The Default State Is Broken

In an introduction to a book once, Neil Gaiman may have written it -- I'm not sure because my google-fu is failing me right now, but that's not the important part -- where the essayist points out that while yes, Moby-Dick is about man's inhumanity and also the relationships that we have with one another and what happens to us in extremis but, most importantly, it is also a book about a whale . The point being made was, of course, that truly excellent books are about  something, but they are also about something . And that's the thing I keep coming back to again and again having read Charlie Jane Anders' The City in the Middle of the Night.  There is a lot of things that this book is about , but it's also a book about first contact on an alien world. And if it didn't work on that fundamental level, it wouldn't work at all. I'm not going to spoil anything, because I'm not an asshole, but I will say this: the tone and voice and flow of this novel ...

In 17 days, I and my partner will be sailing out of Fort Lauderdale on a 7-day Caribbean cruise and I will be entirely unreachable for the better part of 10 days including travel days. When I was an individual contributor, this was fine; I made sure my work was handed off to someone, I made sure my tickets were up to date, and I told my boss I was going, and then I walked away. But now, I  am the boss. There are things, including interfacing with the clients, that no one else on my team is even authorized  to do by dint of corporate policy. Now, this isn't insurmountable; my boss knows I'm going to be unavailable, I'm getting everything lined up and squared away before I leave, and I'll be doing a handoff briefing before I leave. But honestly, I now totally understand why sometimes managers have a tough time stepping away. There's a lot hanging over my head, and I definitely don't want it hanging over my team's head because they already have enough hangi...

I have, as anyone who knows me can tell you, a penchant for reading (devouring, consuming, blazing through) Science Fiction novels. Other people enjoy big thick-brick-of-prose fantasy novels where there's a fight every third page and everyone eats a lot of stew. Some folk like reading about big spaceship battles where there's a lot of lasers and dogfighting and possibly some shooting at people and to be fair, I will often read those novels, too; I'm not trying to say you shouldn't. There's a lot of great work out there and almost all of it is worth reading for someone. But the books I really love, the ones I really sink my teeth into, are what I like to call the Political Manuvering Novels. The PMNs are, on their face, not for everyone. Let's face it, the delicate maneuvering and internal monologues of various characters as they reason their way to a solution (or more often out of a sticky situation) do not, for most people, make a tense and gripping read, nor...