Everything Reviews Apart

Hi,

I got through a pair of books this weekend. So it's a double-review for you!

First up was Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America by Brian Slattery.

The name pretty much says it all. The book posits the laughable notion that somehow the dollar bill will become worthless as a currency and the government collapses. A novel fiction which allows the author to showcase a splintered United States where people scrabble to survive. One of the major players is a man known as the Aardvark who controls and industrial empire spreading from sea to sea which runs on the revived institution of slavery to function.

Into this brave new world steps Marco Oliveira from the prison ship he's been held in for the past five years. Marco was a member of the Slick Six, a gang of brilliant criminals who made fortunes before the collapse with a string of daring robberies. Their last caper was embezzling funds from the Aardvark and while he vowed to take them down, only Marco got caught. Now that Marco's back, he starts a long odyssey to find and reunite the Slick Six and bring down the Aardvark and the slavery system.

The book is pretty good and there's a fair amount of action, but it's really a book more focused on description. It discusses the past and present in great detail with a rushing, poetic voice. A bit like William S. Burroughs, or Hunter S. Thompson, but not quite as disjoint as either of those authors. In the end, it's less about the grand themes and more about the individual members of the Slick Six and their relations with one another. It was an interesting read.

Now on to some non-fiction. The Five Ages of the Universe: Inside the Physics of Eternity by Fred C. Adams and Greg Laughlin is about cosmology and astrophysics. The book was published in 1999 so the caveat here is that science may have advanced a little since then. It's still a fun overview of the past, present and future history of our universe.

The central conceit of the book is to measure universal time in "cosmic decades", where each decade is 10x the length of the decade preceding it (much like the Richter Scale). So the 0th decade is 1 year after the Big Bang, the 1st decade is 10 years, the 2nd decade 100 years, etc. Right now, we're in the 10th decade (10 billion years after the Big Bang). So using this model they can talk about the very first moments of creation, out to the long, slow-forming events of the far futre and the ultimate dissolution of the universe (at around the 150th decade or so).

The book was a lot of fun. Slightly depressing in the sense that Entropy Wins Again, but modified by the timescale on which it achieves victory (it will be trillions of years before all the suns go out and trillions of billions of years before black holes are all that's left). The authors also discuss the possibilities of life in some form or another existing at various stages and how you can use black holes to build computers.

I'd be curious to see what, if any, revisions have come from the intervening decade of research, but all in all, it was an accessible overview of cosmology.

later
Tom

Everything Reviews Apart

Hi,

I got through a pair of books this weekend. So it's a double-review for you!

First up was Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America by Brian Slattery.

The name pretty much says it all. The book posits the laughable notion that somehow the dollar bill will become worthless as a currency and the government collapses. A novel fiction which allows the author to showcase a splintered United States where people scrabble to survive. One of the major players is a man known as the Aardvark who controls and industrial empire spreading from sea to sea which runs on the revived institution of slavery to function.

Into this brave new world steps Marco Oliveira from the prison ship he's been held in for the past five years. Marco was a member of the Slick Six, a gang of brilliant criminals who made fortunes before the collapse with a string of daring robberies. Their last caper was embezzling funds from the Aardvark and while he vowed to take them down, only Marco got caught. Now that Marco's back, he starts a long odyssey to find and reunite the Slick Six and bring down the Aardvark and the slavery system.

The book is pretty good and there's a fair amount of action, but it's really a book more focused on description. It discusses the past and present in great detail with a rushing, poetic voice. A bit like William S. Burroughs, or Hunter S. Thompson, but not quite as disjoint as either of those authors. In the end, it's less about the grand themes and more about the individual members of the Slick Six and their relations with one another. It was an interesting read.

Now on to some non-fiction. The Five Ages of the Universe: Inside the Physics of Eternity by Fred C. Adams and Greg Laughlin is about cosmology and astrophysics. The book was published in 1999 so the caveat here is that science may have advanced a little since then. It's still a fun overview of the past, present and future history of our universe.

The central conceit of the book is to measure universal time in "cosmic decades", where each decade is 10x the length of the decade preceding it (much like the Richter Scale). So the 0th decade is 1 year after the Big Bang, the 1st decade is 10 years, the 2nd decade 100 years, etc. Right now, we're in the 10th decade (10 billion years after the Big Bang). So using this model they can talk about the very first moments of creation, out to the long, slow-forming events of the far futre and the ultimate dissolution of the universe (at around the 150th decade or so).

The book was a lot of fun. Slightly depressing in the sense that Entropy Wins Again, but modified by the timescale on which it achieves victory (it will be trillions of years before all the suns go out and trillions of billions of years before black holes are all that's left). The authors also discuss the possibilities of life in some form or another existing at various stages and how you can use black holes to build computers.

I'd be curious to see what, if any, revisions have come from the intervening decade of research, but all in all, it was an accessible overview of cosmology.

later
Tom