Fantastika

Mean but accurate

Art & Criticism, fantasy
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Adam Roberts’ parody of Robert Jordan’s writing is mean but accurate:

Why did I fail? Oh, why did I fail to polish off wotviii this week, I thought to myself, creasing my brow and tugging my braids. Since the Age of Legends I have been reading this bu’u’ook, as the ancient bound codices were called. White streaking my beard and hair, I stroked the mindtrap upon my bedside table. I must be careful, I thought. Careful. To take care. Three different skills were in play, the ancient art of readin, the even more ancient and venerable art, of which only a few dozen in the world were true masters, of Turnian Pages, and, most difficult of all preventing the bitter, lethal brain num that inevitably pursued any man who dared to channel the antique magic of this kind of readin. It could be fatal, brain num. Fatal, it could be. I tugged my braid. The old Ar Selbow proverb came back to me: readin should be a chore, not a pleasure. I thought, oh, but I’ve read so much! To give up now would be … but I left the utterance an axe-handle short of completion. Was there room for any more? I tugged my braids. Hardly any hair left, I thought to myself. I wonder if tugging it all the time is responsible for it falling out? I wonder. I wonder.

But the parody quoted in a 1993 David Langford fanzine is more concise and just as funny, if not funnier. Which totally makes Adam’s version the more accurate, as Jordan, for all his virtues, was never adverse to use ten words when one would do, or seven sentences where two would suffice…

Adam is reading and reviewing the entire Wheel of Time series and not enjoying it much, hence the parody. He does so because, while he has read his share of epic fantasy, he’s “too ignorant of the 1990s and much of the noughties” which is why he “decided to give Jordan a whirl”. It’s been interesting to read his critiques, though not surprising that he finds Jordan hardgoing and not very good. Most honest fans of the series able to aprpeciate good writing will readily admit Jordan’s writing is not very good, workmanlike at best; much of the criticism Roberts levels at him was already talked about in rec.arts.sf.written.robert-jordan in the mid nineties. Where Adam gets it wrong is when he attempts to understand why people despite this keep reading the Wheel of Time books:

I get that for many people the deal is escape. Leave your worries behind; you enter this better world. It’s a world in which you don’t work in the accounts department of a mid-size educational supplies firm; where, instead, you live in a palace and command servants and have magic powers and enjoy exciting sex with beautiful people and are able to vent your repressed aggression in fighty-fight. Jordan’s twist on this venerable textual strategy is, partly, giving his readers much more detail than his market rivals; and partly, more cannily, creating the illusion of psychological depth. Simple wish-fulfilment gets old too soon; so Jordan’s Alexander-the-Great-alike is troubled by the fear he’s going mad. It’s not much, but it’s enough to separate him from the bulk of competitors.

[…]

And this is the part I can’t seem to get my head around: the fans know that it’s terribly written. They know and they don’t care. Why don’t they care? I don’t know why they don’t care.

[…]

What to say to such a review other than: don’t! Please don’t! The libraries of the world are crammed with beautiful, powerful, moving, mindblowing literature! Read some of that instead!

Adam gets two things wrong. Why people read The Wheel of Time when they know it’s not that good and that it’s possible to “trade in” the WoT series for better books and get the same pleasure out of it. It isn’t wish fulfillment that made me read the first book and then kept me reading: it was the story and the way Jordan told it. And I know the writing is workmanlike at best, the plot not all that original and the padding, oy, the padding! But as I said in my own review of The Eye of the World, Jordan had me hooked from that first scene. It’s not something you can really analyse and it has little to do with literay qualities: you get it or you don’t. If you don’t get it, that’s no big deal; the world is full with better books, but you can’t substitute them for the story Jordan told and the world he created.

It’s always difficult to explain why you enjoy something: in the end it all comes down to “I like it because it’s fun”. What I like in epic fantasy in general and Jordan in particular is a bit of escapism, of losing myself in a story, preferably a long story. The writing doesn’t have to be good to do this, as long as it isn’t so bad it becomes noticable. This isn’t at all comparable to the pleasure I also get from a good science fiction novel or something clever and literary; much more visceral, less intellectual perhaps. It’s also the pleasure in worldbuilding I got from Jordan, the way he which took standard fantasy concepts and remade them over the course of the series. The Encyclopedia of Fantasy agrees with me on that, noting the “ingenuity with which standard plot devices, backgrounds and charachters are subjected to constant and sophisticated modification”. That’s a pleasure that for others may not be enough to struggle through the series, or the kind of pleasure somebody like Adam is looking for, which is okay. It’s just that you can’t recreate this pleasure with a different set of books; certainly not with Nabakov…

Cyberpastoralism

science fiction, sciencebollocks
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In what’s only an aside to his main post, Alex reveals his second thoughts about the slow burn revolution of decentralising technology:

I can’t help thinking, looking at a lot of the growing technology of instant urbanism (suitcase GSM base stations, palletised VSATs, Aggreko gensets, Sun Microsystems containerised data centres…) that a lot of this stuff might actually be a sort of negative toolkit of local optimisations.

RepRap isn’t on that list, but it should be part of this as well. All these technologies take something that you’d normally need a huge industrial complex for, scale them down to were they fit on the back of a lorry and make them independent of the infrastructure that their full scale counterparts depend on, therefore enabling sophisticated technology to be plunked down anywhere in the world without requiring anything but electricity. And even that can be provided independently, by using wind or solar power or diesel generators.

Alex calls it “instant urbanism”, but you could also call it cyberpastoralism: get all the tech benefits of living in the city without having to live in the city. There’s always been a strain of that in science fiction, a longing for the death of the city, for technology to advance to the point where a single household (or at best, a village) could provide everything we now need a global infrastructure for through magic replicator tech. In the fifties it was the flying car and fear of the a-bomb that would bring this about (cf. Simak’s City), in the eighties it was cyberspace and telecommuting and now we’re actually seeing a host of technologies maturing or almost maturing that look a lot like real versions of Star Trek replicators.

Of course even thinking about this for a moment makes you realise this independence is phony. You still need factories to manufacture these “suitcase GSM base stations, palletised VSATs, Aggreko gensets, Sun Microsystems containerised data centres” before they can be used and you still need the raw materials before those magickal RepRap machines can do anything, with everything that implies. All that changes is that people who can afford these toys can pretend to be rugged individualists independent from the rest of society, just like they now can pretend to rough it in the countryside in their expensive 4x4s and brand name survival kits.

In the real world the technologies Alex mentions are meant to be used as quick and dirty stop gaps, to work around the lack of a functioning infrastructure until a more permanent solution can be achieved. But when we see the US Army in all seriousness arguing for diesel generators to power Kandahar indefinately, something has gone wrong. Granted, the alternative of building a proper electricity network and getting power from the Kajaki Dam project and protecting both from the “Taliban” is problematic as well. But the choice for diesel is at heart a political one: it means “Afghanistan” has to buy foreign generators, foreign diesel and keeps the country tied to its donors, much more so than if a proper electricification programme is launched. Going the diesel route means Kandahar electricity production is outsourced to whoever wins the army contract — and the first thing you lose when outsourcing is control.

The visitors are our friends

Science, science fiction
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Stephen Hawking is skeptical:

Such scenes are speculative, but Hawking uses them to lead on to a serious point: that a few life forms could be intelligent and pose a threat. Hawking believes that contact with such a species could be devastating for humanity.

He suggests that aliens might simply raid Earth for its resources and then move on: “We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet. I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonise whatever planets they can reach.”

He concludes that trying to make contact with alien races is “a little too risky”. He said: “If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.”

That quote in the title is there not by accident; Hawking’s fears bear a remarkable resemblance to a certain mid-eighties television series of friendly aliens that turned out to be carnivorous lizards wanting to steal our water (and women). Hawking’s fears are just as realistic as V ever was. Anything Earth has can be had just as well elsewhere in the universe, you don’t need to raid us for raw materials. Now add to that the problems of traveling to us, in an universe which so far seems sadly devoid of easily usable FTL travel and the likelihood that we’ll have to deal with a Columbus type situation is vanishingly small.

Which doesn’t mean any sort of genuine, unambiguous alien contact won’t create a proper out of context problem for us. To have not just life, but intelligent life confirmed to exist elsewhere in the universe means as great a setback to our unique place in history as Copernicus’ insistence that the Earth revolves around the Sun and not the other way around. It will change everything, though probably not as melodramatically as most science fiction has it…

Sexual c*nt-honey

Art & Criticism, fantasy
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An early contender for the worst sex scene in literature 2010 award (Literature is used here in its widest possible meaning.):

She towered over him, aggressive, powerful, dominant, totally in charge, her jewelled hands on naked, swaying, circling hips, the smile of the jailer etched on her face as she eyed him like a cat eyes a cornered mouse. Saark’s gaze slowly strayed, from the sexual cunt-honey dripping from her quivering vulva, to the large rubies on the rings that circled her fingers.

From a very entertaining review of Andy Remic’s Kell’s Legend. Remic you may remember was last seen whinging about too many negative reviews; now we know why.