Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

!markup

What I read in January, basically copied from my "booklog" tracking spreadsheet:

Becky Chambers, *Record of a Space-Born Few* This isn't exactly a sequel to *A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet* but is set in the same fictional universe. This book is set almost entirely on the Exodan fleet. There are intertwined narratives, and mostly the characters are trying to help each other, but the different threads didn't feel as connected as in *A Closed and Common Orbit*. This one also has more conventionally shaped families (parents, grandparents, siblings, spouses) than the family-by-choice of her first novel. (One piece of the plot is about someone looking for family/a place to be, which goes badly wrong.)

Nick Lane, *Life Ascending* A book on evolution in the form of ten chapters on what Lane thinks are the ten most important "inventions" in the history of life on Earth, including DNA, the eukaryotic cell, and death. Fun; bits that stuck with me are that the DNA-to-amino acid coding isn't random, and (the claim) that eukaryotes are descended from a fusion of an archaeon and a bacterium, based on biochemistry shared with each kingdom. The chapters are on The origin of life, DNA, Photosynthesis, The complex cell, Sex, Movement, Sight, Hot blood, Consciousness, Death. I'm not convinced (and would want to read more, at least) by his argument for the evolutionary value of death, or how that connects to possible life extension, but yes it's a question worth asking.

Margery Allingham, *Sweet Danger* Another of the odd Campion books, this one with a tendency toward Ruritanian adventure--odd artifacts to prove the claim to a fragment of Balkan coast, and the village doctor is a sinister figure who fancies himself a black magician.

Martha Wells, *Artificial Condition* volume 2 of The Murderbot Diaries, very good. Murderbot finds some other non-humans to talk to/work with, though not trust, and adamantly refuses modifications that would make it in any way sexual or gendered.

Rex Stout, *Before Midnight* Reread of one of the Nero Wolfe novels, this one holds up pretty well.

(That's four books and a novella,)

I spent yesterday in transit between Somerville and Bellevue, by buses, subway, airplanes, and taxi. A delayed and slightly jet-lagged post follows:

What have I read recently?

At the water's edge: macroevolution and the transformation of life, by Carl Zimmer. This book discusses two major changes in the history of vertebrate life and habitats: tetrapods coming out of the oceans and cetaceans going back to them. There's lots on exaptation—a trait developed for one context that is useful in another—and on how we figured out the information he's presenting. Exaptation is the opposite of the just so stories we sometimes get about evolution, which talked about one particular fish developing lungs and surviving when the pools they were in dried out. That one was based in part on no-longer-accepted ideas about the climate at the time. More to the point, lungs plus gills appears to be the primitive/older condition for ray-finned as well as lobe-finned fishes. There are just a lot of teleosts, a group in which lungs turned into swim bladders instead, and they're what most people think of when they think "fish." Since all the papers are by humans, a species with lungs, and neither gills nor swim bladders, we're tempted to think of lungs as better and more advanced than gills or swim bladders. Better they may be, certainly for us; that doesn't mean they evolved later.

After spending about half the book on the evolution of land vertebrates, Zimmer then discusses what traits the ancestors of cetaceans had that enabled them to move back into the oceans, again with material on individual researchers, the discovery of fossils in specific places, the tendency to see what we expect, and so on. An important group of whale-ancestor fossils is Basilosaurus, "king lizard," because a nineteenth-century fossil hunter thought he'd found a sea serpent, and reconstructed it as such, sometimes combining bits from multiple fossils to produce a longer and more impressive display.

Cladistics was a lot newer when this was written, and they were just starting to do molecular trees; Zimmer spends time on why this approach is valuable, as well as on conflicts between trees based on comparing DNA and those based on bones and other traits produced by the genes.

Three Blind Mice, by Ed McBain. I read a lot of McBain's 87th Precinct series, a long time ago; I picked this novel, from a different series, off Adrian's shelf to see if I still liked McBain. The investigator here is a defense attorney in a small city in Florida in the late 1980s; he is defending a man who insists he is innocent of murdering three men and then mutilating their bodies. It's well written, and somewhat gory. The book depicts racist characters; it's not at all sympathetic with them, and the worst racism is in the killer's internal monologue, but it didn't take much of that to make me wonder whether "takee-outee" for "take-out meal" was also racist as well as not being my dialect or something I can remember seeing before. Other than that, it's well done, and McBain doesn't hide the clues from the reader, though I'm not entirely convinced by the murderer's eventually revealed motive.

What am I reading now?

Volcanoes of the Cacades: their rise and their risks, by Richard L. Hill. An overview for the layperson, which defines terms like "lahar." I just finished the section on "Volcanic Hazards," with the eruption of Mount St. Helens for context and example. The chapters are short, with sidebars on things like "Rating the Risks"; it's a good idea, but would be better if the sidebars weren't printed in white on not-very-dark blue.

Banner of the Damned, by Sherwood Smith. This is a good but physically large and heavy fantasy novel, to the point that I not only didn't take it with me to Somerville—I try not to travel with library books anyhow—but that I tend to reach for something smaller when I am reading here at home.

What are you reading now?

The Spy Princess by Sherwood Smith—I'm one chapter into this, and enjoying it so far. It seems to be a first-person narrative of a war or revolution in a fantasy kingdom, from the viewpoint of someone who is a pre-teen at the beginning of the events.

The Story of Julia Page by Kathleen Thompson. This is a mainstream novel, set around the turn of the 20th century; the story starts before the title character is born, with descriptions of her poor/dysfunctional family background. At this point in the story, Page is several years into working happily in a settlement house, after walking into the situation by accident: she took a streetcar nowhere in particular after an unpleasant visit with some relatives, got off at the end, and turned up at the right time to help the woman who runs the settlement, who recognized her from a chance meeting some months earlier. (This was recommended by papersky.)

What did you recently finish reading?

Magic Lessons, by Justine Larbalestier. This is a sequel to Magic or Madness, which continues the story, and shows us and the characters a bit more what's going on and how magic works in their world. The stakes are higher than in the first volume, but in ways that seem plausible: this isn't a case of someone arbitrarily telling the characters "you have to save the world now."

Tomb of the Fathers, by Eleanor Arnason. This is labeled "a Lydia Duluth adventure," but somehow didn't quite get the tone of adventure, even as the characters were being sent on a first-contact mission and in various sorts of danger. When they're stranded and the AI tells them "if I can't figure out X and Y, three of you will starve to death," it doesn't feel like there's any doubt that it will figure those things out. That said, there's some fun exploring and world-building, and Arnason makes me believe in the alien who keeps quoting Marx and Engels.

What are you likely to read next? "Next" may be a bit, given how many books I'm getting through right now and how much of The Spy Princess I have yet, but possibilities include the third volume in the Larbalestier trilogy; Bruce Schneier's Liars and Outliers; and Nancy Anderson's Work with Passion in Midlife and Beyond, which I took out of the library on the theory that the job hunt is crawling so maybe I should refocus it, but keep not actually reading. (I also have several things on the Kindle that I downloaded free from Project Gutenberg on someone's recommendation, and a few that Nightshade Press was giving away to celebrate that the world hadn't ended.) The current process seems to be one kindle book, and one other, or occasionally a kindle book, a paperback, and a hardcover. (I rarely carry hardcovers around to read on the train these days.)