The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin

A paranormal romance in which the heroine is not an idiot,

A book that raises fascinating questions about power, sex, theology, race, and slavery – and answers none of them,

Does it count as deus ex machina if the deus in question is (spoiler) the main character?

An ancient war between the gods left the Amn people in charge of four godly prisoners of war. Turns out that enslaved gods make the ultimate weapon, and now the Amn rule the world. (And it’s not a coincidence that Amn sounds like Aryan. They’re described as bone-white in the book and they’re overly concerned with ethnic purity.)

Yeine Darr, the mixed-race granddaughter of the current king of the world, gets summoned to the court where she receives surprising news: the king’s throwing her into the succession contest along with her cousins. Meanwhile Nahadoth, one of the enslaved gods, takes a shine to her. Two cousins who want to murder her and unwanted advances from a billions-year-old chaos god? Yeine must navigate this nightmare.

Just for the fact that it’s something different, I would say bravo to the romance aspect of this book. Yeine possesses a lot more self-awareness than other paranormal romance heroines I’ve read. She knows the difference between lust and love and knows full well that sex with Nahadoth could fry her brains out. She carefully ponders that risk. Jemisin indulges in some Meyeresque prose sometimes – she’s fond of taut moments and bitter looks – and Nahadoth wants Yeine because she’s special, not because of anything Yeine did. On the other hand, there’s a damn good plot reason Yeine is so special.

The politics side of the book left me wanting so much more. For one thing, I want to know how the ruling family of the Amn managed to stay in power for two thousand years straight. We get to see the current nobility guilty of slavery, rape, sex slavery, child sex slavery, religious persecution, torture, mutilation, cannibalism, incest, and alcoholism. That’s an interesting exploration of what two thousand years of absolute power will do to you. But in all that time, there was nobody insane enough to use the god-weapons to destroy the entire planet? Everybody hates the rulers, so I would at least think that failed rebellions would ruin the world’s economy.

Here are just a few of the questions that the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms raises: If your slaves are insane, do you dare set them free? What happens if you engineer a zombie plague that only kills commoners? (That one could have been an entire book.) Is Nahadoth responsible for his actions? Is Yeine Amn or Darre? Is Amn an ethnicity or an attitude? Is brutality to save one’s own people ever justified? Is Yeine ever justified in commanding the enslaved gods?

Are the Darre people any better than the Amn? Yeine accuses the Amn of being barbarians, just the barbarians with the most toys. If the Darre had control of the enslaved gods, what kind of people would the Darre become? The Darre are prejudiced against men and they have a habit of kidnapping and mutilating their neighbors. They earned their enemies. But they didn’t earn the annihilation Yeine’s cousin threatens to deal out to them.

But no, none of these questions get addressed. Yeine just (spoiler) becomes a goddess and fixes everything to her satisfaction. Which includes letting Nahadoth torture one of her cousins. Both Yeine and Nahadoth are forced to do horrible things over the course of the book, but the ending implies that neither of them are going to face any consequences for them.

I enjoyed the book. It’s gripping and I devoured it in a few days. But I really, really wanted it to be Game of Thrones with enslaved gods added and it’s not. It’s foremost a romance novel that happens to have tantalizing political asides.

This is Neat: The Uncanny Valley

What is the uncanny valley? Suppose you win a sweepstakes and the prize is that you get to spend a day hanging out with a robot. You get to pick one of the following companions:

Robot1
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An industrial robot.
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Aww!
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Robot3
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OH GOD WE HAVE TO TAKE OFF AND NUKE IT FROM ORBIT
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Robot4
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A mannequin that’s kind of creepy.
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Robot5 copy
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Are you sure that’s not just a photo of a woman?
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The different reactions you just had to the different faces demonstrate the uncanny valley. We’re fine with completely human or completely nonhuman faces, but many people find faces that are somewhere in between creepy.

Though there’s some evidence that the uncanny valley is a real psychological phenomenon, so far it has been mostly speculative. In a recent paper published in the journal Cognition, a pair of scientists sought to reproduce the uncanny valley experimentally.

Theoretically, this is how we think people will react to faces depending on how human or nonhuman they look:

conjecture The researches collected eighty snapshots of real-life robots that people have actually built. (The five photos above are from their collection.) They asked research participants to rate each face for “mechanicalness” and “humanness” on a scale of 0 to 100. That way they could quantify how far to the left or right each robot belonged on the uncanny valley chart.

Then they recruited a fresh set of participants who wouldn’t be biased by having seen the faces before and asked the new set of people to rate each face on “friendliness.” This is what the researchers got:

This figure looks a lot like the uncanny valley chart we expected. There’s a peak in likability with the cute robots that look a little human, and another peak with the robots that look like regular humans. But note that the 100% industrial robots didn’t do too shabby.

How well people like or dislike a robot’s face is one thing, but does that affect what people actually do? This is a question engineers care about. If they want to build a robot that’s meant to socialize with people, they’d rather not have their human clients secretly trying to kill it. The researchers involved in this paper recruited another batch of participants to address this question.

They gave each participant some imaginary money. Participants got to decide how much money to give to one of the robots in the pictures. Here’s the important part: the researchers told the participants that the robot would decide how much money to give back. Participants who did especially well at maximizing their imaginary money in the game would win real money as a prize. So the participants had to make decisions about how much they trusted each robot with real money at stake.

These are the results:

trust The researchers found an uncanny-valley-like pattern again.

Based on this research, we have evidence that the uncanny valley really exists and that people make decisions with important consequences based on it. So if you’re a designer and you want to avoid get me a cross and some holy water moments, you should keep your robot out of the valley.

The article is open access, so you can read the whole thing here: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010027715300640

The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. LeGuin

How in the world did Ursula K. LeGuin think that an Earth with seven billion people in it would be on the brink of starvation?

This is just one of the issues I had with one of LeGuin’s more well-known works, The Lathe of Heaven. It’s still an excellent read despite all these issues. George Orr is an ordinary man with a very weird problem. Sometimes his dreams come true. Not in the sense of prophetic dreams, but his subconscious somehow retcons the entire universe so the dream has always been true, since the dawn of time. Naturally Orr winds up referred to a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist, Dr. William Haber, starts to manipulate Orr’s dreams for his own purposes…

Over the course of the book, Orr runs through a lot of universes, exploring a bunch of mostly dystopian science fiction ideas along the way. (Notice his name is a pun on George Orwell?)

At the beginning of the book, the year is 2002 and global warming has melted all the ice in the world, including Antarctica. This is even true in realities where the human population – and thus CO₂ emissions – nosedive sometime in the 1970’s. In realities where the world’s population is still seven billion, the people of Portland are crammed in so tight they can barely move, and the state of Oregon has to build several more cities in the desert, each containing millions of people.

I can’t fault LeGuin for getting the details of global warming wrong, since this book was published in 1971. But she’s too smart to miscalculate how many people a world can physically hold. All one needs to figure that out is the square footage of a typical one-bedroom apartment, the square footage of the world’s urban areas, and some math.

Another objection I have is to Dr. Haber. The book’s meant to present a moral dilemma: How far would you go to make the world a better place? That’s a fine dilemma and one I’d like to see explored. Dr. Haber’s meant to be a sympathetic character who makes questionable choices. But in practice, Dr. Haber behaves so despicably that this book does not work for me as a dilemma.

I am a scientist. I have a thing about scientific ethics. And Dr. Haber blazes past the bounds of acceptable behavior within the first dozen pages. He is literally performing medical experimentation on an unwilling patient with no protocol, no control group, and no institutional oversight. And he’s stupid. When one of his experiments on Orr kills six billion people, does it occur to Dr. Haber that this project is dangerous and he should stop? No.

There’s merit to watching a monster version of my own profession in action. And Dr. Haber makes a great villain. But a moral dilemma he does not make. I want to see him squashed like a bug. (I found the end of the book quite satisfying, but I’ll leave the reader to discover the details on their own.)

The Lathe of Heaven is meant to critique utilitarian ethics. But like I said earlier, Dr. Haber inadvertently kills six billion people for the sake of the remaining one billion. Sacrificing the many for the sake of the few is far from a utilitarian ideal. One of LeGuin’s short stories, “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,” does a much better job of critiquing utilitarianism.

And LeGuin puts Taoist philosophy into characters’ mouths when they don’t have any in-universe reason to know these things.

But that’s enough ranting for now. Though I have all these objections to the book, at no point does LeGuin slip into shoddy writing. The book’s beautiful. And I disagree with it. And I like it when books bite back.

It’s wonderfully ambiguous what’s actually going on with Orr’s mind. There is a Blade-Runner-like blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment at the beginning of the book that changes everything.

All the universes Orr surfs through remind us how weird our universe is compared to what science fiction writers expected. We live in the world where the Soviet Union sort of evaporated in 1991. Where obesity now poses a greater worldwide health burden than undernutrition. Where Eastern Europe and Japan aren’t having enough babies. Where it’s 2015 and we still haven’t conquered space, but we’re still managing to do some really awesome things with it.

The Woman Who Loved Reindeer by Meredith Ann Pierce

Uncomfortable love story, really cool setting.

I loved Meredith Ann Pierce’s Darkangel Trilogy when I was a kid. Hoping for more awesomeness, I’ve read a few of her other works over the years. Each time, I’m unhappy to find out that she seems to have pulled a Shyamalan: she’s good at one specific thing, which made The Darkangel so special, but when she tries to do the same thing in other books it doesn’t work. Her literary career seems to have petered out in 2004.

The same applies to The Woman Who Loved Reindeer.

A girl named Caribou is orphaned in her teens and the villagers refuse to take her in because she’s a seer and they’re a little afraid of her. She gets by living alone outside of town. One day Caribou’s sister-in-law Branja shows up. Branja has been charmed and impregnated by a trangl, a kind of were-deer in his human form. Branja managed to hide the pregnancy from her husband over a long hunting trip, but now she needs to get rid of the baby. Caribou reluctantly takes the baby in and names him Reindeer.

Part of what follows is a really cool adventure story. Volcanoes are taking over Caribou and Reindeer’s homeland, so Caribou uses her witch-powers and Reindeer uses his were-deer-powers to lead their people to safety. Lots of explodiness and epic crossing country scenes. There’s also a romance plot that I don’t like. It’s between Caribou and Reindeer.

Here are just a few of the problems I have with that:

Caribou is legally Reindeer’s aunt,
She raised him like a son, including breastfeeding him,
She’s twenty-eight years old and he is fifteen when they start having sex,
Caribou ate Reindeer’s father. (She thought he was an ordinary deer at the time, but still, she eventually figures it out.)

There’s also no earthly explanation why they love each other that way. Shared interests? Tender moments? Not really, Caribou just panics whenever she thinks Reindeer is going to leave her.

But gosh, the world Pierce has created is so cool. Caribou belongs to a hunting and farming community who live on a volcanically active polar continent. It’s got two fertile regions separated from each other by the pole itself, which is partially underwater. The book contains beautiful descriptions of the terrain and the adaptations of the people’s culture and lifestyle. I wanted to see lots more of that, but unfortunately it’s not the focus of the book.

I think The Woman Who Loved Reindeer would have been improved if told as a regular mother and son story. Reindeer has to grow up and run with the reindeer herd and Caribou has to learn to let him go. It would also have been better if Pierce had not tried so hard to make this into a fairy tale, because it isn’t, it’s an adventure story.

Banana Peach Pudding

(Very loosely) adapted from this persimmon pudding recipe, mainly because I don’t like persimmon but I like pudding. The texture of this pudding is reminiscent of a Yorkshire pudding, almost cakelike. I like it. This version of the recipe is slightly sweet, so you can increase the sugar if you want.

2 cups bananas and drained canned peaches, mashed
2 eggs
2 1/2 cups milk
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 cups flour
1 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
spices to taste – I used allspice and clove, which worked well

This is another one of those recipes that consists of mixing all the ingredients together and putting it in the oven.

Preheat oven to 325 ºF. Grease a 9″ by 13″ baking pan.

Mix the fruit, eggs, milk, and vanilla in one bowl. Mix the flour, sugar, baking soda, baking powder, salt, and spices in another bowl. Mix the contents of the two bowls, put in the baking pan, put in the oven. Bake until just set, about 1 hour.

Cultured Butter

Ever seen cultured butter in the grocery store? This is butter in which the cream has been cultured before the butterfat is separated from the buttermilk, yielding a butter with a tangy flavor. Cultured butter looks delicious, but it can go for upwards of $10 a pound. So I decided to try making it at home.

First, culture your cream. You can use yogurt starter, fresh yogurt, kefir granules or even let the cream sit around a while to pick up microbes from the air. I went with yogurt starter.

I was skittish about the 24-48 hour incubation that most cultured butter recipes called for, so I decided to culture the cream in warm water for 8 hours. Here’s the setup:

It worked. By the end of the afternoon, the cream looked and smelled like yogurt.

I’ve read advice to get your cream good and cold before trying to churn it and I’ve also read to work at room temperature. One way seems to work for some people, the other way seems to work for others. The method of churning also seems to depend. As you’ll see below, the cream for me was a fickle beast.

I split the batch in half and beat the first half with a hand mixer. I got whipped cream pretty quickly:

Then I got really stiff whipped cream:

Then I got whipped cream that looked wrong, but the fat globules still wouldn’t separate from the liquid:

At this point I had been standing there beating the cream for half an hour, when the instructions I’d read said it would take 5-10 minutes. I gave up and tried the other batch in the food processor:

Boom! Butter. Those globs of butter you see there took less than a minute to form. Don’t know why, never did get the hand mixer batch to work.

Anyway, I took the mixture of butter and buttermilk out of the food processor and ran it through a strainer. I saved the buttermilk, then I rinsed the butter off, added salt, and formed it into a glob. The next morning in the refrigerator it had seeped out more buttermilk, so I drained it. That’s it.

The verdict on taste? The buttermilk tastes exactly like store-bought buttermilk. The butter is tasty, like a very rich cheese. But I think I would want to find a less messy way to do it if I was to make this again.

Urtica ferox

Check out this plant from the CBS greenhouse. It’s a species of nettle that’s endemic to New Zealand.

It has huge, extremely painful stinging spines:

The Martian by Andy Weir

Ever gotten a few pages into a book and recognized something you learned about from Kerbal Space Program? I didn’t realize how awesome that would feel until I read The Martian.

Some time in the near future, NASA has organized a manned Mars space program. The first two Ares missions go off without a hitch. On the third, a freak dust storm on the surface of Mars forces the crew to ditch the mission early. An antenna breaks off in the wind and impales astronaut Mark Watney. He goes down and his suit’s vital signs blink out. The rest of the crew don’t have time to recover the body, so they leave.

There’s a problem. Mark Watney’s still alive.

Just … how did Andy Weir manage to make a space disaster thriller hilarious? Watney accepts the fact that he’s probably going to starve to death with surprising aplomb. His mission log entries are the high point of the book. The book’s told in a highly unconventional mix of first person (Watney’s snark), third person (NASA officials, who are freaking out), and omniscient (what’s going on with equipment and unmanned probes). Weir shouldn’t get away with it, but he does because it’s so very entertaining.

You’ll want to read this book if you want to know how a manned mission to Mars would work. Weir’s thought the details through. This book sent me to Wikipedia a lot, and while I don’t understand all of the science, it’s rock-hard. Yet it’s not dry and technical. Weir manages to make nail-biting tension out of Hohmann transfer windows.

If you wanted to know what a mission to Mars would look like, though, you won’t find out here. For example, here’s a description of the Hermes, the spacecraft the Ares crew used to get to Mars:

The Hermes crew enjoyed their scant personal time in an area called “The Rec.” Consisting of a table and barely enough room to seat six, it ranked low in gravity priority. Its position amidships granted it a mere 0.2g.

This is the most extensive description of the Hermes in the book. The Martian surface doesn’t fare much better.

I also have a pet peeve about Vogel’s broken English. His grammar is ridiculously bad for someone who has spent months of mission time and years of training time using English exclusively to communicate. If NASA had caught him saying things like “Very important is thirteen centimeters,” they would have kicked him off the mission.

But that’s a minor point. The Martian is the most entertaining hard science fiction I’ve read in a long time.

Edit: NASA just announced they found evidence of liquid water on Mars. The timing couldn’t be better.

Lemon Cake Pudding

I felt like making pudding, so I dug around James Beard until I found a recipe that caught my eye. This one’s simple (mix all the ingredients together and put them in the oven) and delicious.

You will need:

3 egg yolks
3 tablespoons flour
1 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon melted butter
6 tablespoons lemon juice*
1 tablespoon grated lemon rind*
1 1/4 cups milk
3 egg whites

* I used lime juice. It worked great.

Preheat oven to 350 ºF. Stir together all the ingredients except the egg whites. Beat the egg whites until they form stiff peaks (more on that below), then mix the egg whites into the rest of the ingredients. Pour into a 9″ baking pan and bake until it’s set, about 35 minutes.

That’s it. It’s an easy pudding.

Zesting the limes.

This is what egg whites beaten to stiff peaks look like. The protein in the egg whites traps tiny air bubbles, which give the pudding its fluffiness. Isn’t science cool?

The finished product. It isn’t a very imposing-looking pudding, but it’s deliciously tart. You can get away with adding extra lime juice and cutting down the sugar if you like that sort of thing (I do!)

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon

I don’t usually write DNF reviews, but this has got to be one of the best books I couldn’t get through.

In an alternate 1940, the U.S. government decides to allow European Jews to set up a temporary homeland in the panhandle of Alaska. One the one hand, four million of the six million Jews killed in our timeline escape the war and survive. On the other hand, on January 1, 2008, their lease will expire and they will be screwed yet again. (Israel doesn’t work out so well.)

The premise is absolutely brilliant and I wanted so much to read this book. But I can’t. Get. Through. The. Prose. It is so dense. Chabon describes every little thing. Reading The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is like trying to eat an entire chocolate flourless torte – a little bit is delightful. Chapter five, the backstory about Meyer Landsman’s relationship with his father and chess, would have made a great short story on its own. It’s also the point at which I gave up.

If you like alternate history and you can hack the prose, I recommend it. But if you can’t, don’t feel too bad.

Steam Trains and Ghosts

Margaret R. Taylor's Writing Blog