Going into this book, I had only a vague impression of Vernor Vinge's work. I had a notion of him as a hard science fiction writer, of roughly the same generation as men like Larry Niven, Robert Forward, and Gregory Benford. Thus, I figured A Fire Upon the Deep would be the same sort of book that one of those guys would write—a fairly straightforward plot centered around a strong central scientific or technological concept, written in an engaging style but with more of a focus on ideas and action than compelling characterization. Now, I do enjoy those other writers. Nevertheless, I found it a pleasant surprise that this, my first foray into Vinge's work, turned out to be quite a bit more complex and engaging than I had anticipated.

Most hard science fiction novels are built on a single concept—a giant ring-shaped structure built around a star, for example, or an alien race that lives on the surface of a neutron star—and the bulk of the plot is driven by exploration of the implications of that concept. Fire, on the other hand, incorporates two main SF ideas. One, a universe in which technology becomes limited by proximity to a galactic core—thus, advanced civilizations with faster-than-light travel and interstellar domains can only exist near the edges of the galaxy, and the furthest reaches of space are inhabited by god-like AI entities. The other, a race of wolf-like aliens in which individuals have no true intelligence or consciousness and true sentience only occurs amongst highly bonded packs. Either of these ideas would be interesting enough to merit its own entire book, but by bringing them together in a single story, Vinge makes some neat ideas really spark.

In Fire, a team of researchers inadvertently awaken an ancient and powerful AI that immediately turns on them, destroying the outpost and then spreading outward like a virus to take over entire civilizations. One ship escapes, carrying with it a small piece of the AI that could be the key to defeating it, but it is marooned on a primitive planet within the Slow Zone—a part of the galaxy close enough to the core that faster-than-light travel is impossible. Immediately after landing, the survivors on the ship encounter the planet's inhabitants—a group-minded race called the Tines—and become caught up in the local politics and war. Meanwhile, the malevolent AI continues to spread, and the starfaring races in the outer galaxy scramble to oppose or flee it. The novel bounces back and forth between epic, space-opera interstellar war and medieval intrigue and betrayal, culminating in a breathtaking climax.

Fire combines gripping action, well-realized characters, and tense, complex intrigue in what I think is one of the best examples of its genre. It's also surprisingly funny for hard SF—scenes are intercut with newsgroup-style posts discussing the events of the story, many of which are hilarious to an Internet-savvy reader. It's little wonder that Fire won the Hugo for Vinge—I could scarcely put it down, and even having had weeks to contemplate it I can think of no flaws and still find it a very satisfying story. Indeed, this is the best hard SF I've read in quite some time.

Started: 2010-09-21 | Finished: 2010-09-23

Purchase from Amazon

I mentioned yesterday how impressive the detail was in the Legoland Minitown displays. I also love the sense of humor you see from the designers. This image is from the pool scene at the Mirage, in Minitown's tiny Las Vegas. It's neat that the Lego architect here thought to include a bit of human connection in the scene, the exact kind of thing you might expect to see by a Las Vegas pool. And it's impressive that he or she was able to convey it with just a few Lego bricks. But the fact that the little Lego woman is grabbing the little Lego man's little Lego butt? That, my friends, is just wonderful.

Technical information: Shot with a Nikon D40 and Nikkor 55-200mm VR DX lens, in manual exposure mode. Focal length 85mm, aperture f/5.6, shutter 1/125 sec, ISO 200. Post-processing in Aperture 3: curve to lower shadows, increase midtones, and hold highlights; slightly reduced overall saturation; reduced saturation and increased luminance in yellows; added slight vignette.

Thoughts for improvement: There's a "man" in the background that would be better if he were a bit more to the right. I also think a wider angle with more room to the right would be a bit more interesting.

Me: "Do you like Ms. Manijeh? Is she your friend?" [Ms. Manijeh is one of the teachers at his day care.]

Jason: "Um yeah." [This is his new thing, putting "um" in front of his answers. I don't know what's up with that.]

Me: "That's good. What about Eva, is she your friend?"

Jason: "Um yeah."

Me: "And is Tescia your friend?"

Jason: "Um yeah."

Me: "Is Kayleigh your friend?"

Jason: "Um no."

Me: "No?"

Jason: "Ale my friend."

Me: "Ale's your friend? Well that's nice."

Jason: "And Kayleigh."

Me: "Wait, Kayleigh is your friend?"

Jason: "Everybody my friend, daddy!"

Me: "That's true. Everybody is your friend, Jason."

Jason: "And Jason my friend, and Mommy my friend, and Daddy my friend. And Cooper my friend."

Me: [smiling] "That's right, we are all your friends."

Jason: "I love you!"

Me: "Awww, thank you! I love you too!"

Jason: "I love you, daddy!"

Me: "Awww... That is so sweet. I'm going to kiss you now!"

Jason: "No, don't kiss me!"

This was supposed to have been written a week ago but, as I say often enough that it's more or less become the blog's unofficial motto, better late than never.

The finale of our "Copy NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour" series is a very special episode all about collections. When I was just a wee lad, my grandmother told me that everyone should have some kind of collection. One of my cousins collected wind-up toys, for example, and another collected pins. Over the years I've collected a lot of things: pins, Matchbox cars, and Choose Your Own Adventure books when I was younger; comic books, coins, Marvel cards, and tabletop game miniatures when I was a teenager. These days my collections are mostly unattended and gathering dust, but thanks to my stepdad's adamant stand against my mom getting rid of my stuff, I still have all of them. Even my complete set of Secret Wars II comics.

I can tell how jealous you all are.

Actually, it turns out there is one collection from my youth that has been lost to the sands of time, and it was my first: baseball cards. I started collecting baseball cards in first grade, which was when baseball and the San Francisco Giants first came to my attention

The mid-80s were a heady time for a young Giants fan. Those were the days of Candy Maldonado, José Uribe, Robby Thompson, and Rick Reuschel. I remember sitting on the steps above the playground when I was in second grade, opening a pack of baseball cards with my friends and desperately wishing for a Chili Davis card. Unlike most of my friends, I also always chewed the gum, even though it both tasted gross and tended to break into little shards when you first bit into it.

The mid-80s are also about the last time I actually paid attention to sports until college. Certainly it was the last time until about a year or two ago that I actually knew the names of a significant number of players on any team. Not that knowing those names or caring about the Giants translated into, you know, watching the games or anything. No, I don't think I've ever heard of any fan as passionate as myself at seven years old who had less interest in the actual game.

How about you? Did you have to have every single Nancy Drew book? Or perhaps your thing was G. I. Joes? Leave a comment, tell me all about it.

We took Jason to Legoland for their "Brick-or-Treat" event this weekend. We actually ended up skipping the event due to an extremely long line, but Jason was totally wowed by the park. He liked the rides a lot, but I think his favorite thing was actually Minitown, which is full of intricate Lego dioramas of cities around America. I was also pretty impressed by the models—they really invite you to look closely, as there is a ton of detail that you'd miss on a casual look. I could have shot for hours just in that one part of the park.

Technical information: Shot with a Nikon D40 and Nikkor 55-200mm VR DX lens, in manual exposure mode. Focal length 200mm, aperture f/5.6, shutter 1/125 sec, ISO 200. Post-processing in Aperture 3: curve to hold shadows and bring up midtones, added vignetting.

Thoughts for improvement: Would have been nice if there were a little Lego farmer feeding the little Lego cows, but I'm pretty happy with how this turned out.

We put Jason in a toddlers' soccer class over the summer and he hated it. He didn't want to run or even get out of our arms, and when it was his turn to kick the ball he'd almost invariably burst into tears. I don't know what's changed between now and then, though, because when he saw some of the other kids at Sunday's birthday party chasing the ball around, he couldn't get enough.

Technical info: Shot with a Nikon D40 and Nikkor 55-200mm VR DX lens, in aperture priority exposure mode, center-weighted average metering. Focal length 200mm, aperture f/5.6, shutter 1/125 sec, ISO 200. Post-processing in Aperture 3: Auto WB adjustment, picked from a white part of the design on his shirt; curve to reduce exposure, bring up blacks, and add contrast.

Thoughts for improvement: I like the way the grass looks with the narrow depth of field, but this would probably have been better at f/8 or maybe even f/11. I was shooting wide open mainly to keep a fast shutter speed and avoid motion blur, but here I managed to miss the focus just a bit—you can see that the front of the ball is soft, and due to his stance, his right leg is a bit further away from the camera than his left, and is therefore also slightly out of focus. Stopping down to f/8 would have given me a lot more leeway with focus depth and probably still would have had shallow enough depth of field to separate him from the background.

Are you ready for some more "Copy NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour"? Well, I'm not. I don't think I could be less ready, and it's all because of today's topic: my first celebrity crush.

Here's the thing: I don't know if I've ever actually had a celebrity crush. I've always loved movies, TV, music, and books, but I've never been all that interested in the people that make them.

Take my favorite TV show from when I was a kid, Star Trek: The Next Generation. I loved that show for its entire run, and watched almost every episode many times. (The one exception was the second-season premiere, "The Child," which my grandmother forgot to tape for us. When I finally did see it, I was glad to see I hadn't missed much.) But as much as I immersed myself in the lore of the show—I even won a few local Trek trivia contests—I don't think I was ever interested in going to a convention or meeting any of the actors. It wasn't the actors I cared about, it was the characters and the stories.

As I got older, I did eventually gain some interest in actors, musicians, and writers, but only insofar as reading or seeing interviews with them gave me insight into their craft. I still don't particularly care about their personal lives.

So I never really found myself with any celebrity obsessions as a kid. Oh, sure, there were actresses that I thought were pretty. In middle school, for example, I remember thinking that Tiffani-Amber Thiessen and Jennie Garth were pretty hot. But while I was attracted to them, in some ways it was almost an academic thing, kind of like the way I appreciate, say, Christina Hendricks these days. I liked to see them when they were on shows I was already watching, but I didn't go out of my way to see them in other things. I certainly never had any posters of them on my walls. (The only posters I had were a Trek poster and a couple of comic book posters.)

The closest thing I can think of to a celebrity crush I had was actually not all that similar, and, actually, it's considerably more embarassing. I read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer when I was in first or second grade, and for a little while afterwards I had a fascination with Becky Thatcher, Tom's love interest. I had a pretty active imagination as a child, so I tended to tell a lot of stories and play make-believe often. I had a number of imaginary friends that went along with my games, after reading Tom Sawyer, Becky Thatcher got added to that group as my imaginary girlfriend. I have no idea how long that lasted—probably no more than a few weeks or a couple of months, tops.

I don't know if I find the idea of a six-year-old with an imaginary girlfriend to be cute or sad, but there it is. My first celebrity crush was a fictional character from a book written over a hundred years before my birth.

Your turn!

"Old Books: Don't Judge a Book By Its Megabytes":

The first time I ever had a writing piece published was in my senior year of high school when an essay I wrote for my English class made it into the local paper. My teacher had assigned us to answer the question, “Will computers ever replace books?” Being the book-lover that I am, I said no.

Jason likes to run but he has a tendency to trip over his own feet, so we've tried to get him to run only when he's on a soft surface, like grass. He forgets a lot, though, so we still have a fair number of scrapes and bruises to kiss. Fortunately, the only times he fell down at his friend's birthday party on Sunday, he was on some nice, springy grass. He was up chasing after a soccer ball just a few seconds after this photo.

Technical info: Shot with a Nikon D40 and Nikkor 35mm f/1.8 DX lens, in manual exposure mode, center-weighted average metering. Aperture f/4, shutter 1/125 sec, ISO 200. Post-processing in Aperture 3: straightened horizon; auto WB, picked from the white of his eye, strong curve to bring down the exposure, bring up black point, and add contrast, mild dodge over his eyes.

Thoughts for improvement: A lot of the shots I got in the later part of the party were overexposed, which I did on purpose to try to get some more pop. Unfortunately, I overdid it a bit, which did some weird things to the color when I brought the exposure back down in post-processing. You can see a red tint to his hair that isn't really there, and the grass is a bit electric. I do like the texture of the grass, though, both the in-focus and bokeh, and I like the look on his face. Compositionally, the only thing I'd change is to not have the gazebo right behind his head.

The "Copying NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour" series rolls on here at Sakeriver with our next entry: my first favorite movie.

I have no idea what the first movie I ever saw was. I mean, I can barely remember which movie was Jason's first and he's only seen about ten of them, so the odds of me remembering which of the hundreds (or possibly thousands) of movies I've seen over the past thirty-one years was my first are slimmer than a runway couture model. Most likely it was one of the Disney animated features; who knows?

Most of my earliest movie memories are tied to a place. I remember lying on my stomach on the living room floor at my dad's condo watching Ghostbusters for the first time. (I also remember him having to stop the movie after the scene where the terror dog breaks out of the statue, because I was so scared.) Or watching The Neverending Story with my brother and cousins on the little TV in my grandparents' bedroom. And while I don't remember actually watching it, I remember talking to my dad about Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory by the dining table of his first house, before he moved into the condo.

None of those could really be called my favorite, though. Well, possibly The Neverending Story, but that movie didn't hit theaters until 1984 and I probably didn't see it until a year or two after that, after it had come out on video. And by that time I'd definitely already seen what is probably my first favorite: Star Wars.

The funny thing about Star Wars, though, is that I'm way too young to have gotten caught up in the buzz on my own. I was born two years after the original release, and I was 1 and 4 when Empire and Jedi came out, respectively. Yet despite the fact that there's no way I saw any of them in the theater, I was obsessed with them from a very young age. I had Star Wars sheets on my bed, I had all manner of action figures and toys (though I recall losing the wings to my T.I.E. fighter pretty quickly), and I'm pretty sure I dressed up as Han Solo for Halloween when I was in kindergarten. Even when I was playing with non-Star Wars toys, I still found a way to turn them into stuff from the movies—the most common thing I built out of Legos were lightsabers and X-wings. I even remember desperately wanting the C-3PO breakfast cereal, which didn't turn out to be nearly as exciting as I thought it would. How could I have even known about these movies, being that young? I guess I can thank my sci-fi-fan mom for that.

And there we are. My first favorite, one of my all-time most-watched, and still an integral part of my movie library today: Star Wars. Your turn!