Nonfiction
Fiction
Bruce Schneier
John Wiley & Sons, 1996
It's incredibly difficult to keep up with everything happening in the field of cryptography. Every six months, it seems, the field is overturned by something new like elliptic encryption or Ron Rivest's chaffing and winnowing. But you have to start somewhere, and Bruce Schneier's mammoth book is the place.
The book is divided into five sections. The first two parts cover the theoretical and mathematical background of cryptography. Part three covers encryption and hashing algorithms, including DES, triple DES, RSA, IDEA, and MD5. The next section deals with real world issues such as export restrictions, Kerberos, PGP, smart cards, and Clipper. Finally, there is C source code for DES, IDEA, and seven other encryption algorithms.
Even if you don't implement any encryption code, there are many fascinating topics to dive into: zero-knowledge proofs, theoretical limits of encryption/decryption, secure electronic voting schemes, the Chinese lottery etc. These will give you plenty to chew on through cold winter nights.
More information about the book, including an errata list, is available here.
Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, John Vlissides
Addison-Wesley, 1995
If you don't program computers, then skip this. If you program in C++, Java, or any other object-oriented language, you must read this book.
Rather than dispensing general advice, this was the first book that listed what the authors call "design patterns". These are groups of classes that solve common programming problems. For example, what do you do if you want to treat a shared printer as an object? You want to have at most only one instance of this printer object available. How do you accomplish this? The answer is to define a class that controls access to the printer and only allows one copy of itself to be created. The structure of classes which solve this problem is similar, and that structure is what the authors call the "Singleton" pattern.
Patterns don't solve every problem. This book, however, introduced OO programmers to the idea that it's possible to re-use the essence of a solution rather than just individual classes. Two-thirds of this book is a very usable pattern catalog. Each pattern has different sections for intent, motivation, applicability, structure, participants, collaborations, consequences, implementation, sample code, known uses and related patterns.
After you've read this book you'll never think of OO programming in the same way again. Even if you don't program often, it's worth reading just for the introductory third. A ground-breaking book.
Robert Axelrod
Basic Books, 1984
This short book, a non-mathematical analysis of cooperation, contains some surprising findings. For example, there is no single best strategy for cooperation; the circumstances of each situation define the best strategy, if there is one.
However, there is one strategy that works remarkably well in a wide variety of situations. It's called Tit for Tat. The author ran a computer tournament with many entrants that could either cooperate or defect on a given turn. The entry that almost always came out on top had the most easily decribed behavior: cooperate the first time, then do whatever the other program did on the previous turn. This is the essence of Tit for Tat.
Axelrod analyzes the entrants and comes up with the following list of qualities of a successful strategy:
Be nice. This means don't be the first to defect.
Be provocable. If the other person defects, retaliate immediately.
Be forgiving. If the other person defects, defect yourself, then immediately return to cooperation.
Be clear. Your opponent has to have some idea of what you might do in a given situation. Using a simple, predictable strategy makes this possible.
Tit for Tat exhibits all of these properties.
The evolution of cooperation is illustrated by several examples. The most striking were the spontaneous truces that broke out in the trenches of World War I. Although there was no explicit communication between the two sides, informal rules were established that discouraged conflict. It's a facinating chapter.
Another surprising finding is that it only pays to cooperate when the long-term payoff is high enough. This leads to the conclusion that sometimes it makes sense to not cooperate with people you will never see again!
In short, this is a fascinating work that will make you think about how you deal with people. Read it, and then follow it up with Nancy Kress' novella "Beggars in Spain" (in The Year's Best SF, Ninth Annual Collection).
Douglas Hofstadter and the Fluid Analogies Research Group
Basic Books, 1995
It's always hard to review books by Hofstadter. This one's a little different, though. Rather than being a single unified work, it's a collection of research papers by the people in the Fluid Analogies Research Group. All but one have Hofstadter as a co-author. He also provides a prologue, epilogue and prefaces to the individual papers.
Okay, I'm not an impartial observer of this research. It excites me. The most fascinating is the Copycat project. It attempts to model how people try to figure out "do this" puzzles involving strings of letters. Here's an example. if abc becomes abd, what should ijk become?
Rather than trying a brute-force search of all possible answers, Copycat simultaneously tries to figure out what the rule is in the example that changes abc to abd, as well as how the source string (abc) maps onto the target string (ijk). When a good candidate rule is found, Copycat tries to apply it to the target string.
What's fascinating is that Copycat isn't deterministic. At any given moment there may be dozens of potential actions that compete for attention. Each action that is selected may generate additional, different actions. These are used for model construction and destruction, deciding when to try a rule, etc.
Measuring the entire system is the concept of temperature. When the system has a high temperature, there is little structure built, and there are many uncoordinated actions vying for attention. As the temperature drops, the system converges on only a few potential structures. Since the system is probabilistic, the temperature can rise as well. Copycat uses this to find better answers.
When an answer is finally produced, Copycat's current temperature is also printed. Given a problem with two solutions - one okay and common, one rare and good - Copycat will more often find the okay answer. What's fascinating is that more rarely, it will find the good solution - but the average temperature will be lower! The temperature becomes a measure of how "satisfying" the answer is.
Copycat is but one project in this book. The most ambitious is Letter Spirit. Still in progress, it attempts to create a typeface with a common look, given only a few example letters.
This stuff just gets my mind going. I'd love to watch Copycat running on my PC. Melanie Mitchell's released the source code, but it's in Lisp and runs on a platform I don't have access to. Anyone have a Sun machine running Sunview they can lend out?
This book isn't for everyone - but it's definitely for me. I had to order Melanie Mitchell's doctoral thesis on Copycat after reading this.
Rudy Rucker
Birkhäuser, 1982
Rucker's non-technical exposition of infinity, transfinite mathematics, and the paradoxes and limitations of logic is a delight to read and ponder. For example, there's Berry's Paradox: Let X be "the least integer not nameable in fewer than nineteen syllables". Now, X itself is described in eighteen syllables - a contradiction. How does this relate to the Axiom of Choice? These are the kinds of questions this book raises.
Theodore Sturgeon
Ballantine, 1953
This is one of the odder stories of my life. I've read a lot of SF over the years, and this book has become my favorite. Yet I didn't pick it out; my sister, who read almost no SF at all, bought it and Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End (another favorite) while we were shopping one day in New Jersey. If I had known that her SF taste would turn out to be so good, I would have commissioned her to buy all the SF from then on.
An expansion of Sturgeon's novella "Baby is Three", the book is divided into three sections. The first introduces a bunch of misfits: an idiot, a disturbing young girl, twins who only speak to each other, and a mongoloid baby. Apart, they are people who don't fit into the world; together, they are more than their sum. They are the next step in human evolution.
The second section, one psychiatric session, details what happens when this new being starts to evolve and faces challenges to its existence. The last section follows this gestalt organism through its maturation.
I love this book for two reasons. The first is that every time I read it (and that surely must be twenty times now), there is more to discover. A character's motivation suddenly becomes apparent; a fact that was hidden is now clear. I first read this as a teenager, and my understanding of the book has mirrored the growth of my understanding of people.
The other thing I love about it is that the book is so human. Even though Sturgeon's talking about Homo Gestalt, the next evolutionary step, he's really talking about us. Why else would he spend so much effort trying to define what ethics and morals are? How else could he show us so effortlessly why we need them? It's because all of us need them, and he's compassionate enough to show us how without ethics, even a superman is alone.
Whenever I need a dose of humanity, this is where I go. By now I can quote sections of it. It's as familiar as an old glove, yet there is still more to learn from it. "Wise" is a word that's out of fashion nowadays, but I wouldn't hesitate to bestow it upon Theodore Sturgeon. It's sad that he isn't alive anymore. But with this book, the best of him is there for all to touch.
Greg Egan
HarperPrism, 1992
Every decade or so a SF writer comes along who just has it. They're the writer whose works set you on fire, setting you off on a binge of creativity. In the 1960s we had Larry Niven's hard science; in the 1970s James Tiptree Jr. and John Varley's stories defined the peak of the decade; William Gibson's stories shaped the course of fiction in the 1980s. It's taken longer than usual for the Next Big Writer to come to prominence, but it's finally happened. There are some fine SF writers in the 1990s, but the authors who owns this decade is Greg Egan.
A mix of detective novel and quantum physics, Quarantine is a roller coaster ride. Implanted neural behavioral modifiers, known as mods, are integral to the novel; our hero, a former policeman, is wired with several. Some helped him on his job, and one allows him not to be disturbed by the death of his wife in a terrorist bombing. He still remembers her; he just isn't affected. It's a canny choice for a hero. We can't help wondering about how the mod affects him.
Add to this the facts that years ago the solar system was sealed off from the rest of the universe by the "Bubble", and that our hero was hired to find a severely brain-damaged woman who has escaped twice from a maximum-security facility, and you have the pieces of a true page-turner.
Egan doesn't take the easy way out, either. At one point the bad guys implant a loyalty mod in our hero. Now, if John Campbell had been editing this in the Golden Age of SF, our hero would overcome this by force of will or logic. Egan's protagonist doesn't; once it's implanted, he joyfully accepts the mod - after all, that's part of what it does. Wondering how the author will write a sympathetic brainwashed character made for even more gripping reading. Egan pulls it off.
This novel has all that and the most imaginative scenario of quantum physics put on paper. He's not the greatest prose stylist ever, but with ideas like these, does it really matter? Be prepared to read this in one sitting.
Egan has followed with the novels Permutation City, Distress, Diaspora, and the collection Axiomatic. All are stimulating reading that will leave your brain reeling. His fascination with neural self-modification and personal freedom continues, and reaches ever farther and farther. See for example the Voluntary Autists in Distress or Permutation City's Solipsist Nation.
If forced to choose, I'd recommend Axiomatic, followed by Distress. The latter boasts the most gripping opening chapter I've ever read. His writing has definitely improved over time.
And if you want to read what might be the ultimate corporate horror story, try "Appropriate Love" in Axiomatic.
Richard Dawkins
Oxford University Press, 1976/1989
This was reviewed on the 1998 book list.
John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton
Common Courage Press, 1995
This book is scary. Its subject is the public relations industry and how it manipulates the media. They expose the PR machinations of the obvious targets: the nuclear power, tobacco, and chemical industries. Those are frightening enough, but they continue onward to discuss the methods that these PR firms use. Besides advertising, there's spying, creating fake "grass roots" lobbying organizations, and planting news stories that the media doesn't bother to investigate.
The most unreal part of the book is where they discussed the title. While they were considering its final title, they received a call from Nancy Blatt, then Director of Information for the Water Environment Federation. In their words:
She phoned to say that she had seen an advance notice mentioning our book, and she was concerned that the title might interfere with the Federation's plans to transform the image of sewage sludge. "It's not toxic," she said, "and we're launching a campaign to get people to stop calling it sludge. We call it 'biosolids'."
Blatt went on to mention that there was a planned campaign put together by the PR firm Powell Tate. This intrigued the authors, so they requested more information. Their requests for inside documents were rebuffed, even though the public is entitled to them since the WEF is partly taxpayer funded. At the time of publication the EPA had not acted on the Freedom of Information Act request.
[A bit of good news: the USDA recently agreed to overhaul their organic labelling guidelines due to overwhelming public protest. Under the proposed guidelines, food fertilized with sewage sludge could have been labelled organic.]
The last chapter covers things individuals can do to make a difference. The appendices are useful sources of information, as are the extensive Notes.
This is a book that anyone who reads or watches TV should read, if only to know how thoroughly they're being fooled.
Let's not forget that Archer Daniels Midland, a sponsor of PBS' The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, might describe themselves as "supermarket to the world" - but recently made a settlement on the charge of fixing the global price of lysine. In the world of PR, nothing is what it appears to be. A little sludge goes a long way.
[For more recent corporate doublespeak, visit American Newspeak.]
Scott McCloud
Kitchen Sink Press, 1993
It starts with two images deliberately placed next to each other...
Understanding Comics is an analysis of what comics are and how they work. McCloud treats the history of comics, the separate elements of a comic (abstraction vs. realism, pacing, transitions, closure, etc.), then broadens his scope to an entire theory of creativity! It's a masterwork, written by someone who loves both comic books and the art form, and wants to see them achieve far more than they now do.
This book can change how you think about creativity. I don't know how many people I've recommended or loaned this book to for precisely that reason.
Gardner Dozois, editor
St. Martin's Press, 1984-
Dozois is the best SF anthologist around. He leans a bit to the hard SF side, though he balances that with pieces that have wonderful style. For example, the best story in the Fourteenth (1997) Annual Collection was Steven Utley's "The Wind over the World". The story deals with loss and remembrance, and the plot is over in the first few pages. But it's the strong characterization that follows which makes the story haunting.
Also in this collection were these impressive stories: Michael Swanwick's "The Dead", Jim Cowan's "The Spade of Reason", and Nancy Kress' "The Flowers of Aulit Prison". I'd award a Nebula to any of them. And that's just one volume.
Each of these 600-odd page volumes also has an extensive summary of the year in SF, as well as the year's recommended reading list. What more could you want? This is one book I make sure to order in hardcover; I expect to have them for the rest of my life. If I could read only one SF book each year, this would be it.
You shouldn't miss the required reading and honorable mention lists.
Last updated 27 February 2004
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All contents ©1999-2002 Mark L. Irons