WWW:Wake (Robert Sawyer)

This science fiction story of a blind teen given her sight through technology won the Hugo award, but I was disappointed. I couldn't get past the ludicrous scientific handwaving to appreciate the rest of the story. Caitlin (an annoyingly brilliant, cheerful, perfect teen) has a rare (and fictional) problem with the wiring of her retinas that scrambles the signals sent to the optical portions of the brain, so they give her an implant that intercepts the signals, fixes the coding, and sends them on. Immediately, her brain can process these corrected signals, and now she can see! This is, of course, incorrect on many levels. There is no fixed kind of coding that the brain expects that the retina has to get right - they wire up together and figure each other out, within certain genetically determined parameters. Even if we grant that, an occipital lobe that has never received useful data from the eyes will simply never develop the ability to process signals, and won't be able to handle them if they are later delivered. The author gets around this by saying that she has used the Internet practically since birth, co-opting her occipital lobes for "visualizing" her way around, and this meant is it well organized, so the visual signals will work. Sorry, but this means it is less able to handle signals from the eyes, now that it's been organized for some other purpose. And all of this is aside from the real point of the story, which is that a self-aware entity has developed out there in cyberspace, not knowing what it is or what existence is like, and it somehow gets plugged into Caitlin's optical feed so the two of them can become aware of each other.... I couldn't buy any of it. Sorry.

Finishing the Hat (Stephen Sondheim)

The lyrics Sondheim writes for musicals are full of unexpected rhymes, intricate interweavings, and other forms of wordplay that I love, so I was happy to read this book for my book club. Actually, I didn't read it all; it's much too dense, including as it does every lyric he wrote for every show between 1954 and 1981, along with what he refers to in the subtitle as "attendant comments, principles, heresies, grudges, whines, and anecdotes." What I did was read all of the material on shows I was familiar with ("West Side Story," "A Funny Thing Happened...," "Company," "A Little Night Music," and "Sweeny Todd") and skim the others. It was delightful to read about how these songs came together, what he thought about each one, and why this one worked and that one didn't. For example, there's nearly a whole column on the invention of Kearny Lane, covering the difference in intonation between Lanes and Streets and the strength of the consonant K, although this place name exists in one line in one song in Sweeny Todd.This book would be a treasure for anyone who writes words for music, and I much enjoyed the bits I read.

The Children of the Sky (Vernor Vinge)

This is a sequel to A Fire Upon the Deep, which I really loved. This one wasn't as much to my liking. The first story had a huge galactic sweep and some really amazing, mind-blowing ideas for science and alien species. This one had no actual new ideas, and the action was limited to a small portion of one world. The story focused on the political treacheries and manipulations of several factions of Humans and Tines (the pack intelligences native to the world), which is not as much of interest to me. I didn't hate it, but I didn't love it either.