So I love Albert Einstein. He was one of those rare scientists who understood that philosophy and science are two sides of the same coin, and that youSo I love Albert Einstein. He was one of those rare scientists who understood that philosophy and science are two sides of the same coin, and that you cannot achieve apex understanding of either without studying both. Famously, he credited Mach (also a scientist/philosopher) and even David Hume for inspiring him to create relativity - one of humankind’s greatest accomplishments.
Point is, in pursuit of these dual interests, Einstein once wrote an essay ‘Why Socialism?’ which contains one of those passages that struck me to my core and has since taken up permanent residence in my thought processes:
I have now reached the point where I may indicate briefly what to me constitutes the essence of the crisis of our time. It concerns the relationship of the individual to society. The individual has become more conscious than ever of his dependence upon society. But he does not experience this dependence as a positive asset, as an organic tie, as a protective force, but rather as a threat to his natural rights, or even to his economic existence. Moreover, his position in society is such that the egotistical drives of his make-up are constantly being accentuated, while his social drives, which are by nature weaker, progressively deteriorate. All human beings, whatever their position in society, are suffering from this process of deterioration. Unknowingly prisoners of their own egotism, they feel insecure, lonely, and deprived of the naive, simple, and unsophisticated enjoyment of life. Man can find meaning in life, short and perilous as it is, only through devoting himself to society.
I’ve bolded the salient portion (which I’ll return to momentarily), which leads me into The Naked Sun.
It’s a beautiful, wondrous, amazing book that, rarely, succeeds on both layers: it is simultaneously entertaining and thought-provoking. In fact, it reminded me of the works of Raymond Chandler:
On the surface, we have our regular down-to-earth ‘plainsclothesman C-7’ Detective Baley, who would fulfill Chandler’s criteria of a good detective. Baley has been called to a distant Spacer Colony to investigate a murder who has one and only one suspect… but who also couldn’t have possibly committed the murder. The characters intrigue. The drama compels. The tragedy evokes. A healthy dose of noir gives it a pleasant spiciness.
But this tasty dish is no mere spaghetti and meatballs. It has complex undertones and aftertastes - much material for ponderance. The Naked Sun is set on Solaria, a post-scarcity, post-labor society of a mere 20,000 people, in which every person lives either alone or with a house on a huge estate, whose every need is attended by a horde of robots, as much as 200,000,000 - or TEN THOUSAND robots per human.
This state of affairs has led to a society in which people are no longer even comfortable ‘seeing’ (i.e. physically being in the same location) as other humans. Instead, they merely ‘view’ one another through holographic/virtual calls. They procreate only with the greatest reluctance and don’t even raise their own children, who are brought up in a single facility, run by one or two humans and a bunch of robot nannies.
And now, at last, I return to Einstein and that quote which has infiltrated my psyche. Solaria is the end-state of this view of community / society not as a positive force but as a threat. A state that appears to have only accelerated since Einstein’s time. Just as one datum, it is now quite common for my students to have a daily average of 10+ hours screen-time. That is, our children now prefer to ‘view’ one another, rather than to ‘see.’
As a person who is quite sympathetic to that specific view and the broader notion of societal dependence as a negative, I feel quite certain that such a society has no future. For a little bit, sure. But in the long run, no. We’re already seeing, in our politics across the world, that authoritarianism and dictatorship rise like some malodorous steam from such cracks in community.
As Bailey says,
The Solarians have given up something mankind has had for a million years; something worth more than atomic power, cities, agriculture, tools, fire, everything; because it’s something that made everything else possible. … The tribe, sir. Cooperation between individuals. Solaria has given it up entirely … It is a world of isolated individuals … Without the interplay of human against human, the chief interest in life is gone; most of the intellectual values are gone; most of the reason for living is gone.
Which, yeesh, bit dark. But I don’t want to end on such doom and gloom. I don’t believe it. And, after all, The Naked Sun is so-titled for Bailey’s own insistence in overcoming his Earthman fear of open spaces, to face the ‘Naked Sun.’ Probably the single most triumphant scene in the book is when he does so not “out of professional necessity” but “to face the open for the open’s own sake; for its attraction and its promise of freedom.”
Every day, I struggle with that eternal war between pessimism and optimism, between all the evidence of humanity’s selfishness and its natural desire for fellowship and community, between my own evil apathy and my desire to make the world around me a better place. And, somehow, I’m not quite drowned, somehow the spark within me manages to burn another day, to evoke a kind word, a neighborly gesture, a choice to put the community’s needs before my own.
I know I am not alone in this. Or as Detective Baley concludes: “there must be millions on Earth who would feel that same urge, if the open were only brought to their attention, if they could be made to take the first step.”...more
My review in its entirety is this excerpt about a character otherwise never mentioned again:
Baley could sense the vague aroma of Yeast-town growing
My review in its entirety is this excerpt about a character otherwise never mentioned again:
Baley could sense the vague aroma of Yeast-town growing stronger, more pervasive. He did not find it as unpleasant as some did; Jessie, for instance. He even liked it, rather. It had pleasant connotations.
Every time he smelled raw yeast, the alchemy of sense perception threw him more than three decades into the past. He was a ten-year-old again, visiting his Uncle Boris, who was a yeast farmer. Uncle Boris always had a little supply of yeast delectables: small cookies, chocolaty things filled with sweet liquid, hard confections in the shape of cats and dogs. Young as he was, he knew that Uncle Boris shouldn't really have had them to give away and he always ate them very quietly, sitting in a corner with his back to the center of the room. He would eat them quickly for fear of being caught.
They tasted all the better for that.
Poor Uncle Boris! He had an accident and died. They never told him exactly how, and he had cried bitterly because he thought Uncle Boris had been arrested for smuggling yeast out of the plant. He expected to be arrested and executed himself. Years later, he poked carefully through police files and found the truth. Uncle Boris had fallen beneath the treads of a transport. It was a disillusioning ending to a romantic myth.
Yet the myth would always arise in his mind, at least momentarily, at the whiff of raw yeast.
So ask the characters of each other and themselves at key moments throughout the story. And while the story has a sci-fi wrapping, it’s Are you happy?
So ask the characters of each other and themselves at key moments throughout the story. And while the story has a sci-fi wrapping, it’s this eternal, human question that serves as the story’s heart. So let’s talk about it!
I’m not going to pretend I have THE definition of happiness, but I have A definition of happiness that I think is pretty good:
That, at the present moment, you have something in your life more precious than anything else you could even imagine. For most people, this will be the relationship with their children or other loved ones, but there’s no reason it couldn’t be an object - a dream house, say - or even an experience - a religious conversion that could not have been more profound.
Now, combine this precious with at least an implicit understanding of chaos theory, the butterfly effect, and/or quantum mechanics - that is, the realization that even the most apparently minute change in the past could have resulted in drastic changes in the present. And now you know happiness:
Because you will have no regrets. You will have total acceptance. Because no matter what horrible things happened to you or the world in the past, no matter how suboptimal the choices and outcomes of your life up to this present moment, you wouldn’t risk a single change because you understand that to do so would risk the existence of your precious. That is happiness, that is contentment, the Gollum-reference notwithstanding.
But here’s the rub: happiness can only ever be fragile because that precious thing can be so easily taken from you, either by your own mistake or cruel reality. The child can die. The wonderful spouse can divorce you. The house can be destroyed by a hurricane because you built it too close to the beach. The religious conversion can be poisoned when you discover that your church has aided and abetted pedophile priests.
I myself once knew such happiness, and not even that long ago. I rescued a dog that meant the world to me. Hey, look, you can even see a picture of us in my profile and his silhouette is in my dev studio’s logo. I knew the happiness of waking up every day, being perfectly content with all the decisions of my life because any change, even the smallest change, would have meant that Atlas and I were not together. I had to be dating the woman who had to say, “We’re adopting a dog or else.” COVID had to happen to isolate us enough that she issued that ultimatum. I HAD to go to the animal shelter on that ONE day, at that EXACT moment, to get Atlas. He was only there for a day or two, he wasn’t even officially registered yet. It had to be then. So literally any change in my life - and there’s been some bad mojo in my life, let me tell you - was unacceptable.
My dog Atlas died in an accident at a young age - and so total acceptance has become total regret.
But getting to Dark Matter finally: That whole arc is basically the arc of Dark Matter, except this ‘butterfly effect’ discussion is made concrete by the inclusion of the Many-World Interpretation of quantum mechanics, which is the notion that waveform collapse represents the branching of the universe into a multi-verse. All that COULD happen DOES happen…a giant tree, Yggdrasill if you will, of all the permutations of reality. Our universe is but a single branch of that. But what if you could explore the other branches…?
The sci-fi here is really just a means to an end. It doesn’t get much more advanced than the paragraph I just wrote. So if you’re interested in a deeper sci-fi exploration of MWI, I would point you towards Greg Egan’s Permutation City, which compared to this book (in terms of the sci-fi elements) is like a Claude Monet painting versus a kindergartener’s crayon drawing.
But that isn’t a criticism of Dark Matter, which ultimately doesn’t particularly care about the science-fiction elements. They really are just the means to an end, that end being the aforementioned question: Are you happy? and the related question: Do you ponder much the ‘paths not taken’ and regret not choosing the other fork? Specifically in Dark Matter, it’s the character of Jason Dessen, a man who MIGHT have become an acclaimed physicist but instead chose to have a family, who explores this question.
It’s a good story. I read it in a single evening. Your preferences may vary but when I read novels, I need a good story first and foremost. Without a good story, without a character or two I can root for (or against), a novel is just a worse version of some other type of text. It’s a worse version of a non-fiction exploration of interpretations of quantum mechanics. It’s a worse version of a philosophical text exploring the meaning of life.
As I said, however, the book does center first and foremost on telling this story of Jason Dressen, and all the other sci-fi gooey is just extra filling to add spice and flavor. I don’t think a book will ever be anyone’s precious, I don’t think it alone can constitute that bulwark against regret, but this is still one of the good ones and a worthy read....more
So Covid led me to an interesting epiphany, what I call the Scalar Edge (or others call the ‘Tyranny of Scales problem’) because I like fancy-soundingSo Covid led me to an interesting epiphany, what I call the Scalar Edge (or others call the ‘Tyranny of Scales problem’) because I like fancy-sounding names: That there exists a fundamental conflict between the macroscopic ‘freedom’ and microscopic ‘freedom’ within a given system. Which… read the intro to my Leviathan Falls review.
Well, after recently reading a cyberpunk pairing - the rather lackluster Shockwave Rider and this much more excellent fare - I had a related epiphany, which is that the Scalar Edge lies at the heart of cyberpunk. Some form of authority - governmental or, more usually, corporate - seeks to maximize the macroscopic ‘freedom’ of society by repressing the microscopic ‘freedom’ of the individual. To the corpo-suits, this is progress and a requisite for achieving maximal economic and technological progress and control. The cyberpunk, then, is a libertarian hero who wishes the opposite.
Viewed thusly, Hardwired is a prototypical cyberpunk novel. In space around the Earth exist the Orbitals, powerful corporations who have beaten Earth and its denizens into the dust. Those on the surface, the poor bastards, the dregs of humanity are ever looking upward and seeking to join the Orbitals in their space heaven.
Hardwired follows two protagonists: Cowboy, a smuggler who once used jets (‘deltas’) to smuggle goods across a fractured States of America and now uses high-speed tanks (‘panzers’) to do the same. Which he does by directly interfacing (‘facing’) with the vehicle’s control and sensor systems using cybernetic implants. His sections reminded me heavily of the anime film Redline (which if you’ve never seen, you really should because it is gloriously absurd). Cowboy is pretty cool…
…but it’s the other protagonist Sarah - who has a cybernetic snake-weapon coiled down her throat - that I would consider the true cyberpunk hero. Cowboy ain’t a punk. He’s too wealthy and too buoyant for that. Sarah, though… she has clawed her way out of the gutter and carries that reality as a badge of both pride and shame in her every thought and every gesture. In fact, that’s the major conflict between Sarah and Cowboy, in that Sarah is a realist and Cowboy is an idealist. This book’s journey is really that of Sarah, who, by the end, has learned to look to the sky not with bitter envy but with something akin to… let’s not say hope, for I am uncertain that such a word exists in the cyberpunk lexicon but rather… an ambition to vengeance. By book’s end, she understands that though the greed and corruption of mankind can never truly be overthrown, it can on occasion be curtailed - and the opportunity to do such is enough to consider one’s life well-lived....more
One of my biggest pet-peeves – which I’ve heard at least once a week for the past decade of my life - is when someone draws the wrong cSo… a bit dumb.
One of my biggest pet-peeves – which I’ve heard at least once a week for the past decade of my life - is when someone draws the wrong conclusion and says, “Oh I really overthought that one.” You… overthought it? You made a mistake because you thought too deeply about it?
Unless your name is David Foster Wallace or Socrates, it seems unlikely. So here’s what actually happened: You thought poorly, and that is why you were mistaken.
Well, the Shockwave Rider is the book equivalent of “I overthought that one.” It is the novelization of the Dunning-Kruger effect. It thinks it is incredibly smart. It is, in fact, quite dumb.
Here’s what happens: There’s this guy who is INCREDIBLY SMART, which we know because the book tells us so. Often. Well this super incredibly smart person gets recruited into a secret school for training super smart people to become future leaders. He gets upset when he realizes that people are mostly amoral bobble-heads and goes rogue. Which involves him running around playing an extended game of charades, using a super secret internet code that lets him alter his identity as needed. So he’s a weird cult leader one moment, then a super-star programmer the next.
However, he encounters a MANIC PIXIE DREAM GIRL! Yes indeedy we have an MPDG and not in the self-aware ironic deconstructive sense. So, of course inspired by our good little MPDG, the protagonist realizes the emptiness of his life and decides to do something MEANINGFUL. This aspiration reaches its apex point when he encounters a LIBERTARIAN UTOPIA, whose primary service to society is a form of non-responsive therapy!
But alas the Evil Government catches up to him (note: no spoiler here, the whole book’s framing is that our protagonist is being interrogated in a government prison). And the Evil Government decides it hates that libertarian utopia and wants to destroy it! Because the Evil Government just cannot stand not having control over everything. But then computer virus! Happy the end.
There’s a lot of jibber jabber in this book on academic topics like intelligence vs wisdom or the means of proper governance or the sociological effects of the erosion of community, but there’s practically zero reference, either explicit or implicit, to any of humanity’s works on the matter. Like you’d THINK that maybe there’d be some reference to the many theories of intelligence that the psychological community has created. But nope. Nothing. The result is not particularly enlightening or interesting to read.
It’s like… you know when someone who knows nothing about a particular problem drastically underestimates its complexity and offers facile solutions? Like someone who says, “Well you can solve homelessness by building more houses, right? There you go, problem solved.” Or, “Oh our education system has a lot of troubles. Let’s just privatize it and the market will sort it out.”
That’s what the whole book feels like. Every discussion, every discursion, is sophomoric – and there’s A LOT of them. Such digressions from the narrative really are the meat of the book.
So there’s that.
Which would be more palatable if the book had any sort of style to it. But despite ostensibly being a ‘cyberpunk’ novel, it is about as far from punk as I can imagine. Better to call it a ‘cryptobro’ novel: a frat boy who thinks he’s a geek and wants to be a geek but is not a geek and does not, in fact, actually want to be a geek. Replace geek with ‘cyberpunk’ in that sentence and you have a decent summary of The Shockwave Rider....more
A Snickers candy-bar has three things going for it: it’s sweet, it’s crunchy, and it’s only 1.86 oz. Cause you know that saying, too much of a good thA Snickers candy-bar has three things going for it: it’s sweet, it’s crunchy, and it’s only 1.86 oz. Cause you know that saying, too much of a good thing is a bad thing? With Snickers, it’s more like too much of a bad thing is, uh, still a bad thing… but in small quantities, eh, not so bad, takes the edge off at least.
That more or less summarizes how I feel about these murder-bot diaries: the protagonist (self-named “Murderbot”) is a bit crunchy and a bit sweet, and it’s good that these are novellas and not full length novels. Just like a Snickers bar, they’re real easy to consume, and I don’t want to undervalue that. Reading each in one sitting is a great way to spend the afternoon.
And to give more substantive praise, probably the best part of these novellas is the way they extend corporate dystopia into the realm of space exploration. The Murderbot begins its life as a “SecBot,” a security/protection android that its company REQUIRES for exploration/survey groups to qualify for insurance (and also lets the company steal data…). While corporate dystopia is nothing new to sci-fi, this more intimate boots-on-the-ground perspective feels fresh within the context of space exploration.
However, these are otherwise absolute junk food. These are books heavily featuring robots and AI and hacking, written by someone who KNOWS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING ABOUT ANY OF THAT. You know that amazingly absurd 1995 film, Hackers? That’s about the level of accuracy of hacking/robotics/AI in this book.
In writing, we have this phrase “write what you know.” I hate that phrase. I despise it utterly. Please, writers, don’t restrict yourself to “what you know.” Please use your empathy to write from perspectives not your own. Please depict worlds beyond what we currently know.
But do your research. I’m not asking for a textbook on encryption or cyber-sec. But if you’ve written a quarter of a million words in which “hacking” is the primary method by which your protagonist resolves conflicts and you never use basic terminology like “firewall” or “encryption” (much less sophisticated jargon like “sanitizing input” or “air-gap”) then your story is probably bullshit, isn’t it?
In that respect, I find it a bit disturbing that people nominated and then awarded these books for not just one Hugo but FOUR. MORE ACTUALLY! They wanted to give MORE! AND two Nebulas. That's like giving the story equivalent of a MCDONALD’S the “best restaurant award.” For better or worse, the field of science fiction literature is now dominated by people who have only the most tenuous grasp of actual science, technology, mathematics, and philosophy.
Also, as a final and related note, each of these books is like $20. I’m sorry but what? You’re charging steak-dinner prices for a candy bar. Ironic, considering this is a book set against a backdrop of corporate greed....more
Just to come right out with it, this is probably my favorite book. It made me feel homesick for a home that exists only in the imagination.
It’s about Just to come right out with it, this is probably my favorite book. It made me feel homesick for a home that exists only in the imagination.
It’s about philosopher-mathematician-scientist monks. It’s about Plato’s allegory of the cave and his world of forms. It’s about the power of ritual. It’s about the conflict between dogma and skepticism. It’s about the love affair between human beings and ideas. It’s about the beauty of the human mind, unchained from economic bondage.
If you’ve read any of my reviews, it should be clear why this appeals to me. Philosopher-scientist-mathematician monk? Yeah that’s everything I aspire to be. If a daemon appeared before me and offered me the chance to be reborn within the world of Anathem, to become a mathematician-monk within the Mathic world, I would take it without hesitation.
I love to explore the works of philosophers, scientists, and artists - because these are people whose thoughts have escaped the drudgery of the economic present. Like everyone else, they must abide by this economic reality, this need to dwell in a daily mundanity, to fulfill animalistic needs for shelter, food, and community. But their minds manage, on occasion, to pierce that veil and transcend into higher realms. They can see worlds that do not exist but could exist, if time or physics or color or geometry or genetics were different.
As the Buddha wrote, life is dissatisfying. I sometimes liken it to a fog of darkness which can feel impossible to understand or navigate. Well these philosophers and scientists and artists create works that serve as beacons of light that grant both clarity and warmth. Or as the character Orolo advises: “Nothing is more important than that you see and love the beauty that is right in front of you, or else you will have no defense against the ugliness that will hem you in and come at you in so many ways.”
And while Anathem has a fun sci-fi (though better to call it phi-fi) plot, the surface narrative is ultimately only a staging ground from which to explore larger, grander questions. How do philosophers and scientists and artists come up with their ideas? What differentiates a good idea from a bad one? How can we tell? What is the ideal world or system in which to cultivate such thoughts and thinkers? What is the thinkers’/scientists’/artists’ relationship, both their responsibility and their expected recompense, with the unreflective majority? Is the point of existence corporeal or cognitive?
Roughly mid-way through Anathem, the protagonist Erasmus has an epiphany that I believe serves as the keystone for the entire novel. In a discussion with his extramuros (i.e. not one belonging to the mathic world) sister, he talks about how much more advanced their basic machines could be, if the mathic world were allowed to improve them.
His sister counters that she wouldn’t like that… because the machines would be too advanced for her to understand. From this, Erasmus has a major epiphany - he generalizes their discussion to the pursuit and communication of ALL knowledge. He asks himself in despair, “What is the point of pursuing and gaining complicated knowledge if no one else will be unable to understand or appreciate it?”
In considering that question, avoid any temptations to consider the technological/economic applications of knowledge. For example, suppose we were considering building a solar system sized particle accelerator to gain better knowledge about the quantum world - knowledge that, by the way, only the 0.00001% of humanity with the necessary mathematical background will actually grasp. However, suppose we were somehow absolutely certain it wouldn't help us advance our technology or economy one bit. Should we undertake such an endeavor?
That question and the ways in which we might think about answering it is basically what Anathem is all about. As is my life's pursuit....more
The covid pandemic has taught us many things. For me, probably the most interesting is that there exists a fundamental, universal conflict between theThe covid pandemic has taught us many things. For me, probably the most interesting is that there exists a fundamental, universal conflict between the macroscopic and microscopic layers of the same system. If the individual microscopic elements within a larger system possess low freedom (or, high entropy, as I think about it) then the macroscopic system itself possesses high freedom (or low entropy). And vice versa.
For example, COVID demonstrated how countries with high individualism, such as the USA, struggled to maintain state-wide or country-wide restrictions. So the USA - a system of high microscopic freedom and low macroscopic freedom - saw roughly 3000 deaths/million. While Japan - an economic peer that has relatively less microscopic freedom and higher macroscopic freedom - saw over 90% less deaths per capita, at ~230 deaths/million.
Obviously that risks simplifying a hugely complex issue, but I’ve found this thinking tool (which imma call the Scalar Edge) holds true for nearly any situation one can imagine: is it easier to herd cats or cattle? Is it easier to construct traffic systems for drivers who are predictable or drivers who disobey traffic laws? Is it easier to design a chip on a 7nm process or a 3nm process? Is it easier to eat rice from a bowl or rice from a plate? Etc.
In each of theses cases, you can see that the greater the microscopic freedom, the more restricted we are at the macroscopic level and thus the greater the energy we need to expend to achieve our macroscopic aims.
Leviathans Falls is more or less that conflict, on the galactic or civilization scale. On one side is an intelligence that seeks to entirely strip every human of its individuality to form a larger hive mind capable of defeating the Dark Gods seeking to destroy all of humanity. The apotheosis of authoritarianism, if you will. And on the other side, you have the rebels, the resistance, the individual heroes who FULLY ACKNOWLEDGE that the hive mind method is more likely to succeed but nevertheless believe strongly enough in individual freedom that they’re willing to risk losing the macro-battle to maintain those micro freedoms.
So obviously I enjoyed the intellectual foundations of Leviathan Falls. Less pleased with the story elements, however. First, we introduce a brand new character in the form of Colonel Aliana Tanaka, who didn’t do much for me, unfortunately. Despite various attempts to complexify her character, she’s essentially a manipulative psychopathic killer, which is a million times less interesting than the murderous psychopathic kindly old uncle we already have in the form of Amos. Second, our previous book soared to the highest highs as it explored some of the mysteries of the universe and the ring-gates. Reading about the planet-sized diamond elevated my mind and my spirit; its inclusion was one of those brief moments of sublimity that help sustain us in an otherwise grim reality. Here, though, those mysteries are crushed under the weight of all-too-human political squabbling and tomfoolery. And when we actually do get some exploration of the origins of the Protomolecule Engineers? It’s these chapters of pseudo-lyrical gobblydegook that ultimately get translated into, Yeah they were some amoeba squid hive-minds. uhhh okay? I want to know the cool mysterious stuff, about their galactic empire and their battle against the dark gods and how they constructed the ring gates and the ring station. I don’t care about how much their evolutionary-ancestors loved undersea volcanic vents.
That said, I’m satisfied. It’s hard to find science fiction that gets better than this. …isn’t impossible, tho....more
Wonder, wondrous, awe. Let’s talk about it, let’s chat, k let’s go:
My previous book, Soldier of Mist, took me 3-4 months to read. Fantasy novel. Complex. Bit of a bore. Didn’t even finish. Then Tiamat’s Wrath, I burn through in less than a week. Speedy like a hedgehog or a roadrunner. Or a particle of light. So huge contrast in reading time. Kinda disturbing. Why? Why one book drew me in, and another did not?
Complicated answer: plot structure, issues with protagonist passivity, obfuscation, one is a story, the other… a fog. But don’t really care about that. Not this time. No, this time, care about WONDER. Big difference in WONDER with these two books. Soldier of Mist: no wonder, no curiosity, no transcendence. Protagonist Latro meets a beautiful nymph in the woods. “Hi. Wanna make out?” he says. More or less. Meets the goddess DEMETER in her temple: “Hi. Wanna make out?” Where’s the wonder, where’s the awe? This is intentional, to ground mythology, strip its mythos, transmute into grittier reality. But why? To what end? Transmute Gold into Lead. Success doesn’t look like success, looks like failure.
Then I read Tiamat’s Wrath. Great contrast in wonder. Like cloudy sky to infinite blue. One sky tells us to hide, hunker down. The other beckons, promises adventure. Want to go explore. In final two books, we explore. Who are the Protomolecule Engineers? Who are their adversaries? How do they function? What do they want? Mysteries. Fun to explore:
A solar system, with no planets but a giant diamond. A history gem? Library of the ancients? Crystallized consciousness? Yes. Or a neutron star, nearly brimming over. On the cusp of collapse. A whisper, a breath, an iota more, then devastation. Ponder the beings with such Physical mastery. Like Gods - or Demons. Or creatures moving through the void. Shadows stalking like lions through electric and magnetic fields, rending ships and people. How do we stop them? First, we must know how they do it. To conquer, first you understand. And once you understand, do you still wish to conquer? So science and peace are brothers.
All this Wonder is like a Bedouin cistern, unsealed before a wanderer’s thirst. Disturbing to discover I had become so parched. Makes me think. Where did all the Wonder go? Is it age? A factor, yes, but prosaic. What else? Many contributors, many thieves. But I’m thinking… social media, internet. It can entertain, educate, enlighten even. But can it inspire? Can it draw forth Wonder?
I posit no, it cannot. Content, a problem. Mostly low effort, low density of quality per consumption. Like candy. Easy to consume, minimal nutrition. Sometimes even negative nutrition. But more than that, a flaw inherent in the medium, in delivery of content. Tiny visual screens, weak audio drivers, no smell, no touch, no taste, flat prioriception. Delivery of information without experience of information. Like a prisoner looking out his barred window. Prison negative connotations but prison feels safe. Prison cell a controlled environment. But Wonder comes from being surrounded by frightening novelty: standing on the Moon, not looking at it through an eyepiece.
Such is provenance and pursuit of skilled story-telling. Tricks your brain, displaces the senses. Simulation constructed of and perceived through linguistic interface, transports you to a new time, new place, into new minds. S.A. Corey, that two-headed beast, is a skilled story-teller. Drama, yes. Suspense, yes. Conflict, yes. But those are easy, cheap, and therefore common. Wonder is rare and priceless and, at the summit of our vertiginous being, it is everything....more
In creative writing, we have these words or phrases that we call “distance words” because they create distance between the reader and the narrative. UIn creative writing, we have these words or phrases that we call “distance words” because they create distance between the reader and the narrative. Usually “distance words” are sensory words, but they can also be words related to mental or emotional states. For example, “I believe tacos are tasty” unnecessarily begins with “I believe.” I could, rather, write “Tacos are tasty” and the fact of it being my belief/opinion is implicit. As another example, I might write, “Bob stood on top of the cliff and looked out. He saw a wave of red-eyed bugs swarming toward him.” The “looked out” and especially the “he saw” are distance words/phrasing. I can instead write, “A wave of red-eyed bugs swarmed towards Bob’s position on top of the cliff.” This is not just a matter of concision, though that is a great boon. Fiction that’s poorly written with too much distance phrasing feels artificial; readers can struggle with empathizing with the characters or losing themselves in the story.
The same result can occur from certain structures. H.P. Lovecraft, for example, loved using Frame Narratives. The first-hand witness rarely narrates his tales; it’s always like, my neighbor told me this story, which the sheriff told him. You might argue that such framing is necessary, given the actual first-hand witnesses usually end up insane or dead. You’d be wrong. Unless explicitly stated otherwise, a character narrating a story (even in past tense) does not imply that character is narrating from some future point and therefore must be alive / sane.
Reading a Frame Narrative feels, to me at least, like watching other people play sports. Or watching other people play video games. Or reading other people’s plot summaries. Or watching a cooking show. I find all of these mind-numbingly boring. I want to play the sports and the video game and discover the plot and do the cooking MYSELF. I don’t want to be a passive spectator watching some other person do the thing. I want to spend my life DOING stuff.
Now, getting to the point, I love Gene Wolfe’s New Sun quartet. In my review, I wrote that I could call no other sci-fi book its superior. Soldier of Mist shares a lot of commonalities with those books: they’re complex hero journeys that can be hard to follow, in part because the word usage is highly colloquial, in the sense that they use the words their society might use, not the words we would use. For example, in these books set in Ancient Greece, protagonist Latro (and others) use the phrase “Rope-Makers” for the Spartans and call the city of Athens the city of “Thought.”
I love complexity, and I love authenticity. Too much of our media is designed for the lowest common denominator, and I feel myself getting dumber every year. So I SHOULD like Soldier of Mist.
UNFORTUNATELY, Soldier of Mist is a frame narrative. Latro, the protagonist, loses his memory every day, so he writes his experiences on a scroll. The book we’re reading therefore is not actually Latro’s experiences. It’s the scroll. It’d be like, in the film Memento, if the camera didn’t exist outside of Guy Pearce’s character’s perspective. Rather, this would be like if his character wrote a script about his own life, and that’s the movie we got.
…which, okay, actually that sounds kinda cool, like Adaptation with a dash of amnesia, But here, in Soldier of Mist? Not so interesting. Here, we get a lot of annoying repetition. Every other chapter, Latro tells us that he has lost his memory and therefore he must write in his scroll every day. And oh who’s this slave girl, Io? Sure, Latro, summarize what she told you about your relationships and your quest, for the umpteenth time.
But worse, it just completely drains any tension from the narrative. It’s not just that we know Latro will survive anything we’re reading about. That would be obvious anyway. It’s that, subconsciously, there’s no immediacy. It’s the difference between hearing someone talk about seeing a ghost in a creepy old abandoned house… and being in that creepy old house yourself and thinking you see a ghost. No comparison. Mild amusement vs haunted.
So SIGH. I’ve been trying to read these first two books for like four months. I did finish the first one and start on the second (Soldier of Arete). And I can SEE the brilliance in them. Like I’m watching some master chef on a cooking show and I can SEE the brilliance and skill. But what does that have to do with me? Without any cognitive or emotional engagement, it might as well all be happening on some distant alien planet, a million light years away.
So it is with Soldier of Mist. This unnecessary gimmick of having Latro narrate to us via a scroll more or less killed my engagement.
Also, it doesn’t help that Latro’s loss of memory causes him to lose any real agency as a character. At its simplest, the story is about a violent, mentally handicapped man being led around by a series of baby-sitters. That some are DIVINE babysitters doesn’t change this fundamental dynamic....more
Elder Race is a glorious specimen of the Scientia Ficta species; it is a Platonic Ideal of the Science Fiction novella.
So I’m a sort of sci-fi alchemiElder Race is a glorious specimen of the Scientia Ficta species; it is a Platonic Ideal of the Science Fiction novella.
So I’m a sort of sci-fi alchemist, seeking in my reviews to distill science fiction down to its purest essence. A frivolous pursuit perhaps, but I believe that seeking and understanding ground truths is the foundation for all personal and cultural growth. So, if I’m going to read and review sci-fi, then I want to know, What is science fiction? What is its essence?
In general, sci-fi has a huge emphasis on technology, such that in many people’s minds, the essence of science fiction is laser swords and rocket ships, much like the essence of fantasy is knights and wizards and dragons, while books without either are something else.
But - and this is a major theme of the Elder Race - technology is really just nature, captured in some cultural framework. Is the sun a piece of technology? Probably not. But a fusion reactor is. Why? Because a fusion reactor is controlled to serve some cultural purpose. So science fiction - even hard sci-fi - isn’t really about technology or science. It’s about the relationship between technology and culture. What types of cultures create what technologies? And then, once created, how does that technology change that culture? Which is why Harry Potter - which often explores the relationship between magic and magician culture - is more sci-fi than Star Wars, which focuses more on the heroic adventure.
So I consider Elder Race the ideal science-fiction story because this technology-culture relationship forms the very core of the protagonists' interactions:
It’s a split narrative, told from two perspectives, the first of Lynesse the princess from a human colony that’s technologically and culturally regressed into a medieval state. The second perspective is that of Elder Nyr, an anthropologist from a second-wave of space exploration sent out to study the first-wave of human colonization. The two meet because the princess seeks the help of Elder Nyr (a “sorcerer” in her mind) in dealing with the threat of a “demon” invasion.
The princess’s narrative is fine, but it’s the anthropologist’s perspective that makes this tale. It’s so rich, with so many wonderful layers.
Nyr’s primary conflict is that, as an anthropologist, he doesn’t want to interfere with the culture that he’s observing. That he did so in the past (and that he does so now) is a huge regret for him. So he tries to play his role as a “sorcerer” without contaminating the culture with his own perspectives. But he’s incredibly depressed and lonely and often wonders why he even bothers. Who will even read his anthropological reports? From what he can tell, everyone on the original Earth is dead. They haven’t contacted him in centuries. So he’s constantly activating a mental system called DCS that allows him to distance himself from his own feelings, to avoid being paralyzed by anxiety and depression.
But - and this is a minor spoiler - he does eventually reach a point at which he’s had enough and just wants to tell Lynesse the truth of it all. And the chapter that follows is simply awesome. It offers side-by-side paragraphs. One is in Elder Nyr’s “language” while the other is Lynesse’s “language.” Both English of course but, for example, Elder Nyr’s “Your ancestors came from outer space on generation arks” gets translated into “Your people came from boats that sailed the sea of stars.”
And that’s the cultural framework I’m talking about. It’s like Arthur C. Clarke’s “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” but I now find that misses the mark. It’s not about ‘sufficiently advanced’ but rather ‘sufficiently inexplicable.’
If I use that definition of magic, then Elder Race contains not just the joys of linguistics and psychology, but even a bit of magic too. Unequivocal recommendation. Simply a delightful reading experience....more
And no I don’t mean it helps commit genocide, thanks no thanks mein kampf.
Rather, I mean a good book must function A good book is like a Trojan horse.
And no I don’t mean it helps commit genocide, thanks no thanks mein kampf.
Rather, I mean a good book must function like a Trojan horse. It needs some exterior elements that make us want to open the gates of our minds and invite it in. An interesting plot. Some thrill. Some suspense. A character or two to root for. Humor works too. Maybe great worldbuilding. Even unique voice can sometimes do it. Y’know, something that makes the novel FUN and ENJOYABLE to read.
But once the novel has gotten inside, it needs to deploy some hidden depths. Maybe a critique of free will. Or an exploration of non-standard pathologies. Or an analysis of the self-destructive nature of imperialism. Something that makes the novel WORTH reading, something to challenge and expand the reader’s mind.
If a novel fails at either task, then it’s not worth reading. Which, unfortunately, includes most novels. It’s challenging to find an author with both skillsets. Philip K. Dick is one such author.
But Man in the High Castle is not one such book.
I don’t want to say that Man in the High Castle has no plot. It does. Stuff happens. Characters have arcs. But none of it is compelling or interesting.
Which isn’t surprising, given what we know about how PKD developed this book’s plot. Famously, he was guided by the I Ching (aka fortune-telling). To give him credit, here’s exactly what he wrote: “I used it in The Man in the High Castle because a number of characters used it. In each case when they asked a question, I threw the coins and wrote the hexagram lines they got. That governed the direction of the book.”
The characters cast the I Ching maybe 10 times throughout the whole book? And of course PKD used his writerly skills to translate the vague lines into plot. In a D&D game, the dice rolls don’t create the story, the DM (and players) do. So I don’t think it’d be fair to say the plot was written randomly.
But I do think the mere fact that he opted to use the I Ching AT ALL tells us something about whether PKD had a strong plot in mind when crafting this book. Obviously, he didn’t. Or he wouldn’t have used the I Ching, right?
And it shows. There’s 4 or 5 points of view, and there’s some ostensible connections between them. But for the most part, they don’t intersect.. Neither are the character arcs themselves particularly dynamic.
That much for the entertaining exterior. But what about the book’s hidden depths?
Not particularly good either. As I cited in my review of his Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, PKD is interested in two questions: “what is real?” and “what constitutes the authentic human being?” In other words, ontology. Does Man in the High Castle help us answer these questions?
No more than, say, Lord of the Rings does.
Because while, yes, this book takes place in an alternate history in which the Axis won WW2, it contains the least explicit and implicit exploration of ontology of any PKD book I’ve read. Probably why it won the Hugo - because it’s one of his simplest and least strange books.
So the book isn’t terrible. There’s some good lines. I enjoyed the characters’ musings on race and the cognitive dissonant racism that many characters have toward their Japanese conquerors. The overall alternative history conceit is cool.
It’s just, every other PKD book I’ve read is better than this one. So… yeah. Go read one of them instead. Ubik, Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, etc....more
This book - which I read almost right after my (failed) attempt to read Robin Hobb's Farseer Trilogy - has led mI should've read the negative reviews.
This book - which I read almost right after my (failed) attempt to read Robin Hobb's Farseer Trilogy - has led me to two important realizations:
#1: Female sci-fi + fantasy authors tend to have a much greater amount of interiority (e.g. internal monologue / narration) than do male authors.
#2: I hate excess internal narration.
Don't get me wrong. I agree with Socrates/Plato, who wrote "the unexamined life is not worth living", though I would clarify it as something like, "The unexamined life is a life followed, not a life chosen." So I believe human beings who don't maintain a healthy internal dialogue with themselves are, if not stupid, at least mostly drone-like.
But there's a marked difference between healthy introspection and a neurotic spiral of nth-order thinking about thinking about thinking. And it's my experience that any writing style that heavily relies on internal narration falls into the latter. It's always neurotic internal narration. It's always thinking that arrests rather than galvanizes action.
I'd even go so far as to claim that too much internal dialogue represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the writing/novel medium. It's TELLING the reader the character's thoughts instead of SHOWING us the thoughts by action, voice, and description.
And being told, instead of being shown, is boring. Which is my also my summary: boring. Book starts off great but then falls into this morass of internal thoughts of a diplomat who's actually terrible at being a diplomat. Incompetence is tedious in the best circumstances. Here, trapped in the thoughts of the incompetent, it's just plain awful....more
Essentially, pure science fiction. It's about how life might arise on the surface of a neutron star and how that civilization might evolve.
That's it. Essentially, pure science fiction. It's about how life might arise on the surface of a neutron star and how that civilization might evolve.
That's it. The end. It doesn't arbitrarily shoehorn in modern elements of the political conversation. It doesn't try to wax poetical with lyrical prose. Hell, it doesn't really even have character arcs in the typical sense. Nor much suspense, for that matter.
It's been called hard sci-fi, but I can't say I agree, at least not in the sense of "hard" sci-fi being "hard to understand." I don't think there's any explicit math and a minimum of explicit science. Rather we might say it's all "based on science."
Overall, I give it 3 stars, simply because this is not the first book I've read that follows the evolution of an alien civilization. My favorite sci-fi author - Greg Egan - has several books (Incandescence, Diaspora, Orthogonal Series) that do much the same. Compared to those books, Dragon's Egg is like a child's crayon drawing compared to a van Gogh painting. Or, perhaps a better analogy, is that Dragon's Egg feels like the cliff-notes version, whereas Egan gets into the scientific, social, and mathematical nitty-gritty detail.
That said, my experience is that an extremely limited number of people can appreciate an Egan book. This one, while still more difficult than your average novel, is vastly more approachable and therefore much more appropriate for your typical sci-fi reader. It's not about what you're capable of understanding, though; it's about what you're capable of enjoying. Not everyone - even if they understand it - enjoys a book that is heavy on technical detail. If that's you, Dragon's Egg might be the better read....more
In my original review of book one, I had three main criticisms: inorganic romance that felt forced and undeveloped, too much inDidn't finish this one.
In my original review of book one, I had three main criticisms: inorganic romance that felt forced and undeveloped, too much interiority that led to glacial pacing, and a corrupt and ineffectual monarchy that led to Fitz being best understood as a gestapo-in-grooming.
But I pushed on to this one until I encountered all three issues back-to-back-to-back. And that was all she wrote.
This is one of those books that simply fails for people who strongly skew non-conformist. It really only works if you buy into the sympathetic perspective the author pushes for Fitz. But I'm a non-conformist, and I don't. It's not enough to claim there's a romance. It's not enough to claim Fitz is largely virtuous. I need it shown and proven. I need to be able, with my own cognizance, to decide that Fitz is virtuous. But he isn't. He's a spineless lapdog of a corrupt monarchy....more
It made me mad because it’s a Video-Game-centric slice of the post-capitalist, materialistic, inverse-Robin Hood Honestly, this book just made me mad.
It made me mad because it’s a Video-Game-centric slice of the post-capitalist, materialistic, inverse-Robin Hood world we live in. A world that is by no means terrible but could easily be a lot better. Like, really easily.
So basically, Press Reset’s thesis is that the video game development industry is notoriously unstable. Studio closures and massive lay-offs are the rule, rather than the exception. The book’s question, then, is why? And (briefly at the end) how can we change this?
As I wrote in my review of Jason Schreier’s first (and much less enraging) book, I’m a huge fan of video games. My first consoles were the original Nintendo Entertainment System and Sega Genesis - and we had a PC that I remember playing Command and Conquer on when I was 11. Fast forward to today when I just bought a PS5, I have a 3080 in my PC, and I am a solo indie game developer. Gaming has been my primary hobby throughout my life and will likely be to the end of my life. I love stories, I love artistry, I love imagination, I love systems, mathematical, physical, linguistic, and otherwise.
So this book is particularly personal because I’m acquainted with every development studio mentioned. For example, a big chunk of this book follows several developers from Irrational Games who created Bioshock Infinite and, oh look, here’s my steam review from way back in 2013.
So that’s part of why it’s so enraging. When I started video gaming, it was a niche industry and those of us who played them were often looked down upon as “geeks” and “nerds” and “losers” who lacked social skills. But I always knew they were the future because they were awesome. Certainly more interesting than paying for the privilege of watching roided-up multi-millionaires give each other brain damage on Monday night football. So the fact that the video game industry was destined to become big business - and eventually be taken over by soulless goons with eyes only for $$$ - was inevitable. But that doesn’t make it any less enraging.
There are a lot of quotes in that vein. Here’s a selection:
“There were people at Disney in executive positions who’d come right out and tell you, ‘I don’t like games,” Spector said. “And I’d be like, “Why are you involved in running a game division then?’”
“[The EA executive] said, ‘Why would I give you a dollar knowing I’m gonna get $1.10 back when I can give Chris $10 million and either make $100 million or get a tax write-off?’”
From EA’s perspective, this was just how the mobile business model worked. The product managers valued statistics and numbers above all else, and they had loads of data showing that iPhone and Android players were perfectly fine with timers that lasted hours or even days. […] “Individually, within the studio, people would look at each other in the eye and go, ‘People are going to hate this,” Crooks said. “You’re like, ‘Yeah, I know. But we have to make it.’”
The executives talked about the new mega-popular battle royale game PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, which they were looking to emulate, and they praised Visceral’s staff, offering platitudes about how talented the team was and how hard they’d all worked. Then they told everyone how to get their severance packages.
Etc, etc. It’s the story of almost every chapter. So I’m actually a bit down on Press Reset. Jason Schreier is WIDELY considered the best games journalist and he absolutely comes through here as well but... Go ask any informed gamer to guess the attitudes and behavior of executives at EA or Activision, and their response will more or less match the content of this book. So Press Reset doesn’t really accomplish anything, and it isn’t fun to read either. As I wrote earlier, it just made me mad.
As one final note, I’d also add that the behavior of executives/MBAs/bankers/etc shouldn’t be shocking if you’ve ever meaningfully interacted with such people. I’ve been a teacher for over a decade now, and my experience is that students who profess to be seeking careers in “business” tend toward amorality. Not immorality. Amorality. As in, ethical or moral considerations simply aren’t a part of their decision making. They’ll cheat or lie without any compunction or hesitation, in order to get the grade or the girl or the goal. They’ll often do it quite warmly, but they’ll do it without a second thought.
Which makes sense. Because a student saying he wants a career in “business” (which is, um, everything) is usually synonymous with saying he doesn’t have any particular career goal or passion. Which leaves us with only one motivation: money. And not like money as a means to an end, like, say, enough money to send your kids to private school or retire at 40 or to buy a yacht. But money as a metric for success.
And those who measure their success by money can never have enough of it. They want to make 20 million rather than 10 million not because they have any need or use of that extra 10 million but because 20 million is twice as successful as 10 million. Such people will only ever consider ethical or aesthetic concerns insofar as they affect profit.
Understanding this helps make sense of this book - and indeed the world we live in. The leaders of the video game industry, just like leaders of most industries, just like most leaders of most governments, are basically amoral. They’re not sadistic. They don’t get pleasure from hurting people. It’s just morality simply doesn’t register, the notion that we should or should not do something for moral reasons is entirely alien to them. Entirely....more
When I originally drafted this review, I launched into a detailed technical explanation, but the book has so many problems thIn a word, underwhelming.
When I originally drafted this review, I launched into a detailed technical explanation, but the book has so many problems that the explanation grew into a behemoth. And I wasn’t being picky either. I’m talking fundamental Creative Writing 101 stuff here: the setting is a feudal, patriarchal, iron-age pseudo-England with a hereditary monarchy. It could not be more generic. The major external threat (the “red ships”) never gets a single scene, while Fitz’s primary romantic relationship is also largely developed via summary. In other words, basic issues with show vs. tell. Fitz’s lack of any concrete desires or goals compounds with overmuch interiority to kill the pacing. Indeed, a general excess of passivity and even incompetence drags the story like a broken anchor. Certainly I expected more than ZERO assassinations from the Assassin’s Apprentice. Not to mention that, if you take a step back out of Fitz’s narrow perspective and ponder the plot and these characters in a larger sense, you realize that Fitz is actually a villainous character, being trained as a sort of KGB agent to prop up a failed, corrupt government, thereby prolonging the suffering of all its citizens. Loyalty to corruption is not a virtue but a vice.
But I decided none of that matters. Not really. It misses the forest for the trees. What really matters is the end result, the overall effect these problems and this story creates. The book’s zeitgeist, if you will.
Now I don’t want to claim you can’t enjoy this story. Clearly a lot of people do. Hell, I did enough to carry on to the next book. But even in positive reviews, you can find a common thread, which is an admission that this is a rather bleak book. None of the reviews, however, used the word that I think best captures the book’s mood: joyless.
By that, I mean it lacks that spark of wonder I consider the keystone of speculative fiction. You can argue about fantasy vs sci-fi and all that but what unifies them both - and contrasts them with a genre like Magical Realism - is an electric thread of wonder, this imagination of what might be or could be or will be.
With one exception, this book lacks that wonder. There are positive emotions and positive elements - but never joy, never the spark of wonder. Not just because of the content but because of the narrative structure. For example, Fitz’s is a childhood with few friends - but even that wild gang of street children who might be called friends gets few (if any) actual scenes. It gets a summarized montage. That’s standard modus operandi for this book: summarize the happy events, but explore the unhappy ones in lovingly detailed scenes.
Even the one truly wondrous element of this book - a magic "system" (sarcasm air-quotes) called the Wit that allows Fitz to communicate with animals - gets turned into a weapon. It’s treated as a shameful thing and the animals that Fitz bonds with are used by the author as plot elements (what my writing partner used to call “sacrificial lambs”) to generate conflict and pathos.
The entire exercise feels like a missed opportunity. We have a book in a genre that is peak wonder set in that time in the character’s life - childhood - that is also peak wonder. You’d think such a book would have at least SOME light, SOME spark. But it doesn’t. I’m not asking for Chronicles of Narnia, I’m not saying this should be a children’s book. Stephen King’s IT, for example, is definitely not a children’s book, yet its exploration of childhood is glorious with wonder, even in the midst of abject horror.
Ultimately, Assassin’s Apprentice reminds me of The Goblin Emperor, which is also mostly at court and mostly dealing with court intrigue and mostly focused on interiority. But the kindness in SOME (not all, doesn’t need to be all) characters in The Goblin Emperor gave it that spark of warmth and wonder that I keep talking about. As a result, I compared that book to a warm chocolate cake, drizzled with caramel, with a side of slowly melting ice cream.
If I were to compare Assassin’s Apprentice to a food, I’d say it’s similar to plain white rice. It’s a decent meal, it’s certainly edible, even nutritious. But that’s all it is, it’s not a meal worth savoring, not a meal that will remind you of the wonder of childhood, when so many meals promised new horizons of flavor and experience.
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