Disobey Gravity

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This is an outstanding work of narrative nonfiction about the sinking of the merchant marine ship El Faro, with no survivors, on October 1, 2015. As far as anyone could tell initially, the captain inexplicably sailed the ship straight into the eye of Hurricane Joaquin, which he definitely knew was there.

Then the black box got retrieved. It had the complete audio recordings of everything that happened on the ship for 26 hours before it sank, right up to its final moments. Rachel Slade, a journalist, used the complete audio plus in-depth interviews with everyone who could possibly have any light to shed on the matter to write the book. She not only gives an analysis of what happened and why, she covers all the surrounding circumstances that led to it. It's an outstanding work of nonfiction disaster reporting that often reads like a suspense novel, it will teach you a lot about many things, and it will make you very angry.

The culprit, essentially, was capitalism. A company called TOTE took over the original company that owned the ship and put a business bro who knew nothing about shipping in charge. He fired a bunch of people at random on the theory that there were too many employees, and slashed maintenance because it was expensive. Everyone who was experienced, skilled, and not desperate who hadn't already been fired quit, leaving only people who were inexperienced, unskilled, undesirable for other reasons, desperate, or in low-level positions where they had no influence on general operations, on a ship in serious need of repairs and upgrades. TOTE put enormous pressure on the captain to get the ship to its destination on time, no matter what, to save money. Finally, there were multiple sources for weather reports, the one which was most current was more complicated to use, and not everyone understood that the other source could be nine hours behind.

The captain had been investigated for sexual harassment, had a history of poor judgment calls, and had the social skills of Captain Ahab; because of this, he knew he was on thin ice and if he got fired from the El Faro, he might not get another job as captain. The second mate was a young woman trying to make it in a men's world who had reported him for harassing her, and dealt by avoiding him as much as possible. The entire crew was operating under a system where the captain was basically God. The only way to contact the outside world, like if for instance a crew member wanted to report that the captain was set on sailing them into a hurricane, was a satellite phone that only the captain had access to.

Basically everyone but the captain was worried they'd sail into the hurricane, the captain was worried he'd get fired if he took the long way around to avoid the hurricane and didn't realize that his weather reports were not up to date, everyone was tiptoeing around or avoiding the captain because he was a giant asshole who was also the God-King, and no one had any way to overrule or go around him.

The culture of "never question the captain even if he's obviously wrong" has caused a number of plane crashes, and the aviation world responded by instituting a system of training to teach crew members to speak up forcefully if they think the captain is making a mistake, complete with exactly how to phrase it. If you're interested in this, it's called Cockpit/Crew Resource Management (CRM); the podcast "Black Box Down" has a number of episodes involving it.

CRM would have been helpful for the El Faro, as would giving the crew private access to the satellite phone or some other way of reporting on the captain. And, of course, so would not allowing companies to put workers in extremely unsafe conditions. Regulations are written in blood. Worse, the blood can spill and nothing gets written at all.

An excellent book. I recommend it to anyone with an interest in disasters, survival, or the failure mode of capitalism.

This book contains several elements which I like very much: it's epistolatory, it has mysterious ancient sophisticated machinery, and it involves very big size differences. I love miniature things and people, but I also love giants and giant things. This novel is entirely in the form of interviews, and it begins with a young girl walking in the woods who falls into a sinkhole, and lands in the palm of a GIANT HAND. (I can't believe that image isn't on the cover, because it's so striking and is also by far the best part of the book.) The gigantic hand is metal, and it turns out that there are pieces of a complete ancient giant robot scattered all over the world! What happens when the whole giant robot is assembled?

It turns out that what happens is yet another example of a great idea making a bad book, largely - AGAIN - by failing to engage with the premise! WHY IS THIS SO COMMON????

To be fair, this book has many bad elements which do not involve failing to lean into its premise.

The entire book consists of interviews by an unnamed, very mysterious person with near-infinite money and power. He is hiring people to locate the robot parts, assemble them, and pilot it. He also conducts personal interviews with them in which he pries into their love lives in a bizarrely personal manner. It's clearly because the author wanted to have a love story (he shouldn't have, it's terrible) and figured this was the only way to do it and keep the format, but it makes no sense. The interviewers do object to this line of questioning, but not in the way that I kept wanting them to, which would have been along the lines of "Don't you have anything better to do than get wank material from your employees? Drop it, or I'll go to HR."

The girl who fell into the hand grows up to be a physicist who gets hired to... I forget what exactly, but it didn't make much sense even when I was reading it. Anyway, she's on the project. There's also a badass female helicopter pilot, and a male linguist to translate the mysterious giant robot inscriptions. All these people are the biggest geniuses ever but are also total idiots. All the women are incredibly "man writing women."

Most annoyingly, the robot does not seem to be sentient, does not communicate, does not have a personality, and only walks for like 30 seconds once.

Spoilers! ( Read more... )

I feel stupider for having read this book.

It's a trilogy but even people who liked the first book say the returns steadily diminish.

I normally don't think it's cool to criticize people's appearances, but in this case, this dude chose to go with this supremely tryhard author photo.