Ahaie Tengwar Angulócello

Someone on Reddit asked what was so special about Heinlein's "Have Space Suit - Will Travel" compared to his other juveniles, and I had two thoughts. (note that I don't count Starship Troopers or Podkayne of Mars as proper juveniles - they're books about teenagers with no sex, but other than that they are fully adult in theme).

First thought: Heinlein's decade of writing juvenile novels for Scribner's starts out small, local, and fairly simple - stories with small casts of characters, happening on one or at most two worlds of the Solar System (Earth plus one other planet or moon), with mostly straightforward plots. Heinlein was still feeling his way and learning how to be a children's novelist. The stories rarely depict future Earth in detail, and what little we do see tends to feel very much like the late 1940's only with rocket ships.

Later books got more complicated - bigger casts, moving from an interplanetary to interstellar settings, more complex plots, and while Earth rarely got much time on stage, it started to look very different from the 50's in some ways (and remained very stuck in the 50's in other ways). The writing didn't change much, but if you look at the structure of the stories you can see Heinlein was gaining confidence in his abilities.

And then, at the end of the decade, right after Citizen of the Galaxy, a masterpiece which detailed the coming of age of the protagonist against a galactic backdrop with time spent among four different highly detailed human cultures (only one of which, the space navy, was at all familiar to 1950's readers) -- after all that, Have Space Suit returned to the solar system, to a then-future very 1950's America just beginning to venture into space, to a small cast and a seemingly simple story (that expands dramatically in the final act). It's like he decided to go back to his 1940's work only doing it better. It's as much of a masterpiece as Citizen, but set on a more intimate stage.

And the second thought was that every Heinlein juvenile is, in the end, all about *leaving Earth* for another world, or for Space itself. Characters who have never been to Earth (Red Planet, Rolling Stones) view Earth with contempt. The one exception is Have Space Suit, which is all about two space kidnapped children trying to return home, to Earth. Like "the Green Hills of Earth," it's one of the only Heinlein stories to admit that Earth is the only real home of human beings, and therefore precious. And that might be another reason it strikes a special chord in its readers.

I have finished reading all of Martha Wells's 90's and 00's work (excluding media tie in novels and one co-authored juvenile). Her output in that time consisted of five Il-Rien novels, two stand alone novels, and two Stargate Atlantis books in the late oughts (I have never watched Stargate Atlantis and avoided those).

Some general observations: Before she wrote her Raksura series (in which everyone is bi), Wells's characters were more inclined to be heterosexual. Her later work is also much more multiracial and careful to avoid default whiteness (describing everyone's appearance, leaving nobody unmarked) than the earlier work.

Wells's first four books have been re-issued by Tor in revised editions. I haven't been able to find anyone talking about what changes were made between the original vs the reissued stories: Wells has just said that she did what she could to bring them up to her current standard. The "Fall of Il-Rien" trilogy remains out of print (with the last volume being hard to find at affordable prices), but ebook versions are available.

Here are my reviews of Wells's first 7 novels plus a collection of Il-Rien short stories.

1. The Element of Fire. I reviewed this several months ago, pasting what I said about it then below. ( Read more... )

2. Death of the Necromancer: ( Read more... )

3. City of Bones: ( Read more... )

4. Wheel of the Infinite: ( Read more... )

5-7. The Fall of Il-Rien trilogy. (The Wizard Hunters, the Ships of Air, the Gate of Gods). ( Read more... )

8. Between Worlds: This is an ebook-only short story collection containing one story set a few years before the events of Element of Fire, one set before Death of the Necromancer, and four telling the back stories of Ilias and Giliead. If you enjoyed the trilogy and wanted to read more of about those two, this will please you.

I continue to watch movies and TV very infrequently. And when I do get in the mood to binge something, it's as often as not a comfort re-watch rather than new material. Here are some of the shows (and one movie) that I've watched in late 2025-26. (not mentioned here: new but utterly forgettable crap that I didn't write down).

1. Strange new worlds season whatever ( Read more... )

2. Ironheart S1. ( Read more... )

3. Monarch Legacy of Monsters S1. ( Read more... )

4. Cybersix: ( Read more... )

5. Reservation Dogs - three years ago I put this and a few other "own voices" Native American authored shows on my list of things to check out. Set in Oklahoma, it follows a group of Native teens who are desperately trying to raise enough money (by both legitimate and illegal means) to go to California. I watched two episodes and decided it wasn't for me. I didn't care about the central character, and the dark comedy wasn't landing right for me. Obviously I am very unusual in this as the series was popular and acclaimed.

6. Dark Winds ( Read more... )

7. Superman (2025). ( Read more... )

Finally, I want to talk a bit about two spy-fi shows that I rewatched recently.

Broadly speaking, spy stories fall into three camps: a) the agents are pitted against other agents of a rival power, sometimes with a great deal of paranoia about double and triple agents and a great deal of cynicism (as in Le Carre's George Smiley stories). A subspecies of (a) without the paranoia and cynicism appears in the Bond films and their many imitators, where the agent is fighting a made up transnational organization dedicated to evil, or the minions of a single wealthy person with an equally sinister agenda - transposing the rival superpower fight to a comic book fantasy realm because of Hollywood squeamishness about offending the Soviet Union. b) The agents are tasked with interfering in the internal affairs of small relatively powerless countries, for the diplomatic or financial benefit of their own country or its corporations. In the 60's, this often had a "great game" backdrop of the rival superpower also interfering, both sides striving to convince the small nation to side with them, but scratch the surface and the stories are nothing more than neocolonialist bullying. c) The agents, who explicitly work for a spy agency rather than a criminal investigation agency, are for some reason called upon to do the work of the police. There's some kind of unusual/bizarre criminal scheme afoot which law enforcement is unable to handle, and they must thwart it. Sometimes the criminals are secretly working for a rival superpower, but such connections to the agents' official job can be completely pro forma and perfunctory.

8. Danger Man (1960) (rewatch).( Read more... )

9. The Avengers, Seasons 2 and 3 featuring Cathy Gale (rewatch). ( Read more... )

Robert O'Brien, Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH.
( Read more... )

Nicola Griffith, Hild
Absolutely brilliant. The sequel, Menewood, is on my TBR shelf and I am looking forward to it very much.

Martha Wells, Queen Demon.
( Read more... )

Martha Wells, Element of Fire.
( Read more... )

Morgan was a huge Mercedes Lackey fan, and even after multiple culls we had two entire shelves full of her books. I finally got around to reading some of them.
( Read more... )

Elizabeth Moon is another author Morgan kept through multiple culls who I had never read. I decided it was time to check her stuff out.
( Read more... )

I watched Sandman season 2 in August, and I guess I should write about it. ( Read more... )

I've been reading some old stuff lately.

1. Wild Angel (Pat Murphy)
( Read more... )
2. The Pushcart War (Jean Merrill)
( Read more... )
3. The Mouse that Roared, The mouse on the moon, the mouse on wall street (all by Leonard Wibberley).
( Read more... )
4. Rimrunners (CJ Cherryh)
( Read more... )
5. Sassinak (did not finish), by Elizabeth Moon and Anne McCaffery:
( Read more... )

Flying cars have been a staple of science fiction since the dawn of SF. Along with jetpacks and moonbases, saying "where's my flying car" has become a shorthand for how the promises of a certain kind of future - made by admen, futurists, and SF writers in the heyday of techno optimism - have have failed to materialize.

The other day, I learned that back in 2000, Larry Niven, who despite being a right wing shithead, writes well researched hard SF, once said in response to an interview question at space com about what things he and other SF authors got wrong, "the wealth (as in flying cars) predicted by Heinlein and his followers (including myself) was another matter. It all went to welfare programs."

Niven's presumption seems to be that the only thing keeping flying cars from becoming reality was sufficient middle class wealth, which did not come to pass due to government policies which diverted that wealth into welfare programs (as a right wing poophead, Niven is fundamentally incapable of admitting that the wealth was in fact siphoned off to the billionaires, who proceeded to buy themselves learjets and yachts and sixth homes and generally act like complete sociopaths).

It so happens that I have been thinking about flying cars off and on for a while. Niven being an ass inspired me to actually write something down. So, have a post. ( Read more... )

Someone brought "They Don’t Read Very Well: A Study of the Reading Comprehension Skills of English Majors at Two Midwestern Universities" by Susan Carlson, Ananda Jayawardhana, Diane Miniel (CEA Critic, Volume 86, Number 1, March 2024) to my attention today. a pdf of the paper is here

This is an appallingly badly designed study and a seriously flawed paper and the authors should be fucking ashamed of themselves. (Carlson is an English professor, Miniel was one when the research was conducted in the teens, and Jayawardhana is a statistician, all at Pittsburgh State U. Why they ventured all the way to Kansas to conduct their research is a mystery).

They interviewed 85 students majoring in English or English education (mostly juniors and seniors with some sophomores and four freshmen) at two Kansas universities. Each participant took a reading test designed to determine 10th grade literacy, filled out a survey, and then were asked to spend 20 minutes reading the opening seven paragraphs of Dickens' Bleak House aloud, pausing to explain the meaning of each sentence as they went along. They were given dictionaries and allowed to look things up in those or on their phones. They were told that it didn't matter if they did not finish going through the passage before time was up. (I'll put the opening paragraphs they used in the first comment below so you don't have to google it on project Gutenberg)

The authors recorded the students reading aloud and explaining the passage to an interviewer, transcribed those recordings, and then tagged and analyzed the transcripts. Their conclusions were that only five percent of the students were able to properly understand the dickens passage ("proficient readers") another 38 percent understood about half the passage ("competent readers"), and 58 percent struggled to understand the passage ("problematic readers"). "Problematic readers often described their reading process as skimming and/or relying on SparkNotes" (page 6).

They conclude that most of the people majoring in English do not have the reading skills necessary for such a major and do not gain those reading skills from their first and second year classes.

This paper has two huge and one large problems.

1. I am probably in or near their top 5% of readers, and I would have struggled and been incredibly frustrated if someone asked me to read the beginning of a Dickens novel one sentence at a time, explaining each sentence as I go along. That's not how novels are intended to work, especially densely written 19th century novels. Reading a whole paragraph, or the whole passage, then going back and working through it bit by bit, sure. But expecting to extract meaning from each sentence in isolation without knowing what's coming in the next sentence -- no fucking way. Fictional prose is intended to *flow*, you can't ask someone to chop it up into bits based on the punctuation and expect those bits to make sense without the context of what comes next.

2. They assigned 21st century American students a passage from a mid 19th century British novel, thereby turning it from a test of whether or not they could read and understand a chunk of complex literary prose, into a test of that *plus* whether or not they had adequate working knowledge of an archaic and foreign prose style, culture, vocabulary, and setting. OF COURSE the students struggled and did poorly in figuring out the meaning of "Michaelmas term," "the Lord Chancellor," and "Lincoln’s Inn Hall" in just the first sentence. Not because they're poor readers, but because they're not 19th century Londoners.

If the researchers had been serious about trying to gauge the students' reading ability without confounding their results with the student's poor familiarity with 170 year old prose style, setting, and culture, they could have assigned them a dense passage from a 20th or 21st century American literary novel. But they didn't. This is the worst kind of bigoted, classist, prior knowledge based intelligence testing. Shame on the authors, and shame on the journal for publishing this crap.

The not so huge but still large problem:
3. Forty-one percent of the study's participants were "English education" majors, not traditional English majors. Even if both majors are taught by the English department, they are very different beasts with very different course requirements that attract very different types of student. One is a major for people who wish to become primary and secondary school teachers of English (aka grammar, literacy, writing, and maybe also age-appropriate novels), the other is for people who enjoy reading and analyzing literature. The authors do not say anything about how the two majors differed in their ability to understand the opening of Bleak House, an omission that makes me raise my eyebrows very high.

In sum: Those who can't, teach. Those who can't do research, write poorly conceived papers on how their students are bad at reading.

***

That said, I am unsurprised that significant numbers of students struggled with the passage. Even aside from the design flaws which artificially lowered the scores of the students in the study, some people who aren't actually interested in reading and thinking about novels get a degree in English as a job credential (like those education majors who were included in the study, who may only be in the English department because it's a path to getting a teaching certificate that doesn't involve math).

And it is a sad fact that secondary schools turn out tons of students each year who have never really learned to read well, some of them with high GPAs. Now that a 4 year degree is required for many jobs that used to be open to high school graduates, they end up taking classes they're not really equipped for.

Which reminds me of something my sister said about her year teaching English at a magnet school in Austin Texas. She was one of the only teachers who stocked her classroom with age appropriate books and encouraged her students to pick out and read ones that appealed to them. The administration and most of the rest of the teachers regarded this sort of thing as a bad idea, because students reading books for fun were not spending time honing the skills needed for doing well on the next standardized test.

To the extent that it's a real problem, and not one manufactured to produce a shocking academic article, it's multi generational at this point. Those who don't read books themselves, have become school teachers and are teaching children to read but not to be able to read very well. Those children grow up, go to college, and frustrate their professors with their lack of reading skills.

I wrote this a while ago on Facebook and utterly forgot to crosspost it here.

American history classes usually peg the start of the telegraph to 1844, with Morse sending "what hath god wrought" from Washington to Baltimore. Actually a bunch of people in Europe and America had been mucking around with sending electrical signals over wires for three decades by that point: Morse's system was merely the first to have great success and go on to be used all over the world.

But the first long distance telegraph networks were not even electrical. Starting in the early 1790's, first France, then Sweden and England built extensive *optical* telegraph networks. Unlike the later electrical telegraphs, which were largely commercial operations from the get go, the early networks were entirely government funded and non-official communications were forbidden. By the early 1800's, countries all over Europe were using optical telegraph systems for sending long distance messages - this being the Napoleonic wars, the networks were mainly used for military dispatches. With Napoleon's defeat, some networks fell into disuse, but others switched to carrying shipping news and other government traffic.

Each network consisted of long series of towers, preferably on hills, with a direct line of sight from one to the next. The first tower would deploy its signals, and someone at the next tower, looking through a telescope, would see them and duplicate them on his own tower for the next tower in line to copy. Each country jingoistically implemented its own bespoke signalling system, even when that meant adopting a slower, harder to use method instead of some other nation's superior system. Nearly all of these networks were for government use only, and paid for out of military budgets.

The idea of an optical signalling system was old - Robert Hooke read a paper to the Royal Society suggesting a system in 1684, but no government saw the need for such a thing until the 1790's. After the revolution, France found itself at war with all its neighbours, and rapid communication became essential. Claude Chappe's semaphore system was just what the revolutionary government needed. It used two vanes on a movable arm. Varying the angles of the vanes and the arm itself allowed a lexicon of 194 signs. Later that was pared down to 94 semographic signs, which were used in pairs to create a code book of 8,000-ish words. During daylight, on days without fog or rain, messages could be sent from Paris to Lyon (500 kilometers away) in 9 minutes. The first line of towers was built in 1792, and within 4 decades France had a vast network of telegraph towers (that leads to a map on Wikipedia). Napoleon loved the system, and built signal lines in conquered territories as well as commissioning portable towers which he brought with him on campaign. Chappe called his invention the semaphore, but the name that stuck was télégraphe.

In Dumas's novel the Count of Monte Cristo, Dantes bribes an optical telegraph operator to transmit false information as part of his scheme to bankrupt his enemy Danglars. In real life, the first ever case of wire fraud occurred in France in 1834 when two bankers bribed telegraph operators to insert some stock market data into their official transmissions, disguised as coding mistakes. The telegraph was also used to prevent fraud, sending out news of the results of the French lottery, closing the gap between the drawing in Paris and the news reaching the provinces, during which fraudsters had long suckered people into buying worthless tickets.

Inspired by France's system, Sweden's Abraham Edelcrantz came up with a binary encoding system that was harder to see, but faster and simpler to operate than Chappe's semaphore signals. Each telegraph tower held a grid of 10 large black shutters which could be open (horizontal/invisible) or closed (vertical/visible). One offset shutter indicated an "A" prefix, and 3 groups of 3 indicated a 3 digit octal code, allowing a code book of 1024 words. By putting lights inside boxes with the shutters at either end, it was possible to transmit messages at night. A mechanical control panel enabled the operator to program the next code group in advance, then one press of a pedal moved all the shutters at once to display the next code group. Sweden's network was the largest after France's, but I haven't been able to find a map. :(

Sweden's network covered 200km in 1809. Most of it went into disuse with the end of the Napoleonic wars, but it was put back into service in the 1830's and continued to be expanded until 1854, when electrical telegraph systems began to take over. The country's fractured coastline and many islands made converting the optical network to an electrical one quite challenging, and Sweden's telecommunications system was a hybrid of optical and electrical from the 1850's through the 1870's. The last pair of optical stations were not shut down until 1881.

In England, George Murray devised a six shutter binary system. The first line was built in 1795, and the network encompassed sixty-five towers by 1808. As in Sweden, the system went into disuse after Napoleon's defeat, but in 1822 the Royal Navy rebuilt one line (from the Admiralty in London to Portsmouth), and after studying the matter, switched from binary shutters to a more easily seen system devised by Home Riggs Popham that, somewhat like the French system, used two semaphore signalling arms attached to a vertical pole. The line remained in service until it was replaced with an electrical telegraph in 1847.

Also in the 1820's, one of the few commercially owned and operated optical telegraph systems started up in the UK, with a line running from Holyhead in Wales to Liverpool, to enable news of incoming ships to reach the Liverpool stock market hours before the ships arrived in port.

Spain's first optical telegraph line went into service in 1800, and by the 1840's the country had three lines connecting Madrid to border and port cities - Barcelona, Cadiz, and Irun (the last is a town on the north coast at the border with France). Spain's very hilly landscape made running electrical lines difficult, and while the first electrical telegraph line began operating there in 1855, the last optical lines continued to be used until 1876.

Prussia came to the game very late, with a single Berlin-Koblenz line opening in 1833 and being replaced by an electrical system in 1849. Two other commercial lines carrying shipping news opened in Germany in 1837 and 1847: both shut down in the early 1850's. Prussia used a binary system like Sweden's, but with 12 shutters.

All of these systems paved the way for later electrical telegraph networks, as the operators of the time had to invent and implement data transmission protocols that are now taken for granted - things like error control, rate control, message priority, and so on.

The incredible speed with which the later electrical telegraph networks were built can at least partly be credited to the earlier optical networks making everyone aware of just how useful fast communication could be. Once a much faster, all-weather, and much more private and secure system came along, governments and industry were all on board despite the high up front costs.

Two last bits: Today's flag semaphore signals are adaptations of the those used by the British Admiralty in their 1830's optical telegraph. And, the many hills in England, Europe, and even parts of America which are today named the local equivalent of "telegraph hill," were all once places where an optical telegraph tower once stood.

Decades ago, I came across volumes 2 and 3 of the Sorcery Hall Trilogy in a bookstore. They were by Suzy McKee Charnas, author of the amazing Holdfast Chronicles, so I bought them instantly. And then they sat on my shelf unread for ages as I never got around to buying volume 1.

Earlier this year, Charnas died, and I decided it was time to fill the holes in my collection of her books. I finally got volume 1, and I also got something called "The Kingdom of Kevin Malone." And today, after many delays, I have finally finished reading the last of them. ( the good stuff )

And then picked up "The Kingdom of Kevin Malone," published in the early 90's, and... I'm not at all sure what to think. It's a portal fantasy - young Amy is roller skating in Central Park when a boy pins a brooch to her sleeve. She recognizes it as one stolen from her by a neighbourhood bully years ago, and recognizes the boy as the bully himself. She chases him down the path and through one of the pedestrian underpasses that dot the park. On the other side of the tunnel, though, is a fantasy world, with a quest and a prophecy in which she plays an important role. ( a book I have complicated feelings about )

It's a profoundly dissatisfying novel, and I'm not completely sure if Charnas intended it that way, or if the power of the tropes she was using prevented her from writing a better, more subversive ending.