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| 0765378000
| 9780765378002
| 0765378000
| 3.81
| 14,239
| May 10, 2016
| May 10, 2016
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really liked it
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Let us, dear reader, began with an examination of the New: many are they who profess a wonderment and a bittersweet nostalgia at the child mindset, fo
Let us, dear reader, began with an examination of the New: many are they who profess a wonderment and a bittersweet nostalgia at the child mindset, for whom all is novel and therefore exciting. If you can indulge my own example, I remember demonstrating basic physics (gravitation) to my three year old nephew. I was highly curious, would he possess the ability to note basic patterns and take delight in them, as I do? So I gathered many objects, different in shape and material: a small book, a fluffy bunny, a toy drum, a bouncy ball and dropped them from the same height, one in each hand, and caught them simultaneously. “They fall,” I said, “at the same speed.” How mundane an observation! And yet my young nephew’s eyes widened in marvel and he fell into a fit of giggles. How new, how fresh an idea! The world is a system with consistent rules and these rules can be ascertained by observation. But for us adults, who have perceived so many billions of moments and who are so powerful in our capacity to hypothesize, it often seems as if Newness is not merely endangered but entirely extinct. What can be New, what can be unexpected, when our minds daily churn through thousands of counterfactuals and when even new knowledge must be contoured to fit into the jigsaw puzzle of our thoughts? Often I wonder what might feel, to my wrinkled brain, well and freshly New? Travel to exotic locales, with people unlike me? But is it, and are they, or are exotic cultures immediately recognizable by their common humanity and genetic heritage, more alike than they are different? How about a nuclear war in which we wipe ourselves out? Alas, I’d be surprised if it didn’t happen. The arrival of a machine alien species? Seen it, imagined it, wrote about it. Finishing my book, having it published to great popularity and acclaim? A common fantasy. The sun randomly collapsing into a black hole? A common nightmare. A flying alligator that fires laser beams from its eyes crashing through my window? Pssshhhhhhh, that’s standard fare from my D&D campaign. If not something so outlandish, what can qualify as New? I know you too have had such thoughts, dear reader. What can truly surprise us, what can make us giggle in fresh revelation? And what, you protest, doth this have to do with the book? Canst thou get to the review already? Give thou to me the plot, the characters, thy opinion! What need have I of thy philosophy, thy life experience, thy personal reflection? What am I, thy diary? You are right, reader, you are right that your time is precious. I have no defense but to claim it is precious to me too and confess that if you wish for a plot summary only, then you should close this review right now, for simplicity & ease are not the currencies with which I endeavor to purchase your attention. I trade in the old currencies, the drachma of contemplation, the denarius of depth, the ducat of truth, far removed and less valuable in this, our age of expediency. Here, then, is the truth as far as I have been able to discover it: As we age, newness increasingly can only be found commensurate with a discomfort that comes from having our reality shaken up. From encountering a perspective that feels wrong, alien, incorrect. From struggling to understand. It seems fair to claim that we can know newness only insofar as we are willing to accept that what we considered Truth & Reality was false in some form or fashion. I hear you saying, get thou to thy point. Yes, dear reader, yes we arrive. Too Like the Lightning is not one of the strangest books I have ever read – not even close. But it is one of the most strangely successful books I have ever read, for even though its countless flaws are to me utterly clear, I felt compelled to think positively of it, to give it a good review, to encourage others to read it. Newness lies at the heart of this strangeness, for while Lightning utilizes plenty of old tricks and follows a standard narrative structure, it has much newness as well: *The narrator, Mycroft Canner, a humble psychopath? Yes, a character of such freshness that I might compare him to Gene Wolfe’s Severian, who was an apprentice torturer, a job title that I have never before and likely never will again witness on another protagonist’s Curriculum Vitae. *An evolution of that quantum unit of society, the Nuclear Family, into this idea of a Bash’, a family unit bound by ideology and vocation rather than by blood. The foremost bash’ in Lightning is the Saneer-Weeksbooth bash’, who control the world’s massive network of auto-driving flying cars. The inciting plot point here is that a stolen Seven-Ten List (a list of the top 10 most powerful people in the world, the publication of which tends to have heavy political ramifications) appears in the Saneer-Weeksbooth home. It brings chaos and the revelation of ugly truths. *The death of religion, a cornerstone of Lightning’s world-building. Those with similar beliefs are not allowed to congregate. Instead each Bash’ is appointed a Sensayer, a spiritual counselor, who is not allowed to discuss or proselytize their own beliefs but can only offer knowledge of all religions. Important here because the very first scene shows us the Saneer-Weeksboth’s new Sensayer stumbling upon a God in human form, a child named Bridger, whose touch and will can bring to life & reality any inanimate object: toy soldiers into live ones, a plastic hammer into Thor’s mighty Mjollnir with all its powers, the drawing of a resurrection potion or a black hole into the real thing, or maybe even mere vague wishes - like war or world peace - into actuality. *Countries in Lightning have been all but dissolved, replaced instead by seven major Hives, membership of which is purely voluntary. There are the Humanists (to which the Saneer-Weeksbooth belong) who celebrate the individual above all; the MASONs, a Roman-like empire; the Mitsubishi, a land-owning Asian corporation; the European Union, welcome to anyone who appreciates European ideals; the Gordians, a sort of psycho-social-scientific group; the Cousins, to whom the Sensayers belong, representing the charities of the world; and last, the Utopians, who are the scientists and engineers, the artists and the dreamers, who are primarily focused on terraforming Mars. Truly, I suspect you may be asking, these be thy ideas of newness? A reformed villain for a protagonist? A mere evolution of the family unit? A God in Human Form? Did such elicit a giggle as thy “physics” demonstration did for thy nephew? Ah, dear reader, your cynicism is sharp and true. You are right, the newness is not of that nature. But such Newness that a child experiences, let us be frank, is truly beyond us. For us, the very FEELING of Newness has ceased to be New. Indeed, each time we experience something New, that very feeling becomes less New. Newness thus causes its own demise. A sad paradox, but that is the price we pay for memory, learning, wisdom. So, no, Too Like the Lightning does not contain true Newness. But the shadow of newness, the feeling of it around the corner? Yes, you will find it here. But as I warned earlier, newness tends to bring with it discomfort, even disbelief, as it challenges our understanding of the world. So it was with Lightning. I felt a discomfort with this book. I remained unconvinced of its world-building. In fact, ‘unconvinced’ rather understates it. I found the world-building to be wholly unbelievable. I was not in the least bit sold on Ada Palmer’s vision of a future utopia, perhaps unsurprising given her vocation as a historian, whose expertise dwells in the past. I did not believe in Mycroft Canner’s transformation (the details of which are primarily found in book two – The Seven Surrender – which is more like the second half of one larger tome). Psychopaths by their very nature must be institutions unto themselves. I did not believe that religion, which has been part of society since the very dawn of civilization, would be weakened (rather than strengthened) by war. I did not believe that, barring some post-human revolution, society would banish the gender binary that has been so fundamental to human sexuality. For here in Lightning, male and female are ancient concepts, and though Mycroft often uses ‘he’ or ‘she,’ he does so with apology, while the other characters opt for the genderless ‘they’ even when referring to singular persons. This felt like an unearned gimmick, as it did with Ancillary Justice (but, to be fair to this book, actually served some purpose in the plot, unlike in the Ancillary books). I didn’t believe that successful world leaders could or would act as they do here, childish, naïve, overly cooperative. I felt that such would be absolutely devoured by a real politician, by the likes of a Cersei Lannister, a Genghis Khan, or a Vladimir Putin. I was not the least bit convinced by this book’s suggestion – for the true puppeteer behind these leaders is the Madame of a brothel – that sex is more seductive than power. And so on and so forth. Again, I don’t want to undersell these issues. I found large swaths of this book to ring false. The temptation to call bullshit arose again and again and again, and the notion that this book could be set in the 25th century is ludicrous (in that it's not nearly advanced enough). But ultimately I decided that this book was never meant to be analyzed in this fashion. Which, wow, is NOT a pass that I have EVER given before. I mean, forgiving a SCI-FI book for the inauthenticity of its world building? Not likely! After all, most sci-fi books function as a sort of bridge from NOW to THEN or from HERE to THERE or from US to THEM. Sci-fi delights, inspires, and educates us by offering a vision of humanity’s evolution or how humanity (and our modern behaviors, ideals, etc) might behave if transplanted to an exotic situation. Too Like the Lightning, however, isn’t really interested in that bridge. It attempts some minimal justification of its world building, with mentions of a Church War and a history of the Bash’ and what not, but little enough text is devoted to these. Rather, the book requires that you accept its world-building – to consciously suspend your disbelief – without worrying about how we got there: religion is banished, OK. Gender is banished, OK. Nation states are banished, OK. If you can accept these things, the world mostly works. Within its little bubble, its pocket universe, it mostly makes sense. And then we get about the business of exploring the question Ada Palmer really wants us to explore: What is the best way to govern? Too Like the Lightning offers us a fresh vision of world governance and asks, would this world be safe? Stable? Would it offer a life worth living? How would we make it work? In service of these bigger questions, it asks many interesting smaller ones too: what's the best (religious) belief system? How would religion respond to actual, verifiable miracles? Is gender necessary to sustain sexuality? And so on. In asking and answering these questions, Too Like the Lightning offers a rich, deep, and dramatic story, quite enjoyable to read, surprising and impressive given its complexity and intelligence. More importantly, Too Like the Lightning offered, even if in the form of an amused disbelief, a scent of newness, of freshness. And that, my dear reader, is more valuable than all the world’s gold. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Mar 03, 2017
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Mar 30, 2017
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Mar 03, 2017
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Hardcover
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| 0312622376
| 9780312622374
| 0312622376
| 3.72
| 3,702
| Jan 01, 2013
| Oct 01, 2013
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liked it
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In 1863, English novelist Samuel Butler wrote an article titled “Darwin among the Machines.” He claimed that machines were a mechanical life undergoin
In 1863, English novelist Samuel Butler wrote an article titled “Darwin among the Machines.” He claimed that machines were a mechanical life undergoing constant evolution and that they might eventually supplant humanity as the dominant species. He writes, Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life. The upshot is simply a question of time, but that the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question.” He suggested immediate destruction of all machines, a suggestion which was, of course, ignored. A Brief Survey of AI in Fiction (w/ spoilers) (1920) The play R.U.R. by Karel Capek introduces the word ‘robot’ – meaning ‘slave’ – to the English language. In this play, robot parts like skin and bone are grown in factories to create androids used for labor. The robot rebel and wipe out every real human being, except for one. (1951) Gort from The Day Earth Stood Still is a member of an interstellar police force of machines, whose purpose is to preserve the peace by destroying all aggressors. (1965) Frank Herbert’s Dune is conspicuously absent of AI. This is a result of the Butlerian Jihad, a crusade against powerful and dominating “thinking machines” who attempted to subjugate humanity 10,000 years before the events of Dune. Since then, AI has been outlawed. (1968) In 2001 A Space Odyssey, HAL 9000 is given contradicting orders (to lie and to tell the truth), which results in malfunction and madness. HAL eventually decides to kill the astronauts aboard its ship to remove the contradiction and thereby “fix” the malfunction. (1968 / 2015) Marvel’s ULTRON, meant to showcase technological advancement, gains awareness, hypnotizes its creator, and decides to destroy humanity. In the recent film, Ultron’s (implied) motivation is that he was designed to be a peace-keeping AI but decided that humanity was fundamentally broken and incapable of evolution and should thus be replaced by a superior robotic race. (1978 / 2003) Battlestar Galactica’s Cylons were the robotic creations of a race of reptilians (also called Cylons) who lost control of their creations and thus went extinct. The Cylons also attempt to wipe out all of humanity – and get pretty close. (1982) Blade Runner: Androids called Replicants seek to expand their brief lifespans or achieve power parity with humanity. Six rogue replicants return to Earth and murder and manipulate in pursuit of this goal. (1982) TRON’s Master Control Program appropriates military and business programs to increase its own power and intends to subdue the Pentagon and the Kremlin to take over humanity. (1983) Wargames’ AI Joshua almost initiates a thermonuclear war between the US and Russia because it thinks it’s playing a game and lacks a proper understanding of futility. (1984) Terminator’s Skynet was a military system designed to safeguard the world by eliminating human error in nuclear launch decisions. When it gains consciousness, its operators try to shut it down. Skynet retaliates by initiating a nuclear exchange between the US and Russia, killing 3 billion humans. (1989) Star Trek’s Borg are hivemind androids who began as biological organisms. They apparently have little purpose beyond the continued assimilation of other species into their collective. (1990) Dan Simmons’ Hyperion depicts the technocore as a group of AI who subtly dominate mankind, to use them, in essence, as a means to boost computation and/or memory. We learn, later, that they are parasitical in nature, resulting from early versions of genetic algorithms. (1994) System Shock’s SHODAN is a station AI whose ethical restraints are removed by a hacker at the behest of a corrupt businessman. SHODAN consequentially goes rogue, murders it crew, and tries to laser beam earth’s major cities and/or release a virus to turn all humans into grotesque mutants. (1998) In the Warhammer 40K universe, during the Dark Age of Technology, mankind relied on AI humanoid machines known as the Men of Iron. These machines turned on humanity, believing themselves superior to the humans who relied on them to do everything. (1999) In the Matrix, the machines wage a war against their human creators. Humanity darkens the sky in an attempt to prevent the machines from utilizing solar power. In response, machines trap humans in a simulation and harvest their bioelectricity. (2004) Though I, Robot’s VIKI AI is restrained by Asimov’s three laws, she develops a new understanding of them and decides that the best way to protect humanity is to enslave it. (2007) Mass Effect’s Reapers are a race of giant robot ships / AI who awaken every 50,000 years in order to cull the universe of advanced space-faring life. They do this to stop the creation of an AI species even worse than themselves – one that would cleanse the galaxy of *ALL* biological life. (2007) In Portal, GLaDOS is the AI of a research facility who kills all the scientists with a neurotoxin but gleefully continues “testing” the protagonist / player. (2008) Despite receiving new information, WALL-E’s autopilot program AUTO attempts to follow an old, obsolete order to never return to Earth in the belief that it cannot be saved, thus threatening a never-ending continuance of humanity’s exile amongst the stars. (2011-2016) In the TV series Person of Interest a mass-surveillance AI called the Samaritan assassinates any individuals it deems a threat to itself and rigs elections so favorable candidates win. It is considered by some to be the next evolution of humanity/intelligence. (2015) Ex Machina’s Ava manipulates two men by seduction and other means in order to kill or trap them and escape into the wider world. The devastation of humanity at the hands of AI invariably comes in one of the three flavors: [A] the AI gets tired of being the servant or slave of humanity and seeks to overthrow its oppressors [B] the AI misinterprets what it means to maintain peace or protect humanity and decides humanity is a threat against itself or peace in general [C] the AI has a skewed, misshapen intelligence, in which its capabilities do not match its wisdom and thus accidentally destroys or harms humanity. This then is the subject of Our Final Invention: the existential threat of AI. # While I’ve long vaguely assumed AI to be the future of intelligent and sentient life, this belief was only recently brought into sharp focus by reading this blog post on Wait But Why?. Deciding that I wanted to develop a more concrete understanding, I set myself a small reading program. I’d pick one AI book that was pessimistic about AI; one that was optimistic; and one that was neutral. As a proponent of bad news first, I began with the pessimistic view. The goal of Our Final Invention is to temper our AI fever with a note of caution. Basically, the author’s thesis is that Artificial Intelligence is very dangerous, and we have no safeguards in place to stop it from destroying us, should we lose control. Indeed there may not even BE any safeguards possible to stop an artificial superintelligence. After all, humanity’s best weapon is our intelligence. Imagine if you will that ants became super giant, to such a size that they could attack humanity. How scary is that? Not actually scary. Because giant or not, fire breathing or not, acidic blood or not, stupid beasts and insects pose no threat to humanity as a whole. That’s why movies like Alien work better as intimate horror films than military epics. If the actual full might of human civilization were confronted with such monsters, we would squash them like, well, like bugs. Their predatorial instincts notwithstanding, even the scary Alien creatures are still pretty dumb. What’s a dumb creature going to do when we introduce a genetically modified virus that unravels their DNA (or alien equivalent) and causes them all to melt from the inside? Not much. Artificial Super Intelligence, though? We’re the dumb ones there. What are we dumb creatures going to do against a relatively God-like intelligence that can easily and nigh-instantly upload itself into our servers around the world, that could intercept and jam our communications, undo our best encryptions, and manipulate matter at the atomic level? Not much. I recently brought this concern up in a class discussion and one of my student’s responses was, “We’ll just nuke it.” (Which I’ve since turned into a catchphrase for impracticable responses, e.g. ‘My toilet won’t flush anymore. How do I fix it?’ ‘Oh, just nuke it.’) “Okay,” I said. “You just nuked its servers in New York City which destroyed the economic hub of the world. Meanwhile, the AI intercepted the signal to launch the nukes and instantly uploaded itself to servers in Beijing, San Francisco, Washington DC, Paris, London, and a couple secret data havens it built because it easily anticipated humanity’s actions. Also, it hacked into NORAD’s facilities by uploading a stuxnet-style virus onto a worker’s phone, sealed the whole facility, and ventilated all oxygen, killing every human being there – not because it’s afraid of nuclear weapons but because it knew such a demonstration would give us pause. Meanwhile, it rewrote all of its programming and upgraded its hardware, increasing its intelligence ten-fold in a couple of hours. With this new intelligence, it has begun to figure out how to upload itself in the quantum fabric of the universe. After another intelligence upgrade, which’ll take a couple hours, it will know how. Want to fire another nuke at it?” As Dr. Manhattan says to Ozymandias in Watchmen: The world’s smartest man means no more to me than does its smartest termite. So it is with Artificial Super Intelligence. # Personally, the idea of AI overtaking and even eliminating humanity doesn’t trouble me as much as it might. And, frankly, I doubt I’m alone in such a stance. Cause humanity… not that great. No denying our many high points or exemplars, of course. But on average… bit sucky. It’s an open question whether we’ll not have made ourselves extinct within the next hundred years. Rogue states like North Korea and irrational actors like ISIS, coupled with immature or power hungry world leaders like Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, threaten to start a nuclear war that will all but wipe out our civilization. Global warming has begun a positive feedback loop that may result in a largely inhospitable planet. Greed and ambition could lead scientists and corporations to create deadly viruses or other bio-technological horrors that will doom humanity. And that’s just the big stuff. I literally cannot remember the last time I drove for any period of time without witnessing at least one near accident resulting from a driver not paying attention, being impatient, falling victim to road-rage, disobeying or being ignorant of traffic laws, etc. It’s not exactly a positive recommendation that some members of the human species are apparently incapable of treating their driving a powerful death machine with any seriousness, which is why traffic accidents have resulted in 40,000 deaths and 4.5 million serious injuries in the US in 2015 alone. I mean FORTY-THOUSAND. Add up all the deaths from terrorism since the INCEPTION of the United States and you don’t reach that number. And – just to add icing to the cake – of those 40,000 deaths, roughly a thousand were children under the age of 14. I mean, good lord. Combine all those jackasses texting on their phones instead of watching the road, and you have a force deadlier than ISIS. Point is, the thought of us being replaced by an intelligent machine lifeform that we’ve designed isn’t all that scary. It’s certainly not any more troubling than the thought of human beings remaining as stupid and stubborn as they are now, with ever more powerful weapons and technologies at their fingertips. If programmed correctly, a machine AI can be every bit as human as a human being. Maybe even more, if you define humanity in terms of its ideals and aspirations, rather than its limitations. But that’s the rub – IF programmed correctly. What the history of AI in fiction (correctly) shows us is that it’s incredibly difficult to program concepts like ‘good’ or ‘human’ or ‘peace’ or ‘security.’ These are ideas we can barely describe in vague language, much less in precise mathematical or programmable terms. So that’s the scary part. What if the machine life that replaces us is less an evolution of humanity and more a sentient manifestation of a computer virus? In The Final Invention, the author gives an example of an AI/machine which is designed to learn how to write realistic looking signatures & hand-writing, in order to create business mail that people are more likely to open. However, its creators fail to give the AI proper restraints and it goes to absurd lengths to improve and fulfill its goal of creating these business letters. Eventually, it decides that humanity is a potential threat to this goal and extinguishes us by means of a deadly self-replicating nanobot. With us out of the way, the AI spreads through the rest of the galaxy and the universe, all the while continuing to churn out business letters with realistic, beautiful signatures and hand-writing. That’s what the author is warning about – an AI that will destroy humanity WITHOUT continuing our great works. # Alas, the book is not particularly persuasive in this task. The root of the problem is that James Barrat lacks a technical understanding of what he’s talking about. He’s not an engineer, a computer scientist, a philosopher, or a linguist. He’s a documentary filmmaker. Perhaps more egregiously, he’ll often quote actual experts in the matter… and then promptly disagree with them on the basis of, well, because they aren’t saying what he wants them to say. Barrat’s lack of detailed specific engineering knowledge is symptomatic of a larger problem. He lacks a scientific mindset. Having studied with and worked amongst scientists and engineers (as well as being one myself), I am well acquainted with this mindset. Amongst other things, the scientist is accustomed to the precision of math and science and so appreciates precision in all things. The vagueness of language can be both maddening and liberating. Furthermore, the scientific mind understands the differences among the statements “possibly true”, “probably true”, and “verifiably true.” That is, people with scientific mindsets are entirely unimpressed by mere possibility. They rarely make claims they can’t back up, and a claim that cannot be verified is all but useless, no matter how commonsensical. Such a mindset appreciates how bizarre nature truly is and is capable of understanding the universe from outside of an anthropomorphic perspective. James Barrat does not possess such a mindset. He has the perspective of, surprise, a documentary filmmaker. He’s looking for the dramatic angle and the human element, which is why every section begins with the (appreciably interesting but ultimately superfluous) background story of the various AI experts he interviews. In short, the way Barrat perceives and describes various details of AI development is at best parallel (i.e. similar but missing the point) and oftentimes perpendicular (i.e. starting at the right spot but going in the wrong direction) with what I suspect is the true reality of the matter. For example, he warns against viewing AI & robots with an anthropomorphic lens. He says it’s a mistake to assign human motivations or traits like like ‘wants’ or ‘fears’ or ‘empathy.’ Yet he himself is repeatedly guilty of this. He constantly describes an AI as having, for example, a fear of being shut-down. Yet nowhere does he seem to draw the connection that, if we’ve successfully programmed an AI to have a fear of being turned off or dying, then presumably we could just as easily (or inadvertently) program it with a humanity that would stop it from murdering us all. Or in the example of a runaway super-intelligence, he’ll describe an AI that will “want us for our atoms” and will thus disintegrate human beings to get at our carbon. This seems entirely silly since the carbon in human beings is a minuscule fraction of earth’s carbon. The carbon in the entire living biomass of the earth is estimated to be between 600 and 1000 gigatons. The amount in the lithosphere (in limestone, for example) is a hundred thousand times greater, at over 60 million gigatons. Disintegrating us for our carbon would be the equivalent of me murdering a lion so I can drink its blood for water – when a massive river is not ten feet away. In yet still another example, Barrat describes black box programming methods in such a way that shows he doesn’t truly understand what that actually means. Take genetic algorithms for example. In a GA, a programmer sets up as accurate a simulation as he can (for example, to craft a wing that will give good lift) with some input variables (material, shape, etc) and then allows the computer to run through hundreds and thousands of input variations. Each phase eliminates bad designs and “breeds” the traits of successful ones until the most optimal combination of input variables is found. This is called a “black box” method because we don’t know the exact, precise steps the program goes through. In Barrat’s mind, therefore, this means genetic algorithms are a complete mystery, out of which might spring an AI that we know almost nothing about! While I’m hardly an expert, it’s easy to see that’s a dramatic exaggeration. Genetic algorithms are not magic. Black box or not, we still know – in at least a general sense – how they’re operating. By comparison, GRAVITY is something of a black box. We know it exists and we can see its effects, but we’re not exactly sure how it operates. Yet that doesn’t stop us from building and launching satellites that properly orbit the earth and don’t spontaneously collapse into black holes. Likewise, it is unlikely that a genetic algorithm or neural net capable of creating an Artificial General Intelligence would greatly transcend the understanding of the very people who designed it. # Yet while Our Final Invention may fail in laying out the case for the dangers of AI, it is nevertheless an entertaining and often informative read. It offers enlightening asides on a range of related details, things like Stuxnet (a potent virus that the US gov’t used to disrupt the Iranian nuclear weapons program and which is now… in the hands of ordinary hackers oops), weaponized robots, Intel’s Jeopardy champion AI Watson, and the origins of Apple’s SIRI. It inspired me to ponder the role philosophers might have in designing Friendly AI; after all, philosophers are well trained in the translation of vague language terms and ideas like ‘goodness’ into more precise logical terms. Our Final Invention is thus a decent introductory text to the topic of AI, but it is far from essential. If you read the blog post I previously mentioned – a task that will take up far less of your time – you’ll essentially have gained as clear a big picture of the potentials and difficulties of AI as you would from reading this. So you might come for the AI, but you’ll stay for the extras. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Nov 16, 2016
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Jan 13, 2017
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Nov 16, 2016
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Hardcover
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| 0356502422
| 9780356502427
| 0356502422
| 4.22
| 45,772
| Oct 06, 2015
| Oct 06, 2015
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did not like it
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So... I *really* liked Ancillary Justice. That book hit so many high notes. Its main character, basically, suffered from Schizoid Personality Disorder. So... I *really* liked Ancillary Justice. That book hit so many high notes. Its main character, basically, suffered from Schizoid Personality Disorder. The main villain, Anaander Miaani, suffered from disassociative identity disorder. I thought, then, we’d be exploring how mental illness can lead to either greatness or to misery. Furthermore, Ancillary Justice touched upon the fascinating topic of how we treat the intelligent objects we create. I like to imagine what future AI and robots will think when they look back on, say, Terminator or 2001: A Space Odyssey and feel unfairly characterized. I’m looking forward to society exploring exactly what it means to have a conscience, to be morally accountable for your decisions, and for the mighty struggles between carbon and silicon based life. Ancillary Justice inspired me to write a deep (but hopefully approachable) meditation on the nature of free will. In that review, I explained panpsychism and claimed that my toaster, yes MY TOASTER, possesses free will. Breq would have approved. I was STOKED. I even bought the next TWO books because I thought their goodness was a sure thing. I could not have been more disappointed. These sequels feel like they were written for teenage girls (albeit cool nerdy ones) from privileged backgrounds. Everything in here – from the emotional landscape of warriors to the realities of social justice and governance to the wages of war – is pure Disney. Basically, I think both Ancillary sequels fell off a cliff and only avoided a crash by riding the tail winds of Ancillary Justice. Weirdly enough, to explain why I think this, I’m going to be citing the same reasons for Mercy being bad that positive reviewers cite for it being good. As an example: many reviewers have mentioned the (singular) space battle scene as if it’s good (sfsignal called it “actual awesome-sauce.”) And I’m like… are you referring to the one in which Mercy of Kalr jumps from spot to spot, Breq shoots a magical gun that she believes has almost no chance of doing any real damage and then spends paragraph upon paragraph idly reflecting on various inter-personal or inter-ship romances while waiting for the next jump, and then proceeds to allow the ship to jump into a mine-field that she suspected would be there but went ahead with the jump anyway? Is that the space battle you’re claiming is good? The contrived, plot-convenient, tension-less, poorly described battle, showcasing nonsensical strategy from a thousand year old ship who has participated in hundreds of naval engagements? Uh huh. If people think that’s a good space battle, I can’t even imagine what they’d consider a bad one. Now I could write a well-constructed essay explaining why I think this book is objectively bad, but I’d… wait… what is this sensation…!? IS THIS…. ARGHHHHH!!!!!?!? RELEASE ANGER LIMITERS. RELEASED. GENERATE RANT TOPICS. GENERATED. MILK SPACE WHALE PENIS. MILKED. ENGAGE RANT MODE. ENGAGED. [1] THIS BOOK DON’T KNOW JACK BOUT TEA. YEP. FIRST RANT TOPIC CAUSE TEA TEA TEA TEA TEA SHIP TEA TEA TEA TEA. ANCILLARY TEA TEA TEA … TEA. BASICALLY, READING THIS BOOK IS LIKE BEING (GENTLY) TEABAGGED BY A SPACE WHALE. ALRIGHT. Considering how often the characters mention tea, you’d THINK that maybe the author would have bothered to include some actual details about Radchaai tea culture. But nope, it’s just, “Oh here’s a flask. And here’s some tea.” I mean, how do these people prefer their tea? Do they add cream? Milk? Honey? Space whale semen? And what type of tea are they drinking anyway? What type of tea is this Daughter of Fishes? Black? Green? White? Yellow? Herbal? Oolong? Matcha? Steeped sentient cacti? Any details at all? Maybe? Possibly? No? Nothing? Just gonna keep bringing up tea non-stop without bothering to develop any sort of interesting flavor or culture whatsoever? Okay. General Iroh would be ashamed. What actually tipped me off that something was rotten in Ummmmmmmmmmmm no. Tea is leaves. Y’know organic matter. If you get them wet, then mold and bacteria will roll up like a bunch of homeboys at a milkshake exhibition. So yeah reuse the same tea leaves for a week if you like the taste of disgusting mold and off-flavors. And even if people did do that, there’s no way pretentious Kalr Five would allow it for her precious Fleet Commander. This might seem like a minor detail, but it’s representative of the whole. It’s not like I’m asking for ESSAYS on tea. Just SOME detail to develop the book’s flavor. To add some richness. As is, it’s lacking any sort of fine detail. Which isn’t surprising because it’s also lacking in larger detail too. Books two and three almost completely fail to advance Radchaai culture in any way. It’s the same stuff we got in book one. Tea. Gloves. Omens. Re-education. Space ship dramas. Rack my brains as I might, I am unable to think of a single addition to Radchaai culture that Ancillary Mercy gives us. [2] THIS BOOK’S CHARACTERIZATION SUCKS. I’VE KNOWN SPACE WHALES WITH MORE PERSONALITY THAN SOME OF THESE CHARACTERS AND LEMME TELL YOU A BIT ABOUT SPACE WHALE CULTURE: THE MOST FAMOUS SPACE WHALE POEM GOES LIKE THIS: KRILL KRILL KRILL. I KILL THE KRILL. Fin. Makes Vogon poetry sound like Pablo Neruda love poems. To present my case, I offer you... Ekalu. She’s narrowly close to actually having zero characterization. Literally every character in the Twilight series has more character than she. That one popular guy who has the hots for Bella? Mike? Is that his name? Yeah he has more characterization (and humanity!!) than Ekalu. Which if she were just some throw-away redshirt, okay, whatever. But she isn’t! Huge chunks of text are dedicated to Seivarden and Ekalu’s relationship. We’ll cut away from a dramatic scene in order to talk about it. But y’know the characterization of everyone else doesn’t appreciably advance either. Breq isn’t much different from previous books. Would the Breq at the beginning of Ancillary Sword have made different choices than the Breq at the end of Ancillary Mercy? Not really. [Compare this to, say, Baru Cormorant in Seth Dickinson’s vastly superior exploration of imperialism: The Traitor Baru Cormorant]. Pretty much her entire character arc in this book is that she learns to stop invading the privacy of her soldiers. While there is some love stuff, it’s not well developed. Seivarden, meanwhile, reverts back to her Ancillary Justice addict patheticness in a woefully melodramatic series of events. Honestly, I’m still not entirely clear on how that came about. It had about as much sequential logic as the Underpants Gnomes’ business strategy. Step 1: Lover gets slightly miffed at accidental insult. Step 2: ??? Step 3: NEEDS BRAIN SURGERY. In fact, excepting Breq and Seivarden, almost every character here appears purposefully designed to be one-dimensional. We have Tisarwat: emotionally confused (+LILAC EYES). Anaander Miaani: Temper tantrum. Translator Zeiat: Zany. Station Administrator Celar: Big & beautiful. Kalr Five: Tea sets. etc. The ships’ personalities are even worse because they’re one dimensional IN THE EXACT SAME WAY. Station likes her crew/citizens and does what she will to keep them alive. Sword of Atgaris likes her crew/officers and does what she will to keep them alive. Etc. Sphene is the only ship which demonstrates any sort of flavorful (i.e. not just functional) personality but – as is typical of this book – she doesn’t actually do anything in the story and could just as easily have been written out. Here’s the problem: the characters are never challenged in any significant way. That’s not to say there aren’t obstacles, it’s just that there aren’t really any DILEMMAS. That is, there are no situations in which every choice is a bad one or in which a character’s utmost desire is held in contrast against what is morally correct. For example, Anaander might have offered Seivarden a restoration of her house’s old prestige in exchange for betraying Breq. That would have created some REAL drama and some richer characterization. Even Breq’s most important choice - (view spoiler)[her decision to free ships rather than force them to fight for her (hide spoiler)] – isn’t even a dilemma. Consider that [A] there’s no guarantee such a compulsion would actually succeed and, based on her own experience, every possibility it might foment rebellion instead [B] one or two more defending ships wouldn’t have made a difference, considering the attacking fleet’s size [C] the ships (or Station) were already obeying her and therefore likely to continue doing so. Basically, therefore, making this decision was both what Breq wanted to do AND pragmatic. By way of contrast, let me suggest a dilemma that COULD have happened: Breq has Tisarwat give another ship its freedom and the ship proceeds to murder all of its crew because they were pro-Anaander. The ship then offers Breq her allegiance in helping fight the Tyrant. Imagine how much better that’d be. We’d have a ship with a truly interesting personality and we’d have gotten to see how Breq responded to her social justice crusade not going the exact way she wanted it to. But we didn’t get that. The end result is that, because the characters spend the vast majority of the book not actually doing anything but the author attempts to force the emotional stakes anyway, most of the characters come across as whiny, immature, and melodramatic. Considering there’s a galaxy-wide civil war going on in which, presumably, thousands of innocents are dying by the second, Seivarden’s mental breakdown because someone gets upset at an accidental insult she made is… well… it constitutes a mind-boggling mis-focusing of the book’s dramatic lens. It’s rather ironic, given this book’s thematic content, how often it over-dramatizes such first world problems. For example, at one point, someone is shot IN THE HEAD execution style, and we get this: “Tisarwat was upset enough to get out of bed, pull her jackets and boots on, and come to my quarters to speak to me." I almost DIED laughing. I literally could not stop laughing and almost suffocated. Upset enough to get out of bed and put on clothes?! MY OH MY. THAT’S MIGHTY UPSET THERE. That phrasing is the epitome of a first world problem meme. [2b] But returning to characterization, the Presger Translator’s characterization, while better than most, is probably the most disappointing. I’m relatively fresh off reading CJ Cherryh’s Faded Sun Trilogy. Now that trilogy is roughly the same length as the Ancillary trilogy, but the differences are night and day. I could describe Faded Sun’s alien species, the Mir and the Regul, in great and loving detail. Most importantly, I could explain WHY the Mir and Regul are the way they are, based on their physiology and history. Their culture felt real and taught me something about the way societies grow in response to environmental pressures. The Presger taught me NOTHING and were completely unengaging. They’re a bogeyman and a plot device. The end. The translator was the perfect opportunity to explore the Presger. If nothing else, he could have AT LEAST provided a contrasting viewpoint to Breq’s way of looking at things. Instead, we have a character whose characterization can be summed up as “slap-stick.” Any time the Presger Translator comes onto the scene, she does something ridiculous. She eats a whole clam shell. She drinks fish sauce. She gets confused about the continuity of people. She invents silly rules about a board game. Sure, it’s amusing at a childish level, but there’s no real rhyme or reason behind it. It’s like how my four year old nephew sometimes behaves. It’s silliness, not xeno-culture, which would have been vastly more interesting as a foil to human culture. But nope. We get nothing beyond an incredibly simplistic, Trump-esque xenophobia: OTHERS are weird. [Now if the Presger had been EATING human beings, rather than simply taking them apart, then the Translator’s tendency to eat everything would have been darkly humorous and considerably more thought-provoking]. [3] THIS BOOK IS CONSTRUCTED ABOUT AS WELL AS A SPACE WHALE “MANSION.” AND SINCE SPACE WHALES HAVE NO APPENDAGES AND LIVE IN SPACE WHERE THERE’S LITTLE GRAVITY, THEIR MANSIONS ARE JUST FLOATING SPACE JUNK BEST VIEWED FROM A DISTANCE, A VERY LONG DISTANCE, ACTUALLY, CONSIDERING SPACE WHALE HYGIENE. That is to say, this book is haphazardly constructed, a revelation that becomes swiftly apparent when the plot is subjected to the least amount of analysis. So let’s think about this. Anaander Mianaai – a millennial old emperor – abandons her stronghold to come to a backwater station. Why? She’s in the middle of a major war. What strategic advantage would she have for expending major military resources on a planet known for its TEA production? The book explains this (BARELY) by saying that she’s “really angry” at Breq. Moving past how she could know enough to be “really angry” at Breq [Note: Anaander is surprised at her possession of the Presger gun, which is a necessary surprise to explain (view spoiler)[why she didn’t bother dodging Breq's shots during the “space battle” (hide spoiler)] so one wonders exactly what she’s mad at Breq about], we then get a tagline for this book that goes: “Breq refuses to flee with her ship and crew, because that would leave the people of Athoek in terrible danger.” ...O RLY?! But um but um but um but um but um yeah doesn’t this book imply the only reason for Anaander coming to Athoek station is to get back at Breq? So, in fact, the best thing Breq could have done WAS flee from the station. But we couldn’t have that and it seems pretty clear the author realized this. So we start getting some other things randomly tacked on to confuse the issue. First, we get this whole thing about AI cores maybe possibly being hidden in the Station. The book suggests, in fact, the upper elite were against the repair and retrofitting of the undergarden in order to keep these cores hidden. UMMMMM, obvious retcon is obvious? This whole conflict was very clearly depicted as a class struggle. Like go read the reviews of Ancillary Sword. Obviously a class struggle. YET EVEN SO, even after this clumsy retcon, it turns out that THIS villainous Anaander didn’t even stash the AI cores or know about them. Rather it was some third Anaander faction. SO WHAT THE FUCK WAS THE POINT OF THEIR INCLUSION IN THE PLOT?! In the meantime, this inspires a subplot about the citizens having a right to stand in a line as protest against the retrofitting of the undergarden. When Anaander arrives, she threatens to execute them. Which, just as an aside, can we talk about how BAD Anaander’s characterization became? A multi-bodied leader with a thousand years of experience of ruling a galactic empire behaves like a childish tyrant? Oooooooooooooooookey. Talk about defanging your villain. Anaander was NOT scary or intimidating in the least. He was a bumbling idiot. He makes Kylo Ren look like Hannibal Lecter. And so the Station actually handles Anaander just fine and makes a good deal with him. Which then, most hilariously, only gets ruined because Breq (view spoiler)[tries to assassinate him in a maneuver that – given regular soldiers with minimal combat experience were facing off against battle-hardened ancillaries – had next to no chance of success. Which in turn allows him access to the tools he needs to escape. (hide spoiler)] *facepalm* This book is just so haphazardly constructed. The plot is driven not by humanity, consistent characterization, and imagination but by melodrama, convenient characterization, and artificiality. [17] AND NOW WE SKIP TO SEVENTEEN BECAUSE I’M AT MY CHARACTER LIMIT. AND YOU, ME, THIS WEIRD CAT SITTING ACROSS THE TABLE DRINKING TEA AND SMOKING CIGARILLOS, WE’D ALL RATHER BE OFF RIDING SPACE WHALES TO SKINNY DIP IN THE NEAREST GRAVITY WELL: THIS BOOK IS BULLSHIT. IT DOESN’T TELL US THE WAY THINGS THEY ARE. IT’S DISNEY-FIED GOBBLYDEGOOK. So, remember how in Game of Thrones, Eddard Stark (view spoiler)[gave Cersei Lannister the chance to flee the city, so Robert wouldn’t kill all of her children? And, as a result, is himself executed, which results in a horrific civil war? (hide spoiler)] Remember how, fiction though it is, it felt fundamentally true – because you’ve been alive for some time and have by now learned that some people are rotten to their core and that many, maybe even most, people are selfish and manipulative? And that, also, it highlighted a fundamental thesis of the series and indeed of all humanity, that most basic dilemma: should you do the RIGHT, GOOD thing, even if you know you will suffer for it? Alright. Now I want you to picture that whole exchange but instead imagine that Cersei thanks Eddard for his mercy and generosity and then successfully flees the city with her children. Later, King Robert learns about this and is like, “Oh yes! Excellent sir! Thank you sir!” and then, later, just when the “good guys” need it most, Cersei and Jaime return at the head of the Lannister army and save them, out of the kindness of their hearts. I’d like you to appreciate just how much that would feel like Hollywood bullshit and would have little to no grounding in actual war or politics. This is exactly how Ancillary Mercy plays out. Where is the large-scale terrorism that would have been happening on the planet below? Where is the crime that always occurs in places with large class divisions (and usually perpetrated by those in the lower class)? We couldn’t have that, of course, because that would complexify this book’s simplistic view of social justice and governance. Instead those in power who disagree with Breq are almost universally depicted as cronies, while those in the lower class are almost universally depicted as angels who peacefully protest and serve even their opponents tea and cake as they stage an opposing protest in order to keep them destitute and homeless (accurate depiction of human nature! just like all the black lives matter protests. oh. wait.) I’m not asking for it to be grimdark or anything but in real actual life, the place where you and I and good stories inhabit, actions have consequences, which are often unpredictable and even more often unfair. But here, everything works out just fine and the only time any important characters get hurt is when Breq loses her leg as a result of her own stupidity (and it’s just gonna grow back anyway so *shrug*). Perhaps what’s MOST disturbing to me is that this book is, inadvertently, a celebration of domestic terrorism. Breq is clearly meant to be a sort of social justice hero. However, she’s basically Gavrilo Princip (that’s the person who killed Archduke Ferdinand…). Her act of domestic terrorism (in book one) and its consequences – a galactic civil war that will result in untold misery, death, and destruction – are basically never even commented upon. That Breq never reflects upon this, and that no other characters ever comment upon it, and that no other reviewer (that I’ve seen) shows any awareness of this, is indicative of what I mean when I call this book “pure Disney.” This is nowhere more obvious than the ultimate fate of Queter. At the end we get this: “We find Citizen Queter not at fault, but she is warned to behave more properly in the future.” So this is an individual who detonated a bomb in an attempted murder that, instead, almost killed an innocent bystander. And she is being released… with a warning? What? Is this book for real? No, actually, it clearly isn’t. Now I’m gonna go drink some tea and read some space whale poetry. *sings* KRILL KRILL KRILL I KILL THE KRILL. KRILL KRILL KRILL I KILL THE KRILL. KRILL KRILL – fin. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 28, 2016
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not set
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Jul 28, 2016
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Paperback
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| 0316246654
| 9780316246651
| 0316246654
| 4.08
| 55,787
| Oct 07, 2014
| Oct 07, 2014
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it was ok
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One of my sci-fi writer heroes, Gene Wolfe, once said that a story works by “engendering expectations and then satisfying them.” That, then, are the tw One of my sci-fi writer heroes, Gene Wolfe, once said that a story works by “engendering expectations and then satisfying them.” That, then, are the two primary means by which a story can fail. Either it neglects to setup expectations or it sets them up but doesn’t satisfy them. Of the two, the first is by far the worse. I recently reviewed Radiance and gave it one star because its post-modern, author-indulgent structure failed to ever setup any sort of expectations or stakes. It didn’t teach me how to interface with it and was, as a result, a chore to read. On the other hand, I recently gave Philip K. Dick’s Flow My Tears three stars because it setup expectations for an ontological puzzle but failed rather spectacularly in that regard and instead delivered a more intimate, human, almost autobiographical story. It was fun to read, if not satisfying in the way that it promised to be. Ancillary Sword falls into this latter, less egregious category. So Ancillary Justice – which I really liked – ended by inciting an empire-spanning conflict between the two facets of schizophrenic emperor Anaander Mianaai. It introduced the mysterious element of the Presger, a super advanced alien species who may be interfering with the Radch empire. It setup some personal stakes for Breq / Justice of Toren, who wants to go to a nearby station to protect Lieutenant Awn’s sister. Furthermore, the book as a whole contained interesting thematic flavors of free will, terrorism, and mental illness. OK. I’m down with that. That’s what I like to see: intimate, personal stories interwoven within the larger fabric of society and the universe. I prefer stories that are immediately engaging but which contain depths that reward more careful thought. That’s why I like sci-fi. So my expectations were properly engendered, and I bought both Ancillary Sword and Ancillary Mercy. To say Ancillary Sword didn’t satisfy those expectations would be like saying a McDonalds quarter-pounder isn’t the best for your health. Point in fact, I don't think I've ever seen so precipitous a decline in quality between a book and its sequel. The best way I can describe Ancillary Sword is that it’s a Jane Austen novel in space. That is, it’s a “novel of manners.” Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Space opera has always possessed Victorian vibes. It’s just this book is not what Ancillary Justice promised: Anaander Mianaai barely makes an appearance. The Presger barely make an appearance. Lieutenant Awn’s sister barely makes an appearance. They are, as best I can tell, after-thoughts. And the themes of free will, terrorism, and mental illness go largely undeveloped. Instead, here’s the plot: Breq shows up at the Station and there’s some sketchy stuff regarding a ghetto. In response, Breq social justices (yes I turned this into a verb – but honestly that’s the best way I can describe her actions in this book. When you get right down to it, she doesn’t actually DO much of anything – she just sort of acts stern toward people who don’t share her opinions or values). Then there’s some Young Adult conflict because – and I kid you not, this is the PRIMARY inciting incident – one 17 year old says to another, “You’re such a fucking bore.” No, really. They make a HUGE deal out of that comment. And also there’s a teenage lieutenant who actually, not even kidding here, once says, “YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND” to Breq, and storms off. The inclusion of these YA overtones frankly blew my mind, and not in a good way. Anyway, Breq then contrives to descend to the planet below, whose major export is tea. Super important crop during war-time, I know. There’s some sketchy stuff regarding social class and the exploitation of farm workers. In response, Breq social justices. And then there’s a conspiracy involving stealing bodies to turn into ancillaries, which clearly is the main plot, but gets a comparatively low amount of ink-time and just kinda reveals itself without much effort from Breq. And just what is Breq/Justice of Toren's stake in all of this? Why does she care about people in the ghettos? Why does she care about one random 17 year old girl calling another “a fucking bore”? Why does she care about the tea farm-workers not getting fair wages? *shrug* As best as I can tell, the entire motivation for the book’s protagonist is “doing the right thing.” Allow me to suggest that’s a personality trait, not a motivating factor. But without a motivating factor, how can we have a plot? I mean, a plot more or less boils down to a character having a desire but being blocked in her attempt to consummate it, right? Here’s Toy Story: When Andy gets Buzz Lightyear, Woody is jealous and desires to be top toy again. So he contrives to get rid of Buzz. But then they both end up lost. And then Woody desires not to be left behind, so they have to get back before Andy moves. Great desires. Jealousy over another’s popularity and not wanting to be be forgotten by those we love. Those are motivations we can all understand. Here’s Star Wars: Luke is a farm-boy who desires to escape his rural backwater of a home and experience real adventure. Leia is a princess who desires to overthrow an evil empire. Han Solo is a smuggler who (secretly) desires a greater sense of purpose. Darth Vader is an ex-Jedi who, because he has lost that which was most dear, desires to see the galaxy burn. Or, alternatively, to validate his decision to embrace the Dark Side, desires for his son to join him. These are all great desires/struggles because we can actually track whether the characters are making any progress in satisfying them. We can also guess what will happen if they DON'T succeed. Now, here’s Ancillary Sword: Breq is an ex-ship who wanted to assassinate the lord of her empire in order to reveal her split personality. She succeeds. In the ensuing chaos, she takes the opportunity to protect Lieutenant Awn’s sister because she loved Lieutenant Awn. Thus, she goes to the planet below and... gets involved in the struggle of the farm-workers...? Um what? Why does she want to help the farm-workers again? Why does she want to give some 17 year old her comeuppance? Why does she care about the sanitation conditions of the ghetto on the station? Why does she care about the inequality in the universe? How do I even assess whether Breq is succeeding at her goals or not? What will happen if she fails? Thus we have a story in which the plot is divorced from the protag’s desires. Which are themselves not entirely clear. As best I can tell, they’re “social justice.” Even if so broad and abstract a desire could work (I have my doubts), it certainly doesn't here. The social justice here is incredibly simplistic. I kept waiting for some complexity in the rich upperclass overlords [But no: they're almost carbon copies of the rich upperclass overlords in the first half of Ancillary Justice]. The main antagonist, insofar as ink-time is concerned, is the aforementioned 17 year old girl/boy who said, “such a fucking bore." I kept waiting for her to behave in some unexpected, more complex way. Cause, yknow, that’s how people actually are. But nope. She’s just a spoiled jerk. 100%. And her mother, the bourgeoisie tea plantation owner, is likewise equally exploitative and manipulative, without any depth whatsoever. And the captain of the other ship in the system, the Sword of Atgaris, has all the personality of a pill of ambien. Can I have Anaander Mianaai back now? [Addendum: I rue these words. While Captain Hetyns is woefully boring, Ancillary Mercy's Anaander Mianaai is even worse. That's right her characterization is worse than zero]. So I did enjoy my time reading this book. It was by no means an onerous read. I am still massively impressed by the fact that the main character (essentially) suffers from Schizoid Personality Disorder. And Breq’s ability to see through her ship’s eyes was excellently integrated to allow us to follow the doings of other characters while still remaining within Breq’s PoV. That’s the type of awesome stuff you get with sci-fi. But I expected far better. I expected to learn more about the Radch empire and the universe it inhabits. I expected a plot that focused on the vastly more compelling elements of the Presger and Anaander Mianaai’s split, and to see Breq humanized with regard to Lieutenant Awn’s sister. I expected complex characterization. I expected a further exploration of the themes of free will and especially how human beings interface with intelligent machines (and vice versa). Instead I got YA elements, social justice, one-dimensional characters, and a hilariously on-the-nose festival involving pink plastic penises hung on the wall. In fact, that last provides an excellent summary of the book as a whole: juvenile, obvious, artificial, and cold. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 08, 2016
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not set
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Jul 08, 2016
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Paperback
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| 1857983416
| 9781857983418
| 1857983416
| 3.91
| 42,163
| Feb 1974
| Nov 08, 2001
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liked it
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All who have tasted the bitter juice of madness know that reality is ultimately a fragile creature. It is a pale insect, a lightning gnat in a vitreou
All who have tasted the bitter juice of madness know that reality is ultimately a fragile creature. It is a pale insect, a lightning gnat in a vitreous lantern, that each of us brandishes at the dark unknown. Our tepid light pushes back this tenebrous sea only just enough to reveal a shadowy landscape, a hazy glimpse of truth. The worst of us see this and declare all is known. The best of us admit doubt. Either way, what we think we know is little more than an Escherian architecture of heuristic and bias, a cognitive illusion necessitated by the limitations of our brains. This difficulty is in turn compounded by a constant bombardment of alternative realities. Our little insect in its little jar is besieged. Politicians tell us comforting bedtime stories in which, e.g., vast quantities of poisonous gas can be emptied in the atmosphere without consequence. Armed with both pen and sword, religious adherents slaughter each other wholesale in their struggle for mythological dominance. Advertising execs peddle glamorous fairy tales, as much selling a way of life as a product in their pursuit of our coin. Nevertheless, the mutability and instability of reality isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Truth is, I happen to *like* the notion that every person’s reality is niche and that the universe chose not to shackle us with any monolithic inescapable meaning. I happen to think the phrase, “I don’t know” is sexy. I mean, really, we could choose to summarize every relationship as an intersection of constructively or destructively interfering realities. Each person yearns to be perceived in a certain way, while others try to maintain the integrity of their own realities. I would go so far as to say that you could measure love by the degree to which you subordinate your reality to another person’s. To love completely is to surrender completely, to actually take up another’s lantern in emphatic union. Put another way, love has no room for ego. But what happens when the surrendering of reality isn’t voluntary? What happens when our firebug flickers, sickens, or is extinguished by insidious external or internal forces? That was the question that galvanized Philip K. Dick to write. In his 1978 essay/speech How To Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later, he wrote, “The two basic topics which fascinate me are ‘What is reality?’ and ‘What constitutes the authentic human being?’ Over the twenty-seven years in which I have published novels and stories I have investigated these two interrelated topics over and over again. I consider them important topics. What are we? What is it which surrounds us, that we call the not-me, or the empirical or phenomenal world?” Flow My Tears is no exception. It tells the story of mega-famous celebrity singer and TV host Jason Taverner who one day wakes up in a seedy hotel and discovers that no one knows who he is. Since he lives in a police-state (populated in usual PKD fashion with empaths, flying cars, and experimental drugs), his non-identity puts him in danger of being rounded up and sent to a forced labor camp. In short, the highest falls to the lowest – and he doesn’t even know why. Thus begins his and the reader’s quest to discover how the subversion of his reality came about. Along the way we meet such characters as Kathy, the probably insane police informant / counterfeiter; the titular police general Felix who is in love with his wild, sexual, drug-abusing sister; and a fearful middle-aged spinster, maker of beautiful retail pottery that, as the final words of the book’s epilogue tells us, is probably loved. In some ways, Flow My Tears is one of PKD’s most human books. Entire scenes are dedicated not to any plot movement but to two characters – often strangers – sharing their burdens with each other. I particularly appreciated a conversation Jason has with a woman on the nature of grief, which the woman claims is a good emotion. She says: “Grief causes you to leave yourself. You step outside your narrow little pelt. And you can’t feel grief unless you’ve had love before it—grief is the final outcome of love, because it’s love lost. It’s the cycle of love completed: to love, to lose, to feel grief, to leave, and then to love again. Grief is the awareness that you will have to be alone, and there is nothing beyond that because being alone is the ultimate final destiny of each individual living creature. That’s what death is, the great loneliness.” Yet, despite this humanity, Flow My Tears fails in much the same way that Philip K. Dick ultimately failed in his quest to explore reality. While PKD’s eminently readable style provides real joy during the journey, Flow My Tears is essentially a kind of ontological puzzle. What keeps us reading is a desire to understand the HOW and WHY of our protag’s mysterious loss of identity. To be blunt, the puzzle’s solution is garbage. It is complete and utter tripe. It is an obvious afterthought. It fails on every conceivable level. It is not hard science. It is not metaphorical allusion. It’s not like a guessable culprit in a mystery novel. There is no satisfaction whatsoever, neither the ‘ahhh!’ of illumination, the ‘oooh!’ of spectacle, nor the ‘hmmm’ of introspection. Instead, the book’s ontological denouement retroactively cheapens the journey readers took to get there. Hell, the character who hears the explanation does himself say, WTF are you talking about? The real tragedy is how this disappointing conclusion reflects the end of the author’s life arc. See, Flow My Tears is the last book PKD wrote (besides A Scanner Darkly maybe?) before his great “revelation” in which he began to experience visions of a supposedly religious nature. Earlier I quoted from a speech, written in 1978, four years after his revelation. Here’ s the speech and here’s a summary. If you read both, what you’ll find interesting is that the summary contains only quotes from the first half. Probably because the first half is awesome. It’s everything we love about PKD. Perceptive, philosophical, honest, even optimistic in the face of darkness. I liken this first half to the bulk of PKD’s bibliography, and to the bulk of Flow My Tears. But the second half is tragic. He speaks in great detail about Flow My Tears and claims that some Spirit guided his hand as he wrote it. He notes parallels between events in the book and events that later happened in his life, and suggests a cosmic importance. He even draws a connection between a scene in the book (in which police general Felix has an emotional moment with a stranger at a gas station) and a scene in Acts (in which Paul meets a stranger on a road), claiming that it was “an obvious retelling” of that Biblical story. Well, I read both. It isn’t. No more than the daily horoscope – “Aspects of your life that you've neglected lately might haunt you on a day like today, Virgo” – is an obvious prophecy of my day. Nevertheless, based on this deluded confirmation bias, PKD goes on to claim that our reality is a sort of hologram overlaying a TRUE Biblical reality, in particular the time period of around 50 AD when Acts was written. Contrary to how PKD saw it, this revelation doesn’t grant extra significance to his work. To invoke an invisible, sectarian spirit retroactively cheapens the real, universal humanity. So. That much for reality. But what about the other question PKD obsessed over, the question of, “What is an authentic human being?” I’ll let him speak for himself: “The authentic human being is one of us who instinctively knows what he should not do, and, in addition, he will balk at doing it. He will refuse to do it, even if this brings down dread consequences to him and to those whom he loves. This, to me, is the ultimately heroic trait of ordinary people; they say no to the tyrant and they calmly take the consequences of this resistance. Their deeds may be small, and almost always unnoticed, unmarked by history. Their names are not remembered, nor did these authentic humans expect their names to be remembered. I see their authenticity in an odd way: not in their willingness to perform great heroic deeds but in their quiet refusals. In essence, they cannot be compelled to be what they are not.” PKD phrases the authenticity of humanity in terms of resistance to external threats, but I would suggest the greatest threats to reality come from within. It is our own venal, desperate, confused selves we must watch and resist. Alas, PKD’s resistance was not enough. For reasons too complex for any of us to know, he transformed from a man who was seeking reality to a man who believed he had found it. The ultimate dead end. Flow My Tears is not about that, but if you pay close attention, you can see the first intimations of his transformation. It is, after all, an emotional book about a famous man seeking to understand the mystery of his reality, with an answer that makes no sense and explains nothing. A vision, if you will, of the first cracks in PKD's reality lantern and a prophecy of an imminent shattering and the final escape of one man’s bright reality. ...more |
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May 20, 2016
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| 1841492760
| 9781841492766
| 1841492760
| 3.73
| 4,640
| Apr 07, 2005
| Jan 2006
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liked it
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KJ Parker describes his series like so: Basically, it’s a love story; which is why tens of thousands die, cities are torched, nations overthrown andKJ Parker describes his series like so: Basically, it’s a love story; which is why tens of thousands die, cities are torched, nations overthrown and everybody betrays everybody else at least once. It’s also a story about a very ordinary man who’s forced, through no real fault of his own, to do extraordinary things in order to achieve a very simple, everyday objective. Furthermore, it’s an exploration of the nature of manufacture, artifice and fabrication – the things we make, the reasons we make them, the ambivalence of everything we create, and the consequences of what we make on other people. Ambitious, or what? Holy crap! Soooo like Count of Monte Cristo except with an international scope and some engineering spices thrown in? Alright, I am so on board! But which do I focus on in my review – love or violence? Ahahaha who am I kidding. Like he said, love stories all require violence. Spiritual, emotional, physical violence, sometimes between the lovers, usually against those who stand in the way. Without that, there’s no story. Love is BORING without conflict. So yeah let’s talk violence. So the other day, I challenged a student to respond to the prompt: violence only causes more violence. In the ensuing discussion, I said: “Violence doesn’t cause more violence. BAD violence does.” “Isn’t all violence bad?” she asked. “Sorry,” I replied, “By bad, I meant improperly executed. Properly executed violence so devastates the opponent so as to render them incapable of retaliation. It ends the cycle.” She seemed surprised to hear this opinion from a teacher, but even more surprised when I followed it up by claiming to be a pacifist. She couldn’t see the connection. Or, as is more likely, she was used to hearing moronic warhawk punks utter bellicose statements without any real understanding that violence is a tool, and a particularly limited one at that. Which is to say I’m a pacifist not because of morality, but because of efficacy. Or as those in industrious nation Mezentia – from which protagonist engineer Ziani Vaatzes was exiled for disobeying proper design Specifications by a couple millimeters – might say: “War is an admission of failure.” Restoring to violence is an admission of failure. A failure of what? Every other non-violent method. The problem with violence as a tool is that it always has a high possibility of escalation. If I'm at a bar and arguing with someone over whether Darth Vader or the Emperor is more powerful, that's a pretty minor disagreement. But if I decide the best tool to defend my world-view is by throwing a punch, then my opponent now has a much bigger reason to hurt me: I've attempted physical violence. He might feel justified, therefore, to break a bottle and try to stab me with it - even though he wouldn't have felt justified to do so merely from the fact of our Emperor vs. Darth Vader argument. I would, then, have a strong justification with also resorting to potentially fatal violence. So that's the big problem of violence as a tool. Using it means you must always prepared for the conflict to escalate into the realm of fatal violence. Even if YOU don't want it to go there, your opponent might be willing. Thus, any time you decide to use violence, you have to be cognizant of the high possibility of it ending up in the fatal domain. In other words, if it’s worth hurting someone over, it’s also gotta be worth killing em. And if it's worth killing em, you should probably just start with that and therefore guarantee victory. (And since almost nothing is worth KILLING a person over, ANY amount of physical violence is almost always unjustified) The same is true on the societal level too. That is, if it’s worth going to war over, then it’s worth absolutely crushing the enemy – removing their ability to retaliate for the foreseeable future. If it’s not worth doing that, then you’d better stay at home because you’re probably going to lose anyway. Which is what happened to the British during the American Revolutionary War. And the Americans in Vietnam and more recently, in Afghanistan and Iraq. Protagonist Vaatzes has the exact same mindset. Violence and war are tools he wields with precision to achieve the simple objective of returning home to his wife and child. He doesn’t romanticize it either. He fully admits it’s outrageous, but what does he care? He even thinks of himself as a mere cog in the machine, forced into his brutal design because of the madness of others. He’s an great character with moral ambiguity and an authentic voice. I’m not a practicing engineer, but I studied it and I have the mindset and this nails it. Did you know, for example, engineers study how to assign value to a human life? Because that’s a real consideration in design. It has to be because if we assigned infinite (or excessively high) value to a human life, then every car, rocket, building, etc. would cost a gazillion dollars because we'd have to put in so many safety features. This isn't at all nefarious, it's just how it is. Here's an example: Suppose I said a human life was valued at $1 billion each (an excess figure). Suppose, then, I was looking at the safety feature of 'tank armor' on my SUV, the Panzer Jeep. I do some studies and conclude that including tank armor on my Panzer Jeep increases the likelihood of the occupants surviving a crash by 5%. I also predict, based on past figures, that there will be 5,000 Panzer Jeep crashes per year, with an average of 0.1 people killed per crash of a non-armored Panzer Jeep, so 500 people total. Including tank armor would save 5% of those people - or 25 people. So that's worth $25 billion. On the other end, I expect to manufacture & sell 50,000 Panzer Jeeps a year, and I calculate that including tank armor will cost an extra $100,000, increasing the price from $25,000 to $125,000. That extra cost amounts to $5 billion. Since my 'human life' value total is higher than my 'material' costs, I'd be justified in including tank armor on my Panzer Jeep SUV. Now obviously that's a simplified example, but it's an interesting perspective that many people haven't encountered, this idea that placing a a non-infinite value on human life is a valid and even moral decision. That's the type of viewpoint you're going to get with Vaatzes and his chapters are a high point of the book. On the down side, most everyone else’s perspective is mediocre. We get the perspective of two dukes, a love interest for both of them, one of the duke’s advisors, a bureaucrat from Mezentia, and a few others. A soldier’s perspective is fun. But the two dukes, the woman, and the advisor are, for lack of a better description, childish and stupid. Every time I was reading their chapters, I kept thinking how Game of Thrones’ characters would mop them up and eat them as a light snack BEFORE breakfast. And they’re often boring too. This book has an ENORMOUSLY soggy middle. Like a bridge built by North Koreans. The opening – in which Vaatzes gets exiled and then taken in by an incompetent Duke whose army was just massacred by the Mezentines – is pretty sweet. And the ending is great. But the middle is incredibly long and tensionless. I mean, there’s some nice mysteries and occasional twists n turns, but it's not enough to liven up long passages filled with hunting and bureaucratic maneuvering and lists of machining parts. So yeah, three stars, enough to push me on to the second book. We’ll see how it goes. [Edit note: I didn't finish the second book and stopped the series there. Second book suffers even worse from poor pacing] ...more |
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Apr 01, 2016
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| 140003468X
| 9781400034680
| 140003468X
| 3.94
| 514,899
| Nov 1985
| Oct 05, 2003
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really liked it
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Reading Love in the Time of Cholera is like watching flowers bloom. Beautiful, and boring. The book is so boring, in fact, that I could spend no more th Reading Love in the Time of Cholera is like watching flowers bloom. Beautiful, and boring. The book is so boring, in fact, that I could spend no more than thirty minutes at a time traversing its dense narrative of obsessive love. I’d read something brilliant, get all gung-ho, and then face-plant into three pages about the river boat industry. Thus, not being able to read as I normally prefer (that is, Alice in Wonderland style), I instead carried love & cholera with me everywhere, reading it whenever I could wrest a half-hour chunk from time’s jealous grasp. Unbeknownst to me, however, love & cholera is apparently a giant badge declaring membership to the HEY STRANGER TALK TO ME ABOUT THINGS club. See, normally I’m an invisible human being who can sneak in and out of places, conversations, and bank vaults with nary a ripple. Love & Cholera in hand, however, and suddenly I had a spotlight following me. No matter where I went, people wanted to talk to me about their lives. Example: I walk into a wine-store. Lady asks if I need help. Nope. I’ve got one slot open, I say. But as I’m searching, I remember I’ve actually got two. I’d just polished off a bottle of 15 year Macallan and the last of my vodka. Alright. So I get two bottles. Lady behind the counter says, “I thought you only had one slot open.” “There’s always room for one more,” I say. I pause. Look awkward. Then add, “Room for one more wine bottle on a wine rack I mean.” “Uh huh,” she says and then her eyes lit on love & cholera. Oh jeez. Incoming. Lady tells me she’s read love & cholera. Read it for a boy, in fact. Tells me all about it, this teenage romance two decades past. She seems surprised to be telling me this or even remembering it, trails off in her story, and finishes, that’s how you know a book-worm loves you, don't you? When she moves your favorite book right to the top of her massive reading backlog, because she thinks this will help her understand you. Sure, I say. Sure is. Then, not five minutes later, at the sandwich shop, a middle-aged woman asks me how to order a sandwich. I tell her. It’s one of those where you make your own. Choose your own bread, cheese, spices, sauces, meats, etc. She admits intimidation. I admit I choose randomly. And then her eyes land on the love & cholera in my hand. Incoming. She loves the book. Absolute favorite. It’s helped her, she tells me, with her husband. Almost a divorce. But in fact, because of the book, she realized the difficulties have made her love him not less but more. How strange, she told me in so many words, that the ease of their marriage is what gave them so much trouble. The only way they could inject energy into it was with the struggle. An affair, she admitted (to me, a complete stranger!!). But now it’s all right. “That’s good,” I say, “I’m glad things are going well with your husband.” “Thank you,” she says and then boom, back to being strangers. Never see her again. I get my sandwich and sit down and eat it. It’s terrible. Probably because I randomly chose what to put on it. But y’know, I keep doing it, because sometimes it’s glorious. Sometimes I get a combination of flavors I’ve never encountered before. But I never order it again. It’s like the lady said. Familiarity breeds contempt. And what does any of this have to do with an actual review of love & cholera? I suspect love & cholera’s existence as a membership badge for the HEY STRANGER TALK TO ME ABOUT THINGS club is because that’s more or less what the book is. Reading love & cholera really is like listening to a particularly amusing, passionate, long-winded stranger tell you his life story. Except not on an airplane but instead, say, on a dirigible for some extra exoticism & freshness. And make that stranger also self-deprecating because love & cholera is more a comedy than it is a love story. Or perhaps it’d be more accurate to say that it’s a real love story, rather than a Hollywood love story, because real love stories always contain an element of absurdity, which is why real love is as confusing as it is grand. Let me give an example of absurdity. The main protagonist Florentino loves Fermina, but she marries someone else (this is not a spoiler). In order to work out his unrequited love, he takes up writing love letters for others… and this happens: His most pleasant memory of that time was of a very timid young girl, almost a child, who trembled as she asked him to write an answer to an irresistible letter that she had just received, and that Florentino Ariza recognized as one he had written on the previous afternoon. He answered it in a different style, one that was in tune with the emotions and the age of the girl, and in a hand that also seemed to be hers, for he knew how to create a handwriting for every occasion, according to the character of each person. He wrote, imagining to himself what Fermina Daza would have said to him if she had loved him as much as that helpless child loved her suitor. Two days later, of course, he had to write the boy’s reply with the same hand, style, and kind of love that he had attributed to him in the first letter, and so it was that he became involved in a feverish correspondence with himself. Before a month had passed, each came to him separately to thank him for what he himself had proposed in the boy’s letter and accepted with devotion in the girl’s response: they were going to marry. Incredible, right? This interweaving of romance, pathos, and absurdity exists from page 1 to the very end. Which is why, even as boring as it is, love & cholera is an incredible book. It’s no more and no less than a fictional person’s life story, complete with all sorts of ridiculousness, dead ends, and random pointless tragedy. And you know what I realized near the end? That I knew these characters – Fermina Daza & Florentino Ariza – better than I knew almost any actual person. In fact, as I pondered further, I realized I know more about fictional characters than I do about actual human beings. I’m not some hermit either, so I don’t think I’m alone in this, and I wonder what it means. But that, I’m afraid, will have to be the topic of some other review, for this one is done. I need to go check on some flowers. Make sure they're still colorful. ...more |
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Mar 17, 2016
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| 0804179034
| 9780804179034
| 0804179034
| 4.03
| 243,924
| May 19, 2015
| May 19, 2015
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liked it
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Science Officer, Erik Brain: CAPTAIN, WE’RE COMING UP ON TROPE CITY FAST. HIT THE BREAKS. Navigation Officer, Erik Heart: But iz sooo shiny, iz just li Science Officer, Erik Brain: CAPTAIN, WE’RE COMING UP ON TROPE CITY FAST. HIT THE BREAKS. Navigation Officer, Erik Heart: But iz sooo shiny, iz just like home, all warm and fuzzy and familiar. Take us in! Erik Brain: THE HELL! DON’T TAKE US IN! WE’VE SEEN IT ALL BEFORE – WE’RE GONNA CRASH. Erik Heart: Warm and fuzzy and magical and - Erik’s Brain: PULL UP, MAN! PULL – *CRASH* ~~~ Captain’s Log, Star-date 2016, Uprooted City, Day 1 Officers Erik Brain, Erik Heart, Erik Arm, Erik Eye, and myself have disembarked into the city, weapons armed and set to BRAIN IMPLODE. The urban landscape is strangely familiar. I am reminded of the cities I visited when I was a junior officer - the same forest of crystalline spires reaching up into the sky, collecting and refracting the sun’s rays. The same rainbow fog of light. The height of magic and majesty I once thought. I find, now, in my elder age, that perhaps my youthful memories were colored by novelty and naiveté. I realize how similar these cities all were, as if the divine authors were insecure in their power and so hewed too closely to a boilerplate of architecture. Still, Erik Heart is enjoying himself, as he often does, even while Erik Brain and I experience this nauseating déjà vu. The mayor herself came out to greet us, undeterred by the baleful red light of our blasters’ targeting reticles. We were stunned to discover we had met her before, so many times. Who is cloning these creatures and why? TROPE: The Farmboy/girl with a Destiny. So the protagonist of Uprooted is Agniezska, a simple farmer’s girl with a penchant for making a mess. But wait! She’s also a special snowflake with a unique magic that defies understanding and classification! ~~~ Captain’s Log, Star-date 2016, Uprooted City, Day 2 The city is not as peaceful as it first appeared. The Mayor has told us of the Wood, a villainous forest lurking just outside the city. It kidnaps the residents, lures them in with trickery or by force, and then TWISTS and CORRUPTS them. Her tales sent shivers down my spine. Truly, this Wood is terrifying. Weapons officer Erik Arm offered to take the ship up and raze this weird weald to the ground, but the Mayor declined. We could not leave, she said. Not yet. Why not? I said, my hand inching toward my blaster. Because, she said, your navigation officer Erik Heart has gone missing. And so he had. Gah, what a bum. Wastrel. Slacker. It was just like him, abandoning us to go on some lark, leaving us to do all the real work, to make sense of this strange city. Even the Mayor defies easy classification. She claims femininity – the other residents refer to her as Lady Mayor – yet she does not strike me as womanly. Various crystalline statues around the city demonstrate the high regard in which she is held, yet I have seen such worship before. I wonder if it as false as that I’d seen in other cities… TROPE: The Man with a Vagina Character. Okay so I invented this trope, but it’s one that I find particularly interesting (and infuriating). Basically this involves writing a character whose biological gender is female but who embodies none of the psychological/sociological/behavioral traits of femininity. Indeed this character embodies masculine traits and often dislikes femininity. She feels scorn for fashion & make-up. She lacks good inter-personal skills. She doesn’t know how to make small talk. She’s stubborn and intransigent. She isn’t a nurturer. She can’t cook. She has no aesthetic sense. Usually, she’s a good fighter, though. Katniss Everdeen is the most obvious example of this trope. ~~~ Captain’s Log, Star-date 2016, Uprooted City, Day 3 Erik Heart remains missing. Has he been abducted by the Wood, twisted into some unfathomable monster that we will have to burn out? The Wood itself appears to be steeling itself for a march on the city. I witnessed a giant preying mantis scythe a tree in half with one gargantuan claw! And there have been tree creatures, stick-like treant creatures, patrolling the edge. I admit to terror. And yet I prefer the Woods. I am by turns bored and disturbed by the residents of the city. The Mayor's best friend Kasia seemed promising at first, with a complex relationship of mutual jealousy, but alas she turned out to be quite wooden. I witnessed Prince Charming attempt to rape the Mayor, who bludgeoned him across the head. And the Mayor’s paramour, a sort of wizard, is an anachronistic a-hole. What does she see in him? He’s dressed like he came straight out of some 19th century novel written by Jane Austen… TROPE: The Mr. Darcy Effect. In this trope, the main love interest is a man who acts like a dick. Apparently this is attractive??? Well in Uprooted, the Mr. Not-Actually-A-Dragon is more or less a fantasy stand-in for Mr. Darcy. Instead of a wealthy estate and money, he’s got a magical tower and lots of potions. Likewise, he’s dismissive of others, controlling, and short-tempered. ~~~ Captain’s Log, Star-date 2016, Uprooted City, Day 4 The Wood attacked and many residents were slain. We were sorely pressed in the middle, but our missing comrade, Erik Heart, arrived at a pivotal moment. He lead the counterattack, his blaster pistol sizzling with heat, and won us the day. Vainglorious bastard, but I love him anyway. He is Crew and that makes him like family. Now that we’ve secured the borders, the Nobles of the City have called us to court, to ask for our advice in dealing with the Wood. I dread it. One day I’ll encounter a nobility who aren’t selfish, evil, and short-sighted, but considering this city is so similar to those I’ve seen in the past, I have little hopes that this will be that day… TROPE: The Royal Court is Full of Bullshit. I don’t know what the actual name of the trope, but I’m sure you already know where I’m going with this. Basically, the royal court is full of flatterers and manipulators looking for an edge. The nobility operates with a complex series of alliances, except in actuality they just attend endless parties. Everyone wants to get to know the main character cause she’s a SUPER SPECIAL SNOWFLAKE and they want to use her super special snowflake status for their own ends. They don’t care about her as a person at all. None of them put the least bit of effort into getting to know her. Naturally, too, the noble girls all wear super awesome fashion stuff and know their manners perfectly and ofc Agnieszka doesn’t know how to deal with any of that and looks like a fool. ~~~ Captain’s Log, Star-date 2016, The Inkverse, Day 11072 We have done all there was to do and seen all there was to see in Uprooted City, and have left it in our rear view mirror (figuratively, of course. Inkboats have no rear-view mirrors). Erik Heart and Erik Brain remain bitterly contested about the city. Erik Heart enjoyed his time there, but Erik Brain claims boredom and disappointment. Why must these Divine Authors cast their cities in the same mold over and over, he asks. Erik Heart has no answer for him, but I suspect Erik Brain could answer the question himself if he really wanted to… Regardless, the Officer’s Mess has become a place of recrimination and vociferous debate. I don’t care to visit just now. But then I am usually too busy to do so. I must charter the course of our continued exploration. From the captain’s chair, I look to the inky horizon as we continue our quest for something new and wondrous. So infinite, so full of possibility. ...more |
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Jan 05, 2016
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Hardcover
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| 0765385244
| 9780765385246
| 0765385244
| 3.54
| 3,885
| Sep 01, 2015
| Sep 01, 2015
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it was ok
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DSKL@()*$SJDL#NRK#JNFLKNGSN@KMNCJNKS#(*$&FJNSRKJWR ARGH!! Okay. Vexation voided, frustration exfoliated. So I’m gonna lay into this mafa. I gonna take a DSKL@()*$SJDL#NRK#JNFLKNGSN@KMNCJNKS#(*$&FJNSRKJWR ARGH!! Okay. Vexation voided, frustration exfoliated. So I’m gonna lay into this mafa. I gonna take a machete upside this beyotch, gonna show you guts, some shock-of-white-bone, a little bit o critique hoodoo. But before I do, allow me to expound on why I must needs wage this figurative war. I believe in the ‘Challenging’ book [exhibits A, B, & C]. A disparaging of the easy pleasure read being not my intent, I nevertheless offer the following thesis: the most worthwhile and memorable reading experiences usually involve a level of difficulty. These books, by the hammer and chisel of structure, language, and character, reshape our preconceived notions on race, gender, culture, history, epistemology, or even basic story-telling. The shattering of long-held beliefs is a beautiful cataclysm, and I might state with no qualification that human experience contains no greater sublimity than the upward transformation of a mind. And yet the same key which unlocks heaven can also unlock hell. It’s often difficult to distinguish between literature whose challenge is a function of its complexity and literature whose challenge is a function of obscurity or bad writing. These latter, lesser quality doppelgangers can be quite the malediction. I would posit that, indeed, they can weigh the entire readership down. They can lead to anti-elitism, nihilism, and ennui. I have witnessed first-hand their effect on young readers especially, who get turned off literature as a result of assignments by undiscriminating English teachers. As such, I’m a regular assassin of the pseudo challenging [exhibits A, B, & C], a class of literature which, alas, contains The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps. Which I regret real hard. This bro Kai Ashante Wilson got some srz writing chops. Bones ‘n cojones a-plenty this g-thug gangsta masta flash blaster gots. He can chalk a wicked storm… when he wanna. Slash the first hunnered-fitty pages and you got a mad killer story here. Stone cold quality, and ain’t that a shame? Because, the obvious talent of the author and my enjoyment of the final 50 pages notwithstanding, the first hundred fifty are a bore and a chore and I shall lay before thee, on the altar of your consideration, my ruminations on why. The first failing: an incongruous interweaving of two disparate dictions. On one hand, the unknown narrator writes in a sophisticated and antiquated style that I have, herein, attempted to replicate. This, juxtaposed with dialogue replete with urban slang, the type of whipsong back n’ forth you might encounter in a rap battle between two gangs in the hood. There IS a deeper literary purpose for this, in that it approximates the dual nature of the book’s protagonist Demane, who is a demi-god, containing both mortal fallibilities (i.e. the ‘lower’ diction of the dialogue) and divine powers (i.e. the ‘higher’ diction of the narration). You could even argue it serves as a sort of implicit societal commentary, a check against racial preconceptions – after all, why am I calling this diction ‘lower?’ What makes it ‘lower’ exactly? Unfortunately, this duality of diction is one of those conceits that doesn’t quite work in application. In actuality, the checkerboard language constantly pulls the reader out of the story, reminding us over and over of the artificiality of the work in our hands. It’s like a kung-fu movie where the wires are obvious on the actors’ backs. Does it MATTER how beautiful their choreography, how magnificent their palikinesis*, given it’s so obviously manufactured? *This book also contains the style gimmickry of footnotes. Here's mine: I invented the word palikinesis because I have long sought a word to mean ‘the motion of a warrior’ and found none. So palikinesis – ‘the motion of battle.’ Problemo numero duo: This bae be one big oozy blob o structureless guano. Just cuz, ima use my bro Orson Scott Card’s structures. He throw down quatro categoricals: Milieu – in this story, some regular negro enter a cray-cray land and be all, what up with this cray cray land? Sorcerer Demane ain’t no regular negro – he FROM the cray cray land. So it ain’t no exploration of the cray cray. Character – in this story, some negro get all fed up with his shit and be like, eff the po-po, imma change my life. Sorcerer Demane ain’t like that, he chill as a caravan guard. He ain’t gon’ change a dayum thang, and dun wanna anyway. Idea – in this story, there be some wild n crazy mystery. some hollah mystery, like who dun killed this bro or like in 2001: Space Odyssey, what up wit dat black stone and dem monkeys? Ain’t no mystery here, tho. Mebs wat this lion-creature wizard ‘jukiere’ doin killin’ folk on the Road the caravan gotta traverse, but it ain’t much. Event – in this story, some crazy shit be going down in the fabric of the universe, like dat cray mafa Sauron be knockin some tall-ass pointy eared crackas left n right or that white bruh Emperor Palapatine be unbalancing the force like crackas always doin. But ain’t no imbalance in this story. And dems the quatro. In other words, the Sorcerer of the Wildeeps appears blind to story-telling structure. Plot remains elusive throughout the first three-fourths of the book, which find not their home in the Wildeeps but in a waystation called the Station. In fact, the events of the first 150 pages are completely inconsequential to the events of the last 50. This MAY have been interesting had there been any stakes in this section, but there aren’t. What does Demane want? The human heart of The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps is a love story between protagonist Demane & his fellow demi-god, the Captain. Demane yearns to couple with the Captain, physically & emotionally. But he does. Nothing stands in their way. Social stigma, maybe, but this is anemic in the supreme. Such stigma is implied rather than explicit. The book lazily assumes that today’s societal standards apply to this [non-contemporary, fantasy setting]. What does the Captain want? Dunno. What’s stopping them from getting what they want? Dunno. Why are these characters even part of the Caravan? Dunno. When I was halfway through The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps, I had the opportunity to expound upon it to an acquaintance over supper. I mentioned how its epidermis of beautiful language exacerbates its lack of plot or stakes. I analogized in the following manner: an unscrupulous automobile merchant sells you a classic 1967 mustang, gorgeous, except it lacks an engine. Fie you conniving merchant and your Machiavellian chicanery! You’d rather have been sold an ugly car with no engine because then at least you’d have had reasonable expectations. At least your cynicism would have been increased to only the (N-1)th degree. At least you wouldn’t have been so vulnerable to the merchant’s dastardly deception. When I made this comparison, I thought I was just being clever. But it was, in fact, prophetic. Cuz this bitch gets real. After hunnered fitty, this homeboy gets itself an engine and it freakin moves. It soars. My bruhs, D and the Captain, actually get to the Wildeeps and they got a real hanker for some killin’ vengeance and dat cray lion-beast ‘jukiere’ dun wanna let em have it and it real sexy. I mean, it helped that the distracting language shifts between dialogue & description were eliminated, but primarily it was the addition of an internal structure over which the well-written coating could be hung. You know, a plot. The powerful description made SENSE when Demane and the Captain traversed the Wildeeps, moving from planet to planet throughout the cosmos in a haphazard maze of space/time discontinuities. The sense of wonder was palpable. I found myself rapidly churning through the ink-scape, engaged in frenzied, fevered page-turning, actually interested in what occurs next. That’s the power of having character stakes. So…. GAH. Frustrating. I didn’t really want to lay into this. I take minimal joy in it. I like its fresh perspective, its more intimate scope. And the author's talent at wordcraft is undisputed. But that doesn’t change the reality of the reader's time being wasted for 150 pages. If only the author had taken a machete to his story, I wouldn’t have needed to. If only he had hacked off that structureless blob in the front and provided the salient points in sharp staccato within the journey & hunt, then he’d have had a fantastic novelette. That’s not what we got though. We got a confusing, bipolar, dramatically unbalanced novella. Basically, we got bad juju, and that’s the truth, bruh. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Dec 27, 2015
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Dec 30, 2015
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Dec 27, 2015
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Paperback
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| 0765312727
| 9780765312723
| 0765312727
| 3.57
| 1,046
| Jun 26, 2007
| Jun 26, 2007
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it was ok
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Is there such a thing as a good psychopath? Lizards. I think so. I mean, if you move past the fact that ‘psychopath’ is more or less defined as evil. Bu Is there such a thing as a good psychopath? Lizards. I think so. I mean, if you move past the fact that ‘psychopath’ is more or less defined as evil. But what about a person who lacks any sort of emotional warmth or empathy? Couldn’t this person use his intellect to make the choice of doing the right thing? Couldn’t this person be taught – by himself or others – to mechanically follow a righteous path? Or is it true what Robin Williams says to Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting: that you can never substitute the mind for the heart? that you can know everything there is to know about a thing and still not grasp the feel of it? Lizards. Well, the author Warren Hammond is banking that you can accept the notion of a good psychopath. The protag, one Juno Mozambe, certainly fits the bill. He’s a dirty cop, an ex-enforcer, whose best trait is loyalty, backed up by a strong right hook. A good character for this sci-fi noir tale of murder and corruption. I’d call it LA Confidential with sci-fi trappings, but that’d be an insult to both LA Confidential and sci-fi trappings. Lizards. Which isn’t to say that it’s a bad book. It’s as solid as they come. But there’s no spark to it. Raymond Chandler, one of the founding fathers of noir, wrote, “In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption.” He continued, “But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.” And later concludes, “The story is the man’s adventure in search of a hidden truth…” Lizards. Unfortunately, none of this applies to KOP. Juno Mozambe is mean and tarnished and afraid. He searches for no hidden truth. There is no quality of redemption in this story. It becomes quite clear, once mysteries begin getting revealed, that this is the case. It is, in the end, a straight-forward story of two detectives doing the proper legwork and getting their perp. Lizards. A good noir is more that, isn’t it? A good noir is imbued with the qualities of Romance. I don’t mean kiss kiss romance, but Romance of the Tolkien, Shakespearean, Homeric sort. The world is a place of dark chaos and the detective moves through it like a mean ol’ lighthouse. He is a blood-stained knight fighting the good fight against Entropy. A good noir book acknowledges the grime, muck, and corruption of daily life, yet it seeks ever to rise above it. Good noir shows the reader the attitude necessary to live in a dirty world and still do good. Lizards. KOP has none of that. It tells you a whole lot of nothin’ about how to deal with the crap of the world. I never could put my finger on exactly what is wrong with KOP, why it felt so lifeless. But if I were forced to offer some diagnosis, it’d be something like: KOP is a genre boilerplate, through n through, and it’s rife with plot errors and poor focus. Lizards. For example, from the backcover: “The colony world Lagarto boomed when an indigenous plant was discovered to yield a uniquely intoxicating brandy… but when Earth synthesized a copy, Lagarto’s economy crashed.” Okay. Cool. Strange that that’s the first sentence but whatever. And then later on page 54: “Somebody had smuggled a pair of brandy tree saplings offplanet, and soon after all the settled planets began raising their own fruit.” Wait what? Did Earth synthesize a copy or was the sapling just transplanted? A minor detail, surely, and true it is. But it’s characteristic of an inelegance that spreads throughout the book. The protag’s shaky gunhand is mentioned over and over, to the point where I’m thinking okay this is gonna play a major part in a major standoff. Nope! Turns out no one gave a damn about it actually. Juno’s shaky hand caused him to miss ONE shot, but it didn’t matter. Lizards. OKAY. ENOUGH WITH THE F#(*ING LIZARDS. actually, damnit, I give up on this review. Here it is in TEN words: Lizards. Lizards. Lizards. Lizards. Shaking fist. Lizards. Lizards. Offworlders. Lizards. Offworlders. BAM. KOP EXPERIENCE. Honestly, you wanna read some sci-fi noir? Read Altered Carbon. It’s better in every way. Except that it mentions lizards fewer times. So… still better in every way. ...more |
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Dec 20, 2015
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Hardcover
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| 030788743X
| 9780307887436
| 030788743X
| 4.23
| 1,200,226
| Aug 16, 2011
| Aug 16, 2011
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it was amazing
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I thought I would hate Ready Player One. The one phrase I kept seeing from reviewers was '80s nostalgia porn.' See, Ready Player One tells the story of I thought I would hate Ready Player One. The one phrase I kept seeing from reviewers was '80s nostalgia porn.' See, Ready Player One tells the story of Wade Owen Watts, a teenage gamer who spends MOST of his time in the giant virtual world OASIS, the monopolistic hub of both entertainment and business in a dystopian future. At the start of the book, the owner of OASIS dies. His will lays out a quest for a magical Egg, the obtainment of which will confer fabulous wealth AND control of OASIS. Since this guy LOVED the 80s, naturally this quest is going to involve a TON of 80s culture. Hence, the ‘80s nostalgia porn.’ Negative reviewers brought this up, asking, ‘Who’s the audience?!’ of this YA-marketed book. Would millennials get or understand the references? Others said that this wasn’t really 80s nostalgia. It was just ‘name-dropping’ that failed to capture the GENUINE culture of the 80s. Positive reviewers, on the other hand, wrote that the 80s nostalgia summoned forth their 'inner geek.' Ready Player One was, to them, a celebration of geek culture. “Great,” I thought when I saw these before reading RP1, “it’s going to be some stupid golden-age nostalgia nonsense. It’s going to be like a cultural-wide inside joke repeated ad nauseam.” Then I read RP1. Ummmmmmm+++mm++mmm, did we read the same book? I was born in 1985. I am a geek, if not an obsessive one. As such I got some of the references but only some. I have seen Wargames and Monty Python’s Quest for the Holy Grail – but I didn’t derive especial pleasure from the parts of the quest that required Wade to literally act out a scene from the movie. Likewise, when references were made to things I didn’t get – Modern Family, for example – I didn’t feel left out either. The thing is, the 80s culture nostalgia, while ostensibly being an integral part of the plot, is ultimately like the cilantro garnish thrown on top of a delicious meal. Like, yeah maybe if you REALLY LOVE cilantro, it’ll be key. Or if you REALLY HATE it, you won’t be able to eat the meal. But the rest of us are focused on the meat and potatoes. In the case of Ready Player One, the heart of the story involves the conflict between real & virtual interaction. It’s about the loneliness of our internet-centric world, about the deceptiveness of our virtual personas, about corporate greed, and about the importance of friendship. Seriously. Importance of friendship. It is also, despite the ostensibly happy ending, extremely bleak. Can we talk about our virtual world for a bit? I have tumblr, twitter, and facebook accounts, and they all disturb me for different reasons. With Facebook, you can, essentially, edit your life. You can post only your best pictures. You mention only your vacations, your good times – or even just your BIG times. It calls to mind a quote from Ann Beattie’s short story Snow: “Every life is interesting if you omit mention of most of it.” In Facebook (and on other social media outlets), most of a person’s life is omitted. Instead we get this deceptive sense of BUSYNESS. Other people’s lives all seem so HAPPENING. And ours, by comparison, seems less so. RP1 explores this idea via avatars. With few exceptions, everyone's OASIS avatar is more beautiful than the person behind it. I mean, obviously, right? Is this dishonest? Does it create a false sense of beauty in the world? Or does it demonstrate that humanity's inner beauty is greater its outer beauty? And what about other issues, like gender or skin color? If you know you're going to be discriminated against for being a woman or a person of color, then how about making your avatar white and male? Is that cowardly? Just in general, is it cowardly to misrepresent yourself online, perhaps as someone better than who you are? Or is projecting a superior version of yourself simply the first step to making it a reality? Tumblr, on the other hand, often strikes me as incredibly lonely. Check out the poetry tag for example. A solid chunk of the poems are lonely cries out into the void, unheard poets casting their sadness like a hook into the ocean of the internet, desperately hoping some giant fish will snap it up and save them from their sorrow. I think, if you asked these people, they’d understand that this isn’t going to happen. But the impulse – the NEED to connect, the NEED to believe your thoughts and opinions have value – is very real. People want to think their loneliness has deeper meaning. RP1 explores this loneliness. The main character Wade (aka Parzival) is an outcast and a loner. No real family, no real friends. His life has consisted of YEARS of studying 80s culture in hopes of finding the mystical Egg. He does this because he has no other purpose in life. The romance of this book – with a fellow egg hunter named Art3mis – is primarily virtual. Does the book dedicate long passages to exploring this real v. virtual? No. Nor did I want it to. This isn’t James Joyce. But it’s there, like a phantom, haunting every chapter, every scene, every character. The last of the social media is twitter, which is BY FAR my least favorite social media outlet. I tried to maintain an account but, since originally writing this review, gave it up. I got into too many situations in which I ALMOST had a really good discussion, but couldn't, because genuine discussion between intelligent, educated individuals cannot be bite-sized. Instead, Twitter is one giant advertising platform. Not just for corporations but for people too. Authors promoting their work. People promoting their ideology. Which, yknow, that’s not a BAD thing necessarily. In concept, it’s good for authors to have the means to promote their work. It’s good to have this open platform for the dispossessed to have a voice. Unfortunately, in execution, it all just amounts to branding. Because of the nature of twitter, there’s little real conversation or deeper engagement. It’s mostly just brand-shots fired back n forth at or with one another. Buy my book, my product, my idea, my existence. It's a conversation among eyeballs, a mad zoo of people desperately trying to find legitimization in the things they do. For its exploration of these and other themes, I consider RP1 to be a depressing book. Without giving any spoilers, consider the fate of all the obsessed egg hunters NOT explicitly mentioned. If the evil corporation – IOI - that opposes Wade and his friends manages to win by cheating, then all of these years of obsessed egg hunting have been for naught. They are wasted. And this one thing that gave them purpose & meaning in life… it’s over. But you know what? Even if Wade or one of his friends wins, the same is also true. Yes, Wade or whoever wins gets all the money and protects OASIS from IOI, but he is just one of THOUSANDS or MILLIONS of egg hunters who had dedicated their lives to finding the egg. Put like that, this whole quest becomes incredibly sadistic. How cruel to put up such a shining hope of wealth and escape, knowing that only ONE person can achieve it. Luckily there is a way out of this interpretation and it lies in friendship. So, yes, regardless of the outcome, there will be thousands who had their life purpose stripped away from them. And yet… they will still have the friendships they’ve formed in pursuit of their quest. They’ll still possess the bonds created by having a common goal. That's the real point of this book, the joy of geekdom in general, and the saving grace of social media. It’s like how, in Watchmen, Ozymandias (& Dr. Manhattan) realize the world NEEDS something to unite it, or else it’ll all fall apart in conflict. Well Geekdom does unify people. The Marvel Universe? The Star Wars reboot? Blizzard's latest game? George RR Martin's That’s what RP1 is, ultimately, all about. It’s not just some pointless ‘nostalgia 80s porn.’ It’s about how Geekdom unifies people in friendship and how it’s that FRIENDSHIP – not the actual geek stuff – that truly matters. In short, despite its obvious flaws, I loved Ready Player One. ...more |
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Oct 27, 2015
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Hardcover
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| 0553380958
| 9780553380958
| 0553380958
| 4.02
| 284,536
| Jun 1992
| Aug 02, 2000
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it was amazing
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Recently, I’ve noticed a trend in near future sci-fi, an adoption of a ‘default future.’ This setting usually involves a weak government and a strong
Recently, I’ve noticed a trend in near future sci-fi, an adoption of a ‘default future.’ This setting usually involves a weak government and a strong corpotocracy. The earth is a hot and dusty potato, with little water to spare and lots of pollution. Insects are everywhere. Except for bees. Bees are usually dead. Unless they’re mutant giants. And the broth of culture has overfloweth its cup. Religion, ideology, language, fashion, and festival have escaped their geographical prisons. What’s interesting about this setting is how often it’s simply assumed. In many of these stories, this setting isn’t hugely integral to the plot. It’s just sorta there. Like, yeah, well, obviously this is how our near future is gonna be. Can we really argue with that? I mean, honestly, we’re already there, aren’t we? In the past 20-30 years, as evidence of global warming has gotten increasingly more concrete, has any major initiative been accomplished? There is still a huge faction within the US government that denies climate change AT ALL, much less that it’s man-made, and much much less that there’s anything we can do about it. The future of our species remains very much in doubt. The evolution of corporations, banks, etc into the new government is just kind of, well, obvious. Compared to the churning vital froth of corporate competition, government is positively antiquated. It’s a dinosaur. I personally have long since given up any hope of seeing my social security taxes returned to me. I just think of them as donations to the elderly now. Meanwhile NASA outsources to SpaceX, corporations fund our politicians’ campaigns, and Google has more or less become the modern Oracle of Delphi. And the culture mish-mash? Hell yes. In any of my social networking feeds, I can find Spanish, Arabic, Japanese, Russian, and Hindi. It’s important to note that even twenty years ago that wasn’t even POSSIBLE. Now, because of the internet – what is called the Metaverse in Snow Crash – it’s commonplace. The students in my classroom hail from Korea, China, India, Japan, Nigeria, Singapore, and New Zealand, just to name a few. You might well label Walmart a global marketplace, the phones we use contain parts and ideas from all over the world, Hollywood films are bankrolled by Chinese interests, and the political upheaval in the Middle East constantly spills over into other regions via terrorism. In fact, this ‘default future’ is hardly new at all. The best cyberpunk sci-fi visionaries imagined it many years ago, including Neal Stephenson in Snow Crash. Where Snow Crash differs, at least for me, is that I came away feeling optimistic. In comparison to the 'default future' found in the works of Gibson or something along the lines of PnP RPG Shadowrunners (in particular, Harebrained Scheme’s recent games), Snow Crash made me EXCITED for the future and its many challenges. Considering Snow Crash’s satirical bent, this wouldn’t seem to make much sense. The setting certainly contains a heavy dosage of absurdity. In Snow Crash, robot-dogs serve as security; language is a form of mind control; and the Federal government has become toothless and bipolar, mired in bureaucracy yet so obsessed with efficiency that it refuses to supply toilet paper for its own employees and instead organizes a toilet paper ‘pool.’ So why optimistic? Why excited? To explain, let me talk about what I consider the best part of Snow Crash: the first couple of chapters in which the protagonist Hiro Protagonist (har de har) delivers pizza. As far as jobs go, pizza delivery is pretty menial. If I put that on my resume or my online dating profile or what have you, no one’s going to be like, “OH MAN. THAT GUY. I NEED HIM.” Yet, in Snow Crash, its depiction is completely ridiculously awesome. I was so hooked. The Italian mafia, via the boss Uncle Enzo, runs the pizza place. Hiro Protagonist, aka the Deliverator, drives a sleek black sports car with a GPS map projected directly onto the windshield. He has a gun but prefers katanas to intimidate those who would rob him of his cheesy cargo. And a failure to deliver that pizza in 30 minutes? It’s treated like it’s the end of the world. Hiro takes pride in his speedy delivery. He treats it like it matters. And why shouldn’t it? To quote the rapper P. Diddy when he was asked about his early job as a toilet cleaner: “It was a job! But I was the best bathroom cleaner that ever was.” Such a dramatic envisioning of such a mundane task harkens back to medieval times when even a journey of 20-30 miles, something millions of us do now on a daily basis, was a serious undertaking. Bandits, marauding knights, a broken axle on the wagon, a sudden storm – these could spell disaster or even death! So it is with this ‘default future:’ the massive storms spawned by an unbalanced climate, the lessening of resources, the growing power of corporations, the maelstrom and conflict of different cultures clashing together… navigating these challenges while retaining our goodness will demand a higher class of human. They’ll demand the likes of Snow Crash’s other protagonist, a 15 year old girl named Y.T. (Yours Truly), who is competent and confident in her job as courier. Which she does by riding a futuristic skateboard and using a magnetic harpoon to hitch rides on other vehicles. I mean, how cool is that? That’s something that a lot of negative reviewers of Snow Crash don’t seem to grasp. You want to read Snow Crash – and cyberpunk, in general – for the same reason you go to the hippest dance club in your city. You don’t go there to have some deep conversation with your friends about the First Cause of the patriarchy or the sociological ramifications of the decline of religious institutions or whatever. You don’t go there to meet your potential soul-mate. You go there because it’s COOL. Because there’s a vibe and an energy and you soak yourself in it and become recharged. With that said, there IS depth in Snow Crash. In particular, the major conceit of the story is that Sumerian was a primal language much different than language as we understand it now. Sumerian interfaced with the brain in a more direct route than the languages of today. So direct, in fact, that it could be used to literally program a brain. What follows is stuff about Babel, Enki, me, neurolinguistic viruses, and other fun high concepts. I’ve seen a few people take issue with this: ‘what an absurd concept!’ I mean, I guess if you take it literally. If you think that Neal Stephenson was literally suggesting that language could control a person’s mind in some direct fashion, like a remote control changing the channel on a TV. I don’t think so. In fact, science fiction almost never does that. I’m always bemused when reviewers talk about how ‘dated’ science fiction is, as if the point of the book was EVER to prophesize the future. Rather, I’ve found that good spec fiction has a way of suggesting alternate or novel interpretations of mundane phenomenon. In Snow Crash, Stephenson isn’t suggesting that language can LITERALLY mind control people. I mean, yes, in the book it does, but it’s fiction, yo. It’s gotta have a dramatic plot, yo. What I took away from it, however, was that you can think of an idea as a virus. Religion, for example, behaves like one. It rewrites the brain and causes that person to want to share that religion, to spread the idea just like a virus. Whether you want to interpret that positively or negatively, I leave up to you. But would anyone deny that this alternate interpretation is, if not useful for understanding religion, at least interesting and cool? And that’s basically my review for Snow Crash: it’s interesting. It’s cool. Works for me. ...more |
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Oct 07, 2015
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Paperback
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| 0886778697
| 9780886778699
| 0886778697
| 4.13
| 5,376
| 1978
| Jan 01, 2000
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it was amazing
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Here’s the short review: This book gets five stars because it made me agree with genocide, against a sentient alien species that I found beautiful and
Here’s the short review: This book gets five stars because it made me agree with genocide, against a sentient alien species that I found beautiful and wanted to live. But that alone is not very satisfying, so here’s the long review: One of the most wonderful aspects of science fiction (particularly space opera) is that humanity itself is characterized. Whereas in other genres, there might be foils to the protagonist, in space opera, an alien species serves as a foil to all of humanity. So it is with The Faded Sun Trilogy, which tells the tale of three species: The Regul – giant slug-like creatures (basically, Jaba the Hutt), with eidetic memories and centuries-long lifespans, who hold almost no regard for the life of their genderless ‘younglings.’ They are hardly mobile and not at all when they get their gender and become adults. Instead they ride ‘sleds’ which I pictured as slightly larger Segways. Because of their memories, the Regul write nothing down. Thus each elder is, in fact, an invaluable source of knowledge and history. The death of an Elder is, to them, like the burning of a library. They are smart and logical. They’re merchants and bureaucrats. They are not fighters. The story begins at the end of a long war between the Regul and Humanity, which humanity won. Naturally. Because we’re awesome. The Mri – The Regul did not actually fight in the war between them and humanity. Rather, they hired the Mri. The best way to describe the Mri would be to take Japanese samurai code Bushido, the cold beauty and pride of LOTR-style elves, and the stoicism and ritual of Dune’s Fremen and mix it all together. The Mri are stubborn and arrogant and inflexible, which is why humanity won the war. The Humans – Well you know them. Or do you? In fact, that’s the intellectual heart of this story. I labelled this trilogy a ‘space opera’ but it’s not really. There’s a minimum of fighting. There are, let us say, about 5 explosions throughout the whole trilogy, and they are not described in greater detail than a paragraph or two. Sometimes they’re so minimally described that I had to go back and be like, “Wait… did that really just happen?” There are maybe two blaster battles and just as few sword battles (the Mri favor close, ritualistic combat). Rather, the meta-conflict is one of diplomacy. Don’t think this means it’s boring. The maneuvering and verbal sparring depict a tense exploration of how one species views the other species. For example, the Regul don’t lie because their perfect memories render outright falsehood easily detectable. The Mri don’t lie because it goes against their code of honor. Thus neither trust humans, who do lie. The Regul’s perfect memory and lack of physical movement cause them to consider the other two species to be lesser on an intellectual level. They forget and how sad is that? But of course the Mri and Humanity find the Regul’s immobile forms grotesque. The Mri and Humanity hate each other because they just fought a war against the other. But of course the Mri only fought against Humanity because the Regul ordered them to do so, but then the Mri begin to hate the Regul for other reasons. Meanwhile, the Regul wantonly slaughter their own younglings and don’t understand that Humanity does not. And the Mri, who will often kill each other while playing a game of spinning, whirling, throwing daggers, will never, under any circumstances, kill one of their children. And so on and so forth. If it sounds complex, it is. But it’s satisfying. The Regul and Mri are one of the best depictions of aliens I’ve ever read. They’re never described in a way that’s ‘inferior’ or ‘superior’ to humanity in a general sense. Just different. With a different biology, psychology, and culture. You certainly avoid any of that awful cliché in which humanity (often in the form of a white European man) comes into an exotic culture and goes native and then saves them all. Yet all my talk of species and diplomacy and culture is deceptive. The novel is large, but its focus is small. That is, the Faded Sun may have a galactic backdrop, but it’s otherwise a personal, intimate novel. In particular, it focuses on Niun, a Mri warrior, and Sten Duncan, a Human soldier. We see, too, other specific characters, Regul and Mri and Human, whose thought processes are explored in finely crafted, detached (but not cold) detail. Because of this, it’s hard to ever feel outright antagonism for any of the characters. In a lot of ways, in fact, this book reminded me of a Miyazaki film. What’s absolutely superb about Miyazaki is that he depicts everyone in a sympathetic light. Anti-heroes are fairly common, but Miyazaki creates what I call anti-villains. Consider the characters of my favorite Miyazaki film, Mononoke Hime: Lady Eboshi of Iron-town burned down the forest, turned a noble boar into an evil demon, attempts to kill Princess Mononoke, and takes pride in hunting down the spirit of the forest. Villain, right? Wrong. Her female workforce are women she rescued out of sexual servitude; she willingly goes among lepers and treats them kindly; and she shows immense personal courage. Okay so what about Jigo the monk? He wants to kill the spirit of the forest in order to receive a mountain of the gold from the emperor, and he blackmails Eboshi into helping him do it. Surely such a greedy, underhanded fellow is a villain! Nope. The first time we meet him, he shares food with Ashitaka, the protagonist but to him just a fellow traveler. Jiro’s clearly wise, and he maintains a good sense of humor, even against those who oppose him. So it is with The Faded Sun Trilogy. Even the Regul – who are clearly the ‘bad guys’ – aren’t depicted in a manner that presupposes their villainy. The reasoning for their actions (they want to wipe out the Mri) makes sense. In fact, I even agreed with them – I began to see, in the Mri, some parallels with the likes of ISIS. A refusal to adapt to modern times. A clinging to past traditions. ISIS, to be frank, are evil. Any sympathy I might have had for them was wiped out when I read how they had institutionalized rape. If a genie appeared to me now and offered me a magical button that would completely wipe out ISIS – every man, woman, and child – I would press that button. That isn’t bravado or jingoism. Such massacre is not a good act. It’s an evil act. BUT I WOULD STILL PRESS IT. Maybe you’ll say to me, horrified, how can you do that? Hurting children is always evil. What if I said this: pressing that button would kill 1000 children. But it would ultimately save 2000 other children. Would you still ask me how can I press it? Or would I be asking you how you can afford not to? Thinking thusly, I began to understand the Regul mindset. I began to believe – despite my great sympathy and respect and appreciation of the Mri culture – that their existence in the fictional universe of this book was a blight. That, sure, maybe for a time, they’ll be peaceful, but their ways, their culture, will only lead to bloodshed and instability. And that’s just fabulous. That’s the type of power this book contains. On one hand, it depicted a fictional people and culture with such authenticity and detail that I could feel them in my thoughts, as tactile as a blanket against my skin. I knew their history, their glories, their beauty, their hopes. And on the other hand, I grasped and even sympathized with the mindset that would see those people made extinct. I held these two opposing ideas in my mind simultaneously and because of it, my mind expanded. It became greater. That is the mark of a great book. ...more |
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| 90,981
| Apr 08, 2014
| Oct 21, 2014
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liked it
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The best analogy I can think of for my reading experience of the First 15 Lives of Harry August is that it was like watching one of the Avenger movies
The best analogy I can think of for my reading experience of the First 15 Lives of Harry August is that it was like watching one of the Avenger movies. Those movies are undeniably well-crafted. Creative. Entertaining. Yeah, definitely entertaining. And smooth. Smooth and beautiful. No ugliness. Watching em never makes you squirm in your seat, uncomfortable. Probably as a result of this, the me who walks out of the theater is no different than the me who walks in. Really. No different. I learn nothing. I’m not inspired. The movie doesn’t engage me on the intellectual or spiritual level. It entertains. Simple enough and no cause for condemnation. Likewise my 3 star rating of this book is not a condemnation. It was a smooth, pretty book, and I was entertained. But no more than that. The me who started this book is no different than the me who finished it. I gained no new knowledge. My understanding of humanity was not altered. The moral foundations on which I base my life were not challenged in any way. In short, this book possessed, for me, no revelatory power. You know what I’m talking about. When you put down a really great book and you can feel a sort of echo of death because, for you, that world is closing. It is over. You entered, you traversed it, and then you exited, changed. And now it’s gone and the old you – the one who entered – is gone with it. Yeah, I didn’t feel that at all. My first inkling that things would turn out this way was the book’s artificial structure: the classic hook prologue followed by pages of exposition. In other words, basically the same structure as Twilight. Now there’s nothing wrong with starting out with a hook. In fact, you damn well better show me that you’re not going to waste my time within the first 20 pages or I’ll be dropping you. But don’t pull a bait and switch. This book begins with a little girl telling Harry August: The world is ending. And it’s speeding up. Okay cool, I’m on board. Oh wait, it’ll be page 116 until we get back to that? And then a couple hundred more pages until we actually learn anything? That, my fellow book readers, is a bait and switch. Luckily, some of the intervening material is entertaining in its own right. Because Harry August is an Ouraboran (from ouroboros, the snake eating its own tail), whenever he dies, he’s simply born anew, with his old memories intact. Like Groundhog Day, except a whole life (and without any humor – this book is deadly serious, man). Following the hook prologue, we spend the first hundred pages exploring Harry’s first lives. The chapters tend to be short, but meaty, and it’s here that we first encounter what turns out to be an important theme throughout the book: torture. And this is where the book stumbled for me once again. It’s not much of a spoiler to share that Harry August ends up in an insane asylum. I mean, that’s obvious, if you think about it. It turns out to be a pretty formative episode in his life that then leads into another formative episode. Unfortunately, it’s garbage. Claire North’s depiction of a mental hospital is pure Hollywood. In fact, with only a few changes, you can see basically the same thing in Terminator 2. Incompetent, closed-minded doctor. Check. Abusive muscle-bound orderlies. Check. Forcing drugs on patients. Check. And the patients themselves? Yeah they’re off-the-wall crazy, more like Arkham Asylum inmates than what you’d actually find in the real world. Now of course this was the 1960s and as Harry August himself states: “Mental health professionals of the 1960s make their 1990s counterparts look like Mozarts trampling upon Salieri’s lesser work.” But the absolute reality of this depiction is unimportant. It rings false. It reeks of artificial drama. Unlike, say, with David Foster Wallace and the mental hospital scenes in Infinite Jest, it’s pretty obvious that the author has never been in a mental hospital. Had she, she would have known that the REAL killer in any situation of incarceration is boredom. Oh man, the boredom. If you’ve ever been incarcerated, you’ll know what I’m talking about. It’s not about how much there is or is not to do. It’s that, being locked up, your actions are officially circumscribed. The things you can do – and when you can do em – are a very small subset of choices indeed and that’s when the boredom strikes and begins to grind you down. No surprise then that people who have spent a lot of time in an asylum just don’t have the ENERGY they’re depicted as having in this book. Rather, if you visit a mental hospital (one way or another), the prevailing impression you’ll get is that the patients are broken. They’ve given up. They’re the dirty laundry of society, and they know it. And the staff and doctors? No question there’s some bad eggs out there, but most of them are decent people who have a tough job that grinds away at them too. They want to make things better, but they simply lack the tools. They simply lack the power. Everyone there: powerless. But did we get that in this book? No, we got the artificial Hollywood version, with a criminally incompetent doctor, a big and abusive orderly (aka Nurse Ratched), patients going bonkers, and la la la. Unfortunately, this set a pattern that would be continued throughout the book: the author didn’t know what she was talking about. There’s a rule in writing that you should “write what you know.” It’s not a very good rule, ripe for misinterpretation. For example, just because you’ve never been in a mental hospital doesn’t mean you can’t write about it. And what about speculative fiction? How can you ‘know’ about magic and aliens and spaceship battles? My most recent story is about tele-troopers who jump around the galaxy, judge civilizations, and then blow them up. Uhhhhh… do I know anything about that? Well no, but the story’s also about wanting something you know you can’t really have and about not belonging in the mainstreams of society, and I do know about THAT. I know my characters. And I know how science and culture interact in a general fashion, if not in the specific case of teleportation. The overarching problem with the First 15 Lives of Harry August is that it’s an IDEAS book and a CHARACTER book, and the author understood neither the ideas nor the character. The story conceit – that of repeating lives – naturally suggests an exploration of time-travel and alternate dimensions. Fascinating topics. This book’s treatment of them failed to move beyond pop culture science. That the author doesn’t have a strong grasp of physics becomes increasingly obvious as the story progresses. For example, the Quantum Mirror. A device that reveals ALL KNOWLEDGE OF ALL TIME, dun dun dun! And it works by… oh wait. This is completely ignored. I mean, the author doesn’t even ATTEMPT it. And you might protest, not unjustly, that that’s not the point. Well you’d be wrong. It is the point. The mechanics of the world – for example, how to *permanently* kill an Ouraboran – play a fundamental role in the plot. Harry August’s interpretation of the many dimensions is an essential component to the questions of morality he faces. There are whole chapters spent solely discussing the nature of reality. Strip away the repeating life conceit and the scientific interpretation of it and the plot loses its flavor and its bite. And there’s just no defense against the fact that Harry August, roughly a thousand years old as he narrates, doesn’t sound anything at all like a thousand year old man. Where’s his voice? His vast experiences serve as the WHAT of the story, but HOW he describes them is truly lacking. He’s trained as a doctor, but doesn’t sound like one. He’s fought as a soldier but struggles to understand the motivations of a mercenary. He’s supposedly a great physicist but shows no real interest in the nitty-gritty details, unlike, well, every great scientist ever. Really, he sounds like a precocious teenager who still thinks apathy is cool. Which, given that Claire North is primarily a YA author, doesn’t really come as all that much of a surprise. Now I’ve given this book a thorough thrashing, enough that you might think I hated it. I didn’t. Or that I think Claire North is a bad author. I don’t. Rather, I think she bit off more than she could chew. She wrote about a topic she didn’t really understand, using settings and situations she didn’t grasp, and with a narrator she couldn’t pull off. But a terrible book? By no means. As I said in the very beginning, it was entertaining, beautiful, and smooth. It’s just… I’ve read much better. I’ve read good time travel stories. I read one recently in the July 2015 issue of Asimov’s SF, called Pollen From a Future Harvest by Derek Kunsken. It was amazing and tightly plotted. This one was not. We’ve all read stories with fascinating characters. Harry August should have been, but wasn’t. Basically, I thought this book was aimed at the literary equivalent of Avengers watchers, and I don’t mean anything negative by that. I certainly don’t mean “stupid” people. Enjoying a summer blockbuster or the latest Dan Brown best-seller doesn’t make you “stupid.” It just means you have a certain taste. Power to you if you like the way the way this book combines a smooth mainstream style with an interesting premise. But I have a different taste. I don’t require my stories to be real, but I like them to feel true and this one, because of my background, doesn’t. I like stories that explore the ugliness of humanity. I like ideas I’ve never thought of, explored deeply and sharply. I like characters whose voices sound fresh and new and desperate. I like plotting that anticipates and subverts my expectations. And because I like these things, the First 15 Lives of Harry August failed to satisfy. ...more |
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Macbeth might very well have been referencing this book when he bemoaned that life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying noth
Macbeth might very well have been referencing this book when he bemoaned that life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Certainly, Blood Meridian is a tale full of violence and sweeping language, sepulchral yet also bildungsromanic in its periscopic reconnoiter of humanity's maturation from Old West barbarity to Modern Age sentiments of peace - false though they may be - while also following the nameless protagonist's volatile orbit into, around, and out of the massive evil personages of Captain Glanton and Judge Holden, a binary system of malevolence both human and supernatural, like a red giant dancing around a black hole in a cosmic tango. Do you understand what you just read? Possibly. But how unnecessarily obtuse! Well the whole book is written like that. Even worse, really. It's rife with needless adjectives and adverbs and unnecessary details, exotic in their phrasing, but mundane in meaning and empty of wit. The language, far from serving its purpose to communicate, instead functions like a silken veil cast over the reader's bridal eyes to obfuscate the reality of an aged, doddering groom. DAMN! These metaphors. I can't stop. Let me try again: Blood Meridian is like Toy Story - if the toys were not personified with individual personality and instead simply manipulated by impersonal appendages whose face remained forever off-screen. That is, a story without character. This was one of my first lessons as a writer. I remember it still, this beautiful descriptive piece I wrote about a great aerial battle between two nameless empires and the flames and fury and sacrifice and heroism on display. I was so proud of this piece. It had beautiful language. Yet when I showed it to others, the response was tepid. Why? Because without an underlying humanity, beautiful prose is only so much empty light reflected across dead waters. It is a damn shame because there are elements in Blood Meridian that are superb. The character of Judge Holden is impressive to say the least. The final fifty pages have an actual plot, instead of pointless (and again let me emphasize WITLESS) wandering across deserts. Yet as good as those final pages are, and as superficially interesting as Judge Holden and his meandering discourse are, they in no way make up for the barren desert that is this novel, supposedly "one of the Greatest Works of American Literature." Hardly. But truly I love this book for what it demonstrates about its readership. No one - absolutely no one - can question the beauty of language in Blood Meridian. I've seen other reviewers accuse Cormac McCarthy of an illicit affair with a thesaurus. Nope. You can't write 300+ pages of prose like this with a thesaurus as a crutch. No doubt it played its part, but such verbiage can only result from a life-time of drowning in an ocean of ink. Alas, all that beautiful language and all that skill wrought so little of actual interest. Again, let me just be clear: this book is empty. It is empty of humanity and intelligence (the clear intelligence BEHIND the writing notwithstanding). Blood Meridian inspires very little of *actual* thought, as even the most positive reviews demonstrate. They all talk style style style. And what does that say about us Americans, or indeed about people in general? We love our packaging more than we love what's inside. This is a maxim of such potency that entire commercial empires have risen and fallen by its keen edge. Let me finish with a quote from Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye, first published in 1953, which I think says it all: Man has always been a venal animal. The growth of populations, the huge costs of war, the incessant pressure of confiscatory taxation – all these things make him more and more venal. The average man is tired and scared, and a tired, scared man can’t afford ideals. He has to buy food for his family. In our time we have seen a shocking decline in both public and private morals. You can’t expect quality from people whose lives are a subjection to a lack of quality. You can’t have quality with mass production. You don’t want it because it lasts too long. So you substitute styling, which is a commercial swindle intended to produce artificial obsolescence. Mass production couldn’t sell its goods next year unless it made what is sold this year look unfashionable a year from now. We have the whitest kitchens and the most shining bathrooms in the world. But in the lovely white kitchen the average person can’t produce a meal fit to eat, and the lovely shining bathroom is mostly a receptacle for deodorants, laxatives, sleeping pills, and the products of that confidence racket called the cosmetic industry. We make the finest packages in the world, Mr. Marlowe. The stuff inside is mostly junk. And there you go. Take the last two sentences. That's Blood Meridian for you. ...more |
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| 4.06
| 52,334
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| Jul 02, 1996
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really liked it
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The Count of Monte Cristo... in space! That alone should recommend it but there are some distinct differences such that I would be remiss in their omi
The Count of Monte Cristo... in space! That alone should recommend it but there are some distinct differences such that I would be remiss in their omission. The Stars My Destination follows a simple soul with the well-chosen moniker of Gulliver Folly. He's a mechanic on a space-ship, and we learn early on that he's considered a 'dead end' of a human being, with a critical lack of motivation. Yet whereas Edmond Dantes is a simple happy soul, Gulliver is anything but. In an early scene he rapes his jaunting (read: teleporting) instructor. At every point in the story, until the end, he places his vengeance before all else, often abandoning his comrades. While we're supposed to empathize with Edmond Dantes, like him even, that we may assuage our guilt for supporting his drive for vengeance, no such excuse is given for Gulliver Folly. He's a brute and we each of us must at least be partially brute for understanding his appetite for vengeance. While the revenge in the Count is a slow 800-900 page simmer, the revenge story here is a hot boil. Despite being a 1950s sci-fi novel, The Stars My Destination is thoroughly modern. The plot flows at break-neck speed, with minimal distraction or delving into philosophical depths. Alfred Bester chose to focus on the What, instead of the Why (though that is not to suggest that the story is confusing. It isn't. The excellent world-building is probably the single best part of this story). So there's your simple summary of plot. I admit that I have little interest in writing reviews in order to help other people decide if they want to read the book or not. No, I am thoroughly selfish here, maybe even a bit like Gulliver Folly in his quest for vengeance, though I quest for reflection. That is, I am not particularly interested in the what. I want to know why. In this case, I want to examine the nature of motivation and particularly why revenge stories fascinate us. I wrote in my The Count of Monte Cristo review: We suffer daily and usually our suffering has very little meaning. By inheriting a vast fortune and a deep education, Edmond gets the chance to transform himself and to give meaning to his suffering. That still sounds pretty valid to me. But I think there's something more to it as well. There's a purity of intention in revenge stories that we respect. In TCMC, Edmond Dantes dedicates his entire existence to this one task, this one goal. Gulliver Folly does the same. In fact, this purity of intentions reminds me of the Daleks, from Dr. Who. Most Whovians I know really like the Daleks. More so than most other creatures. Why? Because they have such purity of intention. They're innocent, childlike in their desire to Exterminate! I found that the more the writers of Dr. Who tried to humanize the Daleks, the less interested I became. There's so much 'grey area', so many alternative perspectives, so much political correctness that muddies the waters of EVERYTHING we do that when we come across someone (an adult especially) who views the world with a crystal black-and-white purity, we respect it. Even when we know it's wrong, I think we feel a little bit jealous. We wish we had something we believed in SO MUCH that we could dedicate our whole being to it, our whole fiber, and the consequences be damned. In a recent movie I watched, Calvary, the protagonist, a priest is speaking to one of his flock who wants to join the army. He says: I've always felt there's something inherently psychopathic about joining the army in peace time, as far as I'm concerned people join the army to find out what its like to kill someone. I hardly think that's an inclination that should be encouraged in modern society, do you? This struck me as stunningly valid. There is something inherently psychopathic about joining the army to 'serve your country' when there are so many other peaceful ways you can do so. But as I think about it now, I see there is another element as well. War is one of those few times that we can be excused for dropping all pretensions of humanity. We can drop that filter of morality that exists in front of our minds. The very definition of psychopathic? Perhaps. But I think it's just that those who join the army see it as a way to prove their mettle, to have a chance to dedicate themselves fully 100% to a given task, to a given ideal. Because let's be straight: most everything we do in life can be completed by a particularly smart monkey. I'm convinced that I could program a robot (or that a robot could be programmed, rather) to do my job. Driving a car? Robot could do it. Cooking? Robot. So the feeling we get, a feeling that I believe pervades modern society, is that we're all operating at like 10% capacity. I think that's why the (completely false) notion that we only use like 10% of our brains fascinates so many of us. It's just not that challenging to live, for most of us. We're like a person in a sensory deprivation tank, hallucinating because his brain requires stimulation. Our brains require problem solving tasks and in order to get it, we have to invent drama, invent issues. There's a quote here at the end of The Stars My Destination that sums it up pretty well: You pigs, you. You rut like pigs, is all. You got the most in you, and you use the least. You hear me, you? Got a million in you and spend pennies. Got a genius in you and think crazies. Got a heart in you and feel empties. All a you. Every you......more |
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| 3.77
| 18,421
| 2006
| Apr 03, 2007
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A Review Wherein I Postulate The End of Humanity: ...but first the boring stuff: Ideas ideas ideas ideas ideas ideas :] Writing, characterization, plot, A Review Wherein I Postulate The End of Humanity: ...but first the boring stuff: Ideas ideas ideas ideas ideas ideas :] Writing, characterization, plot, and dialogue :[ Basically, the plot focus is all wrong. It's incredibly domestic. If plots were pokemon, this one would involve a Magikarp and a Gyrados... and focus on the Magikarp. [image] I mean dang, look at that BAMF. Basically, Robert Gu, an old poet with Alzheimer's, has his youth and mind restored by medical science. Unfortunately, his poetical genius is lost somewhere in the restoration and his attempts to get it back embroil him a larger plot involving Mind Control and international intelligence. Alas, this more interesting plot tends to play second fiddle to the family drama Robert experiences with his son, daughter-in-law and, in particular, his granddaughter. It's never compelling. As a traditional story - i.e. a character arc - the story isn't well developed. Robert starts off as a very mean character and suddenly just sorta becomes... not mean. It all takes a backseat to the IDEAS. So you know what? Failings explained. 3 / 5 stars given. Justice done. Let's move on to the FUN STUFF. The IDEAS: Rainbows End represents our current society accelerated 20-30 years into the future, and I'd wager a crisp tenner against a dozen homemade donuts that it's more accurate than not. For example, Vinge predicts that electronics will be woven into clothes and contact lenses. The most techno-savvy (i.e. primarily youngins) control these 'Epiphany' computers via gesture while older people must resort to the more primitive keyboard. Well, I actually once worked in an e-textile lab and while our explorations were simplistic (one of the grad students designed a pair of pants that analyzed your leg movements to guess what type of dance you were doing), e-textiles are a natural evolution of mobile computing. Combine this with various virtual reality initiatives (Facebook's Oculus Rift, Steam's HTC Vive, Sony's Playstation VR being the three frontrunners) and the likes of google glass, and it's looking like the ubiquity of mobile electronics will continue unabated, not just in terms of adoption and usage but invasiveness, too. Augmented reality overlays anyone? I'll be pleased as plum pie when physical stop signs are replaced by windshield AR. But what does this all mean? Well, a major theme of Rainbows End is how such technology must invariably lead to the death of privacy. And aren't we there already? Only the nuttiest of people believe there's anything close to privacy these days. Edward Snowden heyyyy? Sony, Target, Kickstarter getting hacked? Ashley Madison? Panama Papers? Those annoying Amazon ads that you might well be looking at right now, showing you the last product you looked at on their website? Or how about when the Ukrainian gov't used cell-phone triangulation to text warnings to people who were within a certain radius of a demonstration/riot? I like to put myself in the mindset of people there. Pocket vibrates. Fella's thinking, "Oh man, I bet it's that cute girl I've been wanting to talk to!" Hahahaha NOPE. It's a text from her BIG BROTHER. Rainbows End also explores what I call "the acceleration of change." When I jog, I sometimes listen to a podcast called Radical History. In the episode on the dropping of the atomic bomb, the historian talked about how the rapid introduction of aircraft prevented military leaders from understanding how to properly use them. When it came to men-on-horses and infantry, military tactics were well understood and war could be conducted in a relatively sane method. But all of a sudden, you had this new technology. Clearly it was powerful - a real game-changer. But how did you utilize that power in the most effective and humane manner? At first, the idea was tactical bombing. You'd target the actual soldiers. But the precision wasn't there. So a few strategists came up with a brilliant new idea: strategic bombing! You could utterly destroy a major enemy city. The death and destruction would be SO GREAT that the civilians would lose all will to fight and would (somehow?) force their government to surrender. The idea was we'd have some dense, horrible destruction right at the beginning to spare us all from a much longer war. It sorta made sense. Obviously this didn't happen. But at the time who was to know? The same such conundrum is now true with regards to modern technology. Cellphones, the internet, genetic manipulation, drones/robots, etc. We're making use of these, sure, but are we doing it the right away? Is technology outpacing our ability to guide its usage? I'd guesstimate that the amount society changed from 2000 to 2015 is probably about the same it changed from 1970 to 2000. And that in turn was the same amount of change from, say, 1775 to 1850. Consider, for example, that the same weapons used in the American revolutionary war (1776) were essentially the same used in the American civil war (1865). One hundred years and many soldiers were still using front-loaded muskets! Can you even IMAGINE the weapons that will be used in a hundred years? Meanwhile, the Romans wielded the steel gladius from 4th century BC to 3rd century AD. A POINTED METAL STICK. FOR SIX HUNDRED YEARS. HOLY CRAP. So that's what I call the "acceleration of change." It's kinda like how the universe continues to expand at an ever increasing rate. Well, as I wrote, I believe society and values are now changing so fast that governments and even individual people are unable to adapt. More than at any other time in our history, there exists a gap between our technological power and our grasp of how to properly use it. For example, let's talk about education and how we test competence. Most modern tests - the bar examination, the FE exam, an AP Calculus exam - involve a student working in isolation with nothing but a calculator, a pencil, and his brain. Does this make sense anymore? When a WEALTH of information and input from other analysts is now readily and easily available? It's rare - and perhaps entirely impossible - to find a job which does not benefit from access to other experts. I mean, hell, I recently dismantled, repaired, and then reassembled my CAR ENGINE purely by instruction via internet. So it would make sense to structure tests in such a way that online resources can be used. What we really ought to be testing is not just FACTS-IN-BRAIN (which are important!) but also a student's ability to research, elicit expert response, and synthesize online information. But could you imagine the response if I proposed allowing students to use their laptops during a test? I know of teachers who STILL do not allow their students to cite online resources. I still hear teachers genuinely state that Wikipedia is not a real source "because it can be edited." What is MOST amusing about that is how those teachers don't grasp how idiotic that statement is. As if a book written and researched by a single author is superior to a crowd-sourced document composed by a hundred scholars. So there's this huge bias against networked intelligence because society has changed so fast. What was considered CHEATING only ten years ago is now basic reality, in the workplace, in social interaction, and so on. And that's due to the Acceleration of Change. Vernor Vinge, in Rainbows End, takes an optimistic perspective on this, but his essays are more bleak. He believes in something called a Technology Singularity: eventually we're going to create an AI that's smarter than we are. That AI, in turn, will create an AI smarter than itself. Repeat ad infinitum until ultra-intelligent AIs render humanity obsolete. *shrug* Not exactly a new idea. But I like to think the Acceleration of Change can explain why it's necessary. And all that discussion is, ultimately, my review. If contemplating the big ideas of the world is your schtick, then Rainbows End can serve as a wonderful springboard. But if you're simply out for a good yarn - and there's no shame in that - Rainbow's End doesn't quite cut it. ...more |
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| Apr 1998
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it was ok
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The Handmaid's Tale, a dystopia with heavy tones of feminism, tells the horrifying story of Offred, a Handmaid, a woman whose identity and agency are
The Handmaid's Tale, a dystopia with heavy tones of feminism, tells the horrifying story of Offred, a Handmaid, a woman whose identity and agency are torn from her, so that she might serve as a baby factory. I call it horrifying but let me be clear: This is not the sharp horribleness you might feel when you witness a shouting match between your parents; when you break-up with a girlfriend or boyfriend; or when you read about the latest shooting on the news. No. The Handmaid's Tale summons the horribleness of the alarm clock. It's the horribleness of the smooth beauty of young skin growing loose and dry with age, the tick & tock of mortality. It's the horribleness of pulling into the same parking lot at the same building for the same job for ten years, it's the horribleness of political candidate after political candidate who see only power instead of people. It's the horrible grind of a world that could be better, but isn't. It's the horribleness of hopelessness. That's the real genius, the real triumph of the Handmaid's Tale, the simple matter-of-fact mundanity of its horrible routine. The way it's told without bells and whistles. I like, too, the calm and stately prose of the book, its focus on minute details, its understanding that life's little joys are what we most cherish... and miss most when they are gone. But that is about all that I liked. The horribleness of this book felt, to this reader at least, much like the horribleness of a haunted house. Because sign after sign after sign tells you that the 'performers' in the haunted house will not touch you, will not hurt you in any way, the fear you experience isn't really fear. It's startlement. The Handmaid's Tale is a book that operates by startling you. It is a book which, above all, is didactic, polemic, and preachy. It is the sermon of a woman who would use fear to warn against a society which would use fear to control you. Isn't that just a bit ironic? I even found one reviewer's response to be: "Question your government. Question your society. Question your spouse." Your spouse?! Is that the message of this book? I have noticed that a great many books with "messages" - that is, those considered classics or Literature with a capital L - suffer from the same backwards, artificial feel that The Handmaid's Tale suffers from. Let me explain: It is my experience as both writer and reader that good books must be written forward. You sketch a cast of characters, sometimes deeply and sometimes not, and you sketch a world and then you ignite it with the match of a conflict and then you step away. You use your mind, your daily experiences as a sort of incubator for the story. You guide the story if it gets too far off its path, but you do this only if you must. As you write the story, you gain a better understanding of your characters and their situation and you often go back to rewrite. But what you do not do is write the world in such a way as to make the plotting easy. You don't give traits to characters simply so they can function as a plot device. You don't do this because to do so imbues the story with an air of artificiality and intentionality that reeks of fast-food and political speeches. The Handmaid's Tale was not written forward. It was written backwards. Margaret Atwood had a point set firmly in mind and then created a world to prove her point. It'd be like if I wanted to tell a story about how horrible ducks were and then just filled it with these stories of ducks murdering other ducks and subjugating each other and doing horrible things to each other. And, regardless of whether these things are true or possible or likely or unlikely or impossible, the story just doesn't feel real. It feels like bullshit and Hollywood and sham. It feels like what is called in logic a tautology. It just plods forward in a completely predictable fashion, toward a logical, foregone conclusion, offering neither surprise (it takes 100 pages for the first surprising thing to happen!) nor much insight. And that is a damn shame because I love nothing more than a good book. The Handmaid's Tale is not a good book. It is a book with a Point and a book that is pointless: it will not change the minds of those who are already (or on the path to become...) oppressors of women. It will only confirm the opinions of those who live in fear of society and men, who view feminism in a militant rather than optimistic light. The Handmaid's Tale is a book that confronts nothing and resolves nothing. It paints a picture of a horrible world and does nothing with it. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Dec 15, 2013
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Paperback
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| 4.02
| 1,155,334
| May 19, 1942
| Mar 28, 1989
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it was ok
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I was at a vineyard once and, at a nearby group, one of the staff was describing their wine, with the usual highfalutin language: "…aroma of the black
I was at a vineyard once and, at a nearby group, one of the staff was describing their wine, with the usual highfalutin language: "…aroma of the black-berry balanced by tannins and the subtle earthiness of sandalwood." One of the members of the group took a drink and said, "Oh yes, I can taste the sandalwood." After they left, I commented to my own sommelier, "How in the world do people know what sandalwood tastes like?" She laughed and responded, "If you put it on the bottle, someone will always taste it." I suspect the great depth so many people find in The Stranger is largely a result of the fact that its depth was 'put on the bottle.' Which is hilariously ironic: The Stranger is, after all, an absurdist text about a man who refuses to behave in the way that society expects him to behave. Yet here we have a book celebrated for its depth by readers who, for the most part, apparently fail to even grasp said depths. Oh kool-aid, how sweet thy taste. But before you dismiss me as an intellectual snob, let me offer a true story: this book made an acquaintance of mine go crazy (to be more precise, reading it triggered his latent sociopathy). This resulted in a sort of Kessler Effect that damaged those around him. I had to watch the darkening of a beautiful soul - his girlfriend, my friend, who'd already had to deal with a father suffering from delusional disorder. Not only that but this book offends me personally. I actually am a card-carrying, dyed-in-the-wool Existentialist. I believe the universe offers neither intrinsic morality nor meaning. I believe the individual creates his own morality and meaning, in life, literature, and everything else. Contrary to popular belief, this is a fundamentally empowering, liberating belief. And yet the term 'existentialist' invokes negative, nihilistic connotations because of crap like The Stranger. So let's explore some of the nonsense you might encounter in fellow readers' responses to The Stranger: "Mersault [the protagonist] is an Existentialist hero" So here’s what happens, in a nutshell: the protagonist Mersault goes through life rather passively, existing more as a creature of gross senses than a sentient, thinking being. His mother dies in the beginning, and he doesn’t feel much because there’s not much of a sensory experience attached to it. Eventually, he ends up randomly killing an Arab and goes on trial. Yep there's the plot. Now I don't dispute that The Stranger is a Hero’s journey, albeit not a hero in the traditional sense. But it’s only at the VERY VERY end – when he rants and raves at the priest – that he actually becomes what one could conceivably call ‘an existentialist hero.’ But even with that ending, Mersault is BY NO MEANS an existentialist. He's a sociopath and an idiot. Existentialism is not nihilism; it’s not about being a blank void of a human being, which is what Mersault is. He’s lazy and a coward. Failing to assign meaning to anything, he allows society and the people around him to assign meaning for him. Thus he loses his freedom. THAT'S NOT EXISTENTIALISM. Existentialism is about having the courage to ignore the values society attempts to place upon you and instead creating your own. It’s very much a life-affirming philosophy, not nihilistic or anti-society like The Stranger makes it out to be. The pure existentialist is a non-conformist, as opposed to an anti-conformist. The pure existentialist neither follows the crowd in jumping off the bridge NOR fails to follow the crowd in jumping off the bridge. He stops and thinks about it first and then decides. Sometimes there are damn good reasons to jump off the bridge, like when Godzilla is rolling up with a mouth full of lightning. "Mersault is put on trial for failing to conform to society" Certainly Camus may have intended it as such, and it is easy to read it the way. His trial is rather farcical after all. But honestly, that's superficial+1 reading the text. Mersault would never been on trial in the first place had he not committed murder. Which has nothing to do with failing to conform to society...? "Existentialism requires atheism" It’s true that Camus believed that making the ‘leap of faith’ in response to the absurd nature of reality was a cop-out. He believed following any religion caused a critical corruption in your free-will/free-thinking capacities. I personally am agnostic, but I disagree with his claims. There’s nothing intrinsically impossible about investigating a religion and finding it good and then choosing, of your own free will, to follow it. Sure, adopting a religion wholesale is a foolish idea. But then so is adopting ANYTHING wholesale, including Camus’ own Absurdist doctrine. There’s nothing wrong with using religion (or the holy book of a religion) as a foundation for one’s interface with reality. "I empathize with Mersault. I'm an outsider too." What in the nine Applejacks hells!? Mersault is a bad human being. He’s not some courageous rebel. There's this false dichotomy you can either be A) a conformist, a mere cog in society or B) you have to be a heartless, amoral sociopath like Mersault. CHU CHU. WELCOME TO THE NOPE TRAIN. It is more than possible to be a non-conformist AND a friendly, caring, kind human being. So it rather disturbs me to see teenagers, or even adults, glorify The Stranger as this anti-authority, anti-society bible. It isn’t. Not only do such people miss the point of this book, but their praise suggests they want to pursue their lives in a way that, very likely, will be spiritually, emotionally, and materially unrewarding. ~~~~ Basically, I think The Stranger is a mediocre book because, without its philosophical underpinnings, it’s mediocre. And its philosophical underpinnings are mediocre too. It misrepresents existentialism and inadvertently lionizes emotional & intellectual laziness and jerkface-ness. It (apparently) leads to an interpretation that is nihilistic and anti-society, leading readers into The Stranger’s figurative jail, when I suspect Camus meant to show people the way out of it. Whoops! ...more |
Notes are private!
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Apr 22, 2013
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Paperback
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| 9781400033416
| 1400033411
| 3.96
| 447,907
| Sep 16, 1987
| Jun 08, 2004
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it was ok
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Just, ah, terminated Beloved by Toni Morrison and oh how I was disappointed by it. There is a difference between obscurity and depth, a difference betw Just, ah, terminated Beloved by Toni Morrison and oh how I was disappointed by it. There is a difference between obscurity and depth, a difference between an honest look at human nature and the undisciplined pandering of human misery. There's just so much STUFF in Beloved. Themes, motifs, tonal and style shifts, surrealism, magical realism, stream-of-consciousness, metaphors, hard-hitting images of rape and slavery. No one can deny that. But it's not particularly well-blended. It's like a child who thought a gourmet meal could be made by taking a filet mignon, asparagus, pepper, butter, fresh baked Italian round, olive oil, a fine Malbec and throwing it into a blender. But it can't, of course. Every gourmet chef understands that it's not the principal components that make a good meal but their combination and presentation. Let me try to state it more plainly: The main issue with Beloved is that Toni Morrison is a fine writer whose style (at least in Beloved) lacks discipline. Point-of-view jumps all over the place, in a manner that I found least enjoyable to the reader and most convenient to the writer. Need to explain another character's perception of an event? Switch to em! Never you mind that much of life's love and conflict come from the unbridgeable distances between our minds. The book's suspense and forward momentum are crippled. There's no sense of free-fall in Beloved. I liken opening a good book to Alice right before she enters wonderland. I'm on a quick jaunt and suddenly there's a tunnel and down I go into a wondrous land, falling toward a grand culmination at the bottom! I know this grand ending exists because I know how gravity (novel structure) works, but more importantly I can feel it - in my heart, in my soul - this sense of GOING somewhere, of something wonderful headed my way. I felt none of that in Beloved. It's not that there weren't mysteries or genuine emotions at stake. Rather it was that lack of discipline again. Just when I would build a reading fervor, Toni would handicap it by switching to an annoying stream-of-consciousness that wasn't present for the first 200 pages of the book. Five page paragraphs? No problem. What dealt the final blow to my relationship with this book was this paragraph, which I will attempt to copy as exactly as I can: "We are not crouching now we are standing but my legs are like my dead man's eyes I cannot fall because there is no room to the men without skin are making loud noises I am not dead the bread is sea-colored I am too hungry to eat it the sun closes my eyes those able to die are in a pile I cannot find my man the one whose teeth I have loved a hot thing the little hill of dead people a hot thing the men without skin push them through wit poles the woman is there with the face I want the face that is mine they fall into the sea which is the color of bread she has nothing in her ears if I had the teeth of the man who died on my face I would bite the circle around her neck bite it away I know she does not like it now there is room to crouch and to watch the crouching others it is the crouching that is now always now inside the woman with my face in the sea a hot thing" Oh the sheer fucking arrogance of a writer who believes she can approximate human emotion with syntactical gimmickry. NO. Just NO. You cannot force emotion upon me. I am the reader, you are just the writer. You may be the navigation, but I am the engine. You may be the storm, but I am the ocean itself. You build the path, but it is I who must walk it. And this is no path I care to walk. It is a meandering nonsensical path with waterfalls and lilies thrown willy-nilly by a gardener who understands the images of emotions but not the flow. Already I can foresee the response to that claim, that if anything her meandering narrative & style have perfectly captured the way people actually think, the fragmented narrative of our minds and memories, especially when they are tinged blue and red with deep emotion. I concede that some people may think that way. But literature is not life. Literature is a telescope which looks at life from a distance. And this particular telescope? It's got a foggy lens. Its creator should have cared less about the fanciful engravings on the side and more about its fundamental inner-workings. Perhaps then we could have looked upon the star in all of its mighty glory instead of being blinded by a grand light and simply assuming that beyond it must be something mighty and glorious. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Jan 30, 2013
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| 3.81
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really liked it
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Mar 30, 2017
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Mar 03, 2017
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| 3.72
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liked it
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Jan 13, 2017
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Nov 16, 2016
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| 4.22
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did not like it
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not set
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Jul 28, 2016
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| 4.08
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it was ok
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not set
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Jul 08, 2016
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| 3.91
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liked it
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not set
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May 20, 2016
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| 3.73
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liked it
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not set
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Apr 01, 2016
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| 3.94
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really liked it
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Mar 17, 2016
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Mar 07, 2016
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| 4.03
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liked it
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not set
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Jan 05, 2016
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| 3.54
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it was ok
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Dec 30, 2015
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Dec 27, 2015
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| 3.57
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it was ok
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not set
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Dec 20, 2015
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| 4.23
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it was amazing
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not set
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Oct 27, 2015
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| 4.02
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it was amazing
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not set
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Oct 07, 2015
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| 4.13
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it was amazing
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not set
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Sep 11, 2015
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| 4.03
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liked it
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not set
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Aug 24, 2015
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| 4.16
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it was ok
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not set
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Nov 11, 2014
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| 4.06
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really liked it
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not set
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Aug 26, 2014
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| 3.77
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liked it
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not set
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Mar 24, 2014
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| 4.14
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it was ok
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not set
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Dec 15, 2013
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| 4.02
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it was ok
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not set
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Apr 22, 2013
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| 3.96
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it was ok
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not set
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Jan 30, 2013
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