Elf Sternberg

A friend of mine reminded me that I had a copy of 20 Master Plots on my bookshelf, and I pulled it down to riffle through it once more.

It amazes me just how weirdly out-of-date the whole section on romance and love is. The book was written in 1993, only 18 years ago, and yet the passim treatment of homosexuality (mentioned only in "Forbidden Love," naturally), the nouveau of "Girl romances boy," shows just how archaic it is. The whole kit and kaboodle of the past 20 years' worth of love and affection and romance (gads, some of which I helped shape) is just missing from this book. I didn't expect the world to change that fast, and yet it has.

Good.

Dead Iron by Devon Monk

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Devon Monk's Dead Iron: The Age of Steam is a mash-up urban fantasy-meets-steampunk-meets western. Set in a 19th century Oregon small town facing change as the rail comes closer, Dead Iron is a satisfactorily well-written but by-the-numbers example of how steampunk ought to be written.

In Monk's formulation, the veil between faery and Earth is very thin, and a mysterious, rare substance called glim enables those blessed with the Gift of Artifice to empower marvelous steam-powered "matics" with force and capacity and will. Monk's world features mad agents of The Faery King tracking down a banished prince of faery and his dark magics, a college-professor cursed to be a werewolf by a god of an other-than-faery and now turned bounty hunter, and a witch whose only spells are vows and curses, and a chaotic good zombie. Dead Iron is the kitchen sink.

Monk's prose style is amazing. Every character's voice is utterly unique, and Monk attunes both grammar and vocabulary chapter by chapter to the needs of the point-of-view character: Bounty Hunter Ceder Hunt is lettered and well-mannered, but brutalized by his curse; witch Mae Lindstrom is simple, home-bound, but determined; the zombie's thoughts are stuttering, guttering, but driven by a savage force of will. Monk's language gives every character the room he or she needs to be clear and expressive.

The plot is solid, but predictable. Monk is very good about getting her characters center-stage and setting things in motion. It's steampunk clockwork, and not a piece is out of place as the chess game goes from opening moves to its explosive ending. She pulls new pieces into the plot smoothly and without raising your sense of disbelief, she lays down foreshadowing with skill and experience.

However, the book is not perfect. The heroes are all too damned Good, the villains too damned Evil, the ordinary townspeople too damned Stupid. Dead Iron's morality is pure fairy tale, and none of the main characters really grows much during the course of the book. Each character is led by circumstance and reconcilition with one's existing values, rather than growth and maturity or avarice and decay, from one scene to the next. They're all wonderful people, but that's about it. The book relies on language, likability, and a predictably relentless buildup to the final cinematic confrontation to sell its successor. It works, but just barely.

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Nicholson Baker writes three kinds of books: non-fiction, literary fiction, and porn. It's odd that although he's known for the phone-sex masterpiece Vox, the only thing I'd ever read by him was The Anthologist, a wonky first-person slow-moving story about a poetry writer and editor with a near-fatal case of writer's block. It's well-written and has a solid voice. So when his latest porn novel, House of Holes was released, I had to buy a copy.

House of Holes is an homage to the Golden Age of Porn that began in 1972 with Behind the Green Door and ended, thirteen years later, with New Wave Hookers. In it, Baker reveals three secrets about porn from that era that we should all be aware of.

First, there are only two kinds of women-shaped creatures in porn. But neither are really human women. The first are almost human women, but they lack a terribly deep inner life. They attempt to go about their daily business, but they all have a kind of attention-deficit disorder where the suggestion of sex may overwhelm their attention at any moment, turning them into happy, cock-hungry fuckbunnies. A rare few are fuckbunnies in potentia, but this can be resolved within a day or two. If no cock is available, at least an orgasm must happen and another woman will do. When all else fails, she can do it herself. The second kind are man-eaters, always on but exhaustingly dangerous to know.

Secondly, the men in porn are ordinary men. Most of them are confused about sex, confused about what women want-- even when said women are simply cock-hungry-- and confused about their place in a world full of maneaters and fuckbunnies. They're just trying to get along and get laid. Some are well-hung, some aren't; some can last a long time, some can't. They like a little variety, but can be tempted to a long span of monogamy by a particularly beautiful or wonderful woman, and sex doesn't really enter into their motives for a relationship. It can, however, tempt a man to do wrong.

Third, Golden Age Porn is absolutely full of magical realism. For no explicable reason, and often with an "it happens" shrug of the shoulders, clitori move to unfamiliar parts of the body, men swap penises, penises and vaginas develop minds and voices of their own, various accessories (hats, scarves, belts, shoes, watches) give people unusual powers, usually to either spy on people having sex or increase the user's chances of having sex. And over all there is just a sudden increase in people having sex: the pornoverse is a localized phenomenon, inconvenient but hardly tragic.

House of Holes is written like an acid-trip magical realism porn film, only put into the hands of a respected literary writer. The book opens up with Shandee who, while walking in the woods, comes across an arm. Just an arm. It waves at her, and she takes it home. Giving it a piece of paper and a pen, it introduces itself: "Hi, I'm Dave's arm." They have a conversation about how Dave's arm came to be independent of Dave: It turns out that, at the House of Holes, if you want a bigger dick, you have to give up another appendage to get it. You can get the arm back, but you have to fulfill a contractual obligation. The owner of the House, an ancient wise woman named Lila, knows exactly the right obligation.

There are all sorts of weird, arbitrary rules at the House, and a thousand and one different ways to have fun. Thousands of men, in quest of a great orgasm, have chosen to give up their penises in order to let the "jizm" build. The Hall of Penises has all of these, poking up, sagging down, all waiting to be re-united with their former owners. If someone else wants an especially large one, he might get it from that Hall, but only in exchange for a finger, or an arm, or something.

But it's 70's porn: nobody is mean, everyone says "please" and "thank you," and the banality of the porniverse is that, for these people, it's a pleasure as ordinary and as mainstream, and as separate from real human sex, as any porn film ever can be. It's blissfully a long way from the cruel gonzo porn that's fortunately fading away to a low roar.

If there's a weakness to the book, it's the way the literary form shows just how much the women of 70's porn were like William James' Automatic Sweetheart, "a soulless body which should be absolutely indistinguishable from a spiritually animated maiden, laughing, talking, blushing, nursing us, and performing all feminine offices as tactfully and sweetly as if a soul were in her." Books take us where movies cannot, into the mind of a character. For most of the women in House of Holes, there's no "there" there. To me, that expectation often ruined my suspension of disbelief.

Some reviewers, I think, read too much into the "horror" nature of the way Shandee has a loving relationship with Dave's arm, or Reese gets off with a "sexbody," a male body who's head is in cold storage, waiting to be reunited with the rest of his studly, getting laid, but generally mindless anatomy. For all we know, Baker was analogizing the way we compartmentalize our awareness that the food on our plates comes from cruel factory farms, or that our sexy life-conveniencing iPods are put together with slave labor. He's not saying.

There are some moments that come across with authorial voice, such as the character of Hax, whose mission is to convince women that their nakedness is beautiful-- and Hax has a long soliloquy about how both tattoos and shaved pubes are often forms of hiding one's self. Or the character of Dune, who says that all of the House of Holes, and its concentration on variety and fetish, is "too much," and that what one really needs for good sex is a man and a woman, "not too fat."

There are a lot of short scenes, set-ups of people doing it or planning to do it or getting ready to do it, with titles like "Shandee finds Dave's Arm," or "Dune takes a walk on the Boardwalk." They follow a small cast of people through this weird, psychedelic landscape.

House of Holes is sexy, inventive, and funny. It's also exhausting, full of a kind of humanity that is as distant from us as the New Soviet Man or the Randian Hero. It says things about human beings and about sex by showing wonderfully, creepily inhuman people having sex. But if you like really well-written, witty, and genuinely inventive erotica, I strongly recommend House of Holes. It has set a new standard, and if you're going to write erotica from this day forward, it is a standard that will challenge all of us.

I picked out Fatale by Jean-Patrick Manchette, based on a comment by a friend of mine. The comment was many months in the past, so I was surprised to stumble across the book at the local library. I read it through-- it's only 80 pages or so-- and I have to say that I'm disappointed.

Manchette is thought to be France's greatest roman noir writer, with a kind of post-modern hardboiled sensibility. Fatale is supposed to be one of his best works, but I didn't see it.

( Plot spoilers, in case you ever intend to read obscure French noir. )

But here's the weird thing. For all the praise that this book gets, we never really get a clear reason why Aimée changes her mind. I've re-read the section in the middle where "the wrench" happens, and Aimée's motives are completely opaque. I'm sure Manchette meant, in his middle-passage sections where she returns to Paris to visit her mother, and has an unpleasant encounter with a masher at the train station, to reveal something about her character, but it's incomplete. Perhaps Manchette meant to say something like "Aimée is incomplete as a human being." But his third-person, completely objective, absolutely literal and linear narrative, also gives us an Aimée that is incomplete as a character. Without an appreciation for her and her motives, we're left with a vague, unsatisfying (but to a modern audience, hardly novel or unsettling) portrait of an evil-doer as avenging angel.

I looked twice into this book to try and find what was supposed to be "comedic." The opening chapter is stunning in its brutality, which is why the rest of the book fails, at least for me: its follow-on contrasts are weak, its characters poorly sketched and unconvincing, its crisis is arbitrary and its denouement is a mess.

I feel let down by a book so highly praised. At least it was a quick read.

Surface Detail is Iain M. Banks's latest Culture novel, and... that's about it.

No, really. If you've read a Culture novel, you know what you're in for: a series of novelletish vignettes featuring a vast cast of characters, from all different types, two of which (the corporate sociopath and the political sociopath) will crop up, be lectured to by some nominal "good" protagonist, and eventually fall from grace and probably be killed in some gruesome manner.

If Banks applies himself at all in Surface Detail, it is in his depictions of Hell. Literal Hell in this case. The plot of Surface Detail surrounds those civilizations, similar in technological level to The Culture, that continue to maintain Hells: places where uploaded, digital consciouness are tortured for as long as a given civilization's Powers That Be deem they be tortured. They believe that the existence of Hell, and the threat of it, are necessary to maintain peace and order in their civ/species/polity. The Culture, and other like-minded civs, are convinced that the pro-Hell forces are barbarians, and that the galaxy would be better off without Hell.

The story goes off like a Banks novel, with the usual clockwork-with-some-pieces-missing plotting that is Banks's hallmark. There's a slave girl with a tattoo who somehow ends up halfway across the galaxy and tattoo-less; she fucks her way back to her homeworld for a chance to kill her former master. There's a Culture specialist in dealing with the dead (more on that in a paragraph) who gets caught up in trying to track someone down and help them deal with their death. There's an alien species lifted out of Well World that has Hells, and two politically motivated researchers who break into Hell in order to return and report about it. There are some Culture operatives working to tamp down an outbreak of violently hegemonizing smartmatter, that turns out to be something military involved with something about the political battle over Hells. And there's the secret agent involved in a long-running, publicly visible gladiatorial match between the pro- and anti-Hell forces, having their own referee'd war in the bizarre belief that the side with the strongest moral strength ought to win: the pro-Hells want the anti-Hells to stop lecturing them, and the anti-Hells want the pro-Hells to shut it all down.

Banks' weakness here is that he remains ideologically wed to a personally idiosyncratic vision of humanity. People of The Culture live 400 years, and then cheerfully knock themselves off. Those who don't are considered narcissistic and self-obsessed, since they won't make room for the next generation. When they die, they may choose to spend eternity in a digital retirement zone, indistinguishable from the real universe. There's an entire division of Contact devoted to dealing with these people, called Quietus. The distinction between "I'm a digital person now. I got killed, but as I haven't lived out my 400 years, it is entirely appropriate for me to have a new body made and be reinstantiated in it, but while I'm waiting for it to grow I'll hang out in this paradisical setting," and "I'm a dead person, living out a digital afterlife in a paradisical setting," is bizarrely rigid and universal in his galaxy. It's as if Banks's people have the technology to tune, affect, influence, adapt, modify, and duplicate themselves, but only within narrow notions of Banks's own expectations of mortality.

The other problem is also classic Banks: the two most interesting characters are shuffled around on the stage but Banks doesn't really know what to do with them, once he's done with them. Prin and Chay, the characters from Well World, the ones who break into Hell, have the best story in the book. Chay, especially, but it peters out into the end after Banks has done an especially masterful job of speeding Chay through harrowing Hell after harrowing Hell. Prin, on the other hand, is Banks' mouthpiece: he delivers Banks's lecture to the audience about the Evils of Believing Threat of Pain Is Necessary To Maintaining Social Order. There's supposed to be a big confrontation after this speech is given. Banks never lets us see it. Prin had done his job, and is shuffled off-screen.

Surface Detail is a better book than Matter or Transition, Banks's last Culture and non-Culture SF. (His non-Culture, non-SF The Steep Approach to Garbadale, I haven't read.) It has the vast stage, the wonderous setting, but the sensawunda and shock-and-awe of The Wasp Factory or Use of Weapons is long since gone.

p.s. Why is there no "unsatisfied" tag for Livejournal? There's a "satisfied" tag, after all.

This weekend, I read Genesis by Bernard Beckett. It was at the library and it caught my eye with its subtitle, "What does it mean to be human?" so I picked it up on a whim. It's a YA novel of 145 pages, and I sped through it in about three hours.

TL;DR version:

Genesis is a tightly-plotted YA novel that explores whether or not a sufficiently subtle machine can be said to "think" as humans understand thinking. Its main characters are likeable and you'll enjoy your time with them. The book suffers from several authorial conceits, however, that weaken its overall impact. ★★★☆☆

If you're looking for a detailed exposition of the state-of-the-art in thinking about manufactured conscious entities, and a way to explain it to a bright, nerdy 13-year-old, Genesis is the perfect book for that task. The setting is in a society of the far future; crime and disease and all the rest have been conquered, we are told, after the fall of The Last Republic. There are very few intellectuals, however, and those that exist are encouraged to try for entrance into The Academy, where the very best are said to work toward the well-being of all.

In a fairly standard story-within-a-story plot, the heroine, Anaximander, goes before a review board for entrance into The Academy, and her duty is to explain why her chosen subject was history, and specifically the history of two beings: Adam, a rebellious youth from the time before the current society, and Art, one of the very first AIs. So we read Anaximander's story while she tells us Adam's story. The structure is fairly hackneyed, although I suppose for a YA novel it will be new to its target audience and so maybe that works.

The dialogue between Art and Adam is the core of the book, with its premises about whether or not consciousness is a quality only meat can possess, and whether or not Art, who seems fully conscious in every dialogue, is in fact a philosophical zombie, or if there's more to Art than just yes/no circuitry.

To say I have mixed feelings about this book is to understate my problem with a review. The book is tightly plotted; there's not a wasted word on any page and it hums along quite well. On the other hand, it's poorly opened, with an initial conflict that, quite frankly, didn't grab me until well into the book. By outlaying in the opening chapter that this would be a story-within-a-story plot, we have to wait not only until the inner story gets moving, 20 pages in, but until Adam commits his crimes and gets sentenced be Art's "tutor" in the ways of humanity, which is about 70 pages in. That's a lot of row to hoe.

The story is also downright humorless: there's one laugh in the entire book. In many ways, that might well be a warning about the Rod Serling ending, although fans of Rod Serling will see that ending coming from about the halfway point. I certainly did, and was disappointed when Beckett rode to his inevitable conclusion.

The book also suffers from several authorial conceits. First, in order play up the Socratic dialogue of Anaximander and the review panel, many of the side-characters in The Last Republic are named after Greek philosophers: Plato, Aristotle, etc. The inner hero is named Adam Forde, and I'm confident that Beckett chose "Forde" as a nod to "Our Ford" from Huxley's Brave New World. This constant use of unrealistic names continuously pulled me out of the book. It was a struggle to stay.

Second, the author withholds from the reader knowledge the main character has from the very first page, in order to create a "jaw-dropping" moment at the end of the book. Unfortunately, experienced readers will be anticipating this alternative ending more or less the moment its introduced, about halfway through the book.

Finally, the author asks us to believe that Anaximander, this relentlessly curious, radiantly intellectual character, who has spent the last three years studying to enter The Academy, would somehow have missed completely one critical, obvious detail about The Academy. That completely blew my suspension of disbelief, and ruined the SensaWunda moment for me. I was only three pages from the ending, so I trudged toward it, knowing what was coming.

A lot of the other reviews I read of Genesis are gushing in their praise. But for someone who's been reading Vinge, Stross, Egan, Rucker, Stephenson, even early Hogan, this book was only an interesting refresher course. It accomplishes what the author set out to accomplish: it has a voice, an opinion, and a story to tell.

I don't think I can legitimately say I read Iain M. Banks' latest SF book, Transition. I think it's best to say that I subjected myself to it. Sometime past the halfway point, I snarked to someone that this book answered one of the burning questions of my lifetime: "What would happen if China Mieville wrote Nine Princes in Amber fanfic?" Having finished the book, I stand by that assessment.

( Some spoilers from the Zelanzy half of the snark. )

The Mieville bit comes from the fact that Transition is little more than a collection of screeds, connected together by the story, that gives Banks an excuse to rail against the evils of our world. His biggest bugaboo is The Evil Of The Limited Liability Corporation, the Social Attitudes That Allow Same, and the Corrupting Influence of Such on The Morals of Men In Government. Despite having nothing to do with the central plot, several characters wander in just to deliver a talk on the evils of "Greedist" society ("Degenerate Christian High-Capitalist worlds"), always side-characters about whom we know little and, therefore, cannot judge if they're speaking in any voice but their own.

There's also an incredible (and frankly embarrassing for a man of Banks's skill) essay-length rant on how a society that permits torture is on the Verge of Deep Doomy Doom. While I agree with Banks's politics on a number of points, the clumsy delivery is trite and frankly not up to modern sensibilities. This in 1970s-level Authorial Message In A Book crap, the kind of stuff we expected put behind us when Suzy McKee Charnas stopped writing.

The narrative layout is pure Banks: multiple narrators telling seemingly unconnected stories that all come together in one Grand Guignol scene on a crowded bridge in Venice.

Except... it doesn't. Banks doesn't deliver. It's as if he got to this scene and realized he didn't have the right pieces for his typical breathtaking twist, or even had a breathtaking twist (if you've ever read Use of Weapons, Feersum Endjiin or, cold uncaring stars help you, The Wasp Factory, you know what I'm talking about!), so he lets a deus ex machina casually whisk the pieces away, resetting the chessboard, and the book peters out without much of a satisfying ending.

Worse, Banks delivers the "this is how my universe works" info dumps during explicit sex romps between a student worldwalker and his teacher, as she grills him while trying to distract him. And he pulls this trick in multiple chapters. A more ham-handed "pay attention or you'll miss the fucking" I can't imagine.

There are moments of Banksian brilliance in this book. And there are surprises: the two-page description of a masquerade dance, the hall and its occupants, is full of pure Gothic poetry, so pretty that it again reminded me more of Zelazny in full Creatures of Light and Darkness mode than anything Banks had written before. But these are rare.

On the whole, this is the most disappointing book by Banks I've yet read. His last Culture novel, Matter, was much the same as Transition: the same narrative layout, similar rants (in this case, mostly about solipsism, a topic he touches on as well in a book about walking the multiverse), the same disappointing "time to end the book now" ending. Unless you're a committed Iain M. Banks fan, Transition is not worth your time.

Jim Munroe's Everyone in Silico is a near-future (2036) posthuman book with a very dark premise: uploading of human consciousness has been acheived, but the company responsible for it (Self, a subsidiary of Microsoft) has created a very boring multi-user environment almost completely like the real world. People don't like change, the theory goes: they'll only accept uploading if the virtual world is like the real world, only moreso.

The real world of 2036 is pretty sad. Corporations have dissolved government and now practice detenté with each other. There are special agents who wear warsuits that cause premature aging, and companies use these agents against each other and "rogue governments" (meaning: any government). Goverment is an inefficient drag on the market, and must be eliminated. The year of 2036 is pretty telling to; it's the 150th anniversary of the assumption that corporations had all the rights of individuals, but few of the responsibilities.

The book follows three people: Doug, a "coolhunter" who's worried that he's losing it as he gets older; Nicky, a genehacker who makes custom pets in a world that no longer needs genehacking, now that uploading is the new thing; and Eileen, a former special agent whose 12-year-old son disappeared and seems to have been uploaded into Self.

The "people don't like change" meme is battered heavily toward the end of the book, especially with the description of the "foyer" of the Self universe. Also, inside Self, people don't need to sleep, but they do need jobs; the replication is so significant that only the economically disjunct don't need to do "information work." Everybody else is a knowledge worker despite there obviously being an AI system strong enough that no such work is needed.

The book drags for the first half or so as Munroe gets his pieces into place, unmasks the shadowy hero manipulating them, and reaches a reasonably satisfying climax toward the end.

What I liked about the book is that the characters all feel there's something fundamentally wrong with a "virtual" existence, either in the real world or in silico. But being an uploaded person doesn't make your experiences in the virtual world inauthentic; what makes something inauthentic is when other people choose for you the experiences you're having, or you opt for a shoddier existence knowing there's a vibrant alternative. "Self" isn't shoddier than the real world; knowing that Self is a corporate entity within which you have no rights whatsoever, however distant and pretty the bars on the cage may be, makes it a shoddier existence.

The book is a Statement On Corporatism, so the book is littered with cynical statements about brands: Coke, KFC, Microsoft, Nike, etc. etc. come in for some very heavy bashing. And the shadowy hero is very much the Voice of the Author. Munroe does a good job of slipping his opinions into the story, but it's obvious when he's doing so.

But for a book like this, that's not a bad thing. We come to care about Doug and his existential angst, and we care about Nicky and Eileen, and hope for the best. It's a suprisingly humane and inviting story, for all the grimness going on. The book ends with a satisfying if vague, happy ending. I highly recommend it. And it's available free.

The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves — and Why It Matters attempts to decode the North Korean state religion, a religion that is obscured by the fact that very few outsiders even speak, much less read, Korean (I guess there just isn't enough anime from South Korea for there to be an otaku community in the west). Author B. R. Myers does speak and read Korean, and has assembled what he knows. His excerpts and analysis show that internal propaganda for North Korea is wildly different from that distributed to the West, and what that difference means.

Myers calls internal propaganda "The Text," and makes references to it. His chapters start with his summary of The Text regarding a specific issue-- Who are the North Koreans?, Who is Kim Jung Il?, What of the South Koreans?, What of the United States?-- and then proceeds to show, through extensive excerpts from internal North Korean propaganda, including officially permitted popular books and movies, what The Text disseminated through North Korea says.

The title comes from an quote from official North Korean propaganda, worked into one of his summaries: "The Korean people are the cleanest, purest, and therefore most virtuous race on Earth. Our purity is like that of a child, and therefore our innocence is also that of a child. Only a truly strong leader can protect us from the stain of outside influence." This is the basis of North Korea's entire ideology: that Koreans are pure, uncorrupted, and child-like in their innocence, and they deserve to stay that way, because innocence is pleasure, while maturity and adulthood are painful.

Myers' work is pretty comprehensive, although there are times when takes other historians and analysts to task for their own lack of criticality; he has his eye particularly on leftist historians who try to excuse North Korea, and find solidarity between it and the USSR. He also takes to task South Korean and Chinese historians who interpret North Korea as an extreme example of Confucian polity. Myers claims that nothing could be further from the truth; there is nothing of "fraternity" and the masculine "fatherland" concepts, nothing of the economic benefits of solidarity, nor is there honoring of ancestors and paternal authority; instead, there is familial feeling, always centered on a cthonic maternal ideal, and the people are not to worry too much about the economy and looking forward (the Soviet concept), or the ancient traditions (the Confucian ideal), but instead to hold fast to their individual pasts, to hold to their childhoods and the all-engulfing mother-love of the motherland.

Myers also points out that we misinterpret Pyongyang. Many in the free world see the immense status of the Kim family, and the enormous buildings with their broad, automobile-free streets, as somehow attempting to make the visitor feel small. What Myers points out is that these instead make the North Korean visitor feel big-- look at how powerful his state is, to have raised such monuments. Without the transcendent individualizing religions that arose in the West with a paternalistic god-concept, the North Korean attaches his need for immortality, his own fear of an existential end, by emphasizing his role in the immortality of the state. The North Korean propaganda machine has done a masterful job of conflating the persistence of the state with the purity of the race.

For Myers, Pyongyang is not a "leftist" institution at all, but one of the extreme right: a fascist state propped up by an earnest racism that comes from the top down. Myers also emphasizes that the topmost tiers of the North Korean political system believe in the racial purity as much as the ordinary people do; the Dear Leaders have always had more popular support than we suppose in the West; and that their propaganda has, since the end of WWII, emphasized that there is no chance whatsoever for rapprochement between Korean and the "mongrelized" world, because there is no chance for compromise between purity and corruption. North Korea is on a knife's edge: it needs not to die of economic collapse (and the Chinese can't afford it to); it also needs not provoke a war, but to be true to its ideals it cannot ever be seen by its own people to be seeking peace.

One thing Myers does well is show that the South Koreans are not so far behind the North Koreans in their racism and centrism. This is one of the reasons there is so little South Korean entertainment reaching American shores-- their own ideology allows only for small, dull conflicts. South Korean kids entertain themselves by imagining how violent the rest of the world is, compared to tranquil Korea.

The book is a solid read, and only 200 pages long, filled with long out-takes from North Korean literature translated into English for the first time. There are also hundreds of illustrations of posters and movie stills, showing that as recently as 2006 the North Korean government was reminding its people that Americans poison Korean babies and run over schoolchildren for entertainment. It's a pretty scary book that leaves you with one impression: the North Koreans really believe what they say they believe, and any attempt to negotiate with them "in good faith" is doomed, because they believe that no good faith is possible with a world that seeks their corruption.

The other day, as I was looking through an acquaintance's library, I came across the Open Gaming License book, The Book of Erotic Fantasy, which is intended as a rule add-on to Dungeons & Dragons, D20 edition. There was a bit of a kerfluffle after the book started circulating and Wizards of the Coast amended the rules of their public license to prevent works from circulating that were obscene, pornographic, or contrary to community decency.

They needn't have bothered. The book isn't really worthy of the attention.

There are two sections of the book worth attention: the spells section and the monsters section. The monsters are interesting and, if a bit predictable, still contain a lot of sparks for interesting campaigns. You'll have to work to create the scenarios suggested for many of the monsters, but they're still worth it. The spells are clever and intriguing.

On the other hand, the characters, feats and skills section of the book suggest a complete paucity of creativity. The three standard classes offered are "Imagist" (an illusionist who works primarily with beauty), "Kundalist," (a kind of sex monk), and "Tantrist," (a mage who uses sex to raise power). The whole theif/bard/rogue end of the business, with prostitutes, courteasans, and so forth is ignored, and if you're gonna run a city campaign those would be great roles to play. The feats and skills sections are weak, and suggest an unfortunate tendency to try and impress modern "altie" sexuality on the Dungeons & Dragons world. Piercing and tattooing were not always sexual, and were not always associated with alternative sexuality, but they are in this book.

There's an okay section in the beginning in which the writers try to be adult about the whole thing. For the most part they succeed, but they were preaching to a critical member of the choir when I read it. I couldn't help but hear the sniggering in the background.

It probably doesn't help that the illustrations are, for the most part, photographs, many of them digitally edited for special effects, and many of them straight-up nudes. Not the sort of book you can read in public.

All in all, this book isn't a great addition to either the D&D collection of books, or to the further understanding of human sexuality. Most of the rules are the sorts of things a good gamemaster could come up with on their own, the creative effort is somewhat pauce, and the sexuality much more modern than is appropriate. I think the book succeeds mostly in its final page, where Phil Foglio pretty much makes the same case that I did: good players and game masters will handle sex the way they handle any strange encounter, and the existing rules are sufficient to the game. This book was not required, and it does little to further the genre.