→ November 11, 2015
→ By

Mona Lisa Overdrive.

My buyers’ guide to the outfielder market is up for Insiders. Also, I’ll have my annual boardgame rankings post up later this week, but as a preview, my #1 game is still Carcassonne and it’s on sale now for $22.59 on amazon.

William Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy began with the seminal 1984 novel Neuromancer, which was the first book to win the trifecta of sci-fi awards (the Hugo, the Nebula, and the Philip K. Dick); the book kickstarted the cyberpunk movement, foresaw all manner of cultural shifts that would come about due to the wiring of the world, and may have even helped shape some of the Internet’s early development. I read it in 2005, and it still stands out as a unique work of speculative fiction, one that is overwhelmingly intelligent without ever becoming inaccessible, with a bleak yet expansive vision of a future that isn’t quite dystopian but is certainly light on flowers and rainbows.

I read the sequel, Count Zero, around this time last year, and it didn’t move the needle much for me, as the tripartite storytelling technique felt disjointed, and it was never quite clear why I cared about any of what was going on. The conclusion of the trilogy, Mona Lisa Overdrive, ties the Count Zero plot together with threads from Neuromancer (bringing back Molly, one of that book’s two protagonists), in a highly ambitious storyline that was engrossing but never gets the coherent ending that Gibson probably had in mind.

The narrative of MLO starts from scratch, as we are dropped into four subplots that, as in the preceding book, will all come together by the conclusion, including a not-quite-dead hacker on a stretcher who is comatose and permanently jacked in to the “matrix” and the simstim (a sort of cyberspace reality TV show) star Angela Mitchell whom we met in Count Zero. Someone is after these two people, for reasons that even at the end of the book aren’t exactly clear, leading to a sort of creeping chase throughout the novel where, at first, the targets aren’t even aware anyone’s after them, and various other characters are “used” without their knowledge as part of the hunt.

Gibson’s brilliance in Neuromancer was in his foresight, seeing the potential gains and dangers of the then-nascent technology and concocting a fictional environment that built a culture around the tech – being connected, or interconnected, will change us all in substantial ways, from how we work to how we interact with each other. (It already has, in the First and Third Worlds, albeit in differing ways.) He became a cyberpunk prophet for the depth and incisiveness of his vision; he didn’t just talk about hacking, but about what hacking and hackers might be like. It’s not hard science fiction where we get lengthy explanations of how stuff works; Gibson takes that as a given, which can make his prose a bit confusing at times due to his neologisms and colloquial dialogue, but also has the effect of putting the reader more directly in the story while allowing him to focus on character and emotion.

However, Mona Lisa Overdrive‘s climax falls quite a bit short of his lofty goals. Gibson began to touch on the topic of digital immortality, of uploading one’s “personality” into the matrix to continue to function after the death of the body, but it becomes a mere plot device here, with no exploration of any of the myriad questions around the possibility. The reasons for the conspiracy to kidnap Angela Mitchell or the hunt for the comatose man are still ambiguous after the conclusion, while the actual denouement seems deliberately open-ended and rather unsatisfying. I read Gibson for his vision, but I think here he didn’t offer enough of it.

Next up: Peter Taylor’s 1987 Pulitzer-winning novel A Summons to Memphis.

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→ February 14, 2015
→ By

Saturday five, 2/14/15.

The draft blog is live again, with my first post on Jacob Nix’s outing on Thursday and UC-SB’s mishandling of Dillon Tate; I’ll have another post up this evening on Kyle Funkhouser. I had a quick post earlier in the week on the James Shields signing. My chat with Colin Cowherd today on what WAR is and why we need it is available in mp3 form.

My review of the very good Days of Wonder boardgame Five Tribes is up at Paste.

saturdayfiveThis week’s links:

  • It’s time to stop using the r-word. A stunning piece on a word that should have died long ago, written by former NFL offensive guard Kasey Studdard, himself the target of that word when he was a kid due to a learning disability.
  • What Would Jesus Do About Measles? He’d tell you to vaccinate your children already, that’s what he’d do.
  • Via Kelly Oxford – one of my favorite follows on Twitter because I think she’s a riot – a piece from last year from Mother Jones that argues that you can’t change an anti-vaxxer’s mind. That piece makes vaccine deniers’ situations seem like a mental illness – a delusion from which they can’t escape.
  • Quantum equations say the universe has no beginning. Or no end, which is theoretically good news, except that all the stars will eventually wink out of existence. Anyway, the whole hypothesis depends on the existence of gravitons, massless quantum particles that may just be fictional. I just want to know when I get my jetpack.
  • The BBC’s World Book Club this month discussed William Gibson’s seminal debut novel Neuromancer, featuring a 55-minute Q&A with the author himself.
  • I tweeted this link earlier in the week, but now that I’ve posted my review of The Handmaid’s Tale it’s worth reposting – Salon‘s excellent story of Margaret Atwood’s visit to West Point, where she had lunch with first-year students and took many of their questions about the book.
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→ February 10, 2015
→ By

The Diamond Age.

Neal Stephenson won the Hugo and Locus awards in 1996 for his novel The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, a postcyberpunk bildungsroman that can’t survive under the weight of its own self-importance. While Stephenson managed to create a credible Gibsonian universe in his earlier hit, Snow Crash, here his worldbuilding detracts from the story about the titular book that might be able to reprogram the future of humanity, and his hifalutin language doesn’t meld well with the story’s focus on a child protagonist.

The “primer” of the book’s title is a “ractive” book (short for “interactive” … I’m not a fan of this kind of conlang/argot shit, which ends up little more than an annoying distraction), designed by the engineer John Hackworth for Lord Gussie Fink-Nottle (close enough) using nanotechnology and I think what we’d now call a 3-D printer, designed to raise a young girl – the Lord’s granddaughter, and, via a pirated copy, Hackworth’s daughter – to be a hypereducated, worldly, creative young adult. The copy intended for Fiona Hackworth ends up in the hands of an impoverished, abused girl named Nell, brought to her by her scapegrace brother, Harv, setting in motion a great and possibly unintended sociological experiment pitting nature against nurture – not a mother’s nurture, but a surrogate in the form of the actress, Miranda, who performs nearly all of the “ractive” functions in the Primer for Nell.

The Primer itself is a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure hepped up on nanotech; in fact, Stephenson’s whole universe here revolves around nanotechnology, where static objects can be built in Matter Compilers, and nanosites – microscopic entities designed to perform specific functions in the air or within someone’s body – abound, including security infrastructures that must have the NSA seething with envy. (The book’s very title was coined by cryptography pioneer and nanotechnology researcher Ralph Merkle, whose great-uncle made a certain boner with which you, being a visitor to this particular blog, are likely familiar.) Stephenson’s vision of an age of nanotechnology, combined with a dark post-nationalistic viewpoint where communities are organized in “phyles” that called to mind the guilds of early RPGs, is so overly and unnecessarily complex that it overwhelmed the core storyline of Nell’s education and maturation through her experiences with the Primer. The “Drummers” hive-mind phyle is one of the novel’s bigger messes, ambiguously-described yet central to the operation of the Primers and, ultimately, to the resolution of the plot.

My other, secondary problem with The Diamond Age was the absurd vocabulary Stephenson used in it – perhaps a nod to its underpinnings in Victorian literature, but coming off as stilted and sometimes inappropriate to the characters in question. Nell is only about eleven or twelve years old when she has this thought:

It was just that the story was anfractuous; it developed more ramifications the more closely she read it.

Now, maybe all of you knew the word “anfractuous” from childhood, but I only encountered it sometime in the last two years, somewhere in The Recognitions or Gravity’s Rainbow or some classic from the 1800s that routinely sent me to the dictionary. It’s a valid English word, actually a pretty useful one, but you’re never going to hear that or “ramifications” in the internal monologue of a preteen. Stephenson’s either showing off or incapable of capturing the vernacular of someone that age – and the whole book is full of maddening word choices like these.

The shame of this incoherence is that Stephenson buried what might have been a remarkable novel of ideas, one that merely uses the platform of his nanotech universe to explore the roles of community, government, family, education, and religion in a world where we’re that much closer to the singularity. Even one of those topics would make the foundation for a good novel, although I can’t blame Stephenson – who’s not afraid to be prolix in his prose – for aiming high. Unfortunately, the resolution of the story is so muddled, both in plot and in philosophy, that by the end of the book it wasn’t even clear how we’d gotten there, much less whether there was a point to any of this.

Next up: As I mentioned on Twitter, I’m tackling Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and it is indeed an excruciating read.

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→ January 30, 2015
→ By

Rainbows End.

I’ve written an organization report for each MLB team, including a list of that team’s top ten prospects; you can find them on the full index of all thirty clubs. The Rays’ piece is free; the rest are Insider.

Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End won the 2007 Hugo Award for Best Novel, beating out four books I don’t know by authors I’d never heard of (although one of them, Peter Watts’ Blindsight, also received high critical praise). In a world ripped straight out of the fiction of William Gibson, a plot to undermine humanity in the name of saving it ends up foiled by an 11-year-old girl and a virtual entity known only as the Rabbit. It’s a book so in love with its setting that the plot is unfortunately drowned in a sea of irrelevant details.

In 2025, everything and everyone is connected, constantly online and accessible via wearable technology, coding via hand gestures, with their movements and actions easily tracked by the government (okay, that last part might be closer to truth than I’d like to admit). A global intelligence investigation has uncovered a plot to make humans more suggestible via coded transmissions within ordinary broadcasts like commercials – a sort of ‘mind virus’ – that was in fact developed by one of the people supposed to be leading the investigation. He hires the Rabbit to unwittingly help him retrieve the technology before it’s discovered, only to find the Rabbit is more feline than leporine when it comes to curiosity and doesn’t stop where his orders end.

Meanwhile, Robert Gu, a once world-renowned poet who was stricken by Alzheimer’s, is miraculously cured not just of that malady but of old age, restored largely to the body of a teenager, but without the one thing he’d most like back – his ability to craft poetry. He’s approached by an earnest graduate student – virtually, as most meetings in this book seem to be – to help with the latter’s thesis, only to have that student’s online persona hijacked by another entity that offers him a Faustian bargain: help with this project (tied into the same investigation into the UCSD bio-research facility where the mind-control experiment lives) and you’ll get your muse back. Gu was a miserable wretch before his dormancy, lashing out with intent to wound at anyone near him, but after doing so once to his granddaughter Miri, the two end up with a tenuous bond that draws Miri into Robert’s endeavor, without his knowledge at first, and gives her a pivotal role in the attempt to stop a global takeover.

Vinge is himself a transhumanist who has written on the inevitability of the merger of man and machine known as the singularity – an idea first encapsulated by Ray Kurzweil in his non-fiction treatise The Singularity Is Near – and here he has created a world where the singularity is quite close, so much so that he can’t stop telling us about it. The story is overburdened with the minutiae of the operations of these net-enabled clothes, with their own lingo (either you’re “wearing” or you’re hopeless), and the same attention to detail turns the climactic passage, a battle waged on the ground as well as over the net from points around the world, into nearly two hundred pages of confusing, slogging prose. We get the conclusion we expect – did you really think Vinge would let the bad guy take over the world with a mindworm? – and a minimum of damage to the protagonists; the only way the resolution could have been more maudlin would have been to have Gu reconcile with the ex-wife who dumped him for his malicious behavior.

I think a big part of the appeal of such books is the predictions inherent in the writing – wearable technology is certainly getting closer, with the mild success of Google Glass, and our access to the Internet is becoming broader, which makes our movements easier for someone like the NSA to track. Vinge doesn’t seem to worry much about the enormous energy requirements of his near-future vision; virtual-reality remains stubbornly separate from real reality, we don’t hold meetings with overseas colleagues via projections or holograms; and the silent instant messaging he has the more sophisticated wearers use seems too much like the Red Herring telepathic-email device called orecchio, which was an April Fool’s hoax.

I’d recommend anyone interested in this particular branch of science fiction to read William Gibson’s Neuromancer or Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash instead. Both cyberpunk novels deal with the melding of man and machine in a more humanist light, keeping the narrative moving without the juvenile obsession with sci-fi trappings.

Next up: Going old-school with Arthur C. Clark’s Rendezvous with Rama, winner of the Hugo Award in 1974.

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