Secret to Wall Street Riches Revealed

Closed-caption transcript of an investment banker describing how his firm's half-percent fee on the sale of $100 million worth of securities somehow results in the firm making $5 million, or 10 times that amount.

The interview with the banker is part of a video explaining the financial system. It plays on a continuous loop at the Museum of American Finance in New York.

Book Review: The Big Time

Fritz Leiber
1957
Awards: Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

This book is really abstract and way out there. I think much of it was beyond me. But what I did get I really enjoyed.

The Big Time’s main premise is that the time in which we live is actually an enclosed environment, and that there is a zone surrounding us, a gray misty space outside of and separate from our time, where other beings live. These other beings can come and go into and out of our time at will, plopping onto our world at any time in our past or future that they choose.

Two groups of these beings, which we never actually see but which are called “Spiders” and “Snakes” by the main characters, are fighting a massive war against each other, using our time as their battlefield. This war involves them: (a) recruiting recently-dead people to be soldiers and support staff for their side, (b) resurrecting the ones who agree to sign up, and (c) sending the resurrected soldiers into different eras of our time to fight the forces of the other side.

Through this process, the Spider and Snake soldiers have managed to screw up history in all kinds of ways, like by changing the outcomes of important battles in ancient Rome and assassinating key people during World War II who had never been assassinated before.

The entire book takes place in the misty realm outside of our time, in a sort of behind-the-lines R&R spot for Spider soldiers. The spot is populated by resurrected formerly-dead people who serve as entertainers, prostitutes, counselors, and doctors for the troops. These “ghosts” are pretty satisfied with how things are going until one visiting soldier decides to mutiny against the Spiders, breaks the connection to real time so they’re floating lost in the timeless zone, and then starts the countdown on a portable atomic bomb.

The main character who narrates the story is one of the prostitute/counselor/entertainers. She is very appealing; she has a laid-back attitude and uses a lot of slang. She is the reader’s guide, but she doesn’t feel the need to explain a heck of a lot. I also really liked the variety of the other characters. Since the Spiders can recruit from any place and time they want to, their support staff and soldiers are necessarily from all different countries and all different eras, including the future.

Great Deal on Roasted Mealworms

BOGOs are always irresistible; sign me up. I do wonder if the birds prefer the roasted mealworms or the plain. I would have thought plain.

Source: Duncraft Inc.

Book Review: Blue Mars

Kim Stanley Robinson
1996
Awards: Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

SPOILER ALERT (For Red Mars and Green Mars)

This is the third book in Kim Stanley Robinson’s trilogy about the colonization of Mars. It is, on the whole, not quite as awesome as the first two books in the set, but it has its own strengths.

After the more than one hundred years of construction, terraformation, feuds, sabotage, and war that were described in Red Mars and Green Mars, Blue Mars rewards the colonists’ perseverance (and yours) with a Mars that is now warm enough that its ice is melting and forming oceans. Plants and animals are rapidly adapting to the Martian environment. And, at sea level, humans can breathe the air without special equipment.

The people of Mars have turned the planet into a habitable world and have created a unique system of government with which to manage themselves. They actually are now doing much better than the people of Earth, who are dealing with environmental catastrophes and political chaos.

Robinson is an absolute master of the super-hard science fiction that makes up his Mars trilogy. He describes in minute, realistic detail what the colonization and terraforming of Mars could be like, and at the same time understands the emotional reactions the colonists might have to their situation. There are two themes in Blue Mars that particularly show how wise Robinson is about what people would feel at this point in their progress.

One is the colonists’ need to have some ritual way of looking back and celebrating what they have accomplished.

All three of Robinson’s Mars books explore the complicated tensions between “greens,” who want to change Mars to make it habitable for humans, and “reds,” who want to keep Mars as it originally was. Obviously, by the time of Blue Mars, the greens have won. But the reds get a victory of a sort when everyone agrees on a set altitude on Olympus Mons above which nothing will be grown or built and the atmosphere will be preserved in its original state. Greens and reds (and everyone in between) begin to use this zone as a remembrance space; once a Martian year, they hike up and build a city of temporary tents like those used by the first colonists and they spend a while there remembering what it was like in the beginning and thinking about the friends who have died along the way.

The other theme I really liked was the effect of super-long lifespans on the minds of the First Hundred colonists.

In Blue Mars, fewer than 35 members of the First Hundred survive; the rest have been killed in accidents, murder, and battle. Those remaining have all taken the life-extending treatments invented in Red Mars and are now over two hundred years old.

There are a number of side effects of living this long. For example, as time passes, the original colonists find they have more and more in common with each other and less and less in common with either the newer colonists or the native-born Martians. This makes them tend to draw together, even if they are on opposite sides of the political spectrum or if they originally hated each other.

Another side effect is that even though their brains are perfectly functional, so many things have happened to them that they start to forget or misremember the details of events from a hundred and fifty years ago when they first arrived. Sometimes they say they feel like their early experiences happened to someone else, not themselves. And some of them are unable to keep up with the constant changes that surround them and retreat emotionally, living only in the past.

In general, Blue Mars is a good conclusion to Robinson’s Mars trilogy. There are a couple down sides to it, however. For one thing, it is extremely long, even compared to the first two books. And also much of the last part of the book deals with the expansion of human space colonization into the rest of our solar system, which I found more abstract and less interesting than the original colonization of Mars.

Book Review: Beast in View

Margaret Millar
1955
Awards: Edgar
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

This murder mystery takes place in Los Angeles in the 1950s. A wealthy, antisocial woman, Helen Clarvoe, starts getting weird, threatening phone calls from an old acquaintance. The calls scare her, so she hires her family’s financial advisor, Mr. Blackshear, to try to find out who is calling her and why. This leads Mr. Blackshear on a nice investigation in which he uncovers all sorts of interesting secrets about Helen’s past and the other members of her family, and during which one of the people he is investigating commits suicide and another is murdered.

What I liked about this book most of all was the author’s clear, straightforward style. It was a pretty complicated story, and Millar certainly doesn’t use a simple vocabulary, but her writing is easy to read. She is not deliberately obscure or pretentious or too obvious about trying to create suspense.

The book was also small, a tidy 156 pages. I think that Millar knew the story she wanted to tell and didn't feel that she needed to add a lot of unnecessary fluff around it. Which I appreciate.

I also enjoyed reading a mystery about post-war non-Hollywood society in Los Angeles by somebody with a very different take on it than Raymond Chandler.

One notable aspect of this book is that one of the key characters, Helen’s brother Douglas, is gay. I thought that his character was handled amazingly well, considering that this book was written in 1955. Douglas is a full, complex person, not a monster or a silly stereotype. And when his mother finds out and wants to take him to a clinic to get “cured,” he explains to her (and the reader) that this is a part of who he is and it isn’t anything that he can be cured of.

The back cover of the 2000 edition of this book advertises that it pulls the main characters into a world of “extortion, pornography, vengeance, and murder." I don't know if it's really all that exciting, but it was a good read, with a clear style and plot twists that kept me interested through to the end.

Boulder, Colorado

Pearl Street

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Old-timey ads for Facebook, YouTube, Skype.

Enormous wiener impaled on fork. 

Problem: Need to use up 1 lb each of peaches and tomatoes with only one day remaining before leaving on trip. Solution: Peach-and-tomato gazpacho. 

Book Review: The Claw of the Conciliator

Gene Wolfe
1981
Awards: Nebula, Locus
Rating: ★ ★ – – –

The Claw of the Conciliator is the second book in Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun quadrilogy. It takes place on Earth (“Urth”) a very, very long time in the future. It is one of these futures in which everything is in decline; the sun is dying, the world is getting colder, and humans have forgotten how to use most of their technology and have regressed into a middle-ages-type society full of magic and lore and superstition.

In this society, most professions are organized into guilds, where young boys are taken in as apprentices and work their way up to be journeymen and then – if they’re lucky enough and good enough – masters. The four books of the New Sun series follow the life of Severian, who, as a child, was adopted into the guild of the Torturers.

The Torturers are a sort of necessary evil. They are feared and reviled by most people but they’re the only ones who are willing to do the punishing and executing of criminals. They maintain a professional, emotionally-detached front but their medieval methods for the “excruciation” of their “clients” are brutal and disgusting (and entertaining, for those of us who enjoy bloodcurdling tales of horror and the macabre).

I figured that for me to evaluate The Claw of the Conciliator accurately I should first read the first book in the trilogy, The Shadow of the Torturer. I really liked Shadow but did not feel the same way about Claw.

The first half of Shadow tells the best part of the story, when Severian is a boy apprentice living in the dorms in the Torturer’s Citadel. Things go well for him until, right after he graduates to journeyman, he makes the mistake of showing mercy to one of his “clients.” His masters show leniency on him by not killing him for this infraction but they do have to cast him out. They get him a job as a local executioner in a hick town way up north called Thrax. The second half of Shadow describes the first leg of his journey on foot to Thrax, in which he runs into strange characters and is challenged to a duel fought with carnivorous flowers and has to learn how to do freelance executions to make money.

The entire book of Claw (and, I assume, the third and fourth books in the series) describe more of Severian’s adventures on the way to Thrax. Unfortunately, the book gets increasingly magic-based and riddle-filled as it goes on, and the things that happen in it aren’t very interesting. Yes, he stumbles into an underground cave filled with hundreds of man-beasts that he has to tame with the light of a magical gem. And he does take part in a weird ceremony in which he eats the flesh of a dead person and afterwards has that person’s memories as well as his own. But he also falls in with an unappealing group of itinerant actors and hefty chunks of the book are taken up with descriptions of the incredibly boring plays he performs with them as they all travel northward together.

It was a real struggle to keep reading to the end of Claw. This was too bad because I liked Severian and the way he had to be in a certain amount of denial about the profession he was trained in from childhood. The third and fourth books might make for a fabulous recovery to the story but I don’t have the energy to find out.

Target Reaps Political Donation Backlash

Back in January when the Supreme Court handed down its decision in the Citizens United case allowing coporations and labor unions to donate to political candidates, I was pretty sanguine about it, thinking it might clarify links between donors and candidates.

Talking Points Memo highlights a recent controversy involving Target that illustrates the sort of situation that I had in mind:

We noted recently that Minnesota-based Target had availed itself of the new freedom created by the Citizen's United decision to give $150,000 to support far-right Minnesota gubernatorial candidate Tom Emmer. And in so doing they reaped a big backlash. Target's aim seems to have been to support Emmer's economic policies. But the backlash came over Emmer's extremely anti-gay policy stands. (He's also really against waiters.)

Target's CEO has now taken the pretty extraordinary step of issuing a public apology for the donation.

Target, as it happens, has a quite good corporate record on LGBT issues and workplace policies. So it's a fascinating example of how cross-cutting and complicated Citizen's United giving may turn out to be.

If Target had donated to Emmer under the old regime, via 527s and other shadowy routes, would we have even heard about it?

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Paul Krugman: Federal spending objects in mirror are smaller than they appear.

Soundtrack: Bruce Springsteen, "Downbound Train"

Flags at Half-Staff Here at Cheeze Blog

Morrie Yohai, ‘Mr. Cheez Doodles,’ Dies at 90 - Obituary (Obit) - NYTimes.com

Book Review: The Sculptress

Minette Walters
1994
Awards: Edgar
Rating: ★ ★ – – –

SPOILER ALERT

This book was great, a real page-turner, up to the halfway point, when it abruptly started losing my belief and my patience and my interest.

The story revolves around Olive, an enormously obese woman who is serving a 25-year prison term for the gruesome murder of her mother and sister. A writer, Roz, is doing research for a book about the murders and ends up discovering evidence that suggests that Olive didn't commit the murders after all.

Olive is a disturbed, creepy person who makes voodoo dolls of clay and candle wax and has to be carefully drawn out to say anything of value. Roz's initial investigation into the murders was lively and kept my interest up, particularly when she was interviewing Olive.

But it all starts to go downhill when Roz gets involved with Hal, one of the policemen who arrested Olive, who is now retired and running a restaurant.

Roz’s ex-policeman/restaurateur boyfriend has problems of his own - a foreclosure-scam lawyer trying to get him to close his restaurant. As it turns out, the lawyer was Olive’s family lawyer and had invested in properties (including Hal’s restaurant) with Olive's inheritance assuming she'd be in jail for 25 years, and now that it appears she might be innocent after all he has to start breaking people's kneecaps to get the money back. All of this seemed like an attempt to be twisty that just got too complicated.

Also the relationship between Roz and the policeman is juvenile and annoying. When they got together, Roz suddenly became the stereotypical sassy but helpless heroine. Hal became her stalwart protector and kept referring to her as "woman", as in, "woman, you drive me crazy."

I also didn't buy Olive's character change over the course of the story. She went from being a tough, recalcitrant prisoner who insists she committed the murders to a soft mush-mouth who cries a lot and is practically falling over herself to explain everything that really happened.

Perhaps the most disturbing thing about the book, though, if I may hearken back to my politically correct college days, is its treatment of the Female Body Image. First there is the obvious contrast between fat, creepy, evil Olive and skinny, sassy, virtuous Roz. There are also a couple times when Roz gets beaten up – once by her ex-husband and once by thugs hired to take back Hal’s restaurant. There is a lot of lingering detail about Roz’s injuries, and her bruises bring out the lover and romantic protector in Hal in a way that I found less than comfortable.

Odd Video from Early 1980s

The Russian Federation recently released a number of Cold War era materials, including this snippet of video it intercepted from an unknown American broadcaster in the early 1980s.

Book Review: Starship Troopers

Robert A. Heinlein
1959
Awards: Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

I was surprised that I liked this book as much as I did, given all the controversy about it.

It is set in the future, at a time when Earth is at war with an alien race, the hive-minded Bugs. The overly-idealistic citizen governments of Earth collapsed sometime back in the late twentieth century and the world is now governed by a (some would say fascist) military Federation. Becoming a soldier is very difficult, and only a small number of people even try, much less make it – but it alone earns you the right to vote.

You ride along with one of the tiny pawns in the Bug war, Juan “Johnnie” Rico, as he changes from a green recruit into a hard, professional soldier. Johnnie is in the Mobile Infantry, the grunts, the front line of combat against the Bugs. He is part of an epic war that will determine the fate of the human race, but he has no time to worry about higher levels of politics and strategy – his life revolves completely around getting enough sack time, not getting in trouble with the lieutenant, and keeping himself and the other members of his platoon alive.

Johnnie isn’t someone I would necessarily want to be, or even be friends with, but he is colorful and an appropriate guide to his time. Heinlein also creates a creative and consistent, if scary and hostile, world around his main character – both on the large scale (the Bugs, the state of Earth and its colonies, military and government structure) and on the small scale (boot camp, combat drops, everyday details of military life both in and out of battle).

For example - the mantra of the soldiers is to always be “on the bounce!” This comes from the heavily armored suits they wear in combat on other planets, which allow them to jump long distances and perform several tasks while in midair.

Yes, this book does glorify the military. And Heinlein does inject his tiresome personal-responsibility philosophy into the story, chiefly through Johnnie’s high school History and Moral Philosophy teacher Mr. Dubois. But the libertarian preaching wasn't as intertwined with the plot as in some of his other books, so I could skim those sections without losing much of the story. Plus, Johnnie doesn’t have an opportunity to have a lot of interaction with women, so Heinlein’s misogynistic tendencies stay mostly under cover (or, when they come out, at least they fit his rough-and-ready warrior characters).

The book was much better than Paul Verhoeven's movie, which was more war-action-oriented and didn’t go into much of the detail of the preparation and hardening of the soldiers, which was what about three-quarters of the book was about. The movie also invented characters that didn’t exist in the book and drastically altered the roles of others, to its detriment.

I think it is important to stress that I appreciated this book as a character study. I do not recommend it as a guide to attitudes about the military and government. Two excellent books already reviewed here on Cheeze Blog were written at least partly in reaction to Troopers, and both would help in maintaining some perspective on war after reading it:

* Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
* The Forever War by Joe Haldeman

From Kendall Mountain

 
 

Book Review: Ringworld

Larry Niven
1970
Awards: Nebula, Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

The main idea behind this book is fantastic.

Far, far away from Earth, somewhere in the Lesser Cloud of Magellan, an unknown alien race has built a life-supporting solar system of unique design.

It is basically a small yellow star – like our own sun – with an enormous ring orbiting it. The ring is like a hoop of ribbon, with one surface always facing inwards towards the sun. Niven describes it as “an intermediate step between Dyson Spheres and planets.”

The ring in cross-section is a million miles across and a thousand miles thick and, in total, it has the mass of Jupiter. But because the ring’s radius is so huge – 95 million miles, about the same as from Earth to our sun – it appears from a distance to be relatively narrow.

The ring is spinning around its sun at 770 miles per second, so it has gravity. Thousand-mile-high mountains at the edges prevent air from escaping off the sides. The flat side of the ring facing the sun is completely habitable and is covered with oceans, farms, forests, prairies, deserts – and is three million times the size of the surface of the Earth.

Since one side of the hoop always faces the sun, it would always be noon everywhere on Ringworld. But the engineers built another ring, slightly inside the first, of evenly-spaced opaque black squares connected to each other with wires. The inner ring of squares rotates at a slightly different rate than the outer ring, so that, for those living on the surface, the black squares alternately reveal and cover the sun at intervals roughly equivalent to Earth’s day and night.

Of course the book has characters and a plot. But primarily the characters serve as tools and the plot serves as a vehicle with which to explore the ring.

When Ringworld begins, it is well into the future. Humans have a long history of space travel, have made contact with several other alien species, and have developed "boosterspice" to lengthen their lifespans.

Humans and aliens alike know that there was a giant explosion in the galactic core ten thousand years ago that sent waves of radiation outward. The galactic core is thirty thousand light years from Earth, which means that the outer radiation wave is still twenty thousand years away, so humans aren't worried yet.

However, one race of aliens, the “puppeteers,” who are by nature extremely fearful and whose worlds are dangerously overpopulated, has started to plan ahead. They snapped a photo of the Ringworld in a long-range survey and think it might solve all their problems – a place to relocate to escape the radiation wave for several millenia and that, conveniently, could give them a lot more room.

So the puppeteers arrange a scouting expedition to check it out. They send one of their own – Nessus, a puppeteer who is just insane enough to be brave enough to do it – to recruit a crew of three to go with him. Two of his crew are humans: two-hundred-year-old restless adventurer Louis Wu and twenty-year-old good luck charm Teela Brown. The last member of the crew is a “kzin,” an alien species that has an honor-driven, warlike culture to rival the Klingons and looks like fluffy eight-foot-tall orange cats.

The four of them head out to Ringworld. Along the way they have personality clashes, romances (Louis & Teela), run-ins with dangerous natives, and revelations of disturbing things about each other and about Ringworld.

A structure as cool as Ringworld deserves exploring, and the crew serves to do that adequately in this book. But they do not wear well; the characters became progressively more and more silly in the many Ringworld sequels and I quickly lost interest in the franchise.

For another Nebula-winning novel involving a totally neat-o, unusually-shaped, artificially-created world, see Rendezvous with Rama.

Book Review: The Speed of Dark

Elizabeth Moon
2003
Awards: Nebula
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

This story is told almost entirely from the point of view of an autistic man, Lou Arrendale.

Lou is one of several autistic savants working for a big corporation that hires them for their abilities in math and pattern recognition. Lou also takes fencing classes outside of work. He is very good at fencing, since it also requires good pattern recognition, and he has a crush on one of his fellow fencing students. Lou’s work and his fencing occupy pretty much all of his life, and he likes it that way.

Lou works with a number of other autistic savants. They have a tight bond through their work and also their mutual understanding of each other’s particular fears and routines. They go out for pizza regularly, sitting at the same seats at the same table in the same restaurant where they know they will always get the same waitress and where the interactions are comfortingly predictable. It is a calming refuge when other parts of their lives are in turmoil and these scenes are some of the best parts of the book. I loved all the conversations and non-conversations they have, how they have learned what makes each other nervous, and how they accept it and make accommodations for it.

Lou’s company offers all its autistic workers a new experimental treatment which might cure their autism. He has to decide if he is going to have the treatment or not; it would make him “normal,” which is something he very much wants in the abstract, but it could also fundamentally change who he is as a person and there is a possibility that he could lose the talents that make him useful. To make things more stressful, the company claims it is offering it as an “optional” benefit, but they make it clear that if you do not volunteer for it, you are jeopardizing your job.

I really wasn’t sure until the end of the story whether Lou would decide to take the experimental treatment that his company was trying to force on him. And I worried along with him what would happen to his advantages in pattern recognition if he was cured.

Seeing the world through Lou’s eyes gives you a remarkable perspective on us “normal” people. For example, Lou cannot instinctively understand facial expressions. You follow his thought processes as he sees someone’s expression and consciously deconstructs it, painfully slowly, in order to understand what the person is trying to convey. It makes you think about how much we take for granted about what our faces convey and also how much we can lie with them.

Lou’s co-workers, the people in his fencing class, and the waitresses, policemen, and shopkeepers he comes into contact with every day relate to him with varying and sometimes surprising degrees of understanding, sensitivity, impatience, and cruelty. You really feel good about the people who do their best to overcome their own fears to try to understand Lou and to relate to him with integrity. And you are repelled by the people who take advantage of his naiveté and who are harmful.

Because of the subject matter and plot, this book is often compared to Flowers for Algernon. But I thought The Speed of Dark was a far better book.

Greenland

 
Photo by Karlissimo del Banco.

Least Politically-Correct Menu Board Ever

Laugavegur, Reykjavik, Iceland

Djúpalónssandur

 
 

Book Review: The Moon and the Sun

Vonda N. McIntyre
1996
Awards: Nebula
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

SPOILER ALERT

The Moon and the Sun takes place at the court of Louis XIV at Versailles. The main story revolves around a minor lady of the court, Marie-Josèphe, whose beloved brother Yves is one of the king’s scientific explorers. On one of Yves’ ocean voyages he manages to capture two humanoid sea monsters. One of them dies in the process but he brings them both back to Versailles, installing the live one in a pool and conducting a dissection of the dead one under observation by the king.

The living sea monster becomes the attraction of the summer at court, with nobles coming to gawk at her in her pool. Marie-Josèphe is the only person willing to pay enough attention to the sea monster (and to spend time with her outside of gawking hours) to realize that she is an intelligent creature and thinks like a human and can communicate (through song).

Unfortunately, of course, no one believes Marie-Josèphe about this. And, in fact, the king wants to cook and eat the sea monster at a banquet. So Marie-Josèphe and her brother have to engineer an escape.

This is actually a novel of alternate history, but you don’t know that until the very end. The idea is that this all really did happen; there really were intelligent sea monsters living in the ocean in the 1600s, and two were brought back to Versailles. But in our version of history, the sea monster was eaten by the king and the world was never any the wiser and all the sea monsters went extinct, most killed by sailors who didn’t know what they were killing.

In The Moon and the Sun’s version of history, Marie-Josèphe and her brother saved the sea monster, humans found out that they were not the only intelligent species on earth, human-sea monster diplomatic relations were established and it changed history right down to the modern day.

The story itself was so-so. But it served as a great vehicle for embedding you in life at Versailles. I thought the best parts of the book by far were the everyday details and nuances of court behavior – including how the women did their hair and handled their periods – which really made the era come alive.

I liked how every little part of the king’s life got blown up into something unbelievably ceremonial and elaborate. The very highest-ranking nobles at court, for example, had the dubious honor of being required to get up super-early, dressed to the nines, to attend the "awakening" of the king each morning. (The king actually woke up several hours earlier and had his hair and makeup and clothes done, so what the courtiers saw was really his second awakening, but you can’t have the king looking disheveled.)

There are also some great king-related moments around the otherwise sad scenes of the dead sea monster's dissection, which the king insists on attending in person. One day he is unable to come, so the men-at-arms bring in a portrait of the king instead and put it on the king's chair, and everyone has to act like the portrait is the actual king.

Iceland Search and Rescue

 
 

Kjölur Crossroads

 
 

Kjölur, Iceland, 1:30 a.m.

 
 

Langjökull Glacier

 
 

Book Review: Downbelow Station

C.J. Cherryh
1981
Awards: Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

This is a pretty complicated book about the economic and military conflicts surrounding the colonization of Pell’s World – the first habitable planet to be discovered outside our solar system.

In this story, space exploration is financed by The Company, an Earth-based corporation with Earth-centric views of how the natural resources of other planets should be used. The Company maintains their own military Fleet to protect those interests.

For years, missions to other solar systems have been limited because they could only travel so far from Earth, the only resupply center. But when Pell’s World is discovered, everything changes.

The Company builds a space station orbiting Pell and then a station on the surface of the world itself (which becomes known as Downbelow Station). Once they do this, spacefarers no longer have to rely solely on Earth for resupply, and can explore farther and farther out into the galaxy, which allows them to discover even more habitable worlds. And once there is a critical mass of humans living on planets other than Earth, they begin to question whether space exploration should still be entirely about exploiting other planets for Earth’s benefit or whether these other planets deserve to be self-supporting worlds of their own.

The Company doesn’t like this kind of thinking, of course, and it inevitably leads to tension between the Company, its Fleet, the union of non-Earth planets, and the independent merchant ships that fly between them, all of which culminates in a huge battle at Pell.

I have to admit that I didn’t really get into all the clashing ambitions of the various interest groups. The story was okay, but not always exciting enough to keep my attention through 500+ pages.

I also didn’t find many of the characters all that likeable. My favorite character, Emilio, was in Downbelow Station on the surface of Pell and most of the action took place in the space station orbiting the planet, so unfortunately I didn't see too much of him. There were also the Hisa, an intelligent species of animal indigenous to Pell, who are a little like chimpanzees and who are hired and/or exploited as workers by the humans. The Hisa were very nice and gentle but maybe just a little too annoyingly naive.

Cherryh does, however, do a great job constructing a realistic universe on a large scale and vivid settings on a small scale.

The station orbiting Pell was well thought-out and well described; I could practically draw a map of it. The environment on the just-barely-habitable planet of Pell was also believable; it’s not a ridiculous Eden. Humans have to wear special breathers and the weather is chilly and dank.

And I think the greatest strength of this book is that it paints a believable picture of humans in the first stages of space colonization. It made total sense to me how the discovery of one habitable planet (and then another, and another) would fundamentally change both commerce and psychology. I could see how people would naturally start to split into those still attached to Earth and those who want to look beyond it.

It was what I imagine the early conditions would be that would lead up to Asimov's Foundation universe. It makes it seem entirely possible that over thousands and thousands of years of exploration, Earth could get left farther and farther behind until it is eventually forgotten.

Þingvellir National Park

 
 

Mailbox

 
 

Valdi's CD Store

 
Reykjavik. 
 
 

Graeggi

 
Graffiti possibly related to the 2008 economic crisis.