Smithology

I finished Isaac Asimov’s Second Foundation last night and it was great. It made reading the first two books (which I admit didn’t rock my world very hard) worthwhile and was a great culmination of the trilogy. I can see why these books are held in such high esteem. In this last book, Asimov finally starts to have some fun with the story, writes some really nice personal story lines -stories that are carried on the personalities of the characters as well as the plot. He does some nice fake outs and keeps you involved right until the end then leaves you reeling with the discoveries of the last couple of pages.

There are also, not one but two! strong female characters which goes to show that science fiction is not traditionally a boys club but also appealed to those new plucky post-world war II girls.

Second Foundation on LibraryThing

Second Foundation on Wikipedia (wikipedia is basically all spoilers by the way)

Uncategorized asimov, books, scifi

I’ve been thinking a bit more about Asimov’s writing style and why it feels dated. Some of the giveaways are the assumptions about user interfaces and electronics: closing contacts and turning great big dials. Where we would say “screen” or “display”, he says “visiplate”. He even describes a machine for calculating one’s position in the galaxy by aligning patterns of stars but in doing so reveals the analog and interactive nature of this process – one that we can’t relate to today where you just type in a few parameters on the machine and click the ‘go’ button.

Other giveaways are sociological: the virtual absence of women and for the few female characters, an assumption of gendered roles.

But there are subtle stylistic giveaways that are more felt than anything: the way the action is relatively subdued and violence is very tame, the dialogue heaviness and the “staginess” of it. The bulk of the books are taken up by dialog, often between two people at a time in a kind of staged area like an office or space ship cabin. When the characters are talking they are totally focussed on the task of communication, occasionally one might take out a pipe or cigar but never are they doing much else. In most science fiction you read today, the authors go to great lengths to avoid these scenarios – when the characters talk they are always doing something at the time that’s either somehow underscoring the emotion of the moment, like having a verbal confrontation whilst trying to fix an engine, or moving the plot forward like talking about a planet whilst configuring the ship’s computer for the FTL jump that will take them there.

Having said that, I feel like Asimov’s style actually changes as I read through the books, moving from abstract and intellectual story lines to more personal and active exposition.

Uncategorized asimov, books, scifi

I’m trying a new thing with the blog this week. I often have things I want to blog about but don’t get around to writing them because I don’t have time to really sit down and think about it. So I’ve decided to try writing much shorter posts that just unload whatever’s on my mind without too much effort to package them. Maybe I can get more momentum that way which ma result in something worth reading or at least commenting on. So here goes.

Foundation and Empire is the second book in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation saga. In it he continues the style of what seems like a collection of shorter stories, each one telling of a chapter in the history of the galaxy. The structure of the stories is pretty repetitive: two men, usually of some notable politcal position discuss galactic events and formulate plans. The action is all in the dialog: space battles are referred to but rarely described. Sometimes gadgets such as ray blasters and personal atomic protection shields are wielded but they are not the real focus.

For the first book and a half there are literally no references to any hint of the existence of women in the entire galaxy. The books take place in a completely male world. Strangely in the second half of Foundation and Empire, a female character, Bayta, is introduced who plays a key role in the rest of the book which is where I think the book really picks up and starts to feel like an actual narrative with believable characters. Everything that goes before seems like just exposition of some clever ideas.

I’m looking forward to concluding the trilogy with Second Foundation (I’m not sure if I’ll bother with the other books and prequels though)

Oh and one last thing, I’m not sure if it’s because I’m clever or because the plot device has been overused but I knew The Mule’s secret pretty much straight away (although I didn’t get what his secret power was until later on in the book)

Uncategorized asimov, books, scifi

Well I finished reading Treasure Island and it was great from beginning to end. For those who came in late, Treasure Island is THE pirate book that has influenced all pirate fiction since, written in 1883 but set maybe a hundred years earlier in the late 1700’s when pirates roamed the Caribbean with gay abandon. It’s told (mostly) from the perspective of Jim Hawkins, a boy of I guess about twelve who finds himself embroiled in a sea voyage to hunt for the treasure of a dead pirate. Of course along on this hunt are a bunch of other pirates who make life very interesting for poor Jim.

The book falls into the ‘coming of age’ format that many adventure stories follow: the hero starts off young and naive and undergoes a series of tests during which he/she develops their various virtues and gains the wisdom of experience. In this story Jim learns about the virtues of loyalty, friendship and honesty whilst seeing first hand the destructive forces of waywardness, greed and ignorance.

The captain represents discipline and his friend the doctor, honour. The pirates mostly blend together to portray drunkeness; calousness towards their enemies and each other; violence and constant fighting; and plain stupidity and ignorance from superstition to being easily fooled and manipulated by Long John Silver. Jim sees and understands all these things as the story progresses and expresses his disgust.

One of the most interesting things about this book is its forgiving stance towards Long John Silver the leader of the pirates. He is portrayed as bloodthirsty, deceptive and cunning, inspiring fear in all who know his reputation yet because of his soft spot for Jim, he seems to be forgiven much of his evil by the end of the book. It’s as if the author appeals to Silver’s piranical nature: Boys will be boys and pirates will be pirates me hardys, we have to expect a bit of lootin’ and murderin’ to get by with and it seems like the characters in the book go along with this somewhat once they have their man beat.

The other notable feature of this book is the lack of female characters. The only woman in the book is Jim’s mum who features in the first couple of chapters. Despite being forgotten early on, she displays some formidable characteristics: she runs the Admiral Bedbow hotel with just the help of her son when her husband is sick and dying and she puts the neighbouring town to shame by being the only one willing to go back and confront the pirates when they first arrive in the area. However she wusses out and faints when nasty blind Pew shows up and Jim has to hide her under a bridge. And that’s pretty much the end of any mention of women in the whole book.

As I reflect on it now, I have a lot of questions about Long John Silver and can see that he was a very complex character, far from the typical bad guy who is evil through and through that we get in a lot of lazily written stories. Perhaps this accounts for my aforementioned ambivalent treatment of him. Perhaps the author wants us to think a bit more deeply about Silver’s situation: he is a cripple and doesn’t have any birth rights that let him have respect in society, so he has had to rob and steal to get his fortune and live by his cunning and ruthlessness but he is still human. On the other hand, the “good guys” include a pompous privileged moron who has more money than sense and thinks he’s entitled to the treasure because he is somehow a better person by birth.

Uncategorized books

During my Christmas shopping last year, I came across a three-book set from Puffin Classics books called The Adventure Collection. It includes Treasure Island, Wind in the Willows and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. I thought I might give them to one of my relatives but when it came to wrapping, I couldn’t decide who would appreciate them most and ended up just keeping them for myself.

The books are paperback and feature some nice cover art which you can see here

I’m currently reading Treasure Island and thoroughly enjoying it as I knew I would. There is something about Stevenson’s writing style that is beautiful and gripping. It’s the way he describes his scenes using just a few words to evoke senses so that you feel immersed in the story. This immersion means that when the evil blind Pew is tap tap tapping ever closer to our hiding Hawkins we feel a real sense of peril. But Stevenson doesn’t over do it with melodrama, on the contrary, Hawkins’ narration seems to underplay things. As Hawkins lies stiff with fear in the bottom of an apple barrel, he simply states that he was filled with a mighty dread and dared not move (or something like that), there are no descriptions of heart beating so loudly he thought they might hear it and sweat dripping or stomach churning etc though you sort of insert all that stuff yourself because you’re right there with him.

I first encountered Stevenson’s writing when I read The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde a few years ago. I thought that with all the adaptations and retellings of this story that I might be a bit bored by it but that was not the case and if you haven’t read it, I strongly recommend it simply because it has inspired so much other literature. And after you’ve read it, go and watch Stephen Moffat’s mini-series Jekyll because it is also awesome.

In the back of my copy of Jekyll and Hyde is an incomplete story of Stevenson’s called Weir of Hermiston which is also great (but frustrating because it breaks off and you really want to know what happens)

So I’m enjoying Treasure Island (yo ho ho and a bottle of rum) which according to the preface is the prototype of all our pirate-y fiction even to this day (arrr). I feel I will be well versed in pirate lore by the time of this years talk like a pirate day.

In the meantime, I’m off to find out how little Jim Hawkins survives his sea journey with Long John Silver and his treacherous crew on board the Hispaniola. Remember, X marks the spot.

Uncategorized books, classics

After about four months I’ve finally finished crawling my way through The Algebraist by Iain M. Banks. Not that it was a bad book or particularly long – I suppose 690 pages is longer than average but more that I have been so dog tired at night with the kids staying up due to daylight savings and all the business that goes with moving interstate that I’ve only been reading an average of a couple of hours a week which is just not enough.

I’ve read a few of Iain Banks’ novels now and I remain ambivalent about his story telling. By all rights I should be really enthused: his stories have some really cool settings and memorable characters, there is humour and sometimes deeper reflection on the human condition. Yet, I never seem to click with his stories, there is a certain bleakness and coldness that always pushes me away. Maybe it’s the way he almost predictably kills off the most loveable characters just when you’re really digging them, or the way his bad guys seem to always be able to go the extra evil mile. Possibly it’s a matter of what I’m needing when I read – I’m looking for escape and mental stimulation but usually not looking to be confronted with the impartiality and inevitability of death.

But now that I’ve got that out of the way, there are some really fun aspects of The Algebraist that I’ll take away. The setting being mostly in the atmosphere of a gas giant (think Jupiter) is a challenge because the mental picture is just brownish yellowish gas, but Banks brings it to life with the floating cities, the specialised gas craft that populate it and the stars of the show: the Dwellers.

The Dwellers are big kind of floaty aliens that live in the gas giants. At first they are depicted as ancient and super advanced, living in slow time and only communicating with other species through seers whom they sponsor and train. As the book unfolds we get to know some of these Dwellers more closely and come know that there is a lot more to them than meets the eye – and that they are unexpectedly fun!

The journey into the world of the Dwellers is conducted through the main protagonist Fassin Taak. Fassin is charged with the task of finding a certain artefact amongst the Dwellers that will, if it even exists, be of immense value. At the same time a massive army led by the spectacularly evil Archimandrite Luseferous (warrior priest of the Starveling Cult of Leseum9 IV and effective ruler of one hundred and seventeen stellar systems, forty-plus inhabited planets, numerous significant artificial immobile habitats and many hundreds of thousands of civilian capital ships, Executive High Admiral of the Shroud Wing Squadron of the Four-Hundred-and-Sixty-Eighth Ambient Fleet(Det.) and once Triumvirate Rotational human/non-human Representative for the Cluster Epiphany Five at the Supreme Galactic Assembly) is approaching the Ulubis solar system (where the story takes place) bent on finding the same thing. This plot gives the story a kind of brooding race-against-time feeling as the dread lord comes closer and you can’t begin to imagine the nasty things he’s going to do when he arrives judging by the sport he engages in on the way.

During Fassin’s story we get a tour of the Ulubis system and some nice world building diversions as Banks lays out some pretty neat galactic history and galactic politics. There’s also a side story that made absolutely no sense to me and was possibly a whole other story that ended up being rolled into this novel for some reason (I’m talking about Saluus and Taince for those who’ve read the book already).

The final confrontation and wrap up of the book was pretty satisfying for me and not too over the top as these epic kinds of books often are.

I think I would have enjoyed this book a lot more if I’d read it in more concentrated doses so I could keep more of it in my head as I went. Now I am skimming bits of it I realise I forgot a lot of the stuff in the earlier chapters that are referred to towards the end.

Apart from my criticisms at the start of this post, on an overall view of things, this is a great read and worth looking at if you’re interested in getting a feel for Iain Banks before delving into his darker culture novels.

Uncategorized books, iain banks, scifi

Look, do you really want a detailed description of two sex robots going at it like a pair of bonobos on day release from celibacy camp in front of an audience of jaded aristocrats? What was that? You’ll have to speak up. I can’t quite hear you, you’ll have to try not to breathe so hard.—What are you—some kind of voyeur? Fuck Off!

I’ve finally caught up on the much talked about and slightly hyped Saturn’s Children by Charles Stross. It was listed on a Tor list of kinky scifi sex and I seem to recall seeing it mentioned elsewhere as putting the Barbarella back into scifi. Then there’s the eye-catching cover.

So is there anything more to this book than just an excuse for sex in microgravity? Well, yeah, of course! It’s Charles Stross so it’s packed full of awesome original world building and mind blowing ideas. And an excuse for sex in microgravity. But it’s very funny sex in microgravity and in fact I think Stross might have held back on where he could have gone with the robot sex gags and managed to keep things reasonably decent.

So anyway, Saturn’s Children is set in the twenty-fourth or twenty-fifth-ish century a couple of hundred years after humans mysteriously went extinct. However, in their wake is a civilisation of robots continuing to kind-of do the work of their masters – when they’re not enslaving each other and getting up to no good.

Freya Nakamachi-47 is a femmebot who sadly seems to have missed out on carrying out her primary function which was to – you know, ahem, do it with human men. Instead she roams listlessly around the solar system until she is recruited by a butler-bot and finds herself in the middle of a conspiracy of galactic proportions, fighting for her life while she tries to piece together what’s going on. Along for the ride are the memories in her sibling’s soul chip, various dwarves, a couple of mining robots, some nasty robotic dominatrixes and anime-aristocrats and countless other sentient fixtures, some of whom have unusual sex lives.

The premise for the robot sex stuff is that robot brains are electronic facsimiles of human brains, complete with many of the autonomic responses of humans. Apparently, it was the only way we could manage to manufacture anything approaching a human consciousness in a machine (seems reasonable to me). So as a result, the robots are a little bit more human than we might expect.

As you might guess, the whole thing is a little tongue-in-cheek and Stross has a lot of fun playing with the idea of horny robots but also inevitably does reflect a bit on human nature. I enjoy some of his more absurd moments like the mental image of Freya earnestly playing the bouzouki during a Hungarian folk revival.

Anyway, as usual I recommend yet another Charles Stross book. This one is a real original and very enjoyable.

Uncategorized books, charles stross, saturns children, scifi

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

What is it that gives some people to ability to rise above the crowd and do something exceptional? How come some people seem to have the power to think clearly, grasp opportunities and attract followers while others plug away for their whole lives trying to make something of themselves and never getting anywhere? Is it luck? Genetics? Education? Upbringing? A rich family?

This is the question at the heart of The Diamond Age where we follow the exploits of Nell on her Pygmalion like journey from girlhood to adulthood. Also at the heart of the story is The Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer and those who designed it: Lord Finkle McGraw, a rich and powerful equity lord and John Hackworth, an engineer with a background in the arts.

Finkle McGraw believes that subversiveness is the key. The ability to fully grasp the structures that govern ones life enough to be able to see past them and find ways around the barriers in life. This is what McGraw is getting at when he suggests that Nell has a finely honed ability to see a wall and sense where there might be a gateway through it.

The Primer is engineered to foster subversiveness using puzzles and narrative to hone problem solving skills and develop lateral thinking.

I think the book struggles to find resolution though (which is the usual criticism of Stephenson). Once Nell “graduates” from the Primer and goes out to find her fortune, her story becomes underwhelming even as a few long running threads come together with a bang, you’re left wondering who Nell really is. She seems to get lost in a bit of academic dabbling and then inadvertently has greatness thrust upon her. Hardly a great act of subverting anything at all. So maybe McGraw is wrong afterall?

A few details I noticed in this reread: Hackworth’s loyal chevaline (some kind of robotic horse) Kidnapper is pretty cool and I loved the bit where it trots out of the bushes wearing Hackworth’s moss covered bowler hat. Also in the transportation section, I’m not sure what a velocipede is. Is it like a segway? Or a leg extension walking thing? A small scooter? The idea of nano particles that weave into the brain and link in a kind of distributed human brain powered super computer went over my head the first time. I also more thoroughly enjoyed Judge Fang’s Confucian ruminations this time around.

Uncategorized books, neal stephenson, the diamond age