association-list

This paper is pos­si­bly the grimmest thing that I’ve read about com­puter sci­ence in years, and covers a lot of why I think that work­ing in the indus­try is boring and a lot of why I haven’t gone back to grad school. I don’t agree with all of it, though, and the sug­ges­tions aren’t really sug­ges­tions, more ‘just do the right thing already’ bitch­ing that doesn’t really get any­thing done. Of course, I don’t have the answers either, or I’d be pur­su­ing them. A lot of the trends that he’s pointed out have been con­tin­u­ing. There are pre­cious few new and inter­est­ing OSes out there, and the ones that there are don’t seem to get any trac­tion. It’s impos­si­ble to market a totally novel chip archi­tec­ture. Even Intel can’t manage it and there is no one in the world with more lever­age or money to spend on get­ting people to adopt and write soft­ware for some­thing. An enor­mous amount of money is spent devel­op­ing deeper and deeper emu­la­tion and vir­tu­al­iza­tion layers to get the stuff that we already have to work on new sys­tems and chips. The issue is that all of it is fun­da­men­tally boring. The OS and appli­ca­tions chicken and egg prob­lem is huge, and it’s likely to grow, with no end in sight. I think that if you asked most people today what the answer is, they’d likely say the web, which is pos­si­ble. If most appli­ca­tions are deliv­ered that way, then a new system really only needs a few appli­ca­tions: a win­dow­ing system, a C com­piler, a text editor and a web browser. This might allow for some inter­est­ing new oper­at­ing sys­tems to sprout up and make the cost of migra­tion between them lower, which is always a good thing. How­ever, it also reduces the urge to inno­vate or adopt new sys­tems, since most of what you’re doing is all on the web anyway, and if your system is good enough, there’s little real ben­e­fit to adopt­ing a new system.

Which brings us to the crux of the issue, which is pri­mar­ily that there are few new prob­lems that we’re trying to solve with com­put­ers. I can’t, off the top of my head, think of a new CS prob­lem that I’ve heard people talk­ing about. Ubi­comp, maybe, but most of the things that I’ve heard of as appli­ca­tions for it are just retreads of older things. There’s still a lot of inter­est in the old ones, and there are a lot of prob­lems yet to be solved, but there aren’t a whole lot of actual new topics. Noth­ing new under the sun? Maybe, but I feel like there must be some­thing that we’re miss­ing, whole cat­e­gories of new things that one can do with com­put­ers other than making better web servers at the top end and better web browsers at the bottom end.

I’m get­ting tired of hear­ing about them. Yes, they suck. How­ever, it’s triv­ial, from what I under­stand, to defeat people who want to scan them with­out your per­mis­sion. Just carry the damned thing around in a wallet woven with copper wires, or a solid case made out of some some con­duc­tive metal. You’d think that after two hun­dred and sev­enty years, more people would have heard of Fara­day cages. That said, we shouldn’t have to bother, but if the gov­ern­ment is going to go on about their idiot quest to make us less safe through ill-​​considered tech­no­log­i­cal ini­tia­tives and point­less wars of agres­sion, then we should do more than just wring our hands and make our­selves mar­tyrs to other people’s idiocy. I mean, sure, most people won’t figure out about it and might just get taken advan­tage of because they’re easily iden­ti­fi­able. Me? I’m gonna hang around in foriegn air­ports with a bag of the afore­men­tioned cases and wal­lets and a scan­ner. Sell them to tourists on their way out into the big bad world along with pam­phlets about how to pass your­self off as a native of Toronto.

I have to pref­ace this by admit­ting that I’m a Stross fanboy. As much as I love well writ­ten prose and poetic turns of phrase and those per­fect, telling details, I’m also a sucker for Big Think SF, even when it isn’t car­ried in the most excel­let prose pos­si­ble. Not that Stross isn’t a good word­smith. He’s too smart to write badly, but if there’s music there, it’s the harsh, angu­lar music of out of con­trol tech­nol­ogy, the strange beauty of found sound and rip­ping syn­thetic bass. That said, this is his fourth written-​​to-​​be-​​a-​​novel novel, and he’s improv­ing each time. I don’t think that he’ll ever be a Wolfe or a Swan­wick, but he’s get­ting much better as time goes on, and I have con­fi­dence that these big ideas will even­tu­ally be con­tained within some pow­er­ful prose.

This novel starts off with a mas­sive infu­sion of the strange. A post-​​person, pro­saically named Robin, comes out of memory redac­tion con­fused and lost, more miss­ing than some­one would usu­ally go for when they need a new start on things. It seems that there’s been a war, and that people all over are for­get­ting things the only way they know how, which is having big chunks of the war edited out of their minds. The setup seems a bit idiot-​​plot to me, they early romance too easy and the fact that people are trying to forget a war where their mem­o­ries were mauled against their will by edit­ing their own mem­o­ries is strange to me. I’d per­son­ally think that a cult of sacro­sanct per­son­al­i­ties would spring up, trap­ping people with ortho­hu­man mental archi­tec­tures to stag­nate under the ton­nage of their accu­mu­lated mem­o­ries for cen­turies to come, but I’m not the one writ­ing it and that’s not what the story is about.

So. There’s a story here, where Robin gets caught up in an exper­i­ment gone wrong, or rather an exper­i­ment aimed wrong gone right. He becomes she becomes Reeve, and things just get stranger from there. We get the whole war in these lovely flash­backs through­out the book. Stross seem­ingly paid a lot of atten­tion to struc­ture and voice in this, as he would have to because it is not a human novel, as we think of them. The voice changes here and there as the per­son­al­ity of the teller is changed by the body that he/​she wears and by some exter­nal­i­ties that I’ll not ruin for you. Suf­fice it to say that it’s very inter­est­ing and quite odd in places. You often hear sen­sawunda men­tioned when people are talk­ing about Stross and his sto­ries and books, and this is not done for no reason. He’s very, very good at man­ag­ing to tell inter­est­ing sto­ries about people whose expe­ri­ence we can barely com­pre­hend, since they’re so far out of the stan­dard human expe­ri­ence, which is some­thing that I always enjoy. There’s a thought through qual­ity to it as well, which is some­thing that I really appre­ci­ate, even if I don’t strictly require it. He’s put a lot of thought into these things, and it pays off. The book veers from deadly seri­ous to quite funny, often in the space of a sen­tence or two, but at least Stross has the sense to have his char­ac­ters tell bad jokes when there’s some­thing really awful going on, to high­light the fact that levity cannot defeat all.

I was fol­low­ing Stross’ blog at the time he was writ­ing this novel, and he knocked the damn thing out in less than a month. I bet his hands hurt after that one. But it also means that there’s a con­tinu­tity of thought and pur­pose here that’s lack­ing from Accelerando, his other outing in this future his­tory. Not that any­thing can hang together when you’re not sure that the nar­ra­tor is the same from scene to scene, since iden­tity is so utterly muta­ble. I think that it also makes for a more cohe­sive novel, since Stross was likely able to stuff the entire thing inside of his head, so the inter­con­nec­tions are denser and more intri­cate. There’s a lot going on here, and he more or less man­ages to keep all of the balls in the air. It doesn’t say as much as Accelerando tried to, but it says what it says better. Of all of his novels so far, I think that this one is the most suc­cess­ful, bar­ring The Atroc­ity Archive, which isn’t a novel, by length, but is pretty won­der­ful and funny and has just come out recently in trade paper­back and you should get that too.

Some com­ments on recent purchases.

Glasshouse by Charles Stross.

Longer review forth­com­ing. The long and the short of it: pos­si­bly Stross’ best to date. Go get it.

World­wired by Eliz­a­beth Bear.

The Chains That you Refuse by Eliz­a­beth Bear.

Blood & Iron by Eliz­a­beth Bear.

I really should write some­thing longer about Bear. The first one is OK so far, it’s a con­tin­u­a­tion of Ham­mered and Scar­down. I’m not a huge fan of this series, but it’s OK. That said, I liked it enough to pick up Chains (also, par­tially for the awe­some title), which is very good. Some­how I’ve man­aged to miss every­thing that Bear has done in the short form so far, and I’m glad that Night­shade has brought most of it together in one place. Highly rec­om­mended. I picked up the last because I was so impressed, and my esti­ma­tion of Bear only con­tin­ued to rise. I had trou­ble putting it down. I’m eagerly await­ing the next thing that Bear comes out with. Seeing as she’s gotten out five or so books in less than two years, I don’t think that I’ll have to wait long.

Zoot­suit Black by Jon George.

Just started this one, but already have some com­ments. George has a talent for some won­der­fully vivid scenes, but the level of polish so far is really, really uneven. He suf­fers greatly from info­dump­ism, and they’re not par­tic­u­larly grace­ful info­dumps. In fact, they’re kind of annoy­ing. I’ll see it through and likely com­ment again, but the writ­ing here is really rough in places. I’m hoping that it gets better now that most of the char­ac­ter intro­duc­tions are out of the way.

The Engi­neer Recon­di­tioned by Neal Asher.

More Asher. Asher has a blog now. And this book of short sto­ries con­tains some intro­duc­tions. The con­clu­sion that I take away from these small sam­ples of non-​​fiction that the man has writ­ten is that Asher is some­thing of a per­sonal respon­si­bil­ity guy, and by some­thing, I mean he hates it a lot when people abdi­cate any degree of per­sonal respon­si­bil­ity at all in any form what­so­ever. He’s also not enam­ored of the cur­rent UK gov­ern­ment. I don’t really blame him there, but I think that there are better rea­sons to dis­like them. Some­what uncon­ven­tion­ally, he also seems to hate reli­gion for much the same reason, which isn’t some­thing that you see a lot in Amer­ica, where people want you to be per­son­ally respon­si­ble so that their mas­sive com­pa­nies aren’t respon­si­ble for the damage that they do, and then turn around and tell you that you should also love Jesus and vote as your pastor tells you to. So, not all bad. And the short sto­ries are pretty good. There’s a lot of stuff here that falls out­side of his main Polity sto­ry­lines, not all of it great, but most of it very inter­est­ing. The title story, set in the Polity uni­verse but not quite worked in to where he’s taken it lately, takes up a good chunk of the book, and is quite good, giving a lot of info about the Jain and what might really be going on there.

Gravity’s Angels by Michael Swanwick.

Michael Swan­wick depresses me. The other short story col­lec­tion, this one from ear­lier in his career. Not quite as good, over­all, as Tales of Old Earth, but excel­lent all the same. Go get it.

Info­quake by David Edelman.

Not sure what to say about this one. The writ­ing is pedes­trian, the ideas are inter­est­ing, the his­tory seems unlikely, and the struc­ture is awk­ward. The char­ac­ters are OK. Two out of five isn’t really all that great. (note to self: strike the word ‘really’ from vocab­u­lary). Anyway, there’s some good stuff and some bad stuff here, as I’ve said. I think that a lot of my ambiva­lence after the fact stems from the fact that the book doesn’t really focus on the inter­est­ing things that he could be talk­ing about. We follow a weird, bril­liant, self-​​involved pro­tag­o­nist with some tragedy in his past, but he’s more or less a child of priv­ilige all the same. There are some inter­est­ing glimpses into the cor­ners of the world that he’s build­ing, but they’re just glimpses. And the giant macguf­fin that he’s build­ing us up to the whole time just isn’t all that inter­est­ing or rev­o­lu­tion­ary. I didn’t hate it, though. It just didn’t really speak to me.