The Book of the New Sun is the insanely praised magnum opus of Gene Wolfe. It’s so well reviewed that it’s been called science-fiction’s Ulysses. Since the people praising it are fellow writers like Ursula K. Le Guin, George R.R. Martin and Alastair Reynolds, any serious science-fiction fan had better sit up and pay attention. The tetralogy is also notoriously difficult to make sense of, so much so that there are published analyses of its deeper meanings and themes, such as Michael Andre-Druissi’s Lexicon Urthus.
I found a copy of the hardcover Gollancz 50 edition of the first volume, comprising the first two books The Shadow of the Torturer and The Claw of the Conciliator in a local bookstore and promptly bought it, knowing it to be one of the classics of SF that I never got around to reading. Unfortunately the second volume, comprising the books The Sword of the Lictor and The Citadel of the Autarch doesn’t yet exist in that edition, and I ended up ordering a paperback copy online. That was many months ago. Yes, it took me that long to finish the series to my satisfaction.
Midnight Riot is a book that I picked up as light reading from book recommendation threads on QT3 and Broken Forum. I had some trouble finding information about it on the net and later discovered that this is because it was originally published as Rivers of London is the UK but its US publishers chose the title Midnight Riot, probably because the original name sounded like a boring treatise on British geography. The Americans also changed its cover, creating controversy by choosing to depict the lead character in silhouette. The critics claimed that this was to hide the fact that the protagonist is of mixed race, which would supposedly turn off would-be buyers.
Anyway the book’s back blurb describes it accurately as what would happen if Harry Potter grew up and became a policeman in the UK. Peter Grant, a young constable who has just completed his probation, seems set on a boring career of pushing paper at the Case Progression Unit, when a chance event alters the course of his life. He is standing guard at the scene of a seemingly random act of murder when an eyewitness comes up to him with critical information. The witness turns out to be a ghost, the uncanny nature of the case gets it referred to Detective Chief Inspector Thomas Nightingale, who is the sole member of the London’s Metropolitan Police to specialize in magical crimes, and Grant becomes the first officially sanctioned wizard’s apprentice in Britain in 50 years.
Once again, I’ve been remiss in posting entries, so here’s a smattering of stuff that I’ve recently found to be of interest around the web:
After a long hiatus, Less Wrong (Eliezer Yudkowsky) finally updated the ongoing Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality fanfiction work with a few new chapters. I actually didn’t care that much for the Hermione-centered SPHEW arc that immediately preceded this latest update, but the newest arc is totally mindblowing. Chapters 80 and 81 together constitute probably the greatest crowning moment of awesome in a courtroom in anything I’ve read. My only worry is that this ratchets the epic up so high it’s hard to see how this version of Harry Potter can have any kind of normal Hogwarts life after this.
In the same vein, I’ve started reading the Sequences on the Less Wrong site. It’s a series of essays on rationality with the explicit aim of teaching you how to refine your way of thinking. It involves plenty of logic and math and absolutely no crackpot fuzzy thinking.
The in-thing du jour is the Hunger Games series. I haven’t read the books and have no real interest in watching the movie but this did remind of the much earlier Battle Royale story which I’ve always wanted to check out. So I started reading the manga. Not quite as good as I imagined, but much more brutal than I expected.
I’m always a sucker for entertaining anecdotes about creative and/or smart people and this page on the Math Overflow website turned out to be a treasure trove of them. Here’s one of my favorites:
One of the most common and popular Norbert Wiener (1894-1964) stories is of a student coming to Wiener after class and saying, “I really don’t understand this problem that you discussed in class. Can you explain to me how to do it?” Wiener thought a moment, and wrote the answer (and only that) on the board. “Yes,” said the student, “but I would really like to master the technique. Can you tell me the details?” Wiener bowed his head in thought, and again he wrote the answer on the board. In some torment, the student said, “But Professor Wiener, can’t you show me how the problem is done?” To which Wiener is reputed to have replied, “But I’ve already shown you how to do the problem in two ways!”
Dick Swenson, who was at MIT in those days, tells this variant of the story: Wiener showed the kid the answer twice, as just indicated. Then the student said, “Oh, you mean…,” and he wrote the answer (and only the answer) on the board. Wiener then said, “Ah, very nice. I hadn’t thought of that approach.”
So it took some time, but I’ve finished Peter Watts’ Rifters trilogy, consisting of the novels Starfish, Maelstrom and Behemoth. That’s quite a lot of text, especially the last book which is as hefty as its name suggests, so much so that the dead tree version was split up into two volumes for commercial reasons. After liking Blindsight so much, I just had to read more stuff by Watts even though I knew this prior work wasn’t as well received. Unfortunately even with reduced expectations, I found the trilogy disappointing. It has a ton of cool ideas and a unique post-apocalyptic setting but the story as a whole just doesn’t gel together.
It’s hard to describe all three books in one post without delving into spoilers, so potential readers might want to keep out. The story begins in the middle of the 21st century. Due to global warming, the end of the cheap energy era as fossil fuels finally run out and global conflicts over increasingly scarce resources, the future is decidedly not rosy. Rising sea waters and frequent environmental catastrophes have caused the coasts of North America to turn into refugee zones. Cyberspace grows increasingly wild as self-evolving malware become ever more sophisticated.
One of the QT3 and now Broken Forum regulars mentioned Peter Watts’ novel Blindsight in passing in the dualism / nature of consciousness thread I’d previously referenced. This was when the discussion turned to the subject of p-zombies and it turns out this novel has a thing or two to say on that particular topic. Since the book is available for free on the author’s website it was easy enough to check it out. It’s been such a riveting read that I’ve done little else save finish the book over the past few days. It was only after I’ve finished the book and looked up more info on the author that I realized he’s the same guy who briefly got famous on the Internet last year for being infected with necrotising fasciitis, complete with some very lurid photos on his blog.
Blindsight’s premise is a first contact scenario set in the near future. One day, over sixty-five thousand micro-satellites show up unannounced to presumably perform an exhaustive survey of Earth, destroying themselves in the process. Now if this were Star Trek, that would be the cue to break out the champagne bottles, sing kumbaya and welcome the aliens with open arms. But Watts comes from the Stephen Hawking school of extraterrestrial contact, not Gene Roddenberry. As a character in the novel states, technology exists only to tame nature and nature is basically everything that is not your own species. Therefore technology implies belligerence.
I’ve been cleaning up some of the old books I have scattered around my mother’s house. Some of these have been too damaged by poor storage conditions and need to be junked. Some others I’m too embarrassed to keep and will be donated. The rest needs to be packed up to be ready to be moved to Seremban. Greg Egan’s Schild’s Ladder is of course in that last category and while staying in Kuala Lumpur, I’ve found that my memory of it was poor enough to merit rereading the novel. Since I’ve never written about this particular book here as well, I thought I’d remedy that as well.
The Wikipedia entry for this novel calls it Greg Egan’s hardest SF book ever and considering that Egan is easily the hardest of the hard SF writers, this is a daunting statement indeed. This is because Schild’s Ladder begins with a fictional theory that unifies relativity with quantum mechanics, the so-called Sarumpaet rules of Quantum Graph Theory. In the far future universe of the novel, this has been the basic foundation of all physics for thousands of years even as humanity has spread out and diversified throughout the galaxy. Some of these descendents of humanity exist only as pure software constructs. The acorporeals as they are known aren’t even raised in an analogue of 3D space, preferring more complex spaces due to the belief that this will unnecessarily restrain the flexibility of their developing minds.
Russian writers seem to have a special talent for highlighting the grimness and misery of ordinary life. Roadside Picnic, a novella by the brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, is a fine example of how this morosity shows up even in science-fiction. Computer gaming fans will know this novella, first published in 1972, as the ultimate inspiration for the STALKER series of games, albeit by way of the film version directed by Andrei Tarkovsky that was released in 1979.
Naturally, the original novella differs markedly from the video game. The novella for example is set in the fictional town of Harmont in some unnamed Commonwealth country, instead of the area around the Chernobyl reactor in Ukraine. This in turn is only one of six zones scattered around the global that were created by the alien visitation event. Still, many themes and even individual elements, such as how the stalkers use throw bolts to detect the boundaries of some types of anomalies, will be recognizable to STALKER fans.
