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’ 23^rd 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.