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.