Cibola Burn by James S. A. Corey

Cibola Burn by James S. A. Corey

This is volume 4 of a series. I read the first three and they were pretty good, but I had a problem with this one. We have a space expedition, and on this expedition we have a security chief, and I don't think I have ever taken a dislike to anyone faster or with less evidence. I got about half way through this book and I'm wondering why doesn't somebody just shoot this guy already? He is just loathsome. It got so bad I had to put the book down.
    A couple of months ago I started using the treadmill at The Zoo. That worked okay for a bit but then one day I come in and they are all occupied, so I look around for something else to do and notice that a recumbent exercise bike is available. I 've been using it ever since.
    Exercise machines like treadmills and bicycles are inherently boring. All this work and you are still stuck in the same place. Many people use music to combat this, but that requires earphones of some sort, some kind of magic box to hold your tunes, and a bunch of tunes to listen to. The first two are simple mechanical problems. Compiling a list of tunes would be a bit of a chore for me. Make that dang near impossible. I just don't see it happening.
     So I read. Reading while cycling takes a bit of concentration, but it seems to be working okay for me, and it doesn't have to be a great book, even medium books are tolerable in this environment. So a couple of weeks ago I picked up Cibola Burn and resumed reading it.
     Security Chief Murtry isn't any less loathsome now, but he doesn't get as much of my attention since I have to keep pushing on these pedals and so he is not as annoying. The worst part of this is that for most of the book Murtry isn't doing anything wrong. He's the security chief and he's charged with the safety of a group of people. There are other people in the arena and some of them are not playing very nice, so Murtry has reason for his hard line attitude. What amazed me, and still does, is that it didn't take very many words to make me hate Murtry. What does that say about the reports we get from mass media, AKA 'the news'?
    Towards the end of the book there is a big fight scene. It reads like a script for an action-thriller movie. We've got the good-guy / hero embarking on a perilous journey to save the world, we've got a couple of cute girl scientists wandering into the scene, we've got a good guy thug doing his best to stop the evil villain, and naturally this all plays out in spectacular setting. That would be okay, except that the hero got there by traveling for hours on a high speed mag lev train and everyone else got there by driving dune buggies overland. And they caught up to the hero. You'd think people who could navigate spaceships would be able to see the problem with this scenario, but nobody does.
    All in all, pretty good. Except for Murtry. I still hate him. And he's still alive. Have we got some ethicist watching the outcomes of our fictional police actions? I would feel a lot better if these patently evil characters were executed before the end of the story.

Inertial Navigation

I just finished reading Abaddon's Gate by James S. A. Corey, part three of a grand space opera trilogy. At one point one of the characters (Melba/Clarrissa, maybe?) comments that it's nice to have gravity back, either gravity or its equivalent in the form of acceleration or centrifugal force. Einstein tells us that if we have no external clues, it is impossible to distinguish between equal forces produced by acceleration or gravity. For long term living in outer space, science fiction writers often propose spinning large wheel shaped space stations to simulate gravity. People have a zillion years of evolution behind them that has adapted us to living in a one gravity force field. Zero gravity might be fun for a bit, but it is not our normal environment. So, artificial gravity.

    The human inner ear is a remarkable sensitive piece of apparatus, witness the amazing feats of skill demonstrated by numerous athletes like acrobats, gymnasts and high divers. Shoot, just walking on two legs is a bit of a trick. So if you are moving about in a rotating space station you might very well be able to detect this rotation. If it was spinning quickly it might even have some unpleasant, perhaps even intolerable, side-effects, like vertigo. Using a longer radius and spinning slower could produce that same effective downward (outward) force and it might reduce the side effects. You should not be able to detect this rotation if you were sitting still. In the worse case you might sleep in the spinning section at full gravity, but spend your waking hours in a non-spinning section in zero gravity.

    One thing that comes up in science fiction stories set in rotating space habitats is that the floor curves upward in the distance. If you have a large structure, and a clear view of a large room or a long hallway, that would be true. But what if you only had a small room, say a ten by ten cell located a half a mile from axis of rotation? If you had a tape measure and a good level (or plumb bob) you might be able to measure the difference in angle between the apparent force of gravity at opposite walls, assuming you pick the right two walls, and they are crosswise to your direction of motion. The difference would only amount to half an inch. Given conventional building standards that is well within what you might expect to find in your average house here on Earth.

    Now imagine we have constructed a large rotating space station and have filled the rim of this structure with a warren of small interconnected rooms. The doorways are offset so you cannot see all the way across more than one room, so you would not be able to see "the floor curving upwards". Imagine walking all the way around the rim of this station and arriving back where you started. Never mind having to continually jog left and right to go through the offset doorways. Imagine not knowing you were in this rotating space station, doing all this walking and ending up where you started. Might be a little disconcerting, eh?

    Take this same ring shaped labyrinth of rooms and place it on the Earth, except instead of curving up and back over, curve around to the side. If you walked through this thing would you be able to tell that you were slowly being turned around?

Space Exploration

I finally got around to ordering a copy of Absolution Gap by Alastair Reynolds. It's the third volume of his Revelation Space trilogy. It's chock full of strange new worlds, giant machines, demented personalities and evil monsters baying at the doors. It's great stuff. Some of the dialog is a little, um, what's the word? Childish, maybe? Kind of reminds me of what you hear on television. And then it struck me - this is exactly the thing that determines whether I will like a book or not. I used to think it was realism, that is whether the characters in a story were behaving in a believable manner or not. Now I'm thinking it's whether the dialog is intelligent or dumb. That's why I like James Bond movies, because of all the witty remarks and the absence of banal chatter. Realistic? Hardly, but witty.
    Last year I was reading John LeCarre espionage novels. I was enjoying the heck out of them until I got to one that struck a little close to home, or something. It was the one about the arms dealer selling weapons to the drug lords in Central America. It put me off his stories, but for  another reason entirely, not because of the dialog. Recently I picked up a copy of his The Looking Glass War. This was the first book he wrote after he made his first big success. It is supposed to be a more realistic look at the world of spy-v-spy, and it's a real downer. You have never seen such stupidity or incompetence. If this is what our intelligence agencies are made of (and being as they are made of people, not James Bond super-heroes, I imagine it probably is) it's a wonder they can manage to tie their shoes in the morning, much less figure out what our "enemies" are doing, assuming they can even figure out who our enemies are. I didn't even get half way through before I got totally discouraged and put it down.
    So Absolution Gap is a mixed bag. It's got a lot of really good stuff in it, like characters and concepts and conflict, but it's got a little of the stupid thrown in as well. On balance though it's pretty dang good.
    There are some uneven story lines. He will spend a hundred pages setting the stage for a climatic event, and then later on, in the middle of another story line (there are three main story lines) he will spend a couple of paragraphs explaining how the other story played out. Disappointing. But then the book is over 500 pages as it is, and I imagine that he might have wanted to wrap this story up in three volumes and not spend the rest of his life writing it.
    This is the third Science Fiction book I've read this year that had:

• millions of people
• living in tunnels underground
• on an airless world.

The others were 

• The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein,
• Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey

Coffee

The opening of Chapter 17 of Leviathan Wakes by James S. A. Corey, a most excellent hard Science Fiction novel of the coming war in the asteroid belt.