Locus Online Features

06 May 2008

Cory Doctorow: Think Like a Dandelion

from Locus Magazine, May 2008

Regular Locus readers will have noted a recent front-of-the-book item about my recent Good News, a little daughter named Poesy, born to us on February 3, 2008. This feat of nanoengineering — mostly accomplished by my Alice, with 23 chromosomes' worth of programming assistance from yours truly — has got me thinking about reproduction, even more than usual.

Mammals invest a lot of energy in keeping track of the disposition of each copy we spawn. It's only natural, of course: we invest so much energy and so many resources in our offspring that it would be a shocking waste if they were to wander away and fall off the balcony or flush themselves down the garbage disposal. We're hard-wired, as mammals, to view this kind of misfortune as a moral tragedy, a massive trauma to our psyches so deep that some of us never recover from it.

It follows naturally that we invest a lot of importance in the individual disposition of every copy of our artistic works as well, wringing our hands over "not for resale" advance review copies that show up on Amazon and tugging our beards at the thought of Google making a scan of our books in order to index them for searchers. And while printing a book doesn't take nearly as much out of us as growing a baby, there's no getting around the fact that every copy printed is money spent, and every copy sold without being accounted for is money taken away from us.

There are other organisms with other reproductive strategies. Take the dandelion: a single dandelion may produce 2,000 seeds per year, indiscriminately firing them off into the sky at the slightest breeze, without any care for where the seeds are heading and whether they'll get an hospitable reception when they touch down.

And indeed, most of those thousands of seeds will likely fall on hard, unyielding pavement, there to lie fallow and unconsummated, a failure in the genetic race to survive and copy.

But the disposition of each — or even most — of the seeds aren't the important thing, from a dandelion's point of view. The important thing is that every spring, every crack in every pavement is filled with dandelions. The dandelion doesn't want to nurse a single precious copy of itself in the hopes that it will leave the nest and carefully navigate its way to the optimum growing environment, there to perpetuate the line. The dandelion just wants to be sure that every single opportunity for reproduction is exploited!

Dandelions and artists have a lot in common in the age of the Internet. This is, of course, the age of unlimited, zero-marginal-cost copying. If you blow your works into the net like a dandelion clock on the breeze, the net itself will take care of the copying costs. Your fans will paste-bomb your works into their mailing list, making 60,000 copies so fast and so cheaply that figuring out how much it cost in aggregate to make all those copies would be orders of magnitude more expensive than the copies themselves.

What's more, the winds of the Internet will toss your works to every corner of the globe, seeking out every fertile home that they may have — given enough time and the right work, your stuff could someday find its way over the transom of every reader who would find it good and pleasing. After all, the majority of links between blogs have been made to or from blogs with four or fewer inbound links in total — that means that the Internet has figured out a cost-effective means of helping audiences of three people discover the writers they should be reading.

So, let's stipulate that you want to reproduce like a dandelion and leave mammaldom behind. How do you do it?

There are two critical success factors for dandelionhood:

1. Your work needs to be easily copied, to anywhere whence it might find its way into the right hands. That means that the nimble text-file, HTML file, and PDF (the preferred triumvirate of formats) should be distributed without formality — no logins, no e-mail address collections, and with a license that allows your fans to reproduce the work on their own in order to share it with more potential fans. Remember, copying is a cost-center — insisting that all copies must be downloaded from your site and only your site is insisting that you — and only you — will bear the cost of making those copies. Sure, having a single, central repository for your works makes it easier to count copies and figure out where they're going, but remember: dandelions don't keep track of their seeds. Once you get past the vanity of knowing exactly how many copies have been made, and find the zen of knowing that the copying will take care of itself, you'll attain dandelionesque contentment.

2. Once your work gets into the right hands, there needs to be an easy way to consummate the relationship. A friend who runs a small press recently wrote to me to ask if I thought he should release his next book as a Creative Commons free download in advance of the publication, in order to drum up some publicity before the book went on sale.

I explained that I thought this would be a really bad idea. Internet users have short attention spans. The moment of consummation — the moment when a reader discovers your book online, starts to read it, and thinks, huh, I should buy a copy of this book — is very brief. That's because "I should buy a copy of this book" is inevitably followed by, "Woah, a youtube of a man putting a lemon in his nose!" and the moment, as they say, is gone.

I know this for a fact. I review a lot of books on Boing Boing, and whenever I do, I link to the Amazon page for the book, using my "affiliate ID" in the URL. If you follow one of those links and buy the book, I get a commission — about eight percent. I can use Amazon's reporting tool to tell exactly how many people click on my links, and how many of them shell out money for the book, and here's the thing: when I link to a book that's out soon, available now for pre-order, I reliably get less than ten percent of the purchases I get when I link to books that are available for sale now. Nine out of ten Boing Boing readers who buy books based on my reviews don't want to pre-order a title and wait for it to show up later.

The net is an unending NOW of moments and distractions and wonderments and puzzlements and rages. Asking someone riding its currents to undertake some kind of complex dance before she can hand you her money is a losing proposition. User-interface designers speak of how every additional click between thought and deed lops a huge number of seeds out of the running for germination.

In my next column, "Macropayments," I'll write more about this consummative act, for this is the key to enduring success as a dandelion. Here's the gist: expend less effort trying to ensure that small sums of money are extracted from your fans for individual copies of your work, and focus instead on getting larger payouts, making each germination count for something more than a buck's royalties.

Cory Doctorow's website is Craphound.com, and he is co-editor of Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things.

Cory Doctorow is one of a dozen Locus columnists and reviewers. Every issue, we review over 50 books and magazines, most before they appear in print. A subscription will get you all those as well as the rest of the magazine -- news, People & Publishing, commentary, reports on events, and a list of all books and magazines published that month.

Previous Cory Doctorow columns posted on Locus Online:

Comments are welcome, but are moderated.

24 April 2008

Locus Magazine's Faren Miller reviews Felix Gilman

from Locus Magazine, April 2008

Thunderer, Felix Gilman (Bantam Spectra 978-0-553-80676-2, $24.00, 438pp, hc) January 2008.

Felix Gilman's debut novel Thunderer takes place in the city of Ararat, a vast conglomeration of neighborhoods of varying historical flavors, with children bound to workhouses, nobles smoking cigarettes and scheming, multiple temples worshipping multiple gods, and some of those gods arriving at unpredictable intervals to foment change in everything from the layout of streets to modes of transportation.

That last change is only one result of the Bird-God's passage, which takes place just as outlander Arjan comes to the city. Bringing "the gifts of flight and freedom," the god infuses a workhouse boy with the ability to fly, frees an ocean-going ship from the pull of gravity, and makes many of the natives restless (though its effect on Arjan is less obvious).

The captain of that ship, Thunderer, still serves a devious Countess and mourns a lost love, so rather than marvel at his new opportunities he tends to brood on the sudden uselessness of his hard-won skills. It's different for his men:

One-eyed scar-faced grizzled old hands suddenly catching themselves laughing, giddy as serving maids on carnival. Perhaps it was the lightness of the air, or the nearness of the sun. Perhaps it was that the city they inhabited was so different: no alleys, no filth, no beggars, no shadows; only rustling flags, and weather-vanes, and the golden spear-tips of the spires; and more often, there were only clouds and birds.

While the poverty and decadence below remain, just the sight of the new airship inspires a kind of fever in those who see it.

There are many ways to feel that fever, many forms of hope and anger. One band of street boys, the Chaste Flame, are a kind of junior Taliban intent on scourging the city of its moral impurities by burning down inns, whorehouses, theaters and the like. Their ranks are growing, since "There's a lot in this city want to see others' pleasures burn," as one character says. Jack, the boy with the gift of flight, establishes his own band (the Thunderers) and his own quest, less vicious than Chaste Flame's but nonetheless driven by a grand ideal.

Arjan the newcomer, haunted by a fragment of pattern and melody he calls the Voice, falls in with a creative, dissident group. These are the people whom Captain Arlandes dubs "queers and intellectuals and subversives," savvy enough to move beyond popular idealism and share what he has come to realize: both he and Thunderer could become very dangerous.

Gilman creates a rich stew of allusions, from quasi-Dickensian workhouses (and one woman reminiscent of Madame DeFarge, here a devotee of the Spider god) to a Peter Pan made street-tough, in "interesting times" that evoke elements of Revolutionary France, the Sixties, and a world transformed by something like new technologies and armaments — though initiated by a god, rather than human ingenuity.

If Jack's quest seems too messianic for your taste, Arjan and his associates can counter that with their endeavors, while the Captain becomes something of a tragic villain. The various plot threads lead to a powerful series of denouements that could serve as both endings and beginnings, extending beyond the city and deep into its heart. Whether or not Gilman returns to some of his surviving characters in future work, I don't think we're in danger of any cookie-cutter sequels from this talented new fantasist.

Read more! This is one of over three dozen reviews from the April 2008 issue of Locus Magazine. To read more, go here to subscribe or buy the issue.

Comments are welcome, but are moderated.

Locus Magazine's Russell Letson reviews Greg Egan

from Locus Magazine, April 2008

Dark Integers and Other Stories, Greg Egan (Subterranean Press, 978-1-59606-155-2, $25.00, 232 pp, hc) March 2008.

Incandescence, Greg Egan (Gollancz 978-0-575-08162-8, £18.99, 488pp, hc) May 2008. (Night Shade Books, 978-1-59780-128-7, $24.95, 256pp, hc) May 2008.

A very welcome double shot of Greg Egan — a collection of five novelettes covering 13 years, and a new novel — demonstrates his range and his consistent focus on philosophical questions enabled by mathematical conjectures and the thought-experimental possibilities of various post-human conditions. The collection, Dark Integers, offers two pairs of related stories and a kind of coda. "Luminous" (1995) and "Dark Integers" (2007) play with the metaphysical implications of discontinuities in our systems of mathematical-logical reasoning — that, as Egan puts it in his Introduction, "the mathematics of ordinary numbers might be malleable" and that various apparently constant features of our reality "might turn out to be local quirks of our patch of the universe." What this leads to in "Luminous" is anything but a dry, Flatland-ish speculative fable. It opens with Bruno Costanzo on the receiving end of some ad-hoc hotel-room surgery as a bounty hunter tries to dig a data capsule out of his arm. Then, in fine future-thriller manner, it follows his efforts to get his payload crunched by the superduper computer called Luminous before any other thugs hired by a company with the intriguing name of Industrial Algebra can intercept him with extreme prejudice. The McGuffin at the heart (or in the left arm) of this melodrama is some highly exotic reasoning that might prove the existence of a mathematical and metaphysical "defect," "a fossil of primordial attempts to define the difference between truth and falsehood," which could in turn be used by IA to subvert anything from financial calculations to the fabric of physical nature itself. This weaponizable bit of Platonic idealism is validated when the inhabitants of the universe on the far side of the defect notice what must seem to them to be an attack and they reply directly through the offending mathematicians' nervous systems.

"Dark Integers" is set ten years after Bruno and his colleagues have mapped the defect and secretly established communication and made peace with the continuum on the far side, a whole universe that operates according to mathematics as alien — and toxic — to ours as ours is to theirs. When an independent researcher unwittingly lobs a logic-bomb across the metaphysical frontier, the hard-noses in the neighboring cosmos retaliate, and Bruno and company have to figure (as in calculate) a way of restoring balance and something like trust. Again, the quite effective melodrama plays against some nosebleed-inducing speculations about math, logic, and metaphysics that are both stories' reason for being.

"Riding the Crocodile" (2005) and "Glory" (2007) are set in the very far future of the Amalgam, a galaxy-spanning civilization that could be a development of the polities portrayed in Diaspora (reviewed in September 1997), "Wang's Carpets", and "The Planck Dive", but composed of every sort of naturally evolved or created-from-scratch ("de novo") intelligence imaginable. Technologies and social arrangements have converged to the point that all manner of sentient beings exist as software or embodied creatures or any combination of states, on planets or in physical habitats floating in the void or in software "scapes," for pretty much as long as anyone cares to keep going. With access to enormous computing power, vast and detailed knowledge of physical structures and processes, and a command of replication techniques that work right down to the subatomic level, the beings of the Amalgam have access to and understanding of nearly everything in the galactic disk, and eventually there is not much that hasn't been visited, catalogued, and analyzed, and not many projects that haven't been undertaken many times.

What keeps a thinking being amused in such an environment? In "Riding the Crocodile", Leila and Jasim are considering packing it in after 10,309 years together.

They had traveled to a dozen worlds and lived among a thousand cultures. They had educated themselves many times over, proved theorems, and acquired and abandoned artistic sensibilities and skills. They had not lived in every conceivable manner, far from it, but what room would there be for the multitude if each individual tried to exhaust the permutations for existence? They had no wish to... start cranking through some tedious enumeration of all the other people they might have been.

So they decide it's time to go — but first they wonder whether there might be some really "grand and audacious" project to put a period to their lives. They finally settle on an attempt to contact the Aloof, the beings that occupy the galaxy's crowded central bulge and have for a million years ignored all attempts at communication and gently repulsed all attempts to explore their territory. They determine to "camp at the gates of these elusive strangers, and try to arouse them from their indifference," and in time (millennia), meticulous observation, considerable ingenuity, and the eventual cooperation of billions of other Amalgam-dwellers produce a map of a communication network in the Aloof. Then comes the ultimate adventure: the couple send themselves through the network as "unencrypted... data that anyone can read, anyone can copy, anyone can alter or corrupt."

Leila and Jasim's goal is not just to explore a new realm but to find a fitting end to a long, long existence. "Glory," which seems to be set at an earlier stage of the Amalgam's history, celebrates the centrality of curiosity and the joys of discovery in a different key. A pair of Amalgam xenomathematicians travel to the system of the space-faring but not star-traveling Noudah in order to investigate the remains of an even earlier species, the Niah, whose artifacts are excavated but not much valued by the locals. When Joan and Anne explain that they have crossed interstellar space to study the mathematics of a dead civilization, the response is puzzlement spiced with suspicion, since the Noudah see themselves as dynamic Spreaders, the opposite of wimpy Seekers like the long and deservedly extinct Niah. This points to the conflict that powers the plot: the Noudah cannot get past their own competitive territoriality (which Joan explains to her local minder is a stage the species is going through), and the discovery of what the explorers see as a mathematical treasure triggers a crisis that points up how different are Seeker and Spreader attitudes.

The citizens of the Amalgam are able to build and configure their value and emotional systems, their entire minds, in any manner they can imagine. "Oceanic" (1998), on the other hand, is all about systematically deconstructing the core of a personality (or what is believed to be the core), and examining what remains when the demolition is complete. The boy Martin experiences a religious conversion that becomes the central fact of his life, but he needs to keep adjusting his understanding of his faith as he matures and struggles with sex (an interestingly complicated process in this far future), relationships, and his studies of the native biology of his extensively modified colony world. This is the thematic realm of, say, "Appropriate Love" or "Reasons to Be Cheerful," in which purely subjective, unreasoned states of mind are interrogated, sometimes to the point of disappearing up their own assumptions. Martin's visceral, unshakeable certainty of the love of the semi-divine colonial ancestor Beatrice — "like a flame inside my skull, radiating warmth through the darkness behind my eyes" — remains with him even while his religion's rationalizations and theological explanations are stripped away by education and mature experience. Eventually, though, he has to confront the roots of the primal experience itself, and the trajectory of faith ends in a place satisfyingly familiar to anyone who has read the earlier epistemological stories.

What sets "Oceanic" off from, say, "Appropriate Love" is its setting, the planet Covenant, colonized at least 20,000 years earlier by post-human, un-bodied "Angels" whose original motives and actions have been obscured and mystified and mythologized, but who left behind a planet transformed by the "ecopoiesis" and who also worked interesting changes on the sexual machinery of their redesigned descendants. There's an entire novel implied by the distorted fragments of backstory that Martin turns over and over in his efforts to understand his own nature, and hints of a war-in-heaven over how Covenant should be colonized.

Despite the speculative metaphysics and the miraculous technologies, these stories retain the feel of hard SF, thanks to the rigor with which Egan approaches his materials. On the conventional-science/tech side, the stories respect the light-speed barrier and construct ingenious ways of maintaining a galactic-scale civilization. The first three pages of "Glory", for example, lay out how the "molecular seeds" that reconstruct Joan and Anne and their spacecraft cross interstellar space. All it takes is godlike computing power, engineering expertise, and lifespans that can handle the time-scales required to move matter and information (which are, in any case, practically interchangeable) across huge distances. It's not magic, only magical.

But my personal delight remains Egan's head-on engagement with the philosophical questions that arise from his scenarios. One set of questions is represented by the Seeker-Spreader motif of "Glory": what drives a species to its particular way-of-being, and how deeply inscribed is it in their "nature"? What, in fact, is "nature" once sentience and choice are part of the equation? There are versions of these questions for individuals as well, as the actions of Leila and Jasim and the transformative experience of Martin show. What makes existence worthwhile, especially when everything from basic survival to every imaginable kind of "self-fulfillment" is available for the taking? What would you be if you really could be anything — and how long would you want to be that? It makes a fella dizzy, looking down into that abyss, but it's more exhilarating than scary.

Incandescence extends both the background and the thematics of "Riding the Crocodile" and throws in an exotic environment and its inhabitants for good measure, along with a scenario right out of Last and First Men or Star Maker, viewed in closeup rather than Stapledonian long-shot. In alternating chapters, two sets of investigators work on puzzles that are bound to converge. 300,000 years after "Riding," another pair of Amalgam citizens sets off to search the galaxy's central bulge for the source of a DNA-bearing meteor whose existence has been revealed, with no other comment, by the Aloof. Meanwhile, somewhere in the bulge, two aliens carefully analyze and map the nature of their world, the Splinter, a strange, rocky environment bathed in the radiation of the Incandescence. Rakesh and Parantham of the Amalgam command all the computational and material science of their multimillion-year-old civilization; Splinterites Roi and Zak use springs and rocks and wires to make basic measurements and painfully puzzle out the nature of their environment by means of mathematics.

For both quests, what starts out abstract or academic becomes practical. Rakesh and Parantham trace the meteor's path back to a cataclysmic collision between an inhabited world and a neutron star, and find evidence that the inhabitants managed to devise a means of surviving. They go looking for the wreckage or any conceivable survivors, which, unsurprisingly, takes them to a functioning ancient habitat that has managed to remain functional for 50 million years. In the Splinter, an event they call the Jolt suggests to Roi and Zak and some colleagues that the survival of their world depends on the arcane measurements and calculations they have found so absorbing as mathematical models. The two story-lines remain separate through most of the novel, and even when they do meet, there are questions about how they will interact, practically and ethically. It makes for a curious and effective kind of suspense.

Speaking of curiosity — something we might as well call curiosity (the characters', not the reader's) is the thematic key to the book. Rakesh is a restless spirit — "Our ancestors have sucked the Milky Way dry," he says in the first scene. "We were born too late; there's nothing left for us." He determined early in life (after only a thousand years) to leave home in search of something more worthwhile than mere tourism, and the chance to poke around in the Aloof seems what he's been looking for. In the beginning, Roi and Zak are the square pegs of the Splinter's culture, which is organized into semi-permanent groups instinctively bound together by practical work. Zak is the more profound oddball, a solitary eccentric obsessed with understanding and quantifying the various kinds of motion he observes in the near-weightlessness of the Splinter's Null Zone. Roi is just curious enough to help him with his measurements, and then she's hooked and becomes his teammate in research. When the Jolt comes, it shakes up more than the Splinter's orbit; it gets the attention of large numbers of its people, transforming its society from one sleepily absorbed in routine work to one focused on solving geometrical and mathematical problems, anticipating possible disasters, and inventing solutions to them. There's more to the change than cooperating on a new set of tasks. At one point, Roi looks back at "the uncomplicated bliss of cooperation" and "changeless routine" and realizes that she has developed a side of her personality that

could only claim success now from something new: a revelation, a contradiction, a twist that turned their old guesses inside out. If they ever did reach the end of the mysteries of weight and motion... she would welcome the return of ease and safety like everyone else, but she did not know how that second part of her would go on living.

Various puzzles are solved (though one remains) and thematic threads are tied to some of those solutions in an ingenious manner. My only caveat is directed to the mathematically challenged: parts of the Splinter side of the story trace the process of figuring out the nature of that environment in some detail. My personal intellectual glass ceiling meant that I was incapable of following that part of the adventure, but that did not keep me from being fully engaged by the rest of this book's curious combination of cool rationality and philosophical adventure. Egan has been working these veins since "Dust", Permutation City, and Diaspora, and I say that his hand has not lost its cunning nor his mind its passion.

Footnote: For those who, like me, develop the toothache when attempting to follow not just mathematical reasoning but even well-formed verbal descriptions of it, Egan has posted some explanations and visual aids on his website — but since it gives away the answers to some riddles, those who prefer to do their own figuring-out are warned to save this for an après-book treat. (http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/INCANDESCENCE/Incandescence.html)

Read more! This is one of over three dozen reviews from the April 2008 issue of Locus Magazine. To read more, go here to subscribe or buy the issue.

Comments are welcome, but are moderated.

28 March 2008

Locus Magazine's Graham Sleight reviews Iain M. Banks

from Locus Magazine, March 2008

Matter, Iain M. Banks (Orbit 978-181149-417-3, £18.99, 544pp, hc) February 2008. (Orbit 978-031600-536-4, $25.99, 608pp, hc) February 2008.

It sometimes seems that there are two Iain Bankses, and the difference between them has nothing to do with whether the book is science fiction or not. The first is the merry chatterer who can bring to sparky life vistas you just want to hear more about, whether in contemporary Britain or the far future. This is the guy who names his spaceships things like Experiencing a Significant Gravitas Shortfall. The second is an altogether less amiable character: the one who engineers the often savage structure of his stories, who killed Horza at the end of Consider Phlebas, who makes the seemingly distant lines of story converge.

Matter, Banks's first SF novel since The Algebraist, and first Culture novel since Look to Windward, is told by the merry chatterer for most of its length. Indeed, much of its story doesn't feel like SF at all. It has more to do with the dynastic intrigues you might find in the fantasy novels of, say, George R.R. Martin. In the first chapter Ferbin, a not terribly bright prince, witnesses a battlefield execution of his father, King Hausk. The killer, Tyl Loesp, is Hausp's second-in-command, and means to usurp him. Tyl Loesp returns to the capital, where he puts about the rumour that Ferbin is dead. There is a surviving prince, Oramen, but he is not yet of age to rule, so Tyl Loesp announces himself regent until Oramen's next birthday; in reality, of course, Oramen is the last obstacle between Tyl Loesp and permanent power, and so his life is in danger.

The bulk of the novel follows the stories of King Hausk's two sons: Ferbin on the run with his Sancho Panza-esque servant Holse, and Oramen mostly in the capital. There is a third child of Hausk, though, a daughter: Djan Seriy. Daughters being valued in Hausk's kingdom pretty much as they were in the Middle Ages, she was parcelled off overseas — overseas in this case being to the Culture. Hausk's kingdom, it turns out, resides on one level of an onion-like "Shellworld." The different layers of this world are linked by transporter "Towers," and it's through these that communication with the outside world takes place.

The tone of Djan's story is notably more steely and modern than that of the other two. She has been trained up as part of the Culture's "Special Circumstances" directorate, meaning that as a fighter and operator she's hugely more formidable than any of the humans back at her home world. So Banks has to delay her arrival there till the end of the book, since otherwise his ostensible plot would be over too soon.

The second Banks, the architect, comes into view when Djan gets home, and so does the real plot. We've been told, in an initial infodump about the Shellworlds, that many have been destroyed in the past by a species called the Iln. Late in the book, Oramen is present at the discovery of an alien artefact, which turns out to be an Iln world-killing machine. Very suddenly, the story becomes about the need to stop it. It ramps up sharply into the apocalyptic, and ends with a bang. (There follows a 15-page Appendix, listing all the names used, and then an Epilogue clarifying what happened at the climax.)

So Matter isn't so much a Culture novel, or a space opera one: it is, though, a characteristic Banks novel. The darkly comic double-act of Ferbin and Holse, for instance, is the sort of thing that you find it difficult to imagine many other writers placing in the normally po-faced context of space opera. It's huge fun, enormously readable, and endlessly inventive. If I have a reservation, it's that it doesn't quite cut to the bone as do some Banks novels. (I'm thinking especially of The Bridge, Use of Weapons, and The Crow Road.) The climax is too sudden for all its implications to sink in, and in retrospect the book spends too long getting to this point. But it's still a hugely welcome return to the field.

Read more! This is one of over two dozen reviews from the March 2008 issue of Locus Magazine. To read more, go here to subscribe or buy the issue.

Comments are welcome, but are moderated.

Locus Magazine's Faren Miller reviews James Morrow

from Locus Magazine, March 2008

The Philosopher's Apprentice, James Morrow (Morrow 978-0-06-135144-0, $25.95, 412pp, hc) March 2008.

Back in January, the New York Times Sunday magazine section had an article dealing with morality as explored by today's social scientists, psychologists, and philosophers, mostly in a series of thought experiments designed to investigate the human drive toward altruism — or enlightened self-interest. The questions posed to volunteers involved relatively small body counts, e.g.: Would you doom one person to save five from a runaway train? Sacrifice a few so an overloaded lifeboat could stay afloat? While it gave passing mention to the drives that lead to things like religious war, pogroms, and other high-minded mass murders, the piece gave little sense of the immense price exacted by self-proclaimed idealists, past and present. My latest reading abundantly makes up for that omission.

In The Philosopher's Apprentice, James Morrow brings a hapless "failed philosopher" to a tropical island where he has been hired to tutor a rich woman's teenage daughter, not so much to acquaint her with his own former discipline as to revive her capacity for empathy and ethical feelings after some form of amnesia has wiped her mind of them. That's what they tell him, at any rate. The truth is a good deal stranger.

The cover art shows a clinch between Pygmalion and his now-living statue Galatea, and the blurb alludes to Lolita (Morrow slyly opens the book with a butterfly sighting), but any lust that Mason Ambrose feels for his lovely young pupil Londa is soon tempered by a deep unease. Some of this stems from his surroundings, for the Isla de Sangre isn't a standard rich folks' playground. His new sponsor Edwina Sabacthani rules over her territory like a private kingdom, in partnership with a geneticist who nicely fits the role of mad scientist.

Early on, Mason considers fleeing the place: "Yes, I needed the money, but did I really want to spend a year among people who routinely fashioned mutant lobsters and breathing trees and God knew what other sorts of biological surrealism?" His own attitude toward the Deity has long been a truculent one, and his attempt to defend his doctoral thesis foundered on a point of religion culminating in this rant:

"Why... would this same divine serial killer have begun his career spending thirteen billion years fashioning quadrillions of needless galaxies before finally starting on his pet project: singling out a minor planet in an obscure precinct of the Milky Way and seeding it with vain bipedal vertebrates condemned to wait indefinitely for the deity in question to disclose himself?"

Though he doesn't immediately realize it, he has stumbled into another pet project — this time run by humans with alarmingly grand ambitions.

One further quote encapsulates both his moodiness and the island's Gothic side, natural fodder for gloom. Here he is, contemplating a ruined Spanish fortress whose central keep remains intact:

The longer I stared at that looming tower, the more ominous it seemed — a twin to Kafka's castle, perhaps, or an Auschwitz chimney, or a nuclear-tipped missile. Stoicism was an admirable philosophy, and Epicureanism had much to recommend it, but no Greek school would ever equip Londa to comprehend the bombs and rockets of modernity. We must advance to the Enlightenment as soon as possible.

Mason fails to see that Enlightenment notions can have very little relevance in a particularly mad sector of a mad, mad world. Of course Morrow himself knows this all too well, and keeps escalating the weirdness and the mind games that surround his hapless hero until the plot achieves a degree of insane improbability that's the hallmark of Swiftian satire. Call it fantasy, SF, or some mixture of the two, it's perfectly suited to expose humankind's pretense of rationality for the delusion it really is.

While self-importance and idiocy are universal, The Philosopher's Apprentice also skewers more specific contemporary targets. An increasingly prominent plot thread involves fanatical American right-wingers and their own experiment designed to confront sinners with very physical evidence of their past errors, resulting in such widespread chaos as to make the project on the Isla de Sangre seem almost benign — though it too was conceived in a spirit of hubris and megalomania where good intentions are inevitably lost somewhere along the way.

It's enough to make a man want to leave it all behind him (as much as he can) and go back to chasing butterflies.

Read more! This is one of over two dozen reviews from the March 2008 issue of Locus Magazine. To read more, go here to subscribe or buy the issue.

Comments are welcome, but are moderated.

04 March 2008

Cory Doctorow: Put Not Your Faith In Ebook Readers

from Locus Magazine, March 2008

Two fascinating lumps of white plastic hit major snags this past Christmas. One was the Nintendo Wii, a surprise smash-hit game console that compensates for its relatively crude graphics with ingenious gameplay based on a controller outfitted with accelerometers that let you interact with the console by waving your arms around. The other was the Amazon Kindle, an "E-Ink"-based e-book reader that, like its competition, the Sony Reader, delivers long battery life and superb screen quality in a slim and sexy form-factor that is just about the right size to slip into a large-ish coat pocket.

Both devices had the same problem: they sold out completely and new units could not be manufactured in time for Christmas. Both devices spawned entire Internet tool-suites dedicated to helping frustrated would-be purchasers locate their own unit. Amazon was selling 17 Wiis per second at the height of the fever, and more than one enterprising hacker whomped up a little pinger that would obsessively check Amazon for notice of new stock and then IM, email or SMS you the instant the Wii went back on the block.

No one knows how many Kindles Amazon sold. It's safe to say it was less than 17 per second. Far less.

Book reading is just not a mainstream activity in America. Every study conducted since the turn of the century shows book reading as flat or declining. Reports like the 2004 National Endowment for the Arts "Reading at Risk" is full of depressing nuggets about the ongoing decline in the importance of reading books to pretty much everyone: old people, young people, educated people and dropouts, the affluent and the poor.

But cheer up. It's a big world. Even minority pass-times can be real business and real culture — does it really matter that only mumble-mumble percent of Americans read a book last year if the total number of book sales still topped mumble billions? If you're a writer whose take-home slice of those sales was enough to cover the mortgage and food for the cat, there's nothing at all wrong with living in the niche.

It's fine to be a medium-sized small fry in those areas where the capacity is nigh-unlimited — say, Internet hosting, xeroxing, offset printing. No one's going to tell you that there's no room for your e-books website because the Internet is full. You're not going to have a hard time sourcing programmers to hack together your neat little social book-recommendation system. The world has lots of these commodities.

If you have a cool way to make money (or art, or both) that requires plenty of commodities, you're in luck. Your success metrics are relatively attainable: you need to be passionate, smart, and right. Combine these three and you'll be in business in no time.

If, on the other hand, your cool idea requires that you outbid other would-be artists and entrepreneurs for resources, your success requires more than being right and passionate and smart: you also have to have deeper pockets than the competition. When your plan hinges on something scarce — say, high-quality manufacturing capacity — you need to be able to win the inevitable bidding war.

You can bet that even as the Wiis were disappearing from the shelves, frantic buyers from Nintendo were camping out in the factory cities of Guanzhou and Shenzen, cajoling, threatening and begging for more capacity to make more devices before the Wii's moment in the sun passed, eclipsed by the next surprise-hit console.

As, no doubt, were the Kindle's masters — wheedling to get more units out the door in time to meet the Christmas rush, to ride the PR wave the Kindle caught from its (expensively promoted) launch.

It's telling that neither of the companies could outbid enough competitors to get units out the door in time. Not surprising, but telling. After all, getting good manufacturing out of a Chinese factory requires great care in your sourcing — neither Nintendo nor Amazon wanted to flood the market with defective, rushed units with crummy build-quality that would give the products a hard-to-shake reputation as a lemon.

China has experienced the largest migration in human history — 160,000,000 people moved from the inland farms to the coastal manufacturing cities — but it is not endless. Most of the world has shut down most of its factories, shuttering domestic manufacturing capacity in favor of the cheap labor, poor working conditions and environmental controls of China's factory cities. When you go to China to get your Kindle or your Wii produced, you're competing for space among the factories that produce socket wrenches, Happy Meal toys, laptop computers, prison cafeteria trays, decorative tin planters, vinyl action figures, keychain flashlights and cheap handguns.

Frankly, book reading just isn't important enough to qualify for priority treatment in that marketplace. E-book readers to date have been either badly made, expensive, out-of-stock or some combination of all three. No one's making dedicated e-book readers in such quantity that the price drops to the cost of a paperback — the cost at which the average occasional reader may be tempted to take a flutter on one. Certainly, these things aren't being made in such quantity that they're being folded in as freebies with the Sunday paper or given away at the turnstiles at a ballgame to the majority of people who are non-book-readers.

Meanwhile, handheld game consoles, phones, and other multipurpose devices have found their way into the hands of people from every walk of life. In some countries, mobile phone penetration is above 100 percent — that is, a significant proportion of the population maintain more than one phone, for example, a work cellular and a home cellular.

Not only can these devices command the lion's share of China's high-quality manufacturing capacity, but they are produced in such staggering volume (and often distributed with a subsidy — game devices are sold below cost in the expectation of selling games; phones are subsidized by carriers) that they can be had for a pittance.

As fierce as hardware manufacturing competition runs, it still creates a paradoxical abundance: an abundance of platforms that can run e-book-reading software. If you're someone with a smarts, passion and vision, you can easily source some hackers to bang up an e-book business to run on a PC, phone, or other handheld (note that in the world of phones and handhelds, a substantial portion of the manufacturers take pains to stop you from running software on their devices, as Apple did with the iPhone, but it's not illegal to defeat these measures and plenty of people do so).

Hackers are a commodity. Devices are a commodity. High-quality factories are not.

I'm skeptical about selling ebooks as a business model (see my earlier column "You DO like reading off a screen" for more about this), but if I had to bet on a future for e-books, I would take long odds against a hardware reader catching on in any meaningful way.

What's more, the top choice for hardware reader displays — E-Ink screens — are poorly suited to use in gaming and related applications. While these screens do deliver super-crisp, low-power-consumption text, they have an abysmal refresh rate (the time it takes for the screen to redraw itself). That's because E-Ink works on the basis of a close-knit grid of little two-tone balls that are physically rotated from white-side to black-side when a charge is applied to them. There is a noticeable lag when you page forward on an E-Ink device as all those miniature ping-pong balls spin in their lattice, a lag that is completely foreign to those of us accustomed to watching light get painted on the back of a tube or pass through the polarizing liquid of an LCD. You might be able to play a good game of Zork or Hangman or Scrabble on an E-Ink screen, but no one's gonna be porting Pac Man to it anytime soon, let alone Counterstrike.

E-Ink is a brilliant solution in search of an economically compelling problem. $400 e-book readers are not that problem. As we look to the future of books, reading and bookselling, it's critical to keep things in perspective. When Nintendo can't get line-time for the Wii, what hope does a niche item like an e-book reader have?

Sure, someday we might all be factories of one, printing devices from our desktop fabbers, but until then, put not your faith in hardware readers — take the easy way out and hack bits, not atoms.

Cory Doctorow's website is Craphound.com, and he is co-editor of Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things.

Previous Cory Doctorow columns posted on Locus Online:

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26 February 2008

Locus Magazine's Russell Letson reviews Chris Roberson

from Locus Magazine, February 2008

The Dragon's Nine Sons, Chris Roberson (Solaris 978-1-84416-524-7, $15.00, 329 pp, tp) February 2008. Cover by Chris Moore.

In The Dragon's Nine Sons, Chris Roberson returns to the alternate-historical future in which China never turned inward, so that in the year 4689 (our mid-21st century) it is one of two great powers on Earth and a space-faring empire with colonies on Fire Star (Mars). Nearly 30 years after the events of The Voyage of Night Shining White (reviewed in February 2007), the early exploratory stages are past and the extraterrestrial colonies are well established, but a longstanding rivalry with the aggressive and ambitious Mexica Dominion has flared into a war in space and on Fire Star itself.

The template for the story is the same as The Dirty Dozen, with slightly different arithmetic: a crew made up of condemned men is sent on a dangerous-to-the-point-of-suicide mission as an alternative to execution. The leaders of this gang of misfits are Zhuang Jie, a reluctant warship captain guilty of cowardice, disobeying orders, and flight in the face of the enemy; and exemplary career soldier Bannerman Yao Guanzhong, guilty only of stubbornly investigating a massacre and discovering facts that the authorities do not want known. Their crew — which includes a gambler and thief, a prank-pulling drug smuggler, a couple of murderers, and a philosophical conscientious objector — is hastily trained to operate a captured Mexic ship renamed Dragon, given passcodes that with luck have not yet changed, and instructed to infiltrate an enemy base hidden in the hollowed-out asteroid Xolotl, where they are to plant and detonate a thermonuclear bomb — the Dragon's Egg.

The storyline is a kind of transmogrified military-SF adventure in which familiar tropes (accounts of briefings and training, presentation of equipment and weaponry, descriptions of military procedures and folkways) are re-imagined for this alternate-historical setting that mixes space elevators and abacus-wielding navigators and where every Imperial space crew includes a Minister of Rites. The most strange and exotic features, though, come not from the Chinese side but the Mexic warrior culture, thanks particularly to the centrality of human sacrifice in all aspects of their operations, right up to ship's controls. A sacrificial altar is standard equipment on every Mexic military spacecraft. On Dragon,

the circuitry and ridges on the platform surface combined to form a fierce tableau, an image of the Mexic moon goddess being cut into pieces by the warrior god of the sun. The platform was not a separate component [. . .]; this was an integrated part of the bridge controls, without which the rest of the ship would not function. And the circuitry and ridges on the platform's surface were not purely decorative, but incorporated sensitive instrumentation capable of detecting the presence of [. . .] hemoglobin. Without hemoglobin, the ship would not function. . . .

Also on the bridge is a pair of cages for the spare sacrificial victims needed to reboot the control systems should there be a failure. The Chinese have hotwired a bypass into the altar circuits on their captured ship and also stored away a few liters of blood in case of emergency, but the sacrificial machinery remains a gun-over-the-mantlepiece presence throughout the voyage.

Even before they face the Mexic warriors at Xolotl there are problems — the ill-disciplined crew wrangle and fight, unexpected events force desperate improvisations, and the ship's half-adapted control systems fail in a way that requires the altar to revert to its original function. But the most serious modification of plans comes after they arrive at Xolotl, when they find that civilian prisoners are being held on the station, at which point The Dirty Dozen gets mixed with aspects of The Magnificent Seven.

Perhaps more interesting than the adventure-plot events are the gradual revelations of the paths that brought each crew member to disgrace. The various crises along the way offer opportunities to tell those stories of moral weakness or enlightenment or youthful indiscretion or trauma, and finally of the details of how Bannerman Yao came to know things far above his pay level. And, unsurprisingly, the crewmen's flaws and fears, and the ways they accommodate them and each other, affect their performance in the encounters with the enemy that climax their mission.

The narrative voice and emotional stance of this book remind me strongly of L. Sprague de Camp — discursive, explanatory, and rather cool, even in the face of considerable unpleasantness (the Mexic weapons of choice are the liquid-magnesium-spitting "fire-lance" and the obsidian-studded club, so close combat is anything but pretty). This removes much of the edginess of the dirty-dozen template, replacing it with the ironies of the ways in which the crewmembers' flaws contribute to their heroism. Here, as in The Voyage of Night Shining White, character, character relationships, and cultural background are at least as compelling as the melodramatic action in the foreground. In fact, those are the qualities that would have me return to this charming and oddly-retro-feeling alternate future. (And maybe I'll find out how they construct space elevators and make orbital calculations with only the abacus to do the figures.)

Read more! This is one of over two dozen reviews from the February 2008 issue of Locus Magazine. To read more, go here to subscribe or buy the issue.

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Locus Magazine's Gary K. Wolfe reviews Kathleen Duey

from Locus Magazine, February 2008

Skin Hunger, Ekaterina Sedia (Atheneum 978-0-689-84093-7, 358pp, hc) July 2007.

Most reviewers get reminded on a fairly regular basis of books that we've overlooked, so when Kathleen Duey's YA novel Skin Hunger was brought to the attention of our esteemed reviews editor — after having been a finalist for last year's National Book Award in Young People's Literature — I got a copy, and it didn't take long to see why we might have overlooked it. Despite an impressively brooding David Ho cover, it bears a title that could easily be taken for a generic zombie or vampire tale (though it turns out to mean something quite different), an author who despite some success in the YA field has remained largely invisible to the genre community, and a warning that it's the first volume in yet another trilogy, bearing the overall title "A Resurrection of Magic" (by now, you could pretty much start a monthly book club of tales involving the return of magic to the world). But it turns out that Skin Hunger is one of the more accomplished and original fantasy novels of the year, and the trilogy it inaugurates might well constitute a major work (the narrative here is too truncated to claim that quite yet). There are a lot of strategies available to authors launching trilogies — they can write a more or less independent novel to be followed by sequels; they can complete a limited story arc within the context of a larger unfinished arc; they can write a movie-serial cliffhanger; they can simply stop the narrative at an appropriate breakpoint, with the understanding that the major issues are left unresolved. Duey chooses a combination of the latter two strategies, and it's inevitably a risky choice — some readers will feel that the tale just stops in midstream, or that it's only a fragment — but when the strategy works well, as it does here, it can be ferociously compelling: Duey may or may not know exactly where she's going, but this is clearly a story that wants to be told, and, so far at least, it's a supremely honest and perceptive fantasy.

And it's also a fairly dark one. The story alternates between the third-person narrative of Sadima, a young girl growing up in a world in which magic has been reduced to the depredations of charlatans but who finds in herself a talent for communicating with animals; and the first-person tale of Hahp, a wealthy merchant's disdained second son sent to study wizardry at a draconian monastic academy where students who fail to learn magic are simply allowed to starve to death — a kind of Hogwarts as Gulag. It takes a while to realize that these narratives are set several generations apart — Hahp's tale seems to take place a couple of hundred years after Sadima's — and that they're connected. Sadima, whose mother died at the hands of a fake magician while giving birth to her, lives in a poor rural family which despises anything to do with magic, and her relationship with her father is strained by the circumstances of her birth. She meets a kindly young man named Franklin, servant of the brilliant young aristocrat Somiss, who has heard of her magical skills, and after her father dies she sets out to join them in the seaside city of Limòri, becoming a kind of cook, scribe, and all-around manager for the humane Franklin and the volatile, reclusive Somiss, who is determined to rediscover the ancient secrets of true magic and establish a kind of academy, despite the opposition of the royals and of his own family. Meanwhile in the future, Hahp, whose wealthy family lives in the same city of Limòri and who also has issues with his dad, learns that being sent to study at the wizards' academy is very nearly a sentence of death — supposedly only one of the students will actually graduate. Still, all the students come from wealth except Hahp's roommate Gerrard, who he initially calls "Fishboy" because of his lowly origins, and whose presence there is unexplained. There is absolutely no redeeming warmth in Hahp's brutal tale — the students readily turn on one another (and are warned against helping each other), the instructors are unyielding, students actually die as warned, and even the hope of survival is tinged by bitterness and plans for revenge.

So when we learn that Hahp's major instructors are Franklin and Somiss, a host of intriguing questions arise: how have they survived the centuries? What became of Sadima? How did the promise of returning magic morph into this nightmare of brutality, and how does it actually function in this new world? Duey's view of magic is incisive and morally complex, and her skill at developing the central characters of Sadima, Franklin, and Somiss is equaled by her convincing sense of place — what we see of the city of Limòri, whose history seems somehow bound up in the narrative of the unwritten centuries, almost echoes the rich and grotesque New Weird settings of Miéville or Harrison (but more about that in a minute). Duey is clearly tapping into something powerful here, and if the remainder of the Resurrection of Magic plays out at this level of intensity, it will easily take its place among those YA trilogies that ought to earn the attention of fantasy readers of any age.

Read more! This is one of over two dozen reviews from the February 2008 issue of Locus Magazine. To read more, go here to subscribe or buy the issue.

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06 February 2008

Yesterday's Tomorrows: Ray Bradbury

by Graham Sleight

from Locus Magazine, October 2007

The Illustrated Man, Ray Bradbury (Doubleday, 252pp, first edition, hc) 1951. Cover by Sydney Butchkes; (Flamingo Modern Classics 978-00-0647922-2, £7.99, 240pp, pb).

Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury (Ballantine, 202pp, first edition, hc) 1953. Cover by Joe Mugnaini. (Del Rey 978-0-345-34296-6, $6.99, 208pp, pb). (Voyager 978-0-007-18171-4, £6.99, 192pp, pb).

The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury (Doubleday, 222pp, first edition, hc) 1950. Cover by Arthur Lidov. (Bantam Spectra 978-0-553-27822-4, $7.99, 192pp). (Flamingo Modern Classics 978-0-006-47923-9, £6.99, 240pp, pb).

Something Wicked This Way Comes, Ray Bradbury (Simon & Schuster, 318pp, first edition, hc) 1962. Cover by Gray Foy. (Avon 978-0-380-72940-1, $7.99, 304pp, pb). (Gollancz Fantasy Masterworks 978-0-575-07874-1, £6.99, 272pp, pb).

Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales, Ray Bradbury (Morrow 0-06-054242-X, $29.95, 893pp, first edition, hc) 2003. (HarperPerennial 978-0-060-54488-1, $17.95, 912pp, tp).

Of all the SF writers I read in my teens, there are only two whose names still evoke a kind of pre-verbal response, an intensity of feeling that I can't pin down to one work or setting. One is Theodore Sturgeon, and the evocation there is of emotion — love or fear or hate communicated so directly that they short-circuit my usual critical or eaderly responses. I could point to favorite bits in Sturgeon's work, but that's not the point. Sturgeon-world, that particular affective colour, gets to me too early. The other author is Ray Bradbury, and the association there is visual. Just saying his name conjures up (for me) a dusty, sunlit American landscape with tiny human figures taking joy in it. It may be the idealised childhood of Dandelion Wine, or the "rocket summer" Ohio at the start of The Martian Chronicles.

Or, most likely, the opening of The Illustrated Man, which is — if I remember rightly — the first "proper" science fiction book I ever read:

It was a warm afternoon in early September when I first met the Illustrated Man. Walking along an asphalt road, I was on the final leg of a walking tour of Wisconsin. Late in the afternoon, ate some pork, beans, and a doughnut, and was preparing to stretch out and read when the Illustrated Man walked over the hill and stood for a moment against the sky.

I don't think a critic should go on too much about their own personal experiences, because the point of criticism is after all to get past the personal and find responses to a work that are of more general use. But I can't do that so easily with Bradbury. That opening passage has an almost Proustian specificity for me, not just for what it describes but what it implies. The freedom of the road and the size of the landscape are all there in my head even if not stated in the text. (Justified or not? I don't know, but I'm sure every reader makes these sort of leaps when the text allows them to.) And then, on the next page, there's an even more famous passage of description as the Illustrated Man shows his tattoos for the first time:

As for the rest of him, I cannot say how long I sat and stared, for he was a riot of rockets and fountains and people, in such intricate detail and color that you could hear the voices murmuring small and muted, from the crowds that inhabited his body. When his flesh twitched, the tiny mouths flickered, the tiny green-and-gold eyes winked, the tiny pink hands gestured. There were yellow meadows and blue rivers and mountains and stars and suns and planets spread in a Milky Way across his chest.

There are two levels on which you can respond to a passage like this: the intellectual and the emotional. On the intellectual level, the illustrations are a device. Each one cues in a story in the book that the Illustrated Man narrative frames. In a sense, therefore, Bradbury has just given us a sales pitch for what's to follow. But sales pitches, by and large, don't work on the intellectual level. What sucks us in here is the language, the vividness of the description. There are plenty of purely technical things that could be remarked on in that passage: the attentiveness to colour, for instance — an enduring Bradbury trait and one that he shares with, of all people, J.G. Ballard. There's the alliteration ("a riot of rockets"), the repetition of "tiny" so that you're reminded what a miracle of precision these illustrations are. But more than that, there's an emotional color, an eagerness to explore. It's very different from the emotion you get in, say, Heinlein, even though he was also profoundly attached to talking about humanity taking the next step. Perhaps the distinction is something like this: Heinlein wanted to sell us on the fact of exploration; Bradbury wanted to sell us on the idea of exploration, the image of it.

The first story in The Illustrated Man, "The Veldt", describes a family of the future that has an artificial nursery depicting, for instance, nursery rhymes, fairy stories, or the African veldt for the amusement and education of the children. The description of how the nursery works, through "crystal walls" and "dimensional superreactionary, supersensitive color film and mental tape film behind glass screens" feels like flummery. When Bradbury is called on to infodump, he can often be no better than average. But the point of the story is the allure of the image of the veldt (literally the image, in this case). When the parents try to stop their children using the nursery, it proves to be more dangerous than just an image.

"The Veldt" is a neat morality tale, perhaps too neat — though that may also stem from its relative brevity. (A very crude statistic: the much later retrospective Bradbury Stories contains 100 stories in just under 900, admittedly large, pages. Bradbury is at his most characteristic at these shorter lengths; sometimes, his stories benefit from it and sometimes they don't.) Take, as another example, "The Long Rain", also from The Illustrated Man. It opens with a rare passage of Bradbury writing that fails to work, that's reminiscent of no-one so much as Lionel Fanthorpe:

The rain continued. It was a hard rain, a perpetual rain, a sweating and steaming rain; it was a mizzle, a downpour, a fountain, a whipping at the eyes, an undertow at the ankles; it was a rain to drown all rains and the memory of rains.

"Mizzle," for the record, was the point where it began seeming like arbitrary word-spinning to me. We're on Venus, whose hostile landscape is defined by these rains. A group of human astronauts is gradually driven mad by them, until one manages to find shelter. The narrative is almost beside the point, secondary to the fact (and the symbolism) of the rains. Other stories in the book manipulate symbols that Bradbury was to return to again and again: rockets, religion, Mars, childhood, flight, the stars. Each story, you could say, works out a relationship between humans and the image at its heart. Even in a story like "Marionettes, Inc.", which has at its heart the Dickian/Wolfean premise of being able to make human facsimiles, what sticks with you is the sensual evocation of it. We're told, for instance, that a replica of one of the characters "even smells like you: Bond Street and Melachrinos!" This is very far from the science fictional way of working, where imagery is an emergent property from the extrapolative work of describing a new world. For Bradbury, it's means and end.

This is perhaps most obvious in his one novel of pure SF, Fahrenheit 451. Its core premise is, again, not extrapolative but satirical: firemen exist to set fire to books, not to stop fires. Montag, the central protagonist, is a fireman who believes that his job is in the common interest until he meets a girl called Clarisse who suggests otherwise. The future America that Montag inhabits is dulled into conformity by advertising and television; books are despised because they represent pluralism and contradiction. The most striking passages in the early sections of the book are those where Montag meets Clarisse or thinks about her. They're rhapsodic Bradbury at his best, but at the same time they're not totally believable in the context of this dystopia.

One two three four five six seven days. And as many times he came out of the house and Clarisse was there somewhere in the world. Once he saw her shaking a walnut tree, once he saw her sitting on the lawn knitting a blue sweater, three or four times he found a bouquet of late flowers on his porch, or a handful of chestnuts in a little sack, or some autumn leaves neatly pinned to a sheet of white paper and thumb-tacked to his door.

This is a world, we're repeatedly told in other contexts, that has been mechanised, homogenised, stripped of its connections to nature. So this feels like a visitation from another plane.

But Clarisse exits the book fairly soon, and the core subject becomes apparent: why it's worth celebrating pluralism. Bradbury becomes somewhat dogmatic here, putting strawman arguments into the mouths of those advocating the status quo (as represented especially by Beatty, the head of Montag's firehouse.) Beatty describes the replacement of books by, say, the "vanilla tapioca" of magazines — not because of any kind of state-sponsored censorship but because the people themselves no longer want to be confused by difficulty. Beatty's extended sermon on this issue is just the most extreme example of Bradbury's tendency to the didactic. We might now look askance at Fahrenheit 451's value scheme placing books on a pedestal that, say, comic books or television could never aspire to. And Bradbury's closing plot turns, as Montag falls in with a group of underground readers who have memorised canonical books, seems borderline sentimental. It's not just that, nowadays, we'd expect any SFnal future to have digital storage of text available for almost no cost. It's that the elevation of books and what they represent above almost everything else in the world feels rigged — just as does the creation of "firemen" who destroy them. A book that's centrally about the value of books risks feeling smug: you're reading a book, so you must be on the side of good, right? So what I at last took away from Fahrenheit 451 was not its central argument but its incidental pleasures of rediscovering human feeling. It's an old charge, but entirely relevant here: Bradbury is at his strongest when he shows, not when he tells.

A similar problem, of Bradbury's rhapsodic love of the world grating against the premises he's chosen, arises with The Martian Chronicles. Even when it was written, it must have been clear to its readers that the version it presented of the planet was a dream, and to be read as such. The Martian realist novels of the early '90s, most obviously Kim Stanley Robinson's work, one irrelevant to Bradbury's vision of Martians living in a pseudo-America, offering a funhouse mirror back to their Earth explorers. If The Martian Chronicles has a successor, it's in SF tales of understanding and misunderstanding native populations like Dick's Martian Time-Slip or (more distantly) Wolfe's The Fifth Head of Cerberus. When you get to the point, in "Interim", at which a human-built Martian town is explicitly compared to a Midwestern one swept up by a tornado and deposited on another world, you know very clearly that Bradbury's a writer for whom the aesthetic side of science fiction will always be more important than the realistic.

That's not to say, though, that he wasn't responsive to his times. One of the most famous sections of The Martian Chronicles, "There Will Come Soft Rains", returns to a periodic Bradbury concern, the destructive possibility of an atomic war. Back on Earth, an automated house has survived its inhabitants' destruction in a nuclear attack. (The inhabitants remain only as white shapes on the otherwise blackened west wall of the house.) The house chatters on through its merry routines, waking its now-dead dwellers, until the bough of a tree crashes through the kitchen window, starting a fire. The house is reduced to ruins, inducing a kind of pathos that's surprising and effective.

Pathos is also one of the key notes of the book's stories of exploration, like "—And the Moon Be Still As Bright", which begins by showing us some of the early human explorers on Mars. They make a fire from Martian wood, and one of them thinks about the "imported blasphemy" that will come later: "There'd be... time to throw condensed-milk cans in the proud Martian canals; time for copies of the New York Times to blow and caper and rustle across the lone grey Martian sea-bottoms." It's a very different emotional charge from either, say, Heinleinian gusto or Stapledon/Clarke awe at the cosmos. It's one of those occasions when Bradbury's imagery points not to something describable, like the primitive VR of the veldt or the desirability of Clarisse, but to pure otherness, strangeness. Throughout the book, we keep being reminded of how humans are failing to grasp the planet they are on, and that this has destructive consequences. "—And The Moon Be Still As Bright" ends with the memorable image of one of the crew in the Martian cities, "shooting out the crystal windows and blowing the tops off the fragile towers."

The Martian Chronicles, like Fahrenheit 451, The Illustrated Man, and much of Bradbury's other work, is fixed up from shorter pieces culled from the magazines. One can argue that he's always had a problem sustaining the structure of his work at novel length, though there are exceptions. Something Wicked This Way Comes, for instance, feels almost like the central Bradbury work if one looks at the motifs it carries. A carnival comes to a small Midwest town, bringing surface excitement but deeper danger. Two teenage boys are the main protagonists; Bradbury seems most attuned to that time of life, to the moment when possibility and hope haven't yet been crippled by the constraints of adulthood. In a 1998 afterword reprinted in the UK Fantasy Masterworks edition, Bradbury acknowledges a number of debts in writing the book, but the most potent seems to be his own encounter with a carnival at a similar age. I don't want to diminish him by saying that capturing that moment of adolescence is the only thing he's good at, but it certainly seems to be one of the deepest wells he can draw on. Perhaps it's this that enables him to sustain the narrative so well; though one has to say that its simplicities about good and evil are offputting to an adult reader.

So Bradbury's most characteristic work is to be found in his short stories, and, from the retrospective Bradbury Stories he seems to know it. For every story that verges on sentiment or predictability, there's another — at least from his peak period in the '50s and '60s — that cuts deep. I'm not convinced that the selection represented in this volume is as good as it should be, though that may be just me. (A lot of personal favourites are omitted, for a start, such as the chilling urban nightmare "The Crowd".) Bradbury seems to think of his work as a unity, which is a shame given that a later story like "The Toynbee Convector" is so obviously inferior to the work of the earlier decades. It bullies and cajoles, even more extremely than Fahrenheit 451. It's a story that uses SF devices to assert that the world we have right now is worth celebrating, like Harlan Ellison's "Strange Wine". But the deck is so stacked by voice-of-the-author pronouncements like "Everywhere [in the '60s, '70s, and '80s] was professional despair, intellectual ennui, political cynicism," that one finds oneself wishing for the subtlety and restraint of Ellison.

It's rather a shame, since there's so much good stuff in Bradbury Stories, some of it representing the author at his very best. "And the Rock Cried Out", for instance, or "The Pedestrian" manage to hone Bradbury's love for certain tropes into what feels like definitive form. To return to my first point, more than with most authors, reading Bradbury you're always conscious that each story, good or bad, is part of a body of work. You know the kind of person who wrote them, what he loves, what he believes in. Even if those beliefs are sometimes too simple to command adherence, especially in the world we now have, you long to inhabit their world.

Graham Sleight was born in 1972 and lives in London, UK. He has written reviews and essays on science fiction and fantasy for The New York Review of Science Fiction, Foundation, Interzone, SF Studies, SF Weekly, Infinity Plus, Strange Horizons, Vector, and Locus Magazine. He's served as a judge for the Arthur C. Clarke Award for 2005 and 2006, and becomes editor of Foundation from the end of 2007.

Graham Sleight is one of eight regular Locus reviewers. Every issue, we review dozens of new books and magazines, most before they appear in print. A subscription will get you all those as well as the rest of the magazine -- news, People & Publishing, commentary, reports on events, and a list of all books and magazines published that month.

30 January 2008

Locus Magazine's Faren Miller reviews Ekaterina Sedia

from Locus Magazine, January 2008

The Secret History of Moscow, Ekaterina Sedia (Prime 978-0-8095-7223-6, $12.95, 304pp, tp) December 2007. Cover by Frederic Cayer.

Like [Steve Erickson's] Zeroville's Los Angeles area in the '70s and '80s, Moscow (and much of the former USSR) went into a hectic era of transition in the 1990s. The Moscow of that time, in a world turning mad, serves as the setting for Ekaterina Sedia's The Secret History of Moscow.

Of the three main protagonists, Galina knows she herself is part crazy: a diagnosed schizophrenic just trying to avoid a return trip to the hospital. As long as she doesn't confess to seeing and hearing the impossible, maybe she can pass as normal. But when her own sister turns into a jackdaw, then flies away and disappears, Galina can't help but take it personally. That turns out to be just one of a host of odd disappearances, a mystery awkward enough to put the city's police force on the spot; in traditional style, they choose one of the least popular inspectors to look into the matter.

Yakov may not have been born a peasant, but this policeman does look like one, with no trace of his exotic forebear — an English grandfather who deserted the family long before he was born. He insists on pragmatism with a kind of desperation, while Galina is accustomed to living in a crazy world. Fyodor, the final member of the threesome who venture into an otherworldly version of their city, is a scruffy street artist with his own neuroses but also some valuable knowledge: he can get them into that otherworld.

Old Russia's spirit creatures have long since retreated to the secret city, along with former mortals (misfits one and all) who have become something like ageless, solid ghosts. And someone down there must be more actively malevolent, responsible for the weird phenomena that brought the main characters together in the first place as they set off on their haphazard quest for the truth.

With a mix of blunt, colloquial language, wry humor, a generous dollop of psychological traumas, and some fine descriptive passages (whether setting a scene, showing moments of self-understanding, or producing both in one decisive moment), Sedia moves effortlessly from a '90s Moscow where the world seems to have gone "upside-down overnight," to its magical counterpart where weirdness is the norm, and finally back to the improbable realm of consensus reality. Meanwhile, she keeps in touch with her protagonists as individuals, fostering a sense of intimacy that keeps the plot from outracing our ability to think with them, feel with them, and share their remarkable experiences.

Read more! This is one of over two dozen reviews from the January 2008 issue of Locus Magazine. To read more, go here to subscribe or buy the issue.

Comments are welcome, but are moderated.

Locus Magazine's Gary K. Wolfe reviews Paolo Bacigalupi

from Locus Magazine, January 2008

Pump Six and Other Stories, Paolo Bacigalupi (Night Shade Books 978-1-59780-133-1, $24.95, 248 pages, hc) February 2008.

Science fiction dealing with environmental disasters has tended to fall into two fairly simple categories: stories in which it simply isn't our fault (an asteroid strike, a solar storm) and cautionary tales in which catastrophe becomes an instrument of policy critique (as in Kim Stanley Robinson's recent Washington trilogy, or many nuclear war fictions). With only a handful of stories published since mid-2003, Paolo Bacigalupi has emerged as one of the most distinctive new voices to consistently address this theme, as well as one of the most honored — eight "year's best" appearances, one Nebula and three Hugo nominations, two Sturgeon nominations (and one win), an Asimov's award. None of this is surprising given the consistent quality of Bacigalupi's fiction — his direct and precise prose, his carefully worked-out futures, his convincingly if sometimes perversely flawed characters — but it may be a bit surprising that an author with such a consistently bleak vision has earned such popularity. Reading his first collection Pump Six and Other Stories can be a fairly bracing experience: slavery, torture, cannibalism, posthumans engineered to eat industrial slag and mine tailings, cops shooting babies, other babies born monstrous in a hopelessly toxic environment, post-petroleum societies in which multinational corporations cynically control the food supply, sewage systems collapsing because the technology to maintain them has been lost — and not an ingenious technofix or Heinleinian competent engineer in sight. In environmental terms, Bacigalupi is to Al Gore as Savonarola was to the Pope: human behavior, in his view, is not a matter of rationality but of expediency. We'll always take the easiest route, he seems to say, and try to patch things later. His stories take place in these patches.

And yet if Bacigalupi challenges SF's traditional valorization of reason, he's very much an SF writer in the particulars. One can hear echoes of everyone from Harlan Ellison to David Bunch, Geoff Ryman, and even H.G. Wells here — there are shadows of Morlocks and Eloi all over — but Bacigalupi is mostly the spiritual heir of C.M. Kornbluth, one of the few classic-age SF writers with a similarly grim and mordant view of human nature. The Kornbluthian tone is most distinctive in the one new story in the collection, "Pump Six", in which a sewage engineer in a stinky, deteriorating New York plagued by energy and food shortages and nearly overrun with homeless near-subhuman "trogs" discovers that his dimwitted assistant has permitted sewage to back up overnight due to the failure of the Pump Six of the title. Upon investigating he learns that the century-old pumps are all badly in need of replacement parts and beginning to fail, but that the parts manufacturer is long out of business. Naively hoping to track down an engineer, he makes his way to Columbia University, where in the long-deserted library an aging faculty wife tells him that engineering, and pretty much all other aspects of higher education, had been abandoned decades earlier. If you can imagine "The Marching Morons" without the comic-satirical edge, you begin to get a sense of the darkness of this tale (which also contains a brief dream passage that echoes Judith Merril's "That Only a Mother").

But Bacigalupi is only getting started. In "The People of Sand and Slag", even the cities appear to be gone; the tale takes place in what appears to be an endless Samuel Beckett-like wasteland of strip mines and industrial slag, with the posthumans who inhabit it modified to survive by ingesting this sludge. Miraculously, they come upon an unmodified dog somehow surviving in this toxic environment, and make a half-hearted effort to keep it as a kind of pet, until the inconvenience of providing it with purified water and food becomes impractical. The echo here, both in terms of the setting and the story's rather inevitable ending, may be Ellison's "A Boy and His Dog", but with one crucial difference: the wasteland is not the product of a single massive catastrophe like a nuclear war, but rather of deliberate human action, possibly over centuries, with humans simply modifying themselves to survive in it. Adaptability is also a theme in "Pop Squad", set in a massive arcology called a "carbon sequestration project" in which the bourgeois classes enjoy immortality treatments and symphony concerts while the cops track down and shoot the few remaining illegal children raised in secret squalor by their defiant moms. This sort of brutal decadence is taken even further in "The Fluted Girl" — the story that first brought Bacigalupi to wide attention — in which a wealthy patron seeking social status enslaves a pair of sisters and, through painful surgeries and medical treatments, transforms them into fragile human musical instruments. One such slave who rebelled turns out to be on that evening's dinner menu.

Bacigalupi's two most famous stories both take place in a common future, but in very different settings. In "The Calorie Man" and "Yellow Card Man", oil-based energy is a distant memory, replaced by elaborate wind-up mechanisms and an energy economy based on calories generated through agriculture. "The Calorie Man" begins in what appears to be a bucolic future Mississippi River valley, but soon we learn that powerful corporations have not only monopolized most agriculture through patented crops (whose seeds are also sterile, forcing consumers to continually buy from the corporations), but possibly engineered plagues and rusts to destroy competing crops. The fairly slight plot involves a scheme to rescue a renegade genetic engineer who has plans to be a future Johnny Appleseed by releasing his own modified strains to undercut the monopoly. "Yellow Card Man" doesn't have much of a plot either, but is a powerful tale of a once-successful ethnic Chinese trying to find work as a displaced person in a future Bangkok while being tormented by a former employee who has risen to prosperity. If the direct ecological theme has shifted toward the background here, the story brilliantly shows the human consequences of population shifts as a result of economic change, and is perhaps Bacigalupi's most successful tale purely as character drama. Its only real rival in that regard is "The Pasho", set in a distant future reduced largely to barbaric tribes, in which a young man from one such tribe returns home after learning to be a "pasho," a kind of monk devoted to the gradual rediscovery of knowledge — only to find that his warlord grandfather regards him as a traitor to the principles of his culture.

The most direct ecological fable in the collection is "The Tamarisk Hunter", which interestingly is also the only one not published in an SF venue (it appeared in the ecology newspaper High Country News, for which Bacigalupi writes). It's an extremely timely tale of future water wars in the west, with communities systematically being shut down to enable California to continue importing mountain water, and "water bounties" offered to freelancers such as the title character, who tracks down salt-binding tamarisk trees to improve the water supply. Although it may be the most immediate of his tales, it characteristically offers little hope that anything will be done before these water wars become a reality. The remaining stories are Bacigalupi's first publication, "Pocketful of Dharma", set in a future Chengdu in which a beggar comes into possession of a data cube containing the Dalai Lama, and "Softer", which at first seems to be an uncharacteristic tale of a man who more or less inadvertently murders his wife — until we realize that, in miniature, it's an echo of the expediency and thoughtlessness that characterizes Bacigalupi's portrayal of human nature throughout: at a certain point while playfully pretending to smother his wife with a pillow, the protagonist realizes it's just as easy to go ahead with it, rather than deal with recriminations. As Bacigalupi points out throughout this powerful and important collection, it's just as easy to murder the world, too, once you've gotten started.

Read more! This is one of over two dozen reviews from the January 2008 issue of Locus Magazine. To read more, go here to subscribe or buy the issue.

Comments are welcome, but are moderated.

06 May 2008

Cory Doctorow: Think Like a Dandelion

24 April 2008

Locus Magazine's Faren Miller reviews Felix Gilman

Locus Magazine's Russell Letson reviews Greg Egan

28 March 2008

Locus Magazine's Graham Sleight reviews Iain M. Banks

Locus Magazine's Faren Miller reviews James Morrow

04 March 2008

Cory Doctorow: Put Not Your Faith In Ebook Readers

26 February 2008

Locus Magazine's Russell Letson reviews Chris Roberson

Locus Magazine's Gary K. Wolfe reviews Kathleen Duey

06 February 2008

Yesterday's Tomorrows: Ray Bradbury

30 January 2008

Locus Magazine's Faren Miller reviews Ekaterina Sedia

Locus Magazine's Gary K. Wolfe reviews Paolo Bacigalupi

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