Doubletake: J on The Sky is Not the Limit

The Sky is Not the Limit Cover
All I really knew about Neil deGrasse Tyson going into this book is from his appearances on The Daily Show, his hosting of NOVA ScienceNOW (seriously, what is up with that capitalization?), and perhaps short appearances in documentaries about science. So I guess I knew him as an interesting, fun guy who is big on all that science stuff.

The Sky is Not the Limit is pretty much a memoir. He talks about his love of astrophysics and how it grew from childhood onward.

At first this book read like a love letter to the Hayden Planetarium! Which before reading this book, I could not have accurately placed in New York City. It’s the Hayden Planetarium that inspired him to become an astrophysicist, and the Hayden Planetarium that really educated and pushed him that way (more so than school). And eventually the Hayden Planetarium that he became director of.

But eventually he does talk about other things. You wouldn’t think a black kid in the city would be particularly privileged, but he was very lucky. The Hayden Planetarium led him to a connection to this guy who was in um.. some sort of Explorer’s Club. I forget the name of it. And that led to opportunities to take trips and things. While still only 14, he was on an eclipse cruise with Isaac Asimov! Of course it helped that he decided on a career path early and avidly pursued it.

His story is interesting, although the book certainly has its less than stellar (wait for it…) moments.

Typographically: He misspelled Stephen Hawking’s first name once, though he got it right subsequently. Also there were a number of sentences that just.. made me stop and reread them. They weren’t constructed quite.. right. Or quite clearly. I guess it’s not necessarily something a copyeditor would notice, but it would’ve been nice if someone did.

Thematically: The last two chapters are about the end of the world and about god and science. They didn’t seem to quite belong in this book. Or, if they were going to be there, they should not have been the concluding chapters. I would’ve preferred a final chapter talking about his daily life now (what do astrophysicists do all day?), the Hayden Planetarium, or science education in the US.

Pictures: In the copy I read, there were pictures. Although we had our hands on another edition and that one did not. Oversight! Though I hate that pictures are usually in the middle of a book. It’s probably for pure physical publishing reasons, but.. it means that you’re already chapters away from a person’s childhood before you see a picture of them as a kid. And then if you look at all of the pictures when you come to them, you’re spoiled for the rest of the book! I’d prefer the pictures either spread out or entirely at the back.

When I started reading this book, I could strongly hear his voice narrating it for me. But soon enough that dropped away and it was just my usual inner reading voice. (Which sounds like me, but much cooler.)

He said a couple of things in this book that I disagree with. First, he seems to go on this rant against good students. Straight-A students will be Straight-A students regardless of their teacher. People with high IQs aren’t successful. They aren’t out saving the world. And though I can understand if he’s trying to tell kids who don’t get high marks that that doesn’t mean they can’t be successful after high school and do great, amazing, awesome things.. it felt kind of insulting to me. And could read as an excuse to slack off in school and go play with your telescope. Which will not get you into a good school with a scholarship!

Though I do agree that the terms ‘gifted and talented’ are problematic. I’ve read Talent is Overrated. I know that hard work and just sitting down and doing it will take you further than anything you inherited genetically.

It was a bit amusing to hear him rant about the starscape in the movie “Titanic”. Apparently it was wrong. And it was our scientific illiteracy as a nation that made this okay. He said more critics should be alert to these things. I think maybe he hasn’t been reading the geeky reviews I generally do. Believe me, if people notice a problem, they’ll say so! See Exhibit J and Exhibit K. (Those were even about astronomy!)

He devotes a chapter called “Dark Matters” to discussing a bit of what it’s like to be a black man and an astrophysicist. From the cops who pull him over more often than if he were white to the person at a wedding who assumed he knew more than Tyson did about how popcorn falls out of plane. (How cool is that, by the way? If I get married, prepare to see popcorn dropped from a plane!!) He also talks about the pressure he felt to succeed in athletics and how he got told at one point that he shouldn’t be studying something so frivolous as astrophysics. And how he eventually got past that idea to the idea that being seen on television and other places as a scientist and (later) television personality who just happens to be black was pretty darned important itself.

Taken all together, this book is an interesting look into how Neil deGrasse Tyson views the world. His passion for science in general and astronomy in particular really shines through. Especially when he’s trying to convince us that mathematical equations are easy, interesting, and fun! And you know what? He kind of makes me regret not growing up in a big city.

I’m thinking this book might be a good gateway into reading his more astronomy topic-specific books. Especially for people, including kids, who might be more inclined to like a biography than a science book.

Now go add NOVA ScienceNOW to your Tivo season passes.

The Sky is Not the Limit (Neil deGrasse Tyson)

The Plot
Neil deGrasse Tyson, noted astrophysicist, frequent television guest, and director of the Hayden Planetarium in NYC decided to become an astrophysicist at the age of nine after a visit to the planetarium. Here he muses on the experiences which brought him to his current life and position as a scientist and as a black man in the United States.

My Thoughts
Like many people, I first became aware of Dr. Tyson through his television work — specifically in my case, through his frequent visits to The Daily Show. I always enjoyed his discussions with Jon Stewart, but it wasn’t until they showed the following segment that I really became a huge fan.

It was here that I learned he wasn’t just a scientist. He’s also a dork and a geek, neither of which negates his coolness in any way. It made him more relatable — not just a random scientist, but someone I might enjoy having a conversation with.

Tyson has written several science books for the general audience, but this isn’t really one of them, though there is some scientific content. This is a memoir, specifically a memoir of his development into an astrophysicist. It begins with his visit to the planetarium at the age of nine, the visit which inspired him and fueled his desire to make that his field.

Though they comprised a pretty small portion of the book as a whole, it was his experiences as a teenager participating in non-school based science programs that I found the most fascinating. He seems to have been able to take part in some truly astonishing things, even as a very young kid. At the age of fourteen, he was able to take a star-studded cruise (Isaac Asimov! Neil Armstrong!) out into the Atlantic to view a solar eclipse, apparently with no other chaperone aside from himself. He attended a camp in the Mojave desert for astronomically inclined young people. He was invited to give guest lectures at the City College of New York’s Center for Open Education. And, of course, he was able to take classes offered at the Hayden Planetarium.

As a girl from NH who spent several years in high school trying to find myself astronomy-based programs to do in the summer (and with pretty much no money to use for said), I confess: I am sooo jealous! I don’t begrudge Tyson his good luck, because he surely earned it by being motivated and working hard, but I’m still very jealous, because the stuff he got to do is just So. Very. Cool.

Only the first third of the book is truly chonological; the remainder leapfrogs back and forth through time, each chapter made up of anecdotes loosely connected by their topic. The topics themselves are wide-ranging, from the scientific and mathematical illiteracy of the American public, to the issues he’s faced as a black male in our society. Several were thought provoking, such as his reaction to being asked to participate in a calendar of scientific studmuffins. Others were just darn interesting, like when he collaborated with a Chinese history scholar to try and pinpoint the exact nature of a celestial event referenced in the historical record.

It was after I finished reading this book that I realized that in addition to his hosting duties on PBS’s NovaScienceNOW, Tyson has also been hosting a radio program. Somehow I hadn’t connected the dots until I saw both him and John Hodgman tweeting about Hodgman’s visit to the show. Apparently Bill Nye is also a frequent guest! Worth checking out.

In Short
Neil deGrasse Tyson has proved in his multiple television appearances that he’s not just a scientist but a witty and amusing conversationalist. This talent translates very well into this memoir, and he fills the pages with fascinating bits from his life.

J’s Take on Zita the Spacegirl

Zita the Spacegirl CoverI think I first saw an ad for this in Shelf Awareness, a book industry newsletter. The artwork is really eye-catching and appealing, especially combined with the title. How can you not be drawn to something called Zita the Spacegirl?

There aren’t enough spacegirls, if you ask me.

Since the first thing I did when I went to read it was stare at the cover a little while, I’ll start with that. Zita appeals to me because she looks like a kid. It could easily be a boy in that outfit, except that it has a little skirt-like flare to it that most boys probably wouldn’t wear. She doesn’t look older or more feminine than a girl that age should look. Not that I’m entirely sure of her age, but I’m guessing somewhere between 7 and 10.

The art appealed to me throughout. I think it’s the combination of bright colors (the whole book is in color, score!) and fun characters yet within a realistic sort of style. You know how in some manga the character reactions are unrealistic? People facevaulting onto the floor, sweatdropping left and right, and going SD for no reason. Unless and until you’re used to that, it’s kind of annoying and distracting. There’s none of that in here. All of Zita’s expressions convey her emotions, very well I might add, and not in an over-the-top way.

Oh! So the basic story is that Zita and her friend come across a crater left by a ‘meteoroid’, which misnaming I can forgive because it’s in the mouths of the characters and they’re kids. They discover a mysterious red button in there. And naturally Zita pushes it! Her friend, Joseph, disappears through a portal that opens up.

And the next bit is like the best bit of the book, I think. We get several pages of no dialogue. The author/artist, Ben Hatke, also resists the urge for Zita to have an internal (or external) monologue. We have no idea what she’s thinking. Except that we totally do. Just by looking at the panels. That, ladies and gentlemen, is how you draw/write a graphic novel.

As you might guess, she goes to rescue Joseph. And she finds herself in this weird place, probably another planet, surrounded by weird creatures, probably aliens. Only there’s a meteor coming. Utoh. So she needs to find Joseph and get home, before the whole planet is destroyed.

Along the way she meets people/creatures/robots and makes friends. Some of them are quite unlikely friends, especially at first. A giant mouse, maybe. A killer robot? Ummm..

For a bonus, one of the characters is reminiscent of, or perhaps meant to be, the Pied Piper of Hamelin. Who I’m rather drawn to.

To not give away the whole story, I’ll go back to talking about what we can see, rather than what we read. There are a lot of different creatures, so that it’s fascinating to look at all of them. Some of them look familiar. Some in a vague way, where you’re not quite sure if you’ve seen them somewhere before or not. Others that you could say ‘That’s Star Wars’ or ‘That’s Fraggle Rock’. But still, never exactly the same as from there. Just that they seem to have been used as inspiration, and that they’re there as inside jokes.

If it still needs to be said, I quite liked Zita the Spacegirl. Even her outfit with the sashlike Z on it. Maybe I’m just a sucker for Zs (for the same reason I like the names Diego and Alejandro). The story rings true as a girl’s story. By that I mean that she gathers friends along the way to help her, rather than bullying through it alone.

You know, I have not a single negative thing to say about this book. Even the 11$ pricetag seems reasonable for a full color graphic novel of this size. I’d be quite happy to recommend this to a kid, of any gender, and I look forward to reading and viewing more adventures of Zita the Spacegirl.

I feel like I should close this with a tagline. But I don’t know that Zita has a tagline. There, there’s my negative thing. She needs a tagline.

The Eyre Affair (Jasper Fforde)

The Eyre Affair CoverThe Plot
Thursday Next lives in a world where time travel is possible, cloning is something everyone can do, and where the general population is as passionate about the arts as they are about religion in ours. As a result, literary forgeries, copyright infringements and book piracy are high profile crimes, and Next is a LiteraTec, a detective whose main focus is on dealing with all crimes involving literature. But even she is surprised when crimes against literature turns into crimes against literary characters: after her uncle Mycroft invents a machine that allows people to literally enter a book, it turns out that said machine can also be used to remove characters from the book into the real world. Now the master criminal Acheron Hades is threatening to destroy several of England’s most beloved classics, and Thursday Next has to stop him.

My Thoughts
I had heard good things about this series before we chose to read it, but I didn’t know (and had chosen not to find out) any details, because I wanted to go in without having been spoiled. Having had few expectations, then, it would be a bit silly to say it wasn’t as anticipated — except it wasn’t, a bit.

The world of Thursday Next is an alternate Earth of some kind. Much is similar to our own world, but much more is different. Now, in my past experience with series of books set in an alternate history of Earth, the differences tend to hinge on identifiable differences between that world and ours which have then rippled forward and caused historical divergence. For example, in Naomi Novik’s Temeraire books, the big difference is the existence of dragons and their kin, and this has affected world history in ways which are still being explored. In Jo Walton’s Small Change books, the UK agreed to terms with Nazi Germany and withdrew from WWII before it really got underway, leaving many of the upper classes still able to indulge their fascist sympathies. The setting in Kate Elliott’s Spiritwalker trilogy may be rather too changed to really be called an alternate history, but Strange Horizons has an incredibly in depth analysis of it available for the interested.

So what am I getting at here? Well, in all of the three examples above, the author has thought carefully about the changes they were making and how the ramifications altered the world. While reading, the worlds make internal sense. This was not the case for the setting presented in The Eyre Affair. There are plenty of changes in this alternate Earth, but they don’t seem to hang together well at all. This is a world where time travel is possible and incredibly advanced bioengineering is embarked upon by amateurs at home — and yet their computers still operate with valves and tubes? I’m sorry, what? The technology is out of whack.

There are also lots of clever asides and nudges at history embedded in the text, a number of which I’m sure I didn’t pick up on, being American and well versed in U.S. history rather than British or European. Some were important: the Charge of the Light Brigade has been shifted up a hundred years or so (the war in the Crimea is still going on as the book opens), for instance, and is an important touchstone for the heroine, Thursday Next, as she is a survivor. Others seemed, perhaps, to be setting up for future plot in the ongoing series, but this was less clear.

Part of the problem is that Fforde seems to have fallen victim to the impulse to say too much about the world, far before it was necessary. There’s a reason authors reveal things slowly and only when they need to: first, excess information can bog down the narrative and confuse the reader; second, once you’ve said something, it’s out there and you’re stuck with it — even if you have a better idea of how to handle it in a later book, when you’re actually going to focus in on it. Sure, you can retcon, but that just makes the fans angry.

A secondary result of the information packing (beyond the added confusion and internal contradictions) was that the actual real plot of the book — the danger posed to literature and to the world by Mycroft Next’s Prose Portal — felt like it didn’t ramp up until well past the midpoint of the novel. Once it did get properly underway, the narrative tightened up almost immediately and became far more readable and coherent. Enjoyable, in fact: it was a good idea and an interesting one, and I think it should have been given more pages than it was allotted. The title of the book, after all, is The Eyre Affair, not How Thursday Next Came to Be in Swindon That One Time.

In Short
This book was hampered by the fact that it wanted to be more clever than it actually was. Fforde didn’t seem to decide until halfway through if he was writing a punny Xanth romp or a novel with a plot that was going somewhere; once he settled on the latter, it got better and wrapped up not unsatisfyingly. For anyone who enjoys trying to pick out every sly reference and allusion in a work, this book would be a gold mine. For those who aren’t as enamored of such things, it’s not bad, if you can wade through the confusion of the first half (which is considerable.) Will I seek out the rest of the series? I can’t say I’m chomping at the bit, but I won’t rule it out.

Zita the Spacegirl (Ben Hatke)

The Plot
Zita and her friend Joseph are on their way home from school when a meteor crashes nearby. Upon finding a mysterious red button concealed within the meteorite, Zita naturally wants to press it — and press it she does. After this results in Joseph being kidnapped by aliens, Zita finds her courage and goes after him, knowing that she may be his only chance of getting home again.

My Thoughts
First impressions are key, they say, and this graphic novel makes a marvelous first impression. The book is in full, vibrant color and composed of sturdy, thick paper pages which not only don’t bleed through, but which look and feel like they’ll stand up very well to small hands and repeated readings.

Zita manages to live up to the great first impression. The artwork, a pleasing mixture of cute and weird, manages somehow to present a detailed and exciting setting while still remaining simple enough that the panels never feel cluttered and the characters overpowered by the backgrounds. As the story got underway, part of me couldn’t help trying to picture how the graphic novel would translate to a movie — and if said movie should be animated by Studio Ghibli or done in live action by the Jim Henson Company. (Sorry, Disney-Pixar, I don’t think you could handle it.)

The story itself is straightforward: girl in a strange land collects a group of rag-tag misfits and heads off to find the wizard summon one of the four gods rescue her friend, but it’s very well-done and effectively told through the artwork and dialogue. I was hooked from the beginning, when Zita and her friend Joseph encounter the meteorite (called a meteoroid in the text, which I’m pretty sure is only what they’re called when they’re still in space) and the mysterious red button. Joseph’s abrupt abduction leads to easily the most realistic reaction I’ve seen in a long time: Zita panics and runs away. But she masters her fears and comes back again, making her effort to rescue him clearly much more considered (and brave!) than a story in which she impulsively and recklessly leapt through the portal right away.

I really had only one major problem with this work. It didn’t affect my enjoyment of it, but it’s not a minor concern, either. It is this: after I finished the book, I sat back with a feeling of vague confusion. I could not remember a single identifiably female character other than Zita — not just among the named characters, but even as scenery in the background*. Then I wondered why I remembered all of the other named characters as male. Some of them were robots, and surely they weren’t assigned a gender? So I went back through the book again, and as it turns out, my impression was unfortunately correct. Not only is Zita the only identifiably female character in the book, every other named character (with the exception of Strong-strong) is referred to with a male pronoun.

I was shocked by this. Was this an oversight on the author’s part, or a conscious decision? Either way, it doesn’t look good. The default gender in the universe should not be ‘male’. Unfortunately, this is pretty common in properties which are aimed toward a cross-gender or male market — but that doesn’t make it okay, less offensive, or less obvious to girls that they’re being dissed. (I was one of those girls, and marketing people can say all they like about girls being willing to watch/read/enjoy things with boy characters — it may be true but we NOTICE.)

The book is good, and I’d like to see more. I can’t give author Ben Hatke a ‘bye’ for this, but I can hope he will strive to provide a more gender diverse cast in any future Zita installments.

*Toward the end, there appears to be an extremely random cameo by Marzipan, but I don’t know if I want to count that.

In Short
Zita the Spacegirl is fantastic. As a character, Zita is believable, interesting and charismatic. The artwork supports the story perfectly, and makes it feel like a movie even while remaining still on the page. I’ll certainly be purchasing a copy of my own, and I’ll probably be recommending that the library purchase it as well. The one major flaw in this work is an egregious gender imbalance, with Zita being the only female character I was able to identify in the entire book — I’m hopeful this is something the author will correct in future installments.

A review copy of Zita the Spacegirl was provided by the publisher.