Silicon Valley Redneck

Book not-yet-review

Last week, I had a few hours of enforced idleness (which I thought, at the time, would stretch into a day or so), so, casting about for reading material on my Kindle, I came across Chesterton's Eugenics and Other Evils.

Wow.

I didn't get all that far into it before my reading time was interrupted, but wow.

In a nutshell:

It only extends the principles of the Lunacy Laws to persons without a trace of lunacy.

When you hear calls for limiting or abolishing due process, or restricting the rights of people who are arguably a little off-kilter (or merely out of line with the fashionable beliefs of the moment) but are not certifiably insane... it's the same destructive nonsense against which Chesterton was arguing back in 1922 (or, actually, earlier).

Chesterton notes that the principles of law do need certain exceptions... but that those exceptions do need to be exceptional, and must not be expanded to become the norm.  Madmen are dealt with outside the normal legal processes because they are madmen, and do not (and cannot) share our common frame of reference.

For this reason, and for this alone, the lunatic is outside public law. This is the abysmal difference between him and the criminal. The criminal admits the facts, and therefore permits us to appeal to the facts. We can so arrange the facts around him that he may really understand that agreement is in his own interests. We can say to him, "Do not steal apples from this tree, or we will hang you on that tree." But if the man really thinks one tree is a Lamp-post and the other tree a Trafalgar Square fountain, we simply cannot treat with him at all. It is obviously useless to say, "Do not steal apples from this lamp-post, or I will hang you on that fountain." If a man denies the facts, there is no answer but to lock him up. He cannot speak our language: not that varying verbal language which often misses fire even with us, but that enormous alphabet of sun and moon and green grass and blue sky in which alone we meet, and by which alone we can signal to each other. That unique man of genius, George Macdonald, described in one of his weird stories two systems of space co-incident; so that where I knew there was a piano standing in a drawing-room you knew there was a rose-bush growing in a garden. Something of this sort is in small or great affairs the matter with the madman. He cannot have a vote, because he is the citizen of another country. He is a foreigner. Nay, he is an invader and an enemy; for the city he lives in has been super-imposed on ours.

The notion of State-enforced eugenics is just one of a complex web of related evils, involving loss of the rule of law and the denial of the individual.

(And, remember: the evil Eugenist Prussian menace, when the book was begun, was the Kaiser.  Hitler wasn't even on the yet-to-be-invented RADAR.)

Available for free in various places, such as here.

Read it.  Everyone should read it.  It is at least as relevant today as when it was written.

Raising Steam

The last of the Discworld books: I've started reading it.

I'd seen remarks to the effect that it wasn't very good, and that Sir PTerry had maybe not been all that involved with the actual writing of it - a surmise that I'm finding highly likely.

The characters are there... but the style is all wrong.  It's written in they style of a children's book, for children who haven't read the last few books and need each character carefully introduced.

The story, so far, seems plausible in a Discworld context, but things are happening much too early; the Patrician is getting involved at least one book too soon - after all, how long was the Clacks running before he felt the need to revive the Post Office?  And why would there be an ancient Epebian prophecy about steam, and why would the Patrician worry about it anyway?

The troll lawyer is just plain wrong: name, composition, context, manner of speech, everything.

So, yeah: I'm thinking rough outline, turned into a novel by a not-very-good ghostwriter who hadn't actually read the other novels in the main series.  Fanfic would be better: a fan would take the trouble to get the details right.

Update: I'm about a third of the way through.  It's slow going.  The style isn't getting any better.

I looked back at the Amazon reviews, and I find it difficult to believe that one of the reviewers got 80 pages in before realizing it wasn't a genuine Pratchett.  For me, the style was jarring right from the beginning, and within the first few pages I'd figured out that it wasn't just an opening bobble but a completely different writing style.

Imagine if Leonardo da Vinci had sketched the concept for one last painting, and his eleven-year-old niece had completed it.  In glitter pen.

And this got many five-star reviews?  Did any of those reviewers actually read it?  Never mind having read any of the real Discworld series; just considered on its own, how could this mess possibly rate five stars?

More: This is painful.  Whoever actually wrote it had no feel at all for the Discworld nor its familiar denizens.  The naming conventions are wrong (no troll should be named Thunderbolt unless he's made of meteorite, and Aeron isn't a dwarf name, it's a furniture name).  The characters...

Well, let's just say the author seems to inhabit an academic environment in which everyone has Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder.  Really, Harry King getting all weepy?  Everyone emoting all over the place?  Faugh.

Further, the story is excessively dialog-driven.  This might be OK, except that the author totally sucks at writing dialog.  In most of the real Discworld books, I can hear the characters speaking.  In this mess?  No.  People just don't talk like that.  Not even in movies.  These characters don't jump off the page, they sort of drip off it.  And the less said about the attempts at writing dialect the better.

More reading

I'm mostly over the crud, I think... unless recent bout of crud was my immune system trying to fight off the viruses, it's now given up, and I'll be coming down with three colds and two strains of flu by the end of the week.

Whatever; I had a moderately productive day today, but yesterday was still mostly curl-up-with-a-book time.

I buzzed through "The Commuter": Thomas Mays venturing into Tom Holt territory, with rather a lot of world-building behind a short story.  It's a fun read, if lacking in the utter madness of Holt's work, and it'll be interesting to see what else he writes in that world.

Then I made a start on Monster Hunter International, which seems to be background and/or inspiration for a lot of the current horror crossover genre.  All the extreme action and crazy SFX of a summer blockbuster, but the SFX are in the reader's head!  Wheee!  My assumption on meeting the fancy rich dude - Grant Jefferson? - was that he'd turn out like the rich young fop in $106,000 Blood Money; however, at the current stage of reading, this appears not to be the case.  There's still plenty of book left for him to turn to the Dark Side, though, and he seems the type to do it even without getting bitten by anything, unless he gets himself heroically killed Real Soon Now.

Oh, well.  Work's over for the day, and it's time to wind down.  Back to reading MHI.

Update: Farther along in MHI, and now I'm wondering if Jefferson will heroically foil the evil plot by failing to be sufficiently heroic for the villain's purpose.

Update 2: Elves and Orcs and Things from the Dungeon Dimensions, oh my!  And a werewolf with a waiver, who inexplicably isn't required to wear a collar and rabies vaccination tag.  And a grand flurry of plot twists, some of which are hinted at so that clever people like me who talk loudly in restaurants can see them coming a few pages ahead and some of which are totally unexpected but make sense in retrospect.  And the significance of Chekhov's Dungeon turns out to be not at all what I'd expected.

So now there are how many more books to catch up on????

Oh, and the White Supremacist thing.  Seems certain individuals (maybe not individuals, but elements of the hive mind?) look at this book, see "men" and "guns" and "South", and declare it to be an egregious pile of racism and sexism.  Had they actually read the book, they might (I say might) have noticed that it is in fact aggressively anti-racist, and not sexist by any reasonable definition of the term.  But I guess reading is hard.

Sick day

Actually, two in a row so far.

I got all wore out at the Maker Faire on Saturday - lotsa cool stuff on display, but 7 hours on my feet, mostly in a crowded, noisy, and disorienting setting, is more'n I can handle these days - and I fear I may have picked up a virus or two as well.

Upper respiratory crud, sore throat, and a really nasty headache: not having a good Monday, and certainly not a productive Monday.

Oh, well.  While being useless, I made a little progress on my backlog of book readin', finishing Pixie Noir this afternoon (and now I find that there are two sequels already, so now there's more on my reading list instead of less).

'Twas a fun read: a genre-smash of hard-boiled detective, straight-up fantasy, and small-unit paramilitary, and probably some others I didn't recognize.  Not recommended for those who like their fiction to fit in neat pigeonholes.

One note: Lom supposedly has issues with silver bullets causing excessive barrel wear.  I looked at this before, and don't believe it: in a modern firearm designed for jacketed bullets, it appears silver should be no problem.  (Were I feeling highly motivated, I'd cobble together a hardness tester and poke some jacketed bullets and some .999 fine silver coins, but that's not a today project.)

Also: Now I'm trying to recall the Wild Hunt music from Der Freischütz.  Keep coming up with a hodgepodge of Wagner and Mendelssohn instead.  Have to clear out some opera-listenin' time, too.

Cautionary tale

Spotted here:

The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason. It was waxing, only one day short of full.

This, kids, is why we don't use flammable Moon wax.

What if everyone bought this book?

Yeah, I already finished reading (for sufficiently buzzing-through values of "reading") Randall Munroe's What If?

tl;dr version: Buy it.  Read it.  It's funny, educational, and enlightening.

Now to plow through my little yellow bookmarks of quibbles and other reactions....

Page 39: Why does the Technetium hat say "Te" on it?

Page 47: A Mole of Moles: I find myself humming.

Page 116: "...we don't seem to pass any rhinoviruses back and forth with animals...."  Interesting!  I distinctly recall that some sciencey book I read as a kid said that ferrets could catch human colds.  Current references say this is not the case (though they can catch influenza)*.  I just unlearned something!

Page 152, footnote, regarding being hit by a bus: The description of the "being hit by a car" process would not apply in the case of a bus, 'cause the bus has a big flat front resembling the ground, only vertical.

Page 154: A typesetting issue in the Tsiolkovsky Rocket Equation has given us a rectangular delta.  (There's another funny-looking equation on page 176.)

Page 156: We reach the end of "Everybody Out" having been introduced to Project Orion, but with no mention of laser launchers.  I'd be really interested in having these included.  (Yeah, I could go off and do the work myself.  And wear out my poor little brain.)

Page 164: First mention of CON should be INT.

Page 175: Neutrino steam?  I'm having silly ideas.

Page 197: But, by gliding away from the base of the cliff, won't you miss the cotton-candy pit?

Page 241: Unit peeve!  I hate it when people use kilograms as units of weight.  The Imperial system is goofed up enough by casual misuse of units; can't we try to preserve the meanings of the MKS units?

Page 261: Sorry, but the definition of "sunset" given on pages 228~229 would seem to exclude eclipses.

Page 304: What, no index?

* This suggests a way of telling a cold from the flu.  If you can give it to your ferret, it's flu.

OK, quick book review

A Sword Into Darkness, by Thomas Mays.

Finished reading it this morning.

Before breakfast.  Which offers some clue as to how hooked I was.

I'd only bought it because ESR's review was intriguing.  Besides, 'twas cheap on Kindle; what had I to lose, apart from four bucks and a bit of my time?

The action commences a decade hence, with a crackpot's warning: the aliens are coming!  And they'll be here in only 33 years!  We need to take action!

It progresses from there in a manner logically consistent with the author's assumptions about the world of the next few decades and with the needs of the storyline.  And the storyline?  Worthy of Doc Smith, only a lot better grounded in plausibility.

Following the tale across the decades from the points of view of view of a few key characters is conventional, but it works.  And, since none of the characters is privy to key information, they're kept guessing almost as much as the reader.  Some of them are larger than life, but none are superhuman.

The mainstream tech of the day is a conservative extrapolation.  The advanced tech, driven by the demands of a fanatical wealthy industrialist:, is fantastic, but not absurd.  Imagine throwing money at many of the things that show promise now; keeping it up for several years, weeding out the losers; and merging the winners.  Plus one necessary MacGuffin.

There's just the right level of predictability: at various points, Clever People Like Me* will have a very good idea (though not a certainty) what just really happened.  But these don't dominate the book.

The aliens' motive for their great journey?  No spoilers here.  It's not one I would have thought of.  Heinlein might have, or George O. Smith.  For that matter, it would have been perfect for early-1970s Doctor Who, and yet somehow the writers never came up with this one.  And yet: once having been revealed, it makes sense.

Some little items are Nivenesque, one explicitly so**.  I expect there are other lurking tributes that I didn't catch.

And that last little twist at the end, well: it opens up vast possibilities.  As ESR suggests: sequel hook, for good or ill.

 

Now for the quibbles.

The book could have used better editing and proofreading.  There are various homophone errors scattered around; a glaringly wrong word choice (I'm not sure what the right word would have been; the expression Mays was reaching for may not actually exist in English); and a distance of 100 nautical miles is a mere 100 kilometers a couple of pages later.  There's also a subplot that I didn't see wrapped up; though there were pretty good hints dropped, I think the resolution disappeared in all the excitement of first contact.

There's a lot of NAVSPEAK in various places; this presumably conveys information compactly to readers with naval backgrounds, but it leaves civilian readers running to Google.

And the energy budgets... well, I'll assume Mays did the math and then swept it under the rug as a story-killer.  It's not as egregious as the Honorverse, let alone the Skylark series, and being wildly optimistic about energy sources is a necessary convention of the genre.

The world of the future looks rather too much like that of today, in my opinion; for one so cynical, Mays seems to be taking the optimistic view that the next few decades will see slow decline on the political and economic fronts, rather than accelerating decline and catastrophic upheaval.  Well... I hope he's right.

There seem to have been some changes to South Bay geography.  A shipbuilding company in Santa Clara?  Dang on-line map doesn't show city boundaries, but: would the ship be launched in Salt Pond A8?

 

Overall, if you're looking for a well-constructed Ripping Yarn that's imaginative and won't insult your intelligence, this is a good read, and Mays is now firmly on my "watch for his next book" list.

Oh, and if the list of quibbles seems longer than the good part?  It's because I can't write much more good stuff about the book without great honkin' spoilers.  And the book deserves not to be spoiled.

 

(Next time I find myself with book-devouring time, I should read Peter Grant's latest.  Time to be checking out more of the new authors.  'Cause Clarke, Asimov, and Heinlein are all dead, and Niven's not writing that much anymore.)

 

* Who Talk Loudly In Restaurants.

** Amazingly, one of the characters is a scientist who read sci-fi novels as a kid.  This falls somewhere in the not-so-fine line between the world of that Alien prequel (a large group of smart humans, in the not-too-distant future, none of whom have seen Alien) and that of Fallen Angels (no explanations; if you haven't read it...).

Alien invasion! Why?

OK, so that novel I'm reading: it's A Sword Into Darkness.

Opening premise: an alien spaceship is on the way, and they didn't call ahead.  Their intentions are presumably inimical (else they would have sent radio signals first), and we have only 33 years to respond!

Apparently the aliens' motivations will be revealed later in the book, and will be plausible for their level of technology and the trouble and expense involved in launching such a mission.

But meanwhile, what can I think of?

Well, obviously, they could have discovered that their sun was getting all wibbly-wobbly, and their solar system would soon become uninhabitable.  Having decades to respond, they have time for more than "toss some random baby in a tiny probe and send him off to Earth", and embark on a Strangelovian project of packing their top politicians, mad scientists, and supermodels into an interstellar life-pod.  (Shades of the Golgafrincham "B" Ark!)

Or - and this was inspired by one of the homophone errors that got past the proofreader of this book - it could be some corporation sending a vast shipload of its assets out-system to avoid home-system taxes.

No?  So how about this one: their total civilizational debt has grown to the point where it makes sense to send a hugely expensive expedition across the expanses of space to peddle their government bonds here.

What about: they departed around... oh, never mind.  1937.  I was going to suggest that they were pissed off when I Love Lucy went off the air.  Or My Favorite Martian.  What popular radio show was cancelled in 1916?  (Gotta allow 20 years for the next episode to fail to reach them, and a year for them to build and launch their invasion fleet.)

They're finally getting around to checking on their colony here, left during their long-ago Age of Exploration?

(I understand there are space battles yet to come, so none of the explanations I'm coming up with really fit.  Whatever.  It's fun coming up with them.)

Did someone mention Copybook Headings?

Currently on the Kindle, for those odd bits of time: Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.

Reading through the first chapter, regarding the Mississippi Scheme, I notice... well, first, of course, is that PTerry must be familiar with the tale, 'cause it starts with the preposterous premise of a notorious international scoundrel being put in charge of the brand-new National Bank.  But, once past that obvious absurdity, things start looking rather less Discworld and rather more Ben-Bernank.  (And Nixon, and FDR, and all the rest of the familiar players.)

Now on to the South-Sea Bubble, and... wait, haven't we seen this movie before?  I mean, again?

Factoring in something I read a few years back regarding Tulipomania (not sure what aspects of that are covered in this book; that's the next chapter), and I'm beginning to see a pattern here.

A grand economic scam driven, or at least enabled, by the rich and powerful begets many lesser scams of similar (if sometimes more blatant) nature.  Little scams fall apart quickly, ruining a few people; the big scam can go on for years, before collapsing and ruining a nation.

But I'm sure that could never happen here.

The effects on technology on adventure stories

You read any adventure yarns set more'n a few years ago, and you start noticing plot aspects that Just Wouldn't Work Today.  Like, no end of situations that only arise because people don't have cellphones.

Well, currently on my Kindle is a tale that involves a terrifyingly difficult effort to reach an inaccessible plateau somewhere in South America.  And I keep wondering: why couldn't someone, back when the expedition was organized, have pulled out his Magic Elf Box and looked up "Zeppelin Rentals"?

Because Zeppelins were a thing in 1912, right?

Update: still on the same book, though now they've just decided to ignore for the moment the impossible task of getting back down from the jungly plateau.  Because, obviously, they can't fabricate a thousand-foot-long rope from indigenous materials.  I guess there'll be some clever solution later on, possibly involving blue clay.  Either that, or they die up there and some later expedition retrieves the narrator's notes.

Outdated product placement

While, it seems, the Waterman's Ideal Fountain Pen is a fine implement for writing about Nothing, it is no longer available in stores.

Now, here's a silly thought

In The Compleat Enchanter (as in other such multiverses), when Harold Shea is transported to a world where some particular form of magic works, any technology he takes along with him becomes inoperative.

What if...

What if that's because Shea is a psychologist, and our world's technology is, to him, magic?

If, say, a metallurgist were transported to one of these magical worlds, would stainless steel work for him?  Would matches work for a chemist?

Story possibilities!  (OK, so maybe it's been done and I haven't encountered it.)

Hm.  Engineering student at university, who's read enough sci-fi to know better, gets involved with eldritch redhead who turns out to be Shea's granddaughter... that idea's been floating around the back of my head for years, and this could add an interesting twist: tech transported across worlds works if and only if it's not magic to the person trying to use it.  Could have implications for a wizard transported to our world: only the spells he truly understands are portable.

...Now I need to find time to re-read those stories and see if this notion fits....

This plot device seems dubious

OK, so it's time to admit that with the current H1N1 symptoms I'm not going to be getting much accomplished today.  Better to read a book.  Maybe something trivial and un-demanding.  Randomly on the Kindle: Tom Swift and his Helvetica Fetish Arial Worship Aerial Warship.

As we're ambling through the introductory material, the red shed catches fire.  Oh, no!  Not the red shed!  Seems they mustn't use water to extinguish it, on account of there being a bunch of calcium carbide stored therein.

Er, wait.  Isn't calcium carbide always stored in airtight containers?  Because otherwise it'll absorb moisture from the air?  My supply is in a little paint-style can; how was it stored back in the day?

And Tom saves the day by sprinkling how many tons of sand on the conflagration, from his airship?

(Yeah, waiting until the heat pops the lids off the cans and then applying water would be bad news.  Extinguish early!)

Pratchett's been reading him some Mark Twain

Just finished reading Snuff.

Recently having read Life on the Mississippi, I think I can spot a subtle influence.  Or, it could have been one or another of Twain's other writings.

A couple of things come to mind, that might have saved Vimes (in his various identities) some improvisation.

First, with regard to jurisdiction: surely the Lord of the Manor has feudal powers and obligations within his fiefdom, unrelated to any position he may hold in some foreign police department?

And, second, with regard to the legality of shipping goblins to Howondaland by way of Quirm: if goblins aren't people, but property, then that particular batch, having been taken (if I understand the geography correctly) from the Ramkin estate, is Vimes's property, which had been stolen.  Right?

So, in any event, it seems to me that Vimes ought to have had other options for dealing with the situation.

Still, a good read, if a bit on the serious side.

Corpsicle-backed securities

Been reading Cryoburn; a bit over a third of the way through now.

I keep having the feeling there's some sort of subtle allegory hidden in that book.  Maybe even a whole swamp-full of allegories.

Update: I must not go to the right trade shows.  I occasionally get, e.g., a nifty MCU development board in my schwag bag, but I've never been to a show where anyone was handing out genetically-engineered mini-sphinxes.  Nor even swamp dragons.

Anyway, a good read.  Now I'm partway through the one starring That-Idiot-Ivan.

In which I join the electronic age

Amazon having offered me the $60-off-a-Kindle deal, I decided it was finally time to get myself a Paperwhite.  The promised 2-day delivery ended up being next-day, and so I've just been loading my new pocket-stuffer up with Free Goodies.

Like, 5 volumes of Macaulay's The History of England From the Accession of James II, and a large volume of Machiavelli, and Through the Looking-Glass, and....

And, yes, Mr. NSA, I have works by Adam Smith and Eugene V. Debs on my new Kindle.  Already.

It lacks, however, a cover with the words "Don't Panic" in large friendly letters.  This is a terrible oversight on Amazon's part.

The size... is about right for holding and reading.  Doesn't fit in my shirt pocket, but that's full of cellphone, note paper, and writing sticks already.  It fits nicely, however, in the cargo pocket where I'd normally carry a paperback when heading to a waiting room.

Oh, and the Kindle-edition books that aren't free classics?  Them's mighty pricey, at least the new-and-popular ones.  Baen, though, has e-books at sane prices, and they're supposed to be Kindle-compatible.  Guess I'll buy one of Bujold's latest, sometime soon, and see how that plays.

Meanwhile, if I carry this thing around with me, I can occupy stray moments by stuffing my head with History and Literature, instead of playing The Birds Who Commandeer Neutral Transport.

How do you say "Ivermectin" in Motie?

So I finished re-reading The Gripping Hand...

I didn't remember anything from the first reading past about the first third of the book; this seems to be about par for the course when it comes to sequels I first read a couple of decades back.

There were some interesting bits of outdated tech; for example, there's the assumption that any audio recording can be erased by vigorous application of magnetic fields.  OK, so digital audio stored in flash memory wasn't a thing yet, back in 1993 (and I guess we can assume no surreptitious recording on wax cylinders).

Then there's a key plot element, toward the end: defeated tribes will get infected with the Crazy Eddie worm, turning everyone into healthy, long-lived sterile males.

Which works fine for keeping the population under control, including that of uncooperative tribes, until someone invents an anthelmintic for Moties.

(The fuzzballs need another dose of their praziquantel*, so of course I made the connection.  If the fuzzballs are reading this: eat your funny-tasting processed mouse loaf!  It's good for you!)

 

* Named after the Aztec god of yellow imported machine tools.

Random thoughts regarding hyperdrives

In my awake-but-not-working time, I've gotten up to The Gripping Hand, which inspires the question: if the Crazy Eddie Drive takes a ship from one Alderson point to another, can't the return trip be made pretty much immediately?  So, why did the Moties never send a probe ship with a clockwork timer to jump, take some hasty pictures, then jump back?  Seems like that would be a way to get at least some information about the destination from which no (Motie) ship had ever returned.

This resembles a thought I had, years ago, when watching some episode or other of Babylon 5: a Narn scout ship pops into an unfamiliar system, is approached by awesome spacecraft of unknown origin, and is destroyed while the pilot waits helplessly for the jump engines to recharge.  Um.  So, why doesn't anyone make wartime scout ships with two sets of jump engines, or at least two sets of whatever it is that needs time to recharge?  Seems like that would greatly improve the odds of getting information back from hostile destinations.

Then there's the business of having specific jump points, at locations determined somehow by the local shape of space.  Many writers have used this.  Somehow, the jump points are always at moderately inconvenient locations.  Wouldn't it be totally boring if jump points only happened in places where space was really, really flat?  Like, at the point where the two nearest stars' gravitational attraction cancelled out?  OK, so maybe there's a reason no one writes stories around that assumption.

And I still think that the Nothing that's outside the windows when using a Niven-esque hyperdrive should appear as a perfect mirror, not a mysterious Blind Spot, but maybe I'm not understanding how the drive works.  (If it creates a little private universe, the boundary should be a mirror, as there's no outside for radiation to escape to.  This also implies a need to drop back into normal space every so often, to cool off.)

Also: If FTL travel happens through wormholes, Alderson points, or whatever - you engage the special drive at Special Point A, and soon appear at Special Point B, possibly having to do some esoteric navigation in between - why would merchant ships routinely carry their own jump drives (and, if applicable, specialist wormhole pilots)?  Wouldn't it make sense to set up a ferry service for each often-travelled pair, with a giant jump-drive-equipped carrier making regularly-scheduled jumps?  Price the service just below the cost of lugging a jump drive around, and sit back and collect the tolls.  This is obvious enough that it ought to happen just about anywhere there's a lot of traffic.

Gee, didn't I see this in a book somewhere?

Somebody's proposing to perform user authentication using bioimpedance measurements.

Which is really useful if you want to be sure that your nuclear destruct charge can only be deactivated by the authorized unmarried man.

 

Reading

Currently reading, In My Copious Free Time: Anathem.

I'm up to page 407, rather less than halfway through.  Time to start guessing what's ahead!

Here's a guess: the Cousins are Russian-analogs (Russian on account of the writing on their ship).  During the Terrible Events, some of them, foreseeing their annihilation, bunged themselves into an immense icosahedral Orion-drive spaceship and launched themselves into the void, perhaps on a lengthy trajectory which, all these centuries later, has brought them back into Ardre's neighborhood.

It could be a generation ship, or perhaps there's a Thousander longevity secret to which they're privy.  Maybe both.

Anyway, it's a sort of flying near-quadramillennial math, about to open its gates to see what's happened in the world.

That seems to fit all the known facts up to this point.  Reading time permitting, I'll eventually learn what the author thinks that stupendous stone spaceship is.