Grand unified books thread

[Syt]

I've been reading Star Trek - Vanguard from 2005, first in a series set on a space station (eponymous Vanguard, Starbase 47, because of course 47) set in the 2260s.

I've enjoyed it. It has a very pulpy feel - Starfleet have built a starbase suspiciously quickly in the Taurian reach between Tholian and Klingon Empire and are engaged in clandestine operations there that involve a mysterious intelligence outpost/artifact that seems to affect the Tholians. The characters involved include the station staff, an investigative reporter, an orion crime lord, a petty thief/merchant, a Klingon spy, and more. Unshaved slovenly Cpt Decker gets a cameo in the prologue. But fanservice/memberberries are generally kept fairly limited.

It's set right after the "second pilot" (Where No Man Has Gone Before) aka the one where Gary Mitchell gets superpowers and the crew still wears the old uniforms before switching to the classic TOS uniforms (which is mentioned in the book), and the Enterprise and crew have a (small) role in the story, but won't feature in later books as I understand it.

Its pulp sensibilities also extends to some of the perspectives - almost all major point of view characters are male (the one more fleshed out female character is a lesbian rape survivor constantly reliving the trauma, because of course), women are usually described in terms emphasizing their attractiveness, and all the men love the new miniskirt uniforms while the women are embarrassed about them. Unlike TOS, though, the author allows for women in command roles (though one is killed to motivate a main character, i.e. classic "fridging").

Still, an entertaining yarn that IMO hits the tone of TOS with a dash of DS9 (the mystery and undercover stuff) and I will keep reading for now.

Side note: the petty thief's ship is called the "Rocinante" - but this came out before the first Expanse book.

Also, looking up some characters on Memory Beta, apparently a later book will feature scientists by the names of Hofstadter, Wolowitz and Koothrapali (they already had a character called Cooper).

[Savonarola]

I read a biography of Claude Shannon (father of information theory, and author of a seminal paper on digital circuitry) called "A Mind at Play" by Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman.  He was one of the more eccentric souls at Bell Labs in the 40s.  His most famous work is called "A Mathematical Theory of Communication," once the importance of the paper was realized he was given leeway to do whatever he wanted during working hours, which included building unicycles, creating a computer which used Roman numerals and inventing a horn which doubled as a flame thrower.

Despite inventing the field, he wasn't all that interested in information theory.  When he later became a professor at MIT the projects that he was most interested in were in the fields of robotics or artificial intelligence (and juggling, he was the mentor for the MIT juggling society.)  I thought that was interesting.