Smithology

Did a kind of drive-through book purchase at Pulp Fiction today. Steph parked the car on Adelaide St while I jumped out, dived into the shop, located Charles Stross’ Halting State and Saturns Children, also grabbed Ken Macleod The Night Sessions, paid and then back in the car less than five minutes later and we didn’t pay for parking. I can rest assured that I’ll have some enjoyable reading while I’m on the plane tomorrow. Oh BTW, I’m flying to Holland for work this week: should be fun!

Uncategorized books

I’m honoured to have been tagged by Mark Lawrence (a published author with positive press reviews) to participate in the Three True Things meme.

The rule is to post three true things you’ve read recently that are from fiction. Here are mine from recent memory:

The first is from Ozma of Oz which I think is truth on the nature of hypocrisy:

‘... it must be a great misfortune not to be alive. I’m sorry for you.’

‘Why?’ asked Tik-Tok.

‘Because you have no brains, as I have,’ said the Scarecrow.

‘Oh, yes, I have’, returned Tik-Tok. ‘I am fitted with Smith & Tin-ker’s Improved Com-bi-na-tion Steel Brains. They are what make me think. What sort of brains are you fit-ted with?’

‘I don’t know,’ admitted the Scarecrow. ‘They were given to me by the great Wizard of Oz, and I didn’t get a chance to examine them before he put them in. But they work splendidly and my conscience is very active. Have you a conscience?’

‘No,’ said Tik-Tok.

‘And no heart, I suppose?’ added the Tim Woodman, who had been listening with interest to the conversation.

‘No,’ said Tik-Tok.

‘Then,’ continued the Tim Woodman, ‘I regret to say that you are greatly inferior to my friend the Scarecrow and to myself. For we are both alive, and he has brains that do not need to be wound up, while I have an excellent heart that is continually beating in my bosom.’

‘I con-grat-u-late you,’ replied Tik-Tok.

The joke is of course that neither the Scarecrow or the Tin Woodman have real brains or a heart so their claims to superiority are baseless (the Scarecrow’s head is fitted with a handful of needles and the Tin Woodman has a heart shaped silk pillow in his chest).

My second truth comes from Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age.

“...there is an ineffable quality to some technology, described by its creators as concinnitous, or technically sweet, or a nice hack—signs that it was made with great care by one who was not merely motivated but inspired

And another from The Diamond Age because I am a goldfish and can’t remember anything except from only the most recent book I’ve read.

“To the other girls, the wall is a decorative feature, no? A pretty thing to run to and explore. But not to Nell. Nell knows what a wall is. It is a knowledge that went into her early, knowledge she doesn’t have to think about. Nell is more interested in gates than in walls. Secret hidden gates are particularly interesting,”

If I had a lot of time, I’d think harder and come up with better quotes because there really are plenty, especially in Stephenson but in all great sci-fi that is written, as William Gibson says, about the here-and-now: disguised to make us look at it afresh.

I tag Circulating Library and Goddard’s Letterboxes because they’re the only two blogs I follow that admit to ever having read a book.

Uncategorized blogging, books, neal stephenson, the diamond age, wizard of oz

I’m reading Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age and thought I’d share a little passage that really makes the book for me. It might be considered a spoiler but then again it doesn’t reveal anything that isn’t written on the back cover of the book. The fact that it appears on page 94 of 499 is testimony to Stephenson’s world building style. The plot moves very slowly for most of the book while you absorb a great deal of detail but you also feel you are exploring a new world and culture as you go which is what I enjoy about his books.

This passage is about Nell who is a four year old girl who lives with her mother, brother and her mother’s rotating boyfriends in a society that lacks for nothing except culture. Her brother has recently “obtained” a mysterious object from the rich “Vickies” who live up the hill. It has symbols in it which her brother says are called letters but there is something strange about it so Nell leaves it under the couch.

Also over the last 94 pages we’ve seen heartbreaking social conditions in which Nell lives contrasted with the lavish culture of the Neo Victorians. In this passage, we get a glimmer of what the rest of the book is going to be about as Nell begins her Pygmalion-like journey.

Oh and language warning.

“Ouch, god damn it!” Tad shouted. He looked down at the book in disbelief. “What the fuck is this?!” He wound up as if to kick it, then thought better of it, remembering he was barefoot. He picked it up and hefted it, looking straight at Nell and getting a fix on her range and azimuth. “Stupid little cunt, how many times do I have to tell you to keep your fucking shit cleaned up?!” Then he turned away from her slightly, wrapping his arm around his body, and snapped the book straight at her head like a Frisbee.

She stood watching it come toward her because it did not occur to her to get out of the way, but at the last moment the covers flew open. The pages spread apart. They all bent like feathers as they hit her in the face, and it didn’t hurt at all.

The book fell to the floor at her feet, open to an illustrated page.

The picture was of a big dark man and a little girl in a cluttered room, the man angrily flinging a book at the little girl’s head.

“Once upon a time there was a little girl named Cunt,” the book said.

“My name is Nell,” Nell said.

A tiny disturbance propagated through the grid of letters on the facing page.

“Your name’s mud if you don’t fucking clean this shit up,” Tad said. “But do it later, I want some fucking privacy for once.”

Nell’s hands were full, and so she shoved the book down the hallway and into the kids’ room with her foot. She dumped all her stuff on her mattress and then ran back and shut the door. She left her magic wand and sword nearby in case she should need them, then set Dinosaur, Duck, Peter, and Purple into bed, all in a neat line, and pulled the blanket up under their chins. “Now you go to bed, and be quiet because you are all being naughty and bothering Tad, and I’ll see you in the morning”

“Nell was putting her children to bed and decided to read them some stories,” said the book’s voice.

Nell looked at the book, which had flopped itself open again, this time to an illustration showing a girl who looked much like Nell, except that she was wearing a beautiful flowing dress and had ribbons in her hair. She was sitting next to a miniature bed with four children tucked beneath its flowered coverlet: a dinosaur, a duck, a bunny, and a baby with purple hair. The girl who looked like Nell had a book on her lap. “For some time Nell had been putting them to bed without reading to them,” the book continued, “but now the children were not so tiny anymore, and Nell decided that in order to bring them up properly, they must have bedtime stories.”

Nell picked up the book and set it on her lap

Uncategorized books, neal stephenson, the diamond age

After I finished Anathem, I still had a hankering for some Neal Stephenson so I decided to revisit Zodiac, his “eco-thriller” from 1988. Apparently Neal’s concept for the book was to write a hardboiled crime novel in contemporary times. Set in Boston, the gangsters are the Industry bosses and their favourite crime is to dump toxic chemicals into the harbour.

The protagonist Sangamon Taylor is a natural born rebel: too smart for his own good and contemptuous of a world that promotes dumb people to high places. He chooses to live outside the system, exposing toxic criminals using trial-by-press with extravagant media stunts. At the same time he has a soft spot for the little guys: the not-so-old men dying of cancer after working in chemical plants, the Vietnamese and lobster fishermen who scrape their food and livelihood from the bottom of Boston harbour. Speaking of Vietnamese, there are also lots of references to Agent Orange as Sangamon’s arch-nemesis is a family run business named Basco (fictional) who got started making the stuff for the U.S. government during the Vietnam war. They are now a major corporation based in Boston.

Things turn ugly for Sangamon when some very bad things start turning up in the harbour just as Basco’s CEO decides to run for president. Who is behind this mysterious poisoning, are there links to Basco and will Sangamon survive to find out?

One of the things that struck me about this book on the re-read is just the amount of drug use. Sangamon has a belief that all molecules bigger than just a couple or atoms are very bad so his drug of choice is Nitrous Oxide on which he binges in just about every chapter including the first page of the book. When things get really bad, he drops acid and at one point resorts to taking speed. It just seemed a bit over the top that just about everyone he meets just happily joins in on this drug use, no worries.

It’s unusual (for me) to come across a book that depicts drug use in this way. In his later book Cryptonomicon, a main character Sergeant Shaftoe develops a morphine addiction but in this habit, the negative aspects of drug use are well represented. For Sangamon, they are always a positive experience: helping him have fun and get through mundane work.

I wonder if the positive drug thing is just one of those little literary taboos that you learn to avoid if you want your books to be popular? Maybe that’s why it seems rare to see depictions of positive drug use.

Apart from this, the book suffers no ill affects from 20 years of time warp: I can imagine the whole story taking place this year except instead of listening to Pöyzen Böyzen cassettes not bad for a two umlaut band, they might have it dialed up on the iPod.

There are a couple of references to PCs running CP/M, an ancient operating system but these are in the context of referring to them as ancient so it still works – they are just implausibly ancient as I doubt that there would be any surviving media that could boot CP/M. I tried to boot a CP/M disk once at work in 1999 but the media had degraded in the filing cabinet and that was after I’d hunted through the junk-pile to find a 5.25” floppy drive.

So Zodiac holds up pretty well on re-read and has maintained its worthiness to remain on my bookshelf. Give it a read if you get a chance.

Uncategorized books, neal stephenson, scifi

Actually, I don’t think there is any such thing as a review that doesn’t reveal something about the story but let’s not be too picky ok?

Anathem is Neal Stephenson’s latest offering since “System of the World” in 2004. Since his very popular “Cryptonomicon”, Stephenson has been writing historical style fiction. In cryptonomicon, he followed characters in modern day times with parallels to those people’s ancestors in WWII. E.g. the main character, Randy is a massive nerd and it turns out his great granddaddy was also a massive nerd in WWII when they getting serious about cryptography. The Baroque Cycle (three very thick volumes) then kind of prequelled Cryptonomicon by tracing some of the same characters ancestors through the late 17th and early 18th century. (It turns out Randy’s great great great great grandaddy was a friend of Newton and Leibniz)

Anyway, Anathem breaks away from this line by taking place on another planet. Yet it still kind of fits in by dealing with the same subject mater: history on a broad scale, sociology, politics and religion and how it all affects those caught up in it. The book is set on planet Arbre which has a history roughly analogous to our own except that almost 4000 years have elapsed since our time. Notable is that in the Arbre equivalent of our near future is a period known as The Terrible Events during which civilisation collapsed. Seeing as technology played an integral role in this cataclysm, there was a movement against technological advance which led to the creation of walled communities similar to monasteries as the only place where intellectual activity could continue.

Our hero Fraa Erasmus is an avout which is the name given to one who lives in one of these communities called a concent. The book traces his journey from a small fry fraa to playing a part in saving the world from certain destruction (or at least some bad stuff). Along the way we discover many secrets of Arbres history and some of the mysteries that go on behind the walls of the concents.

As I mentioned, while the book is about aliens on another planet, it is also about our own history and spends a lot of time exploring the history of human thought through many philosophers. Many of the philosophers in Arbre’s history seem to have an equivalent in our history such as Plato (for his belief in a more pure plane of existence above our own), Descarte (for his development of Cartesian geometry) and even William of Occam who brought us Occam’s Razor (called The Steelyard in Arbre). Having studied a little philosophy I enjoyed reading through the book and vaguely recognising many of the ideas.

But the book is not just about ideas and history, all science fiction needs to have gadgets and action. On the gadget front, we get introduced to the idea of New Matter pretty early on which is where the particles in the nucleus of atoms in a substance have been somehow changed so that they have amazing properties. The avout carry a magic new matter sphere, cord and bolt (a rectangle of material) which can be made to change many properties by rubbing and twisting them certain ways. The sphere can grow and shrink and be made hard, soft and even glowing. The cord can be long and flexible or stiff, the bolt can be woolly or thin and is generally worn wrapped into a habit with a hood. Outside the concents (extramurous), technology has stalled so most of the tech resembles our own: jeejahs are basically iPhones, the Reticulum is the Internet etc… Maybe not very exciting but these technologies play a major role in the story and I don’t want to mention some of the others because it will give away the plot a little bit.

On the action side, we get a bit of martial arts courtesy of the Concent of the Ringing Vale: a group of avout who devote themselves to the study of warfare, tactics and strategy from hand to hand combat to commanding armies.

But really as I think about it, this book is not very devoted to gadgets and action, it is mostly dialogue and Erasmus’s confused attempts to make sense of what is going on. It is relationships and day to day life but not in an overblown emotional way like a soap opera. Neither is it dry and lifeless: I think Stephenson strikes the right balance of drawing the reader into the lives of the characters he’s invented so that we want to spend time reading about them and getting to know them more. I suppose it’s a mark of a good book when you feel like you’ve said good-bye to some old friends when you finish it.

But then again, this book doesn’t really finish at the end. Due to the nature of the internet and fan culture, the book has spawned a wiki where fans of the book discuss the philosophical ideas and references that appear in it.

So is the book worth reading given that it’s almost 1000 pages? Yes definitely because you will get a little introduction to philosophy and even some maths thrown in for free as well as some commentary on that nature of society and politics that hits home quite well. On top of that is an epic adventure with likeable characters and lots of interesting corners to look around.

Uncategorized anathem, books, neal stephenson, scifi

I finished reading The Marvellous Land of Oz the other day. It’s the sequel to The Wizard of Oz and I think I enjoyed it more even it was just because I wasn’t familiar with the story. So in this book all your favourite characters are back. Well all of them except your favourites: The Lion, Dorothy and Toto don’t show up but the Scarecrow and Nick Chopper the Tin Woodman are back. Instead of Dorothy, we meet Tip, a boy who lives in the care of an aspiring witch Mombi. Tip decides it’s time to clear out when he discovers Mombi cooking up a nasty brew with which she intends to do him harm. As he sets out on his way, he soon picks up an entourage of a stick man with a pumpkin head named Jack, a wooden horse and later, the scarecrow who has been dethroned from the Emerald City by an army of girls who are sick of doing all the work and have decided to have some fun for a change. Tip meets Jin Jur, the leader of the army on his way to the city. As Tip adventures onwards with the scarecrow, we meet up with the Tin Woodman again, an unusual flying creature made from a Gump’s head and some armchairs, Glinda the good witch and a charming Highly Magnified Woggle-Bug (Thoroughly Educated). We also come across many other friends from the first book such as the field mice.

As I mentioned, I enjoyed this book more than The Wizard of Oz because the enjoyment of both of the books comes from the characterisation. Being familiar with the characters in The Wizard of Oz, I didn’t enjoy discovering them so much where as the characters in The Marvellous Land of Oz were fresh and colourful. To me the two most enjoyable characters were H. M. Woggle-Bug T. E. and Jin Jur. The scariest moment was when the party become trapped in a giant nest and have to fight off the malignant birds when they come back to roost however this book seemed much gentler than the first book with no-one being squashed by a falling house or melting to death.

I haven’t experimented with reading this book whilst listening to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon but if they make a movie from it, I’ll give it a try.

Next in the series is Ozma of Oz which I think I’ll polish off before I start in on Neal Stephenson’s Anathem which I received for my birthday.

Uncategorized books, wizard of oz

A bookmark has been sticking out of the third last chapter of The Wizard of Oz for a couple of weeks now and tonight while I was patting the 7 month old (who has new top teeth BTW) to sleep I decided to finish it off.

In the introduction Frank L Baum writes about how he was intentionally writing a different kind of children’s story which wasn’t so much about moralising and bringing grotesque punishments on the disobedient as just being a fun place where a child’s mind can journey and play. Then in the first chapter, Dorothy’s house lands on and kills a wicked witch! Incidentally, the shoes are not red: they are silver.

There are a number of details where the 1939 movie differs from the book but the overall plot is the same. Dorothy and Toto befriend the scarecrow, the tin woodman and the lion as they journey to see the great wizard. When they arrive, the wizard tells them they have to kill the wicked witch of the west so they go and do that (by accident in the end) and then return only to find that the great wizard is a “great humbug”. There is a fumble where the wizard tries to get Dorothy home in a hot air balloon and ends up getting blown away. Dorothy then journeys south to see Glinda the good witch who lets her in on the secret that her shoes are actually able to transport her anywhere she wants them to with three magic steps. She walks home using the shoes power but the shoes disappear from her feet during the journey but she is happy to be home.

Apart from having been lent some sequels (thanks Catriona), I get the sense that Dorothy’s story hasn’t ended because at the start of the book we got the impression that while Dorothy was happy on the farm in Kansas, she wasn’t getting all she needed from life: i.e. she was living a relatively isolated existence and Baum describes the farm and everyone there (apart from Dorothy and Toto) as grey. Toto is described as Dorothy’s only friend. I was pretty worried for Dorothy when she got home only to be stuck back on that farm after she had seen and done so much in Oz.

Even though the book is short, it had a kind of epic feel to it more like when I read The Odyssey or books like The Hobbit or even Alice in Wonderland, what I’m trying to say is that the plot is secondary and the focus seems to be on journeying between strange little adventures in imagined places that are relatively self contained. Most fiction you read now focusses more on some problem that is being solved and has a more complex journey.

The books I just mentioned are very simple, the protagonist is on a journey trying to do just one thing. The places they visit are on the way and they visit each place in order to get to the next place. A book like The Merchant’s War has a plot that is driven by a number of characters involved in different events and tends to focus on the relationships between those characters (still with plenty of action and description of the fantastic places through which the characters move)

Anyway, once I’m finished my BSG obsession, I’ll see if I can knock over the other Oz books Catriona lent me and then I’m thinking about tackling Neal Stephenson’s Anathem

Uncategorized books, wizard of oz

The Merchants’ War is book four in Charles Stross’ Merchant Princes series which follows the adventures of Miriam, a tech journalist from Boston who discovers she is the long lost daughter of a family of world walkers who live in an alternative parallel universe which is still stuck in the medieval age.

If you haven’t read any of the books in this series, then I recommend that you skip the rest of this spoilerific review and get hold of the first books in the series and read them. If you like the idea of mixing history up like bringing machine guns into a medieval battle and a bit of sociology and collision of cultures then you’ll like these books.

Also, if you haven’t read this one yet and you care, then come back and read this when you have.

At the end of book three, Miriam zapped herself into the steam age world to escape an exploding building and book four takes Miriam deeper into the world of “New London” and steam-age Boston with all its unfamiliar and dangerous politics. Meanwhile Mike the DEA agent in over his head and his spooky friends zero in on the clan in modern America. The new King Egon wastes no time in executing plans to waste the clan in the Gruinmarkt leaving poor Duke Angbard in a spot of bother. Brill is assigned the job of bringing Miriam back to the clan while some new characters Huw and his gang discover yet another world.

I really really enjoyed this book and found it a little more satisfying than the previous one (The Clan Corporate) because it seemed to end at better place. I remember getting to the end of The Clan Corporate and going “Is that it? Are you just going to leave it all hanging like that!?” This one ends on a cliff hanger too – in the middle of a desperate battle in fact but other characters stories kind of wind up and converge a bit more nicely. I’m looking forward to the next books but hoping if Stross is going to keep the series going for many more books, that the stories can be more self contained. He does this well with the Laundry books ( Atrocity Archives and Jennifer Morgue) but I realise the story of the Clan is on a much bigger scale so it has to be told in parts.

[tags]books, charles stross, fantasy, the merchants’ war, the merchants’ war[/tags]

Uncategorized books, charles stross, fantasy, the merchant princes

I finished First Lensman a while back or should I say I finished with it because I didn’t actually read to the end, I got bored and skimmed.

The thing is that these books were written for teenage boys fifty years ago and they have dated rather fatally in terms of entertainment value. The main thing that got to me was that the bad guys were really really evil and the good guys were incorruptibly morally pure and the books just fail to build up any tension around how the characters will be changed or challenged as people. The books are pure plot and idea, the feeble attempts at portraying human relationships fall into either manly men slapping each other on the back and admiring each other’s abilities and moral fibre, men admiring young women’s pluckiness, women insisting on having adventures and then being grateful to men for being rescued when they inevitably end up tied up in the bad guy’s lair and women winking at each other as they are approached by a man. There is the occasional narrative discussion of a man grappling with being torn between going out and shooting guns with the boys or staying back and commanding the battleship.

Having said that, the scale of the writing reminds me of reading Larry Niven’s Ringworld and even Iain Bank’s Culture novels where you are required to get your head around a couple of alien cultures and their peculiar sociology, psychology and history.

[tags]first lensman, books, scifi, e e doc smith[/tags]

Uncategorized books, e e doc smith, lensman, scifi

I was just reading the happy news over at Charlie’s diary that he’s finished writing The Fuller Memorandum, the third book in the series beginning with The Atrocity Archives and The Jennifer Morgue. Which reminds me, I forgot to write up my thoughts on The Jennifer Morgue which I finished last week during the ADSL outage at our place (we were changing over to iiNet Naked ADSL so the lines were dead for a few days and the ADSL had to be killed off for a period of two weeks before that due to some insane bureaucratic rituals that Telstra has).

So The Jennifer Morgue was a great read. Pretty much everything I said about The Atrocity Archives applies. Just a fresh, exciting, funny, clever adventure / spy / fantasy novel set in a world where magic is real and it’s the government’s job to keep it a secret. I really don’t want to spoil this book too much because I think you should all just read it.

For those of you who have read The Atrocity Archives, this book is more of the same but with new villains (obviously) and just generally ramping up the fun a bit. There’s plenty to explore in the “magic is real and it’s the by-product of certain types of maths” universe(s) that Stross has created and he gives us plenty of ideas to think on in this book.

If I have one criticism: If you think too hard about the kinds of things that are being achieved with magic in this book, then it gets absurd very quickly. Yes, that’s part of the comedy but sometimes it can go too far and you might just stop trying to expect any logic at all from the book which then might make you just think “this is rubbish” and put it down. This book goes close to that line but manages not to cross it, for me at least.

Visit me on librarything

[tags]books, charles stross, the jennifer morgue[/tags]

Uncategorized books, charles stross