accelerando, by charles stross

Back in August, I wrote that Charles Stross' Accelerando might be the best science fiction novel of the last ten years. After a few months to think about it, I stand by that, and I wanted to try to follow up on the claim a bit here.

First off, it touches on just about every hot geek topic from the last decade or two: bandwidth politics, data havens, distributed computing, AI pets, entertainment law, viral marketing, the reputation economy, fringe-science ideas from people like Moravec and Tipler... the list goes on. One of Strosser's great talents is that he can not only cram all these ideas into a single book, but also find the ways in which they can be rewardingly combined, the ways they might shoot sparks if struck together: as a result, the future of Accelerando seems like an actual future, the generated result of ideas that have been lived with for a while, and fruitfully combined, recombined, mashed-up, road-tested, exploited, etcetera. It's a future that's imagined richly enough to be pretty disorienting for the reader—the more familiar you are with those zeitgeisty topics listed above the easier a time you'll have.

It'll also help if you've got a passing familiarity with the basic tropes of SF—stuff like interplanetary colonization, "first contact," "the singularity," virtual worlds, consciousness-as-digital-simulacra, etc. Cause most of that stuff's here, too. Still erring on the side of maximalist density, Stross chooses to shoehorn not one but all of these different tropes into his book, again with an eye for the ways they might cross-pollinate interestingly. In other words, this is a book intended to disorient people who find normal SF novels to be not provocative or defamiliarizing enough (no small feat, considering that SF is a genre that has a certain degree of disorientation and frustration built into it as a fundamental requirement). It's also a generational epic and a comic romp—it's brisk and flat-out entertaining. Highly recommended.

some recent capsule reviews

I've updated this year's reading log with some new reviews, posted below for your reading convenience:

Easy Travel to Other Planets, by Ted Mooney
There's a lot to like about the way this novel chronicles the interpersonal drama among a group of intellectuals and artists. The conversations are stylish, fragmentary, and mediated; the prose is compressed, with a cinematic sense of editing; a quasifuturistic theme (interspecies communication) provides ample opportunity for strange riffs; an atmosphere of geopolitical tension permeates obscurely at all times, threatening, at any moment, to condense into apocalypse—at its best, it recalls the energy and thrust of early DeLillo. At its worst, it reads like high-end erotica posing as lit: Mooney's attention to the sexuality of his [female] protagonist lurches towards the prurient at times (in the first thirty pages of the novel, she participates in three sex scenes, including one with a dolphin).

Drawing From Life: The Journal as Art by Jennifer New
Book dedicated to showcasing intricate art journals, mostly hand-drawn. The journals themselves are so self-evidently fascinating that it's hard to say why presenting them in this fashion doesn't quite work. The choice to reduce intricate journal-pages down to postcard size, rendering them mostly unreadable, certainly doesn't help; I think there's also a problem with the sheer number of journals represented here, which helps to give a sense of scope and variety but eliminates the ability to really immerse yourself in any particular journal. The framing essays profiling each journal-maker are worth a read, but ultimately they're not nearly as interesting as the journals themselves: it's just one more degree of remove between the reader and the subjectivity that's alive in the journal-pages. There's so much "frame" here that the art itself is choked out.

Only Words, by Catharine MacKinnon
MacKinnon is an anti-pornography feminist, which can cause people on both ends of the political spectrum to reject her ideas without taking the time to engage with them first. This is a shame, because MacKinnon's argument here is one of the most interesting anti-pornography arguments I've read, avoiding the easy use of anecdotal pathos, in favor of a legal argument, suggesting that pornography's status as "protected expression" is a classification error, and that it belongs more properly in the category of speech acts that are treated legally as actions rather than ideas (hate speech; sexual harrassment). Elegant and deft.

The Amber Spyglass, by Philip Pullman
Final volume in the His Dark Materials trilogy, a children's fantasy trilogy built around the (Gnostic) notion of a War Against God. The fact that such a thing ever achieved a moderate success on the shelves of American booksellers strikes me as so profoundly improbable that Pullman earns points just for pulling it off; that goes double when you also consider that this book also features two heroically pair-bonded male angels and features a young girl's sexual awakening as a major plot point. But to focus on the anti-Narnian qualities on display here is to overlook the sheer strength of Pullman's prose and storytelling craft. In this volume, these strengths are most evident in Pullman's sequences of genuine terror (the passage into the Land of the Dead) and heart-rending tragedy (the parting of lovers). Heavy stuff, but Pullman is right to not flinch from confronting children with emotionally weighty material: it dignifies them as fully human.

The Road, by Cormac McCarthy
Post-apocalyptic minimalism from master prosesmith Cormac McCarthy. This book could fruitfully be partnered with Jose Saramago's Blindness: both stare unflinchingly into extremes of human ugliness in an attempt to unsentimentally illuminate the fragility and sheer miracle nature of human love. In Blindness the love is between a man and a woman; here it is between a father and son, a framework that allows the book also to also rewardingly explore some of the thornier questions of parental ethics—when is it appropriate to lie to a child, for instance? What forms of protection are valid and appropriate? The book disappointingly pulls a few punches in its final pages, but prior to that it was one of the most rewarding novels I've read this year. Recommended.

Half-Real: Video Games Between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds, by Jesper Juul
If I were to pick a book that this one most reminded me of, it would be Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics: you could practically entitle this Understanding Video Games and be none the worse for wear. Like McCloud, Juul comes to his chosen branch of the media tree with a fresh eye, determined to coherently examine its component elements in order to build a new conception of the way they work their effects. For Juul, the key elements are narrative and rule-based play, and the unique experience of video games grows out of cooperation (as well as tensions and slippages) between these forces. Fascinating reading, clear and lucid, an essential work for anyone interested in the academic study of video games or cross-platform narrative. Highly recommended.

(Those of you who are interested in that last one might want to take note that all my "scavengings" from the book (85 in total) can be found here.)

away notice

Leaving tomorrow for a few days in the Great Northeast; if any readers of this blog happen to be in the greater Boston area and have a free lunch hour tomorrow or Friday, let me know and we'll hang. Otherwise I'm going to the Coop to blow some money.

Because of my trip, film club for the week is canceled, and I probably won't really be upping the blog posting pace, but I will leave you with one observation and one question:

The observation: Charles Stross' Accelerando is possibly the best science fiction novel of the last, oh, let's say ten years or so. I am stone-faced serious when I say this, although to get some idea of why, you might want to read some of what I was saying about science fiction last year around this time

And the question: does anyone know of a good way to defamiliarize prepositions? E-mail me at "projects," at imaginary year (all one word) dot com.

some recent capsule reviews

Here are some reviews of stuff I read back in April. I didn't get a chance to review them then, because back then I was posting reviews of stuff I read in March. Oh well.

The Grand Piano: An Experiment in Collective Autobiography: Volume 1 by Bob Perelman, Barrett Watten, Steve Benson, Carla Harryman, Tom Mandel, Ron Silliman, Kit Robinson, Lyn Hejinian, Rae Armantrout, and Ted Pearson
Ten Language poets take turns writing reflections on their origins. This volume (the first in a proposed ten) covers 1975-1980 and is loosely organized around a theme of "love." The unusual collective authorship scheme here is overtly designed to evoke multiplicity and ultimately create a "community of memory," although a less kind read might be to point out that it also serves to build the Language Poetry "brand," perhaps as part of a bid for long-term canonization. After all, the very point of writing autobiography (on one level) is to self-aggrandize, and although the Language thinkers, with their grounding in theory and radical politics, are more likely than most to critique this implulse, they don't manage here to transcend this aspect of the genre. All the same, the group assembled here is basically an all-star list of important poets writing today, and it's fascinating reading for anyone interested in putting their poetic work in context.

The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz
Strange, episodic story cycle of life in a gloomy Eastern European city (Drogobych), which is overstuffed with decaying marvels, cryptic artifacts, and just plain trash. (Same goes for the protagonist's home, which seems both cramped and weirdly infinite.) The book is populated by colorful / quirky / mad characters, most centrally the protagonist's father, who obsesses first over raising exotic birds and then later, over developing a quasi-Gnostic theory about tailor's dummies as a form of imprisoned matter. Uniquely European high weirdness, likely to be enjoyed by fans of Calvino's Invisible Cities or Kafka's parables.

Among the Names by Maxine Chernoff
For this book, Chernoff gathered various texts pertaining to the concept of "giving" or "gifts," ranging from Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay "Gifts," to Marcel Mauss' The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, to DivorceSource.com's "The Question of the Ring." Thus gathered, she culls interesting phrases from them and jettisons the rest, effectively taking the discourse and exploding it into a book-sized cloud. This doesn't reduce it to nonsense, however—the theme of the gift persists—but by shattering the originals she decontextualizes the fragments, transforming them into curious artifacts, rewarding of close examination. The result of arranging these artifacts is not to make an argument about giving, exactly, but to do something more valuable: to try to illustrate (albeit obliquely) the entire sphere of human thinking that surrounds the concept. Fascinating, occasionally moving. Recommended.

the inevitable harry potter posts: III

Finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Harrows a while ago, but only now found the time to write it up. Essentially spoiler-free, but in the comments area, anything goes:

Here, in the series' final book, is where Rowling strives most evidently for long-term grandiosity, from the Pullman-esque epigraphs, to the honest-to-God old-school Fantasy Quest, to the (disappointing) abandonment of "school" as the primary framing device. She also takes this as an opportunity to effectively trash the franchise, attempting with unrestrained relish to definitively retire most of the major characters (in one fashion or another). Some of the sacrifices thusly endured would feel (more?) capricious if it weren't for Rowling's selection of Life Under Enemy Occupation as the replacement frame. As anyone glancingly familiar with the history of WW-II-era Europe can tell you, enemy occupation makes for harrowing circumstances, and it is these circumstances that the book, at its best, convincingly evokes: no place is safe, everyone is constantly at risk, ignoble death can strike seemingly at random. This is a dark place for the series to go, but it sets the stage for satisfying closure.

Over and over again during my read of the series, I thought about the act of world-building, and how it is distinct from or related to the more traditional acts of narrative construction. Expect a discussion on this point soon, using the Potter books (and possibly the Pirates of the Carribean series) as the prime exhibits.

the inevitable harry potter posts: II

Three more Harry Potter reviews. I'm in the middle of reading the last one, which is appropriately harrowing; expect a non-spoilery review here soon.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
The transitional book in the series. Rowling still feels indebted to the "boy wizard-detective solves mystery" structure of the earlier three books, but she's also clearly grown more interested in character development and the long-term narrative elements of the story world. This creates an interesting tension: between the desire, on the one hand, to write another self-contained book (like the first three) and the desire, on the other, to write a book that functions as an installment in an ongoing serial. The tension isn't fruitfully resolved: this book is the slowest to get rolling (it takes nearly 200 pages just to get to Hogwarts) and Rowling's heart doesn't seem to be entirely in the mystery: it's the one of the first four which has the least satisfying Big Reveal, which requires an entire chapter's worth of flavorless talk to fully clarify.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
The first book in the series where Rowling assumes that the readers have read the previous books. Freed of the necessity to ponderously re-establish the backstory-- the flaw that weighed down Goblet of Fire --Rowling is freed up to hit the ground running: the turbulence begins to hit with the first chapter. As with the earlier books in the series, the book is centered around a mystery here, although unlike the earlier books, it doesn't truly belong the the genre of The Mystery as such--there is no real way to puzzle out the solution, for instance. But the series doesn't really need to rely on mystery structure any longer anyway: by this point the long-form plot has amassed enough potential energy that it can soar simply by exploiting the conflicts already set up in its first four installments. Which isn't to say that there aren't new ones as well, notably in the form of Dolores Umbridge, whose petty abuses of power, disdain for the autonomy of young people, and Kafkaesque punishment schemes make her all-too-familiar: possibly my favorite villain in the series. Recommended.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Feels a bit like a book-length positioning of pieces for the big finale of Book Seven. Not that there's anything wrong with that: Rowling, at this point, has developed a very rich world, populated by literally dozens of characters who we care about, each with their own interesting plot arc. (This may form the basis of an entire later post.) Watching this network click forward in the standard increment (one year) is fascinating unto itself; the Voldemort backstory that forms the real backbone of this book is an added bonus.

the inevitable harry potter posts: I

So I've been putting off reading the Harry Potter books for what feels like forever, despite the fact that this means that I'm at a real social disadvantage when hanging with my fanfic-writing pals. With the approach of the seventh final book, however, I realized that I'd have only a short amount of time to ever try to read them without knowing The Ending, so I decided to make ripping through the six existing novels my big July Reading Project.

As all of civilization knows, the final book went on sale last night at midnight, so it looks like I missed my deadline: I've finished the first four books and am about halfway through the fifth. Hopefully I'll get fully caught up before stumbling upon any spoilers, although I'm wondering if this is even possible without having to go on Full Media Blackout.

Anyway. What follows are reviews of the first three, free of all but the most mild spoilers:

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
A good read. Chugs along surprisingly swiftly, drawn by the well-plotted and essentially rewarding mystery story that forms the book's core. The main characters (Harry, Hermione, Ron) are charming, albeit a bit sketchily-drawn in this early volume (and some of the bit characters, primarily the Durselys, are cast with a heavier hand than is perhaps necessary, even for childrens' literature). The book's real stroke of genius, however, is the utilization of the familiar triumphs and trials of Going To School as a way to ground us in the quirky tweeness of Rowling's universe. Perhaps a minor quibble after this praise is the matter of the prose, some of which is occasionally clunky or slack (I don't know what enchanted letters shooting out of a fireplace flue are like, but to say they "like bullets" is no help). I'd probably let this pass if I hadn't just read Phillip Pullman's The Amber Spyglass, a piece of children's fantasy literature that uses prose so finely-wrought and precise that nearly anyone looks clunky and slack by comparison.

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
The second book in the series brings back some of the same pleasures of the first-- the likeable characters, the fast-paced narrative, the "boy detective" elements (clues, red herrings, a finely-crafted Big Reveal) --and also introduces a subtle new one, specifically, a sense of repetition and variation that emerges from Rowling's decision to plot the books around a school year. Many of the milestones from the first book (summer trouble at the Dursley's, a Diagon Alley outfitting trip, the Sorting Ceremony, the Quidditch season, Christmas break, etc) recur here, which adds to our comfort and familiarity, but changing perspective and changed circumstances keep the book from feeling repetitive. The interplay between these poles is essentially the interplay that lends pleasure to any sort of tradition, and it does similar work here, making this book a read that satisfies more deeply than the first-- even if the Dursley's still feel heavy-handed, and even if the climax still has a touch of the deus ex machina about it (tell me again why a sword comes out of the Sorting Hat?).

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
The best of the first three. At this point in the series, Rowling's confidence appears to surge dramatically, resulting in the book being more inventive than its predecessors, most notably through Rowling's decision to introduce creatures that are brand-new to the series universe (Dementors, boggins) instead of simply choosing to revamp of already-existing fantasy creatures (as she does with the pixies, goblins, dragons, centaurs, etc. of the earlier books). In addition, the mystery is more complex and satisfying (although the Big Reveal accordingly requires deployment of huge chunks of dialogue in the center of what's ostensibly a moment characterized by murderous desire). Finally, the book has a thrilling post-Reveal final act -- something absent from the earlier two books -- and a satisfying profusion of loose ends, which begin to give some sense to the shape of the larger seven-book arc. Recommended.

More to come in a while.