Obsolete Your Idols

I did what I’ve been threatening to do and deployed OpenID someplace. Here. This blog. I used an existing plugin to do it because I’ve got less time than ambition right now. Enjoy.

Sometimes the internet is great for wasting time.  This is one of them.

What do you so wish?

I read another Apex book, this one called Hebrewpunk.  It’s a collection of stories and if I had to pick one word to describe this collection as a whole, it would be ‘underripe’.  Not to say these are bad stories, they’re not.  But some of them feel undercooked and some of them feel like they’re the wrong part of the life of the protagonist of the story.

The collection starts off with a heist story named, of course, The Heist.  It has a reasonably engaging though not very detailed criminal undertaking in some fantastical near future setting.  This sounds like the opening adventure to someone’s Shadowrun campaign.  It ends with a bang but not one I found very satisfying, not enough context for me to even understand the ramifications of the crime, the patron, the protector, any of that.

The other three stories in the collection are individual tales of the three criminals from the first story, taking place in their personal pasts.  These are more interesting than the first tale but for my money, the last story is the best, perhaps because of the strength of the source material used.  That tale, The Dope Fiend, calls out a book used as reference and I’m intrigued enough I’ve wishlisted that book.

It’s called Dope Girls and I think it probably factored into the Hand of Glory storyline from The Invisibles.

I’m not sorry I read this collection, but I think I’d rather have read a later Lavie Tidhar collection.

In the meantime, here’s a sad trombone.

Facebook applications I have removed today

• Causes
• Define Me
• Knighthood
• Likeness
• Nazar Boncu?u
• Northwest Trail
• Send Good Karma
• Timezones
• Traveler IQ Challenge

In some cases the application simply fails to work with my operating system and browser often enough that it’s not fun and in other cases I just never found myself playing with it.  Having them there in my profile felt like a mild burden that I can opt out of so I am.

I came back from Wiscon 32 yesterday and on the flight I read a book.

The Next Fix by Matt Wallace.

I have the book at all because I saw Deb Taber as I often do at these places and she made a compelling case for me to buy it along the lines of “gimme your munny!” so then when I got on a plane with nearly no attention span and a powerful thirst for water (yes, I suffered from and continue to suffer from this year’s WisCholera) I figured a collection of short stories would be good flight fodder.  It was.

The foreword identifies the lack of unifying theme for the collection other than them being exploratory works by a developing writer.  Given that, there’s the unevenness to the stories you might anticipate.  Some were created as podcasts and I liked that aspect.  There’s an awful lot of pop culture mashed up in these and while I range from finding it amusing to irritating, I suspect it may soon date many of these stories as time accelerates onward.

Here’s my story by story breakdown reactions.  As many of these are available as podcasts and in other forms, you don’t need to buy this collection to experience them, but at $15 or so, it’s pretty much a steal.

1. Absolution, Insured - good zippy opening but I wanted more from the ending
2. Delve - a remarkable story about the End of Everything (At Least As We Know It), one of my favorite tale settings; I’d pick this as one of the top three in the collection
3. The Losting Corridor - did not like, it felt like an awkward exercise in 4th wall busting if you consider tropes to be a 4th wall.  I find more fun in the tvtropes site.
4. No World For Warriors - I like stories about immortals and immortal perspective.  This one comes with a rumination on the distinction between warriors and soldiers.  It’s pretty good.  You’ll like it if you like that kind of a story
5. Another Man’s Run - another one of my top three pick from this collection, it’s a sort of Damnation Alley / Escape From New York / PKD flavored pony express in space story.  Despite it featuring a Post Office, I don’t think Vy would dig it like I did
6. The Last Frequency - I feel bad about not liking this story.  I just couldn’t get past how irritating I find radio DJs and how this story didn’t feel like it broke any new ground.
7. Mercury’s Magnitude - extremely short sequel to The Last Frequency: liked it even less
8. A Place of Snow Angels - thematically this felt quite a bit like Delve to me but with more imagery; if you find snow more romantic than irritating (eg, you’ve never had to shovel the stuff in order to get out of your home) you’ll probably like it
9. Akropolis - ehn.  It’s a sinister Perry Rhodan story
10. My Caroline - ehn.  It’s a dude who’s monster-whipped with a revenge twist
11. Killing Jars - it’s a horror story.  It reminds me of all those King horror stories people tried to tell me I would enjoy and which I didn’t.
12. Old Tricks - what if Satan didn’t exist but Loki did?  another story I wanted to like more than I did
13. The End of Flesh - the longest and I’d say strongest story of the piece.  This is the third of my top three in this collection.  It’s got noir, for which I am a notorious sucker.  It’s got cannibalism and other taboos.  It’s got a future, one bleak and hungry.  When people tell me about MEAT, the NecroPhasiac event is pretty much what I picture.  Satisfyingly creepy ending.

This is a post-2.5 upgrade post to see if the suggested changes to require_once in the lj_xposter plugin in the release notes wiki work.

I’ve finally dropped the default fancy style sheet and images directory where the generated HTML was pointing at it so now the planet looks a touch prettier.  Also added two new feeds for it:  this blog, and comments to it.

You know who else I’ve never read but should? Charles Stross. That’s who. So I did! In fact, I read Glasshouse all in a rush. There’s a lot of satisfaction to be had in this book if you’re the kind of reader who likes to anticipate what might happen next. This book is the story of how far some people are willing to go. Some of the people in question are trying to effect massive social change and some of the other people in question are trying to resist and undo that change. It’s seen from the point of view of a conflicted and memory-scarred character.

I’d like to talk more about the plot of this book, but I’m conflicted on this. A lot of the enjoyment I got from the book was from figuring out what might be really going on and what might happen next. I would prefer not to deprive anyone of that same opportunity so if that’s the kind of reader you are, stop here and go pick it up.

For anyone who doesn’t like that, here’s what the book is like. We’re introduced to a protagonist who is suffering the emotionally chaotic after-effects of voluntarily undergoing selective memory removal. I’ll call the protagonist he, though for most of the novel, he’s a she. He volunteers for a study which will consume the rest of the length of this novel. The study, of course, is something other than it’s purported to be but he doesn’t know that when he enters. Or does he? Because it turns out this isn’t his memory edit just before novel start isn’t his first and an earlier instance knew that something was going on.

So once the protagonist is a she, things really take off. Previously concealed forces come into the light, internal and external to our protagonist. We get to see her strive and succeed, as well as strive and fail, to solve the mysteries of the setting and overcome hindrances. She’s very easy to cheer for, even as she reveals to us that she has previously been an amoral killing machine, quite literally. The study is actually a former asylum of sorts, now modified to be a panoptic prison.

This novels reminds me of some of the best aspects of Philip K. Dick and John Varley but puts it together in a style I couldn’t see either of them managing. This book is slick and only seems transparent from the outside.

Who might like this book

• Fans of post-Scarcity fiction
• Fans of PKD, John Varley, John Le Carre, Iain Banks
• People with bodytype dysphoria
• People who keep seeing Charles Stross’s name and wondering what a good accessible book by him might be
• People who’ve undergone memory redaction, voluntary or in-

Who might not like this book

• People who don’t like to have a character develop new levels on them
• People who don’t like the reveal of the Great and Powerful Oz as a huckster
• People who think gender, sex, and attraction are fixed and invariant

I think I probably put the book Ribofunk on my wishlist when I ran across Paul Di Filippo’s name in the context of being a writer on Top Ten.  That hazy path of recollection seems fitting in light of this collection of stories set in what seems to be the same future.  A future where organic technology has advanced by leaps and bounds.

As a collection of short stories, these are all over the place, with regards to voice, character and plot, which is nice.  They seem to be arrayed chronologically for the setting, which is also nice.  But with that kind of variety, they weren’t all equally engaging for me.  None of them were unenjoyable but some were perhaps a bit longer than my interest span.

Notable favorite stories from this collection

• Big Eater
• McGregor
• Brain Wars
• Up the Lazy River

So if you’re looking for some wet cyberpunk stylings with different genre spicing and a shared setting, this is a pretty good collection of that.

Who might like this book

• Biologists
• Futurists
• People tired of rocket ships, zap guns and space queens in their sf

Who might not like this book

• People looking for longer cohesive explorations of the themes
• People who prefer to ethically treat animals rather than eat tasty animals

I’ve created a planet for myself at http://planet.manjusri.org/ because I’m just that vain.

More terraforming will have to happen before it’s habitable.