The Gentoo Pain

According to my calculations, if everything went perfectly (bloody unlikely) and I used my laptop for nothing else (obviously not gonna happen), it would take 4 days, 17 hours, 28 minutes and 32 seconds for the upgrade system to properly install Japanese capability onto my laptop.

I swear, XMMS is psychic today.

A book I must buy. The excerpt is enough.

When someone asks me, "What's the point of transhumanism?" I often have no real convincing answer. I have a hard time putting it into words, which is why I'm today grateful to economist Max Singer for giving me the words I've been looking for.

Even today, we live in a Hobbsian world, not a Human one. Too many people lead lives that are nasty and brutal, and say what you want, I think even our own is too short: I don't just want eighty years, I want eight hundred years, and more, if I can have it. I am looking forward to, as Singer puts it in Passage to the Human World:

No other word as aptly describes the character of the new world into which we are passing as the word "human." The new features of this world are being created by people. In this new world the most basic fact of life -- how much of it each person will have -- will be determined by the genes of our human species, not by external natural forces that cut human life short. Humans will be plentiful, and their lives will be the kind of lives that we think of as normal human lives -- concerned mostly with human creations, not with a constant struggle against nature...

The only thing with which I would disagree with Max is singular: our genes are natural forces that, like the rest, will fall into our hands and be subject to our control.

Iron Sunrise, By Charlie Stross

I just finished Charlie Stross's Iron Sunrise (I cannot for the life of me think of referring to him as "Charles Stross," as it says on the cover. It just wouldn't do. He's far too human to be a Charles.)

Iron Sunrise is a sequel of sorts to Singularity Sky. Rachel and Martin are back, but they don't play a part until late in the story. The introductory character is Wednesday, a goth chick who goes from seventeen to twenty through the course of the book and who suffers a lot of hardships in between.

My main emotion upon ending the book is disappointment. Charlie has two problems, and they're becoming more apparent the more often I read his work. This book sets the stage for an ongoing battle between the Eschaton, the superhuman superintelligence who keeps watch over humanity while denying humanity the right to engage in time travel, and the "unborn god of the ReMastered," a being who may or may not exist somewhere down the timeline, and who will possess the captured thought processes of everyone ever uploaded into storage by the ReMastered. He's setting the stage for sequels, which is a perfectly good thing for a writer to do.

Except, if you've read Charlie a lot, you know this plot. Iron Sunrise is the tale of Nazis with some kind of negotiated relationship to a Lovecraftian dark god, all of whom are opposed by plucky and lucky mostly ordinary humans who just happen to come from Charlie's favorite subcultures: bloggers, geeks and goths. Iron Sunrise is Charlie Stross's The Atrocity Archive... in Space!. Charlie's not even hiding this: his villain refers to herself as an "ubermadchen" and her boss is referred to as the overdepartmentsecretary [sic]. Wednesday breaks out of her stereotype late in the book and she becomes a well-drawn character, but really, you can just see a seventeen-year-old Christina Ricci (specifically, this one) in the role.

The other thing is that Charlie writes his stories exactly once. This seems to be a commonplace mode seen when reading his blog: he gets into a groove, he writes the story, figuring out what he's doing along the way. The trouble is, his stories lack the decorative panache that a full re-write gives to a story, and you can almost hear him chuckle with dark glee as he is inspired to a plot point. Everything in the story is broadly telegraphed. His foreshadowing looms over you. The plot is obvious almost from the beginning. When the epilogue's crisis began, with a letter in Rachel's apartment mailbox, I knew exactly where Charlie was going. I could have written the rest of that chapter myself. Iron Sunrise suffers from a lack of writerly subtlety.

It'll be a shame if someday we remember Charlie Stross as the Robert E Howard or Michael Moorcock of his decade: churned out a lot of books in a very short period of time that introduced fresh and new ideas to the Venn diagram intersectives of the genres he loves, only to flame out in the end, stuck in the pretty new box he'd created.

(And then there's me, who'll probably be remembered as the low-rent John Norman of his decade.)

Iron Sunrise is a rollicking adventure set in a space-operatic universe with a well-thought-out brake holding the characters back from their second Singularity. Charlie has done a good job of thinking around what he made in the first book and realizing how much fun it would be to threaten that brake itself. It has good characters and great worldbuilding (although once in a while I caught Charlie doing the "worldbuilding while the reader is watching"™^*). If you've never read Charlie Stross, this book and its predecessor, Singularity Sky, are fabulous introductions to the Singularity subgenre. It's only weakness is that if you have read Charlie Stross, you'll find yourself skipping over the familiar parts.

^*"Worldbuilding while the reader is watching" ™ is a trademark of D. Omaha Sternberg. All rights reserved. Used with permission.