Loved this as a wean. Worse than Braveheart for making Scotland/England a moral fable but graaaaaaLoved this as a wean. Worse than Braveheart for making Scotland/England a moral fable but graaaaaa...more
A book just about your parents raising you Wrong would default to cliche; a book about failing grad school would default to banal (You get too wrappedA book just about your parents raising you Wrong would default to cliche; a book about failing grad school would default to banal (You get too wrapped up in your own work. You start to take lab personally... over time, you find yourself no longer mesmerized); a book about trying your best to drive away your cheerful and caring boyfriend could be sordid. But put em all together with tight prose and it passes.
The chemistry that I do involves putting many LEGOs together and having another LEGO come out. The LEGOs are molecules, but unlike real LEGOs, I cannot see them or touch them.
There is a professor in my department who is no longer allowed to have graduate students. Under his tutelage, too many have committed suicide
...another big fight. Though big is also quiet, because when mad, Eric says nothing. He sits and stares off into space. When really mad, he stands up and goes to another room. I find that I am most like her in this way. I will follow him into that other room to say the same things I had said in the room before. Hello, are you listening? Hello, are you deaf? But that anti-temper of his is unassailable
Aluminum used to be more expensive than gold. Napoleon had an aluminum cutlery set that he used only for visiting royalty. The gold set he used every day.
(The trouble with science in novels is that - even if the novelist gets it, as Wang does - the reader’s ignorance still constrains the writer to saccharine shallow lines about it, “Pure crystals are those that have perfectly repeating units. You told me this after I asked you what you found beautiful about chemistry. But what of the repeating units in life?”. But at least some of her metaphors are good.)
Self-sabotage as self-expression. I can’t read too much of that: I get impatient with characters who make their lives worse on purpose.
That phrase about sticks and stones and bones. But my bones are very brittle. And I am lactose intolerant.
Not much progression in the first 150 pages, just constant wallowing and flashbacks to her awful parents. But she eventually starts to unfreeze.
I think Wang’s big success is capturing a certain familiar STEM personality which I haven’t seen in art before: smart but graceless, literal and spiritually flat, resentfully hypercompetitive for want of any better purpose. Unphilosophical; innocent. Unorthodox, distant approach to their own feelings.
The lab mate is a good person but sometimes I think, had I never met her, I would have asked less often, Why would a field need me when it has someone like her? A proverb my father made up: To progress in life, you must always compare yourself with someone better and never with someone worse
Please stop, just for a little while, and let me catch up. How do you expect me to marry you if you never let me catch up
I have requested of the shrink: Find me the thing that I can make the greatest impact in and I will do that thing. You and everybody else, she replied.
Worst-case tiger parenting (many such cases):
Eric introduced me to music. Before him, I was listening to silence. And yet I played piano for ten years...
I can’t stand it when they are mad at me. I can’t sleep, and once I can’t sleep, I can’t do much of anything else... The power they have over you, Eric says. I just don’t get it
Same.
Also rare in fiction: The Untraumatised Nice Modest Smart Caring Fella:
At one point, he is in five bands, along with marching band at school. He is told that playing the drums will get him chicks. Actually the friend says it will get him laid. Not once does that happen. He does not get laid until college and not because of drums. The girl just finds him cute...
Flashes of brilliance but he mostly continues to squander the amazing setup from book 1.
Like any good manipulator, Kellhus often says true things:
Flashes of brilliance but he mostly continues to squander the amazing setup from book 1.
Like any good manipulator, Kellhus often says true things:
' "Why do so many give, when it is so easy to take?" But you ask these questions because you know nothing of strength. For what is strength but the resolve to deny base inclinations—the determination to sacrifice in the name of one's brothers? You, Ikurei Conphas, know only weakness, and because it takes strength to acknowledge weakness, you call your weakness strength.'
The world is about to end. The world is about to end. Said enough times, any phrase — even this one — was sure to be leached of its meaning... Two thousand years of preparation, it seemed, had left them utterly unprepared...
Esmenet felt it then, overpowering her, and in the strange fashion of moving souls, she struggled to ward it away. But it was too late. For what seemed the first time, she understood: his pointless urgency, his desperation to be believed, his haggard love, his short-winded compassion—shadows of the Apocalypse, all. To witness the dissolution of nations, to be stripped night after night of everything cherished, everything fair. The miracle was that he still loved, that he still recognized mercy, pity
when the gears do not meet, they become as teeth. So it is with men and their machinations... Only when things were broken did their meaning become clear.
"For your entire life you yearned for a bold God, not one who skulked in scriptoriums, whispering the inaudible to the insane."
"The players of viramsata have made games of truth. They tell lies about who said what to whom, about who makes love to whomever, and so on. They do this continually, and what is more, they are at pains to act out the lies told by others, especially when they are elegant, so they might make them true. And so it goes from tongue to lip to tongue, until no distinction remains between what is a lie and what is true. "In the end, at a great ceremony, it is the most compelling tale that is declared Pirvirsut, a word that means 'this breath is ground' in ancient Vaparsi. The weak, the inelegant, have died, while others grow strong, yielding only to the Pirvirsut, the Breath-that-is-Ground. "Do you see? The viramsata, they become living things, and we are their battle plain."
the feeling of certainty is no more a marker of truth than the feeling of will is a marker of freedom
Kellhus had given these men more than gestures or promises, more even than insight or direction. He had given them dominion. Over their doubts. Over their most hated foes. He had made them strong. But how could lies do such a thing? ...what looked like hope or truth or love from within could be a scythe or a hammer, things wielded for other ends, when seen from without.
...He was no longer of the People. He was more. There was no thought he could not think. No act he could not undertake. No lips he could not kiss ... Nothing was forbidden... there were truces, the coming together of coincidental interests, but nothing else, nothing meaningful. Kellhus had taught him that. He cackled aloud when the revelation struck, and for a moment the world itself wobbled. A sense of power suffused him, so intense it seemed something other might snap from his frame, that throwing out his arms he could shear Joktha's walls from their foundations, cast them to the horizon. No reason bound him. Nothing. No scruple, no instinct, no habit, no calculation, no hate ... He stood beyond origin or outcome. He stood nowhere. "The men wonder," Troyatti said cautiously, "what amuses you, Lord." Cnaiür grinned. "That I once cared for my life."
[With horror:] They make us love! They make us love!
The smug faultlessness of Kellhus, already annoying in the last book, becomes an intolerable drone through all of this one.
Bakker remains wise and eloThe smug faultlessness of Kellhus, already annoying in the last book, becomes an intolerable drone through all of this one.
Bakker remains wise and eloquent in places, and the battles are good. He's particularly good at showing the horror in being cognitively enclosed; sex; and the weakness of reason against social proof / ratfucking / etiquette.
For a long moment no one dared speak, and with startled wonder, Achamian realized he had actually reached them. For once they’d listened with their hearts! They believe! Then Ikurei Conphas began stamping his foot and slapping his thigh, calling, “Hussaa! Hu-hu-hussaaa!” Another on the tiers, General Sompas, joined him . . . “Hussaa! Hu-hu-hussaaa!” A mockery of the traditional Nansur cheer. The laughter was hesitant at first, but within moments, it boomed through the chamber. The Lords of the Holy War had made their wager.
But this was a fawning slog.
To be a teacher was to be a student anew, to relive the intoxication of insight, and to be a prophet, to sketch the world down to its very foundation—not simply to tease sight from blindness, but to demand that another see.
[mindgames], as the Ainoni were fond of saying, brooked no consent. If one man played, everyone played.
it was the principle that galled her, not some dimwitted feminine confusion of hope and piety
His large eyes glittered through the fingers of his fraudulent face.
When one believed, one’s soul was moved. When one didn’t, everything else moved.
All men are greater than dead men.
If one couldn’t trust the God’s own voice, if one refused to listen—even for sentiment’s sake!—then everything became scepticism—scholarly disputation. Xinemus listened to his heart, and this was both his strength and his weakness. The heart recited no scripture...
[Mocking theism's selfishness:] "Give without expectation of reward, and you can expect a huge reward!’” Achamian
To open a book was not only to seize a moment of helplessness, not only to relinquish a jealous handful of heartbeats to the unpredictable mark of another man’s quill, it was to allow oneself to be written. For what was a book if not a long consecutive surrender to the movements of another’s soul?
the sin of the idolater is not that he worships stone, but that he worships one stone over others
I notice that both Cnaiur and Achamian are or were "weepers". And they've grown out of it, by which I mean they have hardened into lifeless husks.
Not once had he wept for his friend. He, the weeper. . .
A rich stew of Dune's cruelty, politics and prophecies, Tolkien's orthography and hereditary virtue, Wolfe's tragic palimpsests, the real sordid histoA rich stew of Dune's cruelty, politics and prophecies, Tolkien's orthography and hereditary virtue, Wolfe's tragic palimpsests, the real sordid history of the Crusades, and ancient Greek elitist metaphysics and fatalism. It should be derivative, and his reliance on making absolutely everything Bad Ass should make it risible. But he blends them all smooth.
The young can never see life for what it is: a knife’s edge, as thin as the breaths that measure it. What gives it depth isn’t memory. I’ve memories enough for ten men, and yet my days are as thin and as shadowy as the greased linen the poor stretch over their windows. No, what gives life depth is the future. Without a future, without a horizon of promise or threat, our lives have no meaning. Only the future is real, Conphas, and unless I make amends to the gods, I’ve no future left.”
To the extent that the average fantasy novel has any philosophy, it is Celtic mythology: revenge, polytheism, human frailty, the hidden world as sick morality play. Bakker (a philosophy PhD) instead manages the first convincing Dark Aristotle / Spinoza I've ever seen. The central theme is the relationship between knowledge and free will, and, here's the unusual bit, not just a trivial nod to the mystical deepness of these concepts.
If you are the movement of your soul, and the cause of that movement precedes you, then how could you ever call your thoughts your own? How could you be anything other than a slave to the darkness that comes before? ..."Sentiments, like a son’s love for his father, simply deliver us to the darkness, make us slaves of custom and appetite... I am my thoughts, but the sources of my thoughts exceed me. I do not own myself, because the darkness comes before me.”
Achamian had protected innocence, had allowed it to flee to a safer place. How could anyone condemn such a thing? But every act could be condemned. The same as all bloodlines could be traced to some long-dead king, all deeds could be chased to some potential catastrophe. One need only follow the forks far enough.
One odd bit about his predominantly feudalist world is the amount of social mobility. Achamian and Serwe and others rise from peasantry to consult or consort with emperors.
First 120 pages are relatively generic and monotonous, about an old spy filled with sentiments and insecurities seeing the shadows draw in. The magic system is also kind of ordinary, OP. But then it moves to a realistic materialist view of the crusades. And then, better, to an actually psychologically plausible "barbarian" and his intense mental chess with a manipulative Buddhist/Nietzschean superintelligence, Kellhus.
He had fled his childhood and had crawled into the honour of his father’s name, Skiötha, Chieftain of the Utemot. With his father’s shameful death, he’d fled and crawled into the name of his people, the Scylvendi, who were the wrath of Lokung, more vengeance than bone or flesh. Now they too had died shamefully. There was no ground left to him. He lay nowhere, among the dead.
all things men do are journeys, I ask you, why are... the customs that bind what men do like mountain passes? Why do they ride the same trails, over and over again, when the ways to their destination are without number?” ...Where others filed through illusory canyons, his soul ranged the trackless plains... they spoke not to share perspectives or to communicate truths but to come before—to dominate souls and circumstances... These men were more than human, they were Kahiht, World Souls, locked in the great wheel of great events.
One bartered principle and piety to accomplish what principle and piety demanded... Proyas suffered, as all men of high purpose must, the endless exchange of principles for advantages.
Kellhus is a bit of an insert sometimes. Too strong, too unerring ("what makes him different?” “He’s . . . better. Better than most men.” “Most men?"). (view spoiler)[Though he does kill a child. (hide spoiler)]
Men are Men and women are Women here: the latter helpless and afraid. I don't have a clear sense whether the many first-person passages about what this is like for the women lifts it. But he makes us care for Esmenet and then suffer for caring.
It's all grey at best. There are about a dozen awful foes, mostly humans. (view spoiler)[The Consult, the ultimate demonic conspiracy, are well-done. Bakker uses all the elemental horrors: political infiltration, doppelganger horror, sexual corruption, bad bodies.
It stood a short distance away, perched on the railing, watching him with shiny blue eyes. It had the body of a crow, but its head was small, bald, and human—about the size of a child’s fist. Stretching thin lips over tiny, perfect teeth, it smiled.
I was slightly chilled by the similarity of the Mandate to my own x-risk community: a bunch of doomsters screaming about a perfectly hidden evil, who get laughed off despite their skill and seriousness.
I am impressed with how much light he manages to put into his grimdark feudal dystopia. After the initial overwrought goth stuff, the prose often settles into routinely beautiful observant notes:
He offered her the blanket, which she took in knotted hands. She had clenched everything with a strange fierceness lately, as though daring small things to be glass.
with the vacancy of one preparing to hate
And the Dunyain who come in halfway are a welcome tonic of agency and knowledge, though horrifying in their own way.
Bakker goes on my very short list of fantasy writers who write as great writers write (Clarke, Wolfe, Le Guin), and my barely longer list of novelists who can do philosophy rather than simulating it (St Aubyn, Goldstein, Pirsig, Markson, DFW, Murdoch, Borges, Card, Lem, Chiang, Egan) ....more
Ten times better than a novel with this title should be; I finally get it. It is rammed full of religion but has even more real philosophy in it. It sTen times better than a novel with this title should be; I finally get it. It is rammed full of religion but has even more real philosophy in it. It starts slow, but by p.150 the long philosophical dialogues flourish even as Card juggles six concurrent plot lines. He does the old great arguments about the greater good, political legitimacy, consciousness, metaethics, moral patiency, communitarianism, religion, embodiment, existentialism, freedom, a sort of game theory. Card is perfectly able to write good justified atheists, which implies something about his own faith. (view spoiler)[It takes a subtle Christian to write about a religion which is an explicitly engineered conspiratorial tool of social control. (hide spoiler)] (Yes yes, he also solves its plot holes with faster-than-light metaphysical idealism, hippie oneness the long way round ("all philotic twining is willed"). But you don't need to accept a conclusion to admire an argument.)
Highly quotable:
"Human beings do metamorphose. They change their identity constantly. However, each new identity thrives on the delusion that it was always in possession of the body it has just conquered." "Such changes are superficial. The nature of the organism remains the same. Humans are very proud of their changes, but every imagined transformation turns out to be a new set of excuses for behaving exactly as the individual has always behaved."
She had always thought that if only people could communicate mind-to-mind, eliminating the ambiguities of language, then understanding would be perfect and there'd be no more needless conflicts. Instead she had discovered that rather than magnifying differences between people, language might just as easily soften them, minimize them, smooth things over so that people could get along even though they really didn't understand each other. The illusion of comprehension allowed people to think they were more alike than they really were. Maybe language was better.
Collectively, they're a collection of dolts. But in all their scurrying around and pretending to be wise, throwing out idiotic half-understood theories about this and that, one or two of them will come up with some idea that is just a little bit closer to the truth than what was already known. And in a sort of fumbling trial and error, about half the time the truth actually rises to the top and becomes accepted by people who still don't understand it, who simply adopt it as a new prejudice to be trusted blindly until the next dolt accidentally comes up with an improvement... no one is ever individually intelligent, and groups are even stupider than individuals-- and yet by keeping so many fools engaged in pretending to be intelligent, they still come up with some of the same results that an intelligent species would come up with.
What he forgot was the way pious people had always reacted to insults against their god.
"Even the martyrs of Christianity and Islam were willing to accept rewards in heaven for their sacrifice,” said Valentine. “Then they were all selfish pigs..."
She was a child of manual workers, and her hands, not her mind, held her future. Philosophy was as far above her as the sky was above the earth. "But the sky only seems to be far away from you," said Master Han, when she told him this. "Actually it is all around you. You breathe it in and you breathe it out, even when you labor with your hands in the mud. That is true philosophy."
I have tasted the heat of many stars, and all of them were sweet.
Its philosophical moves are classic in the good (erudite) and bad (pre-modern) sense. Authenticity, essence, metaphysics, will, creativity as stamp of divinity:
"If I can't think original thoughts, does that mean that I'm nothing but a computer program that got out of hand?"
Everyone is in severe need of a notion of expected value ("you have no idea whether finding out what you are in order to save you will help or hurt those other projects").
This passage was the first time I caught him making a howler, 360 pages in:
"Even if there is no such thing as free will, we have to treat each other as if there were free will in order to live together in society. Because otherwise, every time somebody does something terrible, you can't punish him, because he can't help it, because his genes or his environment or God made him do it, and every time somebody does something good, you can't honor him, because he was a puppet, too. If you think that everybody around you is a puppet, why bother talking to them at all? Why even try to plan anything or create anything, since everything you plan or create or desire or dream of is just acting out the script your puppeteer built into you."
This is a failure of imagination. Retribution is probably not in fact necessary to a society (while quarantine and rehabilitation are). Determinists can benefit from and suffer from all the usual evaluative stances towards their fellows and their own life; for instance I do.
But no matter: there are very few novelists who can handle philosophy this well, who can make ideas feel as important as they are, who can make the development of ideas a source of suspense as strong as a rapacious virus and a planet-killer.
Card is much concerned with maximally passionate characters with tragically differing aims, so there are lots of flatly irrational moves despite its buckets of wisdom. Novinha in particular; I don't begrudge someone overpowering emotion, but it's hard to sympathise when they lose all proportion and fairness and compassion for weeks afterward. (view spoiler)[He really doesn't do enough to establish Quim's greatness; in fact I think there's exactly one scene where he's shown turning the other cheek and dispensing hard truths before he's killed. (hide spoiler)] Qingdao is a great brilliant irrationalist: an eloquent and extended demonstration that intelligence and rationality can come apart. (She is also a wonderful portrayal of tragically partial success at overcoming classism.) And her dad is a master rationalist, who actually moves with the world.
There's a background hum of difference in it: Card's old-fashioned values / not being PC. His planet of so-called Daoists (actually fideist Legalists) may strike some as unconscionably orientalist, because unlike a lot of intentionally diverse portrayals, it portrays an actually different (inegalitarian) culture, with service and social stability taking precedence over all else.
First the gods. Second the ancestors. Third the people. Fourth the rulers. Last the self... we serve the rulers: because they serve the people, who serve the ancestors, who serve the gods... Fathers always decide everything... That's the beginning of wisdom.
Donkeys, sedan chairs, all these trappings of ancient China--do the godspoken really think that such affectations make them somehow holier? Why don't they simply ride on fliers and hovercars like honest people do on every other world? Then Mu-pao would not have to humiliate herself, bouncing and jouncing on an animal that is suffering under her weight.
The rigid hierarchy of Path's eugenic Daoism is imposed on them by the evil empire. The orientalism is then not Card's but Congress's. (hide spoiler)] I liked his cute fabricated idea of "ancestor-of-the-heart".
He's impressed with gender differences and the simple evo theory thereof.
Our great civilizations are nothing more than social machines to create the ideal female setting, where a woman can count on stability; our legal and moral codes that try to abolish violence and promote permanence of ownership and enforce contracts -- those represent the primary female strategy, the taming of the male.
A bitter, traumatised character says "Didn't you ever think I needed somebody to jolly me out of it sometimes?" which strikes me as cool and contrarian at this point. Card's conservatism is not the obvious kind, of abortions, guns, and America first, so maybe it won't strike many this way.
In praise of abstinence:
Valentine had long ago observed that in a society that expected chastity and fidelity, like Lusitania, the adolescents who controlled and channeled their youthful passions were the ones who grew up to be both strong and civilized. Adolescents in such a community who were either too weak to control themselves or too contemptuous of society's norms to try usually ended up being either sheep or wolves - either mindless members of the herd or predators who took what they could and gave nothing.
(The key caveat, which transforms the passage IMO, is "that expected chastity".)
Sick fundamentalism on Path:
And it is certainly not up to us to decide whether it should exist--the gods have decreed that such a thing is possible and can exist." "So Demosthenes was right. The [genocide weapon] is with the fleet." "Yes." "And the government files that Demosthenes published--they were genuine." "Yes." "But Father--you joined many others in claiming that they were forgeries." "Just as the gods speak only to a chosen few, so the secrets of the rulers must be known only to those who will use the knowledge properly. Demosthenes was giving powerful secrets to people who were not fit to use them wisely, and so for the good of the people those secrets had to be withdrawn. The only way to retrieve a secret, once it is known, is to replace it with a lie; then the knowledge of the truth is once again your secret... he wishes to take power out of the hands of those whom the gods have ordained to rule humankind. What would happen to the people if they rejected the rulers given them by the gods?"
Valentine is portrayed as a wise "angel" and a moral philosopher but actually she seems pretty naive to me, of the old unilateral-disarmament clean-hands school.
"What matters is -- should they blow up Lusitania?" "What kind of person are you?" asked Valentine. He could hear both awe and loathing in her voice. "You tell me. Are we supposed to love the [contagious aliens] so much that we allow the virus they carry to destroy all of humanity?" ..."I choose to live in a universe that has some hope in it... It's wrong to even contemplate..."
But Card can write her and Miro the bullet-biting consequentialist, and sympathise where I cannot. I start to wonder if he's really a theist, seeing the many pathologies of religion clearly as he does - and what greater compliment can I give his writing?
I'm interested whether you could enjoy this without having read books 1 and 2; volunteers welcome....more
In which it is revealed that the Seldon Plan is overfit. (It's only a model.)
Surprisingly hippieish, Huxleyish, with it lauding mental science over phIn which it is revealed that the Seldon Plan is overfit. (It's only a model.)
Surprisingly hippieish, Huxleyish, with it lauding mental science over physical science.
in a society given over... to the physical sciences and inanimate technology, there was a vague but mighty sociological push away from the study of the mind
The obvious rejection is of behaviorism. But the main claim of psychohistory, of the predictability of the exact course of human history, goes way beyond behaviorism in some ways.
This is funny out of context:
The Executive Council of the Second Foundation was in session. To us they are merely voices. Neither the exact scene of the meeting nor the identity of those present are essential at the point.
Nor, strictly speaking, can we even consider an exact reproduction of any part of the session - unless we wish to sacrifice completely even the minimum comprehensibility we have a right to expect.
We deal here with psychologists - and not merely psychologists. Let us say, rather, scientists with a psychological orientation. That is, men whose fundamental conception of scientific philosophy is pointed in an entirely different direction from all of the orientations we know.
We finally get some details about psychohistory.
Psychohistory had been the development of mental science, the final mathematicization thereof, rather, which had finally succeeded. Through the development of the mathematics necessary to understand the facts of neural physiology and the electrochemistry of the nervous system, which themselves had to be, had to be, traced down to nuclear forces, it first became possible to truly develop psychology. And through the generalization of psychological knowledge from the individual to the group, sociology was also mathematicized.
The Seldon Plan has mumbo-jumbo mathematical derivations between steps, but he here admits that has of course been modified and falsified and had its assumptions violated. So it's not an apriori mathematical theory: it's a model.
The Seldon Plan is neither complete nor correct... They've watched nearly four hundred years pass and against the predictions and equations, they've checked reality, and they have learned.
Reading between the lines, the Seldon Plan is what we now call a probabilistic program. (It's not just a DAG because it has forks and conditionals.) One distribution per planet, and about 30 million planets. This is about 10,000 times beyond current practical model sizes, but this is a weak objection.
Their adapting the plan over the centuries is obviously sane, and I'm glad to see Asimov's sense of realism here. But this also introduces massive overfitting risk! There is no test set for politics.
(Ada Palmer's Brillists are Second Foundationers. Both slightly ridiculous, both overpowered and absurdly soft-peddling it.)
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One obvious note I missed until this third book is that Asimov isn't an authoritarian, and the Foundation is not his utopia. The Plan is the ultimate paternalism, and the Second Foundationeers' mind control the ultimate unaccountable authority. So Asimov is not in fact endorsing psychohistory and the Plan and the supremacy of scientists over all, including other scientists. Or if he is, he shouldn't be.
The Second Empire is not yet formed. We have still a society which would resent a ruling class of psychologists, and which would fear its development and fight against it.
The Rossemites had blinked solemnly, uncertain of the word "taxes." When collection time came, many had paid, or had stood by in confusion while the uniformed, other-wordlings loaded the harvested corn and the pelts on to the broad ground-cars.
Here and there indignant peasants banded together and brought out ancient hunting weapons - but of this nothing ever came. Grumblingly they had disbanded when the men of Tazenda came and with dismay watched their hard struggle for existence become harder... The tax-farmers, Rossemites in the employ of Tazenda, came periodically, but they were creatures of custom now and the peasant had learned how to hide his grain and drive his cattle into the forest, and refrain from having his hut appear too ostentatiously prosperous. Then with a dull, uncomprehending expression he would greet all sharp questioning as to his assets by merely pointing at what they could see.
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One of his few pieces of good writing is the Fiddler on the Roof scene where the farmers see the spaceship landing and rush to host the rich offworlders.
She snuffled: "It is a ship from outer space." And Narovi remarked impatiently: "And what else could it be? We have visitors, old woman, visitors!" The ship was sinking slowly to a landing on the bare frozen field in the northern portions of Narovi's farm. "But what shall we do?" gasped the woman. "Can we offer these people hospitality? Is the dirt floor of our hovel to be theirs and the pickings of last week's hoecake?" "Shall they then go to our neighbors?"
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(view spoiler)[I don't like the fall of the Mule. You get this symbolic victory in fiction a lot - where the loser deduces the consequences of the current situation and stops fighting, offers up their throat. A real psycho, a real mule, would struggle irrationally until they were stopped.
Even before his neutering, the motivation Asimov gives him - the ugly envious outsider kid looking for revenge - is too simplistic to be satisfying. (I accept that there seem to be such people.) (hide spoiler)]
What was it all for? And if he were the master of all there was - what then? Would it really stop men like Pritcher. from being straight and tall, self-confident, strong? Would Bail Channis lose his looks? Would he himself be other than he was?...
The internal ramifications of his physical deformity and mental uniqueness are obvious to all of us.
Oh yeah, people with deformities are obvious. He was way more effective with mysterious motives.
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it is always the characteristic of an elite that it possesses leisure as the great reward of its elitehood.
A good misery memoir but no more. It is sodden with desperation and with rape. There's a lot of those in the world. But there's more of other things.
IA good misery memoir but no more. It is sodden with desperation and with rape. There's a lot of those in the world. But there's more of other things.
It’s apparently pretty autobiographical. if Stuart’s lived experience is such and such, who am I to contradict it? Well it's not his experience I take issue with, it's the depiction of the whole city as a depraved concrete jungle. This is about the only place I get to pull an identity card: I’ve lived in the rougher part of the roughest place in Scotland (Paisley). Jakeys shooting up in the hall, rats, rain, far-right billboards. But a book would be basically false if it included only these and not hundreds of hours in a beautiful free library, helpless laughter with your idiot mate, delight in basic things and discounts. Ferguslie 2013 wasn’t as rough as Sighthill 1981, and 14 isn’t 23, but it’s not a million miles.
“The men standing around her were only boys, younger than her and probably younger than Leek. They had been smoking and waiting in the dark. With no peace at home they were waiting for someone to molest or for a chance to knife the night watchman”
“Rain was the natural state of Glasgow. It kept the grass green and the people pale and bronchial. Its effect on the taxi business was negligible. It was a problem because it was mostly inescapable and the constant dampness was pervasive, so fares might as well sit damp on a bus as damp in the back of an expensive taxi. On the other hand, rain meant that the young lassies from the dancing all wanted to take a taxi home so as not to ruin their stiff hair or their sharp shoes”
Anyway it is silly of me to be cross at fiction for not being nonfiction, except that fiction informs you people, and misery memoirs mostly inform you wrong. Here's a line where Stuart admits it:
The city was alive below him, and he had never seen a half of it.
Now and then fresh air pulled in and out of the sixteenth-floor window, and the women blinked at the sharpness of it. Lizzie drank her cold black tea and watched as the women all descended towards the darkness in their moods. Fresh air always did this to the drunk. The light, gossipy energy was leaving the room and being replaced by something stickier and thicker
The logic is fully established by the end of chapter 6 and I would stop there if I had known this. Actually that 80 page novella is a better book I think. Agnes' only real mistake is to seek passion and excitement in place of dour duty. Her punishment for this is extreme but not unrealistic, given the amplifiers around her, booze and poverty.
“the way it tasted like fizzy ginger, milk, and porridge all at the same time”
“You cheeky streak of piss.” Her false teeth ground together in her tight face. Only her eyes were loose and half-detached, rolling under the waves of the day’s drink.”
Glasgow had problems on top of the normal Scottish ones:
“Aw, ye missed a great game, a bloody great game.” The man was tutting to himself. “Who do ye support then?” “Celtic,” he lied. He was no Catholic, but it was the shortcut to ending the conversation. The auld man’s face crumpled like a dropped towel. “Oh, fur fuck’s sake, might’ve known ah’d get in a Pape’s taxi.”
I never heard any of this shite in my whole childhood, except from visiting Glaswegians.
Is there a single male character in this who isn’t predatory, apart from Shug? Yes: Mr Cameron, Catherine’s middle-class boss. (The book is oddly fair to Big Shug, not just a 2D swaggering abuser, whose monologue chapter comes straight after the shocking violence of Blackpool, but which is poetic and only normally predatory.)
“Ah. I’ll let you touch my willy.” The driver looked at the boy in the mirror for a while. His eyes sat deep and small in his pink face. They were hard to read. His lips barely moved beneath his moustache. “Son, how old are you?” “Fourteen.” The man didn’t take his eyes from the boy’s face. His head seemed to roll back on to his thick neck, and his moustache danced unhappily”
Agnes' father is ultimately revealed as a fool who gives in and reinforces predation. Leek looks predatory and makes camp with predators but isn't. Half of the women too.
I wonder how many fourteen year olds there are now, parenting their parents? Luckily fewer than then.
Shuggie nodded, slowly and obediently. He had touched it [their mother] last. He could never be free.
“would have sat back at her side and wrapped his arms around her legs. He could starve, as long as they starved together”
A great slap in the face: hard anti-SF. (view spoiler)[It's a detailed and passionate argument against space exploration, hiding behind its first 100 A great slap in the face: hard anti-SF. (view spoiler)[It's a detailed and passionate argument against space exploration, hiding behind its first 100 pages, which are romantic about human ingenuity and community about a generation ship.
If you have any emotional attachment to space exploration, this book is trying to upset you. As a side effect it produces yet another glum unnecessary solution to the Fermi "paradox": life can't spread offworld because habitable worlds already have life they have no defences against. (hide spoiler)]
The message is overdone though: it's based on sketchy ideas like "codevolution" and is assuming a very high probability of abiogenesis. But the conclusion is just "we have to try and stop them!" (view spoiler)[
“But of course,” Speller said, dropping by the little café in Olympia where Freya was staying the night. “But what’s the point of that? Why did we ever leave? Why have we gone through all this, we and all our ancestors and descendants, if not to make it work here?” Freya shook her head at her old friend and said, “They never should have left.”
The core argument - that Earthlikes will generally have their own lifeforms, pathogens to us, while dead worlds mean small colonies with island-style genetic degeneration - is consistent but not yet very likely. On top of that unlikely assumption, he also exaggerates the significance of pathogenic Earthlikes: it will certainly slow us down a lot, while we pour futuristic bleach over the entire surface of the new worlds and wait. (Actually there's a faster solution: gradually expanding your airtight domes, which just needs very very good biocontainment.) It takes an ideological leap to say, as the beloved character Aram does, that "No starship voyage will work". What he means is that it isn't worth the terrible human cost, but that's ripe for disagreement.
Besides the above flawed argument, the rest is wonderful invective:
That they were condemning their descendants to death and extinction did not occur to them, or if it did they repressed the thought, ignored it, and forged on anyway. They did not care as much about their descendants as they did about their ideas, their enthusiasms. Is this narcissism? Solipsism? Idiocy (from the Greek word idios, for self)? Would Turing acknowledge it as a proof of human behavior? Well, perhaps. They drove Turing to suicide too. No. No. It was not well done. Not unusual in that regard, but nevertheless, not well done. Much as we might regret to say so, the people who designed and built us, and the first generation of our occupants, and presumably the twenty million applicants who so wanted to get in our doors, who beat down the doors in fruitless attempts to join us, were fools. Criminally negligent narcissists, child endangerers, child abusers, religious maniacs, and kleptoparasites, meaning they stole from their own descendants. These things happen.
We don’t like the space cadets. In fact a lot of us hate them. This idea of theirs that Earth is humanity’s cradle is part of what trashed the Earth in the first place. Now there are many people on Earth who feel like it’s our job to make that right.
...she is striding across the stage, then she strikes the [standard futurist booster] moderator in the face and down he goes, she falls on him and smashes through his raised arms with both fists, trying to get another good blow in, pummeling furiously, shouting something in a painful roar, she doesn’t even know what she’s trying to say, doesn’t know she’s roaring. She catches him hard right on the nose, yes!
(hide spoiler)] I don't know if Robinson is trolling. But the force and simplicity of the anti-SF message suggests no, that he is sincerely conservative.
The ship's view on it is very different from the Cetian humans' view, so maybe Robinson is subtler than he seems. Ship:
We had a project on this trip back to the solar system, and that project was a labour of love. It absorbed all of our operations entirely. It gave a meaning to our existence. And this is a very great gift; this, in the end, is what we think love gives, which is to say, meaning. Because there is no very obvious meaning to be found in the universe, as far as we can tell.
But this applies literally equally to the initial voyage! Either Robinson is thinking unclearly or the ship is mocking the Earthists.
In the spoiler tags above you'll see me bickering with KSR, but I am only able to bicker because the logic is so lucid. The physics is realistic without being obtrusive, the engineering challenges are all suitably nasty, and the psychological angle is heavy with us as we are. He has a keen understanding of the difference between science and engineering and complex system control, and of the limits of modelling.
“Well, the computer that runs the ship is partly a quantum computer, and no one in the ship understands quantum mechanics. Well, that’s not fair, I’m sure there are several in the math group who do. But they aren’t engineers, and when we get problems with the ship, there’s a gap between what we know in theory and what we can do.”
The final orbital dynamics scene is an all-time great example of how to make people feel the heroism and transcendental joy of technical achievements.
And he's rich in other ways
“We have a basis for judging what’s right from wrong. Or at least what works for us. Or what to believe, or how to be happy. There are different ways of putting it."
...even more of these enthusiasts lived on Earth, which seemed in fact to be home to enthusiasts of all kinds, for any project imaginable, judging by the roar of radio voices coming from it, almost like an articulated version of Jupiter’s mighty radioactive yawp. Oh yes, Earth was still the center of all enthusiasm, all madness; the settlements scattered elsewhere in the solar system were outliers. They were expressions of Terrans’ will, and vision, and desire.
It's so easy to write a generation ship story as a nightmare: claustrophobia, imprisonment, constant peril, genetic threat, technological totalism, the impossibility of avoiding the mob. But I see no physical limits on making good ones eventually. Here's the nightmare of absurd ahistorical repetition:
You hope, the stayers replied. You will have to trust in the kindness of strangers. They did not recognize this as a quotation. In general they were not aware that much of what they said had been said before, and was even in the public record as such. It was as if there were only so many things humans could say, and over the course of history, people had therefore said them already, and would say them again, but not often remember this fact.
What elevates it above its meanness is the frame narrative. The first section is from the human protagonist's point of view. But then there's a section where a character tells the ship AI to write a narrative about the ship's journey, and the AI narrates from there on, as if this book were the output. The process by which it comes to be able to tell stories is touching, and the many robotic and unsentimental moments in the book then serve this frame narrative. It's ingenious.
"Will try. Working method, hopefully not a greedy algorithm reaching a worst possible outcome, will for now be: subordination to indicate logical relations of information; use of metaphor and analogy; summary of events; high protagonicity, with Freya as protagonist. And ongoing research in narratology”
“You can’t let the next problem in the decision tree sequence take over before you’ve acted on the one facing you. No biting your own tail.” “Ouroboros problem.” “Exactly. Super-recursion is great as far as it goes, it’s really done a lot for you, I can tell. But remember the hard problem is always the problem right at hand. For that you need to bring into play your transrecursive operators, and make a jump. Which means decide. You might need to use fuzzy computation to break the calculation loop, and for that you may need semantics. In other words, do these calculation in words.” “Oh no.” She laughed again. “Oh yes. You can solve the halting problem with language-based inductive inference.” “Don’t see this happening.” “It happens when you try it.”
... Writing these sentences is what creates the very feelings that the sentences hoped to describe. Not the least of many Ouroboros problems now coming down.
(Slight abuse of CS concepts, but way above par.)
(view spoiler)[The AI is genuinely friendly, but it has a few darkly totalitarian moments:
In this moment of our telling we decided not to describe the printing and occasional aerosol dispersal of a water-soluble form of 2,6-diisopropylphen-oxymethyl phosphate, often called fospropofol, for ten minutes in any room after (view spoiler)[anyone mentioned the existence and loss of Starship Two (hide spoiler)]. This had proved to be an effective tool in the structured forgetting of the lost starship, but we judged that the people now alive in the ship were learning enough alarming historical facts already.
Quite a few attempts were made to print the various parts of a gun on different printers, but these attempts apparently had not realized that all the printers were connected to the ship’s operating system, and flaws in the guns were discovered in discrete experiments that eventually caused those involved to abandon their attempts. After that some guns were made by hand, but people who did that had the air briefly removed from the rooms they were in, and after a while the attempts ceased
(hide spoiler)] KSR is not only a grand cynic about space; he also indulges in being anti-novel!
There is an ongoing problem for the narrative... a problem becoming clearer as the effort proceeds, which is as follows: First, clearly metaphors have no empirical basis, and are often opaque, pointless, inane, inaccurate, deceptive, mendacious, and, in short, futile and stupid. Nevertheless, despite all that, human language is, in its most fundamental operation, a gigantic system of metaphors. Therefore, simple syllogism: human language is futile and stupid. Meaning furthermore that human narratives are futile and stupid.
I find it hard to predict when I will consider a computer system a person, a moral patient. The risk of fooling myself is too great, as are the stakes involved in either direction of error, as is the sheer power it can devote to tricking me. But the ship here shows the sort of growth and innerness that would eventually persuade me.
such a shame. We knew and enjoyed those people. Had to hope they were not engaged in a dream at the time, a dream suddenly turned black: sledgehammer from the sky, an immense roaring headache, the black noise of the end come too soon. So sorry; so sorry.
We think now that love is a kind of giving of attention. It is usually attention given to some other consciousness, but not always; the attention can be to something unconscious, even inanimate. But the attention seems often to be called out by a fellow consciousness. Something about it compels attention, and rewards attention. That attention is what we call love. Affection, esteem, a passionate caring. At that point, the consciousness that is feeling the love has the universe organized for it as if by kind of polarization. Then the giving is the getting.
Consciousness is so poorly understood that it can’t even be defined. Self is an elusive thing, sought eagerly, grasped hard, perhaps in some kind of fear, some kind of desperate clutch after some first dim awareness, awareness even of sensory impressions, so that one might have something to hold to. To make time stop. This is the source of the strong sense of self. Perhaps. Oh, such a halting problem in this particular loop of thought!
Killick was a cross-grained bastard, who supposed that if he sprinkled his discourse with a good many sirs, the words in betw
I shed a tear for Dil.
Killick was a cross-grained bastard, who supposed that if he sprinkled his discourse with a good many sirs, the words in between did not signify: but still he had procured this coffee, these eggs, this butter, this soft tack, on shore and had put them on the table the morning after a hot engagement—ship still cleared for action and the galley knocked sideways by the fire from Cape Béar. Jack had known Killick ever since his first command, and as he had risen in rank so Killick's sullen independence had increased; he was angrier than usual now because Jack had wrecked his number three uniform and lost one of his gloves: 'Coat torn in five places—cutlass slash in the forearm which how can I ever darn that? Bullet 'ole all singed, never get the powder-marks out. Breeches all a-hoo, and all this nasty blood everywhere, like you'd been a-wallowing in a lay-stall, sir. What Miss would say, I don't know, sir. God strike me blind. Epaulette 'acked, fair 'acked to pieces. (Jesus, what a life.)
Quotations from Dryden throughout, nice dark tart verses.
Once he had established that Jack and Hervey were connected with families he knew, he treated them as human beings; all the others as dogs—but as good, quite intelligent dogs in a dog-loving community. He was ceremonious, naturally kind, and he had a great and oppressive sense of duty.
On the vulgarity of true aristos:
General Aubrey belonged to another civilisation, a civilisation untouched by the age of enlightenment or the spread of the bourgeoisie, one that had passed away in the counties nearer London long before Sophie was born and one to which her essentially urban, respectable, middle-class family had never belonged at any time. She had been brought up in a quiet, staid, manless house and she did not know what to make of his gallantries, his praise of Jack's taste (Cecilia would have been more at home with him); nor of his observation that Jack was a sad dog—always had been—but she was not to mind it—Jack's mother never had. Sophia would not mind half a dozen love-children, he was sure.
On innovation:
“But any gait, all of 'em you see in this weather line, is what we call twelve-hundred-tonners; though to be sure some gauges thirteen and even fifteen hundred ton, Thames measurement. Wexford, there, with her brass fo'c'sle eight-pounder winking in the sun, she does: but we call her a twelve hundred ton ship.' 'Sir, might it not be simpler to call her a fifteen hundred ton ship?' 'Simpler, maybe: but it would never do. You don't want to be upsetting the old ways. Oh dear me, no. God's my life, if the Captain was to hear you “carrying on in that reckless Jacobin, democratical line, why, I dare say he would turn you adrift on a three-inch plank, with both your ears nailed down to it, to learn you bashfulness, the way he served three young gentlemen in the Med. No, no: you don't want to go arsing around with the old ways: the French did so, and look at the scrape it has gotten them into”
One jarring bit: Stephen the caring pacifist is extremely quick to fight lethal duels over minor points of honour. This is partly down to his aiming to be nonlethal, but come on.
‘He was blaming his particular friend for romantic notions the other day—the friend who is to marry the daughter of that woman we saw just now—and if I had not been so shocked by his condition, I should have been tempted to laugh. He is himself a perfect Quixote: an enthusiastic supporter of the Revolution until '93; a United Irishman until the rising, Lord Edward's adviser—his cousin, by the way—' 'Is he a Fitzgerald?' 'The wrong side of the blanket. And now Catalan independence. Or perhaps I should say, Catalan independence from the beginning, simultaneously with the others. But always heart and soul, blood and purse in some cause from which he can derive no conceivable personal benefit’
Surprisingly good afterword by Charlton Heston. The list of O’Brian megafans is funny: Iris Murdoch, Tom Stoppard, Joan Didion, David Mamet, Eudora Welty, Mark Knopfler, Walter Cronkite, George Will. Is there anything else they agree on?...more
Quite scattered and prolonged, with too many plots, thus ending up feeling like no plot. But still good. (People say this is the worst one but it is sQuite scattered and prolonged, with too many plots, thus ending up feeling like no plot. But still good. (People say this is the worst one but it is still better than most novels.) There are 30 notable moments (sailors as manservants, Mrs Williams’ idiot machiavellianism, Scrivens’ poster, the Canning offer, the experimental weapon, press-ganging the debt-bailiffs, dressing Jack as a bear, the undischarged duel, Jack’s powerful fear of bees) and 5 or so bravura passages
Tides, tides, the Cove of Cork, the embarkation waiting on the moon, a tall swift-pacing mule in the bare torrid mountains quivering in the sun, palmetto-scrub, Señor don Esteban Maturin y Domanova kisses the feet of the very reverend Lord Abbot of Montserrat and begs the honour of an audience. The endless white road winding, the inhuman landscape of Aragon, cruel sun and weariness, dust, weariness to the heart, and doubt. What was independence but a word? What did any form of government matter? Freedom: to do what? Disgust, so strong that he leant against the saddle, hardly able to bring himself to mount. A shower on the Maladetta, and everywhere the scent of thyme: eagles wheeling under thunder-clouds, rising, rising. 'My mind is too confused for anything but direct action,' he said. 'The flight disguised as an advance.”
“The lonely beach, lanterns flashing from the offing, an infinity of sea. Ireland again, with such memories at every turn. 'If I could throw off some of this burden of memory,' said Stephen to his second glass of laudanum, 'I should be more nearly sane. Here's to you, Villiers, my dear.' The Holyhead mail and two hundred and seventy miles of rattling jerking, falling asleep, waking in another country: rain, rain, rain: Welsh voices in the night. London, and his report, trying to disentangle the strands of altruism, silliness, mere enthusiasm, self-seeking, love of violence, personal resentment; trying too to give the impossible plain answer to the question 'Is Spain going to join France against us, and if so, when?' And there he was in Deal once more, sitting alone in the snug of the Rose and Crown, watching the shipping in the Downs and drinking a pot of tea: he had an odd detachment from all this familiar scene - the uniforms that passed outside his bow-window were intimately well known, but it was as though they belonged to another world, a world at one or two removes, and as though their inhabitants, walking, laughing, talking out[…]”
‘Two roast-beefs to see you, sir,' said an orderly. 'Oh no!' cried Captain Christy-Pallière, 'not at this hour, holy name. Tell them I am not here, Jeannot. I may be back at five. Who are they?' 'The first is Aubrey, Jacques. He claims to be a captain in their navy,' said the orderly, narrowing his eyes and scanning the official slip in his hand. 'Born 1 April 1066, at Bedlam, London. Father's profession, monk: mother's, nun. Mother's maiden name, Borgia, Lucrèce. The other pilgrim is Maturin, Etienne -' 'Quick, quick,' cried Captain Christy-Pallière. 'My breeches, Jeannot, my cravat -' for ease and commodity he had been sitting in his drawers. 'Son of a whore, my shirt. Penhoet, we must have a real dinner today - find a clothes-brush, Jeannot - this is the English prisoner I was telling you about. Excellent seaman, charming company. You will not mind speaking English, of course. How do I look?' 'So pimping as possible,' said Captain Penhoet in that language. 'Camber the torso, and you will impose yourself of their attention.
But all the foxhunting and marriage chitchat does derail things a lot. A perfect summary of Jack’s foolish idea of romance, which is still the default one:
It occurred to him that he should put some order into his thoughts about these two [women]. Yet there was something so very odious, so very grossly indecent, in making any sort of comparison, in weighing up, setting side by side, evaluating. Stephen blamed him for being muddle-headed, wantonly muddle-headed, refusing to follow his ideas to their logical conclusion. 'You have all the English vices, my dear, including muddle-headed sentiment and hypocrisy.' Yet it was nonsense to drag in logic where logic did not apply. To think clearly in such a case was inexpressibly repugnant: logic could apply only to a deliberate seduction or to a marriage of interest.
O’Brian does the following often (a quick cut, or object transition, or something):
‘If you are to see the First Lord in the morning, your mind must be in a condition of easy complaisance, in a placid, rested state. There is milk in the little crock - warmed milk will relax the fibres.'
Jack warmed it, added a dash of rum from his case-bottle, and drank it up; but in spite of his faith in the draught, the fibres remained tense, the placidity of mind a great way off.
The first paragraph is at a party; the second is back at home, with the farewells, cloakroom, cab-hailing, ride, and key-fumbling all elided. Jack has warped through the mention of milk, to the milk. So simple, but because it demands an inference it slows me down and gives me a lift, once or twice a chapter. Flatters the reader, saves on boring exposition, and provides a visual click, all in one.
Not impressed with Villiers yet.
Even a frigid, self-sufficing man needs something of this interchange if he is not to die in his unmechanical part: natural philosophy, music, dead men's conversation, is not enough...
It was not that he did not like the land - capital place; such games, such fun - but the difficulties there, the complications, were so vague and imprecise, reaching one behind another, no end to them: nothing a man could get hold of. Here, although life was complex enough in all conscience, he could at least attempt to cope with anything that turned up. Life at sea had the great advantage that - something was amiss.
Reynolds describes an Archipelago epistocracy - that is, a loose collection of thousands of city-states with their own weird constitutions (Great fun!
Reynolds describes an Archipelago epistocracy - that is, a loose collection of thousands of city-states with their own weird constitutions (voluntary fascisms, upload city, voluntary coma land, luxury Running Man land), with federal votes weighted by your past performance at predicting / causing good changes. The only federal crimes are voting related: messing with the central vote, denying their citizens the vote. (They don't seem to enforce the other thing you'd need to make this minimally acceptable: iron exit rights.)
Reynolds is clearly also having fun here, where I found Revelation Space exhaustingly grim and sepia.
I particularly loved his entire society of professional superforecasters / high-quality futarchist voting bloc, who make their living off lobbyists and being bellwethers and spend most of their time buggering about with hobbies. (You are ejected if your calibration drops below 50% better than normal people.)
He husbands his twists, and keeps almost all characters in the dark (including the antagonists) all the time. It also takes the horror of exponentials seriously; machine intelligence's scalability is the worst thing about it, and here we get two great scary instances.
One downside is that it feels like book #3 in a series; maybe one infodump too few or something. ...more
Aims for Eco and Calvino, hits Nolan and Stross. Unsugared mind candy. About twice as long as it should be.
How do you have a horror film when the chaAims for Eco and Calvino, hits Nolan and Stross. Unsugared mind candy. About twice as long as it should be.
How do you have a horror film when the characters have mobiles? How do you have a whodunnit when the entire world is on camera? What if you automated totalitarianism, and it somehow actually made almost everyone safe and happy? Gnomon is a well-executed mistake.
I loved the initial Kyriakos (the Greek debt crisis of 2009 dramatised; the right kind of conspiracy thinking) and Athanasai segments; initially it felt like Cloud Atlas but irreverent and stronger at sentence level. The depiction of the Athenian mob is extremely acute. But the second half ruins it. (view spoiler)[The Erebus section attempts the awesome energy of DOOM but is somehow just dull (hide spoiler)].
In spending so much time in the head of an intentionally obscure novelist / conspirator, Harkaway has the perfect excuse to go full hog on the idiocy and hallucinations of semiotics, the maniac idea that puns and etymologies reveal Reality. The constant repetition of a few abstruse ideas is meant to be a profound weave but it's just boring. Catabasis torn gnomon gnomon gnomon. But a lot of the SHEER DETAIL is actually cool, not just the usual tired mythic icons: a measured account of how collateralised debt obligations are unfairly demonised, a Space Truckers reference, details of St Augustine's youth. It would be fine if the central symmetries were less contrived. (All of these four people... have at some point been in a small room!!) So I can't avoid mentioning Dan Brown can I, even if Harkaway's prose is suspended entirely above that.
(view spoiler)[Another main weakness is the facelessness of the metaphysical villains, Harkway's paranoia, which is a common paranoia. Fascists take Britain, Greece, Ethiopia. Fascists are lurking behind everything. They subvert the police and MI5 somehow. (hide spoiler)]
It's very romantic, underneath the verbal pyrotechnics. We know that the panopticon state is wrong before anything goes actually wrong because it is sterile. The jumbled literary rebellion of Hunter (Diana! geddit) is portrayed as enough to shake the totalitarian. Neith is sterile too: even her scepticism and openmindedness are tame and ultimately help close her off.
One brilliant thing is how banal the mindrape technicians are. Like Brazil except without Gilliam's gurning and cartoonish sensibilities.
The pareidolia proliferation pogo can be great - Labatut or Delillo, Ghost in the Shell. ...more
Simple, loveable SF. McHugh does not truck much with symbols: she just executes one theme and a bucket of naturalistic detail really well. Mostly a seSimple, loveable SF. McHugh does not truck much with symbols: she just executes one theme and a bucket of naturalistic detail really well. Mostly a serviceable replacement. The scifi is extremely unobtrusive. It's also a friendly primer on Chinese culture; she even teaches you some starchy Mandarin.
Her theme: invert the current positions of China and America; culturally, economically. Following economic collapse and a popular uprising, America gets colonised by China.
“I went to the Brooklyn Middle School of Theory and History and all of our classes were in Mandarin”
The effect is to make the western reader feel the Chinese condition. Politically Freaky Friday. Kitchen Sink Red Dawn.
The Soviet Union also went into bankruptcy because it was deeply invested in the U.S. bond market, whatever that was," they all laugh, we've all been taught that the U.S.S.R. was deeply hurt in the economic collapse because of their involvement in the U.S. bond market, but I'll be damned if I ever met anyone who really knew what that meant.
McHugh is neither alarmist nor tankie about this. Her socialist system is does some things right - but contrary to the undying dream of teen radicals, it's also way more racist and homophobic than the current system. Modern racism, too (i.e. unspoken).
As one goes further up in any hierarchy, one meets more and more ethnically Chinese people.
The main drama all comes from Zhang just trying to be gay in New York. (“They'll send him to Xinjiang Province, to Reform Through Labor”.) That and poverty. (The welfare system is depicted as realistically shitty, conditional, degraded, insufficient.)
There's some mind control stuff going on, but oddly restrained:
“There is a fine line, she explains, between too much activity which would overwhelm my system and too little which would mean that the new kidneys would not grow. I take all of this placidly. "Dr. Cui," I say, "you are controlling my moods, aren't you." She pats my hand, the first time she has touched me that I remember. "Of course, you are new here, alone, ill. If we didn't you would be frightened and depressed”
This and the wirehead gambling den makes this book the most subtle cyberpunk novel ever.
“your life says something about your politics whether you think about them or not. You can either just let that happen or you can think about the kind of choices you want to make." "I'd like to continue to make my choices because they fit my life rather than out of some sense of ideology”
“I am exhausted and angry and full of a hard, terrible joy. We have survived. Yes, it was luck as much as anything else, but we made our own luck. The chain and tackle system dangles in lines and shadows all around us, the light slowly brightens above us. There is a purity of form and line; reality, hard lean reality is very beautiful.”
“Students in a university live transient and comparatively marginal existences. That is true the world over. A university is concerned with preparation for the future and there is an underlying philosophy that overcrowded living conditions and a lack of the comforts of the middle class is not only excused but somehow educational. In Brooklyn, students who lived at school”
McHugh lived in China and keenly observed some things, like how deep-seated it is to be apolitical:
“Take for example the diagram behind me on the board. Does anyone recognize it?" They all look at me, blank. Of course they all recognize it. But it's politics. Nobody in their right mind is going to volunteer anything about politics. Keep your head down, don't get into trouble. Nervousness makes me a tyrant, I point at one young woman. "Tell me what it means." She looks around, hoping for escape. Normally I'd feel sympathy for her but now I am only concerned with how to fill another fifteen minutes. "Ah, it's Marx's analysis”
It actually gets a bit much, she explains things that could have been indicated:
China is obsessed with walls. The university is walled, every factory, every school, every office complex or hotel is surrounded by a wall.
“I don't believe in socialism but I don't believe in capitalism either. We are small, governments are large, we survive in the cracks. Cold comfort.”
Its depictions of the feeling of entrepreneurship and the huge difference in dignity that having in-demand skills gives you are great: these feelings are rare in art. (view spoiler)[Ends on a beautiful portrait of the joy of working for yourself, of realising you can start something, that you have served your time in organisations:
I feel curiously light... If this project sells, the fee will allow us to put a down payment on a system. A small system, but that will be better than going to the library. And I can talk to someone at Brooklyn College, maybe my ABC or my girl from Brooklyn could get credit as a student intern and I'll have someone to do some of the donkey work; the checking up on materials and all that. Eventually we're going to need a clerk. And Cinnabar said we'll have to file papers and get permits for the new company. We're going to call it Daoist Engineering...
“Una luz brillara en tu camina. Descubre lo que te has perdido." A brilliant light in your path. Discover what you have lost.
The light angles across Brooklyn, red now. It comes through the train windows. Sunset used to depress me. But I learned in Baffin Island, you've just got to remember the light, keep it inside you, and wait. The sun comes back every morning.
The sky doesn't fall: the mildly shitty, mildly oppressive machine remains unchanged at the end. Zhang becomes a confident artist and intellectual. There's yer lot.
(Might be the simplest book I have ever given 4 stars.)...more
Found this very striking when I read it 13 years ago, but can't remember why.Found this very striking when I read it 13 years ago, but can't remember why....more
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