My Three Body Problem problem

The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu, and translated by Ken Liu, is one of the nominees for a best novel Hugo this year.

To set thing up I think I should explain that the title of the book refers to one of the oldest problems in mathematical physics (i.e. creation of mathematical models to solve problems in physics). [Note - if you are not interested in the science geekery skip to after the video.] The general theory of relativity is one famous and complex example of such a model, but so to is a much simpler equation that most people are familiar with: the Pythagorean theorem, which states that for any right-angled triangle, the square of the length of the hypotenuse, c, (the longest side of a right triangle) equals the sum of the squares of the lengths of the other two sides (a and b).

a² + b² = c²

These kinds of models are used all the time in the modern world. Technically, however, the three body problem has never been solved - i.e. no one has found a general equation that can be used to successfully predict the position of the bodies in space at some time in the future given every possible initial set of conditions. This is because the motion of bodies is chaotic and highly sensitive to initial conditions (even a very slight difference in positioning at the beginning can result in wildly different behavior as the system progresses in time).

Up until a couple of years ago there were just three families of special solutions - ones that only apply given a particular initial state: The Lagrange-Euler solutions, where equally spaced bodies go around in a circle (technically a conic section) like horses on a merry-go-round, the figure-eight family which describes three objects chasing each other in a figure eight shape, and the Broucke-Hénon solution where one of the bodies orbits inside a space that the other two bodies zip back and forth through (sorry, this one is hard to describe). In 2013, physicists Milovan Šuvakov and Veljko Dmitrašinović found thirteen new families of solutions, which is exciting for the field but pretty opaque for the rest of the world, and it is now pretty much accepted that there is no general solution to this problem. Instead this is part of the beginnings of chaos theory.

This video is Three-body problem 3D from Daniel Piker

So, now that you know what the title means, you have a better idea of what the story is going to contain. The book starts abruptly with some horrific events set in the background of the Chinese Cultural Revolution and, as it is portrayed in the book, it is pretty overwhelming.

Here are the first couple paragraphs for Book Beginnings on Friday, hosted by Rose City Reader, (note shortly after this bit the story gets into some pretty graphic violence so this book will definitely not be to everyone's taste) ...

---

1

The Madness Years

China, 1967

The Red Union had been attacking the headquarters of the April Twenty-eighth Brigade for two days. Their red flags fluttered restlessly around the brigade building like flames yearning for firewood.

The Red Union commander was anxious, though not because of the defenders he faced. The more than two hundred Red Guards of the April Twenty-eighth Brigade were mere greenhorns compared with the veteran Red Guards of the Red Union, which was formed at the start of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in early 1966. The Red Union had been tempered by the tumultuous experience of revolutionary tours around the country and seeing Chairman Mao in the great rallies in Tiananmen Square.  

But the commander was afraid of the dozen or so iron stoves inside the building, filled with explosives and connected to each other by electric detonators. He couldn’t see them, but he could feel their presence like iron sensing the pull of a nearby magnet. If a defender flipped the switch, revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries alike would all die in one giant ball of fire.

---

These events set the stage for what is to follow and the story jumps back and forth in time, moving forward from the events in the Cultural Revolution, and also playing out some of the results in a timeline that is generally now (i.e. the 2010's). The POV shifts from the main character in the earlier time line, Ye Wenjie, to Wang Maio in the present time.  It also floats around untethered sometimes, which can get annoying.

To give you a taste of the now timeline (and for The Friday 56 hosted at Freda's Voice) here is a bit from page 56 of the hardback ...

---

Shi looked around but couldn't find an ashtray. In the end, he dropped the cigarette into a teacup. He raised his hand, and before Chang could even acknowledge him, he spoke loudly. "General, I have a request which I've made before: I want information parity."

General Chang lifted his head. "There has never been a military operation in which there was information parity. I have to apologize to all the scholars, but we cannot give you any more background."

"We are not the same as the eggheads," Shi said. "The police have been part of the Battle Command Center from the start. But even now, we still don't know what this is all about. You continue to push the police out. You learn from us what you need about our techniques, and then you send us away one by one."

Several other police officers in attendance whispered to Shi to shut up. It surprised Wang that Shi dared to speak in this manner to a man of Chang's rank. But Chang's response surprised him even more.

---

This is roughly were I started having a problem (one of several that developed for me). Non-spoiler version - I don't know any physicists who would be that freaked out that the universe didn't behave in ways that they expected. For the people I know, that would actually be the equivalent of a shot of adrenaline. I know several people who are actually rather bummed out that nothing really strange has happened in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. The overall behavior and actions of the people in the story just didn't ring true. Yes - I know that there are cultural differences but when a main character seems to just completely forget about the existence of their wife and child, um, nope that doesn't feel right at all.

As I read, this became a general problem for me - none of the characters felt like real people. They are all more like stand-ins for a "concept." Also - I am a scientist. I work with all sorts of natural scientists and seriously - this seemed to be written by someone who has no idea how science actually works. Almost nothing is straightforward and during research, you spend most of you time finding out that whatever it is you are trying to do isn't working, or at least isn't working the way you expected it to. Even at the applied end things usually don't go as planned - you can just ask any scientist who works in an applied field about the "scale up problem." The assumption that you can "stop" the progress of science the way it is discussed in the book is pretty weird. (Yes, I know we get an explanation at the end of the book - well as far as I am concerned, that just leads to a whole new set problems with the story.)

Oh - side note - can we please get over Einstein and Hawking! For Pete's sake - there are other theoretical physicists in the world - certainly people more relevant to where the story seems to be going - how about Mather and Smoot? Or Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa? Can we namecheck some new people here? I did find that further into the book more scientists are name checked, but it still didn't flow.

I also started having more and more problems with the fact that the POV character would think something that in the timeline of the story they didn't know. This most often happened with Wang - who is the "witness" character - the person in the story who has just enough "special" knowledge that it almost seems to make sense that they get hauled around everywhere to witness all the important actions in the story.


Before I go into spoilers, to sum up ...

When I started this book, I was really looking forward to it.  I actually had it in my wish list at Amazon months ago because it sounded so cool. Now that I have finished it, I am really disappointed.  With all the hype about how deep, insightful, and exciting the book is, I have been left wondering if I read the same book. It wasn't all bad I guess, but for me it definitely didn't even remotely live up to the hype and I honestly don't know if I will ever bother to pick up the next book to see what happens with the human race. As it is presented in the book, you kind of have to wonder if anyone is worth saving.


This story also contains what quite possibly might be the single stupidest sentence that I have read in years (and I grade undergraduate term papers).

The ETO concluded that the common people did not seem to have the comprehensive and deep understanding of the highly educated about the dark side of humanity. 

There are so many things wrong with this that I can't even cope with all of it. All I can invite you to do is contemplate the world as it is now and think about how utterly out of touch and offensive that sentence is. (Yes - this is played straight in the story.)









Spoilers Ahead ... 







I was going to do a more in-depth discussion of the notes I was taking in the margins of the book about the science and what I thought of it, but I got towards the end of the book, these notes pretty much have completely devolved into "WTH!" and "this doesn't make sense!" or some variation thereof. I ended the book stuck in "This is ridiculous" land and have realized it didn't matter about the previous stuff that I had planned to discuss. The action at the end of the book made everything that came before pretty pointless. If the Trisolarian could do that why in the heck do they need to invade another world? or worry about a handful of Earth scientists?  They could literally do anything at this point. They could build their own damn stable world. This just doesn't make any sense. Why use their technology to do something so ...so ... wasteful, if nothing else.

If you are going to use hand-waving science gibberish, you might as well start with gibberish so that it isn't so jarring when you descend into it.  I would have turned off my brain much sooner in the book and not have gotten nearly as annoyed.

I completely lost my suspension of disbelief concerning the Trisolarians by the end of the book. They all apparently live on the same side of the planet too, since they can all gather around to stand and stare at various things. Given the conditions expressed, I don't see how any civilization could develop on that planet (which isn't even a three body problem - it is at minimum a four body problem - but then I guess it is really irrelevant how Alpha Centari is really structured, isn't it.) With how horrible life is, with unnecessary Trisolarians being forcibly dehydrated and burned - why are ordinary citizens supporting this massive project!?! What will they gain?  No such thing as revolution there I guess.


Still, I have some things that I want to pull out of my notes because they annoyed me so much, sorry but this is going to turn all rambling and disordered now ...


I think that the game was pretty ill-conceived. The book kept describing it as sophisticated and deep, but none of the actual activity in the game was that convincing. And you would be very hard pressed to convince me that an internet based virtual game like Three Body wouldn't immediately have an infestation of hackers trying to crack it. I wasn't even convinced about Wang wanting to keep going back into the game. I have "drugs?" scrawled after it a few times because psycotropic drugs being administered through the V-suit were the only reason I could think of that anyone would keep going back into that "game." I mean, the concept as described makes sense (and has been used before), but the actual execution got increasingly silly.

I am also not at all cool with a significant portion of the plot requiring that there be a massive, coordinated, secret organization of sociopaths on Earth. And on Trisolaris. In fact, pretty much everyone is awful on both a small, personal level, and on the grand level of whatever horrifying philosophy they purport to believe in. Is the message that intelligent life sucks? (Is there any other life on Trisolaris?)

How do you destroy human civilization and not destroy the rest of life on Earth as well?  Does not compute! What makes any of the ETO think that 'their Lord' would be any better stewards of Earth's ecosystems?

The book makes this huge deal out of Ye sending that test message to "bounce" off of a solar layer (the "energy mirrors"), even suggesting that the event had been recreated in history books - "No matter how historians and writers later tried to portray the scene, the reality at the time was completely prosaic." And it didn't matter!  The Trisolarian picked up the original broadcasts from Red Coast. In fact, that signal she sent would, at that point, actually be the only thing that the Trisolarians needed in order to find Earth, right ? They didn't even need her "traitors" transmission.  Massive continuity error here.


The implicit assumption that all civilizations will follow exactly the same pattern in terms of "development' and have the same technical benchmarks - I am not buying that at all.


Soooo - you unfold a proton in whatever number of dimensions to make a big surface area with no depth and make circuits on what exactly?  This whole bit is just too nonsensical for me. Like - it has the mass of a single proton but when push it there is air resistance? Against what exactly?  Just ARGH! No!  If you wanted magic gibberish you should have started there !

***Divide by CUCUMBER error!!! ****

Just how many high energy particle accelerators does the author think are on the Earth? Seems to have woefully underestimated this.  Oh - I see - the book claims that the sophons can be everywhere at once. So why should they just be used to mess up some particle physics experiments and scare selected scientists? That's just dumb.


I give - this just does not make any sense anymore.  The book started out so promising and has dissolved into a a puddle of rainbow color goo.  Now my problem is - does this book go above No Award ?  'cause I have read many better books from the qualifying time period for the Hugo. Given the rules I have set for myself concerning use of No Award, this is a borderline case that is causing me trouble.

SO. TOTALLY. DISAPPOINTED.

Flow by Arlan Andrews- More Attempted Hugo's Reading

So, I am trying to read Flow by Arlan Andrew (Analog, 11-2014) - one of the Best Novella nominees.

And I am getting distracted by shiny objects ... Like, I am wondering if ice works differently in this world somehow ... unexplained ?

See, icebergs are roughly 1/3 exposed and 2/3 under the surface - I am having trouble with a little crew of guys with poles and air bladders actually controlling where an iceberg would go. We aren't good at this now using big tugboats. I just can't see how they would have proper leverage at all with just some poles. Isn't there at least a sail?

I mean, this has been an idea for ages - freshwater poor, but economically wealthy places (like southern California, the Middle East, etc.) have been trying to figure this one out for years.

So - rather than reading the story I start looking up stories about towing icebergs. Cool!  Look at this The Atlantic: The Many Failures and Few Successes of Zany Iceberg Towing Schemes and this ...

Towing an iceberg from a collision course with Hibernia oil platform. Photo by Randy Olson

Source: http://www.amusingplanet.com/2014/05/towing-icebergs-away-from-oil-platforms.html

From amusing planet ...

To round up an iceberg, the vessels uses polypropylene towropes eight inches in diameter, and up to 400 meters long a piece. The rope is attached to a buoy and the vessel goes around the iceberg staying within approximately 200 meters as the rope is played out. When the circling is complete the rope is attached to a tow cable three inch in diameter. Between 800 to 2,000 meters of open water is maintained between the vessel and the iceberg while it’s being towed. Icebergs can turn over when towed and some have hidden undersea projections that cause chaos when the bergs flip. And a flipping berg can generate large waves, which is why the vessels stay clear out of the iceberg during operation. 

Because of the immense weight of the ice, towing can take up to three days and the vessel may need ten hours to reach a speed of just one knot. The icebergs aren’t towed all the way to safety; just pushed a sufficient distance so the current will carry it safely past the rig.

Definitely a non-trivial undertaking!

Oh, right - the story!

To quote Hamlet "Words, words, words."

Another shiny object (and I am only on the third page!)  They strip off their fur coverings because they are getting too hot, but don't seem to have a shelter or anything. None of these people get sunburned ???  See I am of Scandinavian heritage with the classic fish belly white skin - I just have to look at the summer sun from inside a building and I get sunburned.  So - they are standing on ice - which has a very high albedo - thus reflects 50-70% of the incident sunlight back up into their faces - and they don't get sunburns?  Um, no, this is hard to swallow.

This story is positively drowning in the same sort of pseudo-science/history stuff that forms the basis of books like Chariots of the Gods - the whole our ancestors were dumb stick.  Seriously they can navigate an iceberg to a port but can't make a chart of lunar cycles ?  WTH?

Ah - page 7 in the Warm Lands Rist is looking at the people who came out to meet the iceberg and thinks "A lot taller and much paler skin than People have."  Really? So now I am wondering about skin pigmentation. Why would skin pigmentation get lighter as you work your way into sunnier climes? Rist is the equivalent of an Inuit?  Humm, this is interesting  Naked Scientist Why are Inuit people dark skinned?

The Inuit people of the American Subarctic are an exception. They have moderately heavy skin pigmentation despite the far northern latitude at which they live. While this is a disadvantage for vitamin D production, they apparently made up for it by eating fish and sea mammal blubber that are high in vitamin D. In addition, the Inuit have been in the far north for only about 5,000 years. This may not have been enough time for significantly lower melanin production to have been selected for by nature.

Interesting - and I have stopped reading the story again.  Back to reading ....

Wait - wen is supposed to be women? Warm wen ? Well that is nice and offensive.  Swell.

"Rist was still astonished that wen could be so tall, and be out on their own without escorts." Okayyy I seem to have hit a downhill slope here.

"Unlike wen back home, these seemed to have a heaviness around the chest, covered by their smoother clothing. The sight was unsettling, but strangely attractive to him.When he asked Cruthar about the extra muscles the wen had, his companion just laughed, “Bird-boy, they ain’t muscles. You sees why we likes to bring in the ice down here, even though it be a long, long walk home. They’s a lot more to these Warm Lands wen than you be used to in The Tharn’s Lands. You’ll find out, this dark."
Seriously !  OMG - when was this written??  1955 ?

Where the heck is this totem that he keeps carving stuff into ? He has like pages of diary here that he is carving what sounds like runes into and he can hide it in his loincloth ?

I am sooooo bored. I did the whole Joseph Campbell Hero with a Thousand Faces/The Masks of God thing. I don't need this.  I am going to stop here.  I might try again later.  Or maybe not. Sheesh.


Wait!  I just realized - why do the people in the Warm Lands want the ice so bad?  I totally missed this. Did the story say somewhere?  Apparently the ice is worth a significant amount of money, and people are willing to fight and even kill over it, why?  What's the deal here ? Where would the ice go if they didn't navigate it ?

I know that the people in Newfoundland/Labrador use the ice to make beer but that isn't exactly a life or death thing. What's the deal here ?

Okay - I admit, I skimmed from there to see if I could catch anything to explain the ice and I didn't see anything.

The other thing I didn't see what an ending to the story!  

I am getting really, really tired of nominees in the short forms not actually being complete stories!

Someone on File 770 said this is actually a second chapter and not a novella at all!  Good Grief!

The Goblin Emperor and other Hugo musings

The Goblin Emperor 

by Katherine Addison

Published by: Tor Fantasy
Copyright: 2014
Format: paperback
Pages: 512
Genre: Fantasy
Source: own book

Summary from Amazon:
The youngest, half-goblin son of the Emperor has lived his entire life in exile, distant from the Imperial Court and the deadly intrigue that suffuses it. But when his father and three sons in line for the throne are killed in an "accident," he has no choice but to take his place as the only surviving rightful heir.

Entirely unschooled in the art of court politics, he has no friends, no advisors, and the sure knowledge that whoever assassinated his father and brothers could make an attempt on his life at any moment. Surrounded by sycophants eager to curry favor with the naïve new emperor, and overwhelmed by the burdens of his new life, he can trust nobody. Amid the swirl of plots to depose him, offers of arranged marriages, and the specter of the unknown conspirators who lurk in the shadows, he must quickly adjust to life as the Goblin Emperor. 

I finished The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison this weekend and, yep, I loved it. I plan to re-read it sometime soon when I have more free time to really enjoy it. The world building is solid and intricate enough that the reading experience is immersive. Maia is a wonderful character, sympathetic, well-rounded, thoughtful and it is wonderful to see him grow and develop in the role of emperor. I also especially appreciated the deft way that the plot line involving Maia's former guardian and abuser was handled. For personal reasons I found it to be hopeful and empowering. 

It is also a really welcome relief to read about a government/court system that, while it has gotten corrupted in places, still makes enough sense to believe that at least things would be functional.  So many stories of this type have characters and fractions so bent on taking over or destroying each other that there is no way any of the actual functions of a government would be taking place. 

This isn't to say that there isn't action, treachery, backstabbing, and even front-stabbing as well but, and this follows on my last point, these actions are considered beyond the pale by the majority of the characters - even those who might disagree with Maia and his proposed actions. Wow - a book about court intrigue where the majority of the action is resolved by negotiation and diplomacy!  I love it! 

From Photography of China
http://www.photographyofchina.com/blog/li-zhensheng

I have started The Three Body Problem by by Cixin Liu and translated by Ken Liu.  I am not too far into it yet - it starts with some of the absolute evils of the Cultural Revolution and as it is portrayed in the book, it is pretty overwhelming (I am not even sure that I can do a Book Beginnings post of it). 

While I was reading, for some strange reason, I kept thinking about all those farmers forced to manufacture poor quality steel rather than grow crops, resulting in massive starvation - which was rather distracting me from the story. Maybe my brain was trying to divert me from what was happening to the academics in the story - seeing as how I am one too (an academic but not a part of the story, duh). 

It was a relief to get to the 40-plus years later jump.  

Where I had another odd problem.  Non-spoiler version - I don't know any physicists who would be that freaked out that the universe didn't behave in ways that they expected. For the people I know, that would actually be the equivalent of a shot of adrenaline. I know several people who are actually rather bummed out that nothing really strange has happened in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

Either the academics in China are wildly different from the academics I know in the rest of the world (including some colleagues from Japan, Korea, and Cambodia and I don't know all where in Asia - I don't actually demand to know where someone is from when I get into a conversation with them at a conference or meeting) or the author has a rather skewed vision of what academics are really like (hint - most of them are just like - people!) Perhaps this changes as the book moves on. 

And can we please get over Einstein and Hawking! For Pete's sake - there are other theoretical physicists in the world - certainly people more relevant to where the story seems to be going - how about Mather and Smoot? Or Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa? Can we namecheck some new people here?

Anyhow - I will keep going and hope to be able to jump into some of the online discussions about this one before everyone else moves on. 

Lastly, I have also finished Totaled by Kary English. My reaction is ... mixed. It is generally well-written and has a complete story arc. The idea is interesting... OTOH this is one more story that reminded me of why I pretty much stopped reading SF shorts - I got sick of all the variations of grim. I am sick of stories where scientists in general are portrayed as unethical. And pretty damn resentful of the whole attack on intelligence in general. I really don't like the underlying concept of 'death panels' seeping through the whole thing - this meme prevents there from being a more serious conversation of what measures are necessary and appropriate under circumstances like advanced Alzheimer's or brain death. That's it - the story is a very simplistic take on something that deserves a much fuller and more nuanced exploration. It seems like there should have been something more too it. On the whole the story just left me feeling upset and vaguely ill.  I suppose that make it a successful story, if that reaction is more or less what the author was shooting for.   

Oh - I almost forgot - I also read “When It Ends, He Catches Her” by Eugie Foster (Daily Science Fiction 9/26/14) - one of the Nebula Award Nominees for Short Story. I went into the story not knowing anything about it, and that helped make the story very, very effective, so I am pretty much not going to say anything about it here other than stating 1) I was quite blown away by this one - just wow and 2) this is not something I would normally read (see the sick of grim comment above) - but I did not finish the story upset or annoyed.  No - I finished that story thinking wow - that was well done. Tight, with information and a broader perspective slowly trickling in, making the reader more and more uneasy. Increasing chills and horror.  Yep - not my kind of thing at all but tremendously well done so that I appreciated it in spite of myself. 

Right - back to grading. Sigh.


Oh man - I totally forgot - I wanted to add this xkcd to my rambling about 3BP ...

 Now this ...  this is more like the physicists that I know. 

A peak into The Goblin Emperor

The massive piles of grading are finally starting to recede and I have hope of seeing the surface again soon.

The one 'fun' thing I have managed to do in the past few weeks is to start reading works nominated for a Hugo award. All of the short works I have read so far have ranged from meh down to yuck!  Thankfully the novel category has some lovely rays of light.  I have been reading The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison and greatly enjoying it.

It might be a bit hard to get into at first - the sheer number of names, titles and personalities to assimilate is daunting. However, this mirrors the experience of the main character, so really it is an experience in cultural immersion. It might take some time to sort out what is going on but the journey is worth it. There are no giant battles or sword wielding heros (at least so far, I am not quite done). Instead it is a finely woven tale of courtly intrigue, the political not bloody variety, and happily there are characters you can like and sympathize with. It is like swimming deeply in another world and I am finding Maia's journey to be throughly engaging. 

So, for Book Beginnings on Friday, hosted by Rose City Reader, here is the beginning ...

Maia woke with his cousin's cold fingers digging into his shoulder. 

"Cousin? What . . ." He sat up, rubbing at his eyes with one hand. "What time is it ?" 

"Get up!" Setheris snarled. "Hurry!" 

Obediently, Maia crawled out of bed, clumsy and sleep-sodden. "What's toward? Is there a fire?" 

"Get thy clothes on." Setheris shoved yesterday's clothes at him. Maia dropped them, fumbling with the strings of his nightshirt, and Setheris hissed with exasperation as he bent to pick them up. "A messenger from the court. That's what's toward." 

And for The Friday 56 hosted at Freda's Voice here is a bit from page 56 ...

One more duty landed on Maia's shoulders. He said, "Thank you, Esaran," because he had to. 

Csevet suggested firmly to the edocharei that they should go up and familiarize themselves with the emperor's private chambers and that moreover they could make themselves useful by preparing the rooms for use. Maia could only watch in hopeless admiration as this tactic cleared the room of his newest anxious dependents, and then Csevet turned back and said, "Serenity, there is one other matter." 

"There is?" 

"We do not like to bring it up, but we cannot ..." 

Back straight, hands folded in lap, face controlled. "Tell us," Maia said. 

So far the book has been a lovely experience and I look forward to finishing it this weekend.

Happy Friday! 

Reading for the Hugo's

I am still alive.  It is finals week and I have about 5 metric tons of grading to get done in the next week, but I have been coming up for air occasionally. For example, I have been reading about what happened to the Hugo's nominations this year and getting increasingly appalled. So, a while ago I got a supporting membership and started reading some of the nominated works.

In the novel category, I am currently reading The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison (Tor Books). So far, I am quite enjoying it.  It isn't fast moving or action packed, and I understand why some people have complained about all the names, but in terms of a deep character study and exploration of a fantasy culture I think this book is a real winner.  

I am glad that I have Gobin Emperor to fall back on because, to put it politely, the material I have read in the other categories so far has been dreck. 

I have read all of the entries in the Best Novelette category since they are all posted on-line (You can find links at SF Signal) and, well, I haven't liked a darn one of them. Here are my reactions in brief ...

Warning SPOILERS and very snarky. 

“Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust, Earth to Alluvium”, Gray Rinehart (Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show, 05-2014)

The descriptions in this story need some serious work. For example we have ...

"The interlocking flutes were sharp edged and equipped with heavy-duty pins as long as his forearm that secured it in the off-hours."

That sentence stopped me dead. There was lots of verbiage, including that bit, and I have no idea what I was supposed to be picturing. The only thing I got out of it (and only very tentatively) was that the Peshari don't like ceilings - which turns out to be a key point.

So the Peshari have been on the planet eleven years and there have been human rebellions of some sort, but they never tried explosives?  Or hiding out in the mines? I had a great deal of trouble understanding how we had reached the point presented in the story after over a decade of contact. 

In terms of something actually happening in the story, well the plot finally gets going at the very end and just as you start to get interested the story is over. With some decent editing this story at least could have lead to something. However, it certainly doesn't qualify as a "best" of the year.

“Championship B’tok”, Edward M. Lerner (Analog, 09-2014)

This one was an absolute labor to read. So you struggle through the first chapter and it ends with a guy named Lyle Logan getting a gun jabbed in his back, with a voice saying to him, "Do not move." So, good setup, right? Except that is the last you every hear about or of Lyle. The whole first chapter doesn't lead anywhere. 

So you have to struggle though the next bit trying to sort out who is who, and why you should care about anything, only to get buried under names and conspiracies. It is totally unwieldily in terms of who is working with whom or why. Infodumps extraordinaire and just like with the previous entry, absolutely no payoff.  

Oh, and the titular B'tok is explained like this ... 

Except that b’tok was to chess as chess was to rock-paper-scissors. For starters, b’tok was four-dimensional and could only be played virtually. The offensive and defensive capabilities of a b’tok game icon depended on its 3- D coordinates, the time spent at that location, and interactions with nearby pieces both friendly and rival. Also unlike chess, with its unchanging board of sixty-four squares, the b’tok domain of play evolved. It developed turn by turn, and the view differed by side. A player saw only as far as his pieces had explored.

Um, author dude, that is called wargaming. Have you been living under a rock?  

“The Day the World Turned Upside Down”, Thomas Olde Heuvelt, Lia Belt translator (Lightspeed, 04-2014)

A more unlikeable protagonist you would be hard pressed to find. So the narrators girlfriend dumps him (actually from the description it almost sounded like he stalked her until she agreed to be his girlfriend, very creepy).  And since the narrator is clearly the center of the universe, once his world got turned upside down, figuratively, it of course had to happen to the entire planet as well.

I think that the author did manage to generate the portrait of a generally jerky lovelorn person wallowing in the aftermath of breaking up (the narrator reminded me of people in college after their first big breakup) so, while I didn't find the narrator sympathetic (actually I pretty much hated him after that one bit of extremely evil behavior), I could understand the narrative choice (though, like in college it mostly made me want to dump a bucket of ice water over him or at least stay very far away from him). It is still possible to write a good story with a loathsome narrator. But, that isn't what happened in this case. I am not going to go into it, but the narrator is one nasty, self-centered, creepy jerk. Yuck.

However, trying to ignore that I hate the narrator, what really, really drove me nuts was the bizarre and inconsistent abuse of physics (and biology). The world building (or unbuilding in this case) didn't make any sense!!!

If the switch to "upside down" was so forceful that people were killed by slamming through their ceilings, how the heck did the buildings stay together ? You could somehow paraglide without getting shot out into space, and water stayed put but everything else shot out into space ? What? I don't ... huh? What happened to the atmosphere?  That is only held here due to gravity. 

The author was also inconsistent with their use of the term down, like when describing the Krogers bags were pulling someone down? i.e. out into space? I don't know - if things suddenly flipped like that I am pretty sure that my brain would insist that the ground - where the dirt is - is down, regardless of the direction that things were falling right then. This made the descriptions even more laborious to understand.

And he totally killed that fish. 7-Up for pete's sake!  Fish do NOT breathe though their lips!

And stylistically, I just didn't think it was that well written. There is a core of an interesting idea there, but the descriptions were confusing at best and sometimes simply awful. 

Finally - where in the heck was he narrating this from?

“The Journeyman: In the Stone House”, Michael F. Flynn (Analog, 06-2014)

OMG - this one was just awful. Conan the Barbarian (or perhaps Tarzan) meets Tonto and calls the nearest princess "babe."  The verbiage just floods you with metric tons of tell (with no show) utterly burying you with unnecessary words. And I thought generic "barbarian dialect" went out of style ages ago. I mean really, is this necessary ? 

“Maybe star-folk, like Jamly tell us find?” suggested Sammi. “Big magic, pile stones so high.”

Ugh. Me no likey. 

For one extra bit of pain - the descriptions of sword fighting were enough to make me choke.  See, I was a fencer / recreation sword fighter.  I know how to use an edged weapon.  I even have the basics of dagger fighting. So reading passages of stuff like this ... 

Kal, as expected, rushed forward with his sword held in the “batter’s stance”—the hilt gripped in both hands with the blade over his right shoulder, ready to swing into a hack or a slice as opportunity presented. Teodorq waited unmoving until his foe was three arms-length’s away, then he swung Lifesaver up into “the bull,” holding the hilt beside his head with his left arm crossed over, ready to push the pommel. This aimed the point of the sword at Kal’s face and blocked the downward motion of Rabbit-killer on the aft part of the blade. Kal, disinclined to impale himself, checked his rush, spun to Teodorq’s left, and disengaged.

Kal held his sword in “plow,” arm extended from the waist. Teodorq stepped forward, brushed the fore aside and thrust in long-point. Kal retreated again, but spun and threw an understrike, which Teo parried with an “iron pinwheel.” Both he and Kal reset the combat.

is enough to make me simultaneously stabby and headdesky. One of the reasons the fencing bit in Princess Bride is so funny is that while they are having a dialogue name-checking the authors of famous fencing manuals, they are not actually doing any of those moves! It is all an intellectual game while their bodies are performing the moves without conscious thought. If you actually have to think "I am going to go into ward 4 and block his weapon with my tang and then repost" - too late, you are already dead. 

This 'fight' scene has clearly been written by someone who has no idea how sword fighting actually works. It just hurt to read. Also, this one is, once again, part of a larger story though it has the grace of completing something of an arc, even though nothing much really happens. 

“The Triple Sun: A Golden Age Tale”, Rajnar Vajra (Analog, 07/08-2014)

At least this one was a self-contained story. I will grant it that. Pretty much all I will grant it. I don't care that in the context of the story "EE" stands for Exoplanetary Explorers, in this universe, EE means electrical engineer - a person sorely needed by the author to help them. I am going to pretty much ignore discussing the three main characters (since there really isn't anything to discuss - standard issue 'brilliant' cadets), except to note that Emily, the team leader, at no point does anything in the way of "leading." Her character is almost totally passive until the rest of the team has been incapacitated.

So, our heroes have "ultra-portable inertia gear we all wear, quantum-spin-liquid crystals woven into our uniforms" which allow them to "bulk up" their inertial fields, basically becoming immobile objects or lighten up so they can float.  Alright - this is far future science fiction with space ships, etc.  I am willing to suspend my disbelief to accommodate this (even though it makes less and less sense). 

As punishment for getting involved in a bar brawl, the trio get sent to help an exploration team evacuate from the planet called Abreathon. For whatever reason, Priam decided to smart mouth the mission leader and claims he will come up with a way to salvage the Abreathon project and make the evacuation unnecessary. If he doesn't, they will be kicked out of the EE.  

Apparently trained EE personnel have been on planet Abreathon (seriously?) for thirty odd years trying to make first contact with what appear to be passive grazing animals because they wear metal bracelets that can be used to transmit and received signals.  (It sounded to me like tags on a herd.) 

So, here is my problem. The EE folks have inertia control but apparently don't have thermal imaging, ground penetrating radar, EMI or any other form of remote sensing. They don't even seem to have string and a camera to stick down one of the stupid holes that start appearing around the animals they are trying to contact.  Nope - they use snowshoes and ignore the holes.  This is all too stupid for words.  

You will never get me to believe in your super high tech futuristic gear if you don't even have a basic grasp of the things that exist right here, right now.  For pity's sake.  

I am done ranting now.  Sorry - this really was supposed to be brief.

TL;DL version - I don't think any of these stories qualifies as a best novelette of the year.