association-list

Three down, fourteen to go. I think. This time, we mostly have stuff from people that I’ve read before. There are two standouts in this issue, John Kessel’s “Sunlight or Rock” and Jack Skillingstead’s “The Girl in the Empty Apartment”. Rucker’s “Postsingular” is entertaining, but there’s something that I just don’t get about Rucker. Perhaps we’re coming at SF from two entirely different angles. I mean, we’re both computer people, both, from what I’ve read of his non-fiction on guestblogging at various places, interested in much the same things. But there are two things that bother me about him, really. For Rucker, a story seems to be a string upon which to hang shiny bright ideas. The ideas might be fascinating, but without a really solid narrtive to drive them, they just seem unrestrained. Plus, I think that he problablty writes too fast, without enough thought as to what’s actually going on with the story and paying far too little attention to the music of his language. I don’t know. The ideas are great, no doubt, and there’s no lack of them. He’s kind of a soft edged, stoned out Charlie Stross in that way, I guess, although Charlie is better, usually, at putting a story together.

“Sunlight or Rock” is a story set on the moon, in a kind of down and out little place where captial is king and life is a little cheap and seedy. It follows on a another moon story of his that I read so long ago that I don’t really remember it. Or maybe I just think that I’ve read it, beacuse looking back, it was in 2002 and I wasn’t reading the magazines then. Maybe it was in the years best? I’ll have to look it up, I remember reading it for some reason. I blather (writing too fast). It’s about a kid struggling to survive without enough money or work far from home and without any real friends. It doesn’t have a proper, satisfying ending, and for the most part it all swings around sports betting, which I couldn’t care less about. At the same time, it’s well written and the tone of the story is excellent. There’s something to be said for stories that don’t go anywhere. It’s like a pause in a novel where the author is doing nothing but moving the character from setting to setting and manages to make it beautiful anyway, just for the joy of writing good words.

“The Girl in the Empty Apartment” is something of a slipstream piece which isn’t usually my bag, honestly, but something about this one caught my attention. Since the action is more than a little surreal, it’s hard to say definitively what’s really going on here, especially as I don’t think that I’ve read any of Skillingstead’s other Harbinger stories. It’s felt, though, which is important. It’s a good read, and I’ll have to find more of his stuff.

This isn’t going quite as quickly as I had hoped it would, partially because of a major computer outage yesterday. Hooray for spending a lot of money when you didn’t want to, with the possibility of having to spend a lot more to get the data back. I haven’t been keeping my backups up to date as I should have, and I guess that I’m paying for it now. Oh well.

In any case. Back to the task, before I do some more computer surgery in hopes of being able to avoid having to pay for data recovery. The April/May issue of Asimov’s is their yearly double issues. There are a couple of people who I’ve never read before, and one that I want to point out.

I’d vaguely heard of William Shunn before, but I’d never read any of his stuff. It seems right now that it’s all magazine sales, which is unfortunate, because it means that they’re going to be hard to get ahold of, at least until someone manages to bring out a collection or something. I have no idea if he’s working on a novel, but on the strength of his story here, entitled “Inclination”, I really rather hope so. I’d buy it in a heartbeat, but maybe I’m not the best person to ask on that mark, as I’m still threating to reach sixty on the unread shelf, despite quite a high rate of consuming the things. At one hundred I’m going to stop buying for a couple of months, I promise. So, this one is good. Good enough that I would seek out his other work, were any of it available in anything other than micropayment type ebooks, which, while a valiant effort, don’t really work for me for some reason. Perhaps it’s something that I’ll talk about at some later date, as I dream about a way out of the wage-earner trap that acutally has some interest for me. Again, hopefully there will be a collection or a novel out soon, because I’d really like to get my hands on more.

I wanted to hate Greg van Eekhout’s “The Osteomancer’s Son”, as it belongs to a brand of fantasy that I really don’t like, but it’s a charming story in its way, and I bet that a lot of people who don’t have my builtin preconceptions will like it a lot.

“The King’s Tail”, by Constance Cooper was pretty all right, but I felt that it needed to be longer to really reach its full impact. Still, I’ll be keeping my eye out, as it was entertainingly told and could lead somewhere.

There’s some other interesting stuff here, a Liz Williams story in her Banner of Souls setting, an entertaining short short by Wil McCarthy, and some interesting thought on Pyr and the state of contemporary SF by Norman Spinrad. Not a bad issue at all.

I only finished one magazine last night, mostly because I spent too much time re-reading Iain M. Banks’ first SF novel, Consider Phlebas. It sucked me in, and I ran low on time. Unfortunately, I bounced off almost everything in this issue, with the lone exception of the Robert Reed story, “Eight Episodes”. I read at least half of every story, and the whole of a couple of them, but nothing grabbed me. To be fair, even the Robert Reed story wasn’t one of his better ones, just another meditation on light-speed and the loneliness of organic species. Elegantly written and inventive as usual, but not something that we haven’t seen from him before. As an aside, I really want to witness a drunken argument between Reed and Ken MacLeod about the place of humanity on a deep time-scale. I feel that it would be deeply amusing, as long as they weren’t too respectful of each other. The most interesting discussion would come from what I perceive as MacLeod’s hopefulness and Reed’s pessimism (yes, I know that Reed has immortal, vital humanity in the deep future stories too, but they are, to me, less deeply felt than MacLeod’s, as if Reed were trying to sell us a future that he desperately wants to believe in, but cannot).

Anyway. Not an auspicious beginning. Hopefully I’ll resist the siren call of Consider Phlebas/Look to Windward tonight and make it through two of them.

So, I did another bookshelf check the other day and the results are depressing.

• Hardcover:

  • Unread: 4
  • Partial: 2

• Trade Paper:

  • Unread: 18
  • Partial: 13

• Mass Market:

  • Unread: 18
  • Partial: 3

• Totals:

  • Unread: 40
  • Partial: 18

• Grand Total: 58

So obviously I’m more than a little behind. And I’m going to the bookstore for the book club this afternoon, so I’ll likely get some more , because I have a problem. But that isn’t the issue that I want to talk about today.

If you look at the notes for the partially read stack of books, you’ll see that there’re two stacks of magainzes, F&SF and Asimov’s. Those stacks are respectively eight and nine issues tall. I buy them and then I put them on the stack and I never read them, because I have too many books to read. But 18 short magazines seems like a small enough number to movtivate myself to tackle in a week, assuming that I apply some determination to the process, and a lot of time. I feel like I should do something for it, though, so I’m going to attempt to write up the best/most interesting stories from each issue, and make a list at the end of people that I’ve not heard of who’re interesting, sort of a ‘names to watch out for’ thing. Of course, considering my history, now that I’ve announced it, it won’t happen, but I’ll see what I can do. Oh well.

I want this. And a gumstix computer with one of these, instead of the XScale and an SD reader instead of the clunky MMC. And a flexible touchscreen. I would then combine all of these things with my friend Ian’s Roadster software and a handlebar bag (can’t forget a big battery of some sort and a big antenna for listening to GPS/talking to networks) in order to make the best bike touring computer eV4r. Unfortunately, all of that stuff would cost me about five grand. Dear lazy(rich)web! Provide, provide!

The other project (also bike-related) that I would like to undertake is a touring recharger system. You put one of these on your front wheel, then wire it to a setup (WARNING: violent hand-waving ahead!) in your rear pannier which has a big capacitor and some regulator hardware (look at those hands go, folks!) which trickle charges all of your batteries (AAAs for lights, a spare battery for the computer mentioned above, perhaps a battery or two for a small laptop, batteries for an LED camping lantern, cell phone batteries, etc.). Once done (and suitably waterproofed) you have most of life’s modern electronic conveniences whilst on the road. In theory. The dynohub only provides a couple of watts, but one imagines that a couple of hours a day would be enough to keep a fair amount of gear charged up. The really unfortunate thing about the front hub systems is that you can’t use the bike as a generator unless it’s moving, so there’s no putting the bike up at night and pedaling free for an hour to get some more juice. You have what you have at the end of the day.

Of the two projects, the first is far more likely to bear fruit despite its staggering cost (and occasionally fictional equipment), as I have the pertinent skills to put a bunch of premade parts together and program them up into something useful, whereas the second wants many skills and much knowledge that I do not have, and am ultimately too ADD to acquire. Still, they’re both neat ideas. Now I just need to suddenly become rich and totally idle so that I can pursue them.

it’s been years since I’ve been able to call someone a carbon facist in an argument. Ah, academia, I miss you and your over-earnest, drunken arguments.

This article on worldchanging, along with some conversations that I was exposed to on RAGBRAI (where the people that I was riding with were seriously into sustainable agriculture, got me thinking. So I’m not into the farming thing. I have no affinity with the land whatsoever. However, I’m pretty into computer systems, and it disappoints me that there are so few opportunities to apply my skills in a socially responsible manner (or, to be more honest about my level of selfishness, to do so and make a reasonable living). Which got me thinking. It would be pretty interesting to me to put together some software to optimize drip irrigation in a few years when solar powered wireless sensors get cheaper. You could even put together an NGO or charity around the product, with optimized plans for effectively irrigating ground, donation subsidized kits, volunteer labor (help with putting the systems in place and supervision for installation and repair). The system would work something like this:

• The core: A small, weatherproofed system-on-a-board computer, possibly solar powered (or you could just station it by the pump, where there’s power). Contains the control software.

• A variable speed computer controlled pump big enough to push water from the water source to the farthest edge of the field, or a network of them.

• The sensors are on stakes, a couple of feet high with solar panels up top. They’re simple soil hygrometers and some internal diagnostics, and maybe a green/red led to report health. They’d need to be really cheap, as you’d want to have a fair amount of them.

• Your drip irrigation equipment has some solar powered and wirelessly controlled shunts with caps or batteries big enough to actuate a couple of times a night if needed, even when there isn’t much sun. They should also be able to report their health. You’d use these for routing water around places where the ground didn’t need to be watered.

That’s pretty much it. You could do a web UI accessible from a OLPC machine (which could talk to the control center wirelessly) so the farmers could fine tune the system for their crops and local environment, and you could work on a much simpler and intuitive system of control for locales where the level of education and/or laptop access is much lower, (but setting one person in a village with one of these laptops would likely be enough, as that person could do all of the fine tuning for many farms). The notional organization could also have educational initiatives for improving water use and could also lobby for smarter water use laws around the nation. It could also subsidize itself by offering up a certain (small) percentage of its people (on a rotating basis) as water use consultants for larger farms (although it’s unclear how desired this service is). In a world where clean, usable water is growing increasingly scarce and hence increasingly expensive, it seems to me that these systems (especially when subsidized) could pay for themselves in short order, and would leave more usable excess water in the system for the expansion of agriculture and for use as drinking water where it is scarce.

Unannounced vacation. I went on RAGBRAI with some friends, so I was gone for a week. This has taught me a couple of things:

• I need better sun block. The crap that I was using has left me covered in pimples and rashes and supremely unhappy, plus I still got burnt a little, though it’s not as bad as it could be.

• For anything above 20 miles, I really need to do something about my handlebars. I think that I’m going to have to get a new stem to raise them up a little and move them closer. A lot of hand pain was experienced.

• I think that I’m going to pony up for a Brooks B.17 leather saddle. People were singing their praises, and my saddle isn’t all that comfortable past 30 miles or so.

• I need some new pedals, again for the greater distances. I think that I’m going to get a new commuter bike and transfer the egg beaters to that one and then get some quattros to go on the road bike.

• I need better bike luggage. I think that I’m going to put a rack on both bikes and get some panniers (something big enough at least to take my laptop and a change of clothes and shoes). It’s all well and good to haul stuff to work in my bag, but there’s really something to be said for real luggage for anything longer than a couple of miles.

Anyway, enough bike dorkery. I did do some reading on the trip, and I thought that I’d spend some time going over that. I took a lot more things along than I was able to get through, but then, I thought that I was going to be able to read at night and there just wasn’t the time or the energy for that. On the plane to and from, I got through Mr. Dozois’ 23rd annual collection of the year’s best science fiction short stories. I really do love short fiction, though I don’t really read enough of it. I need to catch up on all of the stuff that I haven’t read, but then, I have something like 30 unread novels waiting as well, so we’ll see what kind of time I can make for all of it. In any case, a few comments on each of the stories contained (those that I’ve read, at least), to give you a bit of the flavor so that you go out and buy it now like you already should have.

Actually, after about half an hour of writing a little bit about each one, I find that I’m bored with the project. Here’s a short list of the really, really good stories from it that you really shouldn’t miss (because I am a painfully lazy slackass):

• “Camouflage”, by Robert Reed.
  A Great Ship story. I really like Reed’s stuff.

• “A Case of Consilience”, by Ken MacLeod.

• “Little Faces”, by Vonda McIntyre.
  Quite weird. Gracefully establishes a very strange setting with characters who aren’t really anything like human, but gets you emotionally involved in any case.

• “Deus Ex Homine”, by Hannu Rajaniemi.
  I’d never heard of the author before I picked up the Nova Scotia anthology earlier this year. I really liked this one. Looking forward to hearing more from the author.

• “Softly Spoke the Gabbleduck”, by Neal Asher.
  A Polity short story, with a gabbleduck far from home. Every time I read an Asher novel, I keep reading the word gabberduck, which gives me the mental image of some coked out late 90s English raver type wearing a duck hat. I think that this dampens some of the terror, at least for me, some of the terror that Mr. Asher means the gabbleduck to inspire.

• “Beyond the Aquila Rift” & “Zima Blue”, by Alastair Reynolds.
  Both of his short stories in this collection are, to me, indications that Reynolds might be pushing to hard with the novels. He’s still really good at the short form, which makes me think that if he focused on writing shorter, more economical novels, instead of the massive tomes that he’s been pushing out once per year lately (I’m sure that’s publisher pressure more than choice, though), he’d be writing books that I’d be more interested in reading.

• “The Clockwork Atom Bomb”, by Dominic Green.
  Never heard of the author before, but this is an interesting one, about weapons inspector/disarmament expert type handling some really nasty relic weapons.

• “Gold Mountain”, by Chris Roberson.
  Another entry in his series of stories (leading to a novel, I think) about a world where China never turns inwards, but becomes the leader of the civilized world, about the construction of a space elevator using American and other foreign labor around the same time that in our world the railroads were getting built. All about the human aspects, though as what they’re building really wouldn’t have mattered all that much. Affecting.

• “The Fulcrum”, by Gwyneth Jones.
  Jones is almost channeling M. John Harrison here, but doing so in her own inimitable style. Mayhem, weirdness, hateful characters and utter despair in the outer reaches of the solar system.

• “Two Dreams on Trains”, by Elizabeth Bear.
  An really great far future snippet about art and the lengths to which we’ll go to express ourselves.

• “Burn”, by James Patrick Kelly.
  I bought this a while ago as a stand alone novella. It has its weaknesses, but it’s a very good story about the choice to remain human in a universe that has definitely moved right on.

Also read Warpath by Tony Daniel. I really like his short stories and the two other novels of his that I’ve read, Metaplanetary and Superluminal. This is his first novel, and it shows in a lot of ways. I doesn’t have a lot of the confidence and panache that he developed later on, and the pacing is quite uneven. Still, entertaining if you’re a fan. The cover and back copy (and the title! I think that the one word title fad has done on long enough [as an aside, Haldeman’s Camouflage was originally called Sea Change, and was changed for the same reasons. I think that was lessened a little by that alteration, but then, I’m one of those weird people who think that titles matter]) are pretty dire. Ahh, the late 80s and early 90s. Things are getting better, but it’s very, very slow. Anyway, if you’re a Daniel fan, pick it up, although you’re unlikely to find it unless you have a really good used bookstore or you look online. If you’re Tony Daniel, write some more stuff! Looking on the internet, it seems that all of his projects are stalled at the moment, which is assy. I really liked the first two, and would love to see at least some short fiction, but it seems like the man dropped off the face of the Earth in 2003 or so. I hope that he makes a triumphant return at some point. It’d be kinda sad if he didn’t, as he was one of the more interesting up and comers of the last few years.

In other news, it looks like Elizabeth Bear saw my little capsule review of her last couple of books. Again, I really should write something longer, at least about Blood & Iron. It really is quite good.