designcult

Non-Design Year-End Book Wrap-up

I've been enjoying my extended winter vacation and have few thoughts about design to share at the moment, it being more of a sleepy end-of-year tree and gifts and food and friends and family time.

So, instead, I give you my unscientific top 10 non-design books of 2006. I've been keeping track of and writing mini-reviews for all the books I read for just over a year, and it's interesting (to me) to look back over them. They're mostly science fiction, fantasy, and graphic novels (which is not a surprise), but fantasy seems to be outpacing science-fiction by a bunch. Also, there are very few non-design non-fiction books, even less I ended up liking.

In no particular order, my favorite non-design-related books of 2006:

Three Days To Never - Tim Powers
Excellent Tim Powers book. If you're not reading Tim Powers you really should be. Contains the same crazy secret history stuff as the recent books (in this case the Mossad, Einstein, Charlie Chaplin, out-of-body-experiences), but with characters you care about a bit more.

Spin - Robert Charles Wilson
Best Hard-SF book I've read in a LONG while. Really amazing concept. Feels very like classic SF while totally contemporary -- like some odd combination of Isaac Asimov and Gwyneth Jones.

Never Let Me Down - Kazuo Ishiguro
One of the most depressing books ever. Beautiful, yes, nice to see someone who is thought of as 'literary' tackle science fiction and do it really well, yes, worth reading, yes. One of the nice reviewers on the back called it 'elegiac' which is NY Times type reviewer code for both "goddamn depressing," which it is, and "kind of boring," which, while it is excruciatingly slowly paced, it is not.

His Majesty's Dragon - Naomi Norvik
Napoleonic wars with dragons. Excellent fantasy candy reading.

Lamb - Christopher Moore
Subtitle: "The gospel according to Biff, Christ's childhood pal." Look, NOTHING could live up to that subtitle, right? But it almost does. Between the mostly historically accurate details mixed with the wildly inappropriate anachronisms and theological banter, I enjoyed it a ton.

Five Crazy Women - Carla Speed McNeil
By far the best graphic novel I've read yet this year. Set in an ongoing SF world, this book is about one man and his relationships with crazy women. You can read most of it here: http://www.lightspeedpress.com/

The Fate of the Artist - Eddie Campbell
Absolutely brilliant. Eddie Campbell is now pretty much my favorite comics author/artist -- I have never figured out why navel-gazing autobiographical stuff works for me in comics form but doesn't (usually) in prose. But this odd mix of bits and pieces and things -- funny comics, interviews with his daughter, historical meanderings -- all dancing around some personal revelations -- is just wonderful.

The Colorado Kid - Stephen King
184 pages of original pulp with an excellent, and perfectly inappropriate, pulp cover. It is now apparent that Stephen King really, really, really doesn't care if his books will piss people off by not being what they expect.

50 Degrees Below - Kim Stanley Robinson
Sequel to 40 Days of Rain. I'm assuming that "60 feet of melted Antarctic ice-shelf water coming to KILL YOU" is next. Technically about the dangers of radical climate change (and what we could do about it) KSR valorizes (realistically) the DC bureaucrat, the urban homeless, lunatics who live in treehouses, and rogue liberal Senators. This book did, in fact, scare the pants off me.

Perfect Circle - Sean Stewart
Perfect Circle has ghosts, punk rock, and Houston. It's the most amazing, sweetest, saddest novel I've read in a year or two, and will break your heart in parts.

Science Fiction About Search Engines

By way of explanation, I'm thinking a lot about search engines. I've been doing that for about a decade, but now it's my job!  I've also been rereading Shaping Things by  Bruce Sterling (more on this later), and he's always great at gearing up to think really big about something. Which led to me recalling one or two pieces of science fiction written about search engines, so I tried to find them.

It turns out that queries like "search engine fiction" and "search engine stories" or even "fiction.about.search.engines" etc. are pretty useless. But with a little poking about I found the ones I'd been looking for:

• The original Robot Exclusion Protocol by Paul Ford
• How Google beat Amazon and eBay to the Semantic Web (More essay-like prognostication than fiction) also by Paul Ford
• Even more Paul Ford Google stories
• I Saw The Best Minds of My Generation Destroyed by Google by Bruce Sterling

That's what I can find on the web. I know there's a bunch of cool far-future search engine action in SF novels -- I'm pretty sure there's some interesting stuff in William Gibson, Ian Banks, Cory Doctorow, Ken MacLeod .. anyone have any suggestions?

Quick links #7

• The Neighborhood Project - "The Neighborhood Project is creating a map of city   neighborhoods based on the collective opinions of internet   users." Saw this ages ago, couldn't find it recently, and someone sent the link out again. Using collective intelligence to figure out neighborhood boundaries is a wonderful concept. It still doesn't tell me where the "TenderNob" is, though ...
• Project Cartoon (via TNH)- Classic product development cartoon (the one with the tree) has been ... Web 2.0-ified? Strange.
• The Secret Life of Machines (via Faisal) - How things work!
• LibraryThing Unsuggestor (via SIMS fun list) - "It analyzes the seven million books LibraryThing members have recorded as owned or read, and comes back with books least likely to share a library with the book you suggest." I am apparently unlikely to read Confessions of a Shopaholic (true), Desiring God (true), and Terry Pratchett books (not true).
• zipdecode (via SIMS fun list) - Crazy awesome zip code visualization.
• Lectures from Marti Hearst's Search classes - Sergey Brin! Dan Rose! Hal Varian! Geoffrey Nunberg!
• Map (via SIMS fun list) - Ever wondered how Google gets those cool icons onto their maps? The secret is plywood!

Event: The Shifting Role of Design (LukeW edition)

LukeW will be talking about the "Shifting Role of Design" tomorrow night (Wednesday, Dec. 6th) at  the Yahoo campus:

http://www.baychi.org/calendar/20061206/

Should be a fun conversation, I'm going to try to make it.