association-list

I think that I’ve read Adam Roberts’ review of The Name of the Wind maybe 6 times now, so if you haven’t read that, this isn’t going to make any sense. It may not make any sense anyway, since it’s still a bit hazy, but I wanted to get it out there to work through it.

Some­thing about it has always struck me as off, but I haven’t been able to artic­u­late it up to now. For the most part, he’s cor­rect about the novel and its fail­ings. In no way is it high art, and the sooner Roth­fuss fin­ishes this white whale of a series and moves on to some­thing more mature the better for him, and for all of us. But Roberts goes in on Roth­fuss’ fail­ure to truly inhabit the medieval mind­set he posits is required for this sort of novel:

This could be three pals from any novel set in the 20^th or 21^st cen­tu­ryl [sic]; and hun­dreds and hun­dreds of sim­i­lar pas­sages serve only to show the author has not entered into the pre-​​industrial medieval mind­set that his medieval pre-​​industrial world requires — to, for exam­ple, under­stand the cru­cial point that not guilt (“I looked as guilty as I felt”) but shame was the key moral dynamic for the period. But to under­stand that would involve shift­ing about the psy­cho­log­i­cal por­trai­ture of the entire project; it would have meant writ­ing char­ac­ters less like, and there­fore less appeal­ing to, a 21^st-​​century read­er­ship dis­in­clined to make the effort to encounter the prop­erly strange or unusual.

This speaks to a broader state of affairs in which style — the lan­guage and form of the novel — is seen as an unim­por­tant adjunct to the “story.” It is not. A bour­geois dis­cur­sive style con­structs a bour­geois world. If it is used to describe a medieval world it nec­es­sar­ily mis­matches what it describes, cre­at­ing a milieu that is only an anachro­nism, a theme park, or a WoW gaming envi­ron­ment rather than an actual place. This degrades the abil­ity of the book prop­erly to evoke its fic­tional set­ting, and there­fore denies the book the higher heroic pos­si­bil­i­ties of its imag­i­na­tive premise.

I think that this is subtly wrong. Firstly, it is mis­taken in assum­ing that a par­tic­u­lar kind of moral tech­nol­ogy (for lack of a better word), such as guilt-​​driven nor­ma­tive self-​​coercion, nec­es­sar­ily accom­pa­nies par­tic­u­lar social struc­tures and phys­i­cal tech­nol­ogy levels. But more to the point, it’s mis­taken to assume that the sup­posed mis­match of form and tone has some­thing to do with acces­si­bil­ity. Although writ­ing char­ac­ters more like his audi­ence surely makes it easier for that audi­ence to relate to them, I think that the fun­da­men­tal issue is that for books like tNoW, where surely a weighty Moral Lesson is in the offing, is that ante-​​Guilt char­ac­ters have noth­ing, morally, to teach those of us in the post-​​Guilt world. Men and women in the AG inhabit an dif­fer­ent moral uni­verse. Moral lessons taught to and through them are untrans­lat­able, unteach­able to us, unless we’re shame-​​driven atavisms.

So it makes no sense for Roth­fuss to do that work, unless, like Tolkien, he’s a big fan of the period and its work. The telling sen­tence is this one:

But to under­stand that would involve shift­ing about the psy­cho­log­i­cal por­trai­ture of the entire project; it would have meant writ­ing char­ac­ters less like, and there­fore less appeal­ing to, a 21^st-​​century read­er­ship dis­in­clined to make the effort to encounter the prop­erly strange or unusual.

I would argue here that the aim of Roth­fuss’ project here is not actu­ally to expose his read­ers to the strange or the unusual, and that it’s a mis­take to assume that it is (Roberts’ easy ‘kids these days’ con­de­scen­sion wins him no points, either). Roth­fuss’ narrow aims are as yet unclear, as there are any number of ways the third novel could resolve all of the issues that have been set up in the first two books, but his broader aims are clear; Kvothe is going to relate to us some impor­tant bit of moral knowl­edge about being an Excep­tional Out­sider. Hope­fully it’ll be more pro­found than “Get over your first, unre­quited love as quickly as pos­si­ble”, which pre­sum­ably would have, if learned early enough, pre­vented most of the series from happening.

State­ments of Bias*:

• Adam Roberts: I enjoy his reviews, gen­er­ally (espe­cially the lighter, quicker ones at his blog). I typ­i­cally don’t care for his fic­tion for rea­sons too involved to get into in a brief state­ment such as this.
• The Name of the Wind/​Patrick Roth­fuss: I thought it was enter­tain­ing enough, but had to reread it in order to read its follow-​​up, which isn’t really a good sign. I don’t think that any of its char­ac­ters are the least bit psy­cho­log­i­cally real­is­tic, but the manner of the telling makes it a quick and enjoy­able read. I know more or less zip about its author.

* I am think­ing of making bias state­ments part of the struc­ture of the blog. I am not sure how useful that would be, but I feel that making bias clear might matter here more than usual.

Sorry for the flurry of posts today, I need to get all this stuff out before I forget about the site again for six months.

Orig­i­nally when I switched over to this host I had decided that I was just going to stick with the apt-​​provided ver­sion of word­press and just deal with the issues, but it turns out that their mod­u­lar­iza­tion is too leaky, and their code churn rate is too high for that to be a viable strat­egy, what with the low turnover rate of the Ubuntu pack­age. Once I’d fallen too many released behind, all of the AJAX stuff started to break. I couldn’t even reply to com­ments from the con­sole or post any pictures.

So if you’re look­ing for how to do this, here is what worked for me in early 2011 (this post will no doubt date rapidly):

1. As root, type # echo wordpress hold | dpkg --set-selections (note that this step is apt cargo cult magic which may fail in the future; I’ll update this if so).
2. Edit /etc/wordpress/wp-config.php, com­ment­ing out the line which says define('WP_CORE_UPDATE', false);.
3. Down­load the latest word­press tar­ball from http://wordpress.org/.
4. Unpack it somewhere.
5. Backup /​usr/​share/​wordpress (I used # tar czf backup.tgz /usr/share/wordpress but you may (by which I mean should) want to do some­thing more bulletproof.
6. Do # cp -R /path/to/wp/wordpress/ /usr/share/
7. Look at the output and cleanup as appro­pri­ate. I ended up having to nuke /usr/share/workpress/wp-include/js/ and then recopy it from the unpacked tarball.
8. Go back to your dash­board, as you’ll likely have to trig­ger a data­base update or some­thing similar.
9. Make sure your site or sites are still working.

Feel free to com­ment if you have any ques­tions but I am hardly an expert on the Word­Press side. Good luck.

I also read this recently. No one will be shocked, I sup­pose, that I didn’t par­tic­u­larly like it.

Quot­ing myself on twitter:

In the middle of Embassy­town right now. Impres­sion is Miéville doing Har­ri­son doing Blish. Less happy with it after the mid-​​reveal.

And:

Fin­ished Embassy­town. Now wish­ing I hadn’t fought through the middle. “Lan­guage” is a dud pivot. Artful awk­ward­ness here just awkward.

I don’t have a ton to add, I sup­pose, other than a state­ment of bias, as I thought that Kraken, as fun as it was a times, was kind of a baggy mess and con­cerned Men’s Busi­ness entirely too much, and had some huge dis­ap­point­ments in terms of its female characters.

The treat­ment of women as impor­tant is better here, which is praise­wor­thy, but doesn’t over­come the novel’s other flaws.

The ear­li­est and most famous of cyber­punk novels, the end­lessly famous Neu­ro­mancer con­cerns the actions of a few mar­ginal, vio­lent people being manip­u­lated by forces larger than they can com­pre­hend. True, they have some agency; indeed they’d be use­less as agents for their oper­a­tors if they did not have some spe­cial skills and tal­ents that make them the best tools pos­si­ble in the sit­u­a­tion. Ulti­mately, though, they are merely tools. Gibson’s inter­est is, for the most part, on the vast forces at work, rather than the tools them­selves. His pro­tag­o­nists (who grow less mar­ginal and less vio­lent as the sprawl series pro­gresses), are more or less a lens through which the world is seen. The cul­mi­na­tion of each of these novels is the reveal, in which the tool-​​protagonist is made aware of the full scope of the drama in which they have played a small part.

This form, which of course has antecedents in older SF, detec­tive and spy novels, and numer­ous other forms, tends to be what people take away from cyber­punk, second only to its window dress­ing of aug­ments, street-​​wise tech-​​ninjas, and decades-​​old visual sym­bols of bad-​​assery (leather jack­ets, dark sun­glasses or mir­ror­shades, dusters, ass-​​kicking boots, that sort of thing).

When Gibson first wrote his novels, deep into the Reagan-​​Thatcher years, things really did look pretty bad (almost thirty years ago, now). It wasn’t entirely whacked out to pic­ture a world run for the profit of mas­sive cor­po­ra­tions who’d sub­orned the nation-​​states of the world (one could argue that that is in fact what hap­pened, although it didn’t turn out as badly as it could have). Things really did suck, and it wasn’t insane to imag­ine mar­ginal people being empow­ered by some mys­ti­cal coun­ter­vail­ing force being the only way that a little good could be done in the world.

But as time wore on and things got at least a little bit better our noir-​​loving doom­pro­phets seem to have dou­bled down on the spit and the muck, and have moved the lens from the phys­i­cally inef­fec­tual Case to everyone’s favorite sexy ninja badass, Molly Millions.

While there has been some updat­ing of the socio-​​political con­cerns that ani­mate these books, their pro­tag­o­nists have gone ever more ret­ro­grade, evinc­ing ever more car­toon­ish moral­ism and spe­cial plead­ing, while simul­ta­ne­ously grow­ing ever more stim­u­lat­ingly vio­lent. At times, it seems as if their worlds have to be dark­ened and vio­lent in order to enable any sort of engage­ment with their brutal, near-​​psychotic pro­tag­o­nists. Nyx and Takeshi Kovacs would, if intro­duced into a future that was any­thing like the present that we or their authors inhabit they’d swiftly be arrested or killed.

In lit­er­a­ture, form and func­tion are inti­mately linked. Stick­ing so hard to a genre form birthed in an extremely dark moment limits the effec­tive­ness with which you can nav­i­gate the gray time in which we find our­selves now. The easy vio­lence may sell books, and I am loathe to deny anyone their con­so­la­tory nar­ra­tives in hard times, but I feel that these sort of novels are not doing the kind of work that’s push­ing the genre for­ward or doing the sort of adap­tive think­ing and imag­i­na­tive inves­ti­ga­tion which I con­sider to be the main work of SF.

On Niall Harrison’s rec­om­men­da­tion I picked up Hurley’s God’s War and read it over the week­end. As a paid up member of the Post-​​Cyberpunk clade, it’s a solid piece of work. Vio­lent, enter­tain­ing out­casts are jerked around by the pow­er­ful, people are killed, scores are set­tled, bad-​​assery is done. The world-​​building is vivid, if not entirely con­sis­tent. Its treat­ment of gender is inter­est­ing, and rea­son­ably novel, and it depicts the issues of its two Muslim civ­i­liza­tions as being orthog­o­nal to the fact that they’re Muslim. It’s even well paced.

It isn’t with­out its flaws, of course. The writ­ing could be better, espe­cially in the neol­o­gisms depart­ment, and the world-​​building suf­fers quite a lot from tech search and replace issue, sub­bing in ‘bug’ for any number of other terms just to make things fit with the aes­thetic, with­out ever both­er­ing to think of whether these sub­sti­tu­tions actu­ally make sense. The vehi­cles, in par­tic­u­lar, suffer from both the neol­o­gism issue (‘bakkie’??) and from being pow­ered by and con­structed from bug-​​encrusted hand­wav­ium (this wouldn’t be so much of an issue if they weren’t so promi­nent and often men­tioned). The world-​​building is big on bold, vague strokes and light on telling details, and the visual descrip­tion could use some real work. Also, for being so many thou­sands of years into the future, it’s all a bit old-​​fashioned.

EDIT: Niall points out in com­ments below that bakkie is South African slang for a pickup truck. So I apol­o­gize for that (although it still sounds a bit silly to Amer­i­can ears), but this high­lights the visual descrip­tion issues that I men­tion. Nowhere that I noticed was a bakkie described in enough detail for me to get that it was any­thing other than a wheeled vehi­cle (run­ning on bug spit and uni­corn farts).

END EDIT

None of these things are fatal flaws, and are easily over­looked, espe­cially since this is the author’s debut. If you like Richard Morgan (par­tic­u­larly the second two Kovacs books), you’re quite likely to enjoy God’s War.

That said, the more of these I read, the more I wonder why people still bother to write them.

To get at why, I am going to have to delve into spoiler ter­ri­tory, and pos­si­bly into some uniquely per­sonal aes­thetic pref­er­ences, so go read it if you haven’t. It’s only a few bucks online. I’ll write another post detail­ing why I say that tomor­row, once I’ve had some more time to chew over my objections.