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.

Time to Orbit: Unknown

Time to Orbit: Unknown is a novel by Derin Edala. It's the length of maybe 5 standard novels, but available to read in its entirety online here (some typos). This is a work in the specific genre "hypergraphic authors for voracious readers", subgenre "scifi themes". I only recommend it if you are in the target audience "voracious readers", in which case I strongly recommend it.

The story opens on an interstellar colony ship, with one passenger unexpectedly awakened from transport hibernation. This is a great setup from a novel standpoint, as the first-person narrator has no idea what is going on and provides a great introduction to the world for the readers. The fact that he has to figure out what's broken on the spaceship, from first principles, since he is not an astronaut, adds to this framing device convenience. It also makes the mystery delicious: we are discovering things at the same time as the narrator. A mystery! In space!

The author is excellent at their craft. I don't know how else to express it. This story starts as a space-scifi-mystery and every once in awhile, it completely shifts genre. (Spoilers: logistics challenge! science puzzle! rogue AI! social conflict leadership struggle! murder mystery! international interplanetary geopolitical conflict! sociology study of voluntary colonization! philosophical exploration of individuality!) Every time the genre shifted, I was absolutely convinced it was a good idea and the author brought me along. At some point I realized the game was "genre shift in an apparently-endless story" and I loved that, too.

Last week the author published the end --- chapter 183! --- of the story. It didn't end in a way I find satisfying, and it seemed a bit rushed, but honestly I don't know that any end to the infinitely-extensible-feeling beginning of the story would ever feel satisfactory.

Recommended if you have interest in a long reading project that is a bit silly and a bit tense and 100% scifi in the post-publishers-encouraging-doorstop-series era.

This post's theme word is ontic (adj), "having or relating to a real existence." Certain genre staples of science fiction are purely joyful, not ontic.

Six Wakes

Mur Lafferty's Six Wakes is a science fiction novel set on an interstellar ship, a whodunnit novel about clones and implanted memories. The premise seems interesting and I've read (and listened to podcasts of) much of Lafferty's other work.

This book suffers from writing that seems like it is trying to be adapted to a movie or maybe a TV series. Descriptions are sort of basic and don't use the full expressivity of written language. (I know this is a niche complaint, I am a reader of Specific Tastes.) Every chapter ends with a dramatic cliffhanger. These cliffhangers are often resolved by suddenly revealing backstory that the audience (and other characters) could not possibly have known or guessed. I was most irritated by the reveals that critical plot points depended on societal norms and laws about cloning, since the existence and details of those laws would have precluded a lot of the earlier points of confusion and plot.

If what you want is a mystery puzzle set on an interstellar colonizing ship, I've been enjoying Derin Edala's Time to Orbit: Unknown (which you can read free online).

This post's theme word is aspersion (n), "a damaging accusation; slander." It's strange to me that I have read so many books upon which I cast aspersions.

We Can Fix It!

Jess Fink's We Can Fix It! is a brief graphic novel that investigates the question: what if you could travel back in time to formative points in your youthful memories, to try to advise your younger self against making embarrassing mistakes?

What follows is a series of comedic exchanges. Some people never change, and the self-awareness to realize this makes the entire comic wry and clever. No big solutions are achieved, but saving your younger self from choking, from making out with the wrong teen, and from various self-esteem missteps is presented in a charming and delightful manner.

Recommended! It's a quick read.

This post's theme word is skiamachy (n), "a mock fight or a fight with an imaginary enemy." Philosophists debate whether the metaphorical skiamachy with insecurity is too on-the-nose when represented as a slap-fight with one's childhood self, enabled by time travel.

There is no antimemetics division

There is no antimemetics division is a novel / series of short stories / piece of collaborative fiction authored by qntm. The entire work is readable for free online. It is vaguely unsettling horror --- not my usual preference --- but excellently written and with a compelling premise.

There is no antimemetics division lives inside SCP, a huge online collaborative fiction site loosely based around a single fictional prompt and set in roughly the same universe. If you read widely on the SCP site, you will eventually find some mutually-incompatible storylines; these are explicable under the premise of the universe: the site documents a sort of parallel reality (or is it) where certain ideas have the power to erase themselves from your memory. These are "antimemes", and they can propagate just like memes but are much more difficult to secure, contain, and protect against (SCP).

I don't usually enjoy horror, but this novel and the SCP project more widely are very gentle about the horror angle. If you go looking to be scared, you can find that --- but there are also storylines that are 100% playing the premise for comedic value, entire stories based around one pun punchline, and nudge-nudge-wink-wink stories that play with the tropes of horror joyfully. Spending many hours reading this novel, and various other SCP works, convinced me that I'm actually OK with horror, as long as it is psychological and interspersed with jokes. SCP is more like Jasper Fforde's sense of humor, melted with Peter Watts' attitude and then forced to write exclusively in the format of bureaucratic filing reports.

Rereading the above, my opinion might not be clear. I'm trying to be descriptive. 

I strongly recommend There is no antimemetics division. Try the first few chapters and see if they scratch a particular brain itch for you, as they did for me. If you like the premise, then I hope you've already read Peter Watts' Blindsight (GO READ IT RIGHT NOW, it remains my #1 most-recommended-to-others book).

This post's theme word is descript (adj), "having distinctive features or qualities." This novel made me much more cognizant of the aggressively descript and nondescript elements of my environment.

What parallel-universe version of yourself would you like to be?

 I take attendance by having students answer a question.

What parallel-universe version of yourself would you like to be?

(all typos below are preserved as submitted)

Many students aspire to parallel-universe careers:

• pilot (x2)
• POTUS
• president
• economist
• lawyer
• chef
• cheffe
• astronaut (x2)
• commentator

Some wanted careers based on fame (mostly sports):

• PGA tour champ
• pop star
• win the masters
• dancer
• actress/dancer
• pro sport of some sort
• disc golfer

One single student wanted simply more money, in an amount I have not heard of:

• a bizzlionaire

One student wanted to be an inexplicable parallel-universe version, no further explanation:

a cold one

Some students were nonspecific but positive:

• living in nature
• maybe in bed

Some students were simply nonspecific:

• huh
• idk

And this week's most contented mid-semester student picked simply:

• idk I'm happy in this one

This post's theme word is lotic (adj), "relating to or living in flowing water." (Note that "lentic" is the same, but for still water.) The lotic parallel universe features many gills and a lot of waterproofing on electronics, but is otherwise quite familiar. There are a lot of reunions of the lotic and lentic branches of the family.

Artificial Condition

Artificial Condition is the second in Martha Wells' "The Murderbot Diaries" series; it won a Hugo award in 2019. It continues the first-person account of a now-rogue human-robot construct which used to be an armed security agent but is now free(ish) to pursue its own interests --- but notably still constrained by the weird hodgepodge of spacefaring human societies and their various legal and social restrictions, the most relevant of which is that Murderbot is not considered a full, independent person and is regarded as something closer to property or a slave.

This book continued the tone and themes of the previous one, central among them the Murderbot's increasing self-awareness of things like emotional state, body language, facial expression, and social relationships. But in an extremely sardonic and analytical tone, of course --- this leads to some delightful things like "pouting" by powering down or the classic description of the murderbot development cycle: "But you can't put something as dumb as a hauler bot in charge of security... So they made us smarter. The anxiety and depression were side effects." (chapter 2, 9%) It also hit some poignant storytelling beats that land particularly hard given the narrator: in discussing TV dramas, it says, "But there weren't any depictions of [murderbots] in books, either. I guess you can't tell a story from the point of view of something that you don't think has a point of view." (chapter 2, 17%)

In addition to casting aspersions on all humans for their idiotic/bigoted attitudes towards non-humans, the book does a fair amount of oblique emotional growth for Murderbot --- for example "I shouldn't have asked myself that question. I felt a wave of non-caring about to come over me, and I knew I couldn't let it." (chapter 3, 19%) Murderbot's one true passion is watching teledramas, which often get referenced "in an effort to figure out what the hell was going on with humans. It hadn't helped." (chapter 7, 73%) Nevertheless Murderbot has some self-realizations like "And now I knew why I hadn't wanted to do this. It would make it harder for me to pretend not to be a person." (chapter 4, 32%, delightfully reversing many decades of "robots want to pass as human" tropes in fiction!) and the final portion of the book, which included a lot of introspection like "I wish being a construct made me less irrational than the average human but you may have noticed this is not the case." (chapter 7, 78%)

I liked this book --- it was again very quick and enjoyable. I am curious what future adventures Murderbot can get up to, since book 1 was "liberation" and book 2 was "uncovering past secrets" so the future can only hold new wrinkles. We readers got a taste of what is going on in the broader human civilization and it seems like an omnishambles. Given the extremely high number of times that bots/constructs casually edit security logs, footage, and human databases, my estimate of this human civilization is that its documents are swiss cheese and completely unreliable, and it only limps along because all of the non-human intelligences basically tolerate the humans because life would be boring without them --- but the humans have no idea! I'm curious if this will be explored more.

This post's theme word is Gallionic (adj), "indifferent or uncaring." The intelligences running ships are neither rule-bound nor Gallionic regarding their human passengers.

All Systems Red

All Systems Red is the first in Martha Wells' "The Murderbot Diaries" series; it won a Hugo award in 2018. It is a first-person account of a human-robot construct which is tasked with corporate security on an exploration mission to a new planet. It's quick and short, and the fun parts are:

• the story is told in the first person from a point of view which includes interfacing with drone cameras and so is much broader and more comprehensive than a usual human, BUT which also occasionally glitches or shuts down
• the internal monologue voice is dry and a little sarcastic, but the vocalized speech is all pretty straightforward --- this contrast was very satisfying
• on the second read, I noticed that the narration was impeccable about the Murderbot both not having a name and not having a gender; this was done so smoothly that on first read I had mentally pictured Murderbot as a woman (I guess because it was first person and that's how I perceive myself)

There's a ton of delight to be had in closely examining the story in retrospect --- it is essentially an entire narrative centered on the narrator's feelings, emotional state, expression of sentiment, and social cues like body language, but in a "doth protest too much, methinks" way, the narrator's main focus is persistently to avoid feeling or engaging with any emotion. (Multiple scenes include the lowering of an opaque visor or the narrator moving to stand facing the corner mid-conversation.) It's very well-crafted, to be a sneaky story about feelings which constantly mentions how feelings aren't there and shouldn't be acknowledged and could we please just focus on not all getting killed?

I picked it up again as a palate cleanser and enjoyed it; there are many more in this series, all queued up in my library.

This post's theme word is pensum (n), "a task, especially given as punishment." The ability to self-edit and control administrative privileges removes the threat of pensums.

This is How You Lose the Time War

This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone is an epistolary romance novel(la) between opposing time-travel agents. The premise is cute, a little dashed-off letter here, a twist in time there, and it builds to an entirely forseeable end, which was the most surprising thing about the book.

It had some nice turns of phrase --- "apophenic as a haruspex" is truly outstanding (p. 100) --- and plays out a budding relationship nicely, albeit with a flourish only available to truly ridiculous time-travel narratives. The summary "I love cities, To be alone in a crowd, apart and belonging, to have distance between what I see and what I am." (p. 87) resonated with how calm and happy I feel in some city-crowd situations. And the silly-serious "I have built a you within me, or you have. I wonder what of me there is in you." (p. 113) is definitely a feeling I've had, and shared with others, before; it's a nice summary of how it feels to think theory-of-mind thoughts.

Overall, though, the book was not nearly as twisty timey-wimey as I expected. There were certain conclusions that seemed pretty obvious to me, and were delivered as if revelatory. But it's a cute, brief read, and reading fictional characters assigning each other a beloved book and then discussing it has added that book to my list. Plus there were several literary references I appreciated, and others I was sent scurrying to reference material for. And I always appreciate a book that forces me to perform outside study.


This post's theme word is apophenic (adj), "perceiving or believing in connections and meaningful patterns among unrelated phenomena." "I am yours in other ways as well: yours as I watch the world for your signs, apophenic as a haruspex; yours as I debate methods, motives, chances of delivery..." (p. 100)

Empress of Forever

Empress of Forever is Max Gladstone's doorstop-sized foray into science fiction. It tells the story of Vivian Lao, a tech CEO/brilliant executive coordinator-and-person-reader, who is trying to use her wits to make things better for the people around her (and, ultimately, all people everywhere: "for the liberation of all sentient beings." p. 982 in the novel & p. 1041 in the acknowledgements). This opening of philosophy --- "wealth was the only real freedom left. Get money and you could do what you wanted, help your friends, pile cash and power as a wall against the world." (p.7) --- is one I read a lot of in certain online circles, and it seems both relevant to modern discourse and incredibly depressing. It's clear why Gladstone chose this as the starting point, not the conclusion, of the story.

This book, however, is trying not to be depressing. The first chapter reads like the climactic chapter of a William Gibson novel (action-suspense-technology gizmos); the second chapter reads like Philip K. Dick (surreal-trippy-helpless in the face of a powerful incomprehensible system). Thereafter, it goes a bit more on the rails, and sticks to an optimistic tone which alternates between joyous nonsense wordplay (describing fractalline spaceships as "whirling furious Mandelcontinents of Pride set against a regimented vast and glistening phalanx", p. 168) and serious well-adjusted grown-ups dealing with feelings and relationships; overall the theme of the book emerges as:

Viv was used to this split-heart feeling. Most of the time the calculative half bubbled out, seizing control. The interpersonal details, your own emotional well-being or your friends', could wait until after you figured out how to solve the problem at hand. (p. 916)

This resonates for me with all sorts of writing around rationalism, adulthood, science, and community-building. (See for example this post, selected arbitrarily from what I read around the same time as this book.) There is a certain philosophical, a-little-bit-cold approach to being a functioning social person, which hits a lot of familiar notes for the educated-techie-rationalist set; even some of the book's one-liner jokes are in this zone: "the human mind had assembled itself haphazard from spare parts meant for something else." (p. 750)

Overall I thought this book was fine, but a bit overlong (how many times will we cycle through "the team was split up, everyone was sad, then someone had a realization that friendship and caring and communication are the solution, then they miraculously get out of a bind!"?), and it didn't hit that magical sweet spot of Three Parts Dead, which had BOTH a protagonist I identified with (as did this book), AND a really cool mechanic/worldbuilding/storytelling aspect. This one felt more plodding, and the long-building climax felt less climactic, for all that it tried, with strenuous adjectives, to stress how incredibly important and galaxy-spanning the repercussions would be.


This post's theme word is circumvallate (v tr), "to surround by a defensive structure, such as a rampart" and fuligin (n), "dark". The hyperspace circumvallations were a bit strange. "Vantablack statues looked like this in person. Fuligin, but green. The light that came off her throbbed." (p. 54)

Neuromancer

This classic recently bubbled back to the forefront of my attention because of its lovely new reissued cover art (bright green), so I reread it. It is one delicious sip of a novel, an elongated sluuuuuurp of a read, and impossible to read over more than maybe 2 sittings. The story just zooms along, eschewing the verbose detail of a more "deep worldbuilding" authorial style, and its protagonists' often drug-altered state comes through as confusing flashes of detail, occasional emotional insights, and unforeseen but interesting choices.

I've read this book several times, and this time it was no clearer --- the confusing bits were just as confusing (perhaps because I conflate this with several other Gibson books), and the payoff was just as flashy:

• navigating "cyberspace" described as if a physical reality
• networking and AI work unbelievably smoothly, but no one has a garbage Internet of Things device
• the motorcycle chase scene was missing --- I misremembered this from Stephenson's Snow Crash, I think
• going to a permanently-inhabited space station was a tourist-level outing; going online requires specialized equipment and training
• lucid dreaming-like sequences that feel very accurately described to my own perceived sensorium when dreaming
• AI police are called "Turing" and have legal jurisdiction above the level of states?!? I didn't remember this from my last reread, which may have predated my now-extensive knowledge of Turing and computational theory
• basically zero discussion of the educational system, which I find I have a lot of lingering questions about

I recommend this book as still-relevant and -interesting, for any reader of any background; I suspect that different backgrounds/ages/"digital native" readers will have very differing receptions of what this book predicts, from the past, to be the present/future.

The recent edition I borrowed from the library included substantive front- and back-matter discussing "cyberpunk" and Gibson's relation to it. I've always thought "cyberpunk" was a marketing term for "William Gibson or an imitator wrote this", and I haven't updated my opinion.


This post's theme word is enantiodromia (n), "the tendency of things, beliefs, etc., to change to their opposites." While temporary, drug-induced enantiodromia is common amongst the drug aficionados in Neuromancer, most characters emerge from the haze with their core tenets intact... perhaps the titular *mancer is the only one to undergo a major change. 

Too Like the Lightning

Ada Palmer's Too Like the Lightning takes place in the future, a 25th century whose views of our modern day are as colored by weird historical narratives as our views of our own history. The book is described as "political science fiction", a genre I'd never heard of, and its philosophical leanings make it a good partner to Stephenson's Anathem, in that both books academically examine political and philosophical structures that don't --- quite --- exist in our present reality.

This book is excellent. I can see why it's a 2017 Hugo nominee.

I love an unreliable narrator, and the gradual reveal of different layers of story was done very well. The narrator is educated and wary of his audience, but also makes vast assumptions about our familiarity with philosophical, social, economic, and political history and theories. He plays fast and loose with ideas and with pronouns. He has very little free will and yet manages to make pivotal, important decisions for the plot. He is an open liar, but still an interesting narrator. (Many chapters ended with cliffhangers, which isn't my favorite style, but they varied and were interesting and none of them ended up feeling like cheap gimmicks.)  The fact that this highfalutin' philosophical world where everyone is ideally healthy and educated ends up being... bad [spoiler: corrupted by the same interpersonal intrigue as a typical HBO show] is very intellectually crunchy and satisfying. I immediately purchased the sequel book, although it can't jump to the front of my queue since I'm trying to read all of the Hugo nominees before the voting deadline.

One lingering unfinished thread: the title is an oblique reference to Romeo and Juliet (the balcony scene, act 2, scene II), and wasn't ever referred to during the novel. Shakespeare is mentioned a few times, as a famous bard (page 54), as someone now only understood with footnotes (page 55), and as a literary wordsmith alongside Voltaire (page 337). Romeo and Juliet are mentioned only as being one of many famous pairs of lovers depicted in a gallery of paintings (page 132). "Lightning" is referenced as the usual weather pattern, and only once it is used to reference a person: "I am the window through which you watch the coming storm. He is the lightning." (page 220), but this doesn't mesh well with the phrase "too like the lightning"; while many plot points are too rash, too unadvised, and too sudden, the character thus referenced has not ceased to be ere one can say he lightens. Is this an extremely oblique way of foreshadowing his death?

It's an ongoing mystery, and one I'm happy to seek in the sequel, much more sensically named Seven Surrenders --- since there are seven nation-states, this one seems easy to decode.

This post's theme word is aretocracy (n), an invented structure for electing government officials according to from-each-citizen personal nominations. Its exact details are not clear. The Humanist faction-state favors an aretocracy, but this is susceptible to charismatic cults of personality.

Ninefox Gambit

Yoon Ha Lee's Ninefox Gambit is a fun bit of military, space-battle science fiction. It opens in media res, mid-battle, and that is where the book does its coolest things. I'm in favor of any book where a character's aptitude for mathematics makes her especially powerful and desirable as an ally.

I was baffled by the line between metaphor and physical reality in this book. The premise is that certain formations --- of people's bodies, of spaceships, of... space stations? --- are powerful according to whichever calendrical standard one follows.  This is never explained, and neither are the special area effects / technological effects of certain calendars. Under one calendar, a gun which amputates-at-a-distance works; under another calendar, it is useless slag. Under one calendar, standing in a particular formation protects from incoming artillery; under another, it does nothing. I was never exactly sure when the poetic descriptions of battles were literal and when figurative, since the physical reality was rarely described, but the ephemeral effects of calendars were often mentioned. It was never really clear why the calendar has such an effect, or why one couldn't just switch from calendar to calendar, as convenient for the particular technology at hand.

The book ended with a neat, tidy climactic battle, and set itself up to be the first of a series, with a fairly predictable protagonist-quest-outline of the subsequent books. I liked this book fine, but probably by bafflement and the formulaic one-person-takes-down-an-empire setup will combine to influence me away from reading subsequent installments.


This post's theme word is polonian (adj), "bounding in aphoristic expressions" or "a native or inhabitant of Poland." The polonian prose dissuaded me from further literary exploration.

Hugo nominees 2016

The nominees for Hugo Awards have been announced. It's yet another interesting sociological study in gaming voting systems. The number of voters was huge --- more than double last year's all-time record-breaking high! --- but the effect was apparently diffuse. (We will only find out after the awards are announced, when the distribution of nominating ballots is revealed.)

The resulting list is bleak. I used to look to the Hugos as a recommended reading list, and I became a member of the *cons in order to have access to this reading list. Recent years have really shot me in the foot about that --- the stuff I enjoyed reading, I had read already on my own. And the other stuff turns out to be mostly weird, sci-fi fandom in-crowd hatemail from one group to another.

(Why do they do this? I wouldn't. My reaction to this toxicity is "meh", accompanied by a shrug and not really devoting much time or effort to it... probably as a combination of socialization and my own personality. It's an ultimate de-escalation. Participating in scifi fandom is a leisure activity for rich, literate people. It is super easy to opt out. I find it strange and incomprehensible that there are these internet mob leaders, each spending millions of words responding to each other and rallying their mobs and constructing elaborate facades of sophism to justify disembodied hate of an outgroup with which they share most traits and with whom they spend huge chunks of time interacting online. Rather than work myself into the lather of a long blog rant, I would just go outside. Or take a nap. Self-care. If I want to worry, I worry about the heat death of the universe. My outrage is better than your outrage.)

Here's the list of nominees.

Best novel:

• Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie
• The Cinder Spires: The Aeronaut’s Windlass by Jim Butcher
• The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin
• Seveneves: A Novel by Neal Stephenson
• Uprooted by Naomi Novik

Best novella:

• Binti by Nnedi Okorafor
• The Builders by Daniel Polansky
• Penric’s Demon by Lois McMaster Bujold
• Perfect State by Brandon Sanderson
• Slow Bullets by Alastair Reynolds

Best novelette:

• “And You Shall Know Her by the Trail of Dead” by Brooke Bolander
• “Flashpoint: Titan” by CHEAH Kai Wai
• “Folding Beijing” by Hao Jingfang, Ken Liu
• “Obits” by Stephen King
• “What Price Humanity?” by David VanDyke

Best short story:

• “Asymmetrical Warfare” by S. Algernon
• The Commuter by Thomas Mays
• “If You Were an Award, My Love” by Juan Tabo and Harris (psychologically gross and toxic take of Rachel Swirsky's "If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love" which was a Hugo nominee in 2014 and I guess had too much writerly emotion for some people's SFF taste)
• “Seven Kill Tiger” by Charles Shao
• Space Raptor Butt Invasion by Chuck Tingle

Almost nothing I nominated got onto the ballot. I'm most bummed about China Miéville's short story "The Dowager of Bees" from the collection Three Moments of an Explosion, which was utterly fantastic. But really, the amount of bumming I can suffer from an abstract awards nomination in a niche field is minimal. Sure, this varied my mood down, for a total effect of -ε. Breakfast has more of an effect and occurs more regularly.

I'll try to read the nominees again (see my previous efforts in 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012,2011, 2010, 2009 --- all still incomplete as I gradually retroblog what I thought of them). I have Seveneves in my queue and I'll definitely get to it; the other novel nominees are not very appealing, I have read their opening few pages and they did nothing for me. (This browsing long before they received Hugo nominations.) The extent to which the nominees have been controlled by a voting bloc suggests that I might not find much to hold my interest in the rest of the list. On the other hand, I am interested to see the result of what seems like an experiment by the voting block ("will people vote "no award" above popular authors if we endorse the popular authors who would be on the ballot anyway?").

But I'll try.

I have to keep my English limbered up. This fall I get to talk to captive audiences at length! (Read: teach classes!)


This post's theme word is standpat, "one who refuses to consider change," or "refusing to consider change in one's beliefs and opinions, esp. in politics." The standpats debated each other to a standstill.

The Book of Phoenix

Nnedi Okorafor's The Book of Phoenix fits the mold of her previous writing (Binti, Lagoon) for me: it is vaguely science-fiction/fantasy, with characters whose choices are opaque to me even when the writing reveals their inner monologues. It touches on racism and slavery and human testing and the limits of scientific ethics, for very strong values of "touches on" (in the same way that District 9 "touches on" apartheid).

The protagonist, a woman named Phoenix, is the result of a scientific experiment, and has lived all her life in a large lab complex, surrounded by prodding scientists and the bizarre and puissant other human/animal/robot experimental subjects. She begins as fairly naive and innocent, although very well-read.

Then, of course, she escapes.

The book is her own firsthand (maybe) account of her escape and the ensuing series of revelations (about the extent and horror of human-subject testing by this powerful corporation) and rescues/destructions wrought (of the other human subjects and of the company's physical holdings and employees, respectively). Her reflections on human testing are pretty much as expected: "Human beings make terrible gods." (p. 152)

As always, the conclusion is that Racism Is Bad. All other types of discrimination, too: we should all aspire to just get along, respect each other, be kind, and improve the lives of those around us. ("He accepted what I was as if it were normal. He gazed at me but didn't stare. His world was big and there was room for me." p. 155)

The story was a bit jumbled, or at least, it was not designed for someone with my mindset to comprehend. For example, some event happens several times. Time A it takes 3 days. Time B it takes 1 month. Time C it takes a few minutes. After time C, one onlooking character says that it is getting faster... a conclusion which I think unwarranted, given the available data. But he says it with a certain conviction, and without any second-guessing in the narration, that indicates (to me at least) that the readers should accept this pronouncement as accurate. It is narrative fact. This causes some dissonance in my brain, as the available data might just as well suggest that it is alternatingly fast-and-slow, or just noisy and unpredictable, or really anything.

The entire book is like this: it's not what I expect, I never feel comfortable with what is going on, and it explicitly calls out privileges that benefit me. It's discomforting, but as with Okorafor's other writing, this discomfort is clearly meant to be a feature of the writing for readers like me. And I think that it's good, or right, or at least social-justice-minded, for me to "sit with [my] discomfort" (in the words of Another Round host Heben Nigatu, episode 15).

The final notes of the book are weird --- there is a framestory to wrap up, but then we pop the stack one more time. Somehow. Somehow we pop the empty stack, we jump up another level to a frame story that no one even knew was going on. The fourth wall is broken, which is of course pure Lila-bait, but it's brief and weird and I am still thinking about it and not sure what to make of it: "Once the author wrote the story, the author became irrelevant." (p. 210) and "'I know what you think,' she said. 'You can rewrite a story, ... Think before you do; your story is written too... Who is writing you?' she asked."(p. 211)


This post's theme word is rhizophagous, "feeding on roots". The three-mile-high tree had tremendous rhizophagous needs.

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.

Cleave

After enjoying the trilogy's first book and disliking the second, I popped from the top of my book-stack the third one: Elizabeth Bear's Cleave. At first, it was just to see if my new contact prescription was comfortable for reading, but the book managed to sustain my interest, and at the boring or frustrating parts I just soldiered on and through. Now I have finished the trilogy, and it can drag at my heels no longer.

The coolest part by far, and the part that made me hang on until the end, was the moment when two groups of humans meet each other, and find that they are far more mutually alien than the several actual forms of alien life that they have separately encountered. It's a nice moment, the climax gently engineered for many chapters before, and it gave me a little reader-frission.

The fantasy technology to upload whole minds, and thus have machine-mediated memories and brain functioning, was exploited (but only when it served the plot, and not when it would have shortcutted the plot). This allowed a lovely moment of clarity by one character:

I've got a head so full of dead people I suspect whoever I started off as should probably be counted as one of them. (p. 131)

Lots of things gave me ε increments towards rage-quitting, but they never quite triggered book-abandonment. The sentences in general, their constructions and tendency towards Latinate words and local jargon, did not render the book a pleasant poetic read. It read more like my own train of thoughts: technically correct, with all manner of dependent clauses tacked anywhere they'll stick, reveling in complicated words and light wordplay, but coming across as bloodless. It's fine when it's in my own head --- that's me, I can't escape it --- but choosing to spend my leisure time immersed in this verbal frippery was not the relaxing joy that I seek in reading. And the completely unpredictable plot "twists", each of them a new technology/philosophy that could resolve the entire plot (and yet somehow didn't), detracted from the books' good features and distracted me. Most of the two-person dialogues were pure sophistry, barely internally consistent, and immediately invalidated by the next plot hook.

The end of the novel, and trilogy entire, was just as frustrating as the entirety of book two, with all of the meaty interpersonal conflicts and the intellectually interesting problems and the culture shock completely obliterated by a deus ex machina that, in retrospect, could have taken place on the first page of the first book and obviated the need for all these words, words, words.


This post's theme word is covert, "a feather covering the base of a main flight or tail feather of a bird." The covert down, with restricted availability and only obtainable by sneaking, is the softest and most prized for winter jackets and blankets.

Echopraxia

Peter Watts' Echopraxia is not so much a sequel to Blindsight as a sequentially-timed companion piece. The characters and locations are all different; weirdly, the only constant is the aliens (kind of), and since they are not identifiably individual/group entities and don't speak, I don't think it/they really count for story continuity.

As a companion piece, Echopraxia does well --- it maintains the balance of cool and weird ideas* with an engaging and unpredictable plot. The structure was eerily similar: a slow build of action and ideas, turning in a widening gyre, punctuated by a sudden flurry of violence, trailing off into chaos as things fall apart and the book ends. Anarchy is, of course, loosed upon the world.

Again, many elements of the book were pure bait to me.

But she wasn't letting it go. "Everything's numbers you go down far enough don't you know?" She poked him, pinched his arm. "You think this is continuous? You think there's anything but math?"

He knew there wasn't. ... Numbers didn't just describe reality, numbers were reality, discrete step functions smoothing up across the Planck Length into an illusion of substance. (p. 166)

This quote flung me out of Echopraxia and back to my forever-sustained reread of A Compact History of Infinity, whose prose about the continuum is pure joy.

Echopraxia didn't really stick the landing for me. The main character was often off-balance and uncomfortable, but I felt sympathy neither with his feelings, nor his situation, nor his ignorance, nor him himself, even though he was the most relatably-like-modern-humans character, and recipient of the (reader-oriented) explanations and gradual reckoning of ideas.

The ending was incredibly bleak and pessimistic, a sort of anti-engaging wrapper around all the neat ideas. A bushel over the light. Blindsight was about consciousness and neurons, but Echopraxia seems to be about religion and neurons, which is just not as interesting to me.

This book made me feel retroactively obsolete from the vantage of future observers. Meh. I do not especially recommend it.


This post's theme word is casuistry, "deceptive or excessively subtle reasoning, especially on moral issues." Sufficiently advanced rhetoric is indistinguishable from casuistry; we're too dumb to understand the necessary nuanced reasoning.

*thoroughly-cited in Real Academic Literature, adding a huge chunk to my nonfiction reading queue

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.

Lagoon

I have recently read many things; I read voraciously and voluminously. This morning I finished Nnedi Okorafor's "Lagoon", which took all kinds of unexpected turns and, in the end, snuck away from a nice resolution. I find that her style as an author is mostly to leave the reader with incomplete ideas and stories, and while usually this is frustrating, something particular about the way she does it really draws me in.

Lagoon's protagonists are an unlikely crew --- a marine biologist, a soldier, and a rap star --- who are selected as the primary contacts of the aliens who have set up a base camp in their ship in the harbor of Lagos, Nigeria. They are not especially willing or eager, and "selected" sums up their training and objectives. No one knows what is going on, and the book creates an incredible atmosphere of carefully-balanced chaos.

It's like watching someone spin a dozen plates atop a dozen sticks. While juggling the sticks.

The three main characters' lives are interwoven with many others: their families, their friends, their nannies, people they pass in the street. Local students' clubs, the man who owns the bar on the beach fronting the aliens' landing. Okorafor has an incredible and ruthless flair for showing readers glimpses of full characters, and whisking them away in a minute, or a day, or gluing them in the center of our vision so that they occlude the rest of the plot. She is not using any authorial tools I recognize, and the novel has no signposts to reassure or orient the readers. The city of Lagos, and the country of Nigeria, are thrown into pandemonium by the arrival of aliens, and the reader is not really allowed any distance from this turmoil; there's no space to draw back and form an outsider's perspective on the entire thing.

The "normal" narrative chapters are interwoven with chapters from the point of view of fish in the harbor, and bats flying across the sky, and other inexplicable viewpoints that I just let wash over me. Some chapters are only one sentence long. Some parts are creative curlicues: in a book written in a sort-of-omniscient third person, the descriptive sentence

And that is all that Adaora, Agu and Anthony will ever remember about that thirty minutes of their lives. (p. 244)

is a sort of double-tease, since it deprives the characters and the readers of ever knowing what happened. It occurs in a chapter titled "Second Contact" and you've now read most of the chapter.

I like the fact that there is a marine biologist, who puts science explanations on the otherwise-magical things the aliens can do (change matter into other matter, control EM waves, etc.), but this is done quietly in the background, the same way that everyone understands that cell phones work using circuits and software, but we don't constantly talk or think about it. We just use the phones, and when they break, we sometimes can fix them. So the science-fiction/fantasy elements of this book were smooth and unnoticeable.

The book, like pretty much everything Nnedi Okorafor writes, made me think closely about social issues, made me look forward to the future, made me feel guilty for my luck and privilege, and made me incredibly happy by its mere existence. I'm glad she is getting so much exposure and encouragement, because it means there will be plenty more to read and enjoy.


This post's theme word is paresthesia, "a sensation of prickling, tingling, burning, etc. on the skin." Aliens have given you telekinesis? Paresthesia is the least of your worries.