When I was maybe halfway through this book, I wrote this elsewhere:
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It’s funny reading “classic” William Gibson now because he basiWhen I was maybe halfway through this book, I wrote this elsewhere:
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It’s funny reading “classic” William Gibson now because he basically imagined a version of the internet that was much less life-changing than the actual internet.
"There will be instant electronic full VR communication but there will be no communities or subcultures in it, people will still just be friends in real life and then talk on the (video) phone sometimes. Using the internet is sort of like playing a video game on psychedelic drugs, and it it is mainly used as a substitute for drugs, or for Crimes. Being good at this weird game has replaced actual technical skill so the ‘technical’ people involved in the Crimes are not nerds, they are edgy adrenaline junkies who wouldn’t be out of place in a bank heist story. Everyone uses information technology but it works flawlessly all the time so there is no reorganization of society where people who like ‘boring’ technical details can now provide a newly valuable service. The story could effortlessly be rewritten as urban fantasy where ‘the matrix’ is some dreamtime accessed through magic, and the result could be set at any point in the 20th century without changing anything."
It’s not just that it’s anachronistic, it’s that he didn’t actually imagine any social change (for the most part).
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Having finished the book, that still sums up my reaction to it. It is essentially a generic noir story with some fantasy elements, onto which computer-themed wallpaper has been grafted. The one important change in social structure that Gibson imagines is the increased influence of powerful corporations, but this makes little functional difference; the characters who do dangerous jobs for corporations might as well be doing those jobs for governments, for all the difference it makes. Gibson imagines a world where cyber-security is important, but his world is one that couldn't accommodate Edward Snowden; the people who deal with security here are not tech geeks but macho adrenaline junkies, heist wheelmen with computer-themed makeovers.
I guess there is nothing wrong with a generic noir story. What makes this book frustrating is the intimation that it is something more. In hindsight, it's easy to see that it isn't. Gibson almost studiously avoids introducing real deviations from the noir template. Computer hacking is described so impressionistically that it bears no connection to real-world computing whatsoever -- it could be effortlessly rewritten as magic in a fantasy setting.
This renders one of the core elements of the book's plot largely pointless. Entities presenting themselves as Haitian Voodoo gods have appeared in the matrix, and there are arguments between those who believe that these are "really" the gods they say they are, and those that believe they are "merely" artificial intelligences pretending to be gods. However, the book's notion of "artificial intelligence" is already entirely fantastical and unconstrained by any information about real-world computing, so the difference is moot from the reader's perspective. Overall there is a complete sense that Gibson's choices of scenery have no consequences whatsoever. It makes no difference whether something is a "god" or an "AI," whether a character is "jacking into the matrix" as opposed to "casting a spell to enter the dreamtime." It makes no difference that Gibson has chosen a futuristic "look" for his noir story, because in the end it's just a noir story.
Near the end of the book it is mentioned that one character has resistors braided into her hair, which seems like a perfect summary of the weight technology has (i.e. doesn't have) in this book. In a different genre those resistors would be something else, but in any case they are non-functioning parts, used only for aesthetic value. Technology is non-functionally "tacked onto" this book like those resistors.
I remember being very impressed with Gibson's prose when I read Neuromancer at age 18. Either Gibson declined a lot between that book and this one, or I'm no longer as easily impressed by competent prose in plot-driven genre stories anymore (the latter seems more likely). The only way to determine which is the case would be to re-read Neuromancer, but I'm not eager to do that at this point.
One star is too harsh a rating for a competent if totally unremarkable genre story, but Gibson pretends to do so much more, and that's frustrating. He's pretentious, in a much more direct sense of the term than the kind of authors who more commonly get slammed with it. So this book gets one star for being so much less than it pretends to be....more
Why would I need to talk about length in a review of this novel, which -- at around 400 pages -- is decidedly medium-sFirst, a few words about length.
Why would I need to talk about length in a review of this novel, which -- at around 400 pages -- is decidedly medium-sized? Because, for me, medium-sized books are the riskiest ones. I'm a slow reader. Some people might read a book like Use of Weapons in a few days; for me it takes more like a few weeks. When I pick up such a book I know it will accompany numerous subway rides, morning cups of coffee, and pre-bedtime half-hours. There's a nontrivial investment of time there, and with that investment comes risk and the possibility of regret.
Long books are different, because long books are long for everyone. The playing field is leveled. An author writing a long book knows that any ordinary reader is going to be making the sort of investment I described in the last paragraph, and feels (or should feel) a responsibility to make that investment worthwhile. Whether or not the destination is interesting, the journey must be, because your reader is going to spend many hours, of their own free will, making that journey.
Without that sense of responsibility -- without unusual length -- there's nothing to stop an author from writing an uninteresting journey that is putatively justified by its destination. Books that are largely reducible to their premises, to their central plot twists, to their gimmicks. This is one of the reasons I don't read many short stories -- they often feel reducible in this way. But at least a short story is short enough that it isn't much of an investment for a slow reader like me (though even then I often find myself wishing short stories were even shorter than they are!). A medium-sized book, a 400-page-or-so book, with the same problem is just exasperating. I'm never going to get those hours back.
You can probably see where this is going. Use of Weapons was, for me, a pretty extreme case of "an uninteresting journey that is putatively justified by its destination." It doesn't have much of a plot. Much of the book consists of unrelated military episodes, taking place in different wars on different planets, none of which really matter to the reader. The one thing stringing the reader along -- and it is clearly, exasperatingly intended to string the reader along -- is The Chair. See, the main character associates chairs with a ~mysterious, dark event~ in his past, something so dark he can't bring himself to think about it. So dark he can't even bear to look at chairs in the present day. When he sleeps in a hotel and the hotel room has a chair in it, he removes it. What could be so bad about a chair? What could the ~mysterious, dark event~ possibly be??? Oh, dear reader, wouldn't you like to know?
I should probably have stopped reading halfway through when it became clear that I wasn't actually interested in the (non-)plot or in any of the characters. But no: I had to know about The Chair. I couldn't just look up spoilers on the internet. I had to see if the big reveal would make it all worth it. I should have already learned my lesson: it never does....more
This belongs to the "post-singularity" sub-genre of science fiction. "The singularity" was originallyThere Will Be Invisibility Lotion For Ugly Lovers
This belongs to the "post-singularity" sub-genre of science fiction. "The singularity" was originally a name for a conceivable point in the future beyond which science fiction writers cannot extrapolate. Basically, the idea is that if we come to understand the human mind well enough to improve it through technology, and in particular our improvements make them better at the cognitive task of improving minds, then they'll be able to make even better minds, which in turn could be able to make even better ones, and so forth in a feedback loop of increasing intelligence. Once this process starts up, the enhanced-human experience will quickly diverge from the ordinary human experience in ways that are -- basically by definition -- impossible for us to predict or perhaps even understand. So you can't write stories about what it will be like to live after the singularity.
Of course, once someone makes a proclamation like that, people are going to want to try to square the circle. So now it's become quite common for people to write science fiction in which human or human-like minds can be "uploaded" into software and casually modified and improved and redesigned for various tasks. Of course, the problem of the singularity is still there. How would a vastly more capable mind experience life? One approach to this problem would be to try to convey the very ineffability of this experience by using fractured, confusing, difficult writing. But for cultural reasons -- SF loves its "transparent prose" -- this approach has not been widely followed. (Actually, if anyone knows of any good examples of this approach, I'd love to hear about them.) The more common approach is, alas, to simply ignore the problem.
So, for instance, in The Quantum Thief, there are lots of cool post-human technologies, but human culture seems to have been stuck in a time capsule ever since 2010 A.D. People on Mars have a technological privacy system called "gevulot" that mediates their interactions -- just like on Facebook, you can control who sees what, so that only certain people can see your face, and others can access some of your memories at will (cool!) -- and the female lead, Mieli, has a psychic link to the human-level mind of her sentient spaceship, Perhonen (cool!). But what do Mieli and Perhonen talk about?
He is flirting with you, Perhonen says. Oh my god. He so is.
Of course he isn't. He has no face. Mieli feels a tickle that tells her that the tzaddik is scanning her. Nothing that will penetrate the camouflage layers beneath her gevulot, but it serves as another reminder that the natives have more than just bows and arrows.
Neither do I, and that has never stopped me.
Never mind. What do I do? I can't tap into the thief's feed without him scanning me.
He's a do-gooder. Ask him for help. Stick to your cover, silly girl. Just try being nice for a change. (114)
I'm not sure I can put into words just how weird this is. Every moment of Perhonen's dialogue -- not just in this exchange -- makes her out to be a chatty twenty-something woman who could have stepped out of a 20th-century sitcom. She talks freely about "flirting" and in fact flirts with some of the male characters despite the fact that -- I don't how to put this without making it sound incredibly silly, which in fact it is -- she is a spaceship. As she says, she doesn't have a face -- her body is "a butterfly-like spaceship with glittering wings." Wouldn't that change your experience of life, just a bit? There are one or two nods in the book to the idea of ship-human romance, but, um, how does that even . . . work?
And then we have the fact that after the singularity, when you can remake the stuff of Mind at will, people are still talking like rom-com characters from the present day. You mean romance isn't going to be a little more interesting when our minds have been turned into machine software and can remold and upgrade each other? Elsewhere, someone calls Perhonen a "beautiful ship" and she responds: "Thank you, but I'm not just a pretty face." The joke covers a fundamental absurdity -- if minds can inhabit spaceships as easily as human bodies, why do they still talk (jokingly) in human-centric terms like "pretty face," rather than actually changing the way they think about the relation between mind and body? Why isn't there a language of beauty that actually encompasses the various forms that sentience can now take?
I can accept cheesy dialogue like the above from Doctor Who aliens, but come on. This is supposed to be "hard science fiction." The author blurb mentions Rajaniemi's "several advanced degrees in mathematics and physics" as though to say, this guy actually knows what he's talking about, unlike your average sci-fi bullshitter. Maybe he does when it comes to certain of his ideas about physics and cryptography, but that's where the plausibility ends. This future is as "hard" as melted cheese.
(While I'm on the topic of hardness, here's a description of a technique used by mind-pirates to upload their targets' brains: "You infect the target with a virus that makes their neurons sensitive to yellow light. Then you stimulate the brain with lasers for hours, capture the firing patterns, and train a black box function to emulate them." Excuse me? Given the number of possible "firing patterns" and their non-negligible duration, wouldn't that take, like, thousands or millions of years or something? During which time the brain is of course changing in response to all this stimulation, like brains do, so you're really getting a blended-together snapshot of a bunch of different brains? And then you get a giant look-up table of "firing patterns" -- which will take what, a galaxy's worth of computer memory? And what the fuck is a "black box function"? Some sort of artificial neural net? But the training would take forever! What the hell is this shit? Someone get Rajaniemi a few more advanced science degrees, stat!)
Um, anyway. There are plenty of other examples of Rajaniemi's refusal to imagine actual cultural development. There are all the flirty/"badass" remarks the characters sling back and forth, which mostly sound like they're from bad TV shows. A character expresses delight that Perhonen is handy with "pop culture references," as though there will be such a thing as pop culture when humanity has colonized the whole solar system and has fractured into numerous tiers and types of minds. There's the one single subculture that Rajaniemi actually describes in detail, which has grown over the course of centuries out of an MMORPG guild, and now consists of people who act like 21st-century nerds out of cultural tradition and go on "raids" with actual flesh-and-blood monsters they refer to as "epic mounts." The scenes involving these people are hilarious, but of course this is a huge cop-out: references to 21st-century culture free Rajaniemi from having to imagine anything new.
Okay, okay. I get it. Rajaniemi isn't interested in writing a sensitive evocation of future cultures, he's interested in writing a fun detective-vs.-mastermind story. But he fails at that too, for the opposite reason: everything is too different. Rajaniemi tries pretty hard to disorient the reader with lots of futuristic concepts and terminology, and I approve of this in the abstract, but it really doesn't work well with the kind of story he's telling. To enjoy such a story, I need to be able to follow the detective's thoughts and appreciate the mastermind's cleverness. But Rajaniemi's technologies are too vaguely described to ever make the rules clear, so that understanding never coalesces. People are constantly doing fiddly little things with each other's gevulot, and performing semi-incomprehensible actions that are described with lots of words like "Sobornost tech" and "q-dots" and "pseudomatter" and "cognitive rights management software," and eventually it is made clear to the reader that a given action is supposed to be a crucial insight or a clever move, but it's never really clear why. The experience of reading about these technologies is like that of a computer ignoramus listening to a lecture about computer security: basic gists like "the bad guys are gaining control of the system" may get across, but you still don't know exactly what is possible and what is impossible, what is audacious and what is routine, what is clever and what is foolish. As a result, despite taking place in the far future, it is less, not more, dazzling than an ordinary detective story.
I almost gave this three stars because the last 70 pages or so were really cool and made me curious about what would happen in the sequel. But serial fiction always does that kind of thing, and I'm sure if I read the sequel it would be bad in the same way, right up until its end which would try its hardest to get me to buy the third one. I'm just confused about why this book got so much hype. I'm interested in science fiction, and I definitely like some subset of it, but sometimes I don't understand the judgments made by the genre's culture. Is this really one of the best things anyone's done with science fiction lately? I sure hope not....more
My first Banks experience. It was OK. Some cool concepts, writing wasn't awful, the left-wing space utopia was fun, the plot had some twists. But but My first Banks experience. It was OK. Some cool concepts, writing wasn't awful, the left-wing space utopia was fun, the plot had some twists. But but but.
Banks, though he seems like a cosmopolitan guy who's aware of the tropes he's using and their limitations, still commits the basic sin that makes so much science fiction so much less enjoyable to me than it could be. The sin: blandness. Blandness of writing, characterization, worldbuilding, humor -- everything. The problem, and it's not one with an easy or obvious solution, is how do you present an alien world -- with alien biology, technology, culture -- to a reader without being unintelligible or repulsive? I know of two ways to handle this well. The first is to just ditch the idea of true alienness entirely, make the characters basically human, and focus on making them as vividly and enjoyably human as possible, subordinating all superficially alien traits to that goal. A lot of comedic or light-hearted SF takes this path, and in that context it's hard to object to. (Zaphod Beeblebrox, Karkat Vantas, and the Doctor are basically just people -- but what people they are!) The second approach is to truly recreate the experience of being suddenly immersed in another culture. This necessarily involves all sorts of deliberate confusion, including linguistic confusion -- a culture other than one's own (esp. one at a different level of technological development from one's own) is going to mentally carve apart nature at places one is not used to, and that has to be reflected in the way the text uses its own terminology.
The best exemplar of this second approach I've encountered is John Clute's Appleseed, a dizzying linguistic assault that leaves the reader wondering, almost once per paragraph, things like: "is there a difference between 'flesh sapients' and 'flesh sophonts'?" or "what the hell is a 'breakfast head"?" or "wait, have the 'Caduceus wars' ever been mentioned before?" I read Appleseed a few months ago, and was unsure how to feel about it -- I enjoyed it but by the end I was getting tired of not knowing what Clute was going on about. But in retrospect, I think that's simply the way it had to be -- Clute was trying to depict a situation so truly alien that it shouldn't have been comprehensible after a mere 400 pages of contact.
Where was I? The Player of Games. Don't want to go on and on about this because the point is very simple. Banks doesn't take either of the two paths I just described. Like a lot of science fiction, he's at the low point in the middle: his characters are alien enough that they're not allow to talk in the terms used by Banks' own (20th century western) culture, but Banks can't bring himself to create a different set of terms, as that would risk Clute-style incomprehensibility. As a result, everything has a bland, schematic quality. The dialogue all feels kind of abstract and perfunctory, lacking the clutter of real (or even of conventionally-fictional) speech. The humor, lacking any bank of shared references, is weightless and generic. There are machine intelligences in Banks' world, but they do not differ in any interesting way from people, and the imperialist aliens encountered by the book's protagonist -- despite having three sexes and basing their entire society around an elaborate board game -- ultimately seem indistinguishable from a generic earth empire. The science fiction elements feel like stage clothing; the scenes about aliens and drones would not be meaningfully different if they were just about people, and the scenes about alien board games would not be meaningfully different if they were about chess.
That alien empire is a particularly telling example. Here is how the empire's use of that board game is initially presented to us:
The game of Azad is used not so much to determine which person will rule, but which tendency within the empire's ruling class will have the upper hand, which branch of economic theory will be followed, which creeds will be recognized within the religious apparat, and which political policies will be followed. . . . The idea, you see, is that Azad is so complex, so subtle, so flexible and so demanding that it is as precise and comprehensive a model of life as it is possible to construct. Whoever succeeds at the game succeeds in life; the same qualities are required in each to ensure dominance.
Sounds fascinating, doesn't it? But when we actually meet the aliens, there is no indication that the game pervades their thinking about anything but the game itself. They use it to determine who rules, but their speech and thinking about everything outside the game does not seem noticeably colored by the game itself (whose structure is, perhaps wisely, left mostly to the reader's imagination). The same thing goes for their three sexes. The third "apex" sex dominates over males and females, but Banks decides to refer to the apices using male pronouns to make things easier to read for humans from patriarchal societies, and as a result the differences between apices and males is indistinguishable from the difference between male aristocrats and male grunts in a human society. Everything that makes the empire interesting also creates the potential for confusion and distance on the reader's part, and Banks is so committed to being understood -- to "storytelling" in the sense of just getting the plot points across -- that he can't allow those interesting features to persist.
(Of course, one interpretation is that the empire is a satire of modern earth society, and that Azad and the three sexes are just there to distract us so we don't realize we're looking at ourselves in a mirror. But if it's a satire, its substance comes down to "we're obsessed with power and judge people according to arbitrary standards." Which is . . . true, I guess, but it's so broad and obvious a critique that I don't think it justifies the ruse.)
I've heard that many of the other Culture books have more alienness in them than this one, so I still intend to read some of the others at some point. For now, I prefer too much alienness to too little, and Clute to Banks....more
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