Another year done and over with. Iraq war, torture scandal, slow abolishment of key rights, Bush’s reelection, and most recently a nasty floodwave that left 140,000+ dead… when you think back, nothing really unusual happened in 2004 and yet the year seemed somewhat worse than many others.
Let’s hope that 2005 brings some improvements over its predecessor.
Happy New Year.
194This past weekend, I had a unique opportunity to travel to [Toulouse](
http://wikitravel.org/en/Toulouse). Unique because the voyage included an organized tour of the Airbus company yards, with a special something thrown in for us at the end. Everybody can get a tour of Airbus, but as a bonus feature we got a sneak preview of the new Airbus 380. We weren’t allowed inside the hall where the beast was assembled; instead we were looking down from a visitor platform. And of course photography was not allowed.
Seeing the A380 for the first time in such a huge hangar fools you completely. You look down and you see, well, an aircraft. It takes a little while until you notice that those small crawly things on the wing are two technicians brooding over some schematics. Really impressive – and I cannot wait until the plane is finished and I will have my first flight on one.
Other than the A380, an Airbus tour is also highly recommended for any serious geek. It’s way too short, but interesting. I just wish they’d allow you to walk among the aircraft more.
198Tolouse itself is pretty nice, clean, with several interesting buildings and the Canal du Midi is good for an extended walk. I doubt you could spend more than at most an extended weekend without being bored out of your mind however.
One final word of warning: Do not go to the [Cité de l'Espace](http://www.cite-espace.com/index.php), unless you want to interest your young children in space flight. There is little to see and even less to do – it’s a waste of both time and money. And this comes from a guy who really loves spaceflight, too.
We do not need software patents. Wir brauchen keine Software Patente!
“Read more.”:http://nosoftwarepatents.com/en/m/intro/index.html
Tuesday November 23rd: Düsseldorf Köln.
Friday November 26th – Sunday November 28th: Tolouse
Monday November 29th – Thursday December 3rd: Budapest
The Budapest thing has not been finally decided. Some people at work want me to go, but I really don’t think I should as I will be quite overloaded as it is.
We’ll see.
Anybody who wishes to hook up is of course welcome to let me know, although I won’t have time in -Düsseldorf-Köln for any meetups. TLS and BUD would be much easier.
_Update, November 20th:_ No Budapest for me, phew! By the way, is it “Toulouse” or “Tolouse” en Anglais?
Let’s see….
Friday: Get up at 6:30, go to work at 7:30, arrive at 8:35. Work until 17:30. Be on call until 19:00.
Saturday: 0:00-1:00 check into [Fliegenpreise](http://www.fliegenpreise.de) going live for the day. 1:00-11:00 Be on call for that server. 11:00-13:00 lunch with Philipp. Hand over chores to him. 14:00 return home. Sleep until sunday.
_Update, November 13th 2004:_ Wow, that was exciting. It went pretty well. I even got about 2.5 hours of sleep between 20:30 and 23:00. I am pleased with us, if I may be so boastful 
Now, to hope for a quiet rest of the weekend.
Just woke up from 5h sleep (yeah it’s now 1:30am, seriously inconvenient times. Guess I am training for Friday…) and outside it’s snowing. The stuff is melting again as it hits the ground. Guess the winter’s really here now. (D’oh.)
I had big trouble sleeping the last week, and thus completed another (unabridged) audiobook. The beauty of audiobooks, as compared to the normal paper ones, is that I can listen to them while I do other things. Sometimes, this is too distracting. But when you are in bed, waiting for sleep to come, it’s at least a very comfortable way to “read” a book: You can pull the cover up to your ears and above all you don’t have to turn on the light.
_Ender’s Game_ was written by Orson Scott Card. It was originally a short story, until Card wanted to write _Speaker for the Dead_. As he put it, he was having problems with that novel until he decided that Ender Wiggin, the protagonist of _Ender’s Game_, should be the main character of _Speaker for the Dead_. He rewrote _Ender’s Game_ into a full novel, which then became a big hit and a cult classic in some circles of the geek crowd.
In the future, on an overcrowded Earth, mankind is looking at its children to find a brilliant leader, a strategist and tactician who would save it from the feared “Third Invasion” by a vicious alien species called the “Buggers”. These children, monitored from early childhood, are recruited into the space-based “Battle School” at the age of six. Here they learn all about military tactic through a series of games. The adult teachers control all facets of their environment, as Ender soon learns, but otherwise have a very “hands off” approach to teaching. And as they believe Ender is their “best hope”, they put an extra effort into pushing him to the limit.
I am not really sure what to make of the book. It’s pretty useless as a war story; we don’t see much of it, nor of the military, their tactics, and so on. It’s equally useless as a science fiction story; the Buggers and the interstellar war are just trappings and the future history and society of mankind are never explored in any real detail. It’s almost as useless as a “coming of age” story. It’s not so useless as a character story, one that describes Ender Wiggin (and to a lesser extent his siblings). They are good, believable characters; unfortunately they’re not really _fun_. Especially Valentine and Peter; Peter manages to be a good character in the early part of the book, a nice threat and motivation to Ender, but he becomes boring quickly. Valentine, well, she’s just redundant. But I guess every book must have a love interest for the hero; and if it’s not a girlfriend to love, you gotta have a sister he can love.
The other characters are just one dimensional, boring, names without substance. This holds true for good guys, bad guys, and neutrals. Everybody pales in comparison to Hero Ender, and thus are given only the most basic of motivations or personalities.
Still, the book makes you continue on. Card’s style is pretty good, and he makes up for what he lacks in creating an interesting setting that way. You’ll also want to see what Colonel Graff, Endre’s hidden “mentor” (and tormentor) will come up with and how Ender will cope. Finally, at least for me, I also wanted to see if the book got any better.
Only it didn’t; it remained insubstantial and predictable to the very end.
If you want to read good Sci Fi, read any number of other books. If you want to read a good war story, read any number of other books. For the military SF subgenre, I heartily recommend Starship Troopers instead (the book, not the “terrible movie”:/Review/195/starship-troopers-dvd!), especially since it includes a lot of moral/philosophical/political debate. Or read “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress”:/Review/586/the-moon-is-a-harsh-mistress by Heinlein. I cannot even recommend Ender’s Game as the “leadership textbook” I have heard it being described as. I have serious doubts the little bits and peaces Ender learns about leading other soldiers would help anybody but maybe the absolute neophytes.
So, hummm, this comes across as a pretty negative opionion of _Ender’s Game_. Is it a horrible book? No, not really, as in “I have read worse”. But in my humble opinion it is not in any way remarkable. It doesn’t excite, it doesn’t educate, it doesn’t thrill, it doesn’t surprise, but neither does it really bore (except maybe the Peter-and-Valentine bits). If you are stuck on a rainy afternoon, this book is better than nothing. But on your list of books-to-read, it should appear very low in the ranking. _Ender’s Game_ was an afterthought, a novel thrown in when the author was stuck for ideas, and it shows.
I just realized I have been in Frankfurt for exactly three years now.
Oh, well.
I recently completed “Ringworld’s Children” by Larry Niven. I listened to it in the Blackstone Audiobook version.
Let us look a little at the series first, as I seemingly have yet to publish a review of any of the Ringworld novels.
The book is the fourth novel in Larry Niven’s “Ringworld” series, itself set in the “Known World” universe. Basically, a motley crew of aliens – Two humans, a Kzin, and a Pupeteer – arrive at the Ringworld in the novel of the same name. In Ringworld Engineers, they return, albeit with a different pupeteer, and get stranded. Where book two seemed a pale imitation of the original success, Ringworld Throne, the third novel in the series, was just utterly horrible to read. Niven seemed to fixate on Rishatra, the practice of sex outside one’s species, but with another intelligent being. And so, while Ringworld itself already featured a little much sex for a sci fi novel, Ringworld’s Throne had finally degenerated into a rather mindless porn novel. Consequently, it speaks volumes for the coolness of the concept of the Ringworld itself that I forced myself to read the entire book, eager to learn more about it and its inhabitants. One may say I got to know them intimately, and that was more than I bargained for.
No matter. Ringworld’s Children is the result of feedback from fans. The author acknowledges at least one Internet mailing list that was discussing various ideas about Niven’s universe. I am also very certain he noted the negative feedback. To Niven’s honor, his basic style has much improved over Ringworld 3: There is still sex in the book, but it is limited in scope and in a way even necessary for the story.
The book takes off where Ringworld Throne ended and continues from there. The Fringe War – the presence of various species in the Ringworld system, each eager to grab the Ringworld’s secrets for themselves – has turned hot, and threatens the Ringworld and all life on it. Things happen very quickly, and it is difficult to give a synopsis of the action without spoiling the story. Basically, it is the story of the rescue of the stranded mission, and about the end of the Fringe War. He explains the origins of the Ringworld and what happened to it, how it came into its current conditions. Yeah, you got that right: In one novel, Niven resolves all the problems and mysteries he has introduced so far. He even explains away Teela Brown.
It is quite obvious that Niven is tired of the Ringworld series, for one reason or another. I think with the catastrophic quality of the third novel, and the less than perfect performance in books 2 and 4, the series would not attract enough readers to be kept alive. And yet he probably had enough fans that he needed to tie up the loose ends once and for all. To this end, Niven even scoops down to cheating. The whole solution reeks of Deux Ex Machina, and is a violation of established “laws” of Known Space. I may have missed the explanation for it, but I am not going to go through the book a second time.
Overall, I found Children to be a disappointment, but I wasn’t expecting too much anyway. Still, it would have been nice if Larry Niven had come up with something, well, a little more _cool_ than what he did end up writing. At least he did set up one new story arc (the trademarked logo on the autodoc – you will know it when you get to the part) that may result in a good novel if Niven does it right.
So is the book worth reading? Yes…… but only if you read the rest of the series. Because if you did, you will be happy that the whole story has been ended, even if it is executed cheaply. If you have not read all three Ringworld novels, then don’t bother with Children. You’d have to read the rest too, and that’s simply too unpleasant. And if you’ve never read any Ringworld, and aren’t interested in reading all Known Space novels, you should probably just end after reading the first book.
Christopher Reeves [died](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/3732310.stm).