Against all odds, Katniss Everdeen has survived the Hunger Games twice. But now that she’s made it out of the bloody arena alive, she’s still not safe. The Capitol is angry. The Capitol wants revenge. Who do they think should pay for the unrest? Katniss. And what’s worse, President Snow has made it clear that no one else is safe either. Not Katniss’s family, not her friends, not the people of District 12.

I just finished reading “Mockingjay,” the last book of Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games trilogy. (Warning … slight spoilers may follow!)

The book picks up immediately where “Catching Fire” ended: Katniss has been rescued from the arena by the rebels from District 13, but they were unable to rescue Peeta who is now in the hands of the government forces. As part of the resistance, Katniss reluctantly becomes the titular Mockingjay, the face of the revolution, and a tug-of-war of propaganda ensues between the revolting districts and the Capitol.

The revolution in Panem takes center-stage in this final book of the trilogy while the love triangle between Katniss, Peeta, and Gale continues to be a main plot point. Peeta is eventually rescued from the Capitol but turns out to be brainwashed, no longer his gentle self, but a ticking time-bomb programmed to (hopefully) kill the Mockingjay.

Can Peeta fight his demons be returned to normal? Will the Districts be able to overthrow the Capitol and win the war? Will Katniss get her final revenge and kill President Snow? Most (but not all) of your questions are answered in the final chapters. I found the end to be a little rushed (and my daughter had ruined one of the major surprises for me) but still enjoyed the series.

It will be interesting to see how all of this plays out on the silver screen. We went to see “Beauty and the Beast” in 3D today and all of “The Hunger Games” movie posters were hanging up (only two months to go!) which got my daughter all psyched. It’s going to be PG-13, though, and even though she’s read the books I’m not sure how seeing some of those sequences on screen are going to affect her (real or not real?) so we may have to do the “wait and watch at home” thing.

Against all odds, Katniss Everdeen has won the annual Hunger Games with fellow district tribute Peeta Mellark. But it was a victory won by defiance of the Capitol and their harsh rules. Katniss and Peeta should be happy. After all, they have just won for themselves and their families a life of safety and plenty. But there are rumors of rebellion among the subjects, and Katniss and Peeta, to their horror, are the faces of that rebellion. The Capitol is angry. The Capitol wants revenge.

During our summer road trip we listened to the audiobook version of Suzanne Collins’ “The Hunger Games” and my daughter quickly read the remaining books in the trilogy shortly afterwards. With the upcoming March 2012 release of the movie, I know I’ll probably be taking her to see all of them anyway so I figured I might as well read the rest of the books myself.

“Catching Fire” is the second book in the series and begins about six months after Katniss and Peeta emerged as the dual victors of the 74th annual Hunger Games, as they prepare to go on their Victory Tour of the other Districts. This year’s Hunger Games will be a Quarter Quell, which occurs every 25 years and usually includes some sort of miserable twist to the Games. The surprise for this Quell is that the Tributes will be selected from past victors, which means Katniss and Peeta are going into the Arena … again.

The secondary plotline continues to be the unrest in the Districts towards the Capitol. As the title suggests, Katniss has become the spark that could ignite a revolution and the Capitol will do everything in its power to prevent that. So where the first book focused more on the Games themselves, this story gives us more detail on the other Districts, their relationship with the Capitol, and the current political situation in Panem overall.

Just like the first novel, “Catching Fire” is laid out in three parts of 9 chapters each, and is an easy read (not surprising since it’s really young-adult literature). It seemed to end rather abruptly just and events were really picking up, but having started “Mockingjay” now I know it picks up immediately and keeps going, so it was the logical break point for the book.

Just remember who the Enemy is …

In a not-too-distant future, the United States of America has collapsed, weakened by drought, fire, famine, and war, to be replaced by Panem, a country divided into the Capitol and 12 districts. Each year, two young representatives from each district are selected by lottery to participate in The Hunger Games. Part entertainment, part brutal intimidation of the subjugated districts, the televised games are broadcasted throughout Panem as the 24 participants are forced to eliminate their competitors, literally, with all citizens required to watch. When 16-year-old Katniss’s young sister, Prim, is selected as the mining district’s female representative, Katniss volunteers to take her place. She and her male counterpart, Peeta, the son of the town baker who seems to have all the fighting skills of a lump of bread dough, will be pitted against bigger, stronger representatives who have trained for this their whole lives.

During our recent family vacation road trip, we all “read” (listened to) the audiobook version of Suzanne Collins’ “The Hunger Games.” We spent almost 68 hours in the car, so we had no trouble getting through all 11 hours of it.

I had never heard of this book but my daughter apparently learned about it through classmates so my wife purchased the audiobook from iTunes before we left. Since I knew nothing going in, other than it was young adult fiction, I wasn’t sure what to expect.

The excerpt I included at the beginning of this post does a pretty good job of summing up the plot of the novel, so I won’t attempt to elaborate on that any more. It was a pretty good (although sometimes brutal) story. We started out listening to only short bits at a time, intending it to be an occasional distraction from other activities in the car, but soon we were really into it and going through 2 hours at a time easily. Carolyn McCormick‘s reading of the novel was well executed (although $26 for an audiobook seems a bit much).

In the week since we’ve gotten back from vacation, my daughter has already borrowed (and finished!) the next two books in the trilogy: “Catching Fire” and “Mockingjay.” I wonder if I should mention to her that the movie is coming out next year. I guess we’ll need something to look forward to once the Harry Potter movies are all done.

Nobel-hungry physicists conducting an unimaginably high-energy experiment accidentally induce a global consciousness shift: in an instant, everyone on Earth is “flashed forward” 21 years, experiencing several minutes of the future. But while everyone is, literally, out of their minds, their bodies drop unconscious; when the world reawakens, car wrecks, botched surgeries, falls, and other mishaps add up to massive death and destruction. Slowly, as recovery efforts continue, people realize that during the Flashforward (as it comes to be called) they experienced a vision of the future.

My latest read is Robert J. Sawyer’s “Flashforward” which inspired the short-lived ABC television series of the same name. I never watched that series but heard that the original novel was pretty good. The idea of everyone on the planet seeing two minutes of their future and how they would react to that was an intriguing concept and I wasn’t let down.

The majority of the story takes place at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. Physicists Lloyd Simcoe and Theo Procopides are running an experiment which they hope will produce the Higgs boson. Instead, the moment their experiment begins, everyone blacks out and has visions of themselves as much older people. When the CERN scientists regain consciousness they realize that a lot of accidents occurred during the blackout (cars crashes, people falling down stairs, etc.) and eventually discover that it wasn’t just CERN and the surrounding countryside that blacked out, but the entire planet! As news reports begin to come in it becomes clear that everyone had a vision of the same point in the future, which is eventually pinpointed as October 21, 2030.

Except not everyone had visions of the future. Some people were asleep at that point in the future and saw only their dreams. To others, the flashforward event (as it becomes known) was just an instantaneous blip, not a 2-minute glimpse into their future. It is assumed those people are dead by 2030, and Theo Procopides is one of the vision-less. . While part of the  novel continues to deal with the after-effects of the flashforward, part of it is now a murder mystery as Theo begins to investigate the strange circumstances around his death. Meanwhile, CERN wants to try and replicate the experiment, hoping to give humanity another glimpse of the future … but is the experiment worth repeating?

Like any good time-travel story, the other continuous theme of the novel is about the visions of the future. Is our future fixed, or do we have free will and thus can change the future that was seen during the Flashforward?

I enjoyed “Flashforward,” although the end left me a little wanting (it seemed a little rushed and there was a plot element introduced near the end that I wanted to explore more). I’ll probably rent the TV series from Netflix, even though it’s apparently nothing like the book (and was cancelled after just one season).

For twelve thousand years the Galactic Empire has ruled supreme. Now it is dying. But only Hari Seldon, creator of the revolutionary science of psychohistory, can see into the future—to a dark age of ignorance, barbarism, and warfare that will last thirty thousand years. To preserve knowledge and save mankind, Seldon gathers the best minds in the Empire—both scientists and scholars—and brings them to a bleak planet at the edge of the Galaxy to serve as a beacon of hope for a future generations. He calls his sanctuary the Foundation. But soon the fledgling Foundation finds itself at the mercy of corrupt warlords rising in the wake of the receding Empire. Mankind’s last best hope is faced with an agonizing choice: submit to the barbarians and be overrun—or fight them and be destroyed.

I just finished Isaac Asimov’s classic Foundation Trilogy which consists of three collections of stories: “Foundation,” “Foundation and Empire,” and “Second Foundation.” I’ve read a lot of Asimov’s work in the past (“I, Robot”, “Nightfall”, “Fantastic Voyage”, even “Lucky Starr and the Pirates of the Asteroids” back in grade school) but somehow had never picked up this Hugo Award-winning classic series until now.

“Foundation” opens with Hari Seldon, a mathematics professor who invents psychohistory, a combination of history, sociology, and mathematical statistics that can be used to model and predict the actions of large groups of people, like the citizens of the Galactic Empire. Using his new science, Seldon predicts that the Empire will fall within the next century and a dark age lasting tens of thousands of years will occur before a new Empire can rise. In an attempt to shorten the dark age to a mere thousand years, Seldon establishes two Foundations “at opposite ends of the galaxy” to store all gathered human knowledge.

The first collection of stories deal with the first Foundation on the planet Terminus and the challenges it faces during the early years of its establishment on the planet Terminus. Each story usually revolves around a specific “Seldon Crisis,” a specific event or point in time that is critical to moving the Seldon Plan forward, and how the citizens of the Foundation deal with the problem. “Foundation and Empire” continues the story of the first Foundation and the beginning of the dark age after the fall of the Empire. Finally, “Second Foundation” tells of the search for, obviously, the Second Foundation that Seldon established at the “opposite end of the galaxy.” But does it actually exist? Will the Seldon Plan see the galaxy through to a new age and a new Empire?

The idea of a model predicting human events was interesting. In fact, while I was reading these books I heard this article on the 60-Second Science podcast about a new computer model that can predict behavior based on one-to-one relationships, almost the inverse of Seldon’s psychohistory. It was cool to see the Foundation start out as a repository of human knowledge (via the Encyclopedia Galactica), then go through periods of being a mystery, myth, religion, trade organization, technological/military force, conquered planet, etc. etc.

As with most of Asimov’s writing, there is not a lot of descriptive action. Most of the stories are moved forward by character dialog. This isn’t a problem for me, it’s just different than other science fiction reads. If you’re expecting descriptive narrative of space battles or scientific principles or how the technology works, you’ll be disappointed. If you’re looking for a good story and some interesting characters, you’ll enjoy the Foundation novels. Now that I’ve finished the original trilogy, I’ll probably check out the rest of the series which includes some prequels.

The human, Louis Wu; the puppeteer known as the Hindmost; Acolyte, son of the Kzin called Chmeee . . . legendary beings brought together once again in the defense of the Ringworld. Something is going on with the Protectors. Incoming spacecraft are being destroyed before they can reach the Ringworld. Vampires are massing. And the Ghouls have their own agenda–if anyone dares approach them to learn. Each race on the Ringworld has always had its own Protector. Now it looks as if the Ringworld itself needs a Protector. But who will sit on the Ringworld Throne?

It’s been almost two years since I read “The Ringworld Engineers” and back then I wrote here that I probably wouldn’t bother with the remaining two books in the series. I probably should have listened to myself, but I just finished “The Ringworld Throne” … the first e-book I’ve read entirely on my new iPad.

About 11 years have passed since the Ringworld’s orbit was stabilized at the end of “Engineers.” Since then,  Louis Wu and his companions left the Map of Mars on the mile-long ship, the Hidden Patriarch, dropped off the Kzin, Chmeee, at the Map of Earth and continued across the Great Ocean back to land. Louis has since been wandering across the Ringworld surface, encountering and interacting with other species. Mysteriously, the legend of “Louis Wu of the Ball People who boiled a sea” has spread across the land and precedes him.

While half of the story covers Louis, Chmeee’s son Acolyte, the Hindmost, and their dealings with the vampire Protector Bram in the Repair Center, the other half follows a varied group of Ringworld hominids (grass giants, red herders, machine people, ghouls, etc.) as they travel to destroy a huge nest of vampires beneath a floating city. Eventually the two storylines merge for the climax of the novel as the fate of all of the hominid races under “the Arch” is determined by warring Protectors.

While the idea, scale, and technical details of the Ringworld are still fascinating and yet hard to grasp, this third story fell a little flat for me. Maybe it was too much rishathra and not enough science fiction action/adventure. Maybe it was too hard to follow since I had been away from the Ringworld for almost two years. At any rate, I’m going to go out on a limb and say I’m not going to bother with “Ringworld’s Children” but who knows what will happen in two more years …

Next on my list, some classic SF: Asimov’s Foundation series.

Gaming genius Matthew Sobol, the 34-year-old head of CyberStorm Entertainment, has just died of brain cancer, but death doesn’t stop him from initiating an all-out Internet war against humanity. When the authorities investigate Sobol’s mansion in Thousand Oaks, Calif., they find themselves under attack from his empty house, aided by an unmanned Hummer that tears into the cops with staggering ferocity. Sobol’s weapon is a daemon, a kind of computer process that not only has taken over many of the world’s computer systems but also enlists the help of super-intelligent human henchmen willing to carry out his diabolical plan.

The hosts on just about every tech podcast I listen to (Leo Laporte, Tom Merrit, Paul Thurrott, and others) have mentioned “Daemon” by Daniel Suarez at one time or another, so it’s been on my to-read list for a while. I just finished reading this techno-thriller after starting it last month (as I headed to New York on business).

The premise is relatively simple: triggered by the death of its creator, software genius Matthew Sobol, a widely distributed, autonomous daemon starts wreaking havoc on the global economy as it carries out Sobol’s final diabolical plan for humankind.

The main cast of characters consists of people on both sides of the daemon’s war: local police detectives, government agencies, and white hat hackers trying to stop the daemon (if it can be stopped) vs. recruited daemon operatives, hackers, and computer-controlled machines likes killer Hummers, cars, and motorcycles who carry out the daemon’s tasks. The plot is fast-paced and contains a healthy dose of gaming, MMORPGs, GPS tracking, darknets, the global internet and, of course, explosions and mayhem (in other words, it will probably be made into a movie at some point) but unfortunately just as things are really moving the book ends. I guess this was intentional, paving the way for the sequel “FreedomTM” (also on my to-read list).

If you want to learn more about “Daemon” there’s the (rather sparse) Daemon Wiki and of course Daniel Suarez’s own thedaemon.com, which made me think twice before enabling scripts (via NoScript) on that site. You never know where pieces of the daemon may be lurking. Also check out the author’s About page to see if you notice anything interesting about his photograph.

On the far-future Earth-like planet, Arbre, scientists, philosophers and mathematicians—a religious order unto themselves—have been cloistered behind concent (convent) walls. Their role is to nurture all knowledge while safeguarding it from the vagaries of the irrational saecular outside world. Among the monastic scholars is 19-year-old Raz, collected into the concent at age eight and now a decenarian, or tenner (someone allowed contact with the world beyond the stronghold walls only once a decade). But millennia-old rules are cataclysmically shattered when extraterrestrial catastrophe looms, and Raz and his teenage companions—engaging in intense intellectual debate one moment, wrestling like rambunctious adolescents the next—are summoned to save the world.

I just finished Neal Stephenson’s “Anathem.” Considering it took me about 4 months of occasional reading to get through the 761 pages of “Blue Mars,” completing the 981 pages of “Anathem” in just under two months was definitely faster than I expected.

I’ve read all of Stephenson’s previous work, so it was a no-brainer that I would read “Anathem.” I didn’t even really know what it was about other than it took place on another planet, which immediately differentiates it from all of his prior works. You also know you’re in for it when the book starts out with a “note to the reader” containing a detailed historical time line and almost Dune-like glossary. Oh oh! So the first few chapters were pretty rough, trying to wrap my brain around the new vocabulary and immersing myself in the world of Erasmas, the narrative main character. Arbre is a strange place, but luckily there are similarities to our own world. For example, can you guess what kind of person an Ita is from this definition in The Dictionary?

Ita: A caste dwelling in the mathic world but segregated from the avout, responsible for all functions having to do with syntactic devices and the Reticulum.

Sound like anyone you know? There’s a hint in the first two letters.

While perusing Neal Stephenson’s website earlier this evening, I discovered that there’s actually a trailer for the book!

There are also some good interviews here where Stephenson describes how he came up with the idea (he even mentions “Dune” and the glossary!) and how it ties in with his other books at a philosophical level. If you’re thinking about reading “Anathem” take a few minutes and watch the videos, it’s worth it. In fact, all of the introductory information on his site of course does a better job than I could do here describing the book. Be sure to go back when you’re done too, he’s even got some of the avout chants there from the musical score.

I worked out to my benefit that I started “Anathem” during my trip to Arizona for Spring Training because it gave me the chance to really focus and get sucked into the story. If I had started reading it in 20-page chunks as I am wont to do, I probably would have been more confused and not as enthralled. Check out this blog post I found that’s pretty accurate in describing how it can be hard to “get into” this particular book.

To close out this post, here’s a funny quote from the book that I actually marked so I would remember to mention it. I found it to be a comedic, yet strangely accurate, summary of the novel:

“Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs,” I said. “We have a protractor.”
“Ok, I’ll go home and see if I can scrounge up a ruler and a piece of string.”
“That’d be great.”

Using the last 200 years of American history as his template for Martian history, Robinson projects his tale of Mars’s colonization from the 21st century, in which settlers successfully revolt against Earth, into the next century, when various interests on Mars work out their differences on issues ranging from government to the terraforming of the planet and immigration. Sax Russell, Maya Toitovna and others reprise their roles from the first two novels, but the dominant “personality” is the planet itself, which Robinson describes in exhaustive naturalistic detail. Characters look repeatedly for sermons in its stones and are nearly overwhelmed by textbook abstracts on the biological and geological minutiae of their environment. Not until the closing chapters, when they begin confronting their mortality, does the human dimension of the story balance out its awesome ecological extrapolations.

Last week I finally finished “Blue Mars,” the final book of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy. It picks up immediately after the end of “Green Mars” and spans another 100 (Earth) years on the colonized (and now terraformed) planet.

The first portion of the novel covers the aftermath of the second revolution and the formation of the new Martian government, free of Earth/United Nations Transitional Authority control and complete with its own court system and political parties (the old revolutionary branches like the Reds, Greens, MarsFirsters, Free Mars, etc. etc.).

The terraforming effort continues throughout the book: the sea of shattered ice wrapping around the northern hemisphere of the planet has started to melt into the great Northern Sea. Eventually there are islands, boats, canals, sea life, even coastal towns.

In the middle portion, we are finally taken back to see the situation on Earth first-hand. Nirgal, the Martian native and son of Coyote, visits the “home” planet for the first time along with Maya, Sax, and Michel in an show-of-goodwill ambassadorial mission. They want to be able to help Earth with the overpopulation issue (made critical by the rising sea levels) without flooding Mars with immigrants and making the political, social, and environmental issues there any worse. It was cool to “see” Earth through Nirgal’s eyes (so much water, so much sun, so HOT!).

It’s evident to everyone that Mars is not the ultimate solution to Earth’s population problems. Continued advances in technology allow the human race to explore out even further in the solar system (which Robinson calls “the Accelerando”). One chapter takes place on Miranda, a moon of Uranus, where Ann tries to escape to the primal beauty of a landscape (as of yet) untouched by human endeavors.

Finally, the remaining First Hundred are now over 200 years old, thanks to the longevity treatments. But old age is finally starting to catch up with them and there are a few quick deaths in succession. Facing their own mortality, Sax is determined to find a cure for the “quick decline” which plays out across a few chapters on memory and brain research.

As with the prior two books, Robinson tells each part of the story from a single character’s point of view and uses the quick introductory text of each portion to move the story along (sometimes by a few weeks, sometimes by decades), which is necessary when telling a story that covers more than 100 years. I found it difficult sometimes to remember what (Earth) year it was in relation to the other books, trying to grapple with just how much time had passed. Having three or four generations’ worth of characters didn’t help either, but the breadth of detail Robinson has created was just amazing and fascinating . Overall, I really enjoyed this series start to finish, and will probably read “The Martians” just to be complete. When you consider the fact that I started “Red Mars” last August, I’ve been immersed in Robinson’s world and characters for the last 8 months!

Next, though, I’m about 30 pages into Neal Stephenson’s 1008-page “Anathem.” It’s going to be another long ride …

The sequel to Red Mars details an early 22nd-century Mars controlled by Earth’s metanationals, gigantic corporations intent on exploiting Mars. Debate among the settlers–some native-born, some the surviving members of the First Hundred–is divided between the minimalist areoformists, who have come to love Mars in all its harshness, and the terraformists, who want to replicate Earth. As the surface of Mars warms and is seeded with genetically altered plants, the settlers await Earth’s self-destruction, which they hope will give them a chance to claim their independence.

It took almost two months since finishing the prior book (I haven’t had a lot of free reading time lately) but I just finished “Green Mars,” the second installment of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy.

“Green” starts roughly 14 (Earth) years after the end of “Red.” To the new generation of native-born children, Mars is the only home they’ve known, and due to the effects of growing up in the lower gravity of Mars, they’ll never be able to go there. But they don’t care about Earth … these children (the ectogenes) are splintering off into more semi-political groups like the Reds or Marsfirsters as the planet continues to struggle with the metanational corporations back home. Meanwhile, the terraforming efforts continue to change the face of the red planet: algaes, lichen, and moss are being joined by stunted trees, shrubs, and flowering plants. The surface temperature, atmospheric pressure, and oxygen levels are slowly rising, as the CO2 levels are getting lower. Pumps all over the planet continue to fill the lower basins with water from below the surface. It’s all broken ice now, but eventually it will melt and become the new Martian seas.

Jumping forward about 50 years, the majority of the book takes place in the early 2120s, and the reader is reunited with several of the First Hundred who originally landed on Mars nearly 100 years earlier. The space elevator is back, and the latest massive construction project is the soletta: a 10,000 kilometer wide “magnifying glass” orbiting halfway between the sun and Mars, intensifying the sun’s rays providing more light and heat.

Some things never change, though. The remaining members of the First Hundred are still in hiding, as fugutives since the first attempt at revolution. Political and cultural pressures continue to pull everyone in different directions. Will the future see an independent Mars? Or will history repeat itself with another deadly revolution like ’61? Read the wiki article for a better summary.

Robinson’s writing is incredibly detailed, both at the scientific, cultural, and political levels. Just like in the first book, each major part of the story is seen from a particular character’s point of view. Even though I read these two books back-to-back, it was like being reunited with old lost friends from the first novel: Maya, Nadia, Sax, or Ann. I’m looking forward to starting the final book, “Blue Mars” over the upcoming holiday.