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.

Roadside Picnic

Arkady & Boris Strugatsky's Roadside Picnic is a bit of an odd book - it seems to be trying to make a point, but I couldn't quite work out what that point was. It is set in an abstract time period, probably the near future of the 1960s, after aliens had landed on earth in four locations, dropped a pile of assorted stuff, and left. It's set in Canada, but it's a Canada with a very Russian feel to it - all heavy drinking and institutional oppression. Redrick Schuhart is a stalker - a person who makes a living sneaking into the Zone (where the aliens landed), and stealing their artifacts for sale. The Zone is a deadly place, full of random deadly items and occurrences, and most stalkers end up dead. Red is one of the veterans of the trade - he has been doing it a long time, and has strong survival instincts in the zone.

As the story unfolds, the reader finds out more about the nature of The Zone - what the various items are capable of doing, and the effect it has on people who venture inside. Red's deformed child, Monkey, is an example of these effects.

Roadside Picnic is an interesting meditation on the possible effects of contact with an alien civilization, one so advanced that we just have no understanding of how far ahead of us they are, and how their tech works. But it is also very much a product of its time and place, the strange and somewhat alien (to my eyes, now) world of the Cold War.

The Dog Stars

I do like a good post-apocalyptic story. I guess it comes from being an Australian - the landscape and weather lend themselves to thoughts of the absence of humanity, of the collapse of life as we know it. Peter Heller's The Dog Stars, like Cormac McCarthy's The Road, is set in a post-collapse USA. In the Dog Stars, it is a series of diseases - a flu, and some mysterious blood-borne disease - that have wiped out nearly all people, and the survivors have descended into barbarism. In many ways, The Road and The Dog Stars could both be set in the same world; the way the world ended might be different, but the behaviour of the survibors is the same; although the characters in The Dog Stars seem to have been much more successful in setting themselves up for life after the apocalypse.

At the start of the novel, Hig and and Bangley are the only two remaining people in a small town in inland USA. They defend themselves from other survivors, who seem to turn up in the town every few months, trying to attack and kill them. The novel is somewhat unclear about the morality of all this - Hig seems ambivalent about whether they should be killing these attackers, or trying to befriend them. His few attempts at befriending have failed, nearly getting them killed, so now their reaction to newcomers is now to shoot on sight.

It's a slow story, with only a little action, but it's an exploration of Hig's loss, his sadness, and his search for hope in a ruined world. It comes to its conclusion well, and you get to know the characters well enough that their reactions to things can sometimes come as a bit of a surprise. The Dog Stars is well written (the switching between Hig's stilted day to day voice and his waxing poetical is very nicely done), and well worth reading.

The Quiet American

I've been meaning to read something by Graham Greene for a while, and this was the first novel of his I happened across. Written in 1956, it tells the story of the unfolding relationship between Fowler, a world-weary and cynical British reporter, and Pyle, a naive American sent across to represent US interests in Vietnam. Set against the backdrop of the French attempt to suppress the communist uprising. It is a vivid and complex story, and interestingly prescient regarding America's role in Vietnam in subsequent decades. "I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused" says Fowler of Pyle, and it serves as a verdict of American foreign policy - the foolishness and destructiveness of a new imperialist power, as few through the eyes of an old imperialist power.

The focal point of the clash between Fowler and Pyle is Phuong, Fowlerr's beautiful Vietnamese lover. Pyle falls for her as well, and proceeds to try to win her from Fowler. There is a simmering tension between the two men, which never threatens to erupt into violence, despite the raw emotions involved.

Morally ambiguous and complex, this makes a very interesting read - both as a novel and as historical commentary.

The Hydrogen Sonata

I'm always excited when a new Iain M. Banks book comes out, especially if it's a Culture novel. Even though the last one was a bit of a disappointment, I eagerly jumped onto the iBook store and downloaded this one the day it came out.

It's pretty good. The Hydrogen Sonata turns out the be a historical music composition that the protagonist of the story is trying to master. The piece of music itself isn't important, but the time period it's from, around the time the Culture was formed, is important. The composer was a Gzilt, a humanoid species that elected not to join the Culture. The plot of the story revolves around the last days of the Gzilt civilization, as they prepare to Sublime - in the Culture universe, civilizations, once they reach a technological peak, elect to exit our Universe, and move, as a whole, to another plane of existence. Subliming has been mentioned in a number of previous Culture novels, and it's interesting to see it explored in depth. It also delves a bit into the psychology of the Culture's Ships, hyper-intelligent AIs embedded in starships. It gets back to the sense of wonder at the vastness of it all that pervades some of Banks' earlier Culture novels.

It is a good read, and if you like sci-fi, it's a definite must-read (along with all the other Iain M Banks novels).