association-list

For those of you unfa­mil­iar with the com­pe­ti­tion, the John W. Camp­bell Memo­r­ial Award is a juried best novel prize given out each year. There are rank­ings, 1^st, 2^nd and 3^rd place prizes are awarded. The jury changes a little each year, it seems and thus things are a little mixed, in terms of pre­dic­tion. They def­i­nitely seem to con­sider all of the major novels each year, and it looks like they try to throw in a few books that wouldn’t nor­mally be con­sid­ered as part of the SF main­stream (i.e. weren’t pub­lished by one of the stan­dard SF imprints.

While I don’t always agree with their selec­tions, there is a hint of award­ing books based on merit rather than pol­i­tics or pop­u­lar­ity, which I can only applaud. I’m not typ­i­cally one for media spec­ta­cle, and some­times the Hugos and the Neb­u­las are irri­tat­ing in that they seem to be over­whelmed by those fac­tors. So, a few words about each of the final­ists, fol­lowed by some pre­dic­tions. But first, a retrac­tion: men­tioned in the last post that I’d talk more about Ian McDonald’s River of Gods in this post, but look­ing again, he doesn’t seem to be here, I’m guess­ing that it was pub­lished too late in the year and will likely make it onto the ballot next year (I also don’t know whether or not the selec­tion com­mit­tee is going off of US or UK release dates in the case that a novel had both, that also might factor in). In any case, he’s not here, and it’s a book that needs talk­ing about. So, another post on McDon­ald, some day soon.

Tran­scen­dent, by Stephen Baxter

I haven’t read this one. It isn’t really my policy to read Baxter any­more. It’s all inter­est­ing big ideas stuff, but his writ­ing never really grabbed me and the level of shared uni­verse navel-​​gazing got too extreme at some point and I stopped reading.

The Meq, by Steve Cash

People seem to like this book, as they also seem to like men­tion­ing that Cash was once part of the The Ozark Moun­tain Dare­dev­ils. The syn­opses and reviews that I’ve read lead me to believe that it isn’t some­thing that I’d usu­ally go for, but I’ll likely pick it up now that the orig­i­nal is in paper­back, on the strength of pos­i­tive buzz, and because I’m a weak, weak man when it comes to buying books.

Child Of Earth, By David Gerrold

I hadn’t heard of this one before today, to be honest (and many read­ers will be won­der­ing why I both­ered com­ment­ing on all of these if I haven’t read any of them. I’ve read most of the second half of the list, I promise). It looks like a YA SF novel, which is really very strange coming from Ger­rold, who I know best from his unfin­ished War Against the Chtorr series, which are grim and vio­lent and sexual to a degree which would make one thing that Ger­rold is an unlikely children’s author. That said, Scott West­er­feld is writ­ing YA now, and all of his books before Mid­nighters are grim and vio­lent and sexual, so what do I know. Evolution’s Dar­ling, one of his ear­li­est, is a won­der­fully strange novel full of post-​​human fuck­ing and inter­clade love affairs, from what I remem­ber. Neat stuff, if often uncom­fort­able. I saw him speak not too long ago and he admit­ted that the rea­sons for switch­ing to YA are at least par­tially finan­cial, which, in my mind, is a sad state of affairs. Not that I don’t like his YA books, but they’re forced by the tenor of the times to skirt too widely around too many issues for them to be entirely engag­ing. But I digress, wildly.

Mind’s Eye, By Paul McAuley

I like Paul McAuley. I haven’t read this, because it isn’t out here and I haven’t seen it at the store (they carry imports, but can’t really get all of them. I’ll have to ask). I have no idea if it’s any good, but I would assume so, based on his history.

Seeker, By Jack McDevitt

I’ve only read one book, Chindi, which I think that this is a follow up to. A lot of people seem to like McDe­vitt, but I don’t really see it. Despite the increas­ingly furi­ous pace of socio-​​technical evo­lu­tion, the people in these books seem already in the past, other than that they’ve got neato space­ships and know how to go faster than light. It makes any spec­u­la­tion that they books may put forth seem strangely stunted. Also the writ­ing is lack­lus­ter and the char­ac­ters seem stock and the whole thing could have been writ­ten 20 years ago. I’m still talk­ing about Chindi, mind you. I haven’t read this one, and some triv­ial research indi­cates that it’s entirely unre­lated and seem­ingly more up my alley than that book. So, we’ll see. When it comes out in paper­back. Maybe.

Learn­ing The World, By Ken MacLeod

OK. Now we’re back on famil­iar ground. Ken MacLeod is one of my favorite authors from the past couple of years, and this is one of his best books. Rarely, in the newly bur­geon­ing field of sin­gu­lar­ity related SF, do you see any­thing pos­i­tive. We’re destroyed or irrev­o­ca­bly trans­formed or frac­tion­ated or herded into easily man­age­able groups. It’s always a dis­as­ter. MacLeod thinks dif­fer­ently. In his future, we’ve sur­vived, Sin­gu­lar­ity is a chronic but tractable infec­tion and mankind has spread to the stars in a big, big way. You can see human space for light years as the stars go green with life. Megas­truc­tures of truly aston­ish­ing scale are mooted. Travel tubes between solar sys­tems? Why not? Immor­tal­ity? Old hat. In my opin­ion this is one of the best visions I’ve seen of a human­ity truly tri­umphant over dumb matter, not hud­dling in tiny colonies on hos­tile world, fight­ing grim, use­less bat­tles with incom­pre­hen­si­bly alien stand-​​ins for earthly foes. Not here. Space is too big and too rich to fight over. Plan­ets are pleas­ant places to evolve and grow up, but a mature civ­i­liza­tion has too much on the move to be both­ered with such lim­i­ta­tions. Throw in an inter­est­ing first con­tact story cum detec­tive tale and you’ve got one hell of a novel.

The Summer Isles, By Ian R. MacLeod

Our second MacLeod, Ian, is a gifted writer. He lacks some of the spec­u­la­tive brio of many other promi­nent SF writ­ers, but he has a true gift for evok­ing atmos­phere, and that’s usu­ally enough. He’s much like Gene Wolfe in that respect, which is high praise. I’m actu­ally not sure whether I’ve read this or not. I’ve read the story of the same name in one of his other col­lec­tions, but it looks like this has been extended out to the length of a short novel, so it’s quite likely that I’ve only read part of it. In any case, it’s very inter­est­ing, a story of an Eng­land that lost WWI and went fas­cist imme­di­ately (rather than wait­ing for Thatcher), and there are many par­al­lels with early Nazi Ger­many, as is stan­dard. The story left me want­ing to know more, so I’ll have to pick up the novel if indeed it’s been extended. Although it looks like it’s going to be an expen­sive book to come by.

Count­ing Heads, By David Marusek

Count­ing Heads, at first, looks like it’s going to be as packed with won­der­ful and bizarre spec­u­la­tion as Stross’s Accelerando, but there are long gaps in the pace of inno­va­tion and there are pacing issues where Marusek seems to just settle down to actu­ally tell the story that’s going on here, and doesn’t quite achieve the bal­ance that he’s look­ing for. I liked it, don’t get me wrong, but it seems a story unfin­ished and one that never quite pays off fully. David Marusek is a fuck­ing crack­er­jack short story writer, and I’m look­ing for­ward to the fol­lowup, as hope­fully he’ll get more com­fort­able with the form and start crank­ing out some incred­i­ble novels.

Mind­scan, By Robert J. Sawyer

Didn’t read this one. Never been a huge fan of Sawyer’s, and the book didn’t really seem all that inter­est­ing to me, as it seems to me that a lot of the issues therein have been richly addressed in the past.

Accelerando, By Charles Stross

Hard to say any­thing about this one that hasn’t already been said, but that never stopped me before. A string of novel­las fix-​​uped into a novel with, as far as I could tell, very little alter­ation. Explo­sively inven­tive to the point that it’s hard to follow occa­sion­ally, as people change and mutate and are manip­u­lated by a weakly god­like feline AI. Even if all of the sto­ries aren’t great and it doesn’t really hang together all that well as a cohe­sive novel, this should be required read­ing if you really want to know what’s pos­si­ble and what’s going on in SF today.

The World Before, By Karen Traviss

I’ve not gotten to this one yet. I thought that City of Pearl, the first book in the tril­ogy of which The World Before is the third novel, was pretty good, and very inter­est­ing as a first novel. Traviss isn’t push­ing a ton of bound­aries, but she’s a good writer and draws inter­est­ing and sym­pa­thetic characters.

Spin, by Robert Charles Wilson

I avoided Robert Charles Wilson for years because I con­fused him with Robert Anton Wilson, author of the Illu­mi­na­tus! books. Oh lordy was I wrong. Once I real­ized that, I read every­thing of his that I could get my hands on. Wilson is a fine, fine writer of prose, and never fails to tackle Big Ideas. Some­times he fails, but that’s a good thing. His forte seems to be track­ing in great and telling detail the reac­tions of humans to events quite beyond their ken. A truly enjoy­able read and one that only lets you down a little when the ending doesn’t quite live up to the promise of the start, but you don’t really care because the writ­ing is too won­der­ful to regret.

Evan’s Hope­ful Predicitons:

1. Learn­ing the World

2. Spin

3. Accelerando

Evan’s Cyn­i­cal Predictions:

1. Mind­scan

2. Spin

3. Seeker

Also, I note that I’ve been linked to by Jeremy, which means that there might be more than just two or three of you out there now (gotta love RSS read­ers). Just as a note, I close com­ments because I don’t have time to deal the the com­ment spam, nor do I have the time to learn the ins and outs of wordpress’s spam reduc­tions mech­a­nisms. How­ever, I always enjoy get­ting feed­back and hear­ing what other people have to say about the issues that I’m address­ing. There’s an email con­tact link at the bottom of the page (obfus­cated a tad for spam­mers, but simple enough), and I’d love to hear from you.

Living Next Door to the God of Love, by Justina Robson

Ignor­ing the mis­step that was Nat­ural His­tory (it wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t as good as this one or Silver Screen), every­thing that Robson does seems to get both weirded and better. I am avidly await­ing her next novel. Really, go out and read this one, and pick up Silver Screen while you’re there.

Macro­life, by George Zebrowski

Pyr con­fuses me. On one hand, they pub­lish things like Silver Screen and River of Gods, the latter of which is easily one of the best SF novels to have come out in the last couple of years (I’ll talk about this one more in the con­text of the Camp­bell jury prize nom­i­nees). On the other hand, the spent part of their budget bring­ing back Macro­life, which, while it isn’t by any means a hor­ri­ble book, and is in fact filled with many wild and won­der­ful ideas, I’d rather have just read a pam­phlet of the ideas and skipped the bull­shit cozy cat­a­stro­phe story about an Amer­i­can immi­grant dynasty (we’re still pretty white-​​bread), who acci­den­tally destroy the world and then make good anyway. The second sec­tion is equally painful story wise, but you’re already past the new ideas until the third part, so what you get is some hand wring­ing about the First World’s aban­don­ment of the Third World and then a jus­ti­fi­ca­tion that it would hinder growth too much to stop and help every­one (anyone?) else out, and to stop grow­ing is to die, etc. Admit­tedly, this came out when I was a year old, so per­haps I’m miss­ing some his­tor­i­cal con­text, or things have changed in the interim, but top this off with an aston­ish­ingly grat­ing intro, and you’re left with a book that has some great ideas that are accom­pa­nied with a more inter­est­ing set­ting and much better writ­ing in Iain M. Banks’ Cul­ture novels.

The Overnight, by Ramsay Campbell

This is the first horror novel that I’ve read in a while (mean­ing around ten years). Incred­i­bly creepy and atmos­pheric, but tends to rely on the same tricks over and over again. Ulti­mately, it ends up being incred­i­bly grim. Worth it for the creep out at the time, though.

Vision­ary in Res­i­dence, by Bruce Sterling

For my money, the best of cyber­punk to come out of the orig­i­nal move­ment (sto­ries aside) in the ‘80s were Schiz­ma­trix, Vacuum Flow­ers and Count Zero (flame away). Ever since then, Bruce Ster­ling has been jerk­ing me around. Time to re-​​re-​​re-​​read A Good Old-​​Fashioned Future or Holy Fire. Chair­man Omniver­i­tas has not deliv­ered today.

The Voyage of the Sable Keech, by Neal Asher

I am a shame­less Asher fanboy. Read The Skin­ner read it all! NOWNOWNOW!!one1

The Bone­hunters, by Stephen Erikson

I’m not usu­ally a fan of the huge, never-​​ending fan­tasy sagas. So it is with vast embar­rass­ment that I admit that I bought this at great expense as soon as Bor­der­lands imported me a copy from the UK and I enjoyed it very much, thank you.

The Ghost Brigades, by John Scalzi

I’m wait­ing for The Lost Colony before I write about this whole sequence. Fun read­ing. I think that, while the antecedents to this and Old Man’s War are fairly plain, people do Scalzi a dis­ser­vice my com­par­ing him with Hein­lein. Mouth­piece char­ac­ters and wish ful­fil­ment sex are pretty much nowhere to be seen. I have the feel­ing that Scalzi, is one of those writ­ers who is pretty good but makes a mas­sive, mid-​​career jump upwards in qual­ity (good->awesome), must like Vernor Vinge with A Fire Upon the Deep (you should read that too, post upcom­ing, even­tu­ally). I don’t know why I get this feel­ing, but there, I’ve said it.

Ring of Swords, by Eleanor Arnason

I enjoyed this, but I cannot claim to be totally con­vinced by her argu­ment and or analy­sis of sex rela­tions. She seems to avoid all of the inter­est­ing stuff that’s referred to in the novel. Although it all makes sense on the level of story, it often fails to excite.

The Etched City, by K. J. Bishop

I’m assum­ing that Bishop is part of the whole inter­sti­tial fic­tion crowd and this may or may not be true. Regard­less, her stuff reads like their stuff, but while most of it leaves me cold, I quite liked this one. It put me in mind of One Hun­dred Years of Soli­tude. It’s stuffed full of gor­geous descrip­tion and telling details and calami­tous and incom­pre­hen­si­ble actions. What you were look­ing for if you were thrilled, then dis­ap­pointed by Veniss Under­ground

Dark­land, by Liz Williams

I am also a Liz Williams fanboy. She can do no wrong. You should buy ten copies of every­thing she’s ever writ­ten and give all but one copy of each to people that you know.

God­play­ers, by Damien Broderick

Meh. Kind of a less morally ambigu­ous update of Play­ers at the Game of People. Feels… I dunno, smug. Brod­er­ick isn’t nearly as clever or as orig­i­nal as he seems to think he is. I’d give it a miss.

Dusk, by Tim Lebbon

My first encounter with Tim Lebbon. Quite good, but I’m think­ing that I’ll have to wait for the con­tin­u­a­tion before I can make any calls about where this is really going. John Clute says it better and more ellip­ti­cally than I can in this brief space. I’m anx­iously wait­ing for the sequel, but for right now, I’m going to dig through his appar­ently fan­tas­tic back cat­a­logue (because I don’t already have enough books on the To Read shelf).

Read­ing Currently:

Double Vision, by Tricia Sullivan

Recently Read:

Living Next Door to the God of Love, by Justina Robson

Macro­life, by George Zebrowski

The Overnight, by Ramsay Campbell

London Revenant, by Conrad Williams

Vision­ary in Res­i­dence, by Bruce Sterling

The Voyage of the Sable Keech, by Neal Asher

The Bone­hunters, by Stephen Erikson

The Ghost Brigades, by John Scalzi

Ring of Swords, by Eleanor Arnason

The Etched City, by K. J. Bishop

Dark­land, by Liz Williams

God­play­ers, by Damien Broderick

Dusk, by Tim Lebbon

On the To-​​Read Shelf:

A * means par­tially read.

The Pres­tige, by Christo­pher Priest

The Sep­a­ra­tion, by Christo­pher Priest

The Female Man,* by Joanna Russ

The Game Play­ers of Titan, by Philip K. Dick

Radio Free Albe­muth, by Philip K. Dick

World­wired, by Eliz­a­beth Bear

The Facts of Life, by Graham Joyce

The Demon Princes books 3 – 5, by Jack Vance

Ignit­ing the Reaches,* by David Drake

Mid­nighters book 1, by Scott Westerfeld

The Dark Beyond the Stars, by Frank M Robinson

Wild Things,* by Charles Cole­man Finlay

The Prodi­gal Troll, by Charles Cole­man Finlay

City Come a Walkin’, by John Shirley

A Fire in the Sun, by Alec Effinger

Effendi, by John Courte­nay Grimwood

Predator’s Gold by Philip Reeve

Cas­tles Made of Sand, by Gwyneth Jones

Life,* by Gwyneth Jones

The City of Saints and Madmen, by Jeff Vandermeer

The Lost Dis­trict,* by Joel Lane

King of Morn­ing, Queen of Day,* by Ian McDonald

Cross­ing the Line, by Karen Traviss

A Quan­tum Murder,* by Peter F. Hamilton

Con­text by John Meany

Spares, by Michael Mar­shall Smith

Bad Volt­age, by Jonathan Littell

The Ghost Sister, by Liz Williams

Moth­er­ship, by John Brosnan

The City, Not Long After, by Pat Murphy

Also about six months of F&SF and Asimov’s.

I really do. Sadly, most of his work, save for the quite good but not nearly the best Bones of the Earth, are out of print. This is a crime. So there will be little link­ing in this post, because there’s really noth­ing to link to. Go to your used book­store to seek this stuff out, or check online.

His nov­el­is­tic career began with In the Drift which is an ambigu­ous little book about fanati­cism in a post-​​apocalyptic land­scape, set close to home (he lives in Philadel­phia). Three Mile Island has melted down and poi­soned the land­scape. Weird Things Happen. It’s his first novel. I read it a long time ago and it didn’t leave much of a mark.

He hits his stride with Vacuum Flow­ers, a novel writ­ten at more or less the height of cyber­punk, but more full of more inter­est­ing ideas than any­thing other than per­haps Schi­ma­trix, by Bruce Ster­ling (you should read that, too). Swan­wick explores here what it might mean for human­ity when the brain is a known quan­tity. Earth, the planet, has been lost to Earth, the hive mind, know as the Com­prise. Every­one else lives in space, because speed of light jitter keeps Earth from branch­ing out too far. The story revolves around a Mys­te­ri­ous Qual­ity held by the by the implanted per­son­al­ity of the view­point char­ac­ter. To figure it out, every­one and their dog and their run­away planet will Stop At Noth­ing to get a hold of her and cut up her brain to figure it out. She runs and she hides, and therein lies the real show. You, the reader, get an awe­some guided tour of the sur­vivor state left by the birth of god, where people change per­son­al­i­ties like clothes and make deals with the devil (Earth again) to make their dead­lines. You meet a man with per­haps the most inter­est­ing case of self-​​inflicted mul­ti­ple per­son­al­i­ties com­mit­ted to the page. Tyler Durden really has noth­ing on Wyeth. The char­ac­ters here are weird, as Swan­wick is in full bore Oth­er­ing mode, forc­ing the reader to try and under­stand the expe­ri­ences of people whose lives are barely com­pre­hen­si­ble if you stop to think about them, which, given the short length and rapid pace of the novel, you’re rarely inclined to do. For all that, they’re warm and human and you care about them, although you might not entirely under­stand their con­cerns. After all, these are people who alter and replace bits of their minds like the char­ac­ters in a Warren Ellis comic treat their limbs and sexual organs.

From there, we take a mighty leap for­wards time and upwards in vision and style to Sta­tions of the Tide. The book won the Nebula for best novel in 1991, apro­pos of noth­ing, other than that it’s out of print now, which, to repeat myself, is a crime against all that’s good and pleas­ant in the world. The nar­ra­tive details the jour­ney of an name­less bureau­crat sent by the Depart­ment of Tech­nol­ogy Trans­fer to recover some poten­tially stolen tech­nol­ogy on the sur­face of an embar­goed world called Miranda, where the natives may or may not be sen­tient, and they may or may not be extinct, and most all of the ani­mals have an aquatic for and a form for land, because the unex­plained Jubilee Tides over­whelm most of the world every so often. The book notably con­tains many nods to pre­vi­ous works of sci­ence fic­tion, which hon­estly are its weak­est point. The real meat of the story con­cerns the bureaucrat’s inter­nal jour­ney towards under­stand­ing his and his Department’s role the hinted-​​at inter­stel­lar polity which pro­vides the frame for the story. Earth is men­tioned only once, but sig­nif­i­cantly. The major­ity of his story is couched in the chaotic fin de siecle ambiance with some­thing of the rot­ting glam­our of New Orleans as it’s often seen in lit­er­a­ture com­bined with the wild west enthu­si­asm of a dying town where law and order have gen­er­ally already packed up left. I am com­pletely fail­ing to cap­ture here how thor­oughly and con­vinc­ingly Swan­wick estab­lishes and main­tains this atmos­phere. Every detail, from the most mun­dane to the almost painfully sur­real, helps to fur­ther embed the reader into the weave of the story. Again, the trip is the thing, here. The solu­tion to the cen­tral mys­tery is almost sec­ondary by the time you reach it, for you are enthralled first and fore­most with the bureaucrat’s inter­nal crisis and debate over a change of direc­tion. Sta­tions of the Tide is def­i­nitely one of the better SF books writ­ting in the last 20 years, and would be on any of the lists I keep threat­en­ing to com­pile about what you should read.

The Iron Dragon’s Daugh­ter looks like it’s get­ting a hard­cover re-​​release some­time this year. This is a good thing, but hon­estly it’s more than a little weird, as this isn’t a book that’s easy to market. There’s no cover image yet, and I imag­ine that it’ll be at least as bad as the cover for Neal Asher’s The Skin­ner. As always, I’m totally will­ing to be proved wrong, but the cur­rent trend seems to point to covers that get worse and worse and worse and worse. Expect a sep­a­rate post about that soon. Anyway. I can’t imag­ine how they’re going to market this, except as a small release so that all of us who have ratty paper­back copies can buy some­thing that might last more than another read­ing or two. It’s awfully weird and won­der­ful, empha­sis on the weird, I sup­pose, for the gen­eral reader. There’s a seam­less meld­ing here of celtic inspired fan­tasy, con­tem­po­rary fic­tion and sci­ence fic­tion. You never really get a clear idea of just how seri­ously the book is taking itself. It’s been quite a while since I’ve read it, because my copy has been passed from hand to hand to hand and it isn’t quite clear where it’s set­tled. I’ll re-​​read it soon, and per­haps update. It wasn’t as much to my taste as Sta­tions of the Tide, but it’s huge and enter­tain­ing and filled to burst­ing with won­der­ful ideas and rich characters.

To be honest, I’m doing Swan­wick a dis­ser­vice by focus­ing on his novels, as excel­lent as they are. Some, per­haps most, of his best work is at shorter lenghts, and there are a couple of North Atlantic Books short story col­lec­tions of his work, two of which are still avail­able. Tales of Old Earth and Gravity’s Angels, if you live some­where with­out a decent local book­store who can do spe­cial orders for you. To be honest, I don’t own either of them, but I should and will and I feel that I can rec­om­mend them to you with­out reser­va­tion, as Swanwick’s short sto­ries are gen­er­ally excel­lent and it’s pretty mag­nif­i­cent to be able to pick up most of his short sto­ries for less than 25 dol­lars. And remem­ber, kids, when you’re short of cash, your local library will often sur­prise you with the breadth of its offerings.

Also worth check­ing out is his web­site, which is full of neat stuff.

For all of the longer posts on this site, I use emacs as a text editor (refill-​​mode is your friend). How­ever, if you’re using Word­Press, which has some sort of wonky rich text editor on by default, the hard coded breaks tend to cause some prob­lems. My sug­ges­tion is to turn off the rich text editor (which I don’t feel is all that help­ful, you might think dif­fer­ently), which at the very bottom of the page when you click on the Users tab of your admin page, and down­load, install and acti­vate the php-​​markdown plugin. It’s a world of improve­ment once you get used to the mark­down syntax, which shouldn’t take long at all.

There are two M. John Har­ri­son novels that you should read, more or less imme­di­ately, if you haven’t. The Cen­tauri Device and Light. It’s an invest­ment though, since Cen­tauri Device is only avail­able in a Gol­lancz (UK) SF Mas­ter­works edi­tion, so if you’re inter­ested, read his story Tourism here, or in your copy of years best SF 22, which of course you own. If you like that, then the invest­ment is worth it. That said, some people have hated the story and then loved the books, so your mileage may vary. It doesn’t really matter, though, because if you don’t love M. John Har­ri­son, you’re a bad person. Fun­da­men­tally and with­out question.

I’d read _​Light_​ before, a couple of years ago, on the strength of a rec­om­men­da­tion by some­one, though I can’t recall who, although it was prob­a­bly Jeremy Lassen, book pimp and co-​​owner of [Night­shade Books](http://nightshadebooks.com). Cheated a little, and bought the UK edi­tion cheap out of Canada, since it wasn’t coming out here for ages. I thought that it was great then, but the qual­i­ties of the book didn’t really stick with me that first time. I kept rec­om­mend­ing the book to people who would never read it unless I loaned it to them, which, I think, is how I lost my first copy. It’s out there some­where, unless I got it from the library. That time period is a bit hazy with bore­dom and frus­tra­tion. In any case, I bought it again the other day with­out hes­i­ta­tion. Har­ri­son both is and isn’t one of my favorite writ­ers, but mostly is. He writes about losers, mostly, and not the cute, cuddly kind that you can feel well about when they make good at the end, such as you might find in vin­tage Gibson and Ster­ling. Most of the people in his novels are sad fig­ures with mas­sive flaws as vis­i­ble and obvi­ous as sup­pu­rat­ing sores, who gen­er­ally manage to fuck up every­one around them in the long run, both their friends and their ene­mies, and in Harrison’s work, these cat­e­gories are ter­ri­bly fun­gi­ble. So, losers, kicked around by forces that they can nei­ther affect nor ulti­mately com­pre­hend and being pushed towards some end that we cannot see or antic­i­pate, with the reader barely stuck in place by a mix­ture of charis­matic char­ac­ter­i­za­tion and the sick fas­ci­na­tion that rivets your atten­tion to an acci­dent in progress. It sounds a lot like the over­ar­ch­ing themes of the cyber­punks, really and would be fairly flat at this point were not Har­ri­son one of the better writ­ers work­ing today.

It’s inter­est­ing to com­pare the two books side by side. They were writ­ten in more or less the same milieu about twenty nine years apart. Har­ri­son has writ­ten little else in this par­tic­u­lar set­ting, but I think that he must think about it, now and then, because the uni­verse that we wander into in The Cen­tauri Device is rough, still a little just off the rack, and the world in Light is an old but sturdy thing, many-​​patched and full of details and utterly com­fort­able to wear. Device is told through a smudged lens, its nar­ra­tor utterly reli­able but whose deep sym­pa­thies his char­ac­ters and for the story that he’s telling come through very clearly. Light doesn’t avail itself of unre­li­able tech­niques either, and it’s nar­ra­tive voice couldn’t be more neu­tral, but it almost seems as if the back­ing behind the story has slipped, the ontol­ogy under­neath itself become unre­li­able. You might think that I’m speak­ing of Dick­ian onto­log­i­cal riffs, but it isn’t really that. Real­ity in Light is just as banal as in the phe­nom­e­nal uni­verse, it’s just less… con­crete. By look­ing, you find, even if what you’re look­ing for wasn’t there to be dis­cov­ered when you started look­ing. It seems to me to be quan­tum theory taken as both nar­ra­tive ethos and as a force deeply tied to the observer, whomever there is to observe. Every method of going faster than light is pos­si­ble, if you try it. The uni­verse spawns anx­ious, grand­moth­erly ghosts from our unease and gawky aliens from our frus­tra­tion at our own awk­ward­nesses. The three inter­lock­ing sto­ries tease the reader, worry at their own coher­ence con­stantly. The uni­verse is tired and out­sider­ish, more than will­ing to play these nasty little jokes endlessly.

The Cen­tauri Device is full of poetic graces and the inten­tion­ally harsh enjamb­ments of sense words with exquis­itely mis­tuned mod­i­fiers that the cyber­punks would later call ‘crammed prose’. There’s an excite­ment to it, a sense that there are new things to be done here, on this par­tic­u­lar overtrod path. It’s a young man’s book and a book mired deep in the cold war, one pri­mary tenet being that there’s a third nation of the sick and the tired who are weary of the war which is their envi­ron­ment entire. This doesn’t, I think, decrease its rel­e­vance, for all that the Cold War has been over for all of my adult life. There’s always a mas­sive con­flict with which you are periph­er­ally involved that and you yearn for it to be over, no matter which side pre­vails. Backed up by the strength of the writ­ing and the a sci­ence fic­tional back­ground which refuses to take itself seri­ously. And it’s funny. I mean, what more can you ask for?

Light is a dif­fer­ent matter entirely. You’ll laugh, sure, but there’s a grim­ness here that a few laughs cannot over­come. The char­ac­ter in Device were more lov­able losers than the ones here, with the pos­si­ble excep­tion of Chi­nese Ed. A sense of fatal­ism and inevitabil­ity over­hangs and cannot be dis­lodged. You get the feel­ing that when a char­ac­ter is less that well rounded, that it is inten­tional. They’re flat because they have noth­ing more to offer the world than they offer their reader. They are simply what they are and it isn’t enough. The writ­ing, which is always impor­tant to con­sider, when you’re speak­ing of Har­ri­son, because his plots do not alway enliven and his char­ac­ters, while well limned, make you want to be sick most of the time, the writ­ing is more under­stated, with­out the shim­mer and the bounce and it doesn’t force your atten­tion here and there, but you never forget that it’s there. By ‘modern’ stan­dard of mimetic writ­ing, I sup­pose that it’s some­thing of a fail­ure, because occa­sion­ally you’ll find your­self pulled out of the story and forced to re-​​read a line or or a choice phrase just because it’s so good. But I’ve never held with the theory that writ­ing should be a pane through which a scene is viewed. That par­tic­u­lar pile of horse­shit has led to more boring writ­ing about imag­ined affairs than I care to recall, and I gen­er­ally shy away from main­stream lit­er­ary fic­tion. Writ­ing should suit the story and Light man­ages this effort­lessly and admirably.

Both books have warts, and their sub­ject matter isn’t exactly what many people will pick up for plea­sure read­ing. They’re quite weird in a lot of ways, and their gaze is obses­sive. They’re worth read­ing, though, with­out any sort of doubt at all. I rec­om­mend them to every­one (although a lot of people are stopped dead by the first chap­ter of Light, but you should press on). They are not art that com­forts, but they can be learned from.

The rich text edit box for Firefox/​Linux fuck­ing sucks. Anyone know how to turn it off in WordPress?

The idea is to write some­thing that can per­sis­tently store values for appli­ca­tions where a data­base is overkill.

I sup­pose, ulti­mately, that my com­plaint isn’t with data­bases as an idea, it’s more with SQL and with their ubiq­uity and phi­los­o­phy. the Berke­ley data­base system is kind of like what I’m think­ing of, archi­tec­turally, but I would like to allow both net­work and memory access to the data­base as well as allow­ing more dynamic query­ing of that Berke­ley allows, but keep­ing the speed of some­thing like BDB as much as pos­si­ble. Also, it would be nice to see just how simple and prim­i­tive I can make the system, so it can be applied to as many prob­lem domains as pos­si­ble. In the end, it would be nice to have writ­ten some­thing so simple and gen­eral that it’s quite easy to write a simple layer to get this system to act just like a SQL, Object, or Berke­ley database.

Abstract.

Essen­tially there are a couple of stan­dard, built-​​in types, from which all other types can be con­structed, up to and includ­ing objects. It should be easy, at the end, to write a very thin layer for things like per­sis­tence of C++ or Python objects, but that isn’t the main goal. The main goal is to have a super quick and low resource server where you can store/​retrieve data. Some­thing like object preva­lence layers for simple types, but a tad more robust (i.e. with built in net­work­ing and smart to-​​disk streaming).

The whole idea comes from hating data­bases and think­ing that SQL sucks, so I’m not going to write any sup­port for the most ‘advanced’ fea­tures of those sys­tems. It’s overkill and really a bit too slow for a lot of high per­for­mance usage, and it makes it dif­fi­cult to detect errors at run­time with­out a lot of expen­sive string pars­ing. There will be a per-​​thread errno and a ps_​perror() which will explain, clearly, what went wrong, so the pro­gram using the store will be able to react appropriately.

Details.

Types:

• byte is the basic stor­age type. Any­thing can be expressed as an array of bytes, except per­haps booleans, which are a spe­cial case that I’m not really inter­ested in sup­port­ing. although this will be the only type that’s defined at base level, there will be sev­eral ‘typedef-​​ed’ types avail­able at the user level and for pro­gram­ming convenience
• int: name of a class of types includ­ing s8, u6, s16, u16, s32, u32, s64, u64, etc.. stored in a machine inde­pen­dent order that be the same as net­work order so we don’t have to trans­late them for send­ing over the wire, so can just send them out with­out trans­lat­ing the order.
• strings: arrays of bytes meant for hold­ing char­ac­ters. There will be sub­types for Uni­code strings as well. strings over a cer­tain size (1k or so) will be com­pressed by default.
• blobs: basi­cally strings with no implied struc­ture. an ordered array of unsigned bytes (or words, if that’s faster). also com­pressed by default.
• dates: a spe­cial type of u64 with some assumed infor­ma­tion about the con­tent, which will be the number of sec­onds from the stan­dard Unix epoch.
• han­dles: a spe­cial type of u64 which refers to another object known about by the same server. These han­dles are per­ma­nent and unique, and used for fast access to stored data.

Com­pres­sion and other speed stuff:

• going to use libLZF, because, as the author says, it’s essen­tially free on modern CPUs. All items will be stored in mar­shalled, com­pressed for­mats so that once they’re located in memory or on disk they can be sent or copied immediately.
• when the server and the client are run­ning on the same machine, the client library should trans­par­ently move to faster ipc meth­ods than send­ing pack­ets over the loop­back inter­face. oth­er­wise, the client side should just use sock­ets to talk to the server.
• chat­ter between the client and the server should be in a highly opti­mized binary format.
• not sure about threaded .vs event driven. will at least need some form of thread­ing so that network/​IPC speed doesn’t lead to block­ing on query fetches.
• the entire store set will be mmaped by default. This really isn’t meant to take more than a couple of gigs of data, and the entire work­ing set should be stor­able in memory. This is easy to get around, though. Most of the huge data­bases that I’ve heard of are stor­ing giant binary blobs, which you can work around by just writ­ing them out as files and then stor­ing the file handle, and using already in place raid and backup mech­a­nisms for safety, since I don’t think that stor­ing this stuff in a data­base vs. stor­ing it on a file system buys you much.

Access:

• Should be able to define new types from prim­i­tive types on the client side. not sure whether this should happen on the client or server side. could just happen on the client side and then get trans­ferred over to the server into a spe­cial store.
• queries are a sticky issue. not really inter­ested in pro­vid­ing joins or other advanced and gen­er­ally less useful-​​that-​​you-​​think data­base fea­tures. The idea here is that CMS of some sort should be able to be imple­mented with­out all of the pain of set­ting up and tuning a data­base, although, ulti­mately it stems from my desire to write MMO server sys­tems that don’t use data­bases. Not that I do that for a living, but, hey, a man can dream.
• a store call on the client side, if suc­cess­ful, should return an 8-​​byte handle (drawn from a pool of han­dles that are basi­cally u64 inte­gers). This should allow for space effec­tive client side caching of fetched information.
• labels will also be allowed, which will allow a-​​list type access for search­ing for han­dles that you don’t know about. unla­beled items will not have a space in the store’s label hash, and cannot be searched for, except in rela­tion to struc­tures that hold the handle for those objects.
• edit­ing struc­tures to have new mem­bers and migrat­ing all of the cur­rent data over should be easy, although it might be space expen­sive. There are a lot of issues here that would be best addressed after the process of writ­ing the app has started, though, so it isn’t entirely useful to spec­u­late on it now.
• trans­ac­tions and other func­tion­al­ity can be sim­u­lated by request­ing locks. I don’t want to build this in, really, as I think that it’s an incor­rect assump­tion that every­thing will need to be accessed by mul­ti­ple clients. Stores may or may not be atomic by default, I’ve yet to decide.
• rela­tional store/​fetch (rela­tional in terms of struc­ture) should be easy.
• free­ing memory allo­cated by the client is always the caller’s responsibility.
• finally, named stores, which I feel that I should men­tion since I’m trying to be exhaus­tive, though it would seem intuitive.

Exam­ples:

• The client cre­ates (or per­haps has pre­de­fined) a struc­ture called ‘char­ac­ter’. This struc­ture has sev­eral mem­bers and goes in a store of the same name. Each of the mem­bers, e.g. hp, class, mana, his­tory, etc., will be a handle to some value in another store. So you would then be able to do a fetch(char_store_handle, “label”, &character_​struct); and the client library would, if it returns with­out error, fetch all of the infor­ma­tion about that char­ac­ter and mutate the character_​struct struc­ture with the infor­ma­tion that it fetches. It would then store the handle for fast store access when it needs to update or delete that structure.
• if the client wanted to sort all of the char­ac­ters on the server by max_​hp, say, it would then call a multi item fetch on the char­ac­ter store, grab­bing the character’s name and the handle of the asso­ci­ated value within the max_​hp store. from there, how you get to the data, sort it and then present it are up to you, on the theory that opti­miz­ing code is easier than opti­miz­ing data­base queries.