CryoBurn! by Lois McMasters Bujold!

CryoBurn by Lois McMaster Bujold
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The exclamation points in my post title are not strictly required--the official book title has no punctuation and unlike David Malki !, Bujold does not appear to have attached an explanation to herself as a formal honorific.  But I wanted to express some of the considerable satisfaction this book left me with even before I got to the meat of the review.

I thought "cryoburn" might mean Miles was battling the health effects of his death some books back, but for the first book in a while he's offworld, in full Imperial Auditor mode, at the height of his powers--which is to say the book starts with him wandering through pitch black catacombs, drugged and hallucinating, on a planet where he has no legal authority and has to rely on some possibly corrupt consulate officials as backup. Against him is the corporate elite and social system of an entire planet, so it's not what you'd call a very challenging case.

The planet itself is a world where more people are in cryosleep than alive, awaiting cures from disease and old age to be discovered and/or centuries of compound interest to accumulate before awaking so they will all pop up and live as an immortal leisure class. The planet is remarkably similar to Clifford Simak's Why Call Them Back From Heaven, though since Miles is an offworlder it only takes a few pages for him to realize everything is bonkers and resolving the mystery doesn't shake his core beliefs or anything.

Above average entry in the series. And if for some reason you only want to read one book about a world full of corpsicles this one, not Simak's, is the one to pick.

The Spy Who Came In From the Cold

The Spy Who Came In from the Cold by John le Carré
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is Le Carre's first successful novel but not one I've read before. It does seem like a general (and very well executed) template for his later ones. Which is to say the characters live in an isolated world or deceit and artifice and the tiniest bits of true connection with another human become inordinately valuable because of their rarity. And then get used to torture the characters who foolishly indulged in them and gut-punch the reader.

The Sandman (Gaiman, not Hoffman)

The Sandman, Vol. 1: Preludes and Nocturnes by Neil Gaiman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

By finishing this book I've doubled my total intake of graphic novels, and I'll probably double it again this year since I was given the next two volumes as well. And then stop, because I'm still not really in my comfort zone with them.

But I did truly enjoy this one. Gaiman is very good at getting the idea of a character or mood across in a few words, so the little sketches of people and their dreams--vanishing from them or overwhelming them--pack a good impact.

The Box

The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger by Marc Levinson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Box is perhaps best visualized in cinematic terms. Before The Box, your scenes on the docks had burly longshoremen loading boxes and using forklifts, bars and brawls, Irish or Italian union bosses and outsiders took a streetwise guide to find what they wanted. After The Box, it's stacks of truck-sized containers, a computer printout to find the location of the one with smuggled goods, and a shoot out in a deserted maze of metal. This is the story of how one cliche became the other one.

Up until 1955 maritime shipping was run by nautical men. "Breakbulk" cargo--stacked in ships cargo holds in whatever containers or pallets it came on--was loaded and unloaded at each port manually, moved onto the next truck or train to get to its destination. This work was hard, slow and expensive. Half the cost and often more than half the time of shipping an item across an ocean was spent with your cargo not actually moving more than a few hundred yards along the dock.

Malcolm McClean was a trucker by background with no romantic connection to the sea. For him, cargo at sea might as well have been on a highway or moving over a bridge, and in 1956 he started treating cargo precisely that way--truck sized containers went on in one port, off in another, and sped on truck or train to their final destination. This is highly simplified--it took a decade to really standardize on technology, business and labor changes, and another decade for customers to start taking advantage of the costs--but ultimately those loading costs dropped to nothing.

The changes this wrought were huge. Most directly, the geography of the world's ports changed. San Francisco and other venerable cities have piers but no shipping because they were obsoleted by the container--the cranes in Oakland, Seattle and Long Beach are what you need today. Factories no longer need to be next to the waterfront, or even on the same continent. The whole ability to run international supply chains depends on the cheap and predictable transport that means a factory in Tennessee can count on suppliers in Korea.

There are of course amazing benefits to this and costs as well. You probably could read this as an unbridled success story of capitalist efficiency but I was a bit more ambivalent. The early chapters deal with the longshoremens' unions, which use to define port communities but employment dwindled to almost nothing with automation. Amazingly enough, they were able to negotiate a cut of the profits from this automation as it was phased in. Others would leave without much to show, from maritime companies and ports that couldn't keep up with the new capital investments (or guessed wrong on how to invest) to the workers and industries who could now be outsourced.