elfs | Entries tagged with book

Fanfic, even authorized fanfic, can be a risky venture. I've often made that point myself as a writer of fanfic, and as a reader. Making a fanfic video game out of a beloved work from a deeply respected genre master is especially treacherous. And yet, The Invincible somehow manages to both be completely faithful to Stanislaw Lem's original novel, The Invincible, yet extend it brilliantly.

I played the video game first, so let's start with this: I knew nothing about this particular book when I played the game. Like most SF readers, my encounter with Lem consisted of being forced to read Solaris in high school, which I found terribly dreary and uninformative. Lem's writing style is very much an older, more telling style, a narrative mostly of descriptions of people doing things; dialogue is reserved for brief color and long expositions. Not a style conducive to video gaming.

The Invincible: the video game

The game focuses on the character of Yasna, a member of a small exploratory vessel from "The Commonwealth," as she wakes up in the desert of Regis III, an unknown world of very dry atmosphere and a weak, cool sun. Her last memory is of her agreeing to stay on the ship with the ship's navigator (and its commander) while the other five people on the crew go down for a look, but she finds her backpack and her notes sticking out of a dune nearby. In her notes she finds that she had been walking for several hours and has a map back to the team's campsite.

She gets in touch with the navigator, finds two of her crew in a state of catatonia, and from there has to find her way back to the ship's one working lander.

The plot and story of this game are what make it worthwhile. There are very few places where you have to decide more than "go left or right," and like most such games the outcome of any such decision is foregone. This is mostly a tale being told in a slow, engaging way by a first-person game engine. The order in which you explore a new place, and whether or not to check out some side-stories, are pretty much the only fundamental decisions you'll make.

That said, it is an engaging bit of work. Yasna comes into conflict with a team from "The Alliance," who came in a starship named Condor. The game doesn't say so in so many words, but you get the sense that the Alliance is "western" in some sense, whereas the Commonwealth is more "soviet." Eventually, the real crisis of Regis III comes to a head and Yasna and members of the Alliance must work together to survive.

The game is gorgeous, the voice acting is excellent, and Yasna is good company with which to hang out.

The Invincible: the book

The 1964 novel has no "Alliance" or "Commonwealth." We're told only that The Invincible has been dispatched by "the authorities back home" to Regis III to find out why Condor, which had been scheduled to explore Regis III eight months earlier, had not returned.

The book focuses on the character of Rohan, the ship's senior exec and second in command, and the experiences he has on the surface of Regis III. The story follows Rohan around as various expeditionary teams are sent out to try to find Condor to discover what could possibly have happened to the ship and its crew. It's dry in that way that 1960s science fiction could be dry, especially when joined with Polish sensibilities of that time and the translator's efforts.

For all that, it's a brilliant book. It was written 22 years before Drexler's Engines of Creation and yet every great idea in that book exists in The Invincible. How the dangers of Regis III emerged from naturalistic processes is so well-described it makes James P. Hogan's Code of the Lifemaker read like fanfic. Lem single-handledly envisioned nanotechnology, and how nanotechnology, automation, and the feedback mechanisms of natural selection could interact decades before those very terms came into existence.

Faith and Deviation

The game is astonishingly faithful to the book. Recall that I read the book after playing the game. In the game, the Alliance has caterpillar construction equipment digging massive boreholes, balloon-wheeled all-terrain jeeps, ground-effect transporters, ducted-turbine "flying saucers," multi-legged crawlers and a few force-field floating war machines. The mix of vehicles felt completely nonsensical... and every one of those is in the book. The "atompunk" feel of the equipment in the game is accurate to the book in every detail. So are the limitations of the space suits, the communications equipment, the surface-to-orbit landers, the sensory gear, and even Yasna's compass is a pretty good representation of the same one Rohan used (although Rohan could wear his on his wrist, and Yasna has to keep taking hers out of her pocket).

The game starts on Regis III three days before The Invincible is scheduled to arrive, which creates tension in that the Commonwealth people, who are just a little exploratory team of eight, know they need to do a quick survey and get the hell out of there before The Invincible arrives.

There are a few deviations from the book. In the book, the crew of The Invincible find Condor and it's dead crew... and one guy who might still be alive in one of Condor's cryochambers. (It's not a spoiler to say he's not alive and can't be recovered; it's just a moment Lem added for pathos.) For game reasons, those cryochambers are empty and still working when Yasna finds the Condor. The book says that Condor and The Invincible are the same class of ship and of the same size. The game says that the Invincible is "the biggest ship in the Alliance, and twice as large as anything else they have." Condor's team didn't have time to set up more than one drilling operation to explore the strange metallic ruins under the sand, but the game, to stretch out Act II a bit, has three different drilling sites for you to visit.

And ... and that's about it. That last one could even be just that the crew of The Invincible, wrapped up in its own concerns, didn't find all the explorations the crew of Condor conducted. Otherwise, the game is a wholly faithful and reasonable extrapolation of what happened in the book, and the cold war conflict of the Commonwealth and the Alliance are deftly added, sensitive to the conditions of the cold war as it was playing out in 1964, and believable. It's a visual novel, an entirely new story, the best kind of fanfiction, told in an interactive way that gives well-thought and well-designed visuals to one of Stanislaw Lem's great works.

Technology And Its Disconnect

You get less of a sense of it in the game because the first-person visual narrative forces you to be "in the moment" with Yasna, but both the book and the game really hammer home the weirdness of atompunk sensibility (and the game somehow manages to do this without being "ironic" about it!). Lem's future is "like five years from 1964, only with bigger engines." Lem didn't expect information processing to get much better; he has robots and, like lots of SF writers, over-estimated how easy speech recognition would be and under-estimated speech production.

In the book, The Invincible has both orbital and atmospheric drones, but their lifespans are short and their cameras are both analog and terrible. On two occasions in the game, Yasna gets to operate a "camera balloon" drone (something not in the book, but completely believable given the tech) and the cameras have the classic snow and terrible bandwidth of analog. The teams use Morse code when voice radio becomes unintelligible. Their orbit-to-surface telescopes have a resolution of "miles", whereas the Mars Orbital Surveyor has a resolution of 1.5 meters per pixel, and unlike the MOS, The Invincible has to de-orbit the satellite so its payload parachutes within about 40 miles of their landing site so someone can retrieve the film!

This is science fiction from the 1960s in all its glory: manly men doing manly things, with bigger engines and more powerful laser guns, but no one and nothing is going to challenge man's position as the most intelligent being. Need to map a planet? You'll need 200 men and four months to go through all the photographs.

Now that I think about it, the introduction of Yasna, a woman crewmember, into the game is actually one of the biggest anachronisms; there are zero women in Lem's book, the only mention of women at all is Rohan's observation that Captain Horpach never married. Or it could be completely in keeping with the games "cold war" sensibilities to introduce a woman on the ~~Soviet~~ Commonwealth's side, since one of Lenin's positions was that, unlike the West, the Soviet union didn't discard the intellectual firepower women could bring to scientific endeavors like space exploration.

Success Isn't Always Pleasure, But In This Case

Fun is where you find it. The book isn't fun, and neither, really is the game. What they are is intriguing and, ultimately, satisfying. The game succeeds wildly in what it sets out to do: retell the story of what happened to the starship Condor on Regis III from a unique (for the book) and different point of view, provide a visual vocabulary for all the wonders Lem described, and make the point of the book and its conclusion just as hard. You learn something from the book and the game, and you learn different things. The book is short, less than 200 pages, and can be read in about four hours. The game is about twice that long.

Technical details

The Invincible ran "okay" on my computer. I run Ubuntu Linux and have a GeForce 2060 with 6GB of RAM, and the framerate was sometimes not all that fantastic (I discovered that disabling the "special effects" on the operating system's window manager made it run much better!), but it runs well on modern hardware and it's gorgeous all the same. Given the nature of the game, I didn't need perfect aim. Running it on Linux and Wine (Proton) was otherwise flawless.

Current Mood: satisfied

Writing about Homer's The Odyssey without devolving into a high-school level book report is a challenge even for the most seasoned writer. Be that as it may, having now finished Emily Wilson's new translation I have to say, I kinda understand why this 2,800 year-old story has lasted as long as it has.

It's not structured the way a modern book is structured, except maybe some avante-garde types. It starts in the middle, with a look at how Odysseus' rivals and his wife are both exploiting loopholes in law and custom, the former to stay in his palace without contribution, the latter avoiding making a decision that would irrevocably place Odysseus in a place of powerlessness, should he be alive. Eventually, it gets around to telling us where Odysseus is, again in the middle of the story, after his first shipwreck, and follows him to civilization, where his host asks him to tell the beginning of the story, from leaving Troy through to the first shipwreck, after which the host gives him a ship to go home and take care of his rivals.

There's a lot more going on here, and Wilson's translation makes reading about it all quite delightful. Lesser gods weild magic wands, for example, and the goddess Athena is constantly messing with Odysseus, both to make his life harder and to make his journey possible. Wilson makes the story accessible in way it never was in high school. In one scene, the sorcereress Calypso says, "Hermes, nice to see you. You don't visit often," to which Hermes says, "Zeus sent me. I wouldn't have come otherwise. You think I wanted to make this journey? You live in the middle of nowehere." And in her translation notes, I sense an honesty in that exchange, a sense that Wilson got it right. You get the feeling that Hermes is peeved to be "far away from the cities with their sweet sacrifices" in the same way some American tourists are peeved to learn there are no Starbucks in Iceland.

Wilson goes both ways with her translation notes. She unflinchingly translates a nasty scene, presented as justice and heroism, in which Odysseus's teenage son orders the men of the palace to round up the twelve slave girls known to be cavorting with and sympathetic to the rivals, and while the men hold the rest in place, slowly strangles each girl to death. On the other hand, she also says that earlier translators, in an effort to make the scene look reasonable to their moral senses, did everything they can to make the girls seem even more wicked and faithless; that is, to justify the boy's misogynistic actions, they wrote about the women with more misogyny than was justified by the text.

Odysseus is pretty much bangin' goddesses left and right here. He sleeps with both Calypso and Circe. Wilson writes that in Homer, it is Penelope's faithfulness to Odysseus that gives Odysseus his strength; as long as his primary line of descent is secure, Odysseus is unstoppable. Odysseus can have sex with goddesses all book long, but Penelope must remain faithful. Strength and prodigy are manly, but faithfulness is feminine.

I learned a lot. I finally read the whole darn story, after all, not the assigned bits we had in fourth form (tenth grade). It's better than that dull exercise made it out to be, and Wilson's translation is a gorgeous, targeted, and sprightly one that deserves a wider audience.

Steve Barnes was once a wunderkind of the cyberpunk set, a man who brought a sensibility to the genre that came from somewhere other than the dystopic dreams of white suburbanites. Like a lot of writers from that time who still get paid, he's branched out and moved on, and The Cestus Deception is a fine example.

Yes, it's Star Wars, and yes, it's Clone Wars, part of the now-disavowed Star Wars Expanded Universe, but it's a fun book. It's about Obi-Wan and Kit Fisto (I still can't believe that's a real name of a real character in the Star Wars universe) on a mission to a distant world that sells 'droids that fast enough to actually defeat a Jedi, in the hopes of convincing them not to sell their technology to the Separatists and their 'droid army.

The world Barnes imagines, Cestus, is surprisingly diverse: not a "desert world," not an "ice world," it's a full-on world with forests and deserts and ice caps and all you'd expect. Barnes makes the case that a single world, with all its hidey-holes, is actually way more exciting than space with its clear lines of sight and easily-detected energy signatures. Barnes introduces us to A-9-8 and his team of clones who accompany Kenobi and Fisto to Cestus, and gives us a really interesting story about the clones, and about how they think, learn, grow, and act as human beings, and how their status in the Republic is on shaky and ethically questionable ground.

There are one or two chapters that are barely a page long, as if Barnes needs to tell you one thing quickly or the next few chapters won't make sense. These moments have a cinematic feel to them— appropriate for a Star Wars novel.

It is a Steve Barnes book, so the other thing you'll get is a lot of discussion of martial arts. I can see why Barnes wanted to write a Clone Wars book, though: the Jedi have several different fighting traditions, given their age and diversity of members; the Grand Army of the Republic teaches the clone warriors a distinct fighting style of their own. This gives Barnes lots of opportunities to discuss one topic on which he loves to expound, but it's done well and I enjoyed what he did with it.

The ending is highly satisfying, even if we do know the ultimate truth: that behind the covers Palpitane is maneuvering to make the galaxy an awful place. And Barnes, much to my surprise given how long ago this book was written (2004), actually makes points about the conflict of the Jedi and the Sith that have now become extremely relevant in The Last Jedi. (That's not a spoiler; you'll really have to have read the book and seen the movie to understand.)

Current Mood: satisfied

I have a soft spot for Robert Wright, as he often seems to be a slightly better constructed but also angrier version of myself. His books The Moral Animal and Non-Zero were big and insightful; both argued that evolutionary complexity leads inevitably to both morality and economics (which he also suggests is a subcategory of moral thought), provided no stray asteroids or nuclear wars happen, and his case for both was strong and compelling, if also somewhat incomplete.

Why Buddhism is True, his new book, is thematically quite different, although he does tread similar evopsychological ground from time to time. Wright is a big fan of scientism: he wants scientific explanations or correlations for phenomena and here he gets into the weeds of neurobiology and modern psychology to explain why Buddha's insights were and are useful.

Wright starts off with a chapter on the illusion of reality, and talks about how the physical, squishy grey matter locked away inside your skull manufactures, moment by moment, a story about who you are and what you're doing. There's good evidence this is true. He writes that our brains, especially our emotional system, is exapted for an environment utterly unlike our modern world, and that food manufacturers, television producers, and nowadays social media networks seek to exploit the misalignement between what our technologies can do, and what our brains can handle, to create within us obsessions toward their brands of food, media, or games. Buddha, Wright explains, understood this a lot, and not only were his insights but his recommendations for how to deal with this maladaptive misalignment were and still are among the most useful.

Buddha diagnosed our problem as restlessness. The Four Noble Truths at the heart of Buddhism start with "You are a creature whose restlessness and dissatisfaction with your state makes you unhappy." Evolution comes to the same conclusion: we need to eat, and stay warm, and reproduce; a creature of satisfaction is unlikely to pursue these goals, and so is a failure. Our emotional system is designed make us pursue pleasures, the pleasure of each fading over time, making us restless for more.

Wright spends a lot of time on this sort of thing: correlations between classic Buddhist teachings and what the science actually says. The idea that there is no "self," but instead lots of little "selves" inside, the ones that distract us from our stated goals in pursuit of shorter-term pleasures, the ones that arise and cripple us with anxiety, and how these "modular subselves" will co-opt or organize to make us seemingly different people at different times, or in different places, or with different people.

The book makes a bit of a left turn about 2/3rds of the way through, when Wright starts talking about Nirvana, Enlightment, Emptiness, and so forth. He starts out by saying that you are not unhappy, you are the subject of all these selves about which you tell a story that presents "you" as a coherent whole. Wright even delves into how the story we tell ourselves and the story we tell others is different, but both are coherent; it's just that the one we tells others is modified with motivations that make us seem capable, trustworthy, and coherent. We might even believe both stories; after all, we make for lousy evolutionary replicators if we had high anxiety all the time.

Wright ends with a plea that others "take up the cushion," even though he's quite sure he's never going to get as far with it as many other meditators. The insights meditation gives us, to look at things as they are and not as we wish them to be, to step outside ourselves, and to just exercise the powers of concentration, are valuable; it also seems almost inevitable that with these insights comes a sense of compassion and wisdom that most people lack.

Wright's book is completely devoid of supernaturalism. There are no gods in his book, no demons, and no other dimensions to see. There's only this one, and Wright's conclusion is that we need better tools to see this one clearly, and Buddha came up with a damn fine, if sometimes exceedingly sharp, set of tools.

Wright's book won't convince you if you're unwilling to be convinced, any more than the combined strength of astronomy and geology won't convince a young earth creationist. But he makes a strong case for Buddhist, Stoics, and those sympathetic to the contemplative life, that the basic meditative toolkit, with at its heart the daily practice of meditating (with its sub-disciplines) to improve your concentration, assess your morality, and seek clarity, is probably one of the best you can find.

As I was writing this review, I was reminded that the notion that we always communicate a "better" version of ourselves to others, and the notion that there is no "self" inside, were both covered in The Illuminatus! Trilogy. The first, that we communicate "better" versions of ourselves, is covered by The SNAFU Principle, and the second, that we have no "self," is covered when Hagbard asks George to figure out who's in change "in there," (pointing to George's head), and George imagines his mind as a house, searches from room to room, concluding "Nope. Nobody home."

"That's funny," Hagbard said. "Who's conducting the search?"

Current Mood: cheerful

I really, really wanted to love The Life Engineered by JF Dubeau. The back cover sounded exactly like my kind of thing— a posthuman mystery in which the a long-dead police officer finds herself resurrected in the body of a first responder robot; humans have long since disappeared from the galaxy and she is soon thrust into a shadowy war between factions with very different ideas about what humanity's legacy will be.

And the cover art is gorgeous.

About two-thirds of the way through the book, I really wanted to hate it. A story outline like the one above has so much potential. Like many a book or movie, there's a brilliant idea hiding in the center of this book that's screaming to get out if only a more mature or skilled writer were allowed to develop it.

The book is either far too long or far too short. It has two introductory chapters, the first of which sketches (and I do mean sketches) out the setting: two humans have a dialogue about whether or not they entrust their robots to take care of the galaxy while humanity goes into hiding, and decide not to tell the robots where humanity's cryogenic creches will be constructed; they have to go into hiding because a series of neutron star bursts are making the galaxy uninhabitable— they discuss whether or not this is deliberate– but they're wary of their AI children. The second shows our heroine in her 21st century existence, and its conclusion is one of those painful "character development" scenes where the heroine gets beaten/raped/abused to give her a "reason to fight."

The rest of the book is a ham-handed expository sequence of our first-person POV heroine telling us what happens next. In a lot of ways, the book reads more like the treatment for an fantastic third-person POV science fiction story like Mass Effect or Dead Space III, only "with robots!". Events leap from setting to setting, incident to incident, with sometimes only very tenuous connections. There are very few surprises in the book, very few twists and reveals. Technological abilities and limitations exist only at the need of the story, and not due to careful consideration of the universe Dubeau had crafted in the previous chapters. Word-by-word, the style is clunky and prosaic, with no attempt to escape, expand, or even embrace the dialect and idioms of the writer himself.

What I wanted was something that pointed to the kind of story Iain Banks or Greg Egan would give us, with lyricism, panorama, character and depth. Banks, Egan, and company didn't jusnt plow the ground toward viable transhumanist writing; they did it with enthusiasm, with panache, with style. But plow they did; they showed us where the road points and they dared (and continue to dare) the rest of us to come up to the standards they've set on this new ground.

What I got was the awkward retelling of a game session from Steve Jackson's Transhuman Space RPG with some clumsy FTL handwavery added for convenience. There are so many moments in the book which are just disappointing, where the author had a chance to show us how magnificent the sights are, rather than having the main character tell us about its magnificence, or to give us revelation in carefully crafted dialogue rather than just reel it out as another expository lump.

In the end, I guess I... liked (?) the book. It ends with a promise that there's more to come, and there's so much hope in this story— not in the story itself, but in writer's potential to mature into something more than just another RPG-esque chronicler. (Not to put down RPG chroniclers; Steven Brust has made an entire career out of it. But he's good at his job!) May Dubeau have a long and happy life; he had patrons for his effort and they deserved better.

Current Mood: disappointed
Crossposts: http://elfs.livejournal.com/1611014.html

Last night I bought the second (or third) Blake Snyder book on plot and genre, Save The Cat Strikes Back, and in chapter one, while he's describing his "one line" plot descriptions, we come across this gem:

On the verge of returning to Earth after another routine mission, a rules-obsessed warrant officer lets an unknown alien species onto the ship; but when the creature kills one member of the crew and begins to grow in power, she must do what is right rather than what she's been told or else all on board will meet the same deadly fate. (Alien)

I read that and was flabbergasted: Dude, did you even watch the movie?

It isn't Ripley who lets the alien into the ship. Ash lets the alien into the ship. The whole idea of the "rules-obsessed officer" breaking quarantine is anathema to an essential tension within the plot. The entire point of the film is that Ripley was right to begin with. Ripley foreshadows the doom that comes to the Nostromo. Her words have weight. That's why she survives. That was a standard trope at the time, the girl who adheres to the rules is the survivor, and Ripley always followed the rules, down to her last log entry.

The best thing James Cameron ever did with Ripley's character in the sequel is make her a risk-taking rule-breaker. Because the moral values conflict between "saving Kane when you have everything to lose" and "saving Newt when you have nothing else to lose" is incredibly powerful and valuable and instructive, and this facile plot description completely takes away that sharpness of that contrast.

Current Mood: annoyed
Crossposts: http://elfs.livejournal.com/1589068.html

The Annihilation Score is a solid addition to the Laundry series, and it's nice to get away from Bob and look at how someone else handles the business. In this case, we get Bob's wife, Mo. In the Laundry series, magic is real and accrues around worlds dense with minds capable of symbolic thought. The book follows her as she attempts to handle an outbreak of Superheroes; as our world become more and more imbued with thaumaturgic powers, people will interpret their acquisition of those powers in culturally familiar ways, and in our current culture that way is: superheroes! Mutant powers! From there, one of Stross's well-thought mysteries unravels until the final reveal. Stross has commentary to make along the way, about superheroes, about bureaucracy, about policing and its traditions, that are trenchant and obvious all at the same time.

The book has some-- not loose ends, but simply frayed ends. It feels like there were a lot of ideas of of which the a freighted train of plot caroms off as it hurtles down to an ending that the reader could see coming from a million miles away, but is very much in keeping with Mo's character and, sadly, sets her up for a tragic fall in one of the coming books. Her enthusiasm for some of the good things in life can blind her to unfolding disaster even as we see it. Part of me wants to insist that the story has an idiot plot, that if we can see the setup as its building, surely she can as well.

Still, we get a lot of fun for the ride. Mo is forced to work with two of Bob's ex's; she and Bob deal with a lot of angst and anguish now that Bob has become the host for (or perhaps simply has become) an ancient but unspeakable ally of humanity known as The Eater of Souls. One's a mermaid, the other's a vampire. We get an honest-to-God, very British version of Superman. And we get a deep lesson in what beat police work is really about, and how it can systemically fail at the extremes. (Contrasting the notion that Stross illustrates one extreme, the USA the other, is left as an exercise to the reader.)

Current Mood: satisfied
Crossposts: http://elfs.livejournal.com/1583370.html

tl;dr: This story depicts a world three elections from now, when the elites have finally bought everything and the world is going to hell. While its skewerings of capitalist excesses and liberal paranoias are both spot-on, the solution it offers is beyond anyone's means. Even the characters in the novel aren't sure what happened, or why. ★★★☆☆

The Subprimes is a book in the classic SFnal genre "If this goes on..." Set somewhere around 2030, the book describes life after the second great real estate bubble, when almost everyone who wasn't in the top 1%, or wasn't amusing and entertaining to them, was suddenly and irrevocably dispossessed of their homes. Some states, such as California, become so dysfunctional their neighboring states set up roadblocks and checkpoints, and to cross you need to pass a credit check. The wealthy have bought Congress and dismantled any and all "socialist" policies: the only police are the ones the wealthy can afford, the only roads the ones corporations need to get goods from one place to another, the only schools are sponsored by fast food companies and don't teach anything at all. The Subprimes are homeless people who once had middleclass jobs.

The story goes a bit off the rails in its final act, as a grand guginol scene of the people of a small town face off both an army of low-trained hired guns and a robotic fracking machine that brings those gigantic sea-going oil-extraction rigs onto land in a nightmare of steel, diesel smoke, and pepper spray. It asks too much of the reader, has too many points violating one's suspension of disbelief, and in the end tells the sad story that the only way "If this goes on..." will be disrupted probably requires divine intervention.

This book does have it all: the 1% are building "sanctuaries" in distant mountain retreats and water-rich obscure Pacific islands, defensive manses to wait out the coming megadeaths wrought by global warming, drought, and starvation. The villainous Pepper Sisters (the Koch Brothers), remind the governor of New Mexico that if he doesn't support them in their effort to evict the town, there are plenty of other candidates they can put their money behind in the next election. Pastor Roger is a Franklin Graham knock-off, a man convinced of American exceptionalism, the power of money, and that God always wants exactly what he wants.

The security state comes in for a beating: solar power is banned: upgrading the grid to support it *and* secure it against terrorist attacks was too expensive, and the corporations knew which one they'd rather pay their senators to vote for. Open public WiFi is banned: you must sign in with a credit card or a confirmed account so the government knows you're not a terrorist. Electric cars are banned: the existing lifecycling recycling was "deemed" too expensive too upgrade for lithium batteries and carbon fibers, mostly by the existing lifecycle recyclers.

Liberal paranoias get their fair share of skewering: the hero is on notice with child protective services because he went outside to join a soccer game with his son and bumped another kid in the process, marking him as a "potential sexual predator." His twelve-year-old son gets the same label because he pinched a girl's bottom at his middle school.

Overall, though, this book is an "If this goes on..." in the counter-capitalist tradition. Workers have almost no relation to the means of production. The vast majority of employed people depicted in the book are guard labor, those among the desperate impoverished whom the wealthy hire to make sure the even more desperate impoverished aren't "cheating" somehow. Ultimately, this system will collapse in fire and pain, and maybe we'll learn our lesson from the disaster. What Das Kapital and The Abolition of Work both missed was the sheer scale of environmental disaster industrialism would wreak, but The Subprimes brings it front and center.

I do recommend this book, if only to give the reader a good idea of what we're all up against, with "liberty-loving oil extractors" at one end, and "free-speech zones" at the other.

Crossposts: http://elfs.livejournal.com/1578770.html

tl;dr: The hot sex scenes do not make up for a book whose moral anchors are non-existent. The author fails to live up to her premise because she doesn't understand what science fiction is *for*.

I really wanted to like Beyond the Softness of His Fur, by TammyJo Eckhart, but I'm afraid that any genuine pleasure out of this book was completely obliterated by setting. You see, the setting is sometime in the future, and our heroine, Emily, has received marching orders from her corporation that she must have "a pet": a biological, engineered furry companion with a limited mental capacity but an infinite capacity to absorb whatever abuse the owner wishes. Emily is a sexual sadist but so far only of the consensual kind. She selects Wynn, a pretty, male fox-morph built for her kind of pleasure, and the story sets off.

Wynn needs time at "the facility" to be "trained," to be oriented toward his new owner and his role for her, and the abuse heaped upon him because he's just "a stupid morph" is legion. Eckhart is trying to contrast people who are genuinely cruel, people who are "just doing their job," and consensual sadists like Emily (who, eventually, comes to recognize that something is very wrong about the utter one-sidedness of her relationship with Wynn), but she just can't.

Because her universe is probably the most poorly thought-out excuse for a sex story I've read in a while. It is, we are told, The Future. Our heroine is vaguely associated with an advertising corporation, but her role is so poorly sketched out it's only important as an executive role with which to ensnare her in something salacious. At one point she says there are "dozens and dozens" of other "elite pet genetics firms," but later says the one she buys from is but "one of four on the planet," yet if there's a world out beyond Emily's house, Eckhart hasn't thought much about it. There is no Internet.

I can stand Used Furniture; there are only so many ways to get around the universe, and making decisions about having or not having teleportation, wet nanotech, dry nanotech, artificial intelligence, humanoid robots, and what have you are "one from column A, one from column B" decisions every writer has to make. But when the used furniture comes from all over the place, and doesn't come together into a coherent whole, stories fall apart.

It's awful to force a character to say something she wouldn't normally say because you need it said to move the plot forward, without regard to the discipline of writing about people, not caricatures. It's just as awful to force a technology point, or a cultural point, without regard to the actual discipline of world building.

And the culture in this story is simply impossible. Somehow the re-emergence of blatant slavery, by dint of growing our slaves in test tubes and mentally stifiling them, seems to have happened without much of a cultural ripple; I wonder if the downtrodden are simply so downtrodden they're just grateful the 1% have something to piss all over that isn't themselves or their children. I want Emily and her ilk to live in fucking terror of PETA and Earth First! and the Earth Anti-Slavery Society. There should be bombings of these "dozens" of places. This society could never have emerged in the first place without, as one commentor on the antebellum American South, the emergence of a constant, relentless, and definitive culture expectation that some people are born with boots and spurs, and some are born with saddles. Instead, the world is blithe and bonny. With furry slaves.

How is a morph "made"? Are they born "adult?" Do they get an education? How do they learn to speak? How long do they live? What happens when an owner gives one up? For a high-powered, wealthy executive who claims to be very interested in human behavior (she specializes in selling stuff, after all), Emily is utterly incurious about the origins, treatment, or moral consequences of the entire 'morph culture. Unfortunately, apparently so is the author.

The author wants you to be outraged that such a universe exists. I'm *glad* Emily is starting to develop a moral conscience by the end of the book; but the author mistakes strong emotions about the culture presented in the book with strong emotions about how poorly and ridiculously the writer proposes, or fails to convincingly describe, how that culture came about in the first place.

Don't bother. There's better.

Current Mood: sad
Crossposts: http://elfs.livejournal.com/1577385.html

"Abuse of power comes as no surprise." - Jenny Holzer

She Left Me Breathless by Trin Denise, is billed as a love story, but the overarching theme of this book is much more about getting away with the abuse of power.

Sydney is a high-powered CEO and owner of a company that produces specialty office hardware and software products. Rachel is the woman she loved in college 13 years ago; at the time, Rachel had a daughter, Caitlyn, aged 6; as the book opens Rachel is married, living a heterosexual life, and has a second daughter.

Sydney has never forgotten Rachel. She hires a private detective to investigate Rachel and collect as many manipulative levers as she can to crowbar Rachel back into her life. She hires Caitlyn, now 19, straight out of high school. Caitlyn is supercompetent in that way only people in novels can be. (In fact, Sydney is surrounded by so many hypercompetent women she either nicked them from a Heinlein universe or Vorkosigan House.) Sydney buys the company Rachel works at just to get closer to her. Ultimately, she blackmails Rachel into a close professional relationship with her by threatening Caitlyn's job.

If a man did that-- no scratch that-- if anyone does this in the real world, it's sexual harrassment. It's stalking. It's bullying. And it's blackmail. At one point, after Rachel has made it clear she's faithful to her husband and her church, Syndney briefly contemplates taking Rachel into her arms and forcefully kissing her. The term for that is "corrective" sexual assault, and it's no different from when a man or woman forces themself on a homosexual of the opposite sex in the belief that exposure to a "real man" or "real woman" would "cure" them of a false consciousness. Everything the gay and lesbian community has built around the ideas of the culture of consent and the equality of all persons is cheerfully ignored in this book. Everything my time at Queer Nation taught me is sacrificed to get these two women into bed with each other.

The villians are all mustache-twirling idiots, even the female ones. With rare exceptions, the men are all incompetent, foul-mouthed, drunk, or generally bad dudes.

And when it comes to character growth, well, there is none. Sydney gets what she wants and isn't chastened for or by her bad behavior. Rachel is a dishrag to her upbringing at the beginning of the book, and a dishrag to her infatuation with Sydney at the end. In the middle there is a lot of painful exposition about an embezzlement scheme that drives one external conflict (you know the type, "I suffered to do this research, and dammit, you're gonna read it, because I need word count!"), a lot of as-you-knows about how rich and powerful and wise and wonderful Sydney is. Ms. Denise could write crackling good dialogue if she knew when to turn it off, because when she starts she goes on and on in a "see how clever I am" bantering way that may work for sitcoms but not for literature. And I don't think she's spoken to an eight-year-old, not even an excessively brilliant one, since she was eight years old herself, because that scene was painful to read.

But all is forgiven for love, and the love scene is actually very good. Too bad it's really the only thing the book has going for it.

Current Mood: disappointed
Crossposts: http://elfs.livejournal.com/1554940.html

The Pomodoro Technique - Illustrated is one of those self-help books of which I am excessively fond, seeing as it's all about turning yourself into a productivity machine and not wasting your life away. This books is called "The Pomodoro Technique - Illustrated," because it's basically a re-write, with amateurish crayon drawings, of Francesco Cirillo's 1990s chapbook, "The Pomodoro Technique," which is available online, as a PDF, under a Creative Commons license, downloadable for free.

Which more or less makes this book worthless.

It's not a bad book, mind you. There are the silly illustrations, and an ill-fated attempt to meld mind-mapping with a sound and well-known time management technique, and really ridiculous dialogues at the beginning of each chapter, but the basics are solid. There are just so many better guides out there. If you've never encountered personal time management for projects before, this book will help, and probably won't hurt.

But everything in it can be gotten for free elsewhere. Zen Habits is a good place to start, and won't cost you $24.95.

Current Mood: disappointed
Crossposts: http://elfs.livejournal.com/1551550.html

Neptune's Brood, by Charles Stross, the author, is not a book written with fans of Charles Stross, the man, in mind.

Neptune's Brood is the sequel to Saturn's Children, but it's set thousands of years into the posthuman future, long since the nasty little tics left in robot consciousness by human beings have been suceesfully excised, leaving the robot descendents of Earth to conquer a sphere about 100 light years across.

In order to make his space opera universe "work," Stross has to cut so many corners that those who are familiar with what Stross is reading can see immediately that this universe should have singularitied itself long ago. It takes a massive, almost fantasy-level suspension of disbelief to accept that there have been no breakthroughs in posthuman consciousness in the thousands of years since Freya Nakamichi walked the surface of Mars. Stross does a lot of maneuvering around the legal rights of "humans" (really: posthumans) without ever dipping into the known literature regarding moral communities of differing capacity. That's not the story he wants to tell, but it is the backdrop in which he's telling it.

All of which is to say that Neptune's Brood is a pretty shallow space opera. It's entertaining-- as always, he has done his homework both with respect to the physics at hand and more importantly, with respect to the economics at hand. Neptune's Brood is a science fiction novel where the primary science on display is economics: the story involves the biggest scam ever in the history of known space, and our heroine's efforts to track down the evidence and expose the guilty.

This is an Eganesque universe: FAL travel of information is possible, but material transport across interstellar distances is an economically devastating activity. Funding it requires a specialized economic system that only works at 1/3C: a sender, a receiver, and a third-party verifier. "Slow money" indeed.

There are bat-winged pirates who don't steal anything, and communist mermaids, zombie priests, and soulless assassins galore in this book. The set pieces are very set, and Stross's skill at creepy is here twisted into hilarious effect. Told in the first person, our heroine "guesses" at descriptive scene that didn't happen in her presence. There's a lot of info dumps, but she has to do that to help you understand the scam.

And there's one problem with Stross's story. Not his fault, the research came after the book had already hit the editor: ( Spoiler! The twist revealed under here: )

Still, like Saturn's Children, it's a pretty good book. There is one section where our heroine, Krina, is pushed into following along a path set by others; it's the slowest part of the book, but Stross handles it fairly well. You can just see him cackling at some of the scenes.

If you want a taste of what this universe has in store, the short story Bit Rot will get you there.

Crossposts: http://elfs.livejournal.com/1550814.html

Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is a form of psychological counseling in which the therapist eschews the traditional seeking of root causes for a more objective and forward-seeking approach. Rather than help the patient seek reasons for their problems, the CBT therapist trains the patient in the use of psychological tools and rationalizations to help the patient manage and overcome their disorder. Through the building of habits, repetition, and framing, the patient is expected to develop a behavior pattern that, through dissonance, drags their emotional state into compliance with their daily activities. This approach has demonstrated surprising efficacy in double-blind studies.

The Philosophy of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy, by Don Robertson, is a sadly long-winded treatise that attempts, and mostly succeeds, to show that the roots of CBT can be found in ancient traditions, mostly Stoicism but also Epicureanism, Skepticism, and even Buddhism. But it's too long, too wordy, too desperate to make its case.

Robertson starts by showing that modern psychotherapy, the sort where the patient must do something to overcome his problems, is trying to be exactly what philosophy was two millennia ago: a practice, a daily routine, a way of living that was harmonious with both human nature and the inevitability of life and life's challenges. Each of these, be it Buddhism or Stoicism or whatever, taught people both a fundamental set of truths about the human condition, and a daily practice for how to manage the frustrations and even despair that comes from those truths.

Robertson then goes through the various standard practices of CBT and its modern precursors, and shows how the Stoics were already doing all of those things 2,000 years ago: mental rehearsal for tragedy or disaster, daily planning to do "the work the world has brought you," always with the tagline, "fate willing," nightly journaling of your day to ensure your actions were in line with your planning, actively imagining a present counsellor over your shoulder to see your own actions as others would see them; imagining your frustrations as others might see them to assess their true weight; and embracing a long-term sense of love, happiness, and joy that has nothing to do with immediate pleasures, but instead is ultimately about ensuring your own long-term mental health, by embracing trust, autonomy, initiative, competence, identity, intimacy, productivity, and the ultimate condition: integrity.

This book, however, could have been half as long and accomplished twice as much. Robertson tries too hard, and co-opts too many different traditions, in his attempt to make his point. At several points Robertson quotes Spinoza, Montaigne, Descartes, and other philosophers, and this comes across much less as a connection between the two traditions and more as an argument from authority: "All these smart guys embraced Stoicism, so you should as well." At one point, Robertson makes a tenuous connection between the teachings of Jesus and his premise, but the material there is weak and desperate; it comes out as an attempt to reassure his audience that there's nothing un-Christian about either practice, and it's one that fails.

This is a thick book of small but valuable nuggets of knowledge and wisdom. It is most definitely not a self-help book, nor is it really a solid introduction to either Stoicism or CBT. Robertson jumps around too many different issues to do more than make his central case: everything in CBT has been done before, successfully, and CBT practitioners should both understand that and be proud of it.

Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Music: Weird Al Yankovic, It's All About the Pentiums
Crossposts: http://elfs.livejournal.com/1544945.html

Red Plenty is probably one of the finest, and saddest, books I have ever read. It's hard to tell what it is. The best description I've heard is that it's science fiction-- only the science is economics, and the fiction is entirely based on real history. Red Plenty is about the rise and fall of the Soviet Union, told in a series of stories-- anecdotes, in many cases-- of the lives of ordinary citizens, apparatchiks, and intelligenzia of the time.

Some of the vignettes feature an ordinary citizen we only see once-- to show us what Spuffords wants us to see, life in the Soviet Union under Stalin, then Kruschev, and finally Brezhnev. The central theme of the book is how close, how desperately close, the Soviet Union was to fulfilling its dream of red plenty, of turning Lenin's massive industrial push into a cornucopia machine that would crank out everything humanity ever needed, and how every opportunity the soviets had was squandered, in the end, by short sightedness, by ideology, by political maneuvering, by sheer human perversity, by bad luck.

Spufford is a talented writer at setting up scenes, at drawing word paintings of places we've never been to and showing us the beauty and decay, the joy and terror. He's good at showing just how human Kruschev was, and how desperately Kruschev wanted to be a good man, and how badly he fared at it. If you want to read a book that makes you cringe, and sigh, and cheer, then Red Plenty is that book.

It starts in 1938, with the invention of Linear Algebra, and how this became the start of what we now call "big data." The soviets started a crash course in it, and in 1959 began cybernizing their command economy, trying desperately to organize networks of networks of industries to produce everything every citizen would ever want or need. It ends in 1970, with Kruschev, retired and desperately depressed, looking back at all the potential wasted.

Every vingette ends with notes about what details are real, what quotes are authentic, and which Spufford crafted for dramatic effect. He's brutally honest with you, and himself, about how he's telescoped or compressed various events to make the drama more real. The EPUB version of the book is better than the print-- the notes are at the end of each chapters, and the truth of each note, dozens per story, are eye-opening. The print edition has the notes at the end of the book.

Every time you read how the SU screwed up-- how the cyberneticists simplified planning in 1960 by valuing every piece of factory equipment, no matter how simple or complex, no matter how hard or how barely used, by its weight-- how the "shadow pricing" system meant to simulate a demand economy without being a market economy was repeatedly overriden by politicians trying to keep the marketplace "familiar" to ordinary Russians-- how the soviets banned "bureaucracy" as they understood Americans did it, and thereby created a system of favors and graft-- how the soviets invented the Lamaze birth technique, then neglected to teach it to expectant mothers but forbade physicians from otherwise helping those women give birth-- how in the 1970s the Soviet Union stagnated because there was no program for tearing down factories, no notion of upgrading from a manfacturing base-- you die a little inside. So much suffering, and yet Spufford convinces you that they meant well. They really thought they were going to create paradise on Earth. They were no more evil than Americans, or Europeans, or anyone else on Earth. They really tried.

The most remarkable thing about Perestroika, at the end of the book, is that Gorbachev was a true believer. He wanted to believe that red plenty could happen; it was Brezhnev and his "managed socialism" that had led to stagnation. The great program of cybernizing the economy, Soviet Union, of making the great chain from farm and mine to consumer and back, could actually really work. But twenty years of slow decay had led the young people to give up. When he started to institute his reforms, popular sentiment revolted. The wall fell. The Soviet Union was over.

These little glimpses into many lives, 18 in all, obviously don't tell the whole story. But they do give concrete examples of why the system failed, and more importantly, why it couldn't recover: there were no alternatives. Exceptional experiments were not allowed. Scientific investigation was "administered" rather than "supported." You can't command what you don't know you want: and nobody knew what they really wanted from computers, or the economy, or industry. And without that freedom to fail, they never had a chance to succeed. No matter how close they were.

If you ever want to know what the Soviets were thinking, Red Plenty will give you a heavy dose of understanding. Worth every second of your time.

Current Mood: satisfied
Crossposts: http://elfs.livejournal.com/1534476.html

So, it took a week, but I finally finished Banks' new Culture novel, The Hydrogen Sonata. It was a better novel that Matter, Transitions, or Surface Detail, but Banks is turning into a one-trick pony here.

The Hydrogen Sonata (also known as T. C. Vilabier’s 26th String-Specific Sonata For An Instrument Yet To Be Invented, catalogue number MW 1211) is a fiendishly difficult piece of music to master, yet Lt. Cmdr. (reserve) Vyr Cossant is determined to master it. She's close, very close-- but in less than a month, her entire civilization is scheduled to be raptured, enfolded, sublimed-- uploaded whole into The Sublime, Banks' "universe next door" where the laws of physics are different-- where experience and possibility are infinite, where growth is intrinsic in existence, where decay is nearly impossible. In the Cultureverse mythology, individuals become discordant within the Sublime-- you must go as a large group, preferably a whole civilization, with a common understanding.

The Gzilt, the civ to which Vyr belongs, was an invitee to the Culture ten thousand years ago but they declined joining the Culture. They're now an equivalent technological level to the Culture, but unlike the Culture the Gzilt, as a civilization, is Done With This Place And Ready To Move On.

Nobody remembers quite why the Gzilt declined joining in the Culture's pan-humanism. Except, someone does. Someone who was there, ten millennia ago. Someone Vyr met once. It's the Last Great Mystery of the Gzilt-- why did they decide to go it alone as a civilization, choosing a planet-bound interstellar existence to the Culture's magnificent Ships and Ringworlds?

Finding Out The Reason Why becomes the centerpiece mystery of The Hydrogen Sonata.

As such, The Hydrogen Sonata manages, for the most part, to avoid many of the cliche's for which Banks is rapidly becoming known. There are many fewer lectures in this book: no rants about how Fear Of Hell Is Necessary To Keep The Masses In Line (Surface Detail), The Limited Liability Corporation Is An Inherently Corrupting Institution Whose Damage Is Magnified By Apocalyptic Religions Like Christianity (Transition), or Virtual Reality Is Not Merely A Distraction But A Vile Abandonment Of Everything That Makes Life Worth Living (Matter). At worst, we get a few throwaway conversations about how wanting to live "too long" is an act of cowardice that breeds further cowardice, about how The Universe needs death to keep the system fresh, and how the living are going to keep repeating their errors anyway until the end of time.

A lot of this book is told in email-- between those Cool Vast Intellects known as The Minds, the hypersentient ultradeep artificial intellects that inhabit The Cultures' starships and stations. The book is a bit like American Football-- fast-paced action punctuated by meetings. Unfortunately, The Minds' conversation looks more like a bickering group chat by semi-professionals than anything else.

There is Banks' usual clockwork plotting (complete with his classic few-pieces-missing). Innocents die, while the guilty, surprisingly, go free this time. That was disappointing. There's a bit of Deus Ex Mechanica, naturally, as Banks' more than once pulls Culture high-tech out of his posterior to justify moving his characters from frying pans into fires to solar flares. The Gzilt come across as more Terran than Cultureniks: more like us, more understandable to us. This lets the reader identify better with Vyr and her opposite, the completely banal, completely understandable, completely pathetic villain, the politician Banstegeyn.

What disappointed me most about The Hydrogen Sonata was the de-mythologization of The Sublime. Banks must have read Greg Egan's Schild's Ladder, because The Sublime comes across as "the other universe" in that book: a place where the core automata rules allow for indefinite, deliberate, willful expansion of Self and Civilization. By explaining it, Banks has killed much of the mystery.

The quest for The Reason Why is pure plot token: go here, acquire this bit of knowledge, which tells you to go there-- lather, rinse, repeat. Still, if you like Banks, there are scenes of his usual brilliance in here: he's still the master of description, of coming up with an Idea and then painting a gorgeous (or repulsive, depending on his mood) word painting of the setting, the people in it, and the circumstances that brought them there, so the plot token works pretty well anyway.

A better book, but far and away lacking the sense of wonder that comes from first encountering Banks. Maybe he decided all the hinting in The Player of Games wasn't worth the effort and not enough people noticed.

Current Mood: satisfied
Crossposts: http://elfs.livejournal.com/1532576.html

I've been re-reading some old "How to write sex and romance" books that I have on my shelves, and the first one, Writing Romances," edited by Rita Gallagher and Rita Clay Estrada, may have had some good things to say about the genre, but is so sadly outdated that it fails to convey the modern market. The rise of the anonymous erotica romance makes all of the advice about subtletly and "this isn't soft-corn porn" seem trite and pointless. But it was Helen Myer's advice that really made want to throw the book across the room.

In a section entitled "The Love Scene," Myers tells us: "These are monogamous couples with healthy, sexual relationships. Mores and morals matter to these people, which challenges critics who label these books as soft pornography."

Uh, no. To claim that "mores and morals" are a challenge to pornography is to miss the point of pornography, and worse, leave no breathing room at all for that vast tract of writing known as erotica. Does it not exist, or can we admit that it exists on a continuum than envelops both the universe of romance novels and vast tracts of the the porniverse as well? To say that pornography writers write in a universe without morals is to say that pornographers write in a universe without plot; the two are inextricably entwined. Characters want, others oppose them, these conflicts keep the reader returning to an author or a series long after the sex has become routinized.

I've read romance where the passion is flat and drab and meanders across the page, and I've read erotica where there's no plot and no morals. (The latter often involves a lot of misogyny, surprise that.) Few people want to read much of that. But don't tell me that good pornography doesn't invoke questions of morals and mores.

What Ms. Myers is telling us, really, is that only in the monogamous sexual paradigm do love, romance, and respect intertwine. (I maintain the old-fashioned idea that having a solid set of working morals and hewing to them is the only source of self-respect.) She seems to have missed forseeing the rise of the polyamory/romance/erotica series coming out of the usual publishing houses these days. Well, we can't all be prophets.

Current Mood: annoyed
Crossposts: http://elfs.livejournal.com/1524617.html

Andrew Mayer's The Falling Machine is a strange and lovely book. It starts with a great idea: The Avengers, only steampunk, and now old and decrepit. The Paragons are a team of superheroes, and all of their equipment is driven by tiny energy sources only one man in the world knows how to make: Cells of Fortified Steam power The Submersible's suit, as well as Iron-Clads armor and The Industrialst's weapons. With one exception-- The Sleuth, who's a suave martial artist now in his mid-60s-- the Paragons depends upon various forms of Fortified Steam to operate specialized powered armor.

That one mad scientist is Dr. Darby, who is killed in chapter one. The Industrialist's daughter, Sarah, loved him as an uncle, and is determined to both free his greatest creation, a sentient robot known as The Automaton, and to figure out why he died. The Paragons are in disarray because, while they can operate the machine that makes Fortified Steam, they don't know if they can reproduce the secret it if and when it fails, and they know that someone else, The Eschaton, is after that very secret. And when things start to go very wrong, it looks like the Automaton may be a killer in their midst.

Only Sarah knows the truth.

The book ends on a cliffhanger, there is a Volume 2 out already, and I do intend to pick it up soon. It's brilliant in a special way, especially in its depictions of a 19th century New York with a very small handful of recently emerged super-powered crazies, both just and unjust. Mayer's writing style is revealed in a merging-plotlines way that I find off-putting. Chapters will end with characters suddenly showing up to save or complicate the day, followed by another chapter that explains how and why that character happened to be there.

Mayer does do a very good job of showing Sarah beating on the walls of the cage created by gender expectations in 19th century Americana, and how surprised Sarah is when she finds the walls are made of wet cardboard, and how uncomfortable she is walking through the hole she just punched through one, and for that he deserves a lot better attention.

A lot of the Steampunk milieu bows to the imperialist fetishism of 19th century eurofantasy steampunk by playing up London or Paris as a setting of choice, probably due to watching one too many Guy Ritchie films. The Falling Machine avoids that entirely, and is a welcome addition to the steampunk shelf if only for that reason alone.

Current Mood: curious
Current Music: Ayreon, The Age of Shadows
Crossposts: http://elfs.livejournal.com/1523889.html

Johannes Cabal: The Detective is the follow-on book to Jonthan L. Howard's Johannes Cabal: The Necromancer. Cabal is the necromancer of the title, a psychopathic little man in the pale, blond tradition of Elric or Dexter, obsessed in his own little way, like Victor Frankenstein, with uncovering the secrets of Life with a capital L, and woe betide those who get in his way. Necromancy is a condemned subject, and those who practice it are summarily executed, but Cabal isn't interested in raising armies of the dead or extracting obscure secrets, so he doesn't understand why people dislike him. Still, as so many people seem to want to shoot him he's gotten better at shooting back. As he himself puts it, he is a scientist "in the ongoing march of humanity from protoplasm to— I don't know, to be honest. Something slightly better than protoplasm would be a start."

I haven't read The Necromancer, and I didn't need to. Howard has written a wonderful little steampunk adventure with its own rules of science, magic, and the universe at large, as Cabal is arrested attempting to steal an obscure book on Necromancy from a library in some obscure Teutonic princedom-turned-republic, has a thrilling escape, and winds up on a quasi-zeppelin luxury liner fever-dreamedly mixed with the SHIELD helicarrier circa 1988, on which murders, assaults, and intrigues lead our anti-hero into a quagmire of personal and political webs. He meets a charming old foe who becomes something of an ally, and an excellent foil for conversation and quippery.

Quippery is at the heart of this book. Howard has a problem: he never met a cliche' he didn't like, and he'll use them at the drop of a hat. I winced, repeatedly, as expressions and metaphors long drained of vitality, much like Cabal's subjects, meandered across the page. And yet, if you forgive Howard his laziness, you'll get past them all for a rollickingly funny story about a high-functioning and brilliant psychopath working his way with relentless logic from one end of a conundrum to the other. Conversation is wicked, pointed, and hilarious; Cabal's own thoughts morbidly precise and smile-inducing.

Aside from cliche's, Howard occasionally head-hops without much warning. His book is rife with anachronisms, as when Cabal raids several morgues clearly run by men much more modern than the clothing, language, and setting imply. But these are actually quibbles. It could have been a much more precise book, I suppose, but it would be hard to imagine the precision necessary to all the fun it provides.

Current Mood: satisfied
Crossposts: http://elfs.livejournal.com/1509480.html

I joked the other day about how the ending of Halting State had a really bloody obvious ending.

My boss is a slim woman in her mid-20s with the high-intensity of a serial entrepeneur. Today, she showed up at work with a massive bruise on her right bicep. I asked about it, and it turns out ( Spoiler! ) So the ending of Halting State wasn't so kooky after all.

Current Mood: giggly
Crossposts: http://elfs.livejournal.com/1503980.html

Halting State is a fascinating swerve: it's a Scottish Police Procedural set twenty minutes into the future, it has three character POV's, and it's entirely written in the second person.

But it's a superveniary second person: Stross successfully captures the mindstate of someone playing a first person shooter, combined with an esoteric puzzler, all told with his characteristic pyrotechnically precise voice. The plot is fairly straightforward: Officer Smith is called in on a bank robbery, only she learns that the bank was in World-of-Warcraft-like massively multiplayer online role-playing game that exists only on the shared cloud-processing platforms of game subscribers, the theives were an army of Orcs backed by a dragon for heavy firepower, and they escaped through an illegal immigration tunnel from one MMO to another.

Which is silly until the nerds reveal that the total worth of what was in the bank amounts to almost many millions of euros. When that much value disappears out of anyone's bank, heads roll. Oh, and the top programmer at the job has gone missing.

What follows is a three-part song and dance between our cop, a forensic accountant from a company that insures the bank, and the forensic accountant's recently acquired pet nerd and gaming expert. There are twists and turns and Stross does a marvelous job of adding up a great many columns of facts and figures to tell it.

If the book has a problem, it's that in order to make it seem more interesting than it is, Stross has to pretend that code management tools for MMOs exist more or less in the same strata as the game itself: in order to debug a problem, one of the heroes must fight his way through demons and Lovecraftian horrors. At the same time, the ending fight seen is so pedestrian and absurd, and oh, you saw that coming a mile away, didn't you?.

But it's a great ride. And you get to sit in the head and look out the eyeballs of the heros, and Stross does a pretty good job of giving you an appreciable feel for each one of them.