REAMDE

The dear blog wife and I have been sharing REAMDE by Neal Stephenson, reading by turns as the other tidies up. It's sort of extravagant, because we could each read it silently and do the chores and have time left over. But, we wouldn't share it.

We have found Neal Stephenson suits us. We made it through the entire Baroque trilogy (it certainly was Baroque) and Anathem (although she found it too ponderous). We have also read Harry Potter this way, and others. But Neal Stephenson is referring so widely that it's often necessary to have too brains and backgrounds to get all the marrow out.

REAMDE was huge and very enjoyable, but much less conceptual than much of his earlier work. It has been described as letting his hair down, but it might also be a strategic move back from the pure philosotainment precipice beyond Anathem. I was expecting more to come of the computer networks and games background to this. In fact, like Alistair Maclean crossed with PG Wodehouse crossed with Tolstoy or Proust (someone prolix), he gives an endlessly detailed adventure yarn with a big cast. One of the interesting effects of putting so much effort into the detail is that coincidences which might (maybe should) seem contrived start to seem inevitable. (This is the likeness to PG Woodhouse.)

I would have enjoyed a little more denoument performance, an interval of comedy longer than the scant pages he gives. It's not confusing or disappointing (which he has been in the past), but it is short. I wanted some afterplay, some of the story of how sorry Olivia and Seamus's bosses were, how Oprah got Zula on - just how everyone was celebrated. I guess I'm just not a real Forthrast.

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Who He? or The Rat Race

Alfred Bester, science-fiction novelist of note, wrote a non-science fiction novel called "Who He?" to very little acclaim.  It's a story set in the production of a New York-based variety TV show called (yes, eponymously, my tyrannical inner lexicographer) "Who He?" It was first published in 1953, and is set in that era.
 
Jordan Lennox is one of the creators of the show, and also the head writer.  Like the whole milieu he moves in, Jordan (aka Jake) is a poison-eater - psychologically dysfunctional in just the right way to take all the rubs, slights and cruelties of the business to heart and then turn it into good work.  But he has a number of problems - he's drinking heavily and having extended blackouts, and his show is under attack from a sinister letter writer called "Knott".  He has to deal with anxious stars, alcoholic actresses and all-powerful producers.  And then he runs into Gabby Valentine, and finds himself in love with her. Unfortunately, Gabby is a communist and married to Lennox's nemesis - and she's not a poison-eater: she is sanity itself.

The story is a psychological detective thriller, reminiscent of the Demolished Man.  Bester can't write uninterestingly, and he creates a coherent and oppressive world in this novel.  I think the things that stand between it and success are to do with the over-reaching psychoanalytical take on personality. The point of the novel is to confront poison-eating and put forward the alternative; but there is something a little cartoonish about people drawn in full, with their repetitions and tics and blind spots more present to us than they are to themselves and people they interact with.  This is probably uncomfortable because it is true - I shudder to think how transparent my need to be right and use the right words, my laziness and my ludicrously inflated sense of my own understanding is.

Bester's wife Rolly was a modestly successful actress and later an advertising executive and he was a New Yorker most of his life.  They had no children.  She predeceased Bester and he left his estate to his barman.

This Immortal

Roger Zelazny's 'This Immortal' made it into a list of the top hundred science fiction novels of all time.  It concerns the adventures of Conrad Nomikos, head of the Earth's department of Antiquities.  Of Greek background, Conrad is fiercely strong and something of a mutant - admitting quite early that he stopped aging between 30 and 40.  He still lives very largely in Greece.

But it is Greece post-Apocalypse - the world's great cities are now Hot Zones, peopled with fierce mutants and monsters. Vegans (striking blue folk from Vega) have intervened to take humans into their civilisation so that our kind might not disappear, and to marvel in horror at the  price of foolhardiness.  An important Vegan is to tour Earth, and Conrad acts as his escort. They have many adventures on the tour (which often reiterate ancient Greek myth) and Conrad has his hands full keeping the Vegan and himself alive.

This is a well constructed and enjoyable novel, but a pure entertainment.  A few light lessons in principles and possibilities, and a relatively interesting resolution, but no fundamental revisions.  It is a conservative story, a celebration of the long history of human being on the planet and a hope for long perseverance even after ecological catastrophe. Worth a look.

Surface Detail

Iain M Banks* writes so engagingly that reading his novels is always a pleasure.  Surface Detail returns to the Culture, one of a small number of Level 8 (referring to a top degree of technical accomplishment) civilisations in the galaxy. The galaxy is not short of less developed civilisations and has its own meta-civilisation with strict social rules about technology transfer and comportment.  The Culture is perhaps defined by it's willingness to go all out at 'being' - engineering Minds (vast machine intelligences that are worth billions of human lives) that long since took over the running the show, extending the powers of matter to its limits in this universe - while usually remaining very laid back about 'doing' anything in particular, and having as little as possible in the way of 'tending'.  But somehow, the Minds and the humans and the drones all seem to get along pretty well, and if you can't get along, well you have as many options as you can think of, money being no object, literally.

Relations with other civilisations are more complicated, are regulated through a Culture organisation called Contact, and are usually where the story-worthy material uccurs.  Within Contact, the usual heroes of these novels, the ships, drones and humans of Special Circumstances.  In Surface Detail, the trouble arises around the widespread galactic practice of preserving the minds of people after death in simulations.  Once discovered, the possibility of condemning the images of sentient minds captured in their 'soulkeeper' to eternal punishment seems attractive to many societies.  Many civilisations maintain large and expanding Hells of a very medieval sort, in Matrix-style worlds in processing substrate. For some reason, there is debate about this obscenity, and the debate has reached such a pitch that the Hells themselves have been declared appropriate space for the war to a finish on the issue.  The war has gone on for thirty years.

The losing side, the one that has been aiming to shut down Hell, has become desperate and attempts action in the Real, with the help of Veppers, a corrupt corporate Tyrant from a Level 3 or 4, a couple of Level 8 civilisations and a Level 6 civilisation that is modeling itself on the Culture, trying to do what it thinks the Culture wants - in fact, offering the sincerest form of flattery.  While the Culture is against the Hells, it is careful about imposing values on other civilisations, and more than careful because there are a bunch of other Level 8s and they all have to agree on how to proceed.  The heroine, Lededje Y'breq, begins as an intagliated prize of Veppers - tattooed inside and out, her very DNA altered to imprint her flesh as the property of Veppers thanks to his betrayal of his oldest friend, her father.  Her native Sichult is a place that believes in punishment.

The themes Banks is playing with here are crime, revenge and punishment. Alongside these is 'surface detail' - and its significance is still a question for me.  Given the interest in simulation and reality throughout, surface detail makes sense as an issue is of interest to conscious beings looking to understand their world - it is repeated in the tattoo, the quality of simulation. The cover design is a fractal, the Mandelbrot set - defined in a simple algorithm, yet the most complicated possible 2D shape. Is the idea here that the Hells are an organising principle, a fractal algorithm for the societies that need them?  That abusive power is the final texture in those societies - that no relationship occurs without tincture of power?

Two confrontations stand out - Veppers confronts the Culture ambassador and the worlds collide: his world of abusive power, and her world of contentment and peace. This moment is small enough, but pivotal, providing insight into all the major players.

The second is Lededje confronting an old lover who tells her gently that Love is not Enough. I think the way this rankles expresses the secret essence of the Culture, hidden behind all the surface detail: that the Culture is founded on the idea that Love is Enough.  The Minds of the Culture enjoy themselves in their immense fashion, but they also make great sacrifices to remain engaged with humans, sometimes ultimate sacrifices. This is belied by the relish with which Banks has all his Culture people & Minds squabble with each other, and his interest in the fringe, the Contact section, in which the people are a bit edgier than the Culture mainstream. But I think the secret constitution of the Culture must be Love.

The problem he raises but cheats in resolving is that some people do deserve punishment and the Real can't be relied on to administer justice - indeed the opposite is probably true for most of us (those who read and write blogs). Sometime its not even just people, its the entire civilisation.  The point of the Hells is to torture, and the point I expected him to be making is that Torture is Wrong - it isn't made significantly worse when applied to the weak or the moral, or carried out by the immoral, because in its face all are weak but relatively righteous, ad beyond its practice no one can remain righteous.  He went to some pains to set up a range of problems and to narrate the awful reality of Hell, but in the end the Culture wins thanks to the strength of an Abominator class vessel with psychopathy on tap.  The Hells become an object of disgust to most of the civilisations that used to operate them once they have the chance to try their civilisation without that threat, but the Abominator doesn't mind administering punishment. Apparently Culture principles of merciful treatment of fellow sentients are not Enough in the Real.

For Banks trainspotters (he invites it) look out for the return of a long lost SC agent. This may be a habit - certainly there was another one in Matter.  There are also major subplots that apparently come to nothing, just carrying a variety of interesting exposition - the treacheries of the SC agent in question, the involvement of the Bulbitians with the sublimed, and the Nauptre Reliquaria as a potential nemesis of the Culture.  I would like to think that these extraneous bits will one day add up to something, perhaps the revelation of the cause of the eventual demise of the Culture revealed in Look to Windward.  While this might be satisfying, I fear it may be too much to ask - these overconstrained plots, with too many players, have happened up before (in Excession, for example).  For all the annoyance of structural redundancy, Banks' writing is so smooth and pleasurable, and his idyllic world of the Culture so pleasant, that I will certainly be lining up again.

*probably the second best M Banks, after Rosy, but well ahead of the others.

Kanye West's MBDTF

Kanye West’s ‘My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy’ has rightly been praised as one of the better big albumns of the year, and rightly condemned as a voicing of some really loathsome bigotry toward women – but no one told me how sad it was.  It’s possible I’m projecting from my own life, or from my sadness for Kanye, but to me its dominant tone is grief of a specific kind – world collapse and its corollary - invalidation of self. 

The first track, Dark Fantasy, is about living the dream of money, power and girls and the refrain is ‘Can we get much higher?’ – ‘the plan was to drink until the painsover, but what’s worse, the pain or the hangover?’.

Second is Gorgeous: ‘ain’t no question if I want it, I need it.’ The ungroundedness of wealth – if I want it, I need it.

Power: ‘No one man should have all this power – 21^st Century Schizoid Man.’  ‘Now this’ll be a beautiful death – jumpin’ out the window, lettin’ everything go.’ ‘You got power to let power go?’  Kanye as superman who’s power has left him alienated, suicidal.

All of the lights: ‘turn up the lights in here baby, extra bright I want y’all to see this, flash cars, shooting stars, cop lights, flash lights, strobe lights, street lights, ghetto university’ – a sexual chorus, but lyrics of tragedy – death of Michael Jackson, domestic violence, conviction imprisonment, ‘restraining order, can’t see my daughter, we met at Border’s.’  The sexual tone is masking the embarrassing horror, the vulgarity of the daily tragedy of life in the real world.

Monster: ‘gossip gossip, nigger just stop it everybody know I’m a mf-in monster.’  A sequence of guests expand on the theme, but the thesis is there.  Refrain: ‘I, I, crossed the line/lime (-light), and I’ll let god decide. I’ll last these shows, so I’m headed home.’ Again, Kanye & co as monsters – the unintelligible, the inhumanly ferocious.

Ridiculous: Meaningless, meaningless, says Kanye. So appalled.  ‘Niggers out of work and I’d rather speak somethin’ with purp’  ‘Champagne dishes, dirty white bitches.’ The gulf between everyday life for buyers of this albumn (schlubs like me!) and Kanye & co appals him.

Runaway: ‘I always find something wrong, you’ve been putting up with my shit for way too long, and I think its time for us to have a toast, let’s have a toast for the douchebags, let’s have a toast for the scumbags, let’s have a toast for the jerk-offs that never take work off.  Baby I’ve got a plan, runaway fast as you can.’  ‘Find pictures in my email, sent this bitch a picture of my dick, Don’t know what it is with females but I not too good at that shit.’ - A song of mourning about the destructive attitudes and behaviour that makes up many of the other songs.

Hell of a Life: ‘I think I fell in love with a porn star, married in a bathroom, honeymoon on the dance floor and divorced by the end of the night, that’s one hell of a life.’ A song of love for alienated sex.

Blame Game:  ‘Let’s play the blame game.  You ain’t perfect but you made life worth it, stick around some real feelings might surface.’  Includes a de-edifying ‘sketch’ dialogue between an interloping ‘neighbourhood nigger’ and a Yeezy girl with an impoverished personality.

I’m lost in the world.  A heady, ecstatic trance chorus about partying, that offers forecasts on if we die...

Who will survive in America? – a spoken word poem in the beat poet vein about the great lie of America, the independence day that allowed citizen wealth to continue to depend on slave labour, and the freedom from responsibility for the effects of past crimes that makes the environment in America more hostile to black men than, for example, China.

See me now: I love it though, I love it though, you know?  Interestingly this is a second track 1 in iTunes, as if Who will survive in America was the conclusion of the matter, and this is the beginning of Kanye’s settling for this life, declining to suffer for it any more, now that everyone sees him.

I read recently that Kanye’s mother (joyfully thanked and celebrated on Late Registration, a Black college professor of English and latterly Kanye’s manager) died quite tragically in 2008 after inadvisable (and unnecessary) surgery.  This albumn seems tonally connected to me, to an experience of loss that is maybe like that.  The ground has vanished, and the new world can only substitute the most primitive satisfaction. Not only do you have no love in your life, the world in which love was meaningfully possible has shown itself insubstantial, failing, and you’re lost in the world.  You can lose your mother like this without her death – physical death is not really the thing at all.

This albumn is (as he says himself) ‘inner city anthems based on inner city tantrums’ and I think this blog has a small enough readership (no offense, readership) that I can suggest that perhaps what is going on with all the shocking lyrics and videos and self-pity is that Kanye wants his bottom smacked?