This novel would appear to be a fixup of two short stories previously published. The sections covering those short stories are the best parts, but the beginning drags a bit in actually getting us there.
The pacing is weird (I suspect it’s due to the fixup) with long sections which are flashbacks or quotes and most of the action happening in the second half.
Also, the summary blurb would be a massive spoiler if it wasn’t completely incorrect. Don’t read the back cover summary. It says something that really isn’t true. The real hook is: our hero Alex Benedict wants to know what his uncle (father figure?) was trying to find out when his space liner randomly misjumped out of existence. It’s National Treasure but instead of American history it’s the detailed fictional history of a far future human space civilization organized around common defense against aliens. I wanted a space opera and I suppose I got one in a slightly roundabout way.
I will note that I read this because I started Polaris and realized that it was actually book two in a series several chapters in. I’m going to restart Polaris and see if anything makes more sense, but it felt pretty self contained (and I think the author improved a lot in the intervening decade and a half anyway.)
The setting has some interesting space opera set pieces, but my favorite is that the center of the character’s universe is a planet called Rimway, Earth is an afterthought.
Where Hartford County intrudes into Litchfield County, that’s where I’m from. Just into the intrusion actually. Like, if we gave it to New Hartford as part of a grand rectification to repatriate the Southwick Jog, it’s difficult to say if we’d be part of the deal or not without squinting.
We lived high on a hill in the region of Connecticut’s Western Uplands, our yard rising to an outcrop of the Rowe Schist bedrock of Ratlum Mountain.1 Rocks there sparkle with mica, which is hard to capture on a camera but produces a dazzling effect in person.
That bedrock was a jungle gym for us kids. Though it looks rough, I mastered running straight across it, front to back. From there, especially in winter when the foliage thinned, there was a clear view out of the mountains, across to the mighty Traprock Ridges that split the central valley.
It was there, but also digging through rocky topsoil (“rock farming”), driving through winding hill roads and up the mighty Avon Mountain that set me up to appreciate that someone went out and wrote the perfect guide for a Connecticut-specific (lay) geology enthusiast.
Bell’s Book
The Face Of Connecticut is divided into two parts: a the first is a region-by-region description of the terrain with a history of land use. Of interest to uplanders like myself is the knowledge that the forests are in fact quite young. Local lore points out that in New England the oldest trees are the ones growing into stone walls, but I don’t think I really took that to heart, no matter how many stone walls I saw running abandoned through forests, or huge trees I saw along them.
The second section starts off slow with Connecticut’s ties to the history of geological science, used as a way to explain the history of the field. Having already read Annals Of the Former World–constituent volume Basin And Range is name-checked here–this wasn’t terribly new to me. What’s exciting, however, is the focus on New England specifically, especially of the creation of the mountain ranges and, perhaps most engaging, the story of the Central Valley (also called the Pioneer Valley in Massachusetts.) The filling in of a rift that almost became the Atlantic Ocean, impingement by lava flows, and the tilting of those layers to form the awe-inspiring traprock (basalt) formation visible from miles away is an adventure on a geological timescale.
The Internet Mystery
The book was published in 1985 by State geological and natural survey of Connecticut as “Bulletin 110.” An exhaustive list of Bulletins wasn’t forthcoming. When I went to look for some maps I could use to try and locate my old stomping ground in the bedrock, I found something curious: the entire book, online, in immaculate HTML. There’s no about page explaining it and the archive barely knows about it. In fact I was so worried it would disappear that I immediately downloaded the whole thing and hosted it on Orbital Fortress and also on the the Internet Archive.
The mystery of who was hosting it, at least, was easily solved: the index page on the IP address told us that it was the Talcott Mountain Science Center And Academy’s “project and secondary server,” copyright 1998-present. That’s probably why the images are disappointingly small, I wonder if they’ve been hosting this site since then!
It was no small undertaking, I imagine, circa 1998 (let’s say) to create such web book. It’s got a fully working index with links! It’s broken up by page! Who created this relic and why? It’s presented (presumably) exactly as the 1997 printing of the book. The archive goes back to 2016, but how far back do links to it go?
It has since disappeared, Talcott’s server presumably receiving a new IP or going offline. Just goes to show: if you see a cool old website, save it!
1: Not, one might note, Ratlum Mountain Schist, which is on the western side of its namesake, not the summit.
Dot Con was good but I felt it was lacking a lot of color, what it was like to experience the the bubble from the inside. Burn Rate has it in spades. This is the story of a single CEO in the midst of the dot com boom running around and trying to secure enough capital to keep his money-burning company afloat. The dialogue is worthy of a Max Barry or Ian M Banks novel. Especially his conversations with his wife/counsel.
Wolff is a bastard. He sells a grandmom-and-pop magazine company his lemon of a database, runs out of money, sells air like a conman and ultimately tries to screw his investors. He shows little or no concern for anyone but himself–not his wife, not his employees, and last of all his customers. His concern is singular: he wants a big payout.
What’s truly insane is that this book was out in 1998. This wasn’t some expose of the bubble nor did the account of numerous dotcoms being dead companies walking or outright ponzis serve to deflate it. It kept rolling for years.
The first chapter contains some factual errors which, while superficial, hurt the credibility of the text. Later, we see Paul Allen’s name mangled. The author was a New Yorker writer, but the New Yorker’s famous fact checkers didn’t get their hands on this one. This didn’t diminish my enjoyment too much however; I was looking for broad strokes anyway.
Each chapter can more or less stand on its own as an article; we follow many different characters (and companies) that only occasionally reappear, like Amazon and Alan Greenspan so there is some continuity. And don’t worry, as you’re probably wondering with the mention of Greenspan, you will hear all about “Irrational Exuberance.” But he’s also taken to task for practicing the non-interventionism you’d expect from a personal associate of Ayn Rand. The author seems to take a rather dim view of Amazon, using it as a proxy for other companies with absurd P&E ratios and seemed to be under the impression that B&N was going to eat their lunch. But for every Amazon or WebMD you see mentioned you will see a dozen companies you’ve never heard of, long defunct.
There’s some wonderful archaic language, like when users ‘call up’ a Web page. But that’s mostly what we get for flavor. The perspective is that of someone watching the stock market for the most part, we don’t get a close view of what it was like for people to actually use these services, what it was like to work at one of these companies, or what it was like when it all came crashing down. I would have liked more of that. The Great Beanie Baby Bubble (Bissonnette, 2014) sort of sets the standard in this regard. That said, I can’t blame the author too much for this, because it’s from 2002 when it was still fresh in the minds of his audience, who had lived it.
Two things that resonate with our present moment are as follows:
The “Productivity Paradox” is something I haven’t seen named before but makes some kind of sense. The introduction of the internet to business was supposed to make everyone so productive per-capita that we’d be swimming in goods and services. That theory was part of how they justified insane P&E ratios, the idea that some time in the future the products would start showing huge profitability because of this. We’re operating under a very similar theory now, complete with the lack of productivity gains.
The other thing is the complicity of the media in creating the bubble. How Day Trading became almost a national sport is discussed at length. There are echoes of that too now; breathless coverage of AI Doom, access journalism, and until recently failing to point out the absurdity of these companies claims. I suppose it doesn’t help that this time around, some major outlets are owned by the same folks who run tech giants. I don’t expect 60 minutes to, for example, run an Ed Zitron style article on Oracle.
I’d like to add that the book pointed to a site which catalogued dead dot-coms and, now only really available in the archive, serves as a window into what the web looked like in 2001. The screenshots preserve many sites that the archive either didn’t save or didn’t fully save. You can find them here (and I’ve used a few to illustrate this review.) I think the interaction of web and print in this way is interesting because diving for sites deep in the archive can be a challenge and having links that act as entry points really helps.
I can’t tell you what the future holds, but I do think it’s instructive to look back on this particular time period right now. I’d recommend this read for anyone who currently feels like they’re being Truman Show’d by the tech industry right now.
This book seems largely constructed out of interviews rather than following people doing field work around. This is understandable to some extent, we can’t expect the author to fly to mars.
I really like the summary of Mars geology here, a lot more color than Wikipedia and also a better sense of what’s settled and what isn’t. Ditto for the Moon and Venus.
A lot of pop culture references, not the elevated reading experience of a McPhee or a Winchester. But the Rhode Island style sizing at least sticks in your head. Yellowstone has an upper magma chamber the size of Manhattan and a lower magma chamber the size of New York City. I think it’s best understood as a work of Science Communication rather than Journalism (or even Science Literature.) It takes pains to make sure you get good understandings of the conceptual stuff but also just as often loses itself in figures.
The color is nice though. By color I mean what you don’t get by reading Wikipedia-you get the candid takes of scientists saying what they think but can’t prove yet. Volcano hot takes, if you will.
Like the story of a plane crash or bridge collapse you know what’s going to happen. Gravity is going to win in the end, and so it is with Enron. A company that tried to defy the laws of thermodynamics and conjure money from thin air with a sort of accounting perpetual motion machine. It’s an old story, over twenty five years now, but the details of the collapse still hold fascination. And there’s a bit more catharsis involved when you’re rooting for failure then when you are rooting for the pilots to land the plane against all odds in an episode of Mayday.
There’s another compelling reason to read this story in the spring of 2026 though. The inescapable drumbeat of AI calls to mind the story of Enron, so I thought it made sense to go over the history. I’m not going to write my own version of an Ed Zitron article, because he’s already done it, better than I could have. I planned on going through everything in the book and linking it to specific articles, but I don’t think that’s really needed or particularly original. So I’ll leave you with the impression of reading it: it’s well paced, well written, and contains a great amount of flavor-of-the-time, something I always look for when I chase nostalgia. They make the financial shenanigans underpinning Enron’s rampant fraud in a way comprehensible to non-accountants. They have a keen sense for when a sentence is going to land with an audible thud for the reader and structure their prose to deliver maximum impact. I have seen a lot of business literature and it rarely reaches this level of craft.
Apparently I am the coffee table book review guy now. I hesitated to pick this one up because I’d long ago scrutinized old catalogs and bricklink pages to learn about these old sets (and built a few of them even) so just seeing pictures wasn’t going to be revelatory, but I wanted to see what it had to offer.
Is the title appropriate?
My main complaint about this book is that it’s not quite what it says on the cover. It’s really three things:
Light biography of Jens Nygaard Knudson including behind the scenes information about Lego’s process.
An illustrated tour through the Space sets designed during his era with discussions especially about the elements and how they’re used.
A fanfic illustrating the type of things one might imagine while playing with lego sets.
The last item isn’t very engaging and I skipped most of it. It’s the type of thing that’s extremely fun to write and not necessarily what I want to read. Maybe there’s some larger story that emerges but the ones I did read were just vignettes. I don’t want to throw too much shade on a project clearly made with love.
The second item has some gems about pieces and is an interesting lens to look through but gets repetitive as the sets themselves get, well, repetitive. At times it felt like an exercise in trying to use as much aircraft jargon as possible or squeeze some sort of interest out of the third little seat with wings scooter vehicle we’ve seen. Reading that the rover is blue next to a photograph of a blue rover isn’t a great use of time. But don’t get me wrong, ‘this element was originally made for pirate ships’ is the type of interesting Lego lore I love. I really would have appreciated if the stat blocks listed the set’s designer though.
The the first, then, is the meat for the readers. It includes interviews with Lego employees from the era and other background color. What era you might ask? Knudsen’s era. What are they asked about? About the process yes, but also about Knudsen. I think a more appropriate title would have been “Lego Space: the Knudsen years.”
The Text
I’m going to focus on that piece. The Juice of this book, so to speak, is information about the creative work behind Space. But it’s also where I have the biggest bone to pick.
There’s interesting information on offer! Niels Milan Pederson says that he originally pushed for a Jules Verne 20000 leagues inspired Steampunk theme and that some of it was recycled into Aquazone (p28). Apparently Aquazone was designed in ’91 and ready to go before launching in ’95 without changes (p194) It should be noted that he sort of got his wish with the Stingrays which, despite the use of neon, have a fair bit of steampunk DNA with their browns and brassy prints.
The information that the famous light grid was an in-camera practical effect using converging wires to achieve the perspective look is really interesting and there’s definitely a magic to seeing how it was done.
Some of the the concepts are already well known having been printed in a highly recommended Brick Journal article a decade ago. Lots of M tron concepts on p155 and some amazing never before seen concepts on p156 and 157. And the fact that half of the concept shots are already known is a symptom: the era this book focuses on has been covered extensively in the past.
Is this enough juice to carry a whole book? I’m skeptical.
I still haven’t found my Lego Book
For me personally, I’m once again left unsatisfied because they only covered the first half of Lego Space and neglected the more vibrant and colorful second half. None of the themes in that picture get treatment. Because it’s really about Knudson it for the most part misses the era of Space I find most interesting, 1990-2002. We get a (much appreciated) interview with Jørn Thomsen, but I want a full book devoted to his designs!
I heard about this one through respected retro computing channels, so my expectations were relatively high.
It doesn’t bill itself as such, but it’s really one of those museum collection books, in this case for the Center for Computing History. This is a fine genre, but understand that’s it is, deep down, an art book. It’s there to inspire, not as a research tool. The photographs are, therefore, artistic rather than documentary. It’s an industrial design coffee table book as much as it is a chronicle of computing.
Some reviewers have disputed the accuracy of the histories and I can’t speak to that except to say that I would have preferred the book cite its sources and spare one or two pages for a bibliography.
I appreciate that the iMac G3 is included as a sort of pinnacle of PC design though.
I picked this one up as research for some pessimistic scifi, but was excited to see the creator behind SMBC anyway.
It delivers on its premise; it will convince you that we are not within striking distance of sustainable off-world human life. But Kelly’s Endurance already told me that. City is lean despite its size. Regular asides on Space Cannibalism and cartoons are fun but they are taking up space that the Weinersmiths could have spent better fleshing out their ideas. And to be fair to the Cartoonist author, who’s comics have always relied much more on dialogue than visuals to convey their humor, but the illustrations don’t really feel necessary. The last couple of chapters read like surveys rather than fully formed persuasive arguments.
It starts out strong though, and perhaps because it’s also written by a Biologist, it does a great job laying out the known and unknown issues with keeping humans alive for extended periods in the harrowing conditions of space and other-than-Earth planets. Oft-neglected points like the need to essentially create a fully functional biosphere, something we struggle to do even on Earth, are given lots of attention in those early chapters. They clearly relished the chance to describe just how horrible moon dust would be for equipment and astronauts. There’s also an extended discussion of the unknowns surrounding human development in space from conception on; we’ve traditionally only sent adults but an off-world colony couldn’t sustain itself indefinitely without kids.
They’re less confident talking about social factors. They spend an inordinate amount of time explain how we probably won’t get Space Madness, but that we would require infrastructure for dealing with behavioral issues. When they get to the real meat of the sociological issues–that creating off-world colonies means creating societies that might out of necessity make peace with inhuman conditions and in the process lose some of what makes them human, and that such societies could become a threat to Earth–they barely touch it. It’s not as if Expanse (its authors give a back cover quote) didn’t already turn everyone on to a version of this, but I would have liked a more in-depth treatment. It feels like a pulled punch.
Perhaps they chose not to dwell on colony cultures going sour because they figure colonies will be so dependent on Earth that any sort of rebellion is impossible, which is reasonable. But rebellion isn’t the only threat. Ruminating on and accepting the sorts of inhuman tradeoffs “necessary” for a sustainable society off-world could be used to shift the Overton Window in the here-and-now. I don’t think the authors wanted to present space fantasists as horrifying ideologues, but this was of course published before the most famous Mars advocate on our planet gave a salute that would have made even the Militaristic Martians from Expanse blush. In that light I think we do need to ask those questions, and I wish they’d been a bit harsher and less apologetic about spoiling everyone’s fun.
That is not to say I didn’t like it or that it wasn’t good. Their overall premise that you need to send a whole civilization was convincing. I just wish it had allocated its resources a little differently.
Authors David Robertson and Bill Breen have unfortunately achieved a dubious honor: they’ve taken an exciting human story and turned it into a stuffy suit.
Brick By Brick details the critical years of The LEGO Group (herafter TLG) as it lost its way, almost went bankrupt, and managed to pull off a feat of business alchemy by becoming (now) the biggest toy company in the world. As a (kid) fan of Lego during that era, I remember watching this from the outside; the Ploughman years where TLG made famous mistakes like Galidor and soaring experiments like Mindstorms are part of the contours of my memory. The inside baseball view was fun, and I’d recommend reading the book if you’re really into that sort of thing, but it’s a lot of book for a few nuggets.
It’s not written as a history, it’s written as a guide for business “innovators,” and as such object lessons sometimes crowd out the finer points. I recognize that I’m not the target audience for the book, and that it’s not the book’s fault that it’s not everything I want it to be. But I can only react to it the way I reacted, so let’s check it out!
Character based themes were nothing new
In Breen & Robertson’s telling, you would be forgiven for thinking that Bionicle was the first time TLG had shipped a theme based on original characters.1 This is plainly incorrect though. We got lore for System themes going way back; it just wasn’t taken seriously early on, see this section from a 1996 Mania Magazine:
Does that support an action-packed space exploration theme? Would the target audience even get the joke that MST3k is a show featuring robots?
It got better though! Check this character bio page from a 1998 mag:
While clearly off-brand Indiana Jones, this takes the premise much more seriously and is trying to design characters. A few other themes from the Ploughman era went in a similar direction; some were even media tie-ins, like Rock Raiders which was launched with a strategy video game.
MindStorms also had a tie in web-game, Stormrunner, quite a high quality one as well; a full on RCX programming simulator in a world you could drive your robot around in to explore. They discussed MindStorms in detail in the book but don’t mention the connection-the online MindStorms game was created by none other than Templar Studios, the same folks that created the Mata Nui Online Game that would prove instrumental in selling Bionicle as a theme with a story.
Another thing I think the book missed about Bionicle is that the art was just far better than what preceded it. Compare this to the above marketing materials, and while you’re at it, compare it to Toy Story 2, the best CGI most of us kids would have been exposed to in 2000:
Kids weren’t used to high quality CGI like this being used to market toys to them. Galador was just a (live action) guy, but Toa were these intricate, alien robots. Unique and memorable. Bionicle does get credit, but the focus is mostly on how innovative it is. But I think not enough credit is given for points on execution; it was just a much better put together marketing package than any theme had ever been treated to. The story was more coherent, the story was consistent (ish) across media, and the story was taken seriously, rather than used as an excuse to write dad jokes. If you were a genuine fan of System Themes, the Magazine blurbs sometimes felt like they were laughing at your expense… Bionicle never felt that way; Faber and co. were clearly huge fans of the material, hell Faber is still talking about it twenty years later! I’d say it was a confluence of factors-trying some of the same things and some new things, plus bringing the quality of the worldbuilding up to the obsessive quality of the bricks.
Nonetheless, Bionicle shouldn’t be seen solely as a unique moment for Lego, but also a progression from earlier attempts, a pulling together of all of the different things TLG had tried, especially during the zany Ploughman era.
Misunderstanding Minecraft
The chapter on Lego Universe unfortunately lacks depth on Lego’s history with gaming, and maybe gaming in general. I wish they’d tapped a seasoned games journo for this one rather than their kid who plays Minecraft. I suppose to be fair, Gaming was taken quite a bit less seriously ten years ago when Brick By Brick was written.
What they don’t seem to see is that Lego was no stranger to publishing games that promote a building play style. Lego Loco (Intelligent Games, 1998) was also an open ended sandbox game, a much gentler, challenge-free take on a sort of Sim City type of game, featuring lego minifigs and trains:
(Wikipedia)
In the same year, TLG also published Lego Creator, an immersive 3d Lego building simulation featuring the ability to build lego models at minifig scale. It wasn’t exactly Minecraft, but it can be easily described in terms of Minecraft, it’s like Minecraft except:
(Wikipedia again)
You could build drivable vehicles
Static flat ground, no mining
Not voxel based; you could build with bricks of various shapes
No enemy npcs, threats or challenges; you just kinda build whatever you want with unlimited resources
Single player; no multiplayer
Apart from that, it was comparable to Minecraft, at least for its day. The sequels may have added some challenges, I never played them. But the prior art was clearly there. Had TLG chosen to develop along that path, it’s possible that they could have shipped something remarkably similar to Minecraft before Infiniminer, which inspired Minecraft, got off the ground. And I think it’s worth asking why and laying some blame on the inability for the culture of TLG to understand the industry, but I wish the book really engaged with that question instead of just lambasting the way they engaged with MMO producers in a fairly shallow way. I agree that perfectionism was the enemy, but I think that it was also a question of seeing kids MMOs like Toontown succeed massively and wanting to replicate that success, another subject not touched on.
The book I want someone to write
A book more focused on the Ploughman era specifically, with a deeper look at what TLG tried and when, when it worked and when it didn’t, and how the things that worked culminated in Bionicle and subsequent themes. I’d love to hear the inside story of TLG working essentially as a video game publisher, something Brick By Brick basically skated over! I want to know how we went from seemingly goofy after the fact ideas like Ann Droid to intentionally created stories like Johnny Thunder. This was clearly a gradual process, and one that’s as responsible for saving the company as a particular fire truck model was!
What I’m asking for, in other words, is a history of Lego Themes.
I gave both the same rating on Goodreads, but in retrospect, I enjoyed Anderson’s story a lot more. It also lacked a lot of theme-level coverage I crave, but it did attempt to tell a story and ground that story in research instead of fitting the narrative to instruct on some specific lesson (besides of course being a hagiography of Kjeld Kristiansen.) If you absolutely loved Anderson’s book you might find additional insight by comparing the two. If Anderson wasn’t for you, or if you were only mildly enthused, I’d give this one a pass.
Footnotes:
Actually they do bring up Fabuland for some incomprehensible reason. I dunno.
