Books about stuff

Book 3, as yet untitled, is cruising along – well over 11,000 words! We’re heading out next week for a road trip, no idea how much I’ll get done on travel but I am taking my laptop.

Meanwhile, the books I’ve been reading are making unexpected links in my head. I’ve just finished Jeremy Fabiano’s first two Glyphwright books, and while thinking about them in the shower today, what came to mind were Janet Kagan’s landmark SF book Hellspark, and Casey Blair’s much more recent Tea Princess Chronicles.

To clarify, you should not assume that if you enjoyed one of these, you’ll like the others. They are not alike, though I’ve enjoyed all of them. They do have one thing in common, though (other than me liking them all).

I don’t think Hellspark was ever as widely known as it deserved, but it has something of a cult following. It can be enjoyed for the story, but it also has a whole lot to say about sociolinguistics and how words shape our thoughts as much as the other way around.

The Tea Princess books follow a princess who doesn’t want to be one, as she moves into a different role in a society where a tea ceremony is away to see who people really are. I recommended it to a neighbor who works as a life coach, and she was easily able to see what made me think of her. Again, it’s definitely readable just as an ientertaining story, but this one had a deeper theme about people, who we are and how we differ.

Obviously I am a human being, but I’m not much of an empath and anyone who wants to use me as a life coach is in deep trouble. I’ve studied linguistics, but only as an interested amateur (and pretty much related to the English language). The ideas underlying the Glyphwright books, Ink & Intent and Wards & Measures, are much closer to my wheelhouse – or at least, an adjacent one. On the one hand, they’re standard coming-of-age fantasy – young man trying to find his way in the world, born into a family business that doesn’t suit him, finds his way into a new trade and begins an apprenticeship. On the other, they have a whole lot to say about how you work on big engineering projects – not the kind where you say “Hey, let’s make something cool and people will buy it,” but the kind where you say, “Let’s figure out what our customers’ problems are and solve them.”

In those two books, among other concepts, I spotted supply chain engineering, documentation of processes, how to develop testable requirements, even a few Lean concepts. Oh, and mention of Service Level Agreements and response times. It took me a little while to realize, but I think what he’s trying to explain is the discipline of Systems Engineering.

It took me a while, because I was decades into my career before I figured out what that actually is. The head of the Systems Engineering department at my university (along with the other Engineering Department heads explained his discipline to us on the first day of Engineering school, with near-total lack of clarity. By the time I graduated, I still had no idea what they did. In my first job, I actually held the title Systems Engineering for a while, but it was just a way for the company to have a standard title that fit both Electrical and Mechanical engineers. It wasn’t until I got farther into Quality Engineering and started to understand why you need to document requirements and make them testable. (It’s because that’s how you ensure that the customer, team members and other stakeholders all have the same idea of what it is you’re supposed to be providing.) Systems Engineering isn’t about designing a thing and making it work, it’s about making a whole bunch of things, designed by different people, work together. Consistently and reliably. And that’s what Fabiano is doing here, especially as he gets into the second book.

A few warnings apply. For one, I think his protagonists have things too easy. They have a new viewpoint and every radical thing they try works out, if not the first time than at least within a day or three. Second, while the books have clearly been edited – I spotted few typos or misspellings – they desperately need a continuity check. Minor things change from chapter to chapter, or we meet new characters who have already been introduced earlier. (For instance, the baker’s daughter in chapter 1 is the same one in chapter 2, but they’re not framed as the same person.) I’ve wondered if the books were originally written as a serial, maybe for a Patreon, and just not smoothed out when they were published as a book. Finally, they have clear LitRPG influences. This works very well in some ways, for instance the use of apprentice journals which show us clearly how characters are learning, but there are some bits like the adventurer team who gave me flashbacks to Zork Zero.

Anyway, they’re fun to read. I still think they might be useful for people going into engineering, but they will also be liked by anyone who likes this kind of thing.