Tarnsman of Gor

I've wanted to read a Gor book for ages, based on their weird reputation and the fact we had a bunch of them in the Sutekh library way back when. It's famed for it's misogyny, taking the usual Fantasy/Sci-fi gender roles to extremes. Tarnsman of Gor is the first in the series, so it seemed like a good place to start.

At first glance, it's actually very John Carter of Mars-esque - young academic Tarl Cabot is mysteriously transported to another world. It's like our world in some ways, but it's trapped in some equivalent of out ancient world - battles are fought with swords, spears, and archers. But it's also different in various fantastical ways - the world is rules by mysterious priest-kings; warriors fly about on giant pterodactyl-ey creatures called Tarns (hence the title of the book, Tarnsman of Gor), there are giant talking spiders in the forests, etc. It's not too bad (or at least, not much worse than other similar portal-into-a-world-with-a-bunch-of-random-sci-fi-and-fantasy-devices-thrown-in novels). The misogyny and extreme gender roles are relatively mild in this one - dodgy in a few places, such as the submissive slave girl business, and the long-winded justification the author felt Tarl Cabot needed to go through in order to hug his father and be happy about seeing him); but not as ridiculously horrifying as the later novels in the series get (it's now up to 30 novels).

I'd recommend this only if you're super-keen on both Conan and Edgar Rice Burroughs, and have run out of anything like that to read.

A Scanner Darkly

Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly is a dark and sombre look at drug culture in the near future (at least, the near future of the near past). It's unlike most of Dick's other stories (at least those I've read) in that it really is a study of character under pressure, rather than a series of shotgun blasts of ideas. It's a eulogy to friends the author lost to drugs in the sixties - not praising, not condemning, but looking sadly at the effects of drugs on the psyche.

The protagonist, Bob Arctor, is an undercover cop trying to infiltrate the drugs scene. To fully immerse himself, he has become addicted to Substance D, a powerful drug, and the drug starts to take its toll on him as the story progresses. We witness this from his perspective, which is often abrupt and difficult to follow, particularly so once his perspective becomes more and more warped by the drugs. It's very well done, and well worth a read.

The Lathe of Heavan

"Dreams come true, changing the real world" is a relatively common theme which has been explored quite a few times - I know I've read at least three stories based around the idea. Ursula K. Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven does a good job of it.

The novel starts with George Orr, an otherwise perfectly normal person, whose dreams occasionally change the world. He is terrified of this, and takes drugs to suppress his dreams. The plot kicks off when he is caught abusing pharmaceuticals and sent compulsory rehab, and Dr Haber (who I only just noticed when writing this, is an anagram of "rehab") realises that his patient is not delusion, and that this power of dreaming can be used to change things.

The novel explores a range of worlds, each a different dystopia. An underlying theme is that we can't really change things for the better, as there are always unexpected consequences to our choices, and the more significant the choice, the more significant the consequence. There is quite a bit of philosophy packed in here, and the key tension in the book is between Haber's very scientific, positivist approach, and Orr's calm acceptance of the world as it is.

Lathe of Heaven is quite an interesting read, and deserves its place in the SF Masterworks series that I found it in.

Emphyrio

I've like Jack Vance's weird blend of fantasy and science fiction since I was a teenager. He presents cultures and worlds with this air of stagnation and byzantine flamboyance that is unlike any othe writer. Emphyrio is a perfect example of this - it's a science fiction, but set in a strictly controlled medieval world where every person is required to follow their parents' career path, and respect the strict control of the Welfare Agency. As such, it feels more like fantasy than science fiction, probably deliberately so.

The protagonist, Ghyl Tarvoke, is a carver who dreams of great things - mainly, freedom and financial independence, and he stands up to the Lords and Ladies of his world to fight for it, with a range of unexpected consequences. As the story unfolds, it turns into a space opera, with Ghyl uncovering the mysteries of his home world. It's an interesting take on a possible future, emphasizing the diversity of governments and societies that are likely to evolve is we ever manage to get off Earth and spread ourselves across the galaxy.

Of Love and Other Demons

Gabriel García Márquez's Of Love and Other Demons is hauntingly beautiful and heart-rending to read. Set in a South American town in the 18th century, it tells the story of the life and death of Sierva Maria, the daughter of a noble whose life has fallen apart around him. She is bitten by a rabid dog, and the emotional disturbances caused by her neglected upbringing are diagnosed as rabies, and then as demonic possession. The tale leads inexorably to a tragic ending for all involved.

I love reading the works of Gabriel García Márquez - they are incredibly powerful - haunting and sad and tragic and subtly surreal, and at the end you're left with echoes of melancholy rather than ideas and plot. They need to be taken in small doses, as too much can overwhelm, so I only delve into his corpus every few years. They colour my whole mental picture of South America - I haven't read much other literature from south of the US/Mexican border, so when I think of South America, I think of sadness and lost love, of careful, gentle priests and dreaming girls, of magic and melancholy. It's a beautiful world, one I can ever visit because it only exists in García Márquez's pages.

Neptune's Brood

I've been a big fan of Charles Stross since I first read Accelerando years ago. I got my hands on this one the day it was released (ebooks ship quickly) - it's a followup to Saturn's Children, set some number of thousands of years into the future, in a posthuman universe that is being gradually colonized by the successors of Humanity.

More than any Sci-Fi author I've read, Stross is fascinated by economics. This thread in his fiction seems to be becoming stronger over the years, though it has always been there, and played an important part in Accelerando. In Neptune's Brood, the protagonist is a banker - specifically, a historian of accounting practices. The gradual colonization of space is drive by economics, not by any sense of manifest destiny or adventurous spirit or greater good of humanity. The novel is, in the end, a accountancy detective thriller set in the far future, rather than a classic space opera. Stross throws in a lot of ideas about how interstellar colonization will work in a universe governed strictly be the speed of light and laws of physics as we know them, and a few of them are quite fascinating. A few of them seem to be of more interest to Stross than to this reader, though.

I wasn't left as impressed with Neptune's Brood as I was by Saturn's Children or Accelerando, but it was still a worthwhile read.

Blue Mars

The last in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, Blue Mars kind of wraps up the story that unfolded in the two previous books. By "kind of", it does it in a slow, meandering kind of way. The book is trying to be a history of the settling and terraforming of Mars, as seen through the eyes of the first humans on Mars, and it really feels that way. There's a whole lot in all three books that is unnecessary. Like real history, deaths can be quite abrupt and not really have a good reason; a lot happens that isn't important, or related to any big thread of history, but is documented in any case. These books could have been a lot shorter, without losing a lot of their substance. But their bulk, and focus on the characters, meant that a huge big pile of ideas could be comfortably slipped in. Robinson has clearly thought a whole lot about how humans will colonize the Solar System; and in bringing together a lot of ideas that people have come up with over the last century, alongside quite a few of his own, he seems to have set the standard for describing how this will happen - a lot of what I read in this series reminded me very much of Charles Stross' Saturn's Children (written later, and has many ideas for how each planet will be settled directly taken from the Mars series, as far as I can see). Of course, the way Robinson writes the Mars trilogy has a certain "rightness" to it - coming out the end of these three long books, I really feel that if we're going to colonize the Solar System, this is exactly how we'll do it.

All in all, it's a very impressive series, and I'm glad I read it. If I had my time again, though, I would strongly consider reading the Cliff's Notes version, to get to the good stuff a lot quicker.

Postsingular

I possibly came into this one with overly high hopes. Rudy Rucker is often mentioned as one of the key authors writing about the Singularity, a concept I find endlessly fascinating. I think I was kind of expecting another Accelerando, but this wasn't up to that level.

Postsingular tells the tale of a few folks who live through a very simplistic Singularity, and how they cope with the new always-networked world populated by artificial intelligences and strange beings from a parallel universe (specifically, another brane different from, but very close to our universe). Some of the ideas are really very interesting, but it's all very deus ex machina, and reads more like a cheap fantasy novel (our heroes go to a magical land to bring back a magical artifact to save the world from a villain who wants to destroy it and remake it to bring back his lost love). Many parts of it were very cartoonish, and it suffered from one of my least favourite tropes, the Amazing Author Whose Creativity Can Change The World.

So overall, I was a bit disappointed. I think I'll start looking at Vinge to get my Singularity hit, and keep hoping Charlie Stross will jump back on that horse.

Green Mars

Green Mars, the second novel in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, is more of the same. It follows a reasonably large group of settlers and Martian natives (humans, born and raised on Mars) over a number of decades. It's pretty slow going, and not a lot happens. After the huge, disastrous, failed revolution, this book is mostly leading up to a second revolution, to free Mars from Earth and its greedy megacorporations.

It feels like about half the book could have been comfortably removed, without reducing the book's impact, or the overall plotline. It feels like the story is meant to be about the big picture of Martian colonization, terraforming, and politics as seen by its early settlers, but there is just a bit too much detail about the personal lives of a group of not particularly likeable, not particularly interesting characters. I don't feel like I'm getting to know them any better, or that their personal travails are adding a lot to the story, so a lot of this could be cut down, an you'd still have the big picture as well as the people picture.

That said, the tale of making Mars a world habitable by humans is unfolding rather majestically. Robinson really knows his stuff, and goes into quite an amount of technical detail describing how the atmosphere is being remade, how oceans are being created, how plant life is being seeded across the planet, and how human society is being rebuilt to adapt to this new world and the new technologies that have been developed. It's fascinating, and the series is well worth the read for this alone. It really feels like a a realistic portrayal of how the settlement of Mars might unfold.

Red Mars

The first book in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy is turning out to be an interesting read. I read the Years of Rice and Salt a few years ago and was blown away by how good it was, but I wasn't sure what to expect with this one. It's clearly the work of someone fascinated by Mars, who loves the planet and the potential for a new society it brings - and this is both a good and a bad thing.

Written in the 1990s, it's extremely up-to-date on our knowledge of Mars, though there is a fair bit of fictional science in there. The downside to Red Mars is that it's a book that really just wants to explore ideas - it's pretty clear that if Robinson could have made a living just writing a giant wiki about Mars and potential societies that might evolve there, he would have been happier doing that than having to saddle his ideas with characters and a plot. Most characters seem to be archetypes, placeholders for an idea rather than real people. There is an awful lot of infodumping happening - I know quite a bit more about the geology of Mars than I did six weeks ago (unfortunately, I don't know how much is based on real world observation and how much is Robinson's wishful thinking). The space elevator bits were fascinating.

I did enjoy Red Mars, and I'm now reading book 2 of the trilogy; but it feels like a series that many folks who are less science-nerdy than myself might not get a lot out of.

Virtual Libraries of the future

My friend Beat has put up an interesting post about digital libraries, the poorness of current interfaces, and how 3D interfaces might improve them. I started composing a response in email, but it ended up rather long winded, so I thought it belonged here as well.

Of all the options Beat lists, I think the Google Glasses wall of books is the most interesting. I'm looking forward to the various digital overlays those things will provide to real life.

There's something missing, though, I think, with 3D interfaces for bookshelves (and 2D bookshelf interfaces). They're replicating interfaces defined by the hindrances caused by the physicality of books. I use Delicious Library to keep track of my paper books, and while it has the ubiquitous bookshelf interface, the interface I use is the database interface - looking like the old iTunes - basically, a list of all my books, with columns for title, author, genre, and so on. The bookshelf interface is too cumbersome. Fundamentally, I think the bookshelf itself is a bad interface. Literature isn't a linear space, but bookshelves are.

Basically, there are too many books in a collection for any linear interface to be helpful. 3D interfaces with shelves are just a slightly fancier way of presenting your books in a one-dimensional list with a single sorting algorithm. They way I see future digital libraries going include:

The loss of length limits - a novel currently needs to be between 150 and 1200 pages - any more and it gets expensive to print, any less and it's not a novel and won't sell. I'd like to have my short stories and novels all sitting in the same repository, without the short stories needing to be bound into anthologies. Charles Stross explains the current limitations well on his blog.

Interesting and powerful cross-linking and filtering - I want to be able to say:
    "Find me stories by this author"
    "Find stories that I'll like, based on books I previously enjoyed" (Amazon is doing this now, to an extent, and Delicious Library pulls this data into my local repository)
    "Find me stories my friends enjoyed" (Goodreads does this well, but why isn't the data in my Calibre library?)
    "Find me stories set in the same fictional world/continuity as this book"
    "Find me stories where oak trees have a mystical significance"
    "Find me stories written in a similar style as this one, but with more action"
    "Find me stories set in 1930s South-East Asia where the European heroine is saddened by the plight of the native workers"
    "Browse for stories by micro-genre, filtered for a certain level of seriousness"

Multiple searching and browsing interfaces - some folks will like the 2D or 3D bookshelf interface, but my children's children might not be familiar with that UI from real life. Tag clouds (2D and 3D), search result lists, and other interfaces that allow the viewing of more data, in a more structured way will be more useful.

The loss of book covers - these are another artifact of the current physical construction of books. I don't necessarily that the pictures will go away, but there might be multiple pictures, or a single picture without title/author text superimposed, or something else (perhaps a 3D scene from the book?). With the rise of comics in our collective literary consciousness, perhaps the line between novel and graphic novel will become more fluid.

Looser boundaries between texts - with the physical volume there is an sense of "oneness", or a text standing on its own. You might tie a series of these together into a trilogy (or a trilogy in five parts), but there are still those inherent boundaries. I remember the sense of wonder that Joe and I felt when we found a boxed set of Lord of the Rings in six books (for those of you who have only read it once or twice and don't remember the detail, each of the three books contains two "books" - Return of the King is books five and six, even in the big single-volume editions), which I think was partly because it violated (in a good way) that oneness of the three books in the series*. What we'll see in the digital future is more sets of stories that stand alone but form part of a something larger - the continuing adventures of a single character, or a set of characters, or the unfolding history of a town or a world; written by one author or many; in stories short and long and interlinked. We'll see short stories that fill out some minor plot point in another story, expanding and throwing light on the original story. We'll see parts of the same story from different perspectives. We'll see more borrowings of characters from one story into another. All of these things are happening now (in things like the Star Wars Extended Universe or various other franchises), but it will become more normal, more complicated and diffuse, and more accepted outside "genre" fiction. This is exactly the sort of thing that will break the "book" and "bookshelf" model of fiction.

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Another problem with 3D interfaces to libraries (or 3D anything, for that matter), is that you only end up with slightly more room to move than in a 2D space. Some interesting ways of accessing information are inherently multi-dimensional (as an example, the range of questions I would like to ask above can be seen as making queries into a highly multi-dimensional data structure). Three dimensional interfaces as they stand today are mostly just fancy ways of viewing one- or two-dimensional data while using an expensive graphics cards. If our best real world interface for cataloging books is the bookshelf (a 1-dimensional filing system), how should a 3D virtual interface improve on that?

Lastly, to fit enough stuff into a 3D space, you really want to use a hyperbolic space, rather than 3D space (I couldn't find a really good visualisation of it, but here's a start). You can just fit more stuff into smaller distances that way - so you can create more powerful cross-linking of concepts in the space. I don't think this will take off in a big way until people have had more experience adapting to virtual worlds, so give it a (human) generation or two.

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It's interesting food for thought, though. One of the exciting things about this is that we're at a point where we are heading into an unknown future, and any of a hundred guesses about how this will turn out are likely to be true.


* "You have to get this for Joe for Christmas," I said to his girlfriend at the time. She replied "What for? He already has a copy of Lord of the Rings". Says I, "No, trust me on this". A few weeks later she thanked me for how well chosen a present it was.

Cloudstreet

Tim Winton's Cloudstreet is a beautiful novel, telling the tale of two families and their relationship over two decades. They are working class families, struggling with poverty, addiction, and the place in society they are given. It ponders the roles given to members of families both by society, and by the families themselves. The language matches the educational level of the characters - chapters are written form the point of view of characters, and the language matches each character subtly but effectively, but then occasionally expands into vivid, poetic beauty.

Well worth a read, and I'm looking forward to watching the TV series, which Jen got for Christmas.