Gravity

[elfs]

It's hard to judge if I've accomplished a lot or a little today. On the one hand, I have vastly improved the performance of my end of the product, reduced the data stream from 13 megabytes to 5 megabytes for a 12,000 file rendering, improved the error handling, and all-around succeeded at making the thing faster, smaller, and smarter.

On the other hand, I'm not eight days away from code freeze with nothing to show for the back-end. We've spent months arguing about the back-end and now it looks like it's gonna come down to a "oh, just write the thing and we'll fix it in testing" moment. I am not going to enjoy that at all.

And I haven't been writing. Oh, that's not really true. I wrote 350 words yesterday, and mananged about 200 today. Those of you who know me know that's an order of magnitude too low. It's all John Clute's fault, really. I've been reading his book, Appleseed, a book that is, well, hard to describe. It's amazingly dense and it has that one quality I like in a book (while everyone else loathes it): it sends me scurrying for the dictionary. I mean, he could have written:

The bridge was alive with soft, coppery glowing tiles, each one illustrated with information, changing, shifting as his eyes glanced over them, the words seeming to emerge from within the gleaming metallic rectangles, blown about by the data wind that caressed his cheeks.

Okay, that's not bad. But, no, Clute has to accomplish the description in two words:

Command center, intagliated azulejaria...

And off you go, to learn that to intagliate means to hammer copper or brass from behind with letterforms so words seem to emerge from the metal on the other side, and azulejaria is a form of mosaic done with large tiles where each tile is illustrated with a classic scene from commedia, which in turn you learn is a kind of archaic stage production with stock characters and situations.

Oy.

It's kinda too bad there's no real plot there. It's your standard kind of plot, but the language, oh, the language... It's wonderful. This is not a book for science fiction readers, but for science fiction writers. Clute's taken every popular cliche' of the past decade-- posthumanism, AIs, evolutionary psychology, quantum universes, IA, the return of sex in SF, retro-SF-- and made something amazingly new. The book is a collection of examples: This is how things should be done, in John Clute's opinion. And he's very, very good at communicating his opinion.

Observation: A box of Girl Scout cookies on my desk is a trembling thing.

Comments

[kenshardik]

I don't mind a book that requires me to look up the odd word or two, but I don't want to have to grab a dictionary and/or a companion book or three in order to even begin to comprehend what the author is trying to say. Why intentionally obfuscate?

A box of Girl Scout cookies on my desk is a trembling thing.

I concur, since I finished two boxes of Caramel DeLites at work last week.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

I don't know that he is trying to obfuscate. I simply think he has this enormous vocabulary and he likes using it, and he's not afraid to do so. I write down every word he says that I don't recognize, and then I look them up, and then I re-read the chapter. Once I understood what an intagliated azulejaria was, I had an immediate understanding of the scene-- the look, the feel, the smell of the room. Other details, just as dense, give me an image of the chair, the peripheries, the way the AIs and the protagonist interact. Clute proves that it only takes two words to paint an incredible picture, and I like that.

The "vocabulary" section of my Palm is growing.

[kenshardik]

I can see how his choice of words would make a scene belong more to the reader because the reader has more freedom in defining the words used and also defining the words in that definition. A juxtaposition of two (or more) words with rich definitions gives the reader much more freedom to interpret the scene and make it his or her own.

Damn, I need to break out my copy of Understanding Comics and look at the pyramid of comics that McCloud used to categorize comics based on word use and imagery. It's interesting that the more realistic a comic is drawn, the harder it is for a reader to identify with the characters - or to put themselves in the character's place. That's almost the opposite of what I said about words above.

Hmm, need sleep before pondering this more.