Exo: A Novel (Jumper) by Steven Gould

As you can tell by the cover, EXO is about a teen-age girl with boy trouble, an eccentric family with a unique talent, and the trials of her LGBT friends and elderly grandmother. Don’t worry that it’s in the science fiction section of the store/site.  It’s clearly not science fiction…it’s a teen relationship novel with fantasy elements.

OK, I lied.

In fact, up until EXO, whether or not Steven Gould’s Jumper series about a family that can do this one extra thing, namely teleporting to anyplace they’ve seen or been to, qualified as science fiction was open to debate.  Although Gould’s grasp of science is first rate, he consistently sidestepped it by granting increasingly useful tweaks to the jumpers. Not only do the transit space instantaneously, but they don’t carry their velocity with them. In fact, they appear at their jump destination with as far as we know, any velocity and direction they want. That’s not science fiction, that’s fantasy. Not that there’s anything wrong with it, but I just want to point out that any sufficiently unexplained technology should be regarded as magic.

But EXO isn’t about Cent’s ability to jump, except that it provides a vehicle for what the book is about. EXO is hard sf devoted to current topics in space science, starting with cutting edge  space suits and not stopping until we’ve discussed inflatable space habitats, orbital clutter, zero gee geriatric care, and a fair amount of material science along the way .  The story is told through the engaging and precocious Cent, daughter of Millicent and David Rice all the jumpers we’re aware of in the book’s universe.

Like Alfred Bester’s “jaunte,” in the classic Stars My Destination, jumping was first discovered when David experienced a life threatening moment and found himself suddenly somewhere else.  The author doesn’t go into much detail of how this works, except to point out that there’s no conservation of momentum and he’s willing to play fast and loose with what’s possible in a pinch.  Unlike Bester , Gould’s jumpers don’t have to know where they’re starting from to get where they’re going, just where that is.  But as I said, this isn’t about jumping.

It’s about getting to space and not dying horribly once you show up.

Our girl Cent got the space bug from her dad, who used to jump her to watch shuttle launches, back when we had shuttle launches, and has decided to start her own womaned space program. Gould makes much of the girls-in-space angle throughout the book, with Cent correcting anyone who comes up with comments about “manned” space programs. This doesn’t come off as annoying, but cheerfully correct and in character. There is a good balance of male and female scientists in the book, with the old guard portrayed as male, territorial, and belligerent, and the new kids open and more gender balanced, but there’s a certain irony to the fact that the skin tight suit is in reality being developed by Dava Newman at MIT, who gets mentioned, but Cent hooks up with a a male scientist…though fortunately, not one who’s an asshole. In the end, it’s perfectly plausible as Cent’s crusade,  and I’m all for the author’s agenda to encourage anyone to take up STEM subjects.

Though she’s an engaging and likeable character, the real object of affection in this book isn’t Cent, or her currently on the outs boyfriend Joe, who got caught thinking with the wrong bunch of nerves, but the counter-pressure space suit, similar to the actual suit being developed by Dava Newman at MIT, who gets honorable mention, but in the book being developed by Dr. Cory Matoska, “whose generous contributions to the Con-orBust sharity” earned him a place in the book, and as Gould points out, has the happy coincidence to by Cory Doctorow’s first name, fitting as he’s both the author’s friend and heavily into the Maker community. The counter pressure suit, also know as the space activity suit, picks up where the pulp covers of the fifties left off, with skin tight suits rather than the current NASA style air filled ones. Leaving the air space to just the helment area offers a lot of benefit in terms of mobility, and though Cent wears a white Nomex coverall to reflect sunlight and keep from overheating, it has the advantage of looking HAWT. Do people really say that? The author seems to think so, and he’s a pretty good researcher…but really?

There’s a lot of exposition here as Cent and Cory work out the details of a form hugging spacesuit, trying to come up with consumer off the shelf (COTS) stand ins for the million dollar bells and whistles that NASA uses for everything from life support to comms. And while the author gives himself a free pass on conservation of energy in jumps, he plays it straight when it comes to orbital mechanics and all the other bits of relevant space science, including orbital debris and the danger of ablative cascade, which is what you probably saw happen in the movie Gravity, where one satellite’s debris kicks off a chain reaction of more and more satellite’s getting pounded. Along with orbital mechanics comes a lot of other junk, space junk that is, and Cent has the idea of using her abilities to put small satellites in orbit for profit explaining that she’d “tried to get a news paper route but the papers kept burning up on reentry” but also that she’ll offset the footprint of anything she puts up by taking down three times as much junk.

That taking things down part makes the NSA nervous, but Cent does enough good deeds that she doesn’t push them over the edge. For that we’ve got the bad guys from the previous jumper novels, the Daarkon Group, who take repeated shots at capturing or killing the teleporting trio. They keep missing, but their aim keeps improving. If only there were some place the family could go where the bad guys couldn’t reach them.

The tech narrative alternates with Cent working through the fallout of discovering her boyfriend from the last book in bed with someone else while off at his first year of college. Having a girlfriend that can bend space makes it a really bad idea to fool around on her, but guys are only smart from the waist up. Still, it was only a one time thing and Cent doesn’t know what she’s going to do about it, though she’s giving new meaning to going ballistic in the process. Also along are her two friends Tara and Jade, separated by Jade’s going off to college and Tara still being in high school. The distance thing Cent can help out with, but Tara’s mother’s issues about same sex relationships are tougher to resolve. Speaking of resolve, I’m not sure how much room the author had left himself to expand the jump universe after this book. Oh, there’s plenty he could do,  but it seems like he’s wrapping things up at the end. Of course, if that means he’s going to get to work on a sequel to his non-jumper novel 7th Sigma, things could be worse.

The marketing folks are clearly hoping that readers will get hooked on EXO before they realize it’s hard sf, and I’m with them. I wish they could have put the girl in a space suit on the cover and been honest about it up front, but I get it. Wish I didn’t, but I do.

All in all, EXO is a fun coming of age romp in low earth orbit with lots of good nuts and bolts stuff thrown in to see what the next generation of space girls (and boys) can make with it.

Go Space Girl!

Links / References

• EXO: a novel (Jumper) at Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/Exo-Novel-Jumper-Steven-Gould/dp/0765336545
• EXO: Excperpt @ Tor.com http://www.tor.com/stories/2014/08/exo-excerpt-steven-gould
• EVA Suit Research Site @ MIT: http://mvl.mit.edu/EVA/biosuit/
• EVA Photoshoot: David Sonders: http://www.sondersphotography.com/blog/2007/11/05/space-suit-photoshoot/

 

Afterparty, is about a permanently overdosed neuroscientist that accidentally became the first person in a type I trial for a drug she’d been working on, and which she swore to never let into the wilds. It starts out like a cross between One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest and The Electric Cool-Aid Acid Test and is pulling me relentlessly along. Having worked in a biotech start-up looking for better brain drugs, and being a Broken/Puritan/Romantic/ at heart, the story makes all too much sense. Oh, and it’s well written. Daryl Gregory is like a dark William Gibson.

Links / References

https://www.netgalley.com/reviewer/viewReview?book_id=42297

Publishers Information:

 

Ever since there the appearance of search engines, website owners have been trying to find ways to make their sites show up more prominently in search results, while search engine managers have worked for a different goal altogether: to connect users with the most relevant information in the fewest keystrokes.

The two goals aren’t necessarily at odds, but they’re definitely different. Historically, web managers have been powerfully tempted to use whatever sugary coating they could to attract the web’s spiders, while the search engine managers keep trying to get past the sugary outer layer and find nuggets of actual nutrition.

They’ve gotten pretty good at it, and will only get better.

The old saw, “Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat its way to your doorstep.” wasn’t as valid in the early days of web searching as it is now because there just wasn’t enough data out there or search engine intelligence to figure out what a better mouse trap smelled like. Now it knows. In fact, it knows before the mice do. It’s that good.

So, while there was a time when putting “better mouse trap” in a webpage’s metadata would get Google, Yahoo, or Bing’s attention, you now have to be able to prove it.

What constitutes proof? Well, in scientific circles, we’d say that bold claims would have to survive peer review. In the whole wide web, it’s tougher than that, partly because the reviews aren’t being offered by “peers,” and partly because the number of possible reviewers is vast and varied, both in perspective and in place of publication.

Search engines now routinely mine all the social media you know and love for relevancy indicators on web content. They mine shopping sites, starting with Amazon, and they watch the news, blogs, and special interest sites to see what’s good, bad, and ugly. In this case, ugliness is what a search engine perceives as dissonance between a content provider’s claims and the content recipient’s appraisal.

So, if you think you can get away with blowing smoke, it’s going to get in your eyes in short order.

Now, that doesn’t mean that there’s no place for hyperbole in self promotion. In fact, it’s essential that you communicate your genuine excitement about your content, or product, in your communications. You want to get the word out through all the mediums you can, and you want to set the world on fire with excitement about what you’re offering. You just have to be able to back it up.

And not just you. Your word is suspect, both to search engines and to anyone in your actual target audience. What you really want is to get other people talking about how much they like your product, which means that what you really want is a product that people like.

So, be sure that when the world flocks to your door to buy that mousetrap that they don’t go away with the feeling that something other than the cheese smells bad. Because no matter where they share that opinion, it will trickle back into the web’s consciousness and come back to nibble away at your credibility, and let someone else get away with all the cheese.

 

 

 

09:20 Leaving Stockholm Station: The train is pulling out from Central Station Stockholm. I know because I looked up and saw the station receding. Really, these things are smooth. Plenty of legroom too, enough for my seatmate to stretch out her long Swedish gams distractingly. EJ’s in the seat behind me so that we both get a window view. Or we would except that my seat is by a really big pillar and all I can see is beige carpet. It’s ok, not only do I know what Sweden tastes like at this point, I know what it looks like, which is Vermont with fewer cows or mountains.

The walk from the hotel reminded me never to travel without a smartphone with local access to Google maps as we kept vectoring into the city and away from the train station through a series of slight errors in reckoning. At some point the errors added up enough that I knew we were off course and decided to dead reckon our way back, which got us within a few blocks. Why not ask directions? Because real men don’t? Not so much. Because the streets of Stockholm are pretty empty at 0800. Fortunately, my logistician had factored in time for mishap and we arrived, sweaty but on time with half an hour before our train to Malmut, the city on the Swedish side of the bridge to Denmark. I think the strike is still on, and we’ll be taking the bus back to hook up with the Copenhagen metro, then on to the Backpacker’s Hostel, as EJ takes me up on my assertion that I’d just as soon stay in a youth hostel as a five star hotel.

I scored another continental breakfast at the station, coffee in a paper cup and a stale cinnamon bun. I’ve decided that Swedes think bread is supposed to be stale because they only bake it once a year and sore it through the long winter. We learned that at the museum village thing, where we chatted with re-enactors baking crisp Swedish flatbread. How long does it keep? Well, up to 27 year. Oh, that would explain my cinnamon rolls.

At the station we saw several people traveling with very well-behaved dogs, which would sit quietly by their owners as they waited for the train. Cities aren’t Rover’s thing, and he’d be pretty much panicked by a train station, so leaving him at Doggy Play Care was the right choice. Not that you can just bring a dog through customs anyway. Others with reasonably well-behaved children.

Returning to the US will undoubtedly be a culture shock.

…many adventures later…

18:20 Copenhagen Backpacker’s Hostel – Things are looking up. We’ve checked into a very funky little backpacker’s hostel. Blues playing in the common room/café, coffee at the bar. OK, sharing a room with six others isn’t perfect, but at least one of them is EJ and they all have heavy vinyl flaps to seal you in. I like it.

So far this trip, The Admiral Hotel (great), the Radison Blu Strand (not as great as they think they are), and the Backpacker’s Hostel (awesome). Shout out to Jonathon McClure and Dimitri Klimenko…this is exactly the sort of place you’d expect me to wind up in. Too bad I have to leave in the morning.

Did I mention the blues playing in the main room?

We did our five hour train ride to the end of the line in Sweden, where we had to get off and deal with the “labor dispute” metro-bus-metro handshake to get over the bridge to Copenhagen. Except we didn’t quite do it that way.

Now the truth can be told.

There was only one thing I really wanted to do in Copenhagen. Visit the Museum of Design and see the Wegner chair exhibit. That, no doubt, sounds like a weird thing to do, but well, design is sort of my thing these days, there’s something interesting about chairs, and Wegner, well…if it’s a chair from the last century and it has curves in it, you can pretty much thank Wegner. Or Eames, but mostly Wegner.

But when we marched up to the gate last Monday, the museum was, as museums often are on Mondays, closed. Yeah, we’re really smart people.

Coming back from Stockholm there was a small window of time in which we could see the exhibit. If things went just right. Train to metro. Bus to Central station. Taxi to museum. Spend an hour at the exhibit.

Only the bus dropped us at the airport, which is about 45 minutes from downtown. EJ, ever focused on the mission, hailed a cab. I’m not asking what it cost.  At the end of our sprint across town in Friday rush-hour traffic, we had one of those classic encounters where the driver said, sure, I take your credit card, then tried really hard to convince us that his machine couldn’t deal with it. EJ set him straight.

Wegner turned out a lifetime of chair designs, many influenced by classic chairs like the Windsor or the stretched leather Spanish chair, but pared down to their absolute essentials and realized in gracefully curved wood.  If you’re sitting in a chair with almost flat arms that have a gentle curve carved into them to make them comfortable as well as graceful, thank Wegner.

21:00 Apre dinner – For our last dinner we’d gotten reservations at what was touted in the Rick Steves’ guidebook as a brilliant restaurant, especially if you like interesting food, and especially if you like fish. Oddly, the menu that they slid in front of us bore no real resemblance to the one we’d seen online when we booked.

That was when we should have run screaming out the door.

Unfortunately, I”d already turned my reasonableness filter off, since I was in “whatever makes EJ happy” mode and figured she knew what she was doing. And she was determined to give me a great restaurant experience for my last night in Copenhagen. So we ordered what can only be considered notional food on tiny plates and NASA style prices.

Well, they were really well-thought-out tiny plates. I had a dry martini (can’t get olives in your martini in Scandinavia, evidently; only citrus peels), Danish oysters, and King Crab with a bunch of froth and a few leaves of green stuff. There was a total symphony of delicate flavors going on between the sharp citrus in the froth and the smoky flavors in the crab. Brilliant stuff…but not actually a meal. More like a collection of petite bouchée. This is how the beautiful people stay beautiful.

Instead of trying to put enough of the tiny plates together to actually make a meal, I held back, secure in the knowledge that I’d seen a place called Pizza Central on the way in.  When we’d extricated ourselves from Kobhyens Fisekebar’s finny clutches, I headed right to the pizza place and asked for a slice.

Oddly, they don’t sell slices. I’m not completely sure they sell pizza.

Instead he offered me Schwarma. Schwarma, the mysterious food that the Avengers chowed down on at the end of the movie. I didn’t know what it was, but suddenly I wanted some too.

That was my undoing. I made the mistake of enjoying the hell out of my dirt-cheap mystery-meat pita while EJ was still in economic  recovery from the shock-n-awe that Fisekebar delivered. Oops. My bad. I probably should have snuck out after taps and done that.

But seriously, I’ve had my taste buds gritted for the entire trip. Going to Scandinavia is not about the food for me. This is a place where fish comes pickled, and I’d have to be pickled to think that was a good idea. My culinary highpoint was Swedish meatballs (sorry, Rudolph), and I’m deeply grateful that they have hot dog carts every few hundred feet.

I told her that if you spread the cost over the next year it won’t seem so bad, but I’m not sure she believes me. Maybe if I old her to compare it to the national deficit.

And it’s not all her fault. I’d been ignoring hints that she’d be happy to stop at any of the little places we were walking by on the way to the fishy restaurant, or even grab something at one of the ubiquitous 7-11’s and take it back to the hostel. I figured she was just trying to give me an out so I didn’t have to go to a fishy restaurant. I didn’t realize that she was having qualms about the whole thing.

Have to do better at that.

Anyway, we’re heading home to the land of cheap everything and our dog Rover. That’ll be good.