association-list

I liked this book. I didn’t hon­estly expect to. The last Williams book I read, Implied Spaces, was clev­erly con­ceived and had some inter­est­ing moments, but it was impli­ca­tion­ally half-​​baked. We got a bunch of first-​​order stuff, some smash-​​bang plot­ting, and it was great fun, but the second-​​order stuff was spare to miss­ing. His future seemed direly old-​​fashioned, some­how. Williams’ space opera thing whose name I am too lazy to google, I couldn’t even get through the first book.

But this one got through to me for some reason. Per­haps I have too much of a soft-​​spot for geeky topics, or maybe it’s just that Williams is better at con­tem­po­rary set­tings, but this one had me from begin­ning to end, stay­ing up late, the whole bit. Other review­ers have com­plained about the end being too obvi­ous, or revealed too early, but it didn’t bother me too much. My only nit­picks are about the dri­vers of the plot being too con­ve­nient, too lim­ited to the scope of the story. It’s totally unbe­liev­able that the AI trader scheme would be as easy to carry out as Williams frames it. That they’re able to take over more or less the entire finan­cial world show touch­ing faith in the rather brit­tle field of machine learn­ing. Still, a clever idea well-​​enough inte­grated into the fic­tion of the world that it isn’t too obtru­sive. Also, there’s a cal­lous­ness — at times bor­der­ing on sociopa­thy — on the part of the pro­tag­o­nist and her friends to the suf­fer­ing of the people caught in the AI-​​triggered cur­rency crises. We spend the first part of the book where the pro­tag­o­nist lives through one of these crises and sees the effects it has on the natives, the deaths and chaos. Yet when she finds out that one of her best friends is more or less entirely respon­si­ble for the issue, she barely reacts. It could be that the flat­tened affect is inten­tional, after all, she’s freshly trau­ma­tized for most of the book, but the fact is that the good geek friend is sig­nif­i­cantly more dan­ger­ous and dam­ag­ing than the actual sociopath who’s trying to kill her.

I should stress that unless you’re a CS person, you’re not going to be both­ered by the first one, and the second never seems to matter while you’re read­ing. Not chal­leng­ing, but an enjoy­able read.

Spoiler warn­ings, I guess. Which should likely be the sub­ti­tle for this blog. Can’t really get at issues of con­struc­tion with­out reveal­ing any­thing. At least unless you’re will­ing to be coy to the point of affec­ta­tion, I suppose.

I wish that I could say that I unre­servedly loved this book. It’s one of Reynold’s better out­ings (since the very begin­ning). Some fas­ci­nat­ing stuff going on, all well told, in an inter­est­ing world. Strong cen­tral themes, decent char­ac­ter­i­za­tions (the cen­tral char­ac­ter is pretty wooden, but he’s sur­rounded by a number of win­ning sec­ondary char­ac­ters). Tore right through it. In the moment, it’s a great book with some for­giv­able flaws. Adam Roberts says more or less how I felt about it here (espe­cially the extra 100 [or maybe 150] pages in the middle), save for:

• Some seri­ously abom­inable copy edit­ing. Not Reynold’s fault, but c’mon, VG.
• Overkill on the fore­shad­ow­ing. If there’s an arse­nal on the mantle, we don’t need to see each gun fired in the third act, really.
• The end.

Oh god, the end. Which makes the title a stupid fuck­ing pun. Which under­mines the drama of the whole novel. Which leaves a bunch of bad ques­tions yawning.

OK, so: The world is a ter­raformed colony world. It’s slowly dying because its cit­i­zens can no longer main­tain the atmos­phere because the world has been divided into zones where real­ity has a dif­fer­ent res­o­lu­tion or grain size. The high­est tech stuff doesn’t work at the lower levels because it’s too com­pli­cated, it dis­solves into noise and seizure and plaque. To a cer­tain extent these zones can be changed by people with the unsul­lied inher­i­tance of the system’s main­tain­ers, who were a genetic caste with mod­i­fi­ca­tions to allow them to oper­ate the machin­ery of the world. They’re regarded as witches and hounded. So far so good.

Then you learn what machin­ery they’re meant to oper­ate. A pre­sum­ably super­lu­mi­nal gate-​​system that allowed people to travel between the stars. We’re on a world called Earth­gate, maybe. A hor­ri­ble acci­dent has occurred some 10k years in the past, break­ing the system. The entire system? Unclear. So the result is, if it’s hap­pen­ing every­where, there are more inter­est­ing places to tell this story. It’s a side­light, at best, to the main show. Worthy of a novella at best, not 500 pages. If it took out the whole damned system, where are the repair­men? The space dwellers? I sup­pose that I am being overly nit-​​picky about the world-​​building, here, but there was a lot of world-​​building. If I am going to sit through umpty-​​hundred little hints, your reveal better be both stun­ning and airtight.

This isn’t fair, to be honest. The book is not about the reveal. It’s about its char­ac­ters and their inter­ac­tions. Ulti­mately, it’s about the frailty of human soci­eties, and how easily they frac­ture and degrade. These are new themes for Reynolds, mostly, and they’re well han­dled, if at too great a length. The whole novel is a solid effort, and if you can forget or for­give the ending (or don’t really care to think through its con­se­quences), its one of the better books of the year so far. I couldn’t, though.

For Chill, by Eliz­a­beth Bear

I really wanted to like Chill.

Hon­estly I did. I loved Dust, I think, although I’ll have to check my notes. I for sure love it in my memory.

I rec­og­nize that it’s the middle book of a three-​​book sequence, and that it’s set­ting up and lead­ing up.

I loved get­ting to know Tris­ten and Benedik and their var­i­ous fail­ures, and their problems.

I loved revis­it­ing the world.

But they have no agency.

We spend the entire book on a jour­ney that is basi­cally wasted.

If they’d been a day or two later, Cynric would have been reborn all the same, from how I read it.

In an ideal world, Tris­ten goes off after Ari­an­rhod and returns with Cynric a chap­ter or two later, and this is done off­screen. We spend that time watch­ing Ben and Caitlin patch things up, or try to, and then some­thing else hap­pens. Per­ci­val doesn’t spend the entire novel being wounded.

I can’t seem to find any­thing that I’ve writ­ten about Dust. Hope­fully when Cleave/​Grail is released I’ll have the time to read through them all at once and write some­thing more substantive.

The life­time of a news story (US pol­i­tics bias):

1. Incep­tion: Cov­er­age here should focus on back­ground, on giving the reader the infor­ma­tion that they need to ini­tial posi­tion them­selves on the issue, and any impli­ca­tions that are clear from the outset. There is room here for sev­eral lengthy arti­cles fram­ing the issue from dif­fer­ent per­spec­tives, pro­vid­ing con­text (at least some of it hope­fully stripped of biases), iden­ti­fy­ing the play­ers and the inter­ested parties.
2. Devel­op­ment: Here we have the bulk of the cur­rent cov­er­age. Almost any­thing labeled ‘break­ing news’ is going to fall into this cat­e­gory. Rever­sals, defec­tions, pol­i­tick­ing, com­pro­mises, & etc.. I don’t think that this was the case twenty years ago. Clearly, a lot of the bloat has been added to fit the require­ments of the so-​​called 24 hour news cycle, and also post require­ments for pro­fes­sional blog­gers. In some ways, it’s good, since you’re able, if say fol­low­ing an expert blog­ger like Ezra Klein, to follow an issue in minute detail, more or less as it hap­pens (give or take a day). The down­side is that the time-​​scales at which Amer­i­can pol­i­tics works are mostly too long for this sort of as-​​it-​​happens cov­er­age. It’s numb­ing and exhaust­ing, both for the reader and, I imag­ine, the writer. I imag­ine that it needs to be done and that for most large issues, this sort of from-​​the-​​ground doc­u­men­ta­tion will be invalu­able for historians.
3. Res­o­lu­tion: Once the dust has set­tled, there’s a need for arti­cles to sum­ma­rize the his­tory of the issue, explain the dynam­ics of the battle and who the key play­ers turned out to be. Again, sev­eral in-​​depth arti­cles are good thing here, as we need the per­spec­tives of both the win­ners and the losers. For those who’re activist inclined, there will always exist places to take more action, and these should be detailed. For wonks, there will be weak­nesses, and these will need some analy­sis so that people can think about how best to shore them up.

Mostly I’m writ­ing this because I find it rough to keep up with cur­rent events. I do an OK job, and like to think that I’m better informed than most on the issues of the day. That said, the con­stant need for con­tent is slowly wear­ing me down, because I need to at least glance at it to dis­miss it. So I end up look­ing at some­thing like 60 news items a day, at least 20 of them fairly sub­stan­tive. I’m for­ever behind, and not having inter­net on the week­ends is really giving me trou­ble on Mon­days. Although that will even­tu­ally be reme­died, I still have better things to do with my week­ends than keep­ing up with the inter­net. It’s clear, of course, that blogs and RSS aren’t the answer, in the long run, but I am strug­gling to come up with some­thing, as a soft­ware person, that makes the making-​​news process both easy to follow and easy to understand.

The app that I am think­ing of works some­thing like this (cap­i­tal­ized words define soft­ware objects that have a vis­i­ble expres­sion in the system): At any one time, there are some number of Issues open. Each issue has one or more Mod­er­a­tors, who may or may not be assigned a Per­spec­tive. An Issue is a mono­lithic col­lec­tion of text and links (text is quotes and prose from the Mod­er­a­tor). A User has a per­sonal feed, and sub­scribes to Issues indi­vid­u­ally on the site (kind of like fol­low­ing some­one on twit­ter). Also included in their feed are announce­ments about new Issues being opened and their Mod­er­a­tors, and also Issues that they don’t follow which have had major changes in the last week. When an issue is updated, people who follow it get an update, which con­tains the sec­tions that were updated and some con­text (may need to be some clever soft­ware here). Simple edits like typo cor­rec­tions wouldn’t update peo­ples feeds, but there would be a strict size limit to this sort of thing, erring on the side of annoy­ing the user in the pur­suit of trans­parency. All Issues would have a full his­tory avail­able at any time. You could choose daily or weekly sum­maries, but my thoughts here are admit­tedly unclear. There would have to be a way for the Mod­er­a­tor to set the urgency of the change (horse-​​race vs. sub­stan­tive devel­op­ment? How do you draw the line there?).

Of course, there’s only so much one can do with soft­ware in the pur­suit of clar­ity and con­ci­sion of accu­rate cov­er­age. Even­tu­ally, some cov­er­age norms would need to be devel­oped that make the form easier to follow and under­stand. I am not sure what these would be. Nor do I under­stand the role that com­ments would play in a system like this (I’m gen­er­ally unhappy with com­ments as they stand now, but that’s another post). Some­thing to think about in the future.

It strikes me that in my last post, that I was some­what non-​​specific in my use of syn­the­sis. It could be that I’m miss­ing out, with regards to knowl­edge of the crit­i­cal lit­er­a­ture, so I wanted to define my terms.

When I call an author an syn­the­sist, I’m mostly refer­ring to what I call their pri­mary mode of extrap­o­la­tion. By pri­mary, I mean the tech­niques that any one author gen­er­ally uses to drive the ideas behind their sto­ries. I’d say that there are at least three broad cat­e­gories here, and I’ll attempt to name them, offer a brief def­i­n­i­tion, and pro­vide some examples.

1. Com­pos­i­tive Sythe­sists: This is a cat­e­gory into which I slot Tidhar, Liz Williams, Wolfe, Delaney, Swan­wick, etc.
   Very few of the ideas are new, and occa­sion­ally things that would oth­er­wise flow nat­u­rally from the world build­ing are missed. Rather they’re used with vary­ing degrees of skill to evoke the set­tings and pre­con­di­tions for their character’s sto­ries to nat­u­rally unfold. Inter­est­ingly, I find that thsi cat­e­gory con­tains both some of the best and some of the worst SF dis­pro­por­tion­ately, going from the bottom, where the paint by num­bers crowd oper­ates, to the top, where some of the best artists of the genre pick and chose just the right ele­ments out of the exist­ing prop box to set the drama of their char­ac­ters and plots off to great­est effect. There are some people in the middle, but they seem to be thin­ner on the ground than in my other (self-​​defined) categories.

2. Con­junc­tive (or Inven­tive) Sythe­sists: These are authors who’re largely work­ing out of the box of stan­dard props and tropes, but they’re inter­ested enough in the ideas that they’re work­ing with that they gen­er­ally con­sider it incum­bent upon them to come up with some fas­ci­nat­ing and novel ideas and cre­ations that shake out nat­u­rally from the quriks of their world­build­ing and how they’re throw­ing their ideas together.
   I’d put Stross, Tricia Sul­li­van, Justina Robson, Bruce Ster­ling, and Richard Morgan here, amongst others.

3. Sub­ject Experts: These are your scientist-​​authors and your lay experts, who take their deep knowl­edge and research and use it to inform either their story ideas or their world­build­ing. They also draw from the common pool, but their unique bodies of knowl­edge lead to both insights and lacu­nae that other writ­ers with a dif­fer­ent speculative-​​extrapolative approach wouldn’t have come across.
   I’d include Ben­ford, Kim Stan­ley Robin­son, Nancy Kress, Vernor Vinge, and a number of others here.

This week’s short story club story is The Shangri-​​La Affair by Lavie Tidhar, who I’d never heard of before.

It’s really quite good.

I was struck from the first by the con­fi­dence of the nar­ra­tive voice. The story fol­lows an unnamed pro­tag­o­nist from a quite close third-​​person per­spec­tive through a future war in South-​​East Asia, con­cern­ing a par­tic­u­lar MacGuf­fin in the form of a peace plague (the Shangri-​​La of the title), virally trans­miss­able fellow-​​feeling that stops hos­til­i­ties in their tracks. We only get to see its effects for a moment before every­thing is blown to atoms by the unseen back­ers of our name­less view­point char­ac­ter. The story’s prime emo­tional con­flict is his strug­gle between destroy­ing the peace plague and let­ting it spread. Finally, he decides that peace not chosen is no peace worth having. This strug­gle would have more res­o­nance if we had some theory as to how the peace plague works. If the reader were allowed another view­point on whether or not the plague nul­li­fies free will, it very well might deepen the effect of his choice. The doubt it still there, but I think that it’d be better if it were made a bit more explicit.

The story isn’t per­fect, of course. There are only token female char­ac­ters and the people that we encounter for the most part are generic Men of Action and Con­se­quence. The plot is at least four decades old and the tone is taken straight from smeary spy novels set in war­zones far away from the home front, with­out any real engage­ment with the con­se­quences of the war on the people who live there. What virtue the piece has lies in the clev­er­ness of its syn­the­sis of these ele­ments, and I think that it suc­ceeds very well (that said, I tend towards syn­the­sis ( see update below ) in my tastes, per­haps to a fault, Gene Wolfe and Michael Swan­wick being favorites of mine).

Since read­ing it, I’ve gone on some­thing of a Tidhar binge, and what is out there on line really strikes me as qual­ity stuff, some of it better, I think, than this par­tic­u­lar piece, 304 Adolf Hitler Strasse over at Clarkesworld being the best of the stuff online, in my opin­ion, at least that I’ve found. I also went out and bought Hebrew­Punk and ordered The Book­man, so I may be in the throes of an irra­tional enthu­si­asm. Look­ing for­ward to what he pro­duces in the future.

UPDATE: see here for a clar­i­fi­ca­tion of the ter­mi­nol­ogy that I’m using above.

I’ve read ten or so books since the last post­ing, but hon­estly I’ve had a run of bad luck and am find­ing that I don’t have a whole lot to say about any of them that’s par­tic­u­larly pos­i­tive. I’m not entirely sure that this is help­ful to anyone, and since this list was for my own edi­fi­ca­tion, I don’t think that it’s much worth con­tin­u­ing on with. I’ll con­tinue to post about books that I like, but since I am grumpy and they’re fairly rare, I doubt that there will be much here for the next little while, until I think of some­thing else to drive com­men­tary and content.

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.