Championship B'tok

Edward M. Lerner's Championship B'tok is a nominee for a 2015 Hugo. The story is about an alien colony in our solar system (they are our prisoners). Everyone in the story has a scheme: the aliens want to escape their human containment, the humans are involved in various plans against each other, the aliens, and shadowy organizations. The titular game is an alien chess (with pieces possessing dynamic powers, on a mutable 3D board, etc.), with complicated strategy, which is an obvious-but-not-beaten-to-death metaphor for various situations in the story.

It was readable and interesting. Decent! My only complaint is that it seemed short, but I see now that this "novelette" is part of a larger multi-piece project from this author. So perhaps the novel-length story I would enjoy exists and includes this and is already written. This little piece is the only bit nominated for a Hugo.


This post's theme word is catawampus, "askew, crooked, diagonally positioned." Your knight is catawampus and your munitions supply is vulnerable, sir --- you are bad at playing chess and organizing defensive military installations.

Flow

Arlan Andrews, Sr.'s Flow is nominated for a 2015 Hugo award. It is short, but I tried to read it three times and couldn't get further than 1/3 of the way through it. It just does nothing for me; it doesn't pull me in, it doesn't push me away. It frontloads maybe 10 characters, all with similar names, some of which are twins of others; others are in father-son relationships. This is boring, and difficult to follow in a completely unrewarding way. The world is not interesting, and is drawn with a heavy authorial hand, as if perhaps a (metaphorical) Sharpie were the only tool available --- no shading, no light touches, no variance of style or level of description.

So: I surrender. I abandon, I bail, I won't finish this one.

I've been reading Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, and next to that sparkling gem, this is eminently ignorable dust.


This post's theme word mantissa, "an addition of little importance," or "the decimal part of a logarithm or the positive fractional part of a number." This is a mere mantissa to the Hugo nominee list.

On A Spiritual Plain

"On A Spiritual Plain" by Lou Antonelli is a short story nominee for the 2015 Hugo awards. It's a double-puppy, although it does not feature any good-old-times space military. Instead, it is the brief tale of a minister to the first human base on a planet where the spirits of the dead are consistently observable and eternally preserved after death (because of magnetism!).

Short stories are: short. I have read that authors try to make every scene, every utterance, every sentence in a short story serve two or even three purposes, to squeeze meaning and significance into such a small package. Good short stories stay with the reader, unpacking in the mind, a long while after the action of reading is complete.

This story doesn't do that. It was very straightforward, it presented no special challenges, it was not particularly memorable. I'm not sure it even had a conflict, nevermind a resolution. I will not be thinking about it for a long time, or even for much longer than it takes to post this.

Also, he misstated the golden ratio. Others have noted this. It is certainly not rational.


This post's theme word is betide, "to happen" (intransitive). Ghosts and magnets betide.

The Day the World Turned Upside Down

This novella by Thomas Olde Heuvelt is one of the 2015 Hugo nominees. It's a cute little story where the title reveals everything you need to know about the heavy-handed metaphor for how the narrator feels after his girlfriend dumps him. And also, gravity reverses so that everything (except rivers and ponds) falls up off the surface of the earth and into space. But really, the narrator focuses mostly on how he feels so bad.

It's just not a very interesting story; I know that he can write a good story, because The Ink Readers of Doi Saket was delightful: charming, with an engaging voice and great characters and interesting things happening. This story does not have those features.

Because of the Puppy-storm around the 2015 Hugos, I considered the story in the light of Social Justice Warrior ideas. I might otherwise have let it slide, have written it off as not as good as The Ink Readers... and left it there. Instead, I thought about how this story focuses on the narrator's feelings, how he constantly expresses the totality of his love for his ex-girlfriend, but when he finally sees her, he describes her only in physical terms and thinks only of his outrage that she would have sex with someone else after dumping him. It's all about his hurt feelings and her body. We don't even get to learn many details about their relationship, so the reader is left to fill in details (how did they meet? what did they like doing together? how did they emotionally connect to each other? did they have good conversations?) around the one-sided authorial depiction of the ex-girlfriend as a body which has hurt this man.

Yech.


This post's theme word is cicatrize, "to heal or become healed by forming a scar." The narrator needed to psychologically cicatrize and explore the new and fascinating world around him.

They said it couldn't be done...

Today an attempt to add more [e]books to my magical futuristic pocket-library, and I received the shocking message that the device is full. No more space! Egads! I thought it couldn't be done; it turns out it can be done.

FYI, I have read just over 50% of the books, according to my digital library software. Each time I add  n fresh and unread books to my magical device, my library informs me that I have read n/2 books since the last influx.

On the one hand, I am losing ground! On the other hand, the two numbers are only a factor of 2 apart. So I am holding steady, at a ratio that theoretically-minded people like myself usually regard as "basically equal" (precluding a catastrophic reading event: my stranding on a desert island with unlimited USB recharging capabilities OR my unexpected and sudden inheritance of a digital copy of the Library of Congress).


This post's theme word is vade mecum, "a book for ready reference, such as a manual or guidebook." My magical ereader is the vade mecum to fulfill my childhood fantasies.

Tigerman

Nick Harkaway's Tigerman is a slippery book --- by turns a colonial narrative, a modern action-adventure, and a heart-rending account of the emotional trials of parenthood. This unusual combination meant that my reading brain swung wildly from one framework (high school English class, reading Things Fall Apart, Heart of Darkness, Rudyard Kipling, Interpreter of Maladies) to another (James Bond, modern techno-spy thrillers, social media management to cause political change). I had trouble establishing preconceived notions... but that is a good thing. The opposite of a complaint. This book kept me on my readerly toes.

The focus, in limited third-person, is on Sergeant Lester Ferris, a semi-retired soldier who is the solitary remaining vestige of British colonial administrative/diplomatic/police presence on Mancreu, a fictional island in the Indian ocean, populated by "an unbothered ethnic jumble of Arab and African and Asian, with the inevitable admixture of Europeans." (p. 12) The island is slated to be nuked into oblivion in a futile attempt to prevent the dissemination of festering industrial waste dumped there by imperial Western companies. Lester fills his days with merry bumbling around (consuming tea, chatting with locals) in the usual colonial-novel style, including befriending a clever street-kid, the pub owner, the witch doctor, the spookily mysterious shaman, and other residual police/political presences on the island.

So far, so typically colonial narrative. Aging military man's body a metaphor for toxic-waste-ridden island a metaphor for the failures of Western imperialism. But every few pages there is a modern touch: a mention of Twitter, people watching YouTube, cell phones, sophisticated cryptography, weaponized drones and spy satellites able to resolve faces.[0] The effectively nameless Clever Street Kid (CSK) refers to comics  from the 50s and internet collectives (Reddit, Anonymous)  in the same breath.

The effect of these weird juxtapositions and limited third person is captivating. Lester draws big, overgeneral conclusions about the world around him[1], but is inward-turning. His internal monologue is mostly silent, and not especially self-reflective, but a dry, jolly humor [2] shows through. He usually thinks single, compact thoughts, and doesn't explain them to himself --- so that even when readers were present for his planning scenes, his later actions and motives are unexpected. Lester's mental focus is unusual to read, a truly different perspective than my own; he fixated on things I would have let slide, and completely missed obvious clues and hooks that would have absorbed all my focus.

Tigerman is full of little snide over-the-shoulder winks to the reader. Or maybe Lester is just the kind of person who continually makes such remarks to those around him (and his own internal monologue), whether they will be appreciated or not. Either way, this was a clash of expectations that I enjoyed. The head researcher describes one of her interns thusly:

"A genius. I cannot come up with enough jobs to keep him busy, so I permitted the other interns to assign him their extra work. ... He established a trading floor for basic tasks and cornered the market in coffee-making futures, and then the espresso machine very mysteriously broke down. So he is a task billionaire. He has calculated that if the others do all his chores and nothing else for seven thousand years, they will be free of the debt."  (p.107)

The book is well worth reading for these nuggets of joy. Its only off-putting feature was its conclusion, the climax and denouement, which came out of left field (although lightly foreshadowed, in retrospect) and left me unsatisfied. It felt sort of like the publisher might have snatched the manuscript out of the author's hands and declared it prematurely hatched. It seems slapdash, unfinished; it did not match the rest of the novel for polish or flair.

... or maybe I am bitter because the story turned out bitter, it did not end the way I was hoping. I admit this possibility.

This post's theme word is apopemptic, "relating to departing or leave-taking." Mancreu's existence is an extended apopemptic metaphor for all kinds of human culture.


[0] For example: "If Pippa Middleton and Megan Fox had announced their intention to marry during a live theatrical production of Fifty Shades of Grey starring Benedict Cumberbatch, and then taken off their clothes to reveal their bodies tattooed with the text of the eighth Harry Potter novel, they might just have approached this level of frenzy. But probably not, ... because not everyone liked Benedict Cumberbatch."(p. 275)

[1] These are pithy nuggets:

• "It seemed unlikely that this crime would remain mysterious for very long. There was a limited number of things you could do with four tons of fresh fish." (p. 48)
• "In America, everything was diagnosable, probably even positive traits could be treated if you wanted to get rid of them." (p. 86)
• "Serious criminals... had been transferred to prisons in Scandinavian countries where the crime rate was actually dropping so fast that the prison infrastructure was having trouble staying afloat. Denmark had been a net importer of criminals since 2011." (p.81) This one has a Neal Stephensonian flavor.

[2] For example, at a funeral they sing "some involved Legion funeral song which seemed to the Sergeant's uncertain ear for French to involve a great deal of discussion of veal sausage and the shortcomings of the Belgians." (p. 77) Or in conversation with his superiors: 

"How's your stomach for totally mendacious bilge?" the Consul had asked him. 

"Limited, sir." (p. 37)

Be still, my beating heart!

In a question-and-answer on io9, Neal Stephenson delighted me to my very core.

Icecold Davis: Any chance of revisiting the world of the Baroque Cycle? 

Neal Stephenson: I would like nothing better than to dwindle into a long retirement writing books in that vein. Maybe I will. But not now.

I have purchased three copies of each brick in the Baroque Cycle (hardcover, paperback, ebook). This comment delights!


This post's theme word is forficate, "deeply forked." Readers are entranced by the forficate plot, winding sentence structure, and delicate interweaving of plausible fiction with fascinating historical fact.

Jean le Flambeur series

Hannu Rajaniemi's Jean le Flambeur (lit: John the Big Spender or the Heavy Gambler) follows the adventures of the titular Jean, a headline-making thief of great notoriety, as he breaks out of prison, steals an assortment of things, develops friendships, double- and triple- and n-tuple-crosses everyone and their parents, and eventually (perhaps) saves all of civilization from destruction (indirectly). It's a neat trilogy, with some cool ideas, but I think it stretches on a bit too long; it would make a tight duology.

The Quantum Thief follows Jean as he escapes a very cool-sounding prison where the iterated prisoner's dilemma combines with adaptive neural learning to "teach" the prisoners to be cooperative. This is a neat idea with actual math behind it (although of course there are many equilibria aside from 100% cooperation). Then he goes to a walking robo-city on Mars where all perceptions of experiences are digitally mediated and managed by a permissions/privacy system, so for example a stranger can deny you the passive observation of the stranger's visual appearance by limiting your permissions. This is a really cool idea, short-circuited by the fact that analog cameras are not subject to the permissions system and completely subvert it. (It seems like vision should, too, except that everyone's brains are being actively edited by a vast computer system which forces perception to align with permissions.)

Lots of other cool ideas abound, but of course the privacy ones piqued my interest. The book was a merry caper, although many mysteries were revealed to be explained by mechanisms that the reader never learned about (until they were narratively necessary to explain the reveal!). This is an irksome authorial practice, but the book is so flamboyantly imagined, with futuristic details and descriptive glitter everywhere, that it gets a pass. For example, on page 193:

His workshop is a cross between a quantum physics laboratory and a horologist's workspace, full of sleek humming boxes with holodisplays hovering around them and neatly sorted piles of tiny gears and tools on wooden work surfaces.

Certain paragraphs or sentences blazed out of the book, gems of excellence and clarity. (Page 49's "Interlude: THE KING" has an outstanding opening paragraph.)

Overall I recommend the book. After finishing the last page, I realized that most of the mysteries hadn't been answered or even completely framed; there was a giant trail of breadcrumbs leading somewhere. Thus we proceed to the second novel!

The Fractal Prince follows Jean as he does some more high-octane thievery and conniving. The scene is transported to a post-uplift/apocalypse Earth, and the previous privacy/permissions technology is abandoned in favor of a system of magic, storytelling, and djinn. This is cool, although in the end it is explained away as basically a different skin over the same technology as before, so that Jean's story isn't actually jumping universes when it planet-hops. This is both enervating (an entirely new magic/technology system to explore!) and irritating (all familiarity with technology from book 1 is useless, esp. for trying to solve the caper-mysteries before the reveal).

The coolest part is that book 2 has many threads, and these threads recurse at several points. The djinn-flavor comes with a 1001-Arabian-Nights spin: stories are powerful, and narrative truth compels. This means that the way the novel unfolds influences how the characters' abilities unfold, since their puissance is directly tied to their ability to recount (in an interesting narrative) how their story has developed so far. This is a nice touch. I'd like to see more done with this. Perhaps another book following (or prequelling) the secondary characters here?

Book 2 doesn't really resolve any of the mysteries developed in book 1. It throws a couple new ones on the pile, and strongly entices you to the promise of book three of three:

The Causal Angel. This book suffered heavily from... existing. And from a lenient editor permitting it to develop John-C-Wright-Eschaton-series Syndrome, wherein the basic plot (a few paragraphs) was rolled in glue and then dipped in jargon and buzzwords, and this cycle was repeated until the conglomerate attained adequate size to justify a novel.  The interesting and true mathematical touches from book 1 are completely thrown out the window here in favor of using spiffy combinations of mathematical words in nonsense configurations. Main characters had interactions which served no purpose but to show off new, special jargon (and universes and technologies) invented by the rampaging and unsupervised kudzu-like authorial imagination. Most descriptions served no purpose. The stakes were raised so ridiculously high that the entirety of civilization was at stake, and this created no tension because of course Jean is going to pull some sneaky caper that resolves the entire thing.

The last third of the novel consists mainly of all permutations of the scene wherein two named characters meet, talk about their overarching conflict, try to cooperate while secretly scheming, then resolve their emotional baggage and say goodbye-for-all-eternity. The denouement is just a glued-on-jargon solution which magically (in heavy quotes: "technologically") hops to another universe for a stupendously oppressive deus ex machina.

Overall I don't regret reading the trilogy; I wish it had been better-managed, though, for a cleaner finish. And the driving mysteries from book 1 are never explicitly answered, so I could have stopped at book 1 (or 2) and just imagined, or preserved the sweet curiosity of an unresolved plot.


This post's theme word is damascene, "to gild," or "having a wavy pattern," or "sudden and significant." The damascene descriptions imbricate with damascene revelations.

Mad Max

Mad Max: nonsensical subtitle was exactly as advertised. The ads show: a handful of characters, sand, guns, cars/trucks/explosions, grit, dirt, and more guns. This is what you get, in a there-and-back two-hour-long car chase with very few scenes devoted to anything but chase action.

It approaches the platonic ideal of a summer action movie. Almost all dialog is removed; almost all characters are nameless; the plot (and the cars) move in one direction only, and that is towards destruction. Everything gets exploded, cut, shot, burnt, squashed, and destroyed. Well, nearly everything. Obviously there are some desert rocks which go essentially unchanged. And somehow quite a few people avoid sunburn.

Apparently it's causing a ruckus amongst people concerned with the dangers posed by having a prominent female character with agency, but these concerns are ridiculous. The movie did not seem to grind any particular axe, unlike, say, The  Dark Knight Rises (overtly anti-Occupy-Wall-Street) or District 9 (anti-apartheid). It was mostly pro-explosions and car chases. Pro-guns. Maybe anti-deserts? At least, pro-water. But that's an undisputed stance. Everyone is pro-water; we are water-based lifeforms.


This post's theme word is augean, "extremely difficult, unpleasant, or filthy." The augean desert wastland holds no appeal as a vacation destination.

Annihilation

Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation is a novel (part one of a trilogy) which tries very hard to evoke a creepy atmosphere. It didn't work on me, but your mileage may vary.

The extremely untrustworthy first-person narrator serves as the primary tool for executing and implementing the extreme creepiness of the atmosphere. But the narrator is so extremely untrustworthy that she barely gets to explain what is going on in the novel --- she keeps interrupting her own narrative with exclamations about her untrustworthiness, with flashbacks about her undependable memory, with second-guesses of her own first-hand experiences. If this was excised, the novel would be a lot shorter and less interesting (like watching Memento in the right order).

Ok, so the untrustworthy narrator (one of my favorite tools, when executed subtly and well) didn't make it creepy. What about the setting, the monsters, the story?

Nope.

They just didn't catch me enough to be creepy. The narrator and the emotional timbre of the entire novel were a little too distant to have any emotional hook. It just seemed... remote. Why should any reader care about the story, when even the narrator gets disassociatively bored at the climactic parts and switches to describing something else? (And as a perpendicular complaint: there was simply not enough hard science in this novel, for a narrative that supposedly came from a scientist's mind.)

Yes, I realize this is all part of a more carefully structured trilogy. Many reviewers say that book 1 makes a lot more sense, re: narrative jumps and avoiding descriptions, after reading book 3. But my time is finite and this just didn't entice me enough to pick up the following novels in the series.


This post's theme word is lysergic, "trippy, psychedelic" --- but often used to describe natural panoramas of beauty and majesty, in my reading experience. The swampy and forested expanses rolled out before her in lethargic, lysergic beauty.