Obsolete Your Idols

You Don't Have to Go Home

This is the end, my only friend.

Of this manifestion of a blog, at least. I've migrated the blosxom entries from the server they used to be on, into a new server space, but having gone through all that, I'm freezing this one in time, disabling comments, removing old comments. As a curious side effect, any updates I made will appear to have been made on this date. Que sera fuckit. If you'd like to continue following my screeds, head on over to http://blog.manjusri.org/

Thanks for reading.

posted at 11:33 PST (-0800)     (comments disabled)   permanent link   Technorati tagged as: archive, blog, chronology

Book of My Year

The book I just read turned out to be a couple of firsts for me

• first Ken MacLeod book I've read
• first post-Singularity book I've read (possibly)*
• first book I've read this year which I'm ready to pronounce my favorite of the year

This book follows one old and dedicated woman in her quest to resolve a deep and abiding threat. We get flashbacks of her youth, we get political and philosophical arguments, we get ironic social commentary, we get sf alien tech.

The book is called The Cassini Division and when I first saw it on a friend's shelf I was compelled to pick it up and look at the back cover and flyleaf text. Once I'd read that much of it, I was driven to borrow it and bump it to the top of my reading queue. If anything, it was even better than I was hoping.

So what's it about? This book is about anticipating what life after the Singularity might be like if only people selfish enough to sacrifice everything to attain it pass through that event. It's full of references to other sf, most overtly in the chapter titles. It's a nice character study and often the dialog had me chuckling aloud.

I like it. I think it's the best book I read this year.

Who else might like it

• people who think about the Singularity
• people who like Heinlein's narratives but not his politics

I would like especially to thank Brad who, on every occasion I have spoken to him for the past year said nothing but "KenMacLeodKenMacLeodKenMacLeodKenMacLeod" and Brent, who loaned me his copy to read.

*Depending upon whether you consider Wil McCarthy's post-Scarcity analogous to post-Singularity

UPDATE 2007/12/30: No it's not new
I may have given the impression simply by being so late to the party on this book that it's a new book. It's not, it's been out for years, but I am a slow reader and have a long to-read queue which prevents me noticing many good books. This book does meet my new reading criteria: it's good enough that if I had died without reading it, I would have been sad about that (in theory, in an alternate reality where sentiment persisted beyond incarnation or where one could know of things beyond one's exposure).

posted at 08:37 PST (-0800)     (comments disabled)   permanent link   Technorati tagged as: book, novel, review, singularity

No Room for Gray

Imagine someone sapped you, popped open your skull like a Pez dispenser and shoved a radio into your head which enabled someone to transmit instructions into your head with the same plausibility as your own thoughts. If that sounds familiar, you've read some of the same books I have.

So I read another book on the same theme and it was The Squares of the City. It's from 1965 and it's One of the Ten Best Science Fiction Novels of the Year. I know that because the publisher helpfully printed that on the cover. What is this book?

It's a novelization of a chess game. Specifically, this chess game. In this aspect, it's a little like The Man in the High Castle, where the narrative is shaped by an external pattern. Chess is less random than the I Ching, or so I seem to believe.

That's not a spoiler, about the chess game. I say this because

• the back cover tells you this
• the foreword tells you this
• the introduction tells you this
• the afterword tells you this

You're supposed to read this story, knowing that it is an anthropomorphic rendition of the chess game. Name characters are pieces and they move, interact, threaten and capture, according to the schedule set by the chess games.

Does it work? Yes and no. It's easy, reading the story, to forget the structure imposed upon it by the chess game. The story is reasonably interesting as a man vs. society struggle. But in the end, it felt overly constrained by that framework. Sometimes the protagonist seems struck inert and unmotivated by the dictates of the game.

Things I liked about it

• prescient awareness of the threat that subliminal messaging presents
• prescient warning that someday the government would manage populace using gimmicks dreamed up by advertisers
• Maria Posador, a strong female character
• romanticizing civil engineering
• an experimental framework which added a layer to understanding the work
• an exploration of prejudice

Things I didn't

• the presentation of the story which laid out over and over the chess game underlying
• the endgame compromise where Brunner abandons the game as played

Who might like this story

• chess fans
• fans of John Brunner, the godfather of cyberpunk
• fans of experimental fiction

posted at 20:25 PST (-0800)     (comments disabled)   permanent link   Technorati tagged as: book, novel, review