[OOC] LARK DOES SCIENCE.
May. 9th, 2011 10:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
corpseknightMan this is turning into an OOC journal. :U I should write about Lark's happy new life now that he is no longer the Littlest Death Knight Cancer Patient, but that can come later.
RIGHT NOW, book review/science tiems. I guess this is more about the science than the book review but I've been reading a lot lately and wanted to write about it all somewhere. Some of the science is questionable and I wanted to ramble about that as well, but some of it is just BOOKS, let's talk about books.
Tides, Scott MacKay
THIS BOOK IS TERRIBLE, DO NOT READ IT. Seriously. As usual the cover and the quotes inside spoke really highly of the author but the guy is the definition of stilted prose. Also, awful names. (The protagonist is Hab. The king's name is Parprouch. PARPROUCH. The enemy adviser who never quite makes a heel-face turn is named Rango, which almost but doesn't quite ruin that movie for me forever for reasons I will go into shortly.)
The evil reptilian badguys are named hoppers by Hab's crew and that name sticks with them throughout the entire book, and apparently MacKay cannot think of a better word for their locomotion than "hopping," resulting in stunning descriptions of entire legions of these ten-foot-tall reptiles "hopping" twenty and thirty feet in the air at one go. Hopping. Dear Mr. MacKay, I would like to loan to you the words "leaping," "bounding," and even "jumping". They refer to themselves as sika-mango, which just made me think of the fruit the whole time.
Also, despite the fact they are reptiles, they have penises like "thick black pieces of rope" (wat) and six testicles rattling around in a scrotum the size of a waterskin (wat) and they pee on each other to establish dominance (wa--okay that would actually be pretty reptilian if reptiles HAD LIQUID URINE maybe he's thinking of rats?), and we get to hear about these genitalia way more than is strictly necessary for the sake of the narrative.
Yyyyyuuuup.
Anyhow the entire premise of the book is pretty bad, too. Hab (the protagonist) lives in an ideal culture of ideals that are awesome (where men go around with dyed-purple hair and fabulous codpieces and ladies have their gazongas hanging out) and involve always telling the truth and never misleading people, but he's always been obsessed with THE TIIIIIIIDES at the meridian of the world. Because the world has two moons (Foot and Lag--this man is amazing with naming stuff), apparently the diurnal cycle for tides is "twenty a day and they are GIGANTIC the closer you get to the equator". (Somehow I am thinking he doesn't really know what "tide" is; throughout the book it's basically used as shorthand for "giant-ass wave that comes in on a regular cycle", kind of like a predictable storm surge. They'll be out sailing and see these giant standing waves in the water and it's all OH SHIT THE TIIIIDES)
Hab fails once to cross THE TIIIIDES with traditional boats after lying to the king about there being 193810120 tons of metal on the other side of the world, ruins his standing with the court, embezzles his family's money, makes sinkable boats to survive THE TIIIIIIIDES, crosses the world, meets the reptiles with giant balls, has his entire crew except his love interest slaughtered, ends up imprisoned for several months and pumped for information to stage an invasion of his home country (because despite lying like a lying liar to the king, he is too naive to recognize the fact he's being used as a patsy, go fig), does not warn the reptiles with enormous junk about THE TIIIIIIIDES, ends up somehow getting back home juuuuust in front of an invasion fleet despite having to go more than halfway on a teeny raft because the boat he was on gets wrecked due to THE TIIIIIIDES, ... and then everything works out somehow screw it I'm too tired to summarize it anymore. It's awful.
AWFUL.
And the "big mystery" set up throughout the entire book is that the evil reptilian badguys are the original inhabitants of the world and humans are relative newcomers who pushed them off. The potential heel-face turn, Rango, reveals all of this in the last chapter or so of the book only to get his head chopped off. Hab goes "oh well, I wonder what that means" and goes on to genocide the remainder of the reptiles with huge junk to push them out of his land because they're bad. And have bigger cocks than he does.
Green, Trial of Flowers, Madness of Flowers, Jay Lake
Green is not actually a story of the City Imperishable as Trial and Madness are, but I got the feeling they either happened in the same world or two closely related worlds, since much of the language is the same, both continuities contain references to the Sunward Sea, and the theogony and role of gods are continuous in both stories. I also got the impression that the Factor from Green could have been an alternate reality version of Jason the Factor from Trial/Madness, if he'd escaped his fate in the City Imperishable and made his way to Copper Downs. They also touch on a number of the same themes, although Green is a lot more delicate about them than the CI duology is (and I like it better for that, in fact).
...Actually, while I have not ever finished anything in the Kushiel's Avatar series (which I may pick up again eventually), Green makes me think of it, redone with a lighter touch on the RAW THROBBING SEXUALITY. (Although it does get kind of gratuitous on the sex later in the book. Oh, we're stuck in a prison cell because I may have betrayed my priestly order? TIME FOR A LESBIAN MAKE-OUT SESSION. We're surrounded by a mad proto-god's followers and could be discovered at any time? I THINK NOW IS AN EXCELLENT TIME FOR US BOTH TO DISCOVER HETEROSEX. WITH EACH OTHER.) All that aside, though, Green is a very very lovely coming-of-age/what-measure-a-slave tale and Jay Lake undoubtedly has an excellent ear for the language. (Also, Blackblood's avatar Skinless made me wiggle and squeak little fangirl squeaks. I am sure people who read the book will be able to tell exactly why.)
Trial and Madness are pretty raw and sexy all the way through, on the other hand, whether it's the graphic consequences of male-on-male rape (now with extra commentary from a doctor on the morning after surgical repairs!) to "it's not incest because you stopped being my brother when you died and came back". It is some crazy stuff. I think I prefer Madness to Trial, if only because Trial is pretty slow going and spends a lot of time wandering around site-seeing through the eyes of characters who are not particularly admirable until they mature much later in the story. Jason the Factor and Bijaz are much more enjoyable to read in their incarnations in Madness; Imago gets a lot better near the end of Trial and carries it on into Madness. All in all it's really hard to root for anyone in Trial of Flowers but Madness of Flowers is much easier to engage with.
Even if it is a total WHY IS EVERYONE I LOVE DYING D: near the end. And horrible. And If there's not a third book about the City Imperishable I think I will be very sad.
Infected and Contagious, Scott Sigler
This one is going to be more of a science review than a content review, because the content review boils down to GO READ IT. Biothrillers normally make me curl up sobbing like a little girl or throw them away in disgust because the characterization is dumb and the plot development is too slow, but Sigler. Is. Fantastic. Get these books and read them.
SO. My main quibbles with the science, in no particular order:
-- Apoptosis versus necrosis: Sigler did a lot of research here, and I was pleasantly surprised to see him writing in a comprehensible way about inhibitors of apoptosis (IAPs) and caspases in a mass market book. You are the man, Scott Sigler. However, the process he was describing the dead triangles and triangle components undergoing doesn't match up for apoptosis; apoptotic cells don't rot. They quietly dissolve and get munched by the immune system; rotting falls under necrosis.
The primary difference between the processes is whether or not the immune system is notified as to the presence of dead cell components (apoptosis: yes, necrosis: no), whether those components are neatly packaged for destruction (apoptosis: yes, necrosis: no), and whether or not inflammation results from cell lysis debris contacting nearby cells (apoptosis: no, necrosis: yes, and the damage amplifies as more cells are damaged and become necrotic). Even if you have a very large body of cells (like a tumor) committing unscheduled apoptosis, the immune system will still come in and clean it up, though there is what's known as TLS (tumor lysis syndrome) that can be life-threatening and relates to the sudden shock of all the intercellular "stuff" (ions, proteins, etc.) being recycled back into the system at once.
There is an intermediate process between these two known as pyroptosis that involves a caspase (caspase-1, in fact) and results in inflammation markers being released, but pyroptosis is specific to infected immune cells during certain kind of bacterial attacks. And there's not any way I can think of that any of the three processes would account for pitting in solid bone; the living cells in adult bone are few and far between.
Regardless, however, it's a horrific mental image he created and I salute him again for researching as much as he did.
-- Stem cells and telomerase: In Infected, Sigler makes a point about how the "herder" components of the triangle seeds recruit stem cells to build their bodies out of. In Contagious, he comes up with a scenario where the rapidly dividing type-B "defender" seeds start killing their hosts via unchecked apoptosis/necrotic rotting because the "crawlers" they produce start dying out due to the telomeric limit on cell replication. However, even adult stem cells have upregulated telomerase--which means despite the fact the rapidly dividing crawlers would be putting themselves much closer much faster to the Hayflick limit on their captured stem cells, they'd also have telomeric regeneration going on.
It also strikes me as odd that the triangle-seeds didn't figure out pretty quickly what the telomeres were and how to reactivate telomerase, since it's a fairly simple switch that would have saved them some protectors and might have prevented the eventual end-game by giving Chelsea Jewell some competition. (Though it takes away two very awful death scenes and the reason for Amos Braun's death.)
-- Immunoevasion: This one may need to fall under "it's necessary for the narrative, just roll with it," but how do triangle seeds and growing triangles evade the host's immune system long enough to do their jobs? I'm willing to bet anything made of cellulose puttering around in the bloodstream would be recognized as a PAMP, and tissue damage disruptive on the order of removing stem cells from their intracellular matrix would send neutrophils rolling in like a house fire. I get that by the time the triangles actually hit visible status they're mostly made up of host tissue, but even cancer (which is made up of host tissue) fails at immune recognition challenges a good percentage of the time. How are triangles, which are reinforcing themselves with non-self cellulose, and building all kinds of crazy shit, and possibly presenting fragments of cellulose and wacky non-self proteins on their MHCIs (because this is what MHCI and MHCII are for), continuously evading destruction by the immune system? (We are treated with a description of Fatty Patty's triangles having "fluid-filled blisters" at their corners, which might imply either simple mechanical damage or some immune involvement.)
I mean, I would not be particularly surprised if the answer is as simple as they're doing what immunoevasive cancers do and recruiting Foxp3/Treg cells to turn off the immune system in the local microenvironment. But it's a question that came up, given everything else about their growth was lovingly detailed.
Shades of Gray: The Road to High Saffron, Jasper Fforde
Another one that's going to be MOSTLY SCIENCE because again, go read this book it's awesome.
Although this time I can't really say as much on the science because Fforde was clearly not writing a science thriller (it is really more satirical/fantasy), but COULD SOMEONE PLEASE GET THESE PEOPLE A CHART SHOWING THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ADDITIVE AND SUBTRACTIVE COLOR? He does credit at least one person in his acknowledgments for sharing descriptions of color blindness with him, but I am going to have to believe that the people in the SoG universe have been secretly bioengineered different, because color perception Does Not Work That Way. Red/blue/yellow is a subtractive color-mixing system like print CMY(K), whereas visual light is an additive system, and human color perception is based on red, blue, and green cones, not the three "primary" colors of the color wheel. (Although I can accept that the Chromatocracy was organized that way because it makes comfortable intellectual sense to them, not because it makes scientific sense--but you need a pair of cones to see color at all, and which means that everyone who isn't a Gray has some sensitivity to all ranges of the spectrum and...augh.)
Okay, I'm just going to leave this one alone because it's too crazy to deal with and I mean, it's a world with carnivorous trees and animals with barcodes and whatnot, so I should not concern myself with the science, but colorblindness just does not work that way.
RIGHT NOW, book review/science tiems. I guess this is more about the science than the book review but I've been reading a lot lately and wanted to write about it all somewhere. Some of the science is questionable and I wanted to ramble about that as well, but some of it is just BOOKS, let's talk about books.
Tides, Scott MacKay
THIS BOOK IS TERRIBLE, DO NOT READ IT. Seriously. As usual the cover and the quotes inside spoke really highly of the author but the guy is the definition of stilted prose. Also, awful names. (The protagonist is Hab. The king's name is Parprouch. PARPROUCH. The enemy adviser who never quite makes a heel-face turn is named Rango, which almost but doesn't quite ruin that movie for me forever for reasons I will go into shortly.)
The evil reptilian badguys are named hoppers by Hab's crew and that name sticks with them throughout the entire book, and apparently MacKay cannot think of a better word for their locomotion than "hopping," resulting in stunning descriptions of entire legions of these ten-foot-tall reptiles "hopping" twenty and thirty feet in the air at one go. Hopping. Dear Mr. MacKay, I would like to loan to you the words "leaping," "bounding," and even "jumping". They refer to themselves as sika-mango, which just made me think of the fruit the whole time.
Also, despite the fact they are reptiles, they have penises like "thick black pieces of rope" (wat) and six testicles rattling around in a scrotum the size of a waterskin (wat) and they pee on each other to establish dominance (wa--okay that would actually be pretty reptilian if reptiles HAD LIQUID URINE maybe he's thinking of rats?), and we get to hear about these genitalia way more than is strictly necessary for the sake of the narrative.
Yyyyyuuuup.
Anyhow the entire premise of the book is pretty bad, too. Hab (the protagonist) lives in an ideal culture of ideals that are awesome (where men go around with dyed-purple hair and fabulous codpieces and ladies have their gazongas hanging out) and involve always telling the truth and never misleading people, but he's always been obsessed with THE TIIIIIIIDES at the meridian of the world. Because the world has two moons (Foot and Lag--this man is amazing with naming stuff), apparently the diurnal cycle for tides is "twenty a day and they are GIGANTIC the closer you get to the equator". (Somehow I am thinking he doesn't really know what "tide" is; throughout the book it's basically used as shorthand for "giant-ass wave that comes in on a regular cycle", kind of like a predictable storm surge. They'll be out sailing and see these giant standing waves in the water and it's all OH SHIT THE TIIIIDES)
Hab fails once to cross THE TIIIIDES with traditional boats after lying to the king about there being 193810120 tons of metal on the other side of the world, ruins his standing with the court, embezzles his family's money, makes sinkable boats to survive THE TIIIIIIIDES, crosses the world, meets the reptiles with giant balls, has his entire crew except his love interest slaughtered, ends up imprisoned for several months and pumped for information to stage an invasion of his home country (because despite lying like a lying liar to the king, he is too naive to recognize the fact he's being used as a patsy, go fig), does not warn the reptiles with enormous junk about THE TIIIIIIIDES, ends up somehow getting back home juuuuust in front of an invasion fleet despite having to go more than halfway on a teeny raft because the boat he was on gets wrecked due to THE TIIIIIIDES, ... and then everything works out somehow screw it I'm too tired to summarize it anymore. It's awful.
AWFUL.
And the "big mystery" set up throughout the entire book is that the evil reptilian badguys are the original inhabitants of the world and humans are relative newcomers who pushed them off. The potential heel-face turn, Rango, reveals all of this in the last chapter or so of the book only to get his head chopped off. Hab goes "oh well, I wonder what that means" and goes on to genocide the remainder of the reptiles with huge junk to push them out of his land because they're bad. And have bigger cocks than he does.
Green, Trial of Flowers, Madness of Flowers, Jay Lake
Green is not actually a story of the City Imperishable as Trial and Madness are, but I got the feeling they either happened in the same world or two closely related worlds, since much of the language is the same, both continuities contain references to the Sunward Sea, and the theogony and role of gods are continuous in both stories. I also got the impression that the Factor from Green could have been an alternate reality version of Jason the Factor from Trial/Madness, if he'd escaped his fate in the City Imperishable and made his way to Copper Downs. They also touch on a number of the same themes, although Green is a lot more delicate about them than the CI duology is (and I like it better for that, in fact).
...Actually, while I have not ever finished anything in the Kushiel's Avatar series (which I may pick up again eventually), Green makes me think of it, redone with a lighter touch on the RAW THROBBING SEXUALITY. (Although it does get kind of gratuitous on the sex later in the book. Oh, we're stuck in a prison cell because I may have betrayed my priestly order? TIME FOR A LESBIAN MAKE-OUT SESSION. We're surrounded by a mad proto-god's followers and could be discovered at any time? I THINK NOW IS AN EXCELLENT TIME FOR US BOTH TO DISCOVER HETEROSEX. WITH EACH OTHER.) All that aside, though, Green is a very very lovely coming-of-age/what-measure-a-slave tale and Jay Lake undoubtedly has an excellent ear for the language. (Also, Blackblood's avatar Skinless made me wiggle and squeak little fangirl squeaks. I am sure people who read the book will be able to tell exactly why.)
Trial and Madness are pretty raw and sexy all the way through, on the other hand, whether it's the graphic consequences of male-on-male rape (now with extra commentary from a doctor on the morning after surgical repairs!) to "it's not incest because you stopped being my brother when you died and came back". It is some crazy stuff. I think I prefer Madness to Trial, if only because Trial is pretty slow going and spends a lot of time wandering around site-seeing through the eyes of characters who are not particularly admirable until they mature much later in the story. Jason the Factor and Bijaz are much more enjoyable to read in their incarnations in Madness; Imago gets a lot better near the end of Trial and carries it on into Madness. All in all it's really hard to root for anyone in Trial of Flowers but Madness of Flowers is much easier to engage with.
Even if it is a total WHY IS EVERYONE I LOVE DYING D: near the end. And horrible. And If there's not a third book about the City Imperishable I think I will be very sad.
Infected and Contagious, Scott Sigler
This one is going to be more of a science review than a content review, because the content review boils down to GO READ IT. Biothrillers normally make me curl up sobbing like a little girl or throw them away in disgust because the characterization is dumb and the plot development is too slow, but Sigler. Is. Fantastic. Get these books and read them.
SO. My main quibbles with the science, in no particular order:
-- Apoptosis versus necrosis: Sigler did a lot of research here, and I was pleasantly surprised to see him writing in a comprehensible way about inhibitors of apoptosis (IAPs) and caspases in a mass market book. You are the man, Scott Sigler. However, the process he was describing the dead triangles and triangle components undergoing doesn't match up for apoptosis; apoptotic cells don't rot. They quietly dissolve and get munched by the immune system; rotting falls under necrosis.
The primary difference between the processes is whether or not the immune system is notified as to the presence of dead cell components (apoptosis: yes, necrosis: no), whether those components are neatly packaged for destruction (apoptosis: yes, necrosis: no), and whether or not inflammation results from cell lysis debris contacting nearby cells (apoptosis: no, necrosis: yes, and the damage amplifies as more cells are damaged and become necrotic). Even if you have a very large body of cells (like a tumor) committing unscheduled apoptosis, the immune system will still come in and clean it up, though there is what's known as TLS (tumor lysis syndrome) that can be life-threatening and relates to the sudden shock of all the intercellular "stuff" (ions, proteins, etc.) being recycled back into the system at once.
There is an intermediate process between these two known as pyroptosis that involves a caspase (caspase-1, in fact) and results in inflammation markers being released, but pyroptosis is specific to infected immune cells during certain kind of bacterial attacks. And there's not any way I can think of that any of the three processes would account for pitting in solid bone; the living cells in adult bone are few and far between.
Regardless, however, it's a horrific mental image he created and I salute him again for researching as much as he did.
-- Stem cells and telomerase: In Infected, Sigler makes a point about how the "herder" components of the triangle seeds recruit stem cells to build their bodies out of. In Contagious, he comes up with a scenario where the rapidly dividing type-B "defender" seeds start killing their hosts via unchecked apoptosis/necrotic rotting because the "crawlers" they produce start dying out due to the telomeric limit on cell replication. However, even adult stem cells have upregulated telomerase--which means despite the fact the rapidly dividing crawlers would be putting themselves much closer much faster to the Hayflick limit on their captured stem cells, they'd also have telomeric regeneration going on.
It also strikes me as odd that the triangle-seeds didn't figure out pretty quickly what the telomeres were and how to reactivate telomerase, since it's a fairly simple switch that would have saved them some protectors and might have prevented the eventual end-game by giving Chelsea Jewell some competition. (Though it takes away two very awful death scenes and the reason for Amos Braun's death.)
-- Immunoevasion: This one may need to fall under "it's necessary for the narrative, just roll with it," but how do triangle seeds and growing triangles evade the host's immune system long enough to do their jobs? I'm willing to bet anything made of cellulose puttering around in the bloodstream would be recognized as a PAMP, and tissue damage disruptive on the order of removing stem cells from their intracellular matrix would send neutrophils rolling in like a house fire. I get that by the time the triangles actually hit visible status they're mostly made up of host tissue, but even cancer (which is made up of host tissue) fails at immune recognition challenges a good percentage of the time. How are triangles, which are reinforcing themselves with non-self cellulose, and building all kinds of crazy shit, and possibly presenting fragments of cellulose and wacky non-self proteins on their MHCIs (because this is what MHCI and MHCII are for), continuously evading destruction by the immune system? (We are treated with a description of Fatty Patty's triangles having "fluid-filled blisters" at their corners, which might imply either simple mechanical damage or some immune involvement.)
I mean, I would not be particularly surprised if the answer is as simple as they're doing what immunoevasive cancers do and recruiting Foxp3/Treg cells to turn off the immune system in the local microenvironment. But it's a question that came up, given everything else about their growth was lovingly detailed.
Shades of Gray: The Road to High Saffron, Jasper Fforde
Another one that's going to be MOSTLY SCIENCE because again, go read this book it's awesome.
Although this time I can't really say as much on the science because Fforde was clearly not writing a science thriller (it is really more satirical/fantasy), but COULD SOMEONE PLEASE GET THESE PEOPLE A CHART SHOWING THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ADDITIVE AND SUBTRACTIVE COLOR? He does credit at least one person in his acknowledgments for sharing descriptions of color blindness with him, but I am going to have to believe that the people in the SoG universe have been secretly bioengineered different, because color perception Does Not Work That Way. Red/blue/yellow is a subtractive color-mixing system like print CMY(K), whereas visual light is an additive system, and human color perception is based on red, blue, and green cones, not the three "primary" colors of the color wheel. (Although I can accept that the Chromatocracy was organized that way because it makes comfortable intellectual sense to them, not because it makes scientific sense--but you need a pair of cones to see color at all, and which means that everyone who isn't a Gray has some sensitivity to all ranges of the spectrum and...augh.)
Okay, I'm just going to leave this one alone because it's too crazy to deal with and I mean, it's a world with carnivorous trees and animals with barcodes and whatnot, so I should not concern myself with the science, but colorblindness just does not work that way.
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Date: 2011-05-10 12:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-05-10 09:51 pm (UTC)