association-list

My super belated chime in on the whole death of the SF magazine market thing.

I think that Paolo’s and Erin’s comments are particularly interesting because they actually propose some forward movement in the market. The short SF market has shrunk so much that there’s almost nothing going on there, in terms of market diversity. I like some of the stories in the current magazines, but the return on investment is somewhat low: I don’t really like enough of them to keep buying them, although I continue to do so (at cover price) out of some sense of dogged loyalty to a kind of fiction that I love, at least for F&SF and Asimov’s. At the same time, none of the editors of the big three really speak to me, taste-wise, and their focuses aren’t my own. What I’d like to see are more magazines out there, with differing focuses and representing a wider variety of editorial tastes. For one thing, I’d like to see more ideas out there, more people thinking of various concepts for magazines, so that someone might actually get excited enough to take the plunge (or one of the existing magazines might get interested enough to launch a spin off).

So in that spirit, I present Energy States.

ES would be a mid-length monthly focusing entirely on overlapped serial short novels. The target length would be 30-50k words, too long to get published in most magazines, and too short to land a novel deal these days. The magazine would run these in 10-15kw chunks, aiming to put each novel in 3-5 issues. After each month, the first section of every story would be put online as a teaser for the rest of the story, and the entire story could be purchased stand-alone online for two dollars, once its print run was completed. Note that buying the story gives you access to previously purchased installments if the whole thing is not out yet, so the customer could catch up on a story that they’re particularly interested in without buying back issues. Bundles of popular stories could also be sold, and I imagine that you could make a deal with a PoD house for custom anthologies and chapbooks. Subscriptions, as a bonus, would get you access to all of the content, including back issues, online. For all individually sold items, the author would get a cut.

I’m not sure how well it would work out, honestly. I don’t know that there’s a reader’s market for this kind of thing, or if a starting magazine could possibly pay well enough to convince people to sell good work that they could possibly expand into a more profitable novel. This idea is mostly meant to address what I perceive as a gap in the writer’s market for story sales, allowing authors to get works out there that are currently considered unsalable.

I don’t really have a lot to say about this book that hasn’t been said more elegantly elsewhere. I liked it, but that was mostly on the strength of Charlie’s engagement with nascent technology and the things that one might do with it, and the feverish density of ideas which he manages to put across. This mostly got me over the indifferent characterization and warmed-over plot. I really liked it when Stross wrote about things other than spies, but I sympathize with the difficulty of trying to write a positive near future scenario with a world impacting plot that doesn’t involve geopolitical intrigue somehow.

That said, reading other people’s reviews and talking to people about his books, I’ve realized that I have problems with Strossian plots that other people do not have, and this one especially. As a coder, I have a lot of trouble just sort of accepting the technobabble at face value.

Don’t get me wrong. Most people in SF and in fiction in general don’t engage with computers and networking or their potential well at all. I am glad that someone is doing it, and generally doing it so well. Stross’ speculations are fascinating, and honestly I would buy a book that was just him blue-skying about the next twenty-five years of IT and computing. At the moment, no one is writing more interesting SF about near future technology. So most people should just stop here. It’s a good book, although not his strongest work. The following is most likely going to be the computer person equivalent of an undersexed physics post-grad picking apart a space opera for inconsistencies. But what is the internet for if not to embarrass ourselves in public?

I’ll address my pedantic concerns from least to greatest. There will be many spoilers.

• The glasses bothered me. They are essentially magic, in a book set ten years in the future. From his glancing description, they would require major breakthroughs in at least three and more likely five fields: Battery energy densities, computer vision, and materials science for starters, and possibly processor design and low-power, high-bandwidth wireless as well. Just ten years out for all of this? I would bet that we’ll have something like these ten years from now, but they’ll almost certainly be tethered to something in your pocket for power and processing. I would love to be wrong, though. Fucking batteries. The computer vision aspect is the one that I really doubt will happen, though.

• The Zone, the distributed platform upon which the gaming system in book runs, seems to me to be less overambitious so much as just really inefficient. You’d need to over-provision so much in terms of storage and processing power that surely it would be cheaper to rent VMs in local colos and not have to worry about all of the client security issues. I am guessing that you’d need at least ten times as much horsepower to do it in an entirely distributed fashion, and ultimately quality of service would suffer. I just can’t imagine it working, even with symmetric 1Mbps broadband to the pocket and mobile phones that are sixty times faster than those today, assuming that Moore’s law hasn’t bottomed out by then.
  
  Note that I don’t think that it’s impossible, I just don’t think that it’s as much of a moneymaker as being able to charge a slightly higher price but be able to guarantee levels of service and responsiveness. The real gating factors for these games are the graphics and the bandwidth, it’d be cheaper and safer just for someone to start a company that seeded cheap, trusted simulation nodes all around the world in colos with massive bandwidth, expanding and collapsing how many nodes each sim was running on based on demand, and charging for runtime only, especially with the large amount of shared code infrastructure that he seems to imply. You wouldn’t get the automatic scale-up in power that you would get as consumers gradually replaced their phones, but I think that the higher availability of servers and the ability to actually target how much horsepower you’d need would more than make up for it.
  
  Tangentially, distributed file systems and databases are of a much harder class of problem than distributed simulation with untrusted processing nodes, but someone might figure that out at any point, so it’s not really fair to bet against it.

• Another thing that bothered me about the zone was the common platform that allowed people to migrate avatars and items between games. But then I read an article about that today on Raph Koster’s site, so what do I know. We’re pretty close to the point at which large scale semi-distributed simulation stuff is middleware, and I doubt that it’ll be long before some startup starts capturing major market share by offering common infrastructure for MMOGs and Virtual Worlds and the big companies stop bothering to roll their own. I just didn’t think that the companies would go for sharing or easy migration, but perhaps I have too little faith.

• Perhaps I misunderstood the Scottish network infrastructure that he described, but a national, wired internet backbone that could be compromised by the exposure of a single one time pad? Huh? I know that Stross knows better than this. Unfortunately, major parts of the plot pivot on this, which made it kind of troublesome for me. I’ll have to take another look to make sure that I have it right.

• The last thing that bothered me was most crucial, I think, to the plot, as it’s what gets the whole ball rolling. The vaunted MMORPG Bank Heist. If someone has already owned the game to the point that they can call up the bank accounts of random players, why the hell do they need to announce this? Presumably one could just vanish all of those items from people’s bank accounts without ever having to bother entering the bank at all. Also, putting a bank in a PvP zone generally doesn’t happen. Additionally, making the bank structure assaultable by people in the game is a much higher level of simulational fidelity than most game developers would bother with.

So there you have it. I have bored even myself. Four or so ideas out of a couple of hundred that seemed sound to me. Unfortunately, some of them are quite important to the plot. I’m just anticipating talking to some people about the book and coming up with an entirely disjunct set of issues to talk about than someone non-technical.

I put aside something like thirty five books the other day. I’d recently needed to clean up all of the books at the foot of my bed and on my chair, so I reorganized and cleared out another shelf for those. As this involved some shuffling, I got a closer look at some of the things that have been festering at the bottom of my first to-read shelf, and I realized that I’m just not going to get to some of them. A few days later I was starting on a paperback and I realized that I wasn’t going to finish it, either. It was overwritten and far too long and the dialog was just painful. To make matters worse, it was the start of a series.

So I marked my place, got up, and cleared out half a shelf in my closet. Then I went through all the to-read piles, and the piles of things that I’d stalled out on long ago and I started culling. It pains me, because I’m a skinflint and paid full price for most of them, but once I was done there were still ninety books there. Almost a year of reading, if I was to stop buying books tomorrow. Away they went.

The only reason this even bears talking about (although it likely doesn’t) is that I don’t often put books aside very often. When I start something, I generally finish it, unless it’s too awful to continue reading. Lately, as I’ve spent more time writing and less time reading, I’ve been falling further and further behind. So it’s time for a new strategy. It’s uncomfortable for me. I feel that I should give each book a shot, each author a chance, but I just don’t think that its going to work. I realize that what I am doing is fairly normal, for the rest of the populace.

So, anyway. To the authors whose gems I will never discover, I’m sorry.

To the guy on the salmon and teal race bike from the seventies: Riding out of the saddle all the time with the sprinter face on and the body gestures like you’re hammering it over the finish line? These things make you look like a douchebag. Learn to shift. Also, wear a helmet so I don’t have to see your faux-hawk. And honestly I really hope that that bike came in that color, otherwise you have likely committed a crime. Please stop being a fashion victim. I imagine you getting home and stroking your collection of outfit appropriate skateboards, and I really could do without that.

To the guy on the black mountain bike: While I applaud your commute-friendly tires and the fact that you’re actually wearing a helmet, trackstanding at every light does not make you cool. Mostly it just makes you take up a lot of space, rocking back and forth like that. If it’s more than 5 seconds, just stand.

To the woman on the single speed conversion: Your frame is too large and your handlebars are inappropriate. Also please make it clear what you’re doing and don’t just wait for me to get right up behind you then pull over and stop at the green light for no apparent reason. And if wearing your bag like that is the only way to keep it from slipping around, you need a new bag. Also, wear a helmet.

To the older gentleman on the non-descript mountain bike this morning: While I realize that it’s nice to be able to ride smoothly and without stops from your home to your destination, please don’t roll past me because I’ve stopped before the crosswalk. I’m supposed to stop there. So are you. Especially so because I passed you in the last block. You’re riding slowly. Stay behind faster riders when you stop behind them at lights. Otherwise, they’ll have to pass you again, which is dangerous, because San Francisco’s bike lanes are too narrow and too close to the parked cars. Also, since this happens to me at least twice every single morning, one of these days I’m going to snap and just shove you into those parked cars as I pass. Please be considerate.

I was bored tonight and procrastinating, as per usual, so I decided to toy around with some simple simulations. The subject for these experiments was taxation, which I’m sure everyone and their dog finds wildly exciting, but these kinds of things are important, and if my life was exciting I wouldn’t be writing simulations.

The setup is this; take some fixed number of individuals, toss them into bins according to a normal distribution (Likely too narrow, really, as a lot of them end up empty. Might need to raise my sigma?), then crudely apply the effects of income, inflation, taxation, random chance, etc. The taxation comes in two modes. Progressive, rising steeply towards the top, and flat for income and capital gains. I eyeballed the curve for progressive, since I didn’t want to calculating each time, and I was too lazy to calculate it in the first place. Rates are 95% for the top bracket.

Some stats:

• Twenty bins in 5000 unit increments, starting at 20000.
• 10000 + 0-10000 starting investment capital.
• 10000 unit tax brackets (at the start).
• Inflation fixed at 4% per year, and brackets scale with it.
• Yearly wage increase is inflation +- 2%, with a 5% chance of losing or gaining 0-10% to simulate job changes.
• Capital gain is 5% if your capital is below a certain point, 8% above that, to simulate incredibly crudely that if you have more money, you have access to a better class of investments. Also there is a 10% chance of losing or gaining 0-20% to simulate above or below average years.
• No one ever dies or has major life changes.
• Income is the sum of your post-tax wages and post tax investment capital for bracket calculation purposes.

Initial results are what you would expect, if you’re reasonably familiar with the theory. Flat taxes tend to spread people out over time, eventually popping people off the top of the simulation and dropping them off the bottom.

Progressive taxes tend to squeeze people towards a stable middle, with outliers being fairly quickly corrected. It’s critical to lock the brackets to inflation or everyone falls off of the bottom in short order.

Observations:

• Capital tends to vanish if you have very little of it to start. At first, I started each person with 0-20000 unit of investment capitol. After a few thousand iterations, the vast majority of people had nothing. I’m fairly sure that this is a modeling issue.
• Programming to learn something new is a great way to remember why you started doing it in the first place.
• This is likely the least interesting post I’ve ever done. I haven’t defamed a single person!

If anyone is interested in looking at the code, or has a suggestion for refining the model, drop me a note. I’d have to clean the code up a little, but it’s not shamefully messy.

The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America, by Daniel Brook

This book is quite likely to make you angry. Angry, if you’re a conservative, at a white, yale-educated author whining about how in order to make ends meet, living in a big city, he has to either suffer or ’sell out’. If you’re a liberal, it’ll make you angry at how bleak the picture he paints is, how completely the right has won certain rhetorical battles. I, personally, am in the latter camp, as disclaimer. Also, I’m more or less a part of the class that he’s talking about, as I went to a good school and have a good job and still can’t afford a house in the place where I want to live.

The book is essentially a paean to the era of progressive taxation and new deal social policies that the right in America has been dismantling for the last forty years or so. I don’t know the history as well as I’d like, so there’s a lot here that I have to take on faith. But the primary argument, that a tax structure that shrinks the middle class is bad for the country. This is not something that we should be aiming for (disclaimer, the EPI is a lefty think tank, take with salt, but I imagine those numbers are kinda hard to fudge). I’ll admit that I was sold on the argument before I picked up the book, since housing prices in San Francisco, where I live, seem to average around 5-700,000 USD for studios, lofts, and one bedroom apartments. I might be able to afford one, because I’ve been very, very lucky, but I’m fairly sure that no one I consider part of my peer group, other than the people I work with, will be able to.

The book is light, and in a lot of places would be bolstered by having better direct access to the statistics involved. It’s written like it’s intended to be made into a documentary. Its primary weakness, however, is linked to its main point, which is that if the children of the upper middle class can’t make it trying to do good, then almost no one can. Unfortunately, it’s too easy to get hung up on the fact that it is about the children of the upper middle class, Ivy Leaguers and graduate students. This is not actually a weakness of the argument, which still holds water, but a weakness to attack. These people (we people?) are not, by definition, a deprived minority. Any complaints that we make are easily attackable by our ideological enemies as the whining of people who want it even easier than we’ve had it. That we deserve to be able to remain middle class because that is where we were born.

This isn’t, of course, the argument that Brook is making, but it’s the easy perception and the standard line of attack. As of the moment, the book has 14 Amazon reviews, six with five stars, one with four, none with three, one with two, and six with one. I am willing to bet, however, that these ratings track the reviewer’s political affiliation more than they track age or socioeconomic class. Most of the negative ones essentially run, “Shut the fuck up and get a real job, you whiner.” Few of them dispute and of the arguments put forth, and when they do, they don’t attack the argument, they attack Mr. Brook, with standard aphorisms of the right; “You’ll understand when you get older.”, “Stop looking for a free ride and work for a living.”, etc.

Let me spell this out for anyone else who reviews this book. This is not a book about Mr. Brook’s or his classmate’s entitlement to a middle class lifestyle. It’s a book about how Reagan- and Goldwater-ite conservative policies on taxation have made the rich richer and have done nothing for the middle class. How if the rich continue to get richer, no one but the rich will be able to live in our most vibrant cities. How an unregulated market for housing and education squeezes out opportunities for the rest of us.

The book is only about the children of the upper middle class because it’s something that’s finally reaching us. It’s already gotten everyone else. We’re not the canaries, not even the miners, we’re the first shift bosses to succumb. If it’s made it this far, what’s next?

So, read the book. Think about it some. Take a trip to some of the other advanced democracies in the world, assuming that you can afford it, and that you can get the time off to go. Talk to some people there, tell them that you’re from Canada, if telling them you’re from the USA is coloring the discussion too much. Take a step out from behind the American exceptionalism that has been so carefully inculcated in you and me and realize that while it’s nice here, if you’re lucky, you most often don’t have to be lucky for it to be nice in one of the other advanced nations, where you wouldn’t be saddled by college debt, you wouldn’t have to constantly worry about what neighborhood you live in to make sure that your kids don’t go to a shitty school, you don’t have to work sixty or more hours a week to own a house.

Mr. Brook isn’t saying that he and his generation don’t want to work, or that they just want something to be given. He just wants to see them, us, be able to work to enrich our own lives, rather than the lives of the people who employ us. To be able to work hard for the things that matter, rather than having to make a choice between our lives and our ethics.

To raise the tone to an incendiary level and to clearly step outside of the argument made by this book. I’d like to put forth the thesis that conservative, regressive tax policies are are aimed at creating a semi-hereditary upper class, an ever less permeable nobility. This is something that, as Americans, as people true to the spirit of the Constitution, we should be fighting tooth and nail. Now stop whining, suck it up, and go out there and vote for someone who’ll raise your damned taxes and spend them on equality and the health and welfare of the people of this country.

Some truly remarkable data visualization stuff here. Also, the presenter, Hans Rosling, is a hell of a public speaker. And it’s not just tech glitz, either. Much thoughtful analysis of numerical trends as they relate to development. It gets weaker towards the end, but I think that this is just because I am less impressed with his dollarstreet software than I am with Gapminder and Trendalyser, which, I think are the best tools I’ve seen thus far for narrativising numerical sequences. Really, nothing quite like them for telling a story with numbers.

The video ends on quite a weird note, but it’s only 20 minutes, so you can’t go in expecting 100% thoughtful analysis of potential solutions and those that have been tried in the past.

That’s the title of a new David Levine story in April’s F&SF. I thought that his Hugo winner Tk’Tk’Tk was OK, but not mind blowing, but this one is really quite good. A an episodic story, told going backwards in time, wound around a string of just so stories about a spacer called Titanium Mike. I’ve just finished reading it, so I’m still not really sure why, but it really resonated with me. I think that I’m starting to understand what all the fuss is about.

When I was in high school, the Chaplain, who was a liberal sort, invited a group of Buddhist monks to come and visit. They came and talked, answered questions, skinny asian men, some young, some old, with shaven heads and saffron and orange robes, wearing sneakers or Birkenstocks over socks. Few of these things made any impression on me, though. I was in high school, after all, and knew most things better than they did. I’m still not a fan of religious orders, although I think that I could have a more fruitful conversation with one of them. The thing that really stuck with me, though, was the sand mandala that they completed while they were there.

I don’t know if you’ve seen one of these things, but they’re quite intricate, fine, clear lines of colored sand, shaken out of a paper funnel with delicate taps. The idea that they were simply going to complete it, let it sit for a few days, and then just tip it into the trash or perhaps use some other, more sacred method of disposal were abhorrent to me. I spent the couple of days that they took to complete it thinking up ways to preserve it. My favorite, the one I ended up suggesting to the Chaplain, was to have them build it on steel, or some other heat resistant surface, then bake it in the kiln we had in the art building, sealing the pattern in glass. He explained it all to me then, but I didn’t buy it then, and am not one hundred per cent sold on the idea of enshrining the transitory nature of things in expensive ritual.

Still, there are lessons to the things beyond the obvious, or at least there were for me. The value of artwork as symbol, rather that just being the thing itself. Up until then, art was just something that you did because it was beautiful, or because it felt good, rather than because it meant anything. Sometimes, of course, an artwork is just a thing done for its beauty, or the satisfaction of creating it, and often that’s enough, or even better than had it come gravid with symbol, but for all of my teachers nattering on about what this or that artwork symbolized, I’d never known what they meant before then, never had the realize that in a particular context a visual artwork could be transformed into a tool for saying, lent narrative weight beyond its immediate presentation.

I had intended to say something here about my distaste for the internet’s tendency towards the packratting of ephemera, but on further contemplation, it’s early days yet. Recording everything and then using various filtering mechanisms (primarily the eyes of the bored, at this point) to ferret out the things among them that aren’t trivial or ephemeral isn’t something that we’ve had the technological capability to do, up to now. As a strategy for finding the things worth preserving, it certainly has its merits. In all likelihood, most of the hesitancy we see, the trepidation toward being seen as trivial or insignificant, has to do with the human perceptual bias towards the superiority of the past. We should probably give it a little time before we bother to pass judgement, or even before we worry about the problem.

Not quite an exhaustive listing of the fiction that I’ve been reading recently, but for the most part it’s been re-reads lately, in addition to a lot of writing. Coming up on the first draft of the book and knocked out a good third of a new story yesterday. Near term schedule for writing, for the truly bored amongst you:

• Finish the first draft before my brother’s wedding in late June. This is ambitious, but I think that I can get it done, and I’d like to have nothing hanging over my head for that.
• Let the book sit for a month before revising. In that time period, I’m going to work more on the supporting stories and start polishing them for publication and then sending them out. I plan on starting to send these out in July.
• One all of the supporting stories are ready for market and making the rounds, revision starts on the novel. Hoping to have this hitting agent’s desks around late September, but we’ll see how long it takes. I’ve never been an expert at revision, nor have I ever revised something this long before. We’ll see how long it takes.
• Once it’s polished and ready to go, more supporting stories and a start on the next book, which I’m sure that I’ll talk about more when the writing starts.

Now, to the books.

Brasyl by Ian McDonald.

Every time I read something by McDonald, I’m kind of shocked that he isn’t better known. That said, River of Gods was a huge, dense book, and that might have scared a lot of people off. Brasyl, however, is not nearly so long, and every bit as good, if not better. Not being Brazilian, I can’t tell you how close he’s gotten to the feeling of the place, but as a reader I now feel like I’ve been there. The sense of atmosphere is incredible and the pacing and characterization in the book are spot on.

Now, I rarely say things like this, being a fan of brevity, but I really felt that the book would have benefitted from being just a bit longer. This is only partially because the rest of it is so good that I didn’t want it to end. We’re well set up for a sequel of some sort, but another ten thousand words could easily have dispensed with the need for one, I think. McDonald is a writer who’s heavily influenced by music, I think, and one thing that he’s taken home from that influence is the concept of dynamics. He’s more than capable, I feel, of stuffing every page with pyrotechnics, but he refrains, making parts of the novel quiet, other parts loud, some fast, some slow, and he does this quite intentionally and to wonderful effect.

Although I’ve been somewhat underwhelmed by Pyr’s efforts so far, they’ve at least earned by admiration by bringing McDonald back to the U.S., and I think that this is possibly the best book that they’ve put out so far. I’ll be looking to see this one on the award ballots next year, and I’ll be very disappointed if it isn’t there, but with the way that they’ve been going lately, it’s almost hard to take them seriously.

The Last Colony by John Scalzi.

The last book in his series concerning John ‘Competent’ Perry, The Last Colony follows up reasonably quickly after the conclusion of the other two, but not so closely that I’ll be incomprehensible to someone who hasn’t read either of the others. Like his hero, Scalzi is competent, charming, and funny. Unfortunately, that’s about all there is to the book. As much as I applaud his concept of ‘gateway SF’, I can’t help but think that this isn’t quite it, or at least isn’t the gateway that isn’t originally meant. Instead of bringing new readers to the table, I think that these books are more likely to serve as a entree to those readers who haven’t read anything published by an author who wasn’t writing prior to the New Wave.

I’m not sure what I think about that, really. I’m not sure more backwards-looking SF is really what we need from someone new. We have enough extant genre mandarins doing that already, and I’d be nice to see people trying to take things in a new direction. Especially American authors. It isn’t for nothing that three of the books on this list are from the UK. What I would really like to see is something from Scalzi that is forward looking but retains his energy, optimism, and humor. Scalzi is well on his way to making a name for himself, and I’d like to see him stretch a little, rather than continuing to address the established base. To write some true gateway SF.

The Execution Channel by Ken MacLeod.

I only finished this a couple of days ago, and I’m still not sure what to think about it. For the most part it’s a fascinating read, full of MacLeod’s usual assurance and poise, and then at the end it yanks the rug out from under the characters and the reader so violently that no one is quite sure what happened. And then it ends. I have to admit that I felt a little bit like I’d been mugged after I turned the final page. I might have to revisit this one, after some time to think it over and re-read it. Fascinating work, but I’m still not sure what the point was, and if the author was telling us the right story.

Bone Song by John Meaney.

I have to admit that I’m still a bit confused by John Meaney. The books that he writes are interesting, sometimes even compelling, but all too often are crippled by his reliance on stale genre tropes and otaku-style interest in certain topics. If he writes one more scene about his characters going running, I think that I’m going to scream. At least in this one he mostly abstains from the dull martial arts stuff and orientophilia. What we get in it’s place is a more or less standard hard-boiled science fiction novel that’s been search and replaced into a somewhat more ornate and dark fantasy novel.

There are some good spots, some effectively written scenes of fantasy and horror, but ultimately the novel is hamstrung by two glaring flaws, in addition to a host of irritants that otherwise could be glossed over. The first is the entirely unbelievable romance at the core of the story. It honestly has no legs and adds absolutely nothing to the story other than a hook with which the author can, quite unsuccessfully, tug at our heartstrings at the very end of the book. It should have been cut, full stop. It’s fine to have those characters sleep with one another and then deal with the weird fallout of that.

The other is the irritating assumption that all polities, everywhere, are going to be too corrupt for Good Cops On The Side of Right and Good to do their jobs without taking the law into their own hands. I’m generally annoyed by tough-guy characters like the protagonist of this book, but to use them in this day and age with scarcely a nod to the long and unglamorous history of them in genre literature is a mistake. To his credit, Meaney makes most of the things that they do in this vein mistakes, but it still detracts from the supposedly moral center of the novel.

This looks to be the start of a series. I’m not sure that I’ll read the next one, unless the premise is more intriguing than that of this novel. I was hoping that the shift in genre might jar something interesting loose, but it’s more or less like the old stuff with a differently colored coat of paint.