My wife Tina is watching True Blood on HBO. I caught bits and pieces of it last night while I was writing my post. From what I saw, the show pretty much revolves around pornography and maybe something to do with vampires. My wife is hooked, so we stayed up a little too late last night, so I was tired all day. 

I started reading Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson. I can not say enough about Stephenson, though I've only read two of his novels, Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon. I think Stephenson may be moving up my list of favorite authors, actually I think I would rank him right behind Steven Brust. I like authors who tell a good story and are enjoyable to read. Stephenson's novels are of phone book proportions, but every word is a treat and when you finish the novel, you can't help feeling that you did not get enough.

I've been reading a lot lately. Reading was not a priority in the 90's and now I am making up for lost time. It is a little scary how bad your spelling gets and how limited your vocabulary becomes if you do not read. So I've been reading book after book and this can get expensive. Off to the library for me! The town I live in has a small library, which is a branch of a larger library system. Unfortunately, there are not a lot of books at the library that interest me, but you can request books from other libraries. I hope it works out, the wife hates when I drop $30 to $40 at the book store. I have also bought used books online and I may have to look into selling some. There is just not enough money for books, comics, movies, music, video games, toys and high end beers. Not to mention Catholic school for the boys.

And yes, I watched The Clone Wars tonight. What the hell is "Artooie?" I hate George Lucas.

One repeated theme, for instance, is how much can be figured out from very limited knowledge by the systematic application of logic and reason: how accurate a picture is possible from a limited number of facts. But at this point, I run into a problem not dissimilar to that facing reviewers of Ian McDonald's Brasyl last year, which is to say that the specific nature of the story being told is a withheld revelation that it would be unfair to spoil. Suffice it to say that it's a familiar kind of sf narrative, and that although from one perspective it's a version of that narrative that takes an extraordinarily long time to get to the point, from another it's the most detailed working-out of the theory underlying that narrative for many years. This is, of course, what many people said of The Baroque Cycle. I am not one of them: in fact, my reaction to Quicksilver is handily summed up by Raz in this book, who is at one point sentenced to the standard punishment of his Order, to copy out a number of chapters from a tome whose contents are said to have "been crafted and refined over many centuries to be nonsensical, maddening, and pointless ... The punishment lay in knowing that you were putting all of that effort into letting a kind of intellectual poison infiltrate your brain" (157). But while on one level I'm ready to acknowledge that Anathem simply engages with a cluster of ideas that are more interesting to me, I think it is also a better book.

See also Liz's review; and elsewhere in that issue of IROSF, Nick Mamatas on "Why Horror is the Odd Man Out in Genre Fiction", and Ruth Nestvold and Jay Lake asking "Is it the Age of Fantasy?", among others.

First, the good: Stephenson has gone to great pains to create a consistent, believable, and interesting future world in an alternate cosmos, in which cloistered monks called Avout keep the study of math and philosophy alive through the eons. Erasmas, the main character, is interesting and well-developed as a character. The description of life in the concent is compelling. The events that trigger the main drama of the story, which I won't give away here, are meaningful.

So what goes wrong? In the first place, the drama is not what we're used to, especially in comparison to the Baroque Cycle. Both are thinking-person's adventures, but Anathem suffers in comparison by being a bit *too* thoughtful and contemplative. Many pages are spent in detailed discussion of "theorics" (metaphysics to you and me).

Second, Stephenson relies on the ass-pull a little too often. There is a scene midway through the novel, set in the fictional city of Mahsht, in which a troupe of badass kung-fu monks show up out of nowhere to save Erasmas from certain death. Total ass-pull.

I really love Stephenson as a writer and congratulate him on spending a lot of time on crafting such a great world. Unfortunately, the drama - the story - failed to keep pace with the setting. This is still a good read, just not a great one.

Work was fun. If you enjoy trying to sell people things that they feel are overpriced when the whole country is worried about having to stand in line at a soup kitchen tomorrow.

I work at a new car dealer, I’m a service advisor, you know, the guy who built your car, broke your car, drove your car for the last 75,000 miles without maintaining it. Yeah that guy. The guy who made you late for your doctor appointment because it took me more than 15 minutes to change your oil, that’s me. So people hate me, because I set the prices, I try to steal from them and I charge them to fix the car that they just spent $1000 at their mechanic’s for the same problem. See where I’m going with this?

The job was better when I was young, but now the stress is taking its toll.  A good thing about the job is the endless supply of characters that come into the place. Today we had an older lady come in, about John McCain’s age, 90 or so. Anyway, I knew her from another dealership, the one I just got fired from, that’s another story. So, this woman is crazy and hard of hearing, great combination. I warned the service advisor about my past experience with the woman and proceeded to sit back and enjoy the show. Now you need to remember that I work at a Nissan dealer, the woman drives a Buick. So the technician changes her oil and rotates her tires, easy enough. The service advisor does her paperwork and escorts her to the cashier, also easy enough. Now at this point the service advisor and you are both thinking that I was wrong about this nice old lady, the one who is too old to be president of our country, just like John McCain (last McCain joke, I promise). The woman pays her bill and goes out to her car, then storms back in and screams that her low tire light is on and we did something to her car! Now you remembered that this was a Nissan dealer and the woman drove a Buick? The technician had no clue he had to reset the low tire light manually. How dare he not be trained on a General Motors vehicle when he works for Nissan!? I laughed and laughed.

I’m going to keep it brief tonight because I want to go finish reading Diamonds Are Forever. After watching Casino Royale, I was interested in reading the James Bond novels. What a pleasant surprise. Most of us love the movies, but the books great and worth a try. Ian Fleming would probably have trouble getting them published today, since they are not very politically correct. Next up I have Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson, which I’m looking forward to, he also wrote Snow Crash, which is on my list of favorite books.

Be nice to your service advisor.

In other news, I bought the book Anathem by Neal Stephenson and it is phenomenal. It literally took three hundred pages for the setting to change, but it's just ridiculously engrossing.
Oh, Blackberry Storm, anyone? Loving it. I'm still getting an iPhone, though :)
I'm really tired with the high fructose corn syrup commercials. WE GET IT! IT'S A DIFFERENTLY REFINED FORM OF SUCROSE!
I apologize for this entry...it's completely stream-of-consciousness.

Here's my schedule for next semester (or, here are the classes I'm taking):
Introduction to Archaeology
Introduction to Anthropological Linguistics
Fundamentals of Photography
Advanced Spanish I
Yoga II

I'm really excited. Mostly for the photography class. Listen to this trouble: To minor in studio arts (yeah, general...there are no specific ones), I have to take classes that have nothing to do with photography. I'm literally taking a photography class every semester starting next semester and am even taking history of photography classes. AND I'm planning on studying abroad in Paris in IU's photography program. Better believe I'm appealing the college of arts and sciences for a photography minor...and bitches better hand it over.
I. Love. Rachel. Zoe.

Things are different on Arbre. The planet certainly has had its periods of "intellectual darkness" - at least three of them; but Arbran repositories of knowledge were not religious institutions. Quite the opposite, in fact: communities of mathematicians, scientists, and scientist-philosopher - most of whom reject the concept of religion out of hand - have been responsible for keeping the flame of knowledge lit for almost 4000 Arbran years. Cloistered within the walls of their "maths," the brothers and sisters live, love, eat, think, and argue amongst themselves; opening their gates to the outside only once a year, decade, century, or millennium. One among thousands of fraas and suurs (brothers and sisters), eighteen-year-old Fraa Erasmus - "Raz" to his friends - is but a simple student of geometry and agriculture; the apprentice of old Orolo, a student of astronomy and viticulture (he's far better at the former than the latter, it is said). All that changes when Orolo is "thrown back" to the secular world in the rite of Anathem, a permanent expulsion from the mathic world reserved for the most severe violations of The Discipline.

But what did Orolo do to earn his fate? Raz thinks he knows - and this knowledge may prove his undoing as well. That's the least of his worries, however, for Arbre is about to be visited by an alien craft; and this first contact could well be the planet's last.

Thrust from the comfortable surroundings of his math into the seething, seedy world of the secular masses; Erasmus and his friends find themselves unprepared for the role of leadership. Yet this is precisely the role for which they have been called: theirs is a desperate, last-ditch effort to save Arbre from whoever's out there orbiting the planet - but first, Raz has an errand to run...

In an era in which speculative fiction authors crank out three, four, and even more volumes per series, Neal Stephenson's Anathem stands out by virtue of its singular nature: at nine hundred pages, it's a volume that lesser writers would have felt compelled to split into a trilogy - if for nothing else, for the resulting three paychecks instead of one. Like many a trilogy, it loosely follows the chronology of The Lord of the Rings: discovery of danger and formation of a "fellowship," a dangerous journey, and final confrontation. And yet Anathem is vastly different from the potboilers such fantasy seems to often produce. There's not a single sword; not a single sorcerer (although I could not read Orolo's name without envisioning Ian McKellar's bushy eyebrows...); no dragons, orcs, elves, or dwarfs - yet this is clearly a tale of epic proportions. Kudos to Stephenson (Snow Crash) for his ability to turn a rather hackneyed formula on its ear.

Kudos as well for his dry wit, having creating a world that's clearly modeled on our own. The Arbre beyond the walls of Raz's home math might well be another Vegas or Atlantic City: "an endless landscape of casinos and megastores that is plagued by recurring cycles of booms and busts, dark ages and renaissances, world wars and climate change." Beyond the walls of the math one finds religions (in the secular world?) squabbling over niggling differences in dogma, class warfare, racial tensions, and rampant illiteracy; all furthered by a constant barrage of information arriving through their "jeejahs," sort of a smartphone to end all smartphones. Some of the inhabitants might seem familiar to anyone who's been in a suburban mall of late:

"The current ...fashion was to wear a garment evolved from an athletic jersey (bright, with numerals on the back) but oversized, so that the shoulder seams hung around the elbows, and extremely long - descending all the way to the knee. The trousers were too long to be shorts and too short to be pants - they hung a hand's-breadth below the jersey but still exposed a few inches of chunky calf, plunging into enormous, thickly padded shoes. Headgear was a burnoose blazoned with beverage logos whose loose ends trailed down the back, and dark goggles strapped over that and never removed, even indoors.

"But it was no only clothing that set [them] apart, They had also adopted fashions in how they walked (a rolling, sauntering gait) and how they stood (a pose of exaggerated cool that somehow looked hostile to me)."

Stephenson probably had only to look out the window of his Seattle office to describe that fashion...

Like many a spec-fic writer, Stephenson created his own language for Anathem; a language he dutifully defines in a glossary and in "Dictionary" entries within the text (not unlike Asimov's chapter headings in the Foundation series, and a thousand other spec-fic books). Some are quite familiar - "the Reticulum" is a sort of wireless internet (which makes sense, since reticulum means "network). Some are amusing - theories of the Sconic school are named for a group of philosophers who showed up at a patron's house just in time to consume her daily batch of scones. Jeejah is obviously derived from "Geegaw" (something gaudy and useless - which says a lot about Stephenson's opinion of smartphones). At least the vocabulary is (for the most part) something about which English speakers can wrap their tongues.

But what of the plot? Yes, Anathem is a sort of amalgam of fantasy trilogy and scifi thriller, but is it worth all those 900 pages (a volume that, frankly, took me more than a week to wade through)? Sure, it has a little something in it for everyone (except fans of Britney or Miley, I suppose). Sure, it's chock full of fascinating (although sometimes overly pedantic) math, philosophy, and science; especially physics. But let's be honest - the middle third (the "journey") could have been omitted in its entirety and the beginning and the end are rather long, too. So it may be 900 pages long (890, if you want to be accurate), but perhaps 400 of those pages utterly failed to move the plot forward - they moved it sideways, instead.

And where have you heard of monastic orders maintaining science and technology in a post-apocalyptic world? Ummmm, A Canticle for Liebowitz, perhaps? Or the idea that the food and even air of one cosmos (dimension, whatever you want to call it) might not provide sustenance for natives of another? Try Roger Zelazny's Doorways in the Sand. So while Anathem clearly represents an enormous volume of work and Stephenson must be congratulated for avoiding the pitfalls of trilogy spec-fic, he likewise should be admonished by the Terran version of Arbre's Lorites: this is ground that's already been plowed, and plowed well.

Recommended only for those who are prepared to chew through nine hundred pages that move in fits and starts, with scattered flashes of brilliance.

: : : :

I never really "got" Neal Stephenson's concept of federated and FRANCHISED governments in Snow Crash. I mean, I understood he was trying to feel all cyberpunk and future-y, but I didn't immediately see practical drivers which would necessitate the transformation. Beyond Stephenson's plot need for a  fictional generic doom and gloom everything falls apart into a gritty underworld backdrop, what would be the systems benefit of evolving into a real life situation where government is significantly geographically non-contiguous and people have to buy in to their state of choice? No answer.

Fast forward a few years. The other day I attended the kick-off for the "National Cyber Security Awareness Month" this year at the national press club.  Suits from the non-profit org, Symantec, and DHS were on the panel. They talked about their plans to raise awareness (it seems to involve schools, but not much else?) and current threats (ye olde "insider threat" spiel. What a cop-out. Who are your insiders? Your users? Your business partners? Your supply chain? The wife and kids at home who are on the same network as your laptop? The starbucks-going-public? Wake up. You don't have an inside. But, I digress).

Apparently this is the fifth year there has been an awareness month. Wow. I've certainly never noticed it before. Why is that? At first it seemed like the government just couldn't get its shiot together. But then you have to wonder two - why is this a government issue at all (why arent people self-organizing?) and is this limited to security awareness? Are we having these issues coming to social consensus elsewhere?

(Bear with me here, I havent completely thought this post out yet)

It really seems that the answer to the second question is a resounding yes.  We cannot seem to come to agreement on anything in the US lately...and when we do, it's a conclusion based on only the most oversimplified non-complex versions of "facts".  The reason the government is involved is because people throw up their hands and go "this is too much! help!"

Why is it too much?

A combination of too much data and a lack of common interests and needs on a geographical basis.  A geographically federated state system assumes that people nearest each other have the most in commun wrt value systems, needs, desires, beliefs, culture, etc.  Do we have that now? Somewhat...but not nearly, IMO, as much as we used to and maybe not as much as we need to.

Look at it this way:  If 30% of people in one area agree on something, but so many other people disagree that the 30% is a majority, it's the 30% that gets represented ultimately. That's expected and fine when it happens on some issues. But what happens if interests and values have become so diversified within geographic voting/opinion districts that this kind of discord is the norm?  We may be vastly over-normalizing our opinions to the point where they're not meaningfully reflective of reality and no one will ever happy with the results.  We're essentially making decisions based on noise.

Related to voting, and more pertinent, is that we're not having nearly as many -conversations- or -dialogue- between people based on geo-centric shared interests. Rather, we're talking over the internet and national TV. People with shared interests are collaborating around the world. Virtual communities of interest have become as normal in many areas as real ones.

This is where Neal Stephenson's franchised governments start to come into play.  States are usually formed around a group of people in one "place" with shared values and interests. If we virtualize and abstract out "place", what do we end up with?

Can we or should we reorganize voting/opinion districts around these opt-in shared communities? You choose which group to join and be a part of.  Everyone in said virtual community votes and that virtual community subsequently votes in large polls/electrions the way its community voted.

Would that work? Would it help? Is that where we're headed?

This post obviously needs to be fleshed out in a lot more detail, but I really dont have the time. Just thinking out loud :)

Sarah Vowell's The Wordy Shipmates is being released on Tuesday, October 7, and is her first book since Assassination Vacation. I never really read Assassination Vacation, and I will not read The Wordy Shipmates. Assassination Vacation is the first and only audiobook I have ever listened to, and I have listened to it four times, most recently on my relo trip from Atlanta to So Cal. Her wry delivery and slightly nasal voice (she's Violet in The Incredibles) made thousands of otherwise boring miles enjoyable, and her funny, sad, profound and trivial take on three murdered presidents and the men who killed them is burned in my brain forever. I don't have any long distance drives planned in the near future, but honestly I can't imagine not being able to hear Ms. Vowell tell me herself about the Mayflower pilgrims, which is what The Wordy Shipmates is about.

I gave up reading Anne Rice years ago, sometime around Memnoch the Devil. I used to love her stuff, her genderbending vampires and incestuous witches. I thought Lestat was sexy though I related more to the brooding Louis. I collected her books, and counted myself lucky to have found 1st edition copies of her Sleeping Beauty trilogy before she was revealed as the author. She was always over the top; but one day I felt she had now gone completely over the edge and just couldn't read her anymore. Even when she declared that she had returned to the Catholic Church and would write a series of books about Christ I rolled my eyes, wondering what she was up to now, trying like Madonna to stay relevant in a world that has moved on without her. But I must say I am eager to read her autobiography, Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession. Her off again on again relationship with Catholicism is fascinating to me, as the love-hate is so apparent in her early work (and probably her later stuff, I don't know). And for personal reasons too--as a lifelong gay Catholic who spent twelve years in and out of seminaries and the Jesuits, who loves and hates the Church, and who is compromising his integrity by playing "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" as a Catholic High School teacher, I want to hear why Anne Rice came back, and what she finds there now, especially with her son being an openly gay man. This book also comes out on October 7, the same day as Sarah Vowell's book.

A week later Gregory Maguire is coming out with A Lion Among Men, the third book to take place in his reimagined Land of Oz. Everyone's heard of Wicked, and maybe some have heard of the sequel, Son of a Witch.  Book 3 will be about the Cowardly Lion. I read the book Wicked twice, and saw the play, though of course the two cannot compare--I loved the book's philosophical take on good and evil and thought turning Oz into a dark dictatorship was brilliant. Son of a Witch was okay--I may have to read it fresh to avoid the letdown I felt after thinking it suffered from sequelitis. And I have found Maguire to be hit and miss. I loved Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, liked Mirror, Mirror, but was left cold by Lost. But when it comes to Oz I trust him--there's so much there left to be explored, and I am looking forward to the journey back.

There you have it, at least so far; I am sure the rest of October and November and December will give me more reasons to hand over the ATM card to my local Borders (if it doesn't close down, that is). In the meantime, time to go back to the planet Arbre with Fraa Erasmas and the gang from Anathem.

Long version:  Detractors of this novel have complained that it is long.  To borrow a phrase from our friends over at Mantown, they need to harden the fuck up.  This book is lengthy in pagecount due to three key points

• the printer was nice enough to use a readable text size rather than tiny print,
• there's a lot of ground to cover.  The novel starts out at a monastery on some other planet that is sufficiently earthlike that we don't need an explanation of their vegetables but do, from time to time, need definitions of some of their rarified monk-jargon, and then it ventures off into the Idiocracy-esque secular world outside the monastery, into different monasteries, and then into SPACE. to go from monastery to crazy-road-trip to a fucking space station takes some pages, son.  let it happen.
• there's a glossary of the special monk-jargon in the back

Some have also whined about the long monastic conversations.  These whiners also need to harden the fuck up.  These monks are a blend of jedi, philosopher, and scientist.  They're going to use big words and discuss complex issues as part of the plot.  if you can't handle that, please step away from the Science Fiction book section until you grow an attention span.

with those issues addressed, I can get into what makes this book a delightful addition to anyone's home library.  First off, the characters.  We get a good smattering of plucky young monks who are glad to be away from the secular world.  Outside the monasteries (called Maths), people spend all day watching teevee and yammering into cellphones.  Imagine a blend of Idiocracy and Wall-E and you're pretty close.  This society of screen-potato phoneheaded nitwits doesn't know how to handle people who want some peace and quiet to actually think about things, so every new year's day their quiet thinker types are cermoniously welcomed into the Mathic world.  Adults and teens default to the Unarian math, for monks that have contact with the outside world once a year.  Children go the Decenarian math, which interacts with the outside world once a decade, toddlers get to be Centenarians and see the outside world once a century, and newborns go to the mysterious Millenarians who see the outside world once every thousand years.

The first couple hundred pages of the book are a crash course in monastic society from the viewpoint of the novel's narrator Erasmus, a Decenarian (aka Tenner) who has discovered some sort of coverup at his monastery around the new-years' festivities.  readers get to learna bout the various factions within mathic society, how they interact, and what's so unsual about certain things Erasmus notices during the new-year's festivities.

This is where the coverups and secret society storyline start to come into play, and winds up with Erasmus going on an adventurous, crazy road-trip with his techie/gearhead sister and one of the once-mysterious Ita, the technicians who help maintain the monastery but don't interact with the monks.  road trip leads to encounters with various crazies from outside the monastery, there's romance, there's action, there's a growing realization that a lot of smart people don't go into a monastic life, but stay outside and become doctors, technicians, executives, and other educated types that keep things running so the idiots don't destroy the world.  Some of them even get Mathic education before venturing forth as productive, educated members of society, and some of those educated people.. gasp! ... hold religious beliefs.

This is where a lot of the pithy conversations the critics complain about come in - they are explaining that yes, smart people can indeed be religious, but many realize that religious things exist outside of space and time and are thusly difficult to discuss in the context of scientific matters and are happy to just leave their personal beliefs out of any discussions on science and philosophy, and can participate in these discussions without them being a threat to their beliefs.

Other pithy conversations are moved to the appendix, because they're not conversations at all but calcas, a monk-word for scripted thought experiments that establish a certain point about epistemology or math or one of their other fields of study.  you can read the book without ever peeking at the calcas and it all makes snese, but I read them anyway, and the glossary of monk-words, because they are supplementary material that aids in immersion into that world.

After I read this book, I saw ads for Bill Maher's new supposed-documentary Religulous, where he and a camera crew head out into public places and try to talk to people about religion, as a sort of set-up for his usual jokes about religious people.  It's an insulting comedy act posing as a documentary, and I bring it up because if you want serious discussion about the place of religion in a scientific world and vice-versa, you need to A) ignore Bill Maher, because he gets paid to offend people and B) read Anathem.  By setting the discussion on another planet whose religions are not connected to our own but whose science is the same because the laws of physics are the same regardless of what planet you're on, Anathem creates a space where these things can be explored and analyzed and tested and played with without offending anyone or being asked to set aside your own culture and beliefs.

This book has no zombies, no explicit sex, no foul language (although the monks do use "Bulshytt" to mean  intentionally vague or confusing speech that fails to answer any questions or convey any meaning, and are talented at spotting bulshytt and calling it what it is), and no monsters (aside from some dragons in a thought-experiment), and despite these conspicuous (given my reading habits) absences it fucking rocks.

various places around the internet also sell a disc (or a download) of music inspired by the book, called Iolet.  It's not bad.   I was expecting something more along the lines of Gregorian chants or even Buddhist sutras, but it is nothing like either of these, and suggests that Mathic music is far more abstract than the music of religious monks, which makes no sense, because the narrator at one point visits a religious monastery and remarks on how similar the religious music is to mathic music.

"Porque la línea de comando es la mejor forma de relacionarse con el mundo. La línea de comando es lo que te permite acceder a la realidad fundamental. Seguro que dios cuando creo el universo lo hizo como un hacker delante de la pantalla de su ordenador tecleando crípticos comandos para crear universos."

Descargar // E-Book Completo

Of particular note are a bunch of graphic novels, some of which I'd read long ago, and some that I read for the first time.

Swamp Thing has always tugged at my heart - the misunderstood monster, sort of like Frankenstein's monster; yet Swamp Thing is gentle, only rising to anger and violence in defense of humanity and Mother Earth.  I'd forgotten how much the love story of Abby and Swamp Thing swamped me with emotion when I first read it, at least until I started reading "Swamp Thing: Love and Death" by Alan Moore again last week.  It still holds that power for me, and I actually caught myself being titillated by the "vegetable sex" episode (as Neil Gaiman calls it in his introduction).  The artists, Steve Bissette and Jon Totleben, know how to capture emotion and, well, sex, but without actual copulation.

I also loved the Pog episode, a tribute to Pogo; but it is very sad, and sadly, it does seem like something that would happen on this lady.

Hellboy sort of ambushed me.  I didn't know what to expect from it, and was pleasantly surprised to find that it wasn't torture-porn - I think I was confusing it with Hellraiser, because I kept picturing something like Pinhead when I thought of Hellboy.  At any rate, I love a world where people can address a red demon with truncated horns on his forehead as "Mr. Boy".  Here again, we have a sort of Frankenstein's-monster-become-useful-member-of-society - Hellboy, summoned from ??? by Rasputin, kills his "father"; but without all the moral agonizing and self-justification of Frankenstein's monster who took revenge through killing loved ones of *his* "father".  Rasputin pulls a Darth Vader by trying to convert Hellboy over to the Dark Side, telling Hellboy it is his destiny, this is why he (Rasputin, his father) summoned him (Hellboy) - and Hellboy kicks his ass, instead of blubbering and trying to commit suicide like Luke Skywalker.  But does he get the girl?  Or maybe she's his sister. . .

I remember reading one Sin City volume way back when, but only vaguely.  So I've started with The Hard Goodbye - definitely hadn't read it.  Marv is:

a) Paranoid
b) Heroic
c) Crazy
d) All of the above
e) None of the above

but is he really dead?  I won't know until I crack the next volume.

Heroes: Season 1 is 34 betweener tales about the characters in the television show - you can read these online at the Heroes website, although it is also in published form. It's very cool to see some background for the characters, and it explains a lot that one may not have understood from the televised episodes.

But my biggest read was Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson.  This book made me a little ashamed at how much popular literature I spend time reading.  It is written for people with attention spans longer than a breezy 250 or 350 pages; it uses language and vocabulary in a way that people as well educated as myself should *expect* to read and use it, and Stephenson never dumbs down his plot or his characters to try to suck in a few extra readers; nor does he rely on (or need to rely on) sex to make the story interesting.  I was hooked from the first page.  If Neuromancer by William Gibson is cyberpunk, then Cryptonomicon is cybergeek.

I will admit that there were a few places that out-geeked me - being a nerd, married to a nerd, I was pretty much able to keep up with the techno-language and scenarios; I can see where someone who is totally uninterested in or unfamiliar with computers and cryptology might have trouble with this aspect of the book, but it would be worth skimming those parts just to read the rest of the story.  Which is primarily about people.

The story is set up as alternating timeframes, between World War II and the late 1990s. It takes a long time to get around to the point of the story, but the journey there was fun. I have to admit some disappointment at the way it ended - something like 1160 pages of build-up, 6 pages of climax, and 2 pages of denouement. Don't get me wrong, I loved the book, it's just hard to get let down on the ending. It's a problem, I'm sure, to end a story well - one of my favorite authors, Stephen King, writes incredible stories, but oftentimes the endings suck. And I surely couldn't do any better, I'm just sayin' ...

*******************

p.s. I actually started this post 2 months ago but real life intervened, to the point that I did not feel up to writing (see my personal blog for details - link is on the About page). However, I did get a bunch of reading done in the meantime. I will probably post about some of the books, but definitely not all. I'll try to be better, but I've got a lot more real life heading my way, so no guarantees.

Many aspects of the future as seen in Snow Crash are drastically different from the world we know today. Obviously, human technology in the novel is highly advanced compared to what most Americans today see and use in their daily lives. That being said, I find this level of advancement very plausible. Look at our history: invention and technology have always progressed by leaps and bounds, so it would follow that the people of the future will have some pretty crazy stuff to play with.

Following this theme of progression, let's take a look at some of the motorists in Snow Crash -specifically those that drive what Stephenson refers to as "Bimbo Boxes." Whenever Stephenson makes mention of such "Bimbo Boxes," I find myself imagining a slow-moving, SUV-esque vehicle being driven by a rather non-attentive or careless person (Y.T. doesn't seem to have any trouble hitching a ride behind them anyway). This image is strikingly reminiscent of a stereotype that has recently emerged in our culture today, that of the... oh, how to put this ? ... dangerous female driver talking on a cell phone while nearly wiping out a crosswalk full of unsuspecting pedestrians. Justified or not, it's a stereotype that seems to say "it's only a matter of time" before we arrive at the era of Snow Crash.

Another somewhat shocking aspect of Stephenson's future is the widespread substance abuse among teenagers. Well, maybe it's not so shocking. It's definitely not pleasant, especially because it's already happening today. Children are becoming exposed to drugs and alcohol at younger and younger ages, and more and more supposed role models have been caught abusing steroids and the like. It's a problem that doesn't seem to be getting any better: it's only a matter of time.

Aha, sorry to end on such a low note - Snow Crash seems to be full of 'em. :D

What I enjoy about Stephenson's books is the integration of historical events and characters with the fictional ones. He weaves these two seamlessly, supporting them with facts, so that in the end its one giant story about the world. While not all of it is true, it could have been. I prefer this to science fiction or fantasy books, neither of which have I been able to get through. (Exception: Jules Verne) Furthermore, Stephenson is not afraid to take detours to flesh out the context of the action. Too many books I read today drop the reader in from space without a decent explanation of the setting. The writer expects the reader to know what 1950's Dublin is all about, or what's going on in terms of present-day European skullduggery, or how religious practices of some distant tribe create social mores. Sorry, I have quite a diversity and depth of knowledge, but it is your job, dear writer, to create the world of your story for me to read. If that takes a few more pages, please, indulge me. After all, I didn't pay the cover price to read a magazine article.

Yes, that was criticism in the previous paragraph. Some critics have lambasted Stephenson for not editing or condensing his work. My humble opinion is that he should leave it the way it is or add more. I mentioned his work in an early post about the "brevity cult" (his term). Well, the "brevity cult" is alive and well in this era of attention deficit disorder. However, just because some people can't stay focused doesn't mean the rest of us should be short changed. Good characters and enthralling plots don't bog down in long books; they engage the reader, giving him solid footing to travel along the novel's journey.

So, Neal Stephenson takes the long road. I'm right there with him.

It was a very, very fun read… I was initially concerned at how simple Stephenson's prose was, but everything looks simple after spelunking through Ulysses. The novel is very much in the vein of Snow Crash in its simplicity; like Ender's Game, Anathem is a bildungsroman where the protagonist is learning about himself while getting into adventures and overcoming challenges seemingly every five minutes.

Most interestingly, Stephenson sets the novel in a world called Arbor — think of it as Earth with a few simplifications and with a different social structure. Monasteries are populated by fraas and suurs who train in the scientific, not religious, arts… slines talk incessantly into their jeejahs and sport baggy clothes with their favorite athletic logos. Despite xkcd's useful rule of thumb, Stephenson uses these differences and parallels to make astute observations about society and about the modern world — the book often hits close to home before the reader has a chance to put up his defenses.

I genuinely miss the characters now that I've finished the novel — that's always a good sign. Well worth your time to read this one if you're looking for something fun with a little bit of science fiction.

Before I start todays post, I have a question to ask everyone who reads this blog.  Please leave a comment with your answer in it.

do you think the  i phone is good, or a regurgitated piece of crap pulled out of Steve Jobs' ass while he was going through a session with his proctologist?

On to today's blog.

I know that this first topic isn't really about media, but anyone who liked the matrix, sci-fi, and supreme randomness should read the book Snowcrash.  It is possibly one of the best books I have read in a long time.

In a nutshell, the book is about a man named Hiro Protagonist (no, I'm not kidding) who is a pizza delivery man in reality, and a samurai prince in a virtual world called the metaverse.  He eventually finds out about a virus which is killing people in the metaverse and reality, and has perform the cliche act of saving everyone. Also, the pizza delivery service is run by the maffia.

In other news, the new Silent Hill game will most probably be unavailable in Australia.  If you live in Australia: YOU CAN OFFICIALLY PROCLAIM THAT YOUR COUNTRY HAS GONE INSANE.  THEY SHOULD DO WHAT SEVERAL IDIOTS DO, AND LICK RAT TESTICLES DIPPED IN VINEGAR BECAUSE THEY ARE SO FUCKIN INSANE.  Why?  because your government has refused to give Silent Hill and ESRB rating.  Any game without an ESRB rating can't be sold in stores there.  Its not so much your country's fault as it is your government's.

And yes, I do have the power to insult an entire country

And yes, I do expect to hear from many angry Australians.  I simply can't guarantee I'll care.

Under normal circumstances, I wouldn't be talking about the following topic, but I recieved a request from a friend (who doesn't live in the basement I live in.  I do own a phone you know.), to dedicate part of my post to Street Fighter.  So I will.

STREET FIGHTER

Yes this game has been around for over a decade, and is still pumpin blood, despite that this blood is now pumped through a pacemaker.

This oldy but a goody has recently come out with yet another addition to the series, streetfighter 4.  and after 10 years, they finally decided to take the series to 3D!!!! Most people won't appreciate this new art style, but being a street fighter die-hard fan, I think I'll still enjoy it.  But then again, anyone whos ever taken a liking to side scrolling fighter will always find at least one street fighter game they like.  Why? BECAUSE THERE ARE SOOOOOOOOOO FUCKING MANY!

street fighter, street fighter 2, street fighter 2 turbo, super street fighter, street fighter turbo, street fighter 2 hyper fighting, street figher 2 turbo HD remix, street fighter alpha, street fighter alpha 2, street fighter 3, street fighter 3 second impact, and the list goes on, and on, and on.

but lets all admit that no one's complaining.  Street fighter is possibly one of the best fighters made to date.  mainly because its one of the most original gems made to date.  In  what other game have you ever seen a fat man move at lightning speed?

I lead Grues, so let me lead you,

The Grue Leader

It is helpful, but not necessary, to have read Plato's Allegory of the Cave before reading Anathem.  The concept of perception from the Allegory of the Cave is at the heart of the ideological battle between the two main groups of philosopher/scientist in the novel.

More thoughts after I finish the book.

This month they had a fantastic article about Neal Stephenson and his new book, Anathem (I wonder why he dropped the extra a...). If you've never read any of Neal Stephenson's books, then you really need to stay in more. Stephenson is an excellent Science Fiction writer, whos worlds span from Near Future dystopia's like the world behind Demolition Man to philosophical escapades in the Baroque period. Apparently his new book is going to be centered around a interstellar society which is split between hyper-indulgent cosnumerists(Which in fact seems to be bordering on hedonism), and the Avaunt, a group of intellectuals who live monasterial lives cloistered in their own cities for huge amounts of times (Think years, decades, centuries and even millenia).

Interesting stuff, I'll report back when I eventually buy the book  (And yes, I did scavenge most of this information from Wired; I didn't want to check Wikipedia because it usually has a very poor synopsis) :)

Tonight, after spending the afternoon finishing Anathem (very good but all in all I prefer the Baroque Cycle), I went to see Burn After Reading. It took a while to get into it, but by the end I really liked the movie. At first it felt a bit too Intolerable Cruelty, but got to something more in the good Coen Brothers stuff once Frances McDormand got screen time. There are clear parallels to The Big Lebowski and The Man Who Wasn't There, but it felt most like they were trying to remake Fargo (without the funny accents). So yeah, not as good as any of those three, but it had its heart in the right place.

Diary Date: Friday 17th October 6-7pm

Forbidden Planet is pleased to announce a signing by Neal Stephenson. He will be signing Anathem at the Forbidden Planet Megastore, 179 Shaftesbury Avenue, London, WC2H 8JR, on Friday 17th October 6-7pm

Neal Stephenson lives in Seattle and we are extremely lucky to have him in store for a rare public appearance. Neal has written seven other novels, five of which have been short-listed for the Arthur C. Clarke Award. He eventually won with the book Quicksilver. Three of his last four novels have been on the New York Times bestsellers list.

ANATHEM: Fraa Ersmas has spent most of his life inside a 3,400 sanctuary on the planet Arbre, but all that is about to change when he is chosen along with other scientists, philosophers and mathematicians to help save the world from certain doom. It’s a novel of huge scope, intelligence and imagination. Classic Stephenson.

Forbidden Planet is the largest store of its kind in the world. Some of the biggest names in Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Comics and Cult Entertainment have come to our London Megastore for signing events, including: Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett, Simon Pegg, William Gibson, Mark Millar, Guillermo Del Toro, Brian Froud and Stephen King.

GS Reporter: The Nuge

Source: Forbidden Planet

The premises of Anathem is obviously reflective of that of the current world we live in, notably the ubiquity and evanescence of information. The fact that most people lack learning of significant depth (which isn't really all that much of a change from any other time in history) while becoming increasingly irreverent of the devotion to learning itself is a trait of the modern world frequently discussed in variety of media. Anathem also devotes quite a number of pages to discussion of the issue, and I hit upon a simple idea while thinking about a section on dangers of unintentional misinformation born through insubstantial learning.

In conventional process of teaching and learning, an individual opts to become a node of a degree of knowledge. The individual-node then connects with other individuals of varying degrees of learning and transmit his/her learning to those individuals in a process reminiscent of propagation of thermodynamic equilibrium. Currently the system of public knowledge-the web-is like an ever expanding vacuum. Lack of reliable sources of data and knowledge combined with abundance of random bits of knowledge that remain nonetheless incoherent and worthless in light of a greater system of thought is the symptom of such a vacuum. Maybe this symptom can be alleviated once the academic sector of the knowledge network begins to open its data to the world at large? Maybe the web itself can become a coherent learning environment through steady injection of respectable nodes of knowledge that expands along with the noise of the internet vacuum. I believe we already have the beginnings of the groundwork for such a project in the guise of openscience/science 2.0. If the openscience movement remains unhampered by the increasing haranguing of special interest groups and economic fundamentalists, we might be able to observe a true renaissance of human learning some time in the future that makes current advances in human network and information technologies pale in comparison.