Relic by Alan Dean Foster

After finishing The Spider Woman's Daughter on August 19, I picked up Relic by Alan Dean Foster.  The Husband read this book first and then I decided to give it a spin.  I started it on September 3 and finished it on September 6 - another quick read.

This is neither a cop book nor a spy book.  It is a book about the last living human in all of space.  Ruslan, a human, is the last human.  He was picked up by a race of aliens known as the Myssari and lives happily among them.  He's known to the Myssari as a relic - because that's what he is - a relic - one of a kind - the last human.

The Myssari are determined not to let homo sapiens go extinct and with or without Ruslan's cooperation, they are going to resurrect the human race.  Somehow, Ruslan agrees to cooperate in exchange for the Myssari's help in locating Earth.  Though Ruslan wasn't born there, has never been there, and no one and no reference can point to where Earth is, he wants to see the human homeland.  Thus begins the fantastical story of how a human, aided by aliens, begin the search for Earth, and their quest to resurrect the human race.

I don't want to give too much away here so I won't.  However, as I was reading this book, there were so many parallels to the now-defunct TV show "Last Man on Earth."  Can you imagine being the last human, the only human, the sole survivor?  It boggles my mind, but I guess it shouldn't.  So many things - plants and animals - have gone extinct already, why can't humans too?  And, it seems fantastical to imagine alien life out there - but hey - we humans exist, so why can't life on other planets exist too?  These are questions for another day.

This book was extremely entertaining and easy to read (hey - I finished it 4 days).  If you liked The Martian, or the TV show "Last Man on Earth", you'll probably like this book.

Anniversary of a Tragedy

So, it is September 11th...  We all know what happened on this day in 2001.  We all know where we were on this day in 2001.  We all know about the tragic events that occurred and how they are still impacting our lives and world today.

Me - I was awake and getting ready to go to work.  At the time, I worked for an investment bank in San Francisco, and it was the first day of our annual investment conference (a very big deal at the time).  I had to be at work by 7am PT.  I had to wear a suit that day because of the conference.  As I was in the process of putting on make-up and deciding which suit to wear, I was watching the morning news to see what was going on in the world, and what the weather would be like so I would know what to wear.  When I turned on the news that morning at around 5:30am PT, I remember seeing on every channel, reporters showing a building in New York smoking and on fire.  They knew a plane had run into one of the World Trade Center buildings, but not why it ran into the building.  On the channel I was watching, the newscasters were speculating that perhaps an airport beacon wasn't working properly and led the plane to the building by mistake.  Then as I was pulling up my tights, I watched in horror as the 2nd plane slammed into the South Tower.  I stood there half clothed, mouth agape, tears streaming down my face.  My home phone rang a few minutes later and one of my co-workers told me not to come to work, as they were evacuating all landmark buildings in SF because they didn't know what else was going to happen.  At the time I worked in the TransAmerica Pyramid.  She told me the conference was cancelled indefinitely, and she would call me later and let me know what to do the next day, in terms of coming to work or not.  I called my friend, Amanda, whose sister lived in New York to make sure she knew what was going on and to be sure her sister was Ok.  Then I called my dad for some reassurance of something.  We stayed on the phone a while, mostly in silence, until the buildings started to collapse.  I watched that on live TV also.  At that point, I had to get away from the television, so I went out for a walk in my neighborhood, and pondered life and what was happening to thousands of innocent people and their loved ones.

Fast forward to today - September 10, 2014.  My husband and I had the final episode of season 1 of Cosmos with Neil deGrasse Tyson to finish and delete from the DVR.  The show played a quote from the late Caral Sagan that for some reason struck a chord for me.

Here is the quote by the brilliant Carl Sagan:

“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."

It makes me think - what the hell are we humans doing to each other?

I didn't know it until tonight, but in 1997 Carl published a book (among many other books) titled, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space.  That just might be my next book.

My life motto:  Treat others how you wish to be treated.

Wish more people could do that.

Earth is the tiny speck of light in the middle of the reddish stripe of light on the right side of the picture.  This photo was taken by cameras on Voyager 1, launched from Earth on September 5, 1977.  The picture was taken when Voyager 1 was 4 Billion miles away from Earth.  

We, all humans, are floating on a speck of sand in an infinite universe.

The Martian, by Andy Weir

After finishing Nothing to Lose, by Lee Child on May 31, I had a small book hiatus.  I usually read at night before going to sleep, and during most of June, I was simply too tired to start a new book at bedtime.  I also did not have anything teed up that I was chomping at the bit to read.  The husband read about a new book in the Mercury Newspaper by an author that worked at the company I recently started working at.  Andy Weir was a software engineer, and an author on the side.  The husband thought the book sounded cool, and was intrigued that I worked with the author, so he picked it up.  During the time when he was reading it, he would be laughing out loud quite often, but would never tell me what was so funny.  Upon finishing the book, he announced that I was to read it now, please.  So, on June 29th, I picked up The Martian and started reading it.

The book starts, literally on page 1 with:

I'm pretty much fucked.  That's my considered opinion.  Fucked.  Six days into what should be the greatest two months of my life, and it's turned into a nightmare.

Um, so yeah, there is a lot of cussing in the book.  But it is funny.

The book is about a group of astronauts who land on Mars.  There is a big dust storm, and the astronauts have to abandon their camp and high tail it back to their ship.  In the commotion and chaos of getting out of their living quarters and back into the ship that takes them from the surface of Mars back to their ship in the space around Mars, Mark Watney, a somewhat salty botanist/engineer, gets skewered by an antenna.  His co-astronauts frantically try to find him in the blinding Martian dust storm before the wind knocks over their ship (their only escape), but are unable to.  They tried everything they could to locate them, but were unsuccessful.  Very reluctantly, they had to leave the surface of Mars without Watney.  Unbeknownst to them, he did not die.  His space suit did begin to depressurize, but the small hole was sealed by his congealed blood.  His suit re-pressurized and pretty much saved him.

The book is basically about Watney's life on Mars and his antics and adventures to try and save himself.  He is literally all alone on Mars and has no way to communicate with Earth nor with his co-astronauts.  He is fucked.  Or so we thought...  Watney is one crafty dude.

At one point, he had a zany idea on how he could possibly communicate with Earth / NASA by using the abandoned Pathfinder ship and accompanying Mars rover, Sojourner.  Being the computer engineer he is, Weir, of course figured out how to incorporate tech-speak into his book:

So, I'll have to use ASCII.  That's how computers manage characters... How do I know which values go with which characters?  Because Johanssen's laptop is a wealth of information.  I knew she'd have an ASCII table in there somewhere.  All computer geeks do.

The way the story is told is very clever - it is told by Watney in a series of journal / blog / log entries he writes while trapped on Mars.  Watney is not only crafty, but he's really funny too (and apparently doesn't follow instructions):

My conversation with NASA about the water reclaimer was boring and riddled with technical details.  So I'll paraphrase it for you:

Me: "This is obviously a clog.  How about I take it apart and check the internal tubing?"

NASA: (after five hours of deliberation) "No. You'll fuck it up and die."

 So I took it apart.

In another portion of the book, Watney has to drive a very long way from one part of Mars to another, but he has no navigation equipment, maps, or anything to help him find his way.  In addition to being crafty, funny, and fucked, Watney also has a knack for either directly or indirectly screwing things up.  Once his saving grace, the jerry-rigged Pathfinder / Sojourner communication with NASA becomes useless because of a small mishap by Watney.  So, he's all alone again on Mars and has to high tail it to where the next mission to Mars was going to land in order to have the remotest chance at rescue.  So, he made a sextant:

Latitude and longitude.  That's the key.  The first is easy.  Ancient sailors on Earth figured that one out right away.  Earth's 23.5-degree axis points at Polaris.  Mars has a tilt of just over 25 degrees, so it's pointed at Deneb.

Making a sextant isn't hard.  All you need is a tube to look through, a string, a weight, and something with degree markings.  I made mine in under an hour.

So I go out every night with a homemade sextant and sight Deneb.  It's kind of silly if you think about it.  I'm in my space suit on Mars and I'm navigating with sixteenth-century tools.  But hey, they work. 

I kept expecting for this to turn out to all be a dream - like Watney was just some dude dreaming about being an astronaut.  But, thankfully, it didn't turn out that way.  The book had many twists and turns, and near death experiences for Watney.  But it also had a great conclusion.

The book really sucks you in.  It was difficult to put down, even when I was doing the falling-asleep-head-nod-read-the-same-page-over-and-over-again-thing.  I just wanted to see how it ended.

I finally got there this past Saturday.  I was not disappointed.

I am disappointed that Andy Weir is no longer working at the company.  I did meet him once and overheard him saying his book was optioned and might possibly be made into a movie!  So, that's pretty exciting.

Pick this book up - you won't be disappointed.  And, you might learn a thing or 2 about being an astronaut, Mars, and how to make viable soil with your poop, reclaimed water, and sheer will.

Next up - either a book about Los Angeles, or a book about Paris...  Stay tuned!