Obsolete Your Idols

The book I just read turned out to be a couple of firsts for me

• first Ken MacLeod book I've read
• first post-Singularity book I've read (possibly)*
• first book I've read this year which I'm ready to pronounce my favorite of the year

This book follows one old and dedicated woman in her quest to resolve a deep and abiding threat. We get flashbacks of her youth, we get political and philosophical arguments, we get ironic social commentary, we get sf alien tech.

The book is called The Cassini Division and when I first saw it on a friend's shelf I was compelled to pick it up and look at the back cover and flyleaf text. Once I'd read that much of it, I was driven to borrow it and bump it to the top of my reading queue. If anything, it was even better than I was hoping.

So what's it about? This book is about anticipating what life after the Singularity might be like if only people selfish enough to sacrifice everything to attain it pass through that event. It's full of references to other sf, most overtly in the chapter titles. It's a nice character study and often the dialog had me chuckling aloud.

I like it. I think it's the best book I read this year.

Who else might like it

• people who think about the Singularity
• people who like Heinlein's narratives but not his politics

I would like especially to thank Brad who, on every occasion I have spoken to him for the past year said nothing but "KenMacLeodKenMacLeodKenMacLeodKenMacLeod" and Brent, who loaned me his copy to read.

*Depending upon whether you consider Wil McCarthy's post-Scarcity analogous to post-Singularity

UPDATE 2007/12/30: No it's not new
I may have given the impression simply by being so late to the party on this book that it's a new book. It's not, it's been out for years, but I am a slow reader and have a long to-read queue which prevents me noticing many good books. This book does meet my new reading criteria: it's good enough that if I had died without reading it, I would have been sad about that (in theory, in an alternate reality where sentiment persisted beyond incarnation or where one could know of things beyond one's exposure).

Imagine someone sapped you, popped open your skull like a Pez dispenser and shoved a radio into your head which enabled someone to transmit instructions into your head with the same plausibility as your own thoughts. If that sounds familiar, you've read some of the same books I have.

So I read another book on the same theme and it was The Squares of the City. It's from 1965 and it's One of the Ten Best Science Fiction Novels of the Year. I know that because the publisher helpfully printed that on the cover. What is this book?

It's a novelization of a chess game. Specifically, this chess game. In this aspect, it's a little like The Man in the High Castle, where the narrative is shaped by an external pattern. Chess is less random than the I Ching, or so I seem to believe.

That's not a spoiler, about the chess game. I say this because

• the back cover tells you this
• the foreword tells you this
• the introduction tells you this
• the afterword tells you this

You're supposed to read this story, knowing that it is an anthropomorphic rendition of the chess game. Name characters are pieces and they move, interact, threaten and capture, according to the schedule set by the chess games.

Does it work? Yes and no. It's easy, reading the story, to forget the structure imposed upon it by the chess game. The story is reasonably interesting as a man vs. society struggle. But in the end, it felt overly constrained by that framework. Sometimes the protagonist seems struck inert and unmotivated by the dictates of the game.

Things I liked about it

• prescient awareness of the threat that subliminal messaging presents
• prescient warning that someday the government would manage populace using gimmicks dreamed up by advertisers
• Maria Posador, a strong female character
• romanticizing civil engineering
• an experimental framework which added a layer to understanding the work
• an exploration of prejudice

Things I didn't

• the presentation of the story which laid out over and over the chess game underlying
• the endgame compromise where Brunner abandons the game as played

Who might like this story

• chess fans
• fans of John Brunner, the godfather of cyberpunk
• fans of experimental fiction

I've since updated the laptop to Ubuntu 7.04 and then immediately thereafter to Ubuntu 7.10 and nothing bad has happened. The web camera was getting closer to usable as I could see it in lsusb

binder@death:~$ lsusb
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 0000:0000  
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 0000:0000  
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 0000:0000  
Bus 005 Device 001: ID 0000:0000  
Bus 003 Device 002: ID 05e1:0501 Syntek Semiconductor Co., Ltd 
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 0000:0000  
binder@death:~$

and so knew it was a Syntek webcam. I did some browsing around and found recommendations to use the cutting edge Syntek driver via an Ubuntu forums thread and following those suggestions, I could see it recognized in dmesg:

[   31.580000] stk11xx: Syntek USB2.0 webcam driver startup
[   31.584000] stk11xx: Syntek USB2.0 - STK-1135 based webcam found.
[   31.584000] stk11xx: Syntek AVStream USB2.0 1.3M WebCam - Product ID 0x0501.
[   31.584000] stk11xx: Release: 0005
[   31.584000] stk11xx: Number of interfaces : 1
[   31.592000] stk11xx: Initialize USB2.0 Syntek Camera
[   31.808000] stk11xx: Syntek USB2.0 Camera is ready
[   31.808000] stk11xx: Syntek USB2.0 Camera is now controlling video device /dev/video0
[   31.808000] usbcore: registered new interface driver usb_stk11xx_driver
[   31.808000] stk11xx: v1.1.0 : Syntek USB Video Camera

So now I was nearly home. But I still needed to do one more thing to get it to go because when I tried to start Camorama it kept erroring out with:

Could not connect to video device (/dev/video0). 
Please check connection.

And when I ran it from the command line with the -D switch, I got a touch more information:

binder@death:~$ camorama --debug
VIDIOCGCAP  --  could not get camera capabilities, exiting.....

Which turned out to be resolved by the same thing that always fixes using multimedia devices in Linux: permissions. In this case, /dev/video0 existed, was owned by root:video and only had permissions for user and group. So I added my user account to group video with:

sudo adduser binder video

and all is right with the world.

So a friend of mine is making her way through Snow Crash. Plowing, as she cleverly puts it. Reading her midpoint assessment of it reminded me of the first time I read it. How the opening passage, with The Deliverator, grabbed my attention, how everything seemed comic book slick and sf movie out-there.

It was like an especially good novelization of a wicked cool dream some nerdy guy might have. Which is why it held such appeal for me then and still does. But after a couple times through it, and having learned more about how stories get crafted, it's no longer a book I'd rave about to someone.

In fact, as much as I really deeply enjoy Stephenson books, it's not even the first Stephenson book I'd suggest someone new to him read. For sheer accessibility, I'd recommend Interface and even then I'm not convinced I'd recommend Stephenson to most people. Honestly, the kind of fetishization of information and language and long perspective view needed to really suck the marrow out of the bones of his novels is not very common.

That is, it's a niche of an already niche market. A subselection, as it were. I don't exactly construe it as a guy vs. gal thing but I think there are probably social forces which make it more likely that there is a higher percent of gears which will mesh in a guy's head when reading Stephenson than will click with a gal reader.

I know. Exceptions. If you're reading this, you're quite possibly in the self-selecting narrow range of people who read about the kinds of books I read and write about, even if you don't read those books, yourself.

So I think it's a fair assessment to believe that Snow Crash is a book which will predominantly appeal to guys, in particular a subset of guys who are computer savvy, language obsessed and who, yes, fetishize girls on skateboards. I suppose by now the market must be relatively flooded by derivative and imitative works which refer or have the underlying assumption of familiarity with Snow Crash but I haven't sought them out because, after Snow Crash hit all those buttons for me, I was satisfied.

But that implies to me that there is, somewhere subsequently, a novel which is enough like Snow Crash that the bit-head guys would dig on it but which has broadened out enough in appeal that people outside of that demographic, even just a little bit [bit-head gals, non-bit-head guys] or way, way out [non-bit-head gals] would enjoy but if that is true, even if I were to become aware of the book, would I even recognize the similarity? Would I be able to read it?

I know I couldn't read many of the Tolkien-inspired fantasy books, and when I could I would be unsatisfied at how incoherent, contradictory or blandly derived they were.

So if Alli Dalisay had asked me for a book recommendation sort of in the cyberpunk modern style, I wouldn't have said Snow Crash. I'd have said When Gravity Fails or if she wanted Stephenson in particular, Cryptonomicon -- hey, it even has scenes in the Philippines.

It's possible to draw a line, dividing the comic book works of Warren Ellis I enjoy from those which I don't. It severs the cape and sf work (which I can't get enough of) from the horror and prehistory stuff (which, while viscerally affecting, I do not consider enjoyable).

Some of his work is closer to the line, on one side or another. Global Frequency is just barely on the like side, for example. I can't read that as a book, I have to read each chapter/issue and let it simmer between readings. Nextwave is just barely on the dislike side, mostly because I'm not a fan of the Marvel setting which he's riffing on, there.

I like his way of seeing the world enough that I even bought his Available Light book. Read it, and enjoyed it for more than novelty's sake. Some very striking images and suitable prose.

So now he's written a novel. This novel.

It's called Crooked Little Vein and in a word it is awesome.

It's an American road trip viewed through the lens of the internet.

It's a natural outgrowth of some of the text fragments I've seen him posting before on his various websites, news stories he's flagged as research materials, rolled up into a nice sharp bolus of insight. It's a perspective on America from the other side of an ocean. It's funny and gross and suspenseful and wry.

It's in a similar vein to the last book I read and a pair of my all-time favorite books but updated to a more modern set of patterns of perception.

Who might like this book

• paranoids, practical and practicing
• fans of Warren Ellis's dialog and characters
• fans of secret history
• fans of noir stories

Who might not like this book

• people who are frightened of the internet
• people who are so over the internet, already

Tangentially, there's a more informed and less glib review of CLV over at fearzone written by Nick Mamatas.

After I moved to the Bay Area, my desktop machines began the long slow death march which machines undertake after they've been bumped around from state to state for a half decade, and seen heavy use as development platforms, house servers, and world facing servers. Which is to say they got gradually less useful / available to me on a personal level. Meaning that for the past three years or so, I've been using whatever laptops my job issued to me for anything I needed to do at home. Meaning I stopped coding on my personal projects, stopped enjoying much of the material the web has to offer. You know. Pr0n.

But now that's changed!

I bought a laptop for myself, my very first just-for-me laptop, in May of this year and as I threatened at the time, here's my review of it.

First off, what is it? It's an XW1560 from RCubed. I'd link to it but they seem to have discontinued that model. The closest match is probably their XW1580. It's about the same size, had the same CPU choice, different video, similar RAM. So pretty comparable to what I have.

How do I like what I have? It's AWESOME.

I got a dual boot configuration because there are a few things I need to provide technical support for in my superhero identity which require me to use Windows but I only tend to boot up in that mode when fighting crime or when a particularly exciting Patch Tuesday has happened and I need to catch up. Otherwise the laptop runs Ubuntu 6.06.

Despite it being a dual core 64-bit CPU, it's running the 32bit release of Linux so that I can have multimedia flash support. Remember that bit in the first paragraph where you thought I was joking? I'm still making that joke.

One of the services RCubed provides with an Ubuntu pre-install are nice icons to install proprietary binary-only multimedia drivers. That means I can watch Windows Media and MPEG-n format video on this laptop and getting to that point was painless. Yes, I know how to do that manually and yes I've gone through that loop more than once but oh how nice it was to have someone else do the work for me on this. The downside to that is that I'm leaving it at release 6.06 until the next Ubuntu LTS releases, rather than chasing the cutting, or even the stable, edge.

Things I do with this laptop which seem pretty cool to me

• watch DVD movies
• watch videos from the web
• use wpa2 wireless access points
• code in as many languages as I care to (I exclude here the ones which suck, ie, are proprietary or otherwise lack SDKs for Linux)
• boot painlessly into Windows when I need to suffer the Land of Suck
• use a number of solid state removable media with it, no gotchas

Things I don't do with this laptop but wish I could

• use the built-in camera; maybe a newer kernel / drivers will help
• use the firewire or E-SATA interfaces; none of my devices need this so the ports just sit idle and I couldn't tell you if they work
• go on battery power for more than two hours; my only real complaint, the battery life is shitty but I think I'm just spoiled from using other laptops
• make better use of the SD/MMC bay; all my solid state stuff is CF (oops!)

Things I'd do differently if I were to buy a laptop today

• nothing; this is exactly the laptop I wanted and I didn't pay more than seemed reasonable for it

Who might enjoy a laptop from RCubed

• people who want to get a dedicated Linux laptop without doing a lot of research / labor to get to that point
• people who like to use the little magic key stuff on laptop keyboards; they come configured to work with Linux (thanks, RCubed!, thanks, Ubuntu!)
• people who will not be angry when UPS drops the package and SOAKS IT IN WATER as they did with mine; man, UPS keeps working my teats. If I could change one thing about RCubed it would be to have them provide shipping options other than UPS ones

I did buy myself a ShaggyMac screen protector because I'd been very happy with what a similar set of laptop pajamas did for a Powerbook I bought some time back and am pleased at how well that has helped keep the RCubed laptop clean and crud-free. So that's a pretty cool purchase I made, there.

Remember when I read Catch-22 and I said I should have read it years ago? That wasn't strictly true in that at a younger age I probably wouldn't have appreciated it as much as I did reading it now. That I had to age into the point where that cynicism glitters.

I just read The Crying of Lot 49 and I may have the opposite situation, where I'm past the prime of my enjoyment of the book.

I did enjoy it, but I probably would have enjoyed it more at the point where I still thought powerful ideas were enough to change the world. That the sharpest knife is actually perspective and that it can be used to carve away all the parts which don't fit in the perfect world. That's the kind of book this was for me, an exploration of a perspective where paranoia is contagious and the extrusion of other worlds into one's own are wondrous and revelatory as well as disturbing and sickening.

Is that an operational definition of the consensus reality of the real world? Maybe. I'm less sure than I once was.

This story did seem to capture something core about the California experience, the droning background impression of living here, where everyone seems to be the star of their own dramatic tale and all other humans are merely bit players. In the same way that Oedipa Maas entertains the notion that the entire sequence of events she's experiencing are perhaps an elaborate prank or a targeted threat, many of the people I see every day similarly behave as if everything is staged for their benefit. It's an odd realization to notice that you're the least important person in California, if you were to judge by the reactions of others.

The book is the story of a woman brushing up against and becoming ensnared with either madness, a prank, a conspiracy or something which borrows from all three. It's structured very pleasantly and the protagonist is likable and not at all unreliable. The other characters are deftly conveyed but not very convolute. That's the surface.

I suspect there's a lot to decode here, going deeper and analyzing and unraveling the symbols but I'm a shallow reader so you'll need to talk to a graduate student about all of that.

What I liked about the book

• reliable narrator, hooray, even when she's possibly hallucinating
• conspiracy stories, love 'em, especially with secret history overtones
• short and fast read
• meta-fiction, with the play within the book narrative

What I didn't

• nothing

Who might like this book

• young aspiring anarchists, artists, rebels, malcontents, riffraff, hop-heads, surrealists and Republicans
• people who think they should like Pynchon but find his other works too long or too slow
• stamp collectors who've been looking for a racy book to prove to other people that philatelists can intersect with fornication

So this is my review of Sicko.

Well, it was going to be. When I started my day, I was planning to see Sicko as my third and final documentary of the day. But then a funny thing happened. Vy had joined me for dinner and we walked past the Gaia Arts Center hunting the wily burrito. Lo, and likewise, behold, it was Documentary Tuesday at the Center. That meant a free showing of Enron: the Smartest Guys in the Room!

I'd been meaning to see this one since I first saw trailers for it, but I don't normally go to the movies. Or so it seems to me. So we jumped at this chance. Or I did and Vy humored me.

My take on Enron: a symptom of the problem.

The problem: systems built to diffuse responsibility combined with pursuit of money above all other concerns. It's a triumph of single minded obsession lauded as an individual and group virtue. It's sick and it's disgusting and it's how things work.

Pissed me off.

The King of Kong: a Fistful of Quarters was the second movie I saw. Again, a documentary. Again, highly rated at Rotten Tomatoes. Even better, it had things in it I'd actually seen. There's a video game tournament from 1982 ... in Ottumwa, Iowa.

You know, where we used to have to roll up the window to drive past the Hormel plant so we wouldn't gag from the stench.

Oh, yes. I've been to Ottumwa. I even remember when that tournament happened. I wasn't allowed anywhere near it, of course.

Just as I remember the Twin Galaxies video game arcade in Fairfield, Iowa. I remember going in to it and being dazzled by the options, the lights, the sound. I remember staring at those boxes and knowing that inside of each one there was a simple computer doing all of the work I was perceiving as sound and sight.

I was in there once and then never again. I suppose I must have not shut up about it in a way which worried my parents that I'd fall into the trap of pouring a lot of money (not that I had any) into the machines. But I did go in once and it was amazing.

There's also some bits about Transcendental Money-extraction in the movie which is just as creepy now as it was when I was living right next to it.

I didn't recognize any of the current day streets of Fairfield stuff but how would I? So much has changed. The last time I visited, I didn't even recognize much of the stuff on the main drag. I could find my way to the schools I'd gone to and that's about it.

But this documentary isn't really about Fairfield, it's about playing arcade video games competitively. It's about doing whatever it takes to win, including estranging your wife, neglecting your kids, social engineering, acting through proxies, playing mind games, and spending hours a day playing. This story starts off playing for laughs, gets unseemly pretty quickly, and turns into something of an underdog tale.

Very good movie for the nerd set, the retro gaming set, or people who like barbecue sauce.

Not so good for people who never saw classic video arcades, don't care about video games or who think dude rivalry films need guns to be worth watching.

Yesterday I saw three documentaries. The first one was one named The Devil Came on Horseback. I chose it on the basis of the Rotten Tomatoes rating it had: 96%. That's a pretty amazing score for a documentary.

It's an amazing documentary. It's brutal, bleak, tragic with dashes of hope and optimism. It really moved me with pity and compassion for the suffering the people of the Darfur region of Sudan suffer at the hands of their own government.

This movie is brutal but should be mandatory viewing for any citizen of the world.

The book, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, is not science-fiction but it is fiction. I'd previously read The Speed of Dark and I can't help but compare the two (compare, not contrast).

Both have autistic narrators as protagonists. Both feature simple narratives and focus on the kinds of situations which one assumes to be simple for non-autistic people to navigate but which are shown to be challenging for the functional autistic people in our societies.

So what did The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time bring which was usefully new? Some ruminations on how absolutely brutally difficult it is to assimilate betrayal into one's mindset if one has little to no emotional empathy. The implication here being that with a sense of why someone might do or say to express complex emotional states, it becomes possible to perceive a gradation of excusable behavior.

So in that reading, this book is not really about an autistic sense of the world, it's more a narrative about how people are constantly committing betrayals of one another, great and small, for the most justifiable of reasons and they are able to do this because of a deep sense of emotional empathy. Because I suspect some fact may harm another, I choose not to reveal it or perhaps I reveal it partially or perhaps I even obfuscate that fact to hide it from the person who I suspect it may harm.

But the world is a multi-vector space.

Even if I never reveal the fact, the potentially harmed person may learn it in some other way. The impact may be heightened if they can learn or deduce that I kept the information from them.

That's the message I took away from this book and that's much deeper than the textual narrative. I don't know that that's something the author put into it on purpose but it's something I feel free to take from it as a late modernist period reader (tangentially, we are not yet post-modern because I haven't seen anyone actually being over modernism; we're junkies in denial, not remission) and that explanatory framing of this story made it an enjoyable read for me, after the fact. During the reading, the story was interesting but had no real accelerant quality to motivate me to read it faster and faster.

Interestingly, this is a book which a record number of co-workers had already read (TWO of them) before I did and both of them loved it and raved about it. They're not especially genre readers so this book is probably pretty accessible to people who hate the other books I write about having read.

(I also read Secrets and Lies in the interim but nobody cares about my take on that as it is the anticipated response.)

Who might like this book

• genre-haters who like books with a little different spin
• people who like to read about children and broken homes
• people who like bite-sized math facts

Who might not

• dog-lovers with sensitive constitutions

Overall, a not very challenging, easy read of a book. It even has pictures and some fun math bits.

If I knew a strange story of something which happened to me but rather than tell you that story I told you a story about telling you the story of the strange events which transpired, it would be a form of story not entirely unlike Kelly Link telling you stories as she does in stranger things happen which I just read. This is not an explanation of her stories, this is not even an explanation of my experience of her stories but it does seem to indicate an almost irrepressible urge to take on some of the practices of her writing in shallow form when writing about her writing.

It's all very meta-, you see.

There's a blurb on the cover and it's by Jonathan Lethem and it seems to me to be Jonathan Lethem writing about Kelly Link as if he were Kelly Link writing about someone else (who has the same name as Kelly Link) but is not the Kelly Link about whom Kelly Link (in her guise as Jonathan Lethem) is writing. It says

Kelly Link is the exact best and strangest and funniest short story writer on earth that you have never heard of at the exact moment you are reading these words and making them slightly inexact. Now pay for the book.

When I read that blurb, before reading the stories in the book, I thought What a curious way to say that and it didn't sound very much like the Jonathan Lethem books I've read but now that I've read this collection of stories, I think it's very much like something Kelly Link might say about her writing if she were someone else.

This collection has eleven stories. Here are some brief notes about them.

• Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose. When this story was over, I wanted to watch The World According to Garp. It seems representative of Kelly Link stories to me, in that it has a protagonist who is unclear on their origin, motives, and environment.
• Water Off a Black Dog's Back. This is a moral tale about not fucking people you meet in libraries. Or a cautionary tale about being sure to lose things you care about before it's too late. I'm not entirely sure.
• The Specialist's Hat. I can give this story no higher praise than to say: this story could have been written by Vy.
• Flying Lessons. This is a good story for people who want to run certain kinds of Unknown Armies games or for people who like a kind of glib knowing modernization of Greek myths.
• Travels with the Snow Queen. I guess it's a fairy anti-fairy tale but I didn't really care for it very much.
• Vanishing Act. I have no response to this story. I think that I don't get it.
• Survivor's Ball, or, The Donner Party. I have been waiting all my life for someone to write a story based on this joke premise. It's everything I dreamed it would be, almost. Needed more rough sex.
• Shoe and Marriage. This story seems like a writing experiment. The last part was the best part. The Miss Kansas bit was also pretty good.
• Most of My Friends Are Two-Thirds Water. I think this is my favorite story in this collection. Sadly, nothing happens, so I can't tell you what happens in it. There are some phone conversations and some emotions, mostly sadness and lust and love. You should read this story sometime with whiskey and if you think it's you I'm talking to, yes, you're right.
• Louise's Ghost. Another story which makes me think it's the result of Kelly writing a writing experiment along the lines of "how can I have a story with two characters of the same name?" Given how reasonable an explanation that seems to me, I'm pretty sure that's not what she did here. But it's got some fetishization of cellists so, hooray for that.
• The Girl Detective. I guess this is the story everybody loves. Shortest response: I'm not everybody.

So this collection is totally readable and not at all hostile. It is friendly but doesn't know what to say to you, quite, when it sees you in the hallway of conventions. Do I read too much in to it? Very well, I read too much in to it.

I liked this collection but I am looking forward to having my own thought patterns reassert themselves.

People who might especially like these stories.

• writers who are serious about their craft
• writers who are frivolous about their craft
• people who are or suspect they may be dead

So now I have read something by Kelly Link, only three months after I could have talked to her about it; there is always next year, but I still don't think I know anything to say she won't already have heard. Many of the things I enjoy in her writing are things I enjoy in Vy's writing. The few things I don't enjoy I attribute to my not getting some underlying mechanism of narrative.

Kelly Link: she is thinking harder about her stories than you are.

I haven't been listening to a lot of music, lately. I busted both my primary and my auxiliary pair of headphones. Now I've got an excuse to buy some new ones: Magnatune's The Art of Persuasion.

Oh, and it doesn't hurt that Brad Sucks has not one but two compilations of remixes out now.

Because Vy is awesome, she buys me books.

Most recently she bought me Under My Roof by Nick Mamatas and I just finished reading it.

First, some digressions.

I know Nick. Have known him years, first as a quirky and amusing set of pixels forming acerbic text and later as a more tangible manifestation of cynicism.

I've read all three of his novels, now, shortly after they've been printed.

I remember when I read Northern Gothic I was puzzled by something and so I connected to the online place where I knew he hung about. I said, "Hey, NK, I just read your book and I have a question." He said, "NO, I'm not gay!"

So I never asked him my question, which was, "But why is the ghost haunting the dildo?"

Which is to say, I think I have trouble making these simple and fundamental connections which infuse his stories.

His second novel, Move Under Ground didn't confuse me so much but that's because I don't expect the Beatnik novels to have any kind of closure or to ever really be about anything I can make sense of and the Lovecraftian fusion in it, well, that was just gravy and pandering to the audience of People Like Me. All, uh, 12 of us on the planet or whatever.

Now I've read Under My Roof and I've got one question which has confounded me (aside from what seems to be some fairly bad copy editing) and that is: How does Geri drive away in the car which Daniel just pages earlier sold and had Herbert help him pretend was a car jacking?

But that's enough digressions about my confusion so now I'll talk about the book itself.

It's short.

It's really short. Like, 150 pages short. Is this Young Adult fiction? Probably, hence the lack of length. It moves at a good clip and uses some good devices to keep the story engaging and skip over the boring parts.

It's a coming of age story for all ages. Various characters grow up, grow down, or grow in circles. There's some clever science-y bits and some strong female characters and suitably wry grown-ups-don't-get-kids observations from the young point of view character, who is arguably the protagonist though his struggles are few and far between and he mostly observes distantly the meaty bits of the narrative.

Who might like this book

• kids who are misunderstood by adults
• adults who are misunderstood by adults
• kids who are telepathic or want to be
• satirists, cynics, anarchists, iconoclasts, malcontents and commuters

Here are some domains mentioned in the novel which exist

• satmaps.com

Here are some domains mentioned in the novel which do not exist

• treatyonline.org
• mysonherbiethelovebug.org
• topplethegnome.com

So if you're looking for some domains to squat for when this novel becomes a movie, now's the time!

Once upon a time I worked for a manager with an overtly unusual sense of humor.

An example would be an occasion on which he set up an automatic response in his email client to respond to anything he received from his boss with "That's an excellent idea, thank you for the suggestion." I guess that went on for a couple weeks before his boss caught on that it was scripted.

Similarly, at one point he loaned me a book which he said he thought reflected my attitude toward my job and my co-workers. He loaned me A Confederacy of Dunces.

Right.

I didn't see a whole lot of myself in that book but I wasn't offended. I was amused. Now that I've read a different book, I know what book he should have loaned me, the one which captured my sense of my career field.

Catch-22.

Everyone around me is insane. Many of them are trying to kill me. Some of them are trying to literally kill me, some are merely trying to expose me to fatally dangerous conditions.

Is it too late to become Milo Minderbinder, I wonder?

I won't try to actually review this book because you've either read it by now or nothing I can say will convince you to do what a stack of critics, pundits and probable friends have told you. I didn't get around to reading it until now because I am slow to appreciate classics. In a sense I'm very glad I didn't read it until now because it seems quite probable to me that at some earlier point in my life I could not have appreciated this novel, certainly not to the degree that I now savored the bureaucratic constriction.

So insofar as reviews of books often say more about the reviewer than the book, the important thing to know is this: if you work with me, I'm on to you!

I read a list of books which all the cool kids already know about in New York Magazine and I had already read one of them and have another of them kicking around in my queue of books to read. When I showed the list to my co-workers, my boss loaned me a book by an author who was on that list.

It's called Paradise and it's by Abdulrazak Gurnah. It's about a boy who is given into the care of a merchant. He learns that he's now a slave and his entire life is turned upside down. It's a sad book with some moments of hilarity and others of brutality.

What I liked about it

• good pacing with a distinct narrative voice
• protagonist who is both sympathetic and invested
• really different from most of the books I read

What I didn't like about it

• protagonist isn't very active for most of the story
• it's a sad book about slavery and deprivation

This is probably a good book for people who like sad stories. Like, say, Beloved or Farewell My Concubine.

I'm a bad person. I went to WisCon 31 this year without having ever knowingly read anything by either Guest of Honor. I'd met Kelly Link before and I was vaguely aware of the kinds of writing she does, but it was all second hand. I don't think I'd even heard of Laurie Marks before this WisCon.

I decided to atone for this in the wake of the convention. No, not by actually reading any of their writing; at least, not yet. Instead I'm reading works by the Guests of Honor for next year. Specifically, I read China Mountain Zhang by Maureen McHugh over the last week. (Before that I was reading a collection of Philip K. Dick short work from the 50s.)

I can see why this novel was nominated for awards (the Hugo and Nebula) and nominated for and won awards (Locus Best First Novel, James Tiptree Jr Memorial Award) and I can see why people gush about it. I see all that. What I don't see is why it ends where it does and that is probably because it felt incomplete rather than ambiguous to me in the same way that I find Catcher in the Rye to be an incomplete story.

That's not bad, mind you. Other people will probably feel that enough is resolved for them to have a warm fuzzy feeling about the characters in the story. For me, I want a sequel or an epilogue or something. Because I can't imagine what happens next in their lives. Maybe this represents an insufficient understanding on my part of their nature, their motives, their universe. It felt like too few pages; when I reached the last one, I turned back to make sure I hadn't missed something, that some pages weren't missing from my copy.

It's a fascinating world viewed through genuinely sympathetic and sharply expressed characters. It's a complex interweaving of desires balanced against fears. It's a book which makes me crave a sequel in the same universe.

Aside from the disquieting sense of incompletion, which I admit may be a deliberate part of the presentation of the story, it's a book I'd recommend to just about anyone. It's got socialists and gamblers and prostitutes and Martian colonists and a protagonist who is pushed by his situation into fulfilling a greater portion of his potential than he might otherwise have done so I read it as a maturation story and a stirring from inertia story.

I'll be trying to get my hands on something by the other Guest of Honor, L. Timmel Duchamp, soon, and catching up on the Kelly Link we have in the house (because I keep buying it for Vy) and finding some Laurie Marks but first, first, I need to glut myself on my (not so secret) crush on the worlds Ed Greenwood made, The Forgotten Realms. I have a backlog of current and out of print D&D books about it to read, as well as a slew of downloaded gratis PDFs provided by the otherwise thoroughly detestable Hasbro through their Wizards of the Coast orifice. No link love for them. You know where to find them.

Vy and I both enjoy food.

Which is a ridiculous thing to say. What healthy animal doesn't like food?

I mean to say: Vy and I seek out good food.

Again, ridiculous, but getting closer. For food to be good in our nomenclature, it must manifest some qualities.

• deliciousness
• free of known allergens
• compatible with our Won't Eat Mammals stance
• compatible with our low-carbohydrate, high-protein desires
• compatible with our locally grown, little preservative stance

Which sounds pompous and elaborate and cumbersome in words, but which tends to work pretty smoothly in practice. We can generally glance at a menu and have a pretty good idea if we'll be able to find something we like. Since we have markedly different appetites and flavor requirements, it helps for us to go to a restaurant with a variety of dishes and even styles.

Last night we went to what is probably our favorite restaurant, Nibblers.

Not only is it good food, it's a nice brisk walk away so I can feel virtuous and wholesome as I anticipate gorging myself on cheese. It's an accidental find from when we first moved into the neighborhood and were looking for a video store and decided to treat ourselves to a meal out. It's in a plaza with a barbecue place [great for me, not so much for Vy], an Italian place [not so great for either of us], and a Thai place [usually ideal for us but it was closed at the time]. So we stopped in to what we thought was a cafe, judging by the outside seating area.

We were wrong.

It is a delicious Epicurean indulgence.

Last night, we went back for our third visit and we took with us our friends Annaliese and David because we wanted a chance to share this restaurant with people we really like and who we thought would enjoy it as much as we do.

A thing which Nibblers does which we enjoy is have a theme to the food for any given month. This month was Japanese cuisine, which is one of our favorites and when I say our I think I can safely draw David and Annaliese into my bloc.

David & I started with coffees, the almond mocha kiss. Then we all had wine flights, three different themed wines. Vy had the Aromatics, Annaliese the Elegance, I forget which one David had, and I had the Spanish Sips. Mine was the only flight to include any reds but there about 37 other flight choices and many of them were red-specific or red-heavy.

We had the on-table snack of shrimp chips, or at least Annaliese and I did.

We had a pair of salads which were butter lettuce with balls of cheese rolled in nuts on them and a fruity vinaigrette dressing.

Then we had creamed spinach which was really spinach, in a cream sauce, with caramelized onions, so it was not only attractive and edible, but deliciously so, and stir fried mixed vegetables which had carrots and purple carrots and they reminded us of perfectly grilled veggies.

Then the entrees of the meal:

• rolled chicken stuffed with garlic and fruit, with a tomato sauce
• corn and masa pancake with avocado slices
• squash blossom and fiddlehead quesadilla
• shaft blue and amaretto fondue with apple, carrots and slices of focaccia

Dessert was a chocolate gelatto [locally made by an Italian who got off the boat 12 yeas ago and is very particular about the Right Way to make it], and a ginger cake, and a plate of four artesian cheeses, chosen by the chef.

He chose:

• a Cahill porter cheddar, made in Ireland, with a process where after the curds have begun to form, the throw them all in a vat of beer and let them sit for a time and then take them back out and put them in the mold to squish and shape the cheese
• a cheese from Galicia named San Simon which is crafted with a tear drop shop and is said to be as 'sweet as a kiss' and [according to the chef] is the inspiration for Hershey Kisses being the shape they are and bearing the name they possess
• the Andante Acapella, a goat cheese produced by a local dairy, ran as a one-woman show by a retired biochemistry professor, which has the name it does as it's 'unaccompanied' by any other flavors, it's simply a delicious goat cheese flavor
• a bleu cheese of some kind but of which all details have fled my mind.

Paired with each cheese was an appropriate tidbit: pressed walnut paste, oatcake, apple slices, and so on.

Price per person, after tip? $40. That is a steal of a price for a meal this delicious.

Then we walked back home and because our taste in video games is as refined as our taste in food, we played some four player Gauntlet: Dark Legacy to burn off all of those calories with frantic running away from acid barrels and explosive barrels.

I don't often get pitches from the company from which I lease mobile phone network coverage. Which description, now that I've articulated it, seems kind of odd. I gave them money originally, over the course of a one year contract, to amortize the cost of the phone I use. So that was an actual purchase of an actual good. But then the contract expired and now I'm month to month sending them a payment for services received.

Notably:

• routing data to my phone
• accepting data from my phone to their network and routing it to a next hop

It's a simple relationship.

Occasionally they suggest that they really don't know me. Like today.

Example A:

T-Mobile respects your privacy. To review our Privacy Policy, click below. http://tmobile.r.delivery.net/r/r?2.1.HA.HY.1hYVz8.BwV%2ay2..N.CiSA.2ovW.DVWEWZY0

See that? Because they respect my privacy, I'm encouraged to click on a URL constructed to encode my identity and the message which provoked me. That sounds like a good idea! Good thing I use NoScript, Privoxy, and tor to get genuine respect for my privacy. Too bad for me if I waive all that to click on your tricksy link!

What makes me think that URL encodes my identity rather than simply pointing at a generic privacy document with a goofy URL scheme?

Example B:

If you've received this message in error, or if you prefer not to receive future e-mail messages from T-Mobile, click below. http://tmobile.r.delivery.net/r/r?2.1.HA.HY.1hYVz8.BwV%2ay2..N.CiSC.2ovW.DVEKKZa0

Hey, that looks familiar! [Note that I've given these URLs a very mild shuffle to momentarily protect privacy while still showing the suspicious form for people who weren't lucky enough to get this message.]

But those are both footnotes to the missive which caught my eye because suffix boilerplate often contains the majority of the humor in email sent to sell me something. This message fortuitously had humor sprinkled throughout. Humor of the "I assure you, there is no Thelma here" variety.

Example C:

INTRODUCING THE NEW NOKIA 5300 XPRESSMUSIC -- 240 TUNES(1) IN YOUR POCKET, 24/7.

That's the opening pitch. There are a few things I'd like to mention. The first is: do dedicated music players only function on banker's hours? So now you've got a phone which also has music playing functionality and I'm expected to be ALL! UPPER! CASE! excited because it works any hour of the day and any day of the week? Or is the claim here that the player can run continuously for a week? I suppose 240 tunes playing over and over could be repetitive after a week so let's see what that footnote says.

Example D:

(1) When using the features of this device, obey all laws and respect the privacy and legitimate rights of others. Capacity is based on 3:45 minutes per song, 128 kbps WMA encoding, and 192 kbps MP3 encoding.

Nothing there about battery life, but what's this? Respect the privacy and legitimate rights of others? My choice of broken by design music encoding schemes? I'm glad this device could provide me with opportunities to break laws, disrespect privacy and the rights of others and is the first positive thing I've seen about this phone. It's a little sad that they couldn't even get off the starting block with this pitch without having to qualify their claims with footnoting. If I understand marketing, they probably structured this to open with the strongest features of the device and ... then had to buttress them because they couldn't stick to facts and make it sound sexy.

Maybe it gets more solid in the next paragraph.

Example E:

Get the new Nokia 5300 XpressMusic, exclusively from T-Mobile(R), and listen to your best playlists any time, anywhere - just download them from your computer to your phone. With music keys on the outside it's easy to play, and you can load tons of tunes in a flash, even free ones:(2)

Oookay. Only my best playlists. I guess that's what I'd want to put into the almost certainly less than 240 slots available to me because I won't have capacity to waste on rubbish playlists I won't want to hear. Any time, anywhere ... so long as I have the foresight to anticipate what I'll want to listen to and download from my computer to my phone. I'm guessing with a full flush and fill of songs, that's going to require a cable and a potentially long span with the phone tethered down and unusable for anything else. That sounds like an exclusive offer I can do without.

Also: music keys on the outside is good. I hate when I have to unscrew a plate and disassemble my phone to skip the current song. They maybe mean that I could control the music player without flipping open a flip phone. Which is a great idea. Nothing I like more than being hip-checked into premature deafness.

Also also: WOW, I can even listen to FREE MUSIC?!?!?! What a deal! I had very nearly reconciled myself to only listening to pay per listen music but now it turns that I have options. But wait. A footnote? Oh dear. Worse: it's a long one. I'll chunk it up to accommodate my short attention span.

Example F:

(2) Limited time offers; all products, promotional items, services, features, and pricing are subject to change without notice.

Translation: like everything we say, it's a lie meant to induce you to give us money. We make no guarantees. We don't even tell you when we stop lying.

3 free song downloads available solely in conjunction with purchase of the first 350,000 units of the above-depicted, music-enabled handset device model, which is available solely at participating T-Mobile locations while supplies last.

Translation: we know that you're a whore for 'free' stuff so we've set a cap of how many phones you can buy to get your 'free' music and hey, maybe it'll turn out the place you buy your phone[s] will be arbitrarily removed from our participation location list. HA-HA, joke's on you, for skipping the footnote and waltzing into any old store and thinking that you could have something for free!

It does seem to me that 350k units is probably about right considering the only real market here is existing T-Mobile customers [recipients of this email] who hate Apple, touchscreens, Apple's carrier partners or waiting. It may even be too many. Perhaps they can bundle them with PS3s to really move that inventory.

Handset purchase requires new activation and enrollment in a qualifying T-Mobile voice/data rate plan under a minimum one-year service agreement.

Translation: GOTCHA!

3 free song downloads limited to then-available songs in the Yahoo! Music Unlimited catalogue and subject to redemption rules and other terms and conditions (including U.S. residency requirement) set forth at music.yahoo.com/certificateredemption. You must redeem your code for your 3 free downloads by 02/26/08.

Translation: in order to get your three songs you'll be signing up for Yahoo's music service, installing their music player and since the phone isn't listed as a Yahoo! Music Unlimited 2 Go device, congratulations, you just got three songs you can't listen to with this phone without violating the terms of your usage of Yahoo's music service. Please don't read this small print, we need the money Yahoo! is giving us for this partnership.

And if it's T-Mobile who's paying Yahoo! on this one, well, congratulations, T-Mobile. You got 0wned. Also, those songs are in WMA format and may well have time bomb DRM in them tied to the user being a subscriber to the Yahoo! Music Unlimited service. I didn't feel like falling far enough down that rabbit hole to verify.

See T-Mobile's Devices, Pricing, and Services brochures, and see T-Mobile's Terms and Conditions (including mandatory arbitration) and other relevant pages at t-mobile.com, for T-Mobile rate plan information, charges for various T-Mobile features/services/products, and other details.

Translation: because we obfuscate our costs, it's too complicated to explain here. Visit our site where our dazzlingly presented pile of clunky icons and unresponsive interface will alternately baffle and frustrate you. Then you will know our rate plan, not in the details, but in the intent.

Yahoo! and the Yahoo! Music logo are trademarks of Yahoo! Inc. music.yahoo.com/certificateredemption: http://tmobile.r.delivery.net/r/r?2.1.HA.HY.1hYVz8.BwV%2ay2..N.CiS6.2ovW.DUFEYZN0 t-mobile.com: http://tmobile.r.delivery.net/r/r?2.1.HA.HY.1hYVz8.BwV%2ay2..N.CiS8.2ovW.DUMELZP0

Check it out, more identity and mailing bound redirecting URLs so they can footprint you going from this message to Yahoo!'s site or theirs. In case you were wondering, the delivery.net domain appears to be associated with Digital Impact, whose site [no link love for you] pitches PHP errors at me when I visit it. Haw-de-haw-haw. And that was all of footnote 2. What else?

Example G:

• 1 GB memory card included - good for about 240 songs
• Preloaded music - 2 hits each by Paolo Nutini and Teddybears

I would hope that if changing out the memory card were an option they would mention it so I suspect this is meant to be a no-user-modifiable-parts situation. Good thing nobody in the world owns a screwdriver or soldering iron. Also: 2 hits each by WHO?

Example H:

And with a myFaves(SM) Plan, you can get unlimited nationwide calling to 5 people, too.(3) Eligible T-Mobile customers can get a special price for upgrading to a phone that plays music, too. Sounds good, huh?

If that price is not free, it's not very special. As for that 'Sounds good' pun, who do you people think you are, me? Cut it out. The footnote referenced there is boring so I'm not going to drag it out into the light. But then we get to the climax of the piece.

Example I:

What's cooler than listening to music from your phone? Doing it wirelessly with a Bluetooth(R) stereo headset, easy to slip on and off for sharing. And with Bluetooth wireless stereo speakers, you can listen with a bunch of friends, whenever you want.

OHO! Look at them, inducing you to break the law by illegally sharing your music in a public performance! You know what else is easy to slip on and off for sharing? YRMOM! For the three people out there who think that listening to music from your phone is cool: sorry, no, it's not. It sounds awful, it means overloading the user interface of the device, and adds unrelated fragility to a device which may serve a vital function in emergency. There are probably other ways in which I'm not the demographic for a phone what can play the wicked tunes, but the underlying problem is that that is a function I have never ever wanted in a phone. I'd rather play music on my PDA than my phone. I'd rather bonk my skull with my phone and oif the chorus than have the phone produce music.

The banal communication then goes on to exhort me to get a different text message package but screw that. If I can't get streaming real time teledildonics pr0n from my text messaging package, forget about it. Hey, if it could do that, I'd even spring for a headset which was, er, hands-free.

Hey, guess what I did in 2006. I read a novel. Then I did it again forty-nine more times. Not the same novel, obviously, as one of my self-set constraints was that they must be novels I hadn't previously read.

I just read the fiftieth and it was Drama City. This was out of my usual reading genres, a modern crime drama. Usually reading sf with the occasional fantasy, this book was a shift in reading styles. The first half of the novel was just character building and gradually warming heat under the stewplot.

Then somebody dies.

Until I hit that midway point, this book wasn't really grabbing me. We spend a lot of time understanding the central characters and their histories and it felt to me like it wasn't going anywhere until it abruptly dropped the story into gear and took off at a flash. The latter half benefits from the structure of the first half but I could have used a faster acceleration in the beginning.

So it's set in [as I guess I'm supposed to guess from the name] the District of Columbia and it's got ex-cons and criminals and some people on the other side of the law enforcement line but not very many. It ended satisfyingly and became a much more interesting book to me at just about the midpoint.

What I liked about this book

• once things started to unravel, it takes off like a rocket in brisk pacing
• the characters felt real, partly because of the use of repetition to establish the patterns and cycles of their lives
• the dialog sounded natural to my reading ear
• it's got a brief but torrid sex scene

What I didn't like about it

• slow slow start; I prefer stories which start when something changes in the lives of the central characters
• there's some minor graphic violence
• in the first three pages, it already seemed the author was talking down to reader, through unsubtle repetition

Who might like this book

• people running gritty modern role-playing games [Dark Champions, Unknown Armies, Esoterrorists, Delta Green]
• people who already read crime fiction and like it
• people who don't read crime fiction and want to read something solid and conclusive

Thanks for reading, it's been fun to have a reason to blab at you through 2006.

Forty-ninth novel of the year I hadn't previously read, Silver on the Tree, is now read.

This book is the payoff for all which came before it. It is a culmination of the story, the climax of the fight between the Dark and the Light, and has a rather nice epilogue. It's once again set mostly in Wales, roughly current and substantially earlier.

It has many references to mythology, familiar and otherwise, which drove me to search engines to get a grip on some of the subtext and context not made manifestly clear through this story but only hinted at.

What I liked

• great smash-up climactic ending
• some nice bits with Jane actually getting a personality
• lots of echoes of earlier mythic ages
• King Arthur
• the sad king / maker

What I didn't

• the whole Also the White Rider bit, which seemed a bit unanticipated
• the traditional issue I have with stories of destiny and prophecy, which is, how can they fail?
• substantially longer than many of the previous books in this sequence which made them seem a bit thin in retrospect

Who will like this book [and by implication, the whole sequence]

• fans of the King Arthur stories
• fans of Wales
• writers of slash fiction looking for a space less trampled than His Publishedness
• kids who feel different and want to feel special and magical
• people who want to get back a sense of the wonder of Yule, like it was before Shopping Christ peed all over it

OK, almost to the finishing line. Can't talk. Reading.

Fourth of the Dark is Rising sequence, The Grey King, is all about Will, the youngest of the Old, again.

He goes off to Wales to convalesce, meets a freaky albino boy with a freaky albino dog and has some freaky albino adventure.

Also, there's a harp, an evil fog bank, and some uppity foxes. Also some food which sounds interesting and I'd have liked an appendix of recipes. Oh, and some lessons in Welsh pronunciation, which might come in handy for someone working on the Linux kernel in the footsteps of a famous developer.

It's good. It's not too short. It has more pieces of Welsh myths than I recognize and some Arthurian stuff which I do.

The end is nigh!

Hey, I read Greenwitch by Susan Cooper and it was short short SHORT.

It brings the various heroes from books one and two in this sequence together and tells an incredibly brief story of yet another fight against an agent of the Dark.

There's a nice court scene and it's really short. Did I mention it's short? So I read it in three BART rides.

Predictably, I read the second book in the sequence, The Dark is Rising and it was pretty good. I can see where it would appeal particularly to people with a childlike sense of wonder about Christmas, and those who have December birthdays.

It reminded me quite a bit of the Christmas Revels which Vy and I attended in 2005 and which Vy tells me borrow quite heavily from this book or perhaps some common source material. You may recall I didn't really care for the revels because, well, I am a no-fun grinch.

Also, I don't like audience participation type stuff.

But this book, it's all right. There's unexplained magic and deep symbolic portent and a character from the first book plays an even more major part here than in the first book in the sequence.

So if you like the idea of Britain being a magical land guarded by beings of Light and fighting off an onslaught by the Dark then, yeah, you'll dig this book, too, because More of the Same. Some nice characterization of one of the villains this time out.

Welcome to the Catching Shannon Up Show wherein I read a young adult series ... excuse me, sequence, which all the rest of you read twenty or thirty years ago.

It's Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising Sequence, and it starts with Over Sea, Under Stone. Now go ahead and open that link in another tab. Look at the cover. See that dude? He is very, very bad. Also, he has a hypnotic voice.

He's awesome. But he doesn't get much screen time. This book is about three delightful, wonderful, rambunctious, cheerful, brave and beautiful children finding adventure under the protection of a powerful family friend. Man, that must be nice. Don't get me wrong. This is a fun book. It's cheery and fresh and precious. But it didn't really hit on any of my spaceships.

What I liked:

• Arthurian bits
• there was an evil girl and in the movie in my mind, she's played by Jennifer Blaire
• a riddle which can be answered hundreds of years later, reminding me of these guys

What I didn't:

• the menace was never very menacing
• the kids sometimes behaved in a way which maybe kids behaved in the 1970s but, now? no way
• no retribution!

If you mysteriously haven't yet read this sequence which everyone has read and you think you might like to read some young adult fantasy which is neither patronizing nor boring, this is a pretty good read. It moves briskly, which always helps.

Third novel in the Faded Sun trilogy by C.J. Cherryh, The Faded Sun: Kutath, already? That's awesome!

This was the best of the trilogy. It was the thematic and action climax of the story arc and it even had a nice denouement.

That's really all there is to say about this. If you buy this book, skip the first two hundred pages, and read the rest of it, you'll probably dig it, if you're anything like me. It's a character story, it's got some good intrigue and politics, it has several bloody catastrophes. Good stuff.

Second novel in the Faded Sun trilogy by C.J. Cherryh, The Faded Sun: Shon'jir, I liked much more than the first novel in this trilogy. This is a close study of a handful of characters set at the endpoint of an epic length time-line.

Well worth having read the first book to get to this, it's about some of the characters who survived the first novel and what happens to them in the wake of the peace between the humans and the aliens which kicked off the series. It seems to me to bear a lot of similarity to Lawrence of Arabia but some of that is surely the desert setting which [again!] dominates the narrative, even when the characters are on a ship in space.

This one has actual story events, hints at big doings, and has character development arcs which engaged me. Also, there's an action scene! With real conflict! And shooting! Sort of. Near the end. If you read closely.

This is another sf novel aimed squarely at people not me but I enjoyed it more than the first.

You know what book I really didn't like?

Deathwatch.

Good thing that isn't the book I just read.

Instead, I read Faded Sun: Kesrith. It's better than Deathwatch was but reminded me a lot of it. Also, a lot of the journey to Mordor parts of that other book by that one guy. The one with all the slash fanfic fans. Which I also didn't like either of the times I read it.

But this book, about Kesrith, is allegedly a standalone story. I guess it is. The problem I had with it is that that story is all in the last fifty pages. So what happens in the first 205 pages? Well, there's a whiny alien kid forced to live with old people who oppress him and there's a desert. A big honking huge desert planet with weird weather and some kind of bearish totem animals. Oh, and there's another alien species living on the planet with them and somewhere off in space there are humans who are dirty and don't understand honor.

It's all exposition for the actual events. Not to spoil this for anyone but, really, the first 200 pages or so of this book could have read "Niun lived for an almost unbearably long time with elders of his kind who were actually preparing him for his destiny. Then the first humans landed on their home-world."

But. This book is the first in a trilogy. If I hadn't known that, I wouldn't have finished it. But I did know that so I did finish it.

What I liked about this book

• the two alien cultures both seemed genuinely alien
• there was some good politicking and partial information negotiations
• I liked the human governor's assistant

What I didn't like about this book

• long, unbroken streaks of nothing happening
• incessant whining from one of the point of view characters
• an entire culture choosing death before compromise
• not finding out, as a reader, what the big secret of the novel-ending quest is
• the feeling that if this book had been forced to stand alone, I couldn't have gotten to the interesting parts

Who might like this book

• aliens who miss their home-world
• fans of CJ Cherryh who want to read one of her favorite of her own books
• humans wanting to think about alien mindsets
• people expecting to have to survive in an alien desert
• fans of samurai mindsets

I finished reading the Modern Classic Short Novels of Science Fiction. The last novella is a Nancy Kress called And Wild for to Hold and it's about Anne Boleyn, wife of King Henry the Eighth. You'll have heard of him and probably her, as well.

This is a good story for someone not me. The protagonist is more passive and more of a spectator than I enjoy. The trope is the clever figure of power which asserts control regardless of circumstance and there's some stuff about how rejection works as an aphrodisiac.

Didn't really care for it, but I wouldn't tell other people not to read it. So there we go, a book of novellas finished and nine more novels to read before year's end. Striking distance.

I read a James Patrick Kelly story. It was called Mr. Boy. I think this is the first JPK story I've read but it certainly won't be the last. Man! This story was awesome.

It's got extreme body modification, dire caste and class divisions, and language and culture and fashion forecasting in a delightful "if this goes on" vein. It is, I think, a story fundamentally about Peter Pan growing up, twisted.

It's in Modern Classic Short Novels of Science Fiction, of course.

One more novella left in this book! ONWARD

I read a Robert Silverberg story, Sailing to Byzantium.

But wait! I hear those of you who've had their paws on a copy of Modern Classic Short Novels of Science Fiction cry. What happened in between the Russ and the Silverberg?

Oh, all right. I skipped a novella. Because I'd already read it and recognized it two pages in. So you don't get to know my thoughts about Lucius Shepard's novella because I'm only reading new novels in 2006 and this one I read in late 2005.

Then I read the Silverberg. I've read a bunch of his longer stuff previously and while it's been enjoyable it hasn't been memorable for me. There was the one about the guy who's a juggler. And. Um. A Gypsy king? Something like that, anyway. Which is not to say that there's anything wrong with his writing. I have a hypothesis that some writing hits me right in my retention lobes, that of Roger Zelazny, for example, while other writing misses the part of my brain which makes new memories.

Robert Silverberg's writing takes the form of perfectly fine sentences which pass in my eyes and fall out of the back of my head.

So did I like this story? Yes.

What is this story about? I didn't remember until I referred back to it for this write up.

It's in the future and it has a group of lovely brown physically similar people and a vast horde of temporary humanoids and a protagonist who is neither. It's got some ruminations on what makes a person real, a bit like PKD stories and it's got some epic contemplations of sentiment, a bit like Zelazny, but overall is a whole lot of Silverberg and will remind you of other Silverberg you have read, assuming you are not me and can remember it. At least I think so. It might be nothing like any other Silverberg story other than its ability to evade my memory, in which case, I apologize in advance for potentially misleading you.

So is this meandering a response in kind to this story, a critique which takes on some of the characteristics of the story to convey impressionistic-ally the effect of the story?

Don't ask me, man. I'm just a visitor to this story.

I read the Joanna Russ story, Souls.

It's completely awesome, despite the unreliable narrator.

It's an historical science fiction story with an unrevealed force and some sharp characterization and insightful treatments of human relationships. So it's not the kind of story I normally don't like; yet, I like this one a lot.

It's from Modern Classic Short Novels of Science Fiction.
Of course. It's short and it involves a German monastery and some vikings. And maybe some space elves with no hair. I think.

Who doesn't like Frankenstein stories? This one also has incest but not the kind you might expect and a dystopian societal collapse background. Good stuff! It's a real downer kind of story with one door closing as another more weird door opens.

It's called Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang and it's by Kate Wilhelm who I had the joy of hearing speak at Wiscon 30 but whose writing I had not previously read. It's out of that book, you know, the one I'm reading to catch up on the fifty novel project.

Modern Classic Short Novels of Science Fiction. This book, I should belatedly mention, is one Vy recommended to me and this story is one of her favorites from this book, which is more evidence that we like different kinds of sf, since I enjoyed it but less so than some others so far in this collection.

My friend Cat sold the only piece I've had the pleasure to hear her read. It's an awesome piece which perhaps only a person who MUDs could have written. Look for it when it hits the stands.

I read The Death of Doctor Island by Gene Wolfe. It's got some haunting imagery and a pair of clever perspective pivots, most notably where the character who we've been following turns out to be just a walk-on in somebody else's story. Also, there are monkeys.

It's another tale from Modern Classic Short Novels of Science Fiction, short and punchy, simultaneously brisk in pacing and lyrical in prose. I guess someone made a movie of it, which would probably be worth watching. Reading Gene Wolfe is a guilty pleasure somewhat close to that of reading Robert Heinlein for me; despite the sometimes jarring intrusions of disagreeable ethos, it's often a pretty fun read.

No links to other stuff by or about Wolfe; any search engine you choose to use will have much, much more about him. He's prolific.

I read Merchants of Venus which is not exactly Merchants of Venus nor Merchants of Venus nor Merchant of Venice and so on. There are a lot of things of similar name which is not, all of them inspired at a minimum and in some cases directly translated from this Merchant of Venice.

The one I just read is another novella in Modern Classic Short Novels of SF and it's a satisfyingly complete story with nicely woven exposition and context. Not of the here's an extraordinarily long and inappropriate brain-dump style of world-background but more naturally unfolding in a way which doesn't feel forced or artificial to me as a reader.

So that part I really liked. The lack of ultimate explanation for what's afoot with the Heechee and their tunnels, that's great, too. I even liked the protagonist's mild sexism given how his expectation is refuted by the narrative. This story is a gem that shines on its own.

Brian Aldiss wrote a bunch of stuff, not very much of which I can remember having read. But I read Total Environment in the Modern Classic Short Novels of Science Fiction and it was pretty okay. It's a micro-story of a micro-environment of a micro-cosmic importance.

It touches on some themes of suffering and humanity and inhumanity and the greater good and perspective. So it's some capital letter themes writ small. There's a lot of good material here for someone who wanted to run a story in a modernistic setting, twenty minutes into the future.

There were some slightly wince-worthy race and culture biases but they contributed to the claustrophobic narrative and probably enhanced the experience of reading this story.

Now I read The Star Pit by Samuel R. Delany from Modern Classic Short Novels of Science Fiction and it was the meatiest of the stories so far, by far. It gave me the strongest sensations that there was a plausible world looming ahead of us in the future with real people, real aspirations, real failures, real wins and real tragedies. It follows a narrator who starts by telling us a story within his story and then follows him through a short story arc with tightly-woven strands of exposition which support and propel the narrative.

It's some astounding craftsmanship from one of the deservedly renowned writers of our time.

After you read it, you may want to immediately re-read it to see it develop from the first words to the last, one more time. Unless, that is, you still have 17 more novels to read before year end.

I like Cordwainer Smith stories, in the abstract.

They're the kind of richly detailed setting I should like.

They're the intricate contextual unfolding of characterization and story which I rave about.

And yet.

I read On the Storm Planet from the Modern Classic Short Novels book I'm using to catch up on my novel reading goal. It should have been my cup of tea.

It's allegedly a revenge story. Sort of. It involves enigmatic characters, re-contextualized religion and myth, space opera. All those things I dig on. The planet it's mostly set on, Henriada, has attractively extreme weather and seems to have references to Alabama.

And yet.

This is a fine story for people who like Cordwainer Smith. For people like me who keep wanting to like Cordwainer Smith, it probably won't shift you into the fan column.

I buy comic books.

Sometimes I buy a few. Sometimes a lot. Sometimes I read them. Sometimes I don't. I'm probably part of what's wrong with the comic book industry today; I am inconsistent in my habits, fickle in my devotion and create a weak secondary market by giving comic books away to people who might otherwise buy books.

But today I want to mention three comic books which are ongoing titles. They're probably also announced in trade-bound editions but since I picked these up as part of my current trend of having a stack to read through in order of anticipated enjoyment fortnightly, that's not how I read them.

The first one is a title I've stopped reading. It's the Blue Beetle. I have fond memories of a character of that name dating back to the early seventies, thanks to The Electric Company.

I'd read some comic books with appearances by a character of that name over the years and probably the most satisfying was a character of a very different name, Nite Owl 2. But, still, fundamentally the things I liked about the character were present. Similar to Batman but less deranged.

So I picked up the new Blue Beetle title and read it. For four issues. I'm not sure if it's the feeling that ethnicity is simultaneously ubiquitous and irrelevant or that the cultural mores seem questionable or if I'm hitting an overdose of magic-based characters but it's just boring me.

So that's one I'm not reading anymore.

Another one is Elephantmen. It's a title from Image Comics which, yes, I know better. I learned years ago [roughly, at the company creation] to not expect plausible artwork, interesting characters or plausible story from them. But this time I let the clerk at the counter convince me to give it a try.

I made it to issue #2, which has text entirely constructed of quotes from the Bible super-imposed over a fight as clearly presented as if it had been directed by Michael Bay. The other serial narrative in the book is a parody of Howard Stern. Only, with less class.

But I said I'd talk about three titles. The third one is going to seem odd. It's a title from Marvel. It's yet another retread of a character from thirty years ago. It's Moon Knight. And it's awesome.

Here's why

• it is a revenge story
• it preserves the entire fucked up canonical Moon Knight back-story
• including the parts which were already self-contradictory
• did I mention it's a revenge story?
• revealing new depth and complexity to canonical characters
• fabulous [new?] villain, The Profiler
• it's totally a revenge story

Moon Knight, along with Baron Winter, Ghost Rider and Iron Fist are my guilty childhood comic book pleasures. So I was nervous about how this new series would hold up to my memories. I even made it worse for myself by picking up the Essential Moon Knight phone-book and reading through it.

This new incarnation of Moon Knight not only does my memories justice, it enhances the whole experience in retrospect and makes me eager for more.

Second modern classic short novel down. This one is from Poul Anderson, 1960. It's the moving story of a fallen colony of Earth-spawned civilization and the pride of one ship's captain. Contrasted with the lack of pride by the de facto captain of another ship.

It's got a more interesting narrative voice than the Vance story I read before if, arguably. But the story itself didn't move me as much.

Well worth the honor bestowed it by Dozois's selection of it here, though a story which I perceive as being most enjoyable to me because I'm a guy and it's a story about guys doing stuff and making tough guy decisions and tougher guy sacrifices. Life sucks when you're in charge.

Oh, it's called The Longest Voyage. But you probably already knew that.

Time to make up for lost time in the pursuit of reading fifty novels. I'm tackling Modern Classic Short Novels of Science Fiction and I'm counting each novella as a novel. This will more than offset my counting the five Demon Princes novels as two books.

First up: The Miracle Workers.

It's a Jack Vance story. That's all I have to say about it.

Well, no. It's a great Jack Vance story. In fact, it's a great Jack Vance story about the common acceptance of scientific wonders and the adulation piled upon antiquated traditions. Maybe that's what it's about. That's what I took away from it, anyway.

It's a future other world story where humans contend with the aboriginal inhabitants and are disdainful of such superstitions as the scientific method.

There'll be a dozen more like these. Stay tuned.

Do you know who Greg Egan is? You should.

He wrote the book I just read, Quarantine.

I read it when I did because a coworker loaned it to me. I would have read it anyway, in time, because I had already read the book Distress which he also wrote, loaned to me by a friend. But wow.

Wow.

WOW.

Quarantine takes a perspective I would have previously guessed impossible to carry off and manages it with eloquence and resonance. Not to be coy. It's the measurement problem of Quantum Mechanics as a point of view.

It's a tiny bit like the story from Star Diaries where Tichy bunches up his causal stream. It's a lot like the narrativist styled rpgs I've been playing around with lately. It's good. It's really good. Also, short.

What I liked about it

• the story hooked me four pages in
• the protagonist is so likable despite his radical personality change midway through
• it's got credible, plausible, marvelous technology
• it's got a nicely woven story arc

What I didn't

• there is nothing to not like about this story

Who may like this book

• you
• all of you
• the uncollapsed waveform of all potential you
• technoptimists who believe that all humanity needs is more sufficiently advanced technology

A co-worker loaned me Lamb and since it'd already been recommended to me by a friend, I read it. You've probably already heard about this book. Maybe you read it, already.

It's good.

It's probably the second best book about Jesus I've read, after Ken's Guide to the Bible. So what is it? It's a novel from the point of view of Jesus's childhood pal, Levi called Biff. A new spin on a story which has been covered a number of times which happens to be laugh-out-loud funny in parts and snuffly sad in others.

What I liked

• it's a genuinely warm and funny look at Jesus
• it's got kung-fu
• it's got sex and quite a lot of it

What I didn't

• Nothing, other than the clenching my wallet did when it realized I must now buy all of the books Christopher Moore has written

Who might like this book

• Jews
• Gentiles
• people not possessed by demons
• pigs not possessed by demons
• dogs not otherwise distracted by a flank steak

I read Matt Ruff's first book, huzzah. He had this published when he was 21 and it's called Fool on the Hill.

So what's it like? It's a first novel. It has a slight case of the kitchen sink. There are a lot of threads, a lot of short passages and chapters, a lot of self-awareness on the part of the characters and the deployment of tropes. Which certainly isn't bad but is something to be aware of when you read it.

This book is a good case of a clever, cute, funny book which is intended for someone not me. Unlike his Public Works Trilogy, which was a clever, cute, funny and conspiracy-laden book, which was intended for me or someone very like me.

Fool on the Hill has:

• at least one Greek god
• several other supernatural entities
• dogs which are telepathic with cats and each other
• cats which are telepathic with dogs and each other and which can understand spoken and written human languages
• sprites who can not ordinarily be seen by humans and so live among them
• Bohemians, which in this usage I translate as Chaos Lords
• magic spear, no magic helmet in sight
• several love stories, romance stories and friendship stories
• a Dragon
• a college town

It's thick, it's ambitious, and parts of it were genuinely fun to read for me.

What I liked about this book

• it's a thoroughly upbeat book
• there's some very clever language
• it reminded me of my time in a college town

What I d