Book Review: The Man Who Folded Himself, by David Gerrold

I've never read anything by this author before, which is amazing to me.

When I was a child, I used to love the Sid & Marty Krofft TV show Land of the Lost (anyone else remember Doctor Shrinker, The Lost Saucer, Sigmund and the Sea Monsters, Wonder Bug?).  Mr. Gerrold was responsible for the creation of the Sleestak race on that show (unclear whether he was also responsible for the character Enik, whose race ultimately turns into the Sleestaks).

I also liked the Star Trek:TOS episode The Trouble with Tribbles.  Mr. Gerrold was responsible for that as well.  In the foreword to the book, Robert J. Sawyer confirmed my suspicion that the Tribbles were actually a homage to the Martian flat cats in Robert. A Heinlein's The Rolling Stones juvenile novel.  Mr. Sawyer - thank you for this validation.

In the past, I have sought out books by authors responsible for various movie scripts and TV episodes.  So, the fact that I've never read anything by Mr. Gerrold is very strange indeed.  Perhaps this is due to these things being from my childhood, which seems very far in the background now.

A friend recommended this book several years ago, and stated it was his favorite time travel story.  At the time, I didn't feel like shelling out $12 US for a book that was less than 150 pages in length.  Recently, I was able to get this book for under $3 for my kindle, so it got moved to the front of my reading list.

The story starts off in a very interesting way, and reminded me of Philip K. Dick's Paycheck short story - there's no introduction to any characters, and we just jump right in.  You could say that the story begins in a confusing way.

It begins with this line:  IN THE BOX was a belt.  And a manuscript.

Then there is a divider in the text - three dots - and the story begins with the central character, Daniel talking in the first person about his Uncle Jim.  I had to assume that this text was the start of the manuscript, and I didn't think much of it.  But then, there are several areas where the divider of three dots appears in the text.  I still didn't think much of it, assuming that these were like chapter breaks, and I just kept reading.

The story had several unexpected turns, and deals with time travel differently than many other stories I've read, particularly in the realm of paradoxes.  I found the escapades of this time traveler very interesting and entertaining.

And then...somewhere around the middle of the story, things started to get strange.

If you have read the book:  I'm not talking about the sexual themes that develop.  Back in 1973, when this book was first published, these themes must have been pretty controversial.  In my book, this adds Mr. Gerrold to the "pushing the envelope pioneering ranks" (Bravo!) alongside Philip Jose Farmer (for some of his stories in Strange Relations, such as The Lovers, and his Secrets of the Nine series with Doc Caliban and Lord Grandrith - pastiche's of Doc Savage and Tarzan, Lord of the Apes, respectively), Ursula K. Le Guin (for The Left Hand of Darkness, which includes a race of hermaphrodites), and Robert A. Heinlein (for Stranger in a Strange Land, with its free love and communal living aspects).

I've never had any problem with this kind of subject matter in novels.

No, I'm referring to the point in the book where it started to became somewhat difficult for me to keep straight what was going on.  And I started having questions about who wrote this manuscript, and I even started to wonder if there was actually more than one author.  It was getting a little surreal, and it was becoming difficult for me to determine what these chapter separators indicated.

Anyway, I continued reading, and the story became even more complex, and covered some really interesting territory.  Ultimately, I felt I could see where this story was going to end up, and as it turns out, I guessed right, so there wasn't much surprise for me when the end was reached.

I did enjoy this book quite a bit, but by the time I finished, I felt that there were some unanswered questions with regard to the manuscript itself, and I had difficulty understanding how it ended up being written.  The treatment of paradoxes in the story might help explain some of this, but I couldn't wrap my head around it.  It may be that I was just very tired when reading this portion of the book, but I found it very confusing.

But, I suppose this can be expected with a time travel story.  I've read many time travel stories over the last several decades, including Downtiming the Night Side, by Jack L. Chalker.  This was also a very involved, and potentially confusing story.  In the Authors Note, Chalker called out the complexity of the story as the main reason he would never write a time travel story again.

Something I really liked about this edition of the book is that it was updated in the 2000's.  The description of some of the events that Daniel witnesses occurred decades after this book was first published, and it adds a nice touch to the story.

Ultimately, this was a good read, and no reader will be able to see the direction in which things are heading for a while.  If you like time travel stories, this is a good one to try to wrap your head around. and this one contains a very unique and original treatment of time travel that I expect will be very different from anything you have seen or read before.

Book Review: CyberStorm, by Matthew Mather

This book was not what I expected, and that is not a bad thing.

With a name like CyberStorm, and the words "full scale cyber attack" on the back cover, I immediately had visions of the movie Live Free or Die Hard.  That is, a hacker bent on revenge is slowly bringing down the Internet and the power grid.  Enter Bruce Willis, who works with Justin Long and Kevin Smith to put a stop to the villains master plan, complete with over-the-top action sequences and the impossible physics of gravity defying stunts.

This is not that kind of story.

Well, it really is - but not told from the perspective of a Bruce Willis action-hero character.  This story is told from the viewpoint of an ordinary man in New York City.  A man who tries to survive this attack with his family and friends - with a major snowstorm occurring a the same time.  I don't believe there have been many attempts to tell a story like this before, in a novel or in a movie (I haven't seen the film The Day After Tomorrow, but that might be close - though without the cyber attack).  This was quite a different tale from anything I've read before.

Imagine the scenario.

First, your smart phone is no longer able to access the Internet consistently, and it gets slower.  Next, you are unable to send/receive text messages or listen to voice mails.  You can't reach your spouse on the phone, and their "errand" is taking way longer than you expected.

Then your internet connection on your laptop is slow and flaky, so you have no access to email and either limited or non-existent access to web pages, so you aren't getting any news of what is going on.  Then you realize that you have now lost contact with your spouse for several hours and a major snowstorm has begun.  Then the news starts reporting plane crashes, virus outbreaks, and there are rumors of non-US vehicles in US airspace.  Of course, you can verify none of this - you can't tell what is happening outside due to the storm.  All you have is the vague speculations being reported on CNN.

Then, things get even worse.

The power goes out.  It briefly comes back, but then goes out for good.  The storm becomes a blizzard.  Now you are trapped in your Manhattan apartment with no heat, limited food, and no access to information aside from the vague, unverifiable reports you get from the radio.

The snow starts to accumulate to a depth of 1 - 2 feet and is not showing any sign of letting up.  The temperature drops much lower than expected for the time of year.  There is widespread panic, and nobody seems to know what is going on.  As if things weren't bad enough, let's heap a little more misfortune on the characters - at the same time, you start to have family problems, leading to trust issues, adding an additional dimension to the survival challenge.

Would you be prepared if this unlikely scenario occurred tomorrow?  And, to make matters worse, you live on Manhattan Island with millions of other people.

This story contains elements of The Walking Dead TV show.  No, not the zombies!  (Story idea:  Zombie Cyber Apocalypse - words that have never been strung together before!)  No, I'm referring to the drama of survival.  Trying to survive in competition (mostly for resources like food, medicine, and heating fuel) with others who are also trying to survive - perhaps at the expense of others.  In this case, people who live in your building, perhaps on the same floor, or on a different floor, and the people you might encounter on the street.  Who do you trust?  Who do you really know?  Who can you count on when the chips are down?

This was a great read involving a new kind of war - Cyber War.  A cyber attack that takes out the entire infrastructure of the United States.  This is a horrifying concept.

One of the things I really liked about this story was that there were no John McClane hero-type characters.  These are everyday, ordinary, fragile, people who are concerned about their family - just like those of us in the real world (I think this is one of the reasons that The Walking Dead is so popular - the characters aren't heroes, and they have real problems).

This story reminds me of a statement that was made in the James Cameron movie The Terminator.  The character Kyle Reese states the following about who started the war in his future:

"Defense network computers.  New...powerful...hooked into everything, trusted to run it all."

This was back in 1984.  At least ten years ago, if not longer, a friend tried out a new oven that was Internet accessible.  You could place it in refrigeration-mode, put a turkey inside, and leave it there.  Hours later, you could connect to it via a web browser from your office and start the cooking process so that it would be ready when you got home.  Within the last 5 years I have also seen commercials for applications that you can use from your smart phone to turn off the lights and lock doors to your house from a remote location.

So, if baby monitors with wireless cameras can be hacked, then why not these applications?  If the entire power grid and defense network is Internet accessible, why couldn't that be hacked as well?

The Internet was originally designed back in the early 1990's - but not with security in mind.  Security has evolved as a bunch of features added on top of the Internet structure for decades, but security issues continue to be found (Windows 10 just had a security vulnerability revealed recently by Google).  Attaching critical systems to a network like this seems like a really bad idea.

I would highly recommend this to anyone who wants to be on the edge of their seat while witnessing this terrifying world of speculative possibility.  At the time of the writing of this review, Twitter and several other services were taken down by a Distributed Denial of Service attack on the Dyn DNS servers, which have apparently been probed for months to determine potential weaknesses.

It kind of makes you wonder - is CyberStorm just a work of fiction?  Or could this nightmare scenario actually be played out someday?

Trashed, by Derf Backderf

This cover of this book immediately caught my eye in the bookstore.  It just seemed like it would be an entertaining read, and it definitely was.  But this book is more than just entertaining.  This book draws on the authors prior experience as a garbage man in the years 1979 - 1980, and attempts to raise awareness of the huge problem that garbage has become in our world.  That's not something you would normally expect of a graphic novel.

First, let's talk about the story itself.  J.B, the central character, starts the story being harassed by his mother to take the garbage out.  He ends up making a mess out at the curb and decides that the garbage man can take care of it.  Little does he know that this will come full circle - he ends up becoming one of the two new garbage men in his town, and needs to deal with messes more disgusting than the one that he left for the previous garbage man.  He quickly quickly comes to realize that it is a thankless job, and that there are major problems with our waste management strategies.

The escapades of J.B. and his cohorts are very entertaining, funny, and sometimes they are downright nasty (after reading this, you won't want to piss off your garbage collector).  The story line in general is fairly familiar, and somewhat parallels the movie Backdraft (a rookie firefighter has a rough time after starting out, gains experience in a very traumatic way, and ultimately becomes a seasoned firefighter, and ends up right where he started, ready to show the ropes to the next rookie).

Second, there is the factual part of the story, which is provided in sections throughout the book.  This is the most sobering part of the story, and I found some of it very disturbing.  One of the first disturbing facts is that not much has changed in waste management since 1980.  This book was published in 2015, so let's call it 2013 to allow time for writing - that is still 30+ years with very little advancement.

When I was a young child, we used to take yard waste to the dump in my town, which had its own incinerator, and for years everything was burned.  I don't remember when, but at some point that changed.  The incinerator was shut down and was simply used as a collection place, and all of our waste was trucked to another town and that was pretty much all I knew about it - I assumed it was being burned in an incinerator in another town.

After I graduated from college and moved out of my parents house, I learned that our garbage went into a landfill.  It is interesting that I learned this once my town started curbside recycling.  This was the year they first came out with those small blue bins, and there were many restrictions on what could be recycled (I remember bottled drinks like the coffee drink Capio being a particular pain, since the bottle caps left a metal ring around the bottle which you needed to clip off before it could be recycled).  Anyway, MASSPIRG (Massachusetts Student Public Interest Research Group) came around with a petition for people to sign, because they found out that recyclables which were now being picked up separately from garbage were actually still going into a landfill instead of being recycled.  That was the first I had heard of a landfill, and I was in my early 20's.

This book revealed details that I never would have guessed.  I know that over the least 20 years we

have increasingly become more of a "throw away" society - you see it everywhere (if you can name it, there's probably a disposable version of it).  But, apparently we started this process way back in 1960 - over 50 years ago!  It hadn't taken full hold yet when I was a child.  I remember getting milk delivered in glass bottles, which then got exchanged for full bottles at the next delivery - they may not have been recycled, but they were definitely reused.   We also used to get Charles Chips potato chips (see picture) in a big metal tin, which I imagine must have been recycled back then (or at least reused).

But, just take a look at how things are today:

• Plastic bags are used by most stores (particularly grocery stores, but CVS, book stores, department stores, etc. all primarily use plastic).  If not recycled, they end up in a landfill, and lets face it, remembering to recycle them is a pain.
• Soda/seltzer/juice bottles are all plastic - you need to take them back to be recycled, or recycle them at your curb, or they end up as garbage.  Many of these do get recycled, but at various events involving many people in a public place, they most likely just get thrown out.  It is getting better, but not where it should be.  Note that hundreds of millions of these bottles get used, and they have been around a long time.
• Plastic utensils, plates, cups - all of which are recyclable.  But, when you attend a party, how much of this do you see get actually get washed and recycled rather than being thrown out?
• Everything is made disposable these days - plastic razors, condiment packets and bottles (ketchup, mustard, relish, BBQ sauces), toothpaste tubes, toothbrushes, etc.
• Food scraps - we should be keeping these for compost, but much of it ends up in the garbage or down the sink disposal system.

Things are improving, but slowly.  These days, we have large bins (30 - 50 gallon size) that we leave at the bottom of our driveways for both trash and recycling, which get picked up by a semi-automated truck.  We recycle more and more every year, but it barely makes a dent in the amount of garbage we are producing.  As of a 2013 study, we are only recycling 29% of our 389 million tons of garbage produced every year.  Check out the pie chart to the left to see the distribution of our garbage.  An alarming amount of it - almost 30% - is just packaging that most of our stuff comes in.  Some of that can be recycled, but packing materials like Styrofoam, or those plastic bubbles that are filled with air, cannot be recycled.  The percentage of materials that cannot be recycled is also alarmingly high - over 20% consists of things that cannot be recycled, like diapers.  But, another 20% called "durable goods" contains items that can be recycled to some degree - but not if they are left out at the curbside to be collected by the garbage man.

Some other interesting facts (I won't reveal them all):

• Wealthier people produce more garbage (this is somewhat counter-intuitive, but is apparently true).
• The average person produces 5.06 pounds of garbage every day, which amounts to 1,874 pounds every year.
• Roadkill is included in garbage pickup in many areas - 129 million dead critters every year.  I had no idea this was handled by garbage crews.
• Garbage collection is the 6th most dangerous job (the top 5 include loggers, fisherman, pilots, roofers, and iron workers, in some order).  It is interesting that policeman and fireman don't make the top 6!
• Yellow torpedoes. I won't reveal what this one is - either read this book or research it on your own, but it is a major problem in many states.
• Landfills can be up to 400 feet deep, and one of the largest covers over 2,000 acres of land.
• Many landfills don't have sufficient regulation and safety precautions, and all of them (even the most recent ones) are leaking toxic chemicals into the environment that could poison a water supply.

Ultimately, the only way to put a major dent into the amount of garbage produced is to stop producing so much, meaning buying and using less stuff, and recycling what we do use.  It seems clear that there is a long road ahead of us.  Can we make things better?

This book is an alarming testament to our legacy of destruction on this planet, and reveals things that most of us have no clue about in our daily lives - we take it for granted that things are properly handled.  This is an entertaining story that opens your eyes to the harsh realities of the world we live in.  I think this is a story that everyone should read.

Book Review: Seed, by Michael Edelson

The back cover blurb for this book got me interested immediately, and I just had to read it.  The basic story idea was familiar to me.

Fifty people go to sleep in their own beds, and wake up in a compound with no idea how they got there.

Each person has their own assigned living space where they wake up, and it has a DNA lock.

Each person is from a different background (mathematician, surgeon, military paratrooper, etc).

They have food (if you can call it that) for decades, and seemingly anything they could need (there is an operating room - accessible only by the surgeon, and a room filled with weaponry, which can only be accessed by the military paratrooper).

They are isolated from the world due to a barrier that they cannot pass.

Why are they here?

The premise is very similar to the American TV show Persons Unknown, which aired in 2010 (only one season).  I enjoyed that show until it started to get near the end, and then the finale was quite strange.  Of course, the finale is not the only measure of a TV show.  The British TV show The Prisoner (aired in 1967), starring Patrick McGoohan, was excellent, with an equally strange and confusing finale which had current fans and future fans of the show speculating about its meaning.

Before continuing, I'd like to have a brief interlude about The Prisoner.  This show also had a similar premise at the beginning, although seemingly isolated to the central character.  A secret agent angrily resigns, and while packing in his house is rendered unconscious by knockout gas (this is all conveyed in the opening credits).  When he awakes, he finds himself in a place called The Village.  He no longer has a name, and is simply referred to as Number 6 (everyone in the village has a number).  Most of the events that take place in The Village are attempts to ascertain why Number 6 resigned.  Number 6 reveals no information, since he does not know who he can trust.  Has he been incarcerated by his own people, or by what is vaguely referred to as "the other side"?  This show is the first story of this kind that I recall seeing.  If you have an opportunity to see it, I highly recommend it (not the AMC miniseries, which changed many elements of the story, and is quite slow and difficult to follow).

Now, let's move on.

The story is told from the point of view of Alex, the military paratrooper.  It starts off with a mission he is on, and after he goes to bed for the evening wakes up in a compound with many other people. Not one of them knows why they are there, but they do know they cannot leave because of the barrier - but is the barrier there to keep them in, or keep something else out?

I found this to be a very interesting story.  I didn't want to put it down, and I was always anxious to know what was going to happen next.  I also wanted to know what the "horror" outside the barrier would end up being.

In general, this story has shades of Michael Crichton's novel, Sphere.  You get the impression that Alex and the others were hand-picked to be deposited as a group in this compound (there are various experts to fulfill various essential needs).  Between the two stories, the major difference in is in the reason why the people are in the compound.  In Sphere, it is a team of experts pulled together to investigate something.  In Seed, these people are brought together for a much different reason:  survival.  The mystery unfolds quite nicely as the characters learn more and more about their environment.

Unlike some other stories I've read that deal with survival situations, this one specifically deals with the characteristics of small group which is thrust into an extremely stressful situation, and how cliques form in the group, resulting in what you could call various power struggles and political schemes.  This is a necessary element as the characters try to surmise what is going on.  In that sense, there are also shades of Lord of the Flies here - while this isn't a group of children, there is still an examination of what happens to a group when they are removed from the rest of civilization.

There are a few good surprises in Seed, and the "horror" outside of the barrier was fairly original and unexpected - at least, it wasn't anything I expected.

I would highly recommend this book to anyone who is looking for an interesting, riviting, and suspenseful story.  I already have my eyes on Ice Fall, which is the first story written by this author.