Iain M. Banks, The Algebraist

In the end, I enjoyed The Algebraist. It was long, and in some places a bit of a slog. I kept track: it took me eighteen solid hours to read my way through it. I don't read mysteries, so the two big surprises of the book were surprises to me, and in the end I was quite impressed with the way Banks had laid out the clues, giving me a "Wow, that should have been obvious in restrospect" feeling akin to reading Agatha Christie.

Banks's sense of cosmic wonder is infectious even if he plays hard and fast with his "hard and fast SF" setting. He has moments set in a world of pure water, an adventure with a huge gas giant civilization, and maginificent moments of architecture that are just breathtaking. That part of Banks's imagination is intact and reliable.

There are things Fassin (our hero)'s environment suit can do that you just can't acheive without AI and nanotech, yet AI and nanotech are "forbidden horrors" of the Mercatoria (the government agency in charge of the human part of the galaxy) and there are several agencies tasked with hunting them down and destroying them. (Banks has some ironic words about why there are "several" agencies.) Although Banks has tried to create a universe where FTL is all wormhole based and theoretically within the limits of known physics, but one voyage involves what it clearly not a closed timelike loop. Ah, well.

The "villain" of the piece is a classec E. E. "Doc" Smith villain who has replaced his mustache-twirling for other kinds of evil biophysical enhancements. He's So Evil that he's got to be a satire and ultimately he is just a macguffin to drive the rest of the characters to act.

If there was one thing that disappointed me about the book, it was Banks's return, several times, to the notion that human beings have a Will To Death. He introduces character after character only to describe in detail how they approach death, look forward to it, even embrace it. He does it so often, even to having a species engineered to be morbid, that I suspect he's having fun with his critics. If so, he didn't do it well enough to not depress his regular readers. He spends far too much energy highlighting the tragedies of war and in the end the satisfactions of his story are offset by his dark conclusions in which, really, nobody gets what they want. Banks does his "funny old world" and "life goes on" things, theming as he does that only short lives are worthwhile as long as they carry the illusion of purpose: long lives, those in thousands or billions of years, end up being pointless.

It's hard to tell if he was serious.

Time Sinx

In a recent LJ article, drewkitty drew my attention to this post by meowse, in which he observes after spending 160 hours of gaming only to have the campaign fall apart at the end that, even if he'd succeeded, the benefit of having done so for what amounts to four full work-weeks, and then adds up the economic costs of not working, the social costs of not socializing, and the personal costs of not fucking for all that time.

There was a time, once, when I had that kind of time. I blew a lot of it on MMORPG gaming. Admittedly, at the time, it was "gaming" only in a sense in that most of the players just connected to "go there," chat, hang out, and generally socialize, with the ulterior motive of figuring out who we could lay the next time we got together at some SFnal convention or other. I've also blown a lot of time doing other kinds of gaming: playing through Doom 1-3, Quake 1 & 2, Tron 2.0, Star Wars: Dark Forces 1 & 2, and so on.

I wondered the other day why I hadn't felt like gaming much in the past couple of months. I seem to go through spasms where I game a lot, then it tapers off. Right now I'm in a tapering period, but I suspect I may never game the way I used to. I looked at my calendar for the coming month. Some people complain about their weekends being booked: imagine having every minute of every day booked. Kouryou-chan's dance classes; Yamaraashi-chan's chorus; Omaha's broadcast nights. The kids have their homework and chores, and Kouryou-chan still needs to be watched over to do hers, plus they deserve as much time as I can give them just for fun and games. Every Saturday this month has something: two of them are dedicated to volunteer efforts at my kids' schools. If Sunday isn't full, by the gods I'm not doing anything but recovering from all of this.

And I'm still finding time to write in all of that. Not a lot of time, mind you: an hour here or there, on the bus or during lunch, and sometimes when Omaha's working on her show and the kids are in bed I take another half hour. If I'm lucky. Right now I'm managing to sustain 5000 words a week, and that doesn't feel like enough. Not nearly enough.

I've heard it said that the ages of 40 through 45 are the most stressful in a man's life. The kids, the job, the family are full-time occupations. I hope it gets easier.

Testing a debugging method...

I'm trying out a new editing and debugging method for my stories: I'm having my computer read it to me. It has its advantages, and it does point out where there's excessive repetition and some awkward phrases, but it's not nearly as effective as preparing the story for podcast. Still, it's really, really strange to hear a poorly synthesized voice reading a sex scene. Lines like, "Have you ever been fucked before?" just don't come across with that... quality it deserves.