Saturday Night Linkblogging

[sub_divided]

Reading Maria Doria Russel's The Sparrow. So far I really, really like it. Half is set in 2019, before and during a Jesuit mission to an alien planet, and half is set in 2060, after the return of its sole survivor. Besides apintrix and canis_m, my ex-Catholic atheist housemate Marie also recommended this book.

Unlike in some other near-future science fiction books, there is a really strong sense of continuity in this one. The Sparrow was written in 1996 and it takes a very...1996 view of which things could reasonably be expected to change in 20 years. Strife due to accelerated ethnic breakup with no help from the U.N., increased unemployment due to increasingly sophisticated computer A.I., stuff like that. The biggest stretch is Japanese control of the space mining industry -- and actually, this fits in pretty well with what I know about their space program. (The Japanese space program is practical -- not necessarily in a hard material gain way, but value-driven -- and oriented towards the purchase of other countries' projects, but reorganized so that their leadership is entirely Japanese. This is in contrast to China's space program, which is flashy.)

While I am talking about science, I thought it was SO COOL that Jimmy is a reasearcher at Orinobe (an observatory in the Dominican Republic). That's similar to the site I was going to do calibration research for, before I burned out on physics and punked out on my advisor. Or actually, not similar: Orinobe is a radio telescope, I was set to work with a gigantic Chilaen optica telescope. The dish on the Chile-scope is hundreds of meters wide and it is VERY susceptible to idiosyncratic measurements which are affected by, oh, all kinds of things. The static electricity from people's clothes as they walk past. Atmospheric changes. The dish is old and it's on top of a mountain, it is constantly being warped by the wind. People sometimes ask why it isn't just replaced, then, but it's a question of expense, and anyway there's a lot you can do with even an extremely imperfect instrument if you know how to compensate for its defficiencies.

The odd thing about most scientific research, which Sofia discovers, is that it's both routine and something that requires thought.

I'm at the part of the book that's just before the mission leaves for Rakhat (about a fifth of the way through). When I realized most of the people I was reading about in the 2019 sections would die horribly between then and 2060, I was appalled. The situation seems to be gearing up toward a melodramatics-in-space plot similar to 3010:A Space Odyssey's or Please Save My Earth's. Here's what it looks like:

Anna (anthropologist, doctor, American)<---is married to----> George (engineer, artificial life support, American)
Anna ----is attracted to---> Emilio (celibate priest, linguist, Dominican)
Emilio ----is (mutually?)attracted to ---> Sofia (programmer, industrial connections, Sephardic Jew)
Jimmy (astrologist, American) ---is attracted to---> Sofia
George ---is attracted to---> Sofia

Imagine that as a manga flow-chart and you'll get the basic idea.

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Linkblogging:

Overheard in New York
(via sesame_seed)

Formal Thought Disorder
(Wikipedia article)

rarelitart
(fanart for rare (meaning: not Harry Potter) literature)