Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, March 2013

Attention conservation notice: I have no taste.

Brian Michael Bendis, Michael Avon Oeming, et al. Powers (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14)

Comic book mind candy, at the super-hero/police-procedural interface.

Martha Wells, The Fall of Ile-Rien (The Wizard Hunters, The Ships of Air, The Gate of Gods)

Mind candy. I read these when they were first published, a decade ago, and re-visited them when they came out as audiobooks. They remain unusually smart fantasy with refreshingly human protagonists. (Though I think the narrator for the recordings paused too often, in odd places, to be really effective.)

Graydon Saunders, The March North

Mind candy. Readers know I am a huge fan of science fiction and fantasy (look around you), but there's no denying both genres have a big soft spot for authoritarianism and feudalism. I picked this up because it promised to be an egalitarian fantasy novel, and because (back in the Late Bronze Age of Internet time) I used to like Saunders's posts on rec.arts.sf.written . I am glad I did: it's not the best-written novel ever, but it's more than competent, it scratches the genre itch, and Saunders has thought through how people-power could work in a world where part of the normal life cycle of a wizard would ordinarily be ruling as a Dark Lord for centuries. (I suspect his solution owes something to the pike square.) The set-up calls out for sequels, which I would eat up with a spoon.

Marie Brennan, The Tropic of Serpents: A Memoir by Lady Trent

Mind candy: further adventures in the natural history of dragons.

Franklin M. Fisher, Disequilibrium Foundations of Equilibrium Economics

This is a detailed, clear and innovative treatment of what was known in 1983 about the stability of economic equilibrium. (It begins with an argument, which I find entirely convincing, that this is an important question, especially for economists who only want to reason about equilibria.) The last half of the book is a very detailed treatment of a dis-equilibrium model of interacting rational agents, and the conditions under which it will approach a Walrasian (price-supported) equilibrium. (These conditions involve non-zero transaction costs, each agent setting its own prices, and something Fisher calls "No Favorable Surprise", the idea that unexpected changes never make things better.) Remarkably, Fisher's model recovers such obvious features of the real world as (i) money existing and being useful, and (ii) agents continue to trade for as long as they live, rather than going through a spurt of exchange at the dawn of time and then never trading again. It's a tour de force, especially because of the clarity of the writing. I wish I'd read it long ago.

Fisher has a 2010 paper, reflecting on the state of the art a few years ago: "The Stability of General Equilibrium --- What Do We Know and Why Is It Important?".

— One disappointment with this approach: Fisher doesn't consider the possibility that aggregated variables might be in equilibrium, even though indi