association-list

A few days ago, Steve Wald­man of Inter­flu­id­ity tweeted the following:

“Like in an eco­nomic orga­ni­za­tion, actors nat­u­rally form hier­ar­chies.” ide­ol­ogy embed­ded in soft­ware? fact of nature? doc.akka.io/docs/akka/snap…

— Steve Randy Wald­man (@interfluidity) Feb­ru­ary 21, 2013

I responded thusly:

@inter­flu­id­ity ide­ol­ogy but also prac­ti­cal expe­ri­ence with the fact that it’s super hard to build prov­ably cor­rect decen­tral­ized systems.

— E. Vigil-​​McClanahan (@evanmcc) Feb­ru­ary 21, 2013

Which is true, but at the same time deserves a more detailed unpack­ing (also more commas).

What this sort of state­ment typ­i­cally means in actor sys­tems is that local sys­tems of super­vi­sion are hier­ar­chi­cal. Akka’s super­vi­sors look to derive directly from Erlang’s super­vi­sors. In Erlang, an impor­tant design prin­ci­ple is to let fail what is going to fail and to restart it cleanly. Super­vi­sors are a generic take on this strat­egy, with a super­vi­sor start­ing, watch­ing, and restart­ing (or report­ing) after child actor fail­ures. Super­vi­sors can have their own super­vi­sors, on up the chain to the root super­vi­sor owned directly by the vir­tual machine.

Note, in the above para­graph, an impor­tant dis­tinc­tion from real-​​world hier­ar­chies. For the most part, Erlang (and, I pre­sume, Akka) super­vi­sors don’t tell their chil­dren what to do. Their chil­dren know what to do, and super­vi­sors merely medi­ate when they do it, and clean up after them when they explode. How­ever, in real soft­ware, some­times even this is too much, as a super­vi­sor can rep­re­sent a seri­al­iza­tion point (a con­cur­rency bot­tle­neck) in your soft­ware, and you have to decen­tral­ize launch and cleanup of crit­i­cal actor systems.

This leads me to a more impor­tant point, which is that in the large, dis­trib­uted sys­tems tend to be decen­tral­ized for both scal­a­bil­ity and effi­ciency rea­sons. Mar­shalling all of the data needed to oper­ate a large system cor­rectly into a single deci­sion loop tends to make these sys­tems inflex­i­ble, frag­ile, and slow. As such, dis­trib­uted sys­tems tend towards decen­tral­ized and dis­trib­uted decision-​​making sys­tems, such as gossip sys­tems (to glob­ally dis­trib­ute crit­i­cal data), leader elec­tion (for when cen­tral­ized deci­sions need to be made), and most impor­tantly system design that min­i­mizes inter­nal com­mu­ni­ca­tion and shared state. Riak, the prod­uct that I work on, is a rea­son­able exam­ple here. Homoge­nous nodes with a tem­porar­ily elected leader, with all glob­ally impor­tant infor­ma­tion dis­trib­uted by gossip. Thou­sands of actors all work­ing together to make a single system while send­ing each other as few mes­sages as possible.

So why then super­vi­sors, in the small? My sus­pi­cion is time and engi­neer­ing man­power con­straints. Design­ing these higher level decen­tral­ized sys­tems is extremely com­plex. At Basho, my employer, we spend quite a lot of time get­ting them right, or as right as we can, and we rely on pow­er­ful tools like QuickCheck to help us do it. But if you have to write a formal model for every tiny piece of the system, you’re doomed, at least in today’s fast-​​moving soft­ware indus­try. So you fall back on infor­mally spec­i­fied but easier to reason about sys­tems like super­vi­sion trees, even though they can end up biting you in the end. When I men­tioned super­vi­sors as a con­cur­rency bot­tle­neck above, I was refer­ring to a real-​​world issue that we encoun­tered, where our get and put FSM super­vi­sors (in a nut­shell, these Finite State Machines directly over­see stor­age and retrieval of data from our disk back­ends) were becom­ing over­whelmed in high-​​load sit­u­a­tions, unable to start child actors quickly enough to fully uti­lize the machine the VM was run­ning on.

So in the end, what does this say about the orig­i­nal query? Hier­ar­chy falls nat­u­rally out of untu­tored designs because we find it easy to think about multi-​​actor sys­tems this way (also OOP per­haps over-​​strenuously encour­ages this sort of think­ing, but that’s another post). But in the end, they tend to fall apart, because the parts of the system spend too much time talk­ing to each other to get any actual work done. This is, of course, the logic of the market, or of an anar­chist utopia (so many things become iso­mor­phic when viewed from far enough away). I think that the most impor­tant lesson to draw from all of this is that design­ing and under­stand­ing highly con­cur­rent sys­tems with many inter­act­ing parts (inside or out­side of a com­puter) is a task that lies right at the edge of human cog­ni­tive abil­i­ties. We should never be entirely com­fort­able with them, because it’s extremely dif­fi­cult to tell if they’re cor­rect, so we should always be re-​​evaluating them, and work­ing on the tool­ing that allows us to re-​​evaluate them, to find their defects and cor­rect them.

Be care­ful out there. Unin­tended con­se­quences wait every­where in the tall grass.

I’m sure that this has been noticed before, but I’ve never seen it directly laid out, so here goes:

There exists a tra­jec­tory for any good, ‘free’ web ser­vice, be it a social net­work, a search engine, a blog­ging plat­form, etc.. It looks some­thing like a par­a­bolic arc. The height of its apex and the speed with which it is reached are dif­fer­ent each time, but with enough data, you begin to see similarities.

In the early days, things suck. The site is ugly, it’s slow some­times, maybe they haven’t got their core mechan­ics nailed down, or for a social net­work, the fea­tures are good but there is no one there. As things pick up steam, the ven­ture vul­tures begin cir­cling, more people get hired, and things start to rapidly improved. Things look better, more of your friends are using it, there’s some actual infra­struc­ture money. There is a long, bright period at the top of the arc wherein every­thing is lovely on the user side. At the com­pany, though, they know already that grav­i­ta­tional rot has already set in. They’ve never charged you any­thing, because no one ever charges you for any­thing. They may not even be sure that the prod­uct is worth enough to ask you for money. But the des­per­ately need some. The high lifestyle of all their new coders and design­ers costs money, and the cap­i­tal men lurk­ing in the back­ground are get­ting all sweaty in antic­i­pa­tion of their expected liq­uid­ity event.

If you and they are lucky, some big com­pany will swoop in and pro­vide the release that every­one is look­ing for, buying you up and then run­ning you for years with benign neglect while they fold the bit of your tech that they wanted into their own prod­uct, or try to steal your user base or gen­er­ally just figure out some way to make actual money out of you. Often a ser­vice can live in this limbo for years, pro­vid­ing use value and plea­sure. The ending here tends to be swifter, when the new owner finally decides to shut the ser­vice down, or ‘re-​​brand’ (almost always a fatal wound).

When no fairy god­par­ent comes around, though, you enter the dread busi­ness of ‘mon­e­ti­za­tion’. For the most part, this comes in two fla­vors: charg­ing for pre­mium ser­vices or start­ing to sell ads. I have no prob­lems with using pre­mium ser­vices to sub­si­dize a free ver­sion. It’s a model that I like a lot, although I feel like people aren’t par­tic­u­larly trans­par­ent about their busi­ness models or flex­i­ble in their pric­ing (you have to take this with a grain of salt, coming from me. I think the Swedish(?) policy of having everyone’s tax bill be public is a great idea). Usu­ally, though, this seems to be the best way to post­pone the inevitable decline of a web ser­vice, although some of your users will inevitably com­plain that start­ing to charge money is actu­ally part of your decline.

Go down the path of adver­tis­ing, though, and you’ve basi­cally sub­mit­ted to your fate. It seems easy at first, because ad com­pa­nies like Google have made it really easy to drop stuff right in. You make a little bit of money, but not really enough to pay anyone. So you have to make more changes. You real­ize that you’re actu­ally answer­ing to two sets of cus­tomers now, and only one of them is paying you. So you make com­pro­mises. Over time, you real­ize that your adver­tis­ers are win­ning every time their desires come into con­flict with those of your users. Even­tu­ally your users real­ize this, too. Then they leave, if they have any place to go.

Google is enter­ing this phase right now. They weath­ered the own­er­ship prob­lems and the exter­nal CEO, and any number of other issues that could have sunk them. But inex­orably, since it holds the purse strings, the ad-​​serving part of their busi­ness will take over, and will ruin the user expe­ri­ence and use­ful­ness of their ser­vice for every­one. Already there are issues: if you run ad-​​blocking soft­ware (which is within your rights. If they don’t want cus­tomers who don’t see ads, they’re wel­come to turn you away, which is within their rights), or soft­ware that keeps them from track­ing you else­where on the web, it breaks basic search most of the time. At this time, there is no real exit, so you can only chose voice and evasion.

These are hard times. Busi­ness models are in vio­lent flux. Many com­pa­nies are not sure where their next dollar is going to come from. I sym­pa­thize with people who’re using ads to patch together a busi­ness that they love into some­thing that works. The market isn’t fair or per­fect or even good, most of the time. I am not sure that there are good answers. Pre­mium ser­vice pric­ing is only a par­tial solu­tion, and isn’t going to work for every­one. Inde­pen­dent artists are a par­tic­u­lar quandary. It’s time, though, to start look­ing around for solutions.

Atten­tion con­ser­va­tion notice: ~900 words of divi­sive, under-​​researched hobby-​​horse riding.

So I read this piece by Fred­die de Boer the other day, and then Rob Horning’s post on Steve Jobs. Some­thing in both both­ered me.

Both of them are basi­cally get­ting at con­sumerism and cap­i­tal­ism from slightly dif­fer­ent left-​​wing view­points (I am assum­ing that you’ve read both, at this point). I par­tially agree with both of them. Nei­ther of them gets all the way to the root of their argu­ments, so maybe I am get­ting their posi­tion subtly wrong.

But I think the thing that they’re get­ting wrong, both of them, per­haps this entire line of cri­tique, is that the inter­net that we have cannot pos­si­bly be any other way, as a straight­for­ward con­se­quence of where all of the money (or near as makes no dif­fer­ence) on the inter­net comes from, which is adver­tise­ment. What I mean by this is that almost every­thing inter­est­ing that’s hap­pen­ing lately on the com­mer­cial web is in the SaaS sphere (I include social net­work­ing in this, although the ser­vice is a tad neb­u­lous and always chang­ing) and almost all of it that inter­acts with con­sumers is funded by adver­tis­ing rather than pay­ment for the prod­uct. Even in app stores, there are ads, although due to the cog­ni­tive magic/​trickery of encap­su­la­tion into ‘apps’, people seem will­ing to put in a little money up front, although never very much.

Horn­ing seems to address this every so often, but he never seems to take it all the way. The under­ly­ing logic of the social deskilling that he sees stem­ming from Face­book has no root in the logic of what people actu­ally need from some­thing like a social net­work­ing plat­form. In a world where the money comes from some­where else, Face­book or an entity like it would look and act noth­ing like it does. As it stands, social deskilling is just a epiphe­nom­e­non of Face­book need­ing infor­ma­tion about what you’re doing there, so they can keep you there longer, look­ing at their pages and the ads dis­played on them. One could argue that it isn’t so much a social deskilling as a gam­i­fi­ca­tion of online social inter­ac­tion, with the dual goal of get­ting more infor­ma­tion about the user to sell to adver­tis­ers, and to keep them look­ing at adver­tise­ments for longer peri­ods of time.

My cri­tique of de Boer is a little dif­fer­ent, because I think that he gets closer, in his clos­ing para­graph. I guess I would say that he reads to much in; he assumes that more people are more deeply engaged with the worth­less­ness of the cur­rent online world than really are (as does Horn­ing). I’ll gladly join him in his cru­sade to end a world where every­one is a fetishis­tic consumer/​critic, but I think that the number of people who actu­ally aspire to that sort of thing, who con­struct their selves online, are many fewer than he imag­ines. Here too, of course, we see the logic of the advertising-​​funded inter­net, as innu­mer­able out­lets attempt to pull in as many ‘eyes’ as pos­si­ble with their floods of strate­gized and seo-​​optimized ‘con­tent’. Each strug­gling to estab­lish them­selves as a brand, to gain loyal fol­low­ers (ad-​​viewers all), rather than follow the logic of their var­i­ous mis­sions. Trying to be divi­sive, sticky, intru­sive, to keep us look­ing longer than we would have otherwise.

This is all pretty dreary, I guess. I think that both of these guys are inter­est­ing thinkers, and de Boer doesn’t spend a lot of time talk­ing about the inter­net, so it’s under­stand­able if his insights are a little hazy there. And it isn’t if I come equipped with all of the answers. I mean, I have some pro­pos­als, but isn’t as if the US gov­ern­ment is going to go around reg­u­lat­ing adver­tis­ers and taxing mar­ket­ing bud­gets and nation­al­iz­ing Com­cast. Nor is anyone going to write a com­puter virus that installs adblock­ing on people’s browsers. Although that’s both awe­some and doable.

I just mean to high­light the irre­sistible logic of all of the money on the web cur­rently coming from ads and its con­se­quences. We’re essen­tially stuck at this stage until we can figure out how to make money doing some­thing else. Google is the high­light here. They’ve brought together thou­sands of smart people who make daring and great prod­ucts of gen­uine util­ity, and it’s all just a side­line to their real busi­ness, which is spying on you for people who want to sell you shoes.

Their cri­tiques are obvi­ously heart­felt (at least de Boer’s. I feel that I am never sure where Horn­ing is coming from, emo­tion­ally or con­tex­tu­ally), but com­plain­ing that ‘the inter­net’ is vapid or ener­vat­ing or atom­iz­ing or what have you isn’t the point. To some extent, it falls victim to the same kind of end-​​of-​​history/​there-​​is-​​no-​​alternative think­ing both of them inveigh against in other aspects of their polit­i­cal dis­courses. This is not a sur­pris­ing thing; the inter­net is not apart from the world. But the inter­net is a place where it’s espe­cially prob­lem­atic, where we’re will­ing to build an entire world on a pile of shit because the shit-​​sellers have told us there is noth­ing else to build on. There is end­less analy­sis to be done on the effects of this, but to me it isn’t impor­tant. None of these prob­lems is solv­able inside the cur­rent frame­work, and few of them would exist out­side of it. Anat­o­miz­ing the symp­toms while ignor­ing the dis­ease isn’t going to get you anywhere.

I think that I’ve read Adam Roberts’ review of The Name of the Wind maybe 6 times now, so if you haven’t read that, this isn’t going to make any sense. It may not make any sense anyway, since it’s still a bit hazy, but I wanted to get it out there to work through it.

Some­thing about it has always struck me as off, but I haven’t been able to artic­u­late it up to now. For the most part, he’s cor­rect about the novel and its fail­ings. In no way is it high art, and the sooner Roth­fuss fin­ishes this white whale of a series and moves on to some­thing more mature the better for him, and for all of us. But Roberts goes in on Roth­fuss’ fail­ure to truly inhabit the medieval mind­set he posits is required for this sort of novel:

This could be three pals from any novel set in the 20^th or 21^st cen­tu­ryl [sic]; and hun­dreds and hun­dreds of sim­i­lar pas­sages serve only to show the author has not entered into the pre-​​industrial medieval mind­set that his medieval pre-​​industrial world requires — to, for exam­ple, under­stand the cru­cial point that not guilt (“I looked as guilty as I felt”) but shame was the key moral dynamic for the period. But to under­stand that would involve shift­ing about the psy­cho­log­i­cal por­trai­ture of the entire project; it would have meant writ­ing char­ac­ters less like, and there­fore less appeal­ing to, a 21^st-​​century read­er­ship dis­in­clined to make the effort to encounter the prop­erly strange or unusual.

This speaks to a broader state of affairs in which style — the lan­guage and form of the novel — is seen as an unim­por­tant adjunct to the “story.” It is not. A bour­geois dis­cur­sive style con­structs a bour­geois world. If it is used to describe a medieval world it nec­es­sar­ily mis­matches what it describes, cre­at­ing a milieu that is only an anachro­nism, a theme park, or a WoW gaming envi­ron­ment rather than an actual place. This degrades the abil­ity of the book prop­erly to evoke its fic­tional set­ting, and there­fore denies the book the higher heroic pos­si­bil­i­ties of its imag­i­na­tive premise.

I think that this is subtly wrong. Firstly, it is mis­taken in assum­ing that a par­tic­u­lar kind of moral tech­nol­ogy (for lack of a better word), such as guilt-​​driven nor­ma­tive self-​​coercion, nec­es­sar­ily accom­pa­nies par­tic­u­lar social struc­tures and phys­i­cal tech­nol­ogy levels. But more to the point, it’s mis­taken to assume that the sup­posed mis­match of form and tone has some­thing to do with acces­si­bil­ity. Although writ­ing char­ac­ters more like his audi­ence surely makes it easier for that audi­ence to relate to them, I think that the fun­da­men­tal issue is that for books like tNoW, where surely a weighty Moral Lesson is in the offing, is that ante-​​Guilt char­ac­ters have noth­ing, morally, to teach those of us in the post-​​Guilt world. Men and women in the AG inhabit an dif­fer­ent moral uni­verse. Moral lessons taught to and through them are untrans­lat­able, unteach­able to us, unless we’re shame-​​driven atavisms.

So it makes no sense for Roth­fuss to do that work, unless, like Tolkien, he’s a big fan of the period and its work. The telling sen­tence is this one:

But to under­stand that would involve shift­ing about the psy­cho­log­i­cal por­trai­ture of the entire project; it would have meant writ­ing char­ac­ters less like, and there­fore less appeal­ing to, a 21^st-​​century read­er­ship dis­in­clined to make the effort to encounter the prop­erly strange or unusual.

I would argue here that the aim of Roth­fuss’ project here is not actu­ally to expose his read­ers to the strange or the unusual, and that it’s a mis­take to assume that it is (Roberts’ easy ‘kids these days’ con­de­scen­sion wins him no points, either). Roth­fuss’ narrow aims are as yet unclear, as there are any number of ways the third novel could resolve all of the issues that have been set up in the first two books, but his broader aims are clear; Kvothe is going to relate to us some impor­tant bit of moral knowl­edge about being an Excep­tional Out­sider. Hope­fully it’ll be more pro­found than “Get over your first, unre­quited love as quickly as pos­si­ble”, which pre­sum­ably would have, if learned early enough, pre­vented most of the series from happening.

State­ments of Bias*:

• Adam Roberts: I enjoy his reviews, gen­er­ally (espe­cially the lighter, quicker ones at his blog). I typ­i­cally don’t care for his fic­tion for rea­sons too involved to get into in a brief state­ment such as this.
• The Name of the Wind/​Patrick Roth­fuss: I thought it was enter­tain­ing enough, but had to reread it in order to read its follow-​​up, which isn’t really a good sign. I don’t think that any of its char­ac­ters are the least bit psy­cho­log­i­cally real­is­tic, but the manner of the telling makes it a quick and enjoy­able read. I know more or less zip about its author.

* I am think­ing of making bias state­ments part of the struc­ture of the blog. I am not sure how useful that would be, but I feel that making bias clear might matter here more than usual.

Sorry for the flurry of posts today, I need to get all this stuff out before I forget about the site again for six months.

Orig­i­nally when I switched over to this host I had decided that I was just going to stick with the apt-​​provided ver­sion of word­press and just deal with the issues, but it turns out that their mod­u­lar­iza­tion is too leaky, and their code churn rate is too high for that to be a viable strat­egy, what with the low turnover rate of the Ubuntu pack­age. Once I’d fallen too many released behind, all of the AJAX stuff started to break. I couldn’t even reply to com­ments from the con­sole or post any pictures.

So if you’re look­ing for how to do this, here is what worked for me in early 2011 (this post will no doubt date rapidly):

1. As root, type # echo wordpress hold | dpkg --set-selections (note that this step is apt cargo cult magic which may fail in the future; I’ll update this if so).
2. Edit /etc/wordpress/wp-config.php, com­ment­ing out the line which says define('WP_CORE_UPDATE', false);.
3. Down­load the latest word­press tar­ball from http://wordpress.org/.
4. Unpack it somewhere.
5. Backup /​usr/​share/​wordpress (I used # tar czf backup.tgz /usr/share/wordpress but you may (by which I mean should) want to do some­thing more bulletproof.
6. Do # cp -R /path/to/wp/wordpress/ /usr/share/
7. Look at the output and cleanup as appro­pri­ate. I ended up having to nuke /usr/share/workpress/wp-include/js/ and then recopy it from the unpacked tarball.
8. Go back to your dash­board, as you’ll likely have to trig­ger a data­base update or some­thing similar.
9. Make sure your site or sites are still working.

Feel free to com­ment if you have any ques­tions but I am hardly an expert on the Word­Press side. Good luck.

I also read this recently. No one will be shocked, I sup­pose, that I didn’t par­tic­u­larly like it.

Quot­ing myself on twitter:

In the middle of Embassy­town right now. Impres­sion is Miéville doing Har­ri­son doing Blish. Less happy with it after the mid-​​reveal.

And:

Fin­ished Embassy­town. Now wish­ing I hadn’t fought through the middle. “Lan­guage” is a dud pivot. Artful awk­ward­ness here just awkward.

I don’t have a ton to add, I sup­pose, other than a state­ment of bias, as I thought that Kraken, as fun as it was a times, was kind of a baggy mess and con­cerned Men’s Busi­ness entirely too much, and had some huge dis­ap­point­ments in terms of its female characters.

The treat­ment of women as impor­tant is better here, which is praise­wor­thy, but doesn’t over­come the novel’s other flaws.

The ear­li­est and most famous of cyber­punk novels, the end­lessly famous Neu­ro­mancer con­cerns the actions of a few mar­ginal, vio­lent people being manip­u­lated by forces larger than they can com­pre­hend. True, they have some agency; indeed they’d be use­less as agents for their oper­a­tors if they did not have some spe­cial skills and tal­ents that make them the best tools pos­si­ble in the sit­u­a­tion. Ulti­mately, though, they are merely tools. Gibson’s inter­est is, for the most part, on the vast forces at work, rather than the tools them­selves. His pro­tag­o­nists (who grow less mar­ginal and less vio­lent as the sprawl series pro­gresses), are more or less a lens through which the world is seen. The cul­mi­na­tion of each of these novels is the reveal, in which the tool-​​protagonist is made aware of the full scope of the drama in which they have played a small part.

This form, which of course has antecedents in older SF, detec­tive and spy novels, and numer­ous other forms, tends to be what people take away from cyber­punk, second only to its window dress­ing of aug­ments, street-​​wise tech-​​ninjas, and decades-​​old visual sym­bols of bad-​​assery (leather jack­ets, dark sun­glasses or mir­ror­shades, dusters, ass-​​kicking boots, that sort of thing).

When Gibson first wrote his novels, deep into the Reagan-​​Thatcher years, things really did look pretty bad (almost thirty years ago, now). It wasn’t entirely whacked out to pic­ture a world run for the profit of mas­sive cor­po­ra­tions who’d sub­orned the nation-​​states of the world (one could argue that that is in fact what hap­pened, although it didn’t turn out as badly as it could have). Things really did suck, and it wasn’t insane to imag­ine mar­ginal people being empow­ered by some mys­ti­cal coun­ter­vail­ing force being the only way that a little good could be done in the world.

But as time wore on and things got at least a little bit better our noir-​​loving doom­pro­phets seem to have dou­bled down on the spit and the muck, and have moved the lens from the phys­i­cally inef­fec­tual Case to everyone’s favorite sexy ninja badass, Molly Millions.

While there has been some updat­ing of the socio-​​political con­cerns that ani­mate these books, their pro­tag­o­nists have gone ever more ret­ro­grade, evinc­ing ever more car­toon­ish moral­ism and spe­cial plead­ing, while simul­ta­ne­ously grow­ing ever more stim­u­lat­ingly vio­lent. At times, it seems as if their worlds have to be dark­ened and vio­lent in order to enable any sort of engage­ment with their brutal, near-​​psychotic pro­tag­o­nists. Nyx and Takeshi Kovacs would, if intro­duced into a future that was any­thing like the present that we or their authors inhabit they’d swiftly be arrested or killed.

In lit­er­a­ture, form and func­tion are inti­mately linked. Stick­ing so hard to a genre form birthed in an extremely dark moment limits the effec­tive­ness with which you can nav­i­gate the gray time in which we find our­selves now. The easy vio­lence may sell books, and I am loathe to deny anyone their con­so­la­tory nar­ra­tives in hard times, but I feel that these sort of novels are not doing the kind of work that’s push­ing the genre for­ward or doing the sort of adap­tive think­ing and imag­i­na­tive inves­ti­ga­tion which I con­sider to be the main work of SF.

On Niall Harrison’s rec­om­men­da­tion I picked up Hurley’s God’s War and read it over the week­end. As a paid up member of the Post-​​Cyberpunk clade, it’s a solid piece of work. Vio­lent, enter­tain­ing out­casts are jerked around by the pow­er­ful, people are killed, scores are set­tled, bad-​​assery is done. The world-​​building is vivid, if not entirely con­sis­tent. Its treat­ment of gender is inter­est­ing, and rea­son­ably novel, and it depicts the issues of its two Muslim civ­i­liza­tions as being orthog­o­nal to the fact that they’re Muslim. It’s even well paced.

It isn’t with­out its flaws, of course. The writ­ing could be better, espe­cially in the neol­o­gisms depart­ment, and the world-​​building suf­fers quite a lot from tech search and replace issue, sub­bing in ‘bug’ for any number of other terms just to make things fit with the aes­thetic, with­out ever both­er­ing to think of whether these sub­sti­tu­tions actu­ally make sense. The vehi­cles, in par­tic­u­lar, suffer from both the neol­o­gism issue (‘bakkie’??) and from being pow­ered by and con­structed from bug-​​encrusted hand­wav­ium (this wouldn’t be so much of an issue if they weren’t so promi­nent and often men­tioned). The world-​​building is big on bold, vague strokes and light on telling details, and the visual descrip­tion could use some real work. Also, for being so many thou­sands of years into the future, it’s all a bit old-​​fashioned.

EDIT: Niall points out in com­ments below that bakkie is South African slang for a pickup truck. So I apol­o­gize for that (although it still sounds a bit silly to Amer­i­can ears), but this high­lights the visual descrip­tion issues that I men­tion. Nowhere that I noticed was a bakkie described in enough detail for me to get that it was any­thing other than a wheeled vehi­cle (run­ning on bug spit and uni­corn farts).

END EDIT

None of these things are fatal flaws, and are easily over­looked, espe­cially since this is the author’s debut. If you like Richard Morgan (par­tic­u­larly the second two Kovacs books), you’re quite likely to enjoy God’s War.

That said, the more of these I read, the more I wonder why people still bother to write them.

To get at why, I am going to have to delve into spoiler ter­ri­tory, and pos­si­bly into some uniquely per­sonal aes­thetic pref­er­ences, so go read it if you haven’t. It’s only a few bucks online. I’ll write another post detail­ing why I say that tomor­row, once I’ve had some more time to chew over my objections.

I have some polit­i­cal posts almost done, and will post them (both! I promise!) in the coming week, but mostly I am think­ing that I should really do some­thing else with this space. I clearly don’t have enough opin­ions to post daily (even on twit­ter). I have to keep the machine around, since I am host­ing the farm busi­nesses site on the same server, but I am not sure what to do with this domain.

I no longer read enough, nor like enough of what I do read, for this to be a ded­i­cated space for reviews and crit­i­cism. My writ­ing output is too low for it to be some place to dump story snip­pets and chunks of works in progress. I don’t hon­estly have unique enough opin­ions on cur­rent events, nor do I have enough sub­ject matter exper­tise for this site to be ded­i­cated to pol­i­tics. Farm stuff goes at the farm blog.

In all like­li­hood, it’ll con­tinue to be as it is, as I don’t have the spare time to make it into any­thing else. Too busy build­ing nurs­ery tables and (if we get some rain) laying fence.

I am moving this site over to where every­thing else I run lives.

Not that this site is par­tic­u­larly active, but if you’re look­ing to access it, it may be up and down over the week­end as I get every­thing trans­ferred to the new host.

UPDATE: If you can see this, every­thing should be switched over.  Because I was bored while I was wait­ing, I fid­dled with the layout, and added some Type­Kit stuff to try it out.  Mostly I think that it looks a tad better, although if I upgrade to a real Type­Kit account, I think I’ll be on the look­out for some better fonts.