association-list

For Chill, by Elizabeth Bear

I really wanted to like Chill.

Honestly I did. I loved Dust, I think, although I’ll have to check my notes. I for sure love it in my memory.

I recognize that it’s the middle book of a three-book sequence, and that it’s setting up and leading up.

I loved getting to know Tristen and Benedik and their various failures, and their problems.

I loved revisiting the world.

But they have no agency.

We spend the entire book on a journey that is basically wasted.

If they’d been a day or two later, Cynric would have been reborn all the same, from how I read it.

In an ideal world, Tristen goes off after Arianrhod and returns with Cynric a chapter or two later, and this is done offscreen. We spend that time watching Ben and Caitlin patch things up, or try to, and then something else happens. Percival doesn’t spend the entire novel being wounded.

I can’t seem to find anything that I’ve written about Dust. Hopefully when Cleave/Grail is released I’ll have the time to read through them all at once and write something more substantive.

The lifetime of a news story (US politics bias):

1. Inception: Coverage here should focus on background, on giving the reader the information that they need to initial position themselves on the issue, and any implications that are clear from the outset. There is room here for several lengthy articles framing the issue from different perspectives, providing context (at least some of it hopefully stripped of biases), identifying the players and the interested parties.
2. Development: Here we have the bulk of the current coverage. Almost anything labeled ‘breaking news’ is going to fall into this category. Reversals, defections, politicking, compromises, & etc.. I don’t think that this was the case twenty years ago. Clearly, a lot of the bloat has been added to fit the requirements of the so-called 24 hour news cycle, and also post requirements for professional bloggers. In some ways, it’s good, since you’re able, if say following an expert blogger like Ezra Klein, to follow an issue in minute detail, more or less as it happens (give or take a day). The downside is that the time-scales at which American politics works are mostly too long for this sort of as-it-happens coverage. It’s numbing and exhausting, both for the reader and, I imagine, the writer. I imagine that it needs to be done and that for most large issues, this sort of from-the-ground documentation will be invaluable for historians.
3. Resolution: Once the dust has settled, there’s a need for articles to summarize the history of the issue, explain the dynamics of the battle and who the key players turned out to be. Again, several in-depth articles are good thing here, as we need the perspectives of both the winners and the losers. For those who’re activist inclined, there will always exist places to take more action, and these should be detailed. For wonks, there will be weaknesses, and these will need some analysis so that people can think about how best to shore them up.

Mostly I’m writing this because I find it rough to keep up with current events. I do an OK job, and like to think that I’m better informed than most on the issues of the day. That said, the constant need for content is slowly wearing me down, because I need to at least glance at it to dismiss it. So I end up looking at something like 60 news items a day, at least 20 of them fairly substantive. I’m forever behind, and not having internet on the weekends is really giving me trouble on Mondays. Although that will eventually be remedied, I still have better things to do with my weekends than keeping up with the internet. It’s clear, of course, that blogs and RSS aren’t the answer, in the long run, but I am struggling to come up with something, as a software person, that makes the making-news process both easy to follow and easy to understand.

The app that I am thinking of works something like this (capitalized words define software objects that have a visible expression in the system): At any one time, there are some number of Issues open. Each issue has one or more Moderators, who may or may not be assigned a Perspective. An Issue is a monolithic collection of text and links (text is quotes and prose from the Moderator). A User has a personal feed, and subscribes to Issues individually on the site (kind of like following someone on twitter). Also included in their feed are announcements about new Issues being opened and their Moderators, and also Issues that they don’t follow which have had major changes in the last week. When an issue is updated, people who follow it get an update, which contains the sections that were updated and some context (may need to be some clever software here). Simple edits like typo corrections wouldn’t update peoples feeds, but there would be a strict size limit to this sort of thing, erring on the side of annoying the user in the pursuit of transparency. All Issues would have a full history available at any time. You could choose daily or weekly summaries, but my thoughts here are admittedly unclear. There would have to be a way for the Moderator to set the urgency of the change (horse-race vs. substantive development? How do you draw the line there?).

Of course, there’s only so much one can do with software in the pursuit of clarity and concision of accurate coverage. Eventually, some coverage norms would need to be developed that make the form easier to follow and understand. I am not sure what these would be. Nor do I understand the role that comments would play in a system like this (I’m generally unhappy with comments as they stand now, but that’s another post). Something to think about in the future.

It strikes me that in my last post, that I was somewhat non-specific in my use of synthesis. It could be that I’m missing out, with regards to knowledge of the critical literature, so I wanted to define my terms.

When I call an author an synthesist, I’m mostly referring to what I call their primary mode of extrapolation. By primary, I mean the techniques that any one author generally uses to drive the ideas behind their stories. I’d say that there are at least three broad categories here, and I’ll attempt to name them, offer a brief definition, and provide some examples.

1. Compositive Sythesists: This is a category into which I slot Tidhar, Liz Williams, Wolfe, Delaney, Swanwick, etc.
   Very few of the ideas are new, and occasionally things that would otherwise flow naturally from the world building are missed. Rather they’re used with varying degrees of skill to evoke the settings and preconditions for their character’s stories to naturally unfold. Interestingly, I find that thsi category contains both some of the best and some of the worst SF disproportionately, going from the bottom, where the paint by numbers crowd operates, to the top, where some of the best artists of the genre pick and chose just the right elements out of the existing prop box to set the drama of their characters and plots off to greatest effect. There are some people in the middle, but they seem to be thinner on the ground than in my other (self-defined) categories.

2. Conjunctive (or Inventive) Sythesists: These are authors who’re largely working out of the box of standard props and tropes, but they’re interested enough in the ideas that they’re working with that they generally consider it incumbent upon them to come up with some fascinating and novel ideas and creations that shake out naturally from the quriks of their worldbuilding and how they’re throwing their ideas together.
   I’d put Stross, Tricia Sullivan, Justina Robson, Bruce Sterling, and Richard Morgan here, amongst others.

3. Subject Experts: These are your scientist-authors and your lay experts, who take their deep knowledge and research and use it to inform either their story ideas or their worldbuilding. They also draw from the common pool, but their unique bodies of knowledge lead to both insights and lacunae that other writers with a different speculative-extrapolative approach wouldn’t have come across.
   I’d include Benford, Kim Stanley Robinson, Nancy Kress, Vernor Vinge, and a number of others here.

This week’s short story club story is The Shangri-La Affair by Lavie Tidhar, who I’d never heard of before.

It’s really quite good.

I was struck from the first by the confidence of the narrative voice. The story follows an unnamed protagonist from a quite close third-person perspective through a future war in South-East Asia, concerning a particular MacGuffin in the form of a peace plague (the Shangri-La of the title), virally transmissable fellow-feeling that stops hostilities in their tracks. We only get to see its effects for a moment before everything is blown to atoms by the unseen backers of our nameless viewpoint character. The story’s prime emotional conflict is his struggle between destroying the peace plague and letting it spread. Finally, he decides that peace not chosen is no peace worth having. This struggle would have more resonance if we had some theory as to how the peace plague works. If the reader were allowed another viewpoint on whether or not the plague nullifies free will, it very well might deepen the effect of his choice. The doubt it still there, but I think that it’d be better if it were made a bit more explicit.

The story isn’t perfect, of course. There are only token female characters and the people that we encounter for the most part are generic Men of Action and Consequence. The plot is at least four decades old and the tone is taken straight from smeary spy novels set in warzones far away from the home front, without any real engagement with the consequences of the war on the people who live there. What virtue the piece has lies in the cleverness of its synthesis of these elements, and I think that it succeeds very well (that said, I tend towards synthesis ( see update below ) in my tastes, perhaps to a fault, Gene Wolfe and Michael Swanwick being favorites of mine).

Since reading it, I’ve gone on something of a Tidhar binge, and what is out there on line really strikes me as quality stuff, some of it better, I think, than this particular piece, 304 Adolf Hitler Strasse over at Clarkesworld being the best of the stuff online, in my opinion, at least that I’ve found. I also went out and bought HebrewPunk and ordered The Bookman, so I may be in the throes of an irrational enthusiasm. Looking forward to what he produces in the future.

UPDATE: see here for a clarification of the terminology that I’m using above.

I’ve read ten or so books since the last posting, but honestly I’ve had a run of bad luck and am finding that I don’t have a whole lot to say about any of them that’s particularly positive. I’m not entirely sure that this is helpful to anyone, and since this list was for my own edification, I don’t think that it’s much worth continuing on with. I’ll continue to post about books that I like, but since I am grumpy and they’re fairly rare, I doubt that there will be much here for the next little while, until I think of something else to drive commentary and content.

Any time the spokesperson for a company asserts, in a congressional hearing or via a lobbyist, that a new regulation would “destroy” or otherwise negatively impact their business, there should be a consequence. They should have to prove, using real data to be made public, how and by how much this regulation would impact their business. Thereafter, their books would be audited to ascertain that they’re telling the truth, and the audit’s findings will be made public as part of the congressional record. Speakers who’re proven to have lied or distorted the situation would then have their testimony struck from the record.

Alternatively, one could make this a standard gateway for sending company officers or others to comment on new regulation, with only the granting or denial of permission to comment as part of the public record.

I really like Karl Schroeder’s books so far. Meaty SF think-heavy books that never shrink from engaging with the human characters at their hearts. That said, I have some quibbles with the Virga books. While the central idea is a great one, and it is explored in relentlessly interesting ways, I can’t help but think here that there are too things competing for space in what are, after all, relatively short novels. The first three books were pretty light, action-adventure novels that took us on a tour through Virga while including real human drama and the ugly choices that people are forced to make by circumstances. Since they were at ground level, playing out, for the most part, far from the character’s home, there’s fairly little engagement with societal construction, and that’s fine, because we never really stick any place for long enough for the reader to start wondering how it would all work.

In The Sunless Countries, Schroeder goes darker and attempts to engage with some serious, fascinating societal issues (absolute democratic rule when the public is ill-informed, the hijacking of a polity by neo-fascists), all the while keeping up the adventurous pace and rip roaring action and giving us more Virga wide-screen SFX and taking us out of Virga for the first time and and and. This could really work well, but the downfall of the novel is that Schroeder sticks to the format of the other Virga novels. That is, it is somewhat short (maybe 100-110k words?) and primarily follows the viewpoint of a single character. It’s rare that you’ll find me arguing that a novel should be longer. I’m generally exasperated by the level of padding required to get a book out to the 200k-ish words that seem to be required these days. But this is a book that could really use it. Using both Hayden and Leal as viewpoint characters, actually following Leal outside of Virga, rather than having her briefly recount her adventures, spending more time with the failure of the Eternist takeover, making the ending less abrupt, etc. Another 100 pages at least are justified here, and the last quarter of the book suffers a lot for their absence. Everything feels second-hand and rushed, and it skews the pacing of the novel something awful. You spend a great deal of the end of the novel inhabiting the perspective of someone in a locked room while a naval battle goes on outside.

I enjoyed the book a lot, and the setup at the end could potentially lead some interesting places, but I hope that Schroeder will manage to rush the ending less next time, which might mean bending the structure more than he’d like. As the book stands, it’s a tantalizing hint of the book that it could have been; great fun, but not all that it could quite plainly be.

see here

Not a lot to say about this one. I hate time travel stories, and this one is a particularly odious example of the breed. Too many time travel stories go into puzzle mode, and so too here. The writing is all right, but the characterization is of necessity a bit thin. As a disclaimer, it takes Gene Wolfe level talent to get me interested in this sort of thing, so my opinion is best ignored here.

This book was more or less OK. It strikes me that it’s a little bit too by-the-numbers to really enjoy, but that it’s a competent instantiation of its particular formula, and thus (since it’s a good formula, generally) pleasant enough. I don’t mean to damn with faint praise here. This is a good, polished book for a first novel, and squarely hitting the middle of the road on one’s first outing is impressive. My primary technical complaint, I suppose, is that Downum is perhaps too eager to prove that her viewpoint character isn’t a Mary Sue, that this isn’t just a particularly good transcription of a D&D game, and in so doing largely robs her protagonist, Issyt of any agency in the resolution of the story. There are other characters with more agency than the viewpoint character, but by the end you start to wonder why Issyt (how do you pronounce that, anyway?) has any screen time at all. The one thing that she does in this story could have been just as easily done as a quick insert of backstory in the next novel where she encounters the other character in question. Perhaps the main problem I had with the novel was a lack of economy. Pages and pages were wasted kicking the crap out of the interfering foreigner, and too little time was spent with the local characters who actually make the story go. It’s understandable that the author wants to spend time with her primary character, but she should likely be given more to do in future novels (that said, it’d be an interesting experiment in form if someone were to do a series like this that never featured its nominal protagonist as a primary viewpoint character).

Not a lot to say about this one. It was a book. A book that was too YA for me, too obvious in its setup for its sequels, too uneven in its pacing, too unstinting with its gifts of sentience to almost every thing in the novel. For all that, the writing is consistently pretty good, and there are some playful sections where the writer takes interesting liberties with the voice of the book, and that liven it up. Ultimately, though, there’s just too much going on here all the time, as if the author is worried that if he doesn’t get all of the setup in for the next fifteen books or something he won’t be able to write them, or at least look clever when they come out. Additionally, the book seems to have a hard time deciding whether it wants each portion to be allegorical or taken as a secondary-world construction. Still, the prose is decent, the author’s heart is in the right place, and there really are interesting things happening here, even if there are too many of them and they’re happening too slowly. Did I mention that the pacing was absurdly uneven?

I think my strategy here will be to check out the author’s second series, if there is one. He’s got a lot of raw talent, but the story he’s telling here combined with the roughness of execution makes me think that I’ll skip the rest of this one.