Smithology

The first you know of a mouse in the house is a blur of movement in the corner of your eye as you wonder aimlessly about the house. A few times, you think it is just a reflection but then these peripheral events start to take shape and with a feeling of dread your suspicions coalesce. Still you tell no one, not even your wife, especially not your wife. Maybe the mouse is just a one-off, an accidental interloper from the overgrown outside. But you start to keep an eye out for it.

One night, you are collapsed on the couch in a haze of inexplicable fatigue. Like life is somehow draining you of all creativity: reducing you, compressing your moments into jobs and tasks that must be done. Then, that now familiar blur: along the bottom of the wall and around the corner, out of sight. You jump up and creep quickly into the next room but it has vanished. Still you tell no-one. No need to make a fuss, you can deal with this quietly.

You don’t notice yourself, but the next day, a coworker points out that you have been whistling all day: three blind mice.

Again, late one night, you are upstairs just looking out the window for no reason. You were thinking about something or other but then, for some un-measured time, you have been just staring as the clouds and stars compete for the small patch of sky outside your window. And there is the mouse. It’s head appears first and then quickly withdraws. You swivel your eyes but dare not move. Then it appears from the slightly ajar door of the linen press and scurries quickly away. You follow on tip-toes but it vanishes again.

In the morning, you remember the incident but you start to doubt. Did I really see a mouse or was I just very tired, perhaps I dozed off and dreamed it. There are no signs of the mouse: no nibbled food, no droppings, no nest or smell. Well, there is that partly eaten muesli bar you found on the floor of the pantry once but apart from that…

It’s a week later and you haven’t seen the mouse. You’ve been sitting up at night, quietly by the window, waiting. Does the mouse really exist? You’re pretty sure that it does yet you still haven’t told anyone. You have a connection now, you and the mouse, an understanding or sorts and more than that, as you sit in the dark silence waiting, the thoughts of your mind unravel and peel away, drifting out the window and filling the sky. You think about your ancestors, staring at the same sky, looking up from their own occupations and activities of survival. The mouse doesn’t come tonight, but you don’t mind, you know you will see it again and the thought comforts you.

Uncategorized writing

Let’s fast forward history by about twenty years. America and it’s allies have won¹ what is now known as the Faith Wars and religion has been expunged from all matters of state by laws that prohibit recognition of any religion at all, it’s not illegal, just completely unsupported by government. The Israel / Palestine issue is kind-of solved by the fact that the territory is now uninhabitable due to radioactivity and global warming has been circumvented by the deployment of giant space mirrors in low orbit that block out a proportion of the sunlight. The space mirrors are serviced by two enormous space elevators.

This is the setting in which we find Detective Inspector Adam Ferguson and his sentient robot partner Skulk as they investigate the murder of a Catholic Priest and quickly find themselves submerged in a conspiracy that threatens to reignite tensions that were thought to have been laid to rest.

The book is The Night Sessions by Ken Macleod and is the second near future novel that he has written (the first being The Execution Channel which is really an alternative-earth-present-day but still counts as near future in the broader sense)

This is a pretty bleak and dry book by Macleod’s standards. The Execution Channel was also quite bleak. I think part of what contributes to this is that the characters are all very cerebral. When we get a look at what’s going on in their heads, it’s a lot of exposition and anxiety and not much to comfort us. The characters in The Night Sessions are not likely to inspire you or evoke feelings of admiration, the impression is of a society that grimly remembers recent war and atrocity.

Some of the main characters in this book are Christians and as a once fundamentalist leaning Christian myself, I think Macleod does a pretty good job of capturing the experience of being in a moral minority and feeling the conflict of mission and judgement. On his blog, Macleod doesn’t pull any punches when it comes to his atheism and feelings about creationists and fundamentalist Christians but this book shows a certain amount of sympathy for people of faith and must be the result of a lot of reflection on his part. He could have easily gone for the soft target and presented the Christians as mindless psycho lunatics (much as Nazi’s are often portrayed) and most of his readership would have gone along with it.

The main Christian character in the book is John Richard Campbell, a kiwi robotics engineer who works on animatronics for a creationist theme park. By making his character sympathetic, Macleod invites the atheist reader to take a walk in Christian shoes. Of course, knowing Macleod, we know that Campbell’s faith is going to take a shocking beating throughout the book and that actually makes for some great drama.

If I have one qualm about the treatment of Christianity in the book, it’s that most of the characters are pretty radical Christians in that their beliefs tend to dominate their lives. Many Christians today are not so engaged but tend to use their faith as a social vector and just subscribe to the beliefs by default without too much thought about them between Sundays (at least that is my understanding). On the other hand, Macleod points out that since the faiths have been systematically marginalised, it’s had the effect of radicalising the few remaining adherents.

Other interesting stuff in this book? Let’s talk gadgets. Apart from giant space elevators and low orbiting soletas, there’s the robots. The police robots are seven foot tall tripods (H. G. Wells style) but there are also military robots and quite a disturbing account of what it was like for these robots to accidentally become sentient on the battlefields of the faith wars. Like Halting State, there are contact lenses that project virtual overlays onto the world. It seems some corporation called ‘Ogle’ has managed to make everything in the world searchable through these lenses, e.g. OgleFace allows you to search for online information about a face you’re looking at and OgleEarth allows you to see realtime video of practically anywhere on the planet at the blink of an eye. There’s also some descriptions of a kind of virtual dance club that uses the lenses for transcendental effects.

I found the ending of this book just a little underwhelming but preferred it to the more extreme far-out endings that some books always end up in (like The Execution Channel for example). The wrap-up is pretty intellectual so you don’t feel terribly emotionally wrought by the ending but it hangs together quite well and resolves the story so I should just be happy with that.

Next cab off the rank: Saturn’s Children by Charles Stross.

¹ Apart from the fact that their economies are crippled and several major cities are radioactive holes in the ground.

Uncategorized books, ken macleod, scifi

Halting State is one extremely smart species of fun – or so says William Gibson and I agree with him. Set in near future Edinburgh, Halting State takes us on a journey into massively multiplayer online gaming, virtual economies, black nets, spies and information politics. Our unwitting tour guides are likeable and sympathetic and each of them turns out to be admirably heroic in an understated way. There’s Elaine, the legal arse kicker who’s job is a little bit like swimming in a tank full of sharks (keep moving, but not too fast), Sue the underwhelmed police woman who wishes criminals would stick to simple break and enters and not freak her out with computers and Jack the games programmer who carries a fold-up keyboard in his cargo pants and gets embarrassed when he sees someone in the real world.

These three characters (and a few other memorable jocks) are thrown together when an unprecedented bank robbery takes place: unprecedented because it occurs inside a game and the stolen goods are all game items. Seemingly just an annoyance for the game company and players: until the dead bodies start showing up.

I really enjoyed this book and it hit critical mass for me about two thirds through, after which I had to finish it in a mammoth session that saw me finishing up at 2:30am (a bit past my bedtime).

The near future aspect of the book means it is both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. The characters can remember stuff that has happened in our recent past from their childhoods yet the amount of computing power and bandwidth available to them makes their society slightly alien.

One of the well realised aspects is how much the characters rely on the Internet for information every minute. At one point Jack remarks on how nobody remembers street names anymore and how people back in the day had to remember how to get to places. For Jack, you just search for it and follow the directions or more commonly let the car take you there.

The way that the games overlay everything through use of virtual reality is also well done. Similar to William Gibson’s Virtual Light where glasses can be worn that project labels and data onto the real world view, the glasses in Halting State transform ordinary streets into game environments where virtual objects can be found and other players can be located.

Stross has a lot of fun with these ideas as he leads us through the mystery of the virtual robbery and also spends a little time on exposition of how game economies work, a little bit of cryptography and how governments can use information warfare in more subtle ways than just hacking the crap out of each other.

The end is satisfying enough even if the ultimate premise is a little bit thin or convoluted, we’ve had so much fun getting there, we don’t mind if the bad guys, or good guys who turned bad or whatever have overstretched the imagination a bit. On the other hand, as Sue remarks, if people are willing to kill each other over a few thousand dollars, what lengths would they go to for a few million?

Currently reading: The Night Sessions by Ken Macleod.

Uncategorized books, charles stross, halting state, near future