Fine Structure

Fine Structure is a scifi novel by author qntm. It starts in the present day with some physicists constructing an experiment to test their new theory. So far so good! Unfortunately for them, their theory is correct. Except that every time the test shows their theory works, the fundamental laws of the universe change so that the experiment (and the effect and the theory itself!) is not reproducible.

Scientific reproducibility turns out to be a minor concern among the other issues this creates.

This is a very cool premise, and the entire novel is full of very cool science-fiction ideas. The narrative style, however, jumps around between different storylines and timeframes in a way that I found completely removed the stakes from the story. (Spoiler: there's no tension in the current high-stakes chase scene if I've already seen a future scene where these characters are alive and fine, and everyone else is gone.) At some point I also realized that none of the characters was sympathetic or interesting, as characters --- the author is basically moving them around like puzzle-pieces in order to get to the parts of the story where the cool scifi idea can happen.

Quite late in the novel I was wondering "why did this end up in my TBR stack?" and suddenly there was a paragraph about antimemetics and realized that this must be linked to SCP (previously).

I'd recommend this for vacation reading but the lack of characterization meant that it was missing some depth my brain kept looking for.

This post's theme word is fulgent (adj), "shining brightly; radiant." The prose aims to be fulgent and lands somewhere around "thesaurus explosion" for the most abstract scenes.

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

Becky Chambers' The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet tells the story of the motley crew of a wormhole-constructing spaceship, as they navigate their interspecies cultural differences, galactic-civilization-scope politics, and (of course) the weird wibbly-wobbly non-Euclidean subspace through which they construct spaceship bypasses.

It's fun and it moves along at a clip. In terms of comedic-dramatic romps taking place mostly on spaceships, it is much closer to Iain M Banks'  Culture novels than Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice. There are many species, with different physical and societal structures, but at least a few of them can see eye-to-eye[stalk]. enough to form a conglomerate civilization. Bureaucracy, treaties, the careful social and political leeways given and adjustments made for aliens --- these things are important and hard but mostly tractable in this universe. They come to the forefront because one of our protagonists is an office clerk... but being the clerk on a wide-travelling, alien-filled, wormhole-constructing spaceship makes the paperwork, accounting, border declaration forms, etc. cool.

Also like an Iain M Banks book, there's not one single crescendoing plot, but instead a series of interesting events with no special signposts for readers. Life, in all its banalities and stresses and joys. The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet manages to be a fun, quick space opera; a sweet novel about interpersonal relationships and the values of small tight communities; and a sad story of loss. It could also be read as a screed about basic universal rights, or what constitutes sentience, or how to be a good neighbor. Or the importance of snacking between meals, and continuously drinking non-caffeinated tea.

I liked it.

It didn't sparkle with the sheer perfection of Pride and Prejudice ("too light, and bright, and sparkling" -- Austen herself), or The Hydrogen Sonata, or Ancillary Justice, but I recommend it, especially if you already like space opera. It's a great first novel, and I'll keep Becky Chambers on my radar.


This post's theme word is praxis, "customary practice or conduct", or "exercise of a skill," or "practical application of a theory." This alien praxis is bizarre, but it makes sense for those with neither opposable thumbs nor bones in their bodies.

Blindsight

Peter Watts' Blindsight is a novel set ~75 years in the future, when advances in neurology and computing have merged to reshape all of human civilization into something only distantly recognizable from the present day. Many people semi-upload themselves and live entirely in a simultated "Heaven", enabled by post-scarcity redundancy of human labor. AIs and AI-like bio-machine hybrids exist, as well as quantum computers and engineering projects on the scale of "seat an energy collector just above the sun and shoot a beam of energy anywhere in the solar system."

So when the entire planet gets paparazzi-ed by alien probes, of course a ship of computer-augmented humans are shot off to see if they can make first contact with whatever's floating out there. Humans, and one genetically-reconstructed "vampire", a formerly-extinct humanoid predator who hunts humans and is allergic to right angles. The book is full of flavorful tidbits like this, keeping the reader off-balance: there's a sense of the riotous diversity of an actual future Earth hovering in the novel's background, weird and akilter and intellectually tempting and forever out of reach. (I went back over my highlighted sections and they seem spoilery or like punchline-giveaways, so

We readers are helped to bootstrap by the fact that the main character, Siri Keaton, is recognizably somewhere on the Autism spectrum (although I don't think it's ever put in those words), and spends a lot of time figuring out what people mean and putting them inside a meaningful context. Also, this is his job --- he is a professional interpreter-and-explainer of complicated ideas.

And there are a lot of very cool, complicated ideas.

The characters and plot are great but Watts' science background shines through the novel, piercing it with incandescent rays of awesome descriptions of how the brain works to build the experience of consciousness. Magnetism, evolution, genetics --- this book s a post-Halloween intellectual goodie bag. I don't want to spoil any bits, but I give it my wholehearted recommendation. The ending was so outrageously magnificent, so transcendently thought-provoking, that I completely forgot all the awesome bits at the beginning of the book. On rereading, the details surprised me and slid into place in the larger picture, invoking a level of delight that was missing on my first pass. (There were also some parts that sounded like dangerously stressed-to-breaking metaphors for science and complicated ideas, which on rereading are not actually being abused in the way I initially thought.)

I've started in on the sequel, Echopraxia.


This post's theme word is xerophyte, "a plant adapted to growing in a very dry or desert environment." Whales might have trouble understanding xerophytes, but they apply for research grants anyway.

Sanction

Elizabeth Bear's generation-ship saga continues with Sanction. I really disliked this book. Maybe because I loved the first book so much. I had high hopes for the excitement, and drama, and the sheer imagination inherent in the established setting/characters/history, and this book completely failed to deliver on every possible front.

Extreme spoilers below the break.

Alien husks

The ways in which the inhuman and transitory artificial environments of airports are decorated always suggest strange alien decision-making processes. What effect is the art supposed to have? To hold passengers' attention while they wait? To brighten their days? To give them something to contemplate other than the unusual fluid dynamics upon which heavier-than-air flight relies?

Mimi Bardagjy's sculptures call to mind alien husks, the discarded shells of deep-sea creatures, or abandoned multi-creature egg casings. They are lit in a clinical way that makes them seem creepy.

Close examination shows (and the description confirms) that the ridges and indentations are human-finger sized, so that the entire thing is like a tube of putty gripped in an impossibly-many-fingered fist.

They are creepy and delightful.


This post's theme word is calyculus, "a cup-shaped structure." Behold these discarded ceramic calyculuses!

Star Wars: n+1

No spoilers: It was cute, with the expected (large) amount of fan-service, call-backs, and foreshadowing of predictable events. The villain was actually villainous, with depth of character and a psychological edge that was scary.

As always, the evil side made a series of logistical, engineering, and personnel choices that resulted in catastrophic failure of a[n ill-conceived] plan. I would be really surprised if this did not happen in a Star Wars movie. Also, explosions in space made noise.

I predict that rolling robots will be a popular toy in the upcoming months.

I shared the audience with several storm troopers and one wookie. They did not fight where I could see. No jedi, at least not that I could tell, but I guess they could be disguised as normal people.


This post's theme word is anserine, "of or relating to a goose; silly, stupid." Yet another anserine evil plan thwarted!

Cultural acclimatization

Apartment searching in Paris is demoralizing. I thought I had reached a low when I discovered an "apartment" of 10 square meters for 750 Euros/month, but then I compared it with an "apartment" of 2 square meters (two!), seventh floor (no elevator), slanted roof ceiling, plus a shared toilet on the landing, for 550 Euros/month. This former servant's quarters started looking good, though, after long enough perusing rental listings, agency websites, sabbatical vacancies, and craigslist.

I am coming to understand why all Parisian residents recoil slightly and emit pitying moans when I ask them for advice finding an apartment. I have been encouraged, with an appropriate cringe of social awkwardness, to ask everyone I know: are you moving soon? do you know anyone who has moved? or died?

Yech.

I have spent several days now, in sequence, where every face-to-face interaction was entirely in French. I visited an apartment showing, I walked across maybe 80% of Paris without a map (tl&dr, geography version), I read legal and immigration paperwork, I was asked for directions to somewhere I didn't recognize, I interacted with shopkeepers, I verified my temporary housing situation, I was asked for directions which I was able to give competently.  This last one feels like a milestone in cultural acclimatization. It indicates many things. I am in a demographic sweet spot to ask for directions: woman, white, healthy, not obviously homeless. I am walking purposefully. Until I open my mouth, I can pass as local. Perhaps I have improved my passive scowl. Huzzah!

I am suffering a bad case of l'esprit d'escalier, basically continuously, because my ability to cohere my thoughts into sentences in French suffers a lag.  I know enough words to say the thing I want to say, but my thoughts in English are verbal and sophisticated, while my expressibility in French is simplified and riddled with pauses. If this post seems verbose but oddly curt, blame my attempts to improve my French. Also blame my isolation from English-language conversation. I need to find an expat chatting club.

There is a fascinating mental adjustment necessary. (Il faut que je change... see? sentence structures bleed across my brain barriers between languages. I'm lucky I didn't give directions in Japanese, I aced that chapter and practiced speed directions.)  Every time a child or homeless person speaks French in earshot, my brain does this: wow! that kid/beggar is so erudite! s/he speaks French! ---oh, wait, everyone speaks French here, it's not the marker of some cultural or educational achievment. I obviously understand that there are native French speakers at an intellectual level. But somewhere deep in my brain sits the belief that humans fundamentally speak English, and all other languages are awkward additions, the result of work and study.  So a handful of times a day, I mentally kick myself for my English-centric worldview.

Of course, kids and homeless people probably do speak English, too, and likely German and Italian and a handful of other languages. Because this is Europe and such things are useful, and no one here buys into the kind of cultural/linguistic/national isolationism to which I have become accustomed.

One final thought on cultural acclimatization: I have not yet seen a single Irish pub. Amazing. I thought they were a worldwide phenomenon, a sort of screen saver adopted by any underutilized commercial food site. Apparently here they default to cafes with little black wire tables and smoking waiters.


This post's theme word is ambage (AM-bij, not ahm-bahZH), "ambiguity, circumlocution." I am not fluent enough to commit ambage.

Keith Haring exhibit

I went to a special exhibit of Keith Haring's work. Based on pins and posters, my cultural exposure led me to expect that the work would be two-dimensional doodles, a bit like cartoonified versions of the illustrations accompanying Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Some of them were. 

 Many crossed the threshold into cute and quirky.

But not all. Haring worked in other mediums, too:

And almost 100% of his illustrations are NSFW. These do not get made into posters or pins, although I think this one makes a strong wallpaper.

... perhaps for a public bathroom. But I guess those aren't usually wallpapered.




This post's theme word is omphalic, "navel-gazing." Though lacking belly-buttons, Haring's illustrated people invoke omphalic thoughts.