Obsolete Your Idols

I read another Charles Stross novel, Halting State. Overall, I think I enjoyed Glasshouse slightly more, but this one was more amusing more often. It starts with a bank inside an MMORPG getting robbed and ends with a 419 nod, so it’s an internet-savvy narrative. It’s got some characters who are likable, though their flaws don’t seem to really hinder them. The shy nerd with a sexcrime history gets laid, the cop with the uppity kid never has to take time off from the case to settle his hash, the accountant with the brittle work situation never suffers from office politics during the course of the story. It’s pretty light on the characters but correspondingly there’s some meaty cryptographic and augmented reality dealt to the reader in careful doses.

The more I think about it, the less satisfied I am with the way things resolve, so I’m optimistic about a rumored sequel which I hope will explain more about why Scotland’s software infrastructure survives the threat which emerges in this novel, but that’s just quibbling. This is a pretty good near future sf novel with varied characters and a briskly moving storyline.

Who might like it

• Gamers, both the tabletop and mmorpg flavors, and possibly casino to a lesser degree.
• Fans of nerd protagonists.
• People who just can’t get enough of the intricate crinkling of police procedurals.

Who might not like it

• People who think you’re getting a whole novel about people playing an MMORPG.
• People who felt Orcbusters in The Computer Always Shoots Twice was fundamentally cheating.

I don’t really know who Emily Devenport is.  Because of the way I came by one of her books, I suspect she’s a member of Broad Universe.  At a Wiscon a few years ago, I wandered past the Broad Universe table and one of the book covers caught my eye.  It’s got a dark skinned woman in what looks a bit like Star Wars Stormtrooper armor kneedeep in a pitted dessert landscape while behind her a looming egg shape contains (reflects?) a bright and complicated landscape, possibly a distorted version of the one she stands in.  It’s called EggHeads.

It’s the story of a lucky woman who takes chances to improve her lot and ends up potentially altering the course of human history.  I gather it’s the start of a series and not the only work by Emily Devenport so if it turns out to be the kind of thing you like, there’s more of it available.  I’ll be seeking out more of her stuff, myself.

What I liked

• The structure of the story.  It’s in three major sections, each titled and each well-divided from the others
• The protagonist.  She’s fierce and lucky, two of my favorite qualities.
• The reveals in this story, where things we are told make no sense until later in the story

What I didn’t like

• The protagonist forgiving her asshole boyfriend.  Repeatedly.
• The ending was a little too pat for my tastes but perhaps later works in this setting undo the happily ever after.

Overall it’s a strong far future science fiction story once you get past the crutch of near-light travel.  It’s got a likable protagonist facing tough odds and beating at least some of those odds.

Who might like this book

• People who like sf by women about women

Who might not like this book

• People who don’t like sf by women
• Or about women

I’ve been reading a lot of airport language books lately, because my employer is undergoing some changes.  New people, new focus, new strategy, and I wanted to keep up with the thinking and jargon going into this transformation.  But when I haven’t been reading those, I’ve been reading short stuff to cleanse my palate.  Here’s something I read worth talking about, the collection by Eileen Gunn named Stable Strategies and Others.

I think this is it, all the collected Gunn, and I say that with keen disappointment because these stories range from the great to the mindblowingly awesome.

I’m not going to go line by line on these but I do want to especially call out “Fellow Americans” which is an alternate history where Nixon hosts a gameshow, “Nirvana High” which is set in and around Kurt Cobain High School and “Green Fire”, a round-robin story about Heinlein and Asimov and Hopper.  These stories were the highlights for me but here’s the thing:  if you read this collection I doubt you’d agree with me on which stories are the best but I bet you will really love some of the stories in it.

Who might like this collection

• people with short attention spans, who generally like weird fiction
• people who’ve lived in Seattle
• people who remember the politics of the 60s and 70s

Who might not like this collection

• people who don’t like the sf/f genres
• people who don’t like in-jokes in their fiction

Some of my favorite stories were all written by the same person, Philip K. Dick. So I’m always on the lookout for more stories which remind me of those stories. If you’re similar, you may want to give a read to Walter Mosley’s Blue Light. It’s a story about a group of people around the San Francisco Bay Area who experience an uncanny blue light which changes them. They then work, together and apart, to change the world they live in. Or perhaps it’s the aftermath of a cult recorded by a delusional chronicler, an interpretation which would squint towards the inaccurate if not downright unreliable narrator.

I came to read this book not because it turned up in a search of stories like those PKD wrote but because when out walking near Berkeley one day at dusk, a pedestrian saw me and asked me if I read sf. When I acknowledged his intuition, he insisted that I seek out Walter Mosley’s science fiction stories.

People who might like this book

• Fans of PKD
• People who live, lived or want to live in Northern California
• Fans of the early stages of a utopia

People who might not like this book

• Those sensitive souls who think the past was a golden age where everyone was nice
• Those who need complete closure to a story
• Those who think the only interesting science fiction is the most currently written

I guess in terms of fiction I’ve been on a space opera kick because I also read Revelation Space recently.  That’s a nicely layered book with multiple reveals that twist the earlier understanding of how things are and send the story shooting off in a new direction.

The starting impetus is that an archeologist excavating ruins of a non-human society finds something unexpected.  Then the layers of the onion start coming off, putting the archeologist’s history in new light, the find in new light, the fundamental backdrop they operate against in new light.  This book does an excellent job of making plausible each of these successive expansions of the reader’s understanding of the situation.

Things I liked about this book

• The construction of the story
• The structure of the setting, all the players and vectors of motive in play
• The assassin character
• Knowing that there are other books in this setting which I can look forward to reading, now

Things I didn’t like about this book

• There were a few red herrings which I got invested in and which didn’t pan out
• Some of the characters who weren’t of consequence got an odd degree of screen time, while others who were significant sometimes came out of nowhere

Who might like it

• Space Opera fans, unite!
• People who enjoy the kind of detective story where the author keeps expanding the scope of concern until it’s enormous
• Fans of protagonists who are utter bastards

Who might not like it

• Those who need every last thing explained in a story
• Those who prefer character driven over concept driven narratives
• People who feel like they’ve had a glut of space opera in their diet lately

Continuing my long and successful plan of being the last person to read things, I recently read another Culture novel by Iain Banks, The Player of Games.  This might be my favorite book of his I’ve read and it’s largely because I could understand the central character’s motive, being a game player myself, though on a much smaller scale.

In brief, a champion game player is recruited by a faction within his society to go play a very difficult game with very high stakes and with lots of shenanigans to keep it from getting dull.  The narrative does a good job of raising the stakes and having a rewarding payoff.  Pacing is brisk, the characters are convincingly detailed, and it’s a solid, though somewhat predictable, story.

Things I liked about it

• Central focus on games and the kind of thinking which goes into playing them
• Larger than life sweep of events, with a rich futuristic flavor to the setting
• Devious gambits and duplicity revealed

Things I didn’t like about it

• The final reveal felt too pat to me
• Some of the most dramatic events happened outside the scope of narrative

Who might like this book

• Fans of space opera
• Fans of the experience of playing games

Who might not like this book

• No idea.  I suppose such people much exist but I didn’t notice anything offensive here.

Again this year, Vy and I enjoyed the absolutely dreamlike Valentine’s Day menu at Nibblers Eatery.  Those of you who follow me on twitter probably saw an abbreviated and order jumbled rendition of the courses because the twitter service was having some sort of a meltdown.  Here in fuller form, the delicious dishes delivered and dined upon.

• The amuse was a whisky smoked salmon mousse next to bergamot preserve on baguette toast.  It tasted exactly like you’d expect those two things to taste together, assuming you’ve ever drank Earl Grey tea or eaten lox.
• For the first course, we chose lobster purses on pea sprouts.  This was a course where Vy knew exactly what she wanted and so we didn’t really discuss the other options available.  I liked every option here and would have been fine with any of them.  There was a sparkling wine tasting paired with this and it really helped cut the doughiness of the pastry satchel.
• With the second course, we had no strong feelings other than wanting to avoid some ingredients which give us trouble, so we went with the waitress’s suggestion and had the frittata with duck & fig sausage and red potatoes.  As was evident once it arrived, it had a delicious mustard sauce over it.  Well, delicious for me, anyway.  Vy actually didn’t hate the mustard taste which is a tribute to the culinary skills at this restaurant.  It was paired with a red wine.
• Then, an intermezzo of champagne sorbet.  I’m not a sorbet fan.  This was pretty good for something I don’t much like, certainly better than any of the several fruit sorbets I’ve tried from all sorts of places.
• Do you know what barramundi is?  Me neither!  But the third course was some of this new-to-me fish, lacquered with mirin and served on a bed of couscous.  This was the winner of the dinner for us both.  I liked the strong tang of curry and mirin and the solidity of the fish.  It had a satisfying texture and engaged the tongue.  Back to a white wine taste paired with this one.
• Then, because I love to exercise options, I got the cheese plate.  On it were an Andante Pianoforte, a Torta la Serena Serra de Estrela, and a Rogue Creamery Rogue River Blue.  The blue was paired with apple slices and ginger biscuits, the Serra with honey and the Andante with a preserve.  Vy tasted each of them and pronounced the Pianoforte the one she disliked least while I ravaged all three of them and in the end would say what I did as I began, that the blue cheese is my go-to cheese.  Especially the Rogue Creamery, which we’ve had before at Nibbler’s.
• The meal finished out with a poundcake bite with custard on it and it really put the closure on the meal that you would expect.

As ever, one of the best meals we can remember having since, well, the last time we went to Nibbler’s.  The restaurant was reassuringly crowded on this occasion and so we have hopes they’ll be in business for a good long while yet to come.

So I upgraded the two laptops I use to Ubuntu 8.10 which has the friendly name of Intrepid Ibex.  Bold sounding, adventurous, able to scale and bound around on mountains.  One the laptop where I have a variant configuration (using ion3 instead of GNOME, for example) it hasn’t been a big difference.  Everything works at least as well as it did before, and it even seems more robust under some previously challenging load conditions.

The other laptop, the one with a totally default configuration, has been a big pain.  Wireless, never very reliable on it, has completely become unusable and I spent hours yesterday trying to uncover why.  The keyboard became bizarre and the perfectly functional set up under 8.04 required lots of Keyboard Layout fiddling to find something, anything, which would let me use anything more arcane than letters, shifted letters, and the control and enter keys in 8.10.  All of which has me thinking of things which might have been better names for 8.10.

• Irritating Insect
• Inconsistent Parakeet
• Incontinent Iguana
• Inauspicious Inchworm

Yeah, this is just noise.  I’ll keep using Ubuntu, I’m just annoyed at the number of regressions my laptop suffered by upgrading which I’ll have to spend time fixing because they’re core functionalities I actually use like, oh, having a network connection.  Or, you know, typing.

Island of the Sequined Love Nun is a novel I will confess to buying solely because of the name.  Names, actually.  One name was the title, which was titillating, and the other name was that of Christopher Moore.  I’d previously enjoyed his novel Lamb and so I was interested in reading others by him.  This is the first other one I’ve read and it did not disappoint.

It’s a small scale picaresque of a lovable loser who is driven from scene to scene by the actions of others until he has finally had enough and then his will drives him from scene to scene.  There’s quite a bit to like in this book, from a naked bitch goddess to a cautious and thoughtful tribe chief, from a cannibal to a fruitbat.  This is a fun, fast-paced romp which even has a couple sex scenes, neither one with much romance to it.

Things I liked about this book

• good pacing, chapters weren’t any longer than they needed to be
• a naked drunk petty goddess
• the presentation of an exotic location
• a Brooklyn descended post-mortal protector

Who might like this book

• people who think that Tim Powers is too serious when he writes about spooky cults
• people who’ve always wondered what happens to people who cross Texas matrons
• fans of pilots
• fans of cannibals

Who might not like this book

• men with castration anxiety
• sharks
• strict realists who are looking for a wholesome morally uplifting snore-fest

If there’s one writer whose writing I always get a kick out of reading, it’s my wife.  If there are two writers whose writing I always get a kick out of reading, it’s my wife, and Tim Powers.  I really groove on his blend of American culture and spooky metaphysical intrusions into that culture.  I’ve read nearly every novel he’s published and enjoyed the hell out of each one.

So I recently read Strange Itineraries, a collection of his short stories, including two collaborations with James Blaylock.

This collection is wonderful.  It’s a rising arc of strong writing, weird tales, drunken protagonists and unearthly encounters. Ghost stories galore, a nice time travel paradox story and California flavor.

Who might like this collection

• fans of Tim Powers novels
• fans of Americana ghost stories
• fans of Donnie Darko

Who might not like this collection

• people who enjoy the often long progression to the tipping point in a Tim Powers novel
• people who need every aspect of a story to make sense
• people who are sensitive to mentions of alcohol consumption