Jasper Fforde and The Eyre Affair

Jasper Fforde's worlds are written reality-adjacent. That is, the characters prance along in their familiar lives, performing recognizable acts, until suddenly one thing is very non-real.[1] Then two things, interspersed with quotidian details.[2] These pile atop each other, resulting in hilarious scenarios[3] ranging from slapstick humor to sotto voce jokes delivered to the reader with a wink. One particularly terrible joke setup is several books long and results in a pun so terrible that it finishes the chapter.

Mr. Fforde's worldbuilding neither explains how magic left the world and we ended up with the reality we have (like Tolkien's Lord of the Rings or Ted Chiang's Seventy-Two Letters), nor how a little change in our reality leads to a different world (e.g., recently the Newsflesh books), but just nearby. Some things are relatable, but anytime, a sudden difference may arise and smack readers in the face like a herring.[3]

The Eyre Affair's protagonist, Thursday Next, is a literary detective. This entails many bizarre tasks, as well as the mundane; at one point the officer on duty reports, "I've got most of the office reading Jane Eyre at the moment in case anything unusual happens --- all quiet so far."[4] For the entirety of The Eyre Affair --- as well as the next five books in the series -- Thursday rushes comically around, hurtling from one hilarious emergency to the next. The emergencies build smoothly to a climax, where Thursday, temporarily recursive-written another book, witnesses the fire at Mr. Rochester's house in Jane Eyre. Not yet satisfied, Mr. Fforde uses the denouement to parody Poe's The Raven, explain the authorship of Shakespeare's work, and introduce several time-travelling characters from later books in the series, mid-their-plots.

The Eyre Affair, and for that matter the entire Thursday Next series, is a delightful read. These books singlehandedly justify all degrees ever granted in literature. I wholeheartedly recommend them; how else will you appreciate mad-uncle Mycroft's prototype of a sarcasm early-warning device [5] or punctuation-devouring bookworms?





This post's theme word is frangible, "capable of being broken." It turns out that the classics are quite frangible!


[1] In The Eyre Affair, the narrator Thursday Next is a retired war veteran, working a government job and reminiscing about her lost love... whose father is a renegade time-travelling ChronoGuard, and can pause time at will.

[2] Thursday's pet, Pickwick, is irritable and attention-seeky... and a dodo built from an at-home unextinction kit. 

[3] Door-to-door proselytizers advocate not religions but different authorships of Shakespeare's plays. Red herrings abound.

[4] In my ebook, page 186 of 238.

[5] p. 84 of 238

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.

Jhereg

Stephen Brust's Jhereg jumped to the top of the TBR queue because of Cory Doctorow's strong recommendation. It didn't hit any sweet spots for me: it was a quick ~230 pages of fantasy, told in first-person by an assassin, in a fantasy world with sorcery and witchcraft and Dragaerans (descriptions render these more human than the name would suggest). There were action sequences and preparation scenes and scheming and thousand-year internecine feuds. No plot twists were surprising, although the narration chose at many points to casually reveal things that shifted the entire world-building operation (for example, at one point --- and this is not much of a spoiler --- it is revealed that death is not particularly permanent, and in fact is just a way of sending a snippy message to your enemies).

I might read the next book in the series, but it's low-priority. There's a new Jasper Fforde book out! And I still haven't read the sequel to Hild!

This post's theme word is gegg (v intr / noun), "to play a hoax or practical joke; a trick or practical joke." In a world where magic is a daily practice, there is a breadth of possible geggs.

The Visible Man

Habits change over time, let's start with that. It is unusual of me to bail on reading a physical book, but this is partly because of the inertia --- literally --- that the book possesses. Ebooks are different. For one, they are not physically present, so there is no cluttery pile accumulating at my bedside; discarded ebooks just get pushed to the bottom of the stack. And reading an ebook requires a physical device (in my case, the fantastic Kobo mini, sadly discontinued), which is easily loaded with thousands of other books, so it is easy to put down one book and switch to another.  Plus, ebooks are plentiful in my desired reading language no matter where I am physically located; the same is not true of physical books.

But finally. The New York Public Library has most strongly enabled me to be a book-quitter. There is a huge selection of books available, free, so many that my queue is hundreds of books long, and every single one in the queue looks really interesting.

So when I start reading a book (take, for instance, The Visible Man by Chuck Klosterman) and it's a little weird, I can keep reading it, through distasteful scenes and flat writing and poor characterizations. And when the interesting plot is finally, irretrievably poisoned by the continued lack of choices or actions by the narrator, and becomes a boring chore of moving my eyes across the words, I can easily bail on the book, put it down, and clease my palate with some of my bookmarked favorites, chapters from Neal Stephenson and Stanislaw Lem and Jasper Fforde.

And I never need to look back.

I didn't (at least, the last 60% of it). Skimming some reviews on goodreads suggests that even Klosterman's fans prefer his non-fiction writing to his fiction. Maybe one day I'll have worked through my giant queue and be curious enough to try his writing again. It was intriguing and technical (the story-within-a-story framing raises a lot of questions), so maybe after acquainting myself with some non-fiction I'll revisit this one.

Or maybe not.

Summary: don't bother reading this one.


This post's theme word is desultory, "marked by absence of a plan; disconnected; jumping from one thing to another," or "digressing from the main subject; random." The desultory anecdotes did not advance the plot, although they constituted the entirety of the text.