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The sequel to an outstanding book, Ender’s Shadow, Shadow of the Hegemon tells the story of Earth during the time between Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead. As with the first Shadow, this novel tells the story of Bean, a genetically-enhanced genius and ex-soldier from Battle School.
If you’ve read the other books in this series, you’ll have to read this one too. It is a compelling story, although it contains too much politics and not enough science fiction for my tastes.
Patronize these links, man:
If you are interested in cryonics (freezing of heads or bodies in hopes that future science will discover ways to revive the “corpsicle”) or nanotechnology, you will find this book challenging, rewarding, and significant.
I can’t say this was a fabulous story, in terms of its appeal strictly as a work of fiction, but I believe it will stay with me longer than most of the stuff I read. This book has a lot more to offer than a romp through the future; it is the sort of book that will be used in college Philosophy and Literature classes.
Of special interest to fans of speculative fiction is Halperin’s afterword, which includes a bibliography for further reading about the science within the story.
Patronize these links, man:
I love restaurants, but going out to eat in Germany is not much fun. Besides the fact that everything on the menu used to have four legs and hair, the air inside restaurants in noxious with cigarette smoke.
In California, smoking in public is nearly outlawed. I have lived here for so long that I can’t stand to be around cigarettes any more. When people smoke, my eyes dry out like old granola. It is nearly as unpleasant as having one’s brain fitted for custom earplugs — but that is a story for another time.
Swimming through the blue cloud of acrid smoke that forms within minutes of any social gathering, I have to blink repeatedly, squint, and hold my hands over my bleeding red eyes, just to maintain vision through the film forming on my contacts. I’d done so much of this during my stay in Germany that my wife’s uncle, upon greeting me on New Year’s Eve, performed a sort of exaggerated squint, clenching the top half of his face together as he shook my hand. I thought this parody of my suffering was really insensitive, until I saw him do it when he greeted someone else — and then I saw his brother do it too! I guess they were also feeling distress from the smoke (even though they were making some of it).
Cigarettes are an integral part of German food culture. They enable a diner to algebraically scale any meal into 2n+1 courses. For example, at this New Year’s Eve party, I had a three-course meal, while most everyone else in the room enjoyed seven (cigarette, appetizer, cigarette, soup, cigarette, entree, cigarette). And while I had only one dessert, everyone else had three (cigarette, mousse, cigarette).
Relief came suddenly at midnight when the room emptied of bodies, and in the wake of the exodus, smoke. I was shocked to think everyone had bailed on the evening so quickly, as if all their BMWs and Audis were about to turn into whatever passes for seasonal gourds over there… and then I realized that no one had left; they’d simply gone outside to attempt to set the Earth on fire.
And so I discovered that the Germans’ preoccupation with cigarettes is only in part due to a national addiction to nicotine. I think the more general issue is a fascination with combustion, for this crowd of well-dressed revelers descended on the parking lot like schoolkids to light firecrackers, roman candles, and rockets of all kinds. They had missiles, fountains, mortars, and scary whizzing things that shot sparks in the air, into the garden, and at the spectators. Several of these went under cars in the parking lot — I was afraid they’d generate a bigger bang than anyone expected. I stepped away from the window at this point.
The next morning, sidewalks all over town looked like a war zone. I blew off a lot of fireworks as a child, but I have never seen anything like this — every square foot of sidewalk was littered with soggy cardboard, plastic fins and nosecones, red tissue paper, and burn marks. For a country that is generally cleaner and better maintained than America, this was incongruous and a bit disturbing. I did not see a clean patch of pavement anywhere on January 1st. I was told that Germans had spent 300 million Deutschmarks (about $150 million US) on fireworks for the day.
We walked through the marajuana and “red light” districts to experience offers of a number of not-quite-legal diversions… “Coke” muttered a suspicious-looking guy, far enough under his breath that he could deny it if I turned out to be a narc. “XTC” said another man, nearly whispering it in my ear in passing, while his eyes were fixed elsewhere.
I had no interest in drugs or commercial sex, but I began to wonder what sort of illicit offerings I might actually respond to… “network connectivity” whispered sotto voce from a dark doorway, behind which would be a damp, poorly-lit room with a stained card table and an original IBM Thinkpad, and a frayed phone cable snaking across the floor to where it is spliced into the building’s telco wiring.
It’s true — I’ve traveled to one of the few places on the planet where casual drug use is, if not legal, certainly tolerated… and yet the itch that really needs scratching is knowing whether my servers are still up.
Our hotel room in Amsterdam is scarcely big enough for the bed. It is only trivially bigger than the 4th bedroom in my old San Francisco flat — a 5' x 9' closet we called the “penalty box,” and rented to a classmate for about $250 per month. The hotel room, although smaller, is a lot more expensive at $95 per night. At least it comes with a private bathroom, or more accurately a private shower stall that has a sink and toilet installed within it.
“This room is so small…” I began. My wife rolled her eyes. “…that you have to step outside to change your mind.” The reason this old joke got old is that people repeat it incessantly, just in case someone hasn’t already heard it. (That someone was recently found and thawed after having been frozen in a block of ice for 30,000 years.) Actually the reason I often repeat old jokes is that I rarely have any new ones to tell.
