opens temporary flow paths to different systems, including ones that haven't been contacted in centuries...

 

[Synobun]

The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson. As close to a perfect book I've ever read.

 

[Kaitzilla]

I'll just go ahead and link the greatest Super Hero story ever written. (It is grim, dark, and very long)
Once you finish reading it in a few months, you won't ever have to read or watch another super hero story ever again because they will all suck.

Worm - Wildbow
https://parahumans.wordpress.com/2011/06/11/1-1/

If Worm is too dark for you all, and it probably is, how about a Magical School story mixed with Groundhog Day?
It is almost as good as Worm, and the grammar is superior.

Mother of Learning - Nobody103
https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/21220/mother-of-learning/chapter/301778/1-good-morning-brother

 

[EnglishEdward]

I bought a second hand copy of the "Journal of the Plague Year"
from a charity shop the other week.

That was to distract me from this Wuhan coriona virus and cheer me up,

It has three stories in it:

"Orbital Decay" by 'Malcolm Cross' was rather good

"Dead Kelly by 'C B Harvey' was a good yarn, but had
a couple of holes in the plot and a predictable ending.

I have yet to start the third story:

"The Bloody Deluge" by "Adrian Tchaikovsky"