association-list

Any time the spokesper­son for a com­pany asserts, in a con­gres­sional hear­ing or via a lob­by­ist, that a new reg­u­la­tion would “destroy” or oth­er­wise neg­a­tively impact their busi­ness, there should be a con­se­quence. They should have to prove, using real data to be made public, how and by how much this reg­u­la­tion would impact their busi­ness. There­after, their books would be audited to ascer­tain that they’re telling the truth, and the audit’s find­ings will be made public as part of the con­gres­sional record. Speak­ers who’re proven to have lied or dis­torted the sit­u­a­tion would then have their tes­ti­mony struck from the record.

Alter­na­tively, one could make this a stan­dard gate­way for send­ing com­pany offi­cers or others to com­ment on new reg­u­la­tion, with only the grant­ing or denial of per­mis­sion to com­ment as part of the public record.

I really like Karl Schroeder’s books so far. Meaty SF think-​​heavy books that never shrink from engag­ing with the human char­ac­ters at their hearts. That said, I have some quib­bles with the Virga books. While the cen­tral idea is a great one, and it is explored in relent­lessly inter­est­ing ways, I can’t help but think here that there are too things com­pet­ing for space in what are, after all, rel­a­tively short novels. The first three books were pretty light, action-​​adventure novels that took us on a tour through Virga while includ­ing real human drama and the ugly choices that people are forced to make by cir­cum­stances. Since they were at ground level, play­ing out, for the most part, far from the character’s home, there’s fairly little engage­ment with soci­etal con­struc­tion, and that’s fine, because we never really stick any place for long enough for the reader to start won­der­ing how it would all work.

In The Sun­less Coun­tries, Schroeder goes darker and attempts to engage with some seri­ous, fas­ci­nat­ing soci­etal issues (absolute demo­c­ra­tic rule when the public is ill-​​informed, the hijack­ing of a polity by neo-​​fascists), all the while keep­ing up the adven­tur­ous pace and rip roar­ing action and giving us more Virga wide-​​screen SFX and taking us out of Virga for the first time and and and. This could really work well, but the down­fall of the novel is that Schroeder sticks to the format of the other Virga novels. That is, it is some­what short (maybe 100-​​110k words?) and pri­mar­ily fol­lows the view­point of a single char­ac­ter. It’s rare that you’ll find me argu­ing that a novel should be longer. I’m gen­er­ally exas­per­ated by the level of padding required to get a book out to the 200k-​​ish words that seem to be required these days. But this is a book that could really use it. Using both Hayden and Leal as view­point char­ac­ters, actu­ally fol­low­ing Leal out­side of Virga, rather than having her briefly recount her adven­tures, spend­ing more time with the fail­ure of the Eternist takeover, making the ending less abrupt, etc. Another 100 pages at least are jus­ti­fied here, and the last quar­ter of the book suf­fers a lot for their absence. Every­thing feels second-​​hand and rushed, and it skews the pacing of the novel some­thing awful. You spend a great deal of the end of the novel inhab­it­ing the per­spec­tive of some­one in a locked room while a naval battle goes on outside.

I enjoyed the book a lot, and the setup at the end could poten­tially lead some inter­est­ing places, but I hope that Schroeder will manage to rush the ending less next time, which might mean bend­ing the struc­ture more than he’d like. As the book stands, it’s a tan­ta­liz­ing hint of the book that it could have been; great fun, but not all that it could quite plainly be.

see here

Not a lot to say about this one. I hate time travel sto­ries, and this one is a par­tic­u­larly odious exam­ple of the breed. Too many time travel sto­ries go into puzzle mode, and so too here. The writ­ing is all right, but the char­ac­ter­i­za­tion is of neces­sity a bit thin. As a dis­claimer, it takes Gene Wolfe level talent to get me inter­ested in this sort of thing, so my opin­ion is best ignored here.

This book was more or less OK. It strikes me that it’s a little bit too by-​​the-​​numbers to really enjoy, but that it’s a com­pe­tent instan­ti­a­tion of its par­tic­u­lar for­mula, and thus (since it’s a good for­mula, gen­er­ally) pleas­ant enough. I don’t mean to damn with faint praise here. This is a good, pol­ished book for a first novel, and squarely hit­ting the middle of the road on one’s first outing is impres­sive. My pri­mary tech­ni­cal com­plaint, I sup­pose, is that Downum is per­haps too eager to prove that her view­point char­ac­ter isn’t a Mary Sue, that this isn’t just a par­tic­u­larly good tran­scrip­tion of a D&D game, and in so doing largely robs her pro­tag­o­nist, Issyt of any agency in the res­o­lu­tion of the story. There are other char­ac­ters with more agency than the view­point char­ac­ter, but by the end you start to wonder why Issyt (how do you pro­nounce that, anyway?) has any screen time at all. The one thing that she does in this story could have been just as easily done as a quick insert of back­story in the next novel where she encoun­ters the other char­ac­ter in ques­tion. Per­haps the main prob­lem I had with the novel was a lack of econ­omy. Pages and pages were wasted kick­ing the crap out of the inter­fer­ing for­eigner, and too little time was spent with the local char­ac­ters who actu­ally make the story go. It’s under­stand­able that the author wants to spend time with her pri­mary char­ac­ter, but she should likely be given more to do in future novels (that said, it’d be an inter­est­ing exper­i­ment in form if some­one were to do a series like this that never fea­tured its nom­i­nal pro­tag­o­nist as a pri­mary view­point character).

Not a lot to say about this one. It was a book. A book that was too YA for me, too obvi­ous in its setup for its sequels, too uneven in its pacing, too unstint­ing with its gifts of sen­tience to almost every thing in the novel. For all that, the writ­ing is con­sis­tently pretty good, and there are some play­ful sec­tions where the writer takes inter­est­ing lib­er­ties with the voice of the book, and that liven it up. Ulti­mately, though, there’s just too much going on here all the time, as if the author is wor­ried that if he doesn’t get all of the setup in for the next fif­teen books or some­thing he won’t be able to write them, or at least look clever when they come out. Addi­tion­ally, the book seems to have a hard time decid­ing whether it wants each por­tion to be alle­gor­i­cal or taken as a secondary-​​world con­struc­tion. Still, the prose is decent, the author’s heart is in the right place, and there really are inter­est­ing things hap­pen­ing here, even if there are too many of them and they’re hap­pen­ing too slowly. Did I men­tion that the pacing was absurdly uneven?

I think my strat­egy here will be to check out the author’s second series, if there is one. He’s got a lot of raw talent, but the story he’s telling here com­bined with the rough­ness of exe­cu­tion makes me think that I’ll skip the rest of this one.