What I just read: Klara and The Sun

So, I just finished Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro, and it’s fine? I remember that there was a lot of fanfare when it came out and I sorta see why. Ishiguro does a really good job of rendering the thought process of a person who had difficulty properly understanding how humans work or think and seeing Klara work through how human social interactions and spaces work is pretty interesting.

I do have to say that the fact that Klara is mostly an watcher (it’s commented on many times that she has really good “observational abilities”) means that often the book felt like watching the story happen while Klara made her commentary. While Klara isn’t really passive character, she’s definitely at the whims of the other characters from her owner Josie to Josie’s mother to the housekeeper. Klara’s main drives come from her worship of the Sun and her battle with Pollution, childish notions that contrast with how the rest of the world is falling apart in big and small ways. I do see how much work into maintaining that line between what Klara understands and cares about and what an (hah) observant audience can read into what’s going on.

Still, the main theme of the story, I think, is to keep hope even as things change around you. Klara keeps her faith as close and as secret as a birthday wish, and it’s sweet to see how much she cares about those around her, but unfortunately this isn’t a story about a machine intelligence reaching a higher level of understanding. It’s the story of a child too simple to understand the wider world, doing her best to save those she can even as her sacrifices and efforts are, at best, ill-thought out.

in other news:

• I’ve finished marking up Book 2 before publishing it as a physical copy. Apparently it needs a total rewrite, so that’ll be fun
• It’s been really hot in Seattle. Not normally news, but I legit couldn’t think it was so hot
• Next book club book is The City We Became by N. K. Jemisin. I haven’t reread it yet. I’m kinda scared it’s not as good as I remember

What I just read

I just read Planetfall by Emma Newman. While I found the main character and her mental condition interesting, I found the other characters and the setting to be underwhelming. I did learn that I have very little patience for transparently unreliable narrators though; before the 25% point, I pulled up the Wikipedia page on the book and read the plot so that I didn’t have to wait for the author to dole out the information.

I’m not sure I can recommend the book. There are three more books in the series and I’m not going to read them because the actual world wasn’t that interesting.

Skyborn by David Dalglish is okay

I generally liked Skyborn. The pacing was pretty good and the characters were engaging. I found it to be a mix of Hunger Games and James Patterson’s Maximum Ride as it used a “there’s a core of evil” from the former and the “people with wings” from the latter. Dalglish did a good job rendering the battle scenes and their 3d combat. I think my main complaint is that the finale felt kinda random and honestly effected side character far more than our POV characters (vague ’cause spoilers). I feel like instead of having two characters on the same side, it’d be better to have them be on opposite sides, which would make the world feel wider than it was. It’s similar to the same problem Harry Potter has with everyone being in Gryffindor; all the other houses feel less distinct in constrast.

Overall I recommend the book, but I’m not sure I want to continue. I read a sample for the sequel Fireborn, and I think I’ll wait a bit before reading it.

The Lions of Al-Rassan: a book I won’t finish

The Lions of Al-Rassan is a 1995 next to zero magic historical fantasy novel by Guy Gavriel Kay. It’s set in an alternate version of Spain under the Moors, complete with alternate versions of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, and the story retells the ending of the Christian reconquest of Spain through the lens of two generals on opposite of the war.

At least that’s what the Wikipedia page told me. As the title states, I’m not going to finish this novel.

Spoilers below

I Read Network Effect by Martha Wells

I feel like the Murderbot Diaries are fun clinics on how to manage your own feelings and eventually admit that you like people. Murderbot would love quarantine, even though it would be bad for it in the long term.

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom By Cory Doctorow

    Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is a short science fiction novel released by Cory Doctorow in 2003. It’s set in a post-scarcity world where people can freely make full backups of their consciousness and memories, which can be downloaded into new bodies when they die. Also money and governments as we know them are gone and have been replaced with ad hoc organizations that trade in Whuffie, which is a measure of one’s reputation. The novel’s narrator and main character is Julius, who gets murdered as part of a plot to take over Disney World’s Haunted Mansion. The novel is told from his latest version, who lacks the memories of his murder.

I don’t like this novel.

My first problem is with the novel’s assumption that a clone of a person that has a copy of that person’s memory is the same person. I believe that the metaphor is that the human brain is like a computer’s hard drive and when I restore a backup of one computer into a new one, I get the same computer. I did some light research to see if I could understand the justification behind this belief and found the following quote.

“Many believe a copy is simply a secondary, inferior entity designed by a creator. Others think a copy is useful only in terms of the creator’s ability to use the copy, such as growing a body and harvesting its organs for medical reasons.

Then there are people like me, who believe a copy is just as much me, as I am it.” –https://qz.com/1616187/transhumanist-science-will-reshape-what-it-means-to-be-human/

To nitpick, the quote uses a false trichotomy, listing two sets of people who have no regard for the complete clone and then setting up the author as the kinder, more rational person. However, I think there’s a fourth position (among many) that you could take: that the complete clone of you is their own person. I think this story is using memories to proxy the soul, something that cannot be physically proven, and that that is required to accept that the Julian we’re listening to is the same Julian who was murdered. That belief is in fact a founding tenet of the Bitchun Society, the bounding social contract of Julian’s world. Multiple times, Julian states that the Society won out by default since all of its detractors just died, never accepting the clone/upload tech as a viable form of revivification. That didn’t sit right with me. While it’s obvious that some people like the article’s author above would believe that a clone would be the same as the cloned, I don’t think accepting that would be a prerequisite to accepting the technology. You’re giving people the ability to carry their ideas forward into the future as untainted as possible without the messy randomness of having a child; narcissists would have a field day. Thankfully, that’s not the crux of the mystery.

In this future, governments and corporations have given way to adhocracies, arbitrary groups of people who work towards common goals. Disney World is run by multiple adhocracies, which regulate themselves using Whuffie, a currency that is generated by other people’s regard for you. Basically if you have more Whuffie, you can take more of any limited resource. These two systems, adhocracies and Whuffie, are where most of the drama of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom comes from since Julian, a unlikable and abrasive man, has to navigate both in order to get what he wants.

There is a fourth concept, one that is a logical extension of how revival works in this society. If an individual no longer wants to experience things in real time, they can opt out of being placed into a new body and leave instructions to wake them up later at an arbitrary time and place. This is called deadheading, and it is really not that interesting.

Let’s switch to the characters.

There are three characters who matter: Julian, his friend Dan, and his girlfriend Lil. Julian is around 100 years old and has experiences across multiple bodies. His story begins with him working on Disney World’s Haunted Mansion. He likes it there; between Lil and his work, he has nothing to complain about. Dan is Julian’s best friend from his college days and has been spending the past few decades proselytizing to the last few holdouts on earth. With his work done, he wants to die, claiming that death is the last things he’s done. Finally, Lil is a measure of how much leeway Julian has, a physical representation of Julian’s fluctuating Whuffie values. Since she was born in Disney World, she was Julian’s in to the close knit community that lives there and, being much more likable than him, smooths over his social shortcomings.

Julian is the second thing I don’t like about this book. He reminds me of an engineer who’s competent enough to become project lead but hasn’t ever learned how to treat to people like people. After his murder, he’s impulsive and short sighted, spending zero time trying to get people on his side despite the fact that that is literally what this society runs on. He immediately takes on the task of trying to thwart the conspiracy against him by himself, pushing away Lil and running roughshod over everyone else. As the situation deteriorates, we learn more about Julian’s past relationship with a woman he met in space and who decided to erase him from her memory completely. Julian is aware of his shortcomings but does nothing to address them. I suspect this is part of the satire, but I don’t think watching a man-child throwing a tantrum because he doesn’t want things to change or ask for help is funny at all.

Also it was Dan who had Julian murdered. Turns out he wanted to go out on a high note (read have a lot of Whuffie), and he worked with Julian’s rivals to have him killed. I guess this is a twist; Certainly, Julian didn’t expect it, but Julian was way more concerned about “protecting” Disney World anyway, and even when he knows, he just kinda goes, “he’s my best friend. I forgive him.” Besides, it was in Julian’s best interest to leave.

The end of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom finishes with Julian leaving Disney World, watching his friend Dan go to sleep until the end of everything, and going to space with his murderer. When I got to the end, I wondered what the point of it all was. In my summary earlier, I skipped over the fact that Julian is unable to make backups as it barely mattered to Julian. Between that and Dan’s “death”, you’d think this story was discussing mortality, but ultimately both the story and Julian care more about his position at Disney World than about the idea that he could really truly die (or from his point of view, forget everything after being murdered). The other day I read a GoodReads review that said this book asks whether or not morality and mortality were connected, but I don’t really see that question being asked. Instead it really seems to be about pride. It’s pride that leads Dan to have Julian murdered, pride that leads Julian down his self-destructive path, and pride that prevents Julian from activating a new clone with his memories because he believes he’s the only one who can do the work that needs to be done. Sure he also doesn’t want to lose his last memories of Dan, but he would have avoided that problem if he’d gone to the doctor sooner rather than later.

In conclusion, I think there’s a lot to think, if not to actually like, about Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. From what I’ve researched, there are a lot of references, both to other sci fi works like Snow Crash and to Disney World itself. Having never read the former and only visited the latter once, I can’t really comment on any of that, but I know that getting obscure references is a unique pleasure. Also I read that this book is a satire. If it is, I didn’t get it, which either means the book is highly successful in that regard or a flop. Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is available for free on Cory Doctorow’s website, but despite that and its length, I don’t recommend it. Instead, if you’re looking for an exploration of transhumanism I suggest Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan, who leans into the weirdness of transhumanism much harder. If you’re looking for a story that tackles post-scarcity world then… you’re on your own. The only thing I can think of is Star Trek.

Additional Reading

• “Could You Upload Your Mind into a Computer?” – Philosophy Tube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmXaMNE70g0)

 

An Unkindness of Magicians by Kat Howard

   An Unkindness of Magicians by Kat Howard is a perfectly serviceable urban fantasy book. The main character Sydney is a powerful magician aiming to gain power by winning the House tournament and achieve top status in the world of magic. Or is she?

I found the plot to eventually be serviceable though a lot for a first book. Starting with a tournament is a bold move considering that the prize, control of the World of Magic, is a pretty vague goal for a first book. Usually tournament arcs are some ways into a series after the characters and world have been established and during a bit of downtime between more important plot points. For example, the Triwizard Tournament in JK Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire happens in the fourth book in the series long after Harry and his friends’ personalities have been established. The tournament represents a change up, rather than the norm. By starting with a tournament in the first book, Kat Howard has to set up a world, establish characters and convince the audience that the tournament is important all at the same time. She pulls it off, but I wish we had a change to either get deeper into the pasts of the characters first before having to care about having to save the whole world.

The setting of the book is a little lackluster outside of a couple of the Houses, which are sentient magical entities. The story takes place in New York, but it took me more than half the book to figure that out as the flavor of the city was hardly there. I honestly thought it took place in London because of how the characters acted and talked. That said the Houses are a pretty cool idea. Each House is tied to its Lord or Lady and changes itself to fit their needs. This allows Howard’s the main character Sydney to show not only what she’s giving up in service of her ultimate goal, but how it hurts others. The attempts of a House to please someone who doesn’t want anything to do with it is touching.

With the setting feeling generic and the plot feeling cookie-cutter, it’s up to the characters to express the theme of the book. The main idea is that magic takes sacrifice in order to use, but the power that be have created a system where the sacrifice is borne not by the magician but by those who have been abducted by the House of Shadows. It’s an effective critique of how humans are okay with hurting people in service of their goals if they don’t actually see the people getting hurt. Sydney, as a former member of the House of Shadows and a former sacrifice, represents retribution and the opportunity to step away from the system. Both of the villains focus on sacrificing even more people in order to preserve their own, one of them taking to killing young women to achieve this. I found this engaging and honestly the best part of the book.

I liked An Unkindness of Magicians and appreciate that it told a whole story instead of just setting up for a sequel.

 

Too Like the Lighting by Ada Palmer

Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer is an ambitious start to a four book speculative fiction epic. It describes a world with fast cheap travel, a taboo against the expression of gender and religion and the abolishment of national borders and asks how society would change as a result. The narrator Mycroft Canner fills the book with details about the three levels of law (Black, Grey, and White), the top five Hives (borderless nations) and the ministry that holds it all together. With so much to think about, my book club had a grand old time talking about the implications of each idea and what it would mean to live in such a world. It was a good conversation.

Too bad I hated the book.

The narrator and main character, Mycroft Canner, is a former serial killer and troubleshooter for the world’s elite and he’s the primary reason why I hated the book. Long before the book club selected Too Like the Lightning, I actually downloaded a sample since I found the title so interesting. It opened with the following:

You will criticize me, reader, for writing in a style six hundred years removed from the events I describe, but you came to me for explanation of those days of transformation which left your world the world it is, and since it was the philosophy of the Eighteenth Century, heavy with optimism and ambition, whose abrupt revival birthed the recent revolution, so it is only in the language of the Enlightenment, rich with opinion and sentiment, that those days can be described.

He was right. I barely tolerate 19th century style writing from the likes of Charles Dickens; reading that style from a present day book set in the distant future was too much for me so I moved on, not bothering to read past the 10 page sample. When I read it for book club, I found that my initial impression was correct; Mycroft Canner is very fond of odd turns of phrases, its complicated world, and, most annoyingly, Voltaire, whose name I only barely remembered. Looking him up in Wikipedia afterwards, I read that he’s credited with the development of free speech and was fond of criticizing the Catholic church, which explains why religion is banned. While Mycroft tries to sell me on the man and his work, it felt like I was reading the work of a poser. Palmer’s writing is impressive; she renders Mycroft Canner very well.

If the pseudo-archaic style were it, I’d would been only annoyed with the story, but the writing adds further complications. On occasion, Palmer changes points of view as Mycroft gets other people to write for him, guesses what people were doing out of his sight, or, the worst yet, argues with an invisible reader over word choice. That last does a stellar job of turning me off the work even when I’ve finally settled in. It’s jarring to be in the middle of a scene and then end up reading a long passage about whether or not to call a character a witch. While the arguments do a good job of characterizing Mycroft as defensive and high minded, it breaks my flow in a way that feels somewhat indulgent.

In the first paragraph, I mentioned that expressions of gender were taboo in the world of Too Like the Lightning. This fact frustrates Mycroft who decides (using the excuse of his archaic style) to assign genders to characters based on how masculine or feminine he feels they are in that moment, often switching pronouns for certain characters. This tendency is the most controversial part of the book. As a CIS gendered man, I’ve only occasionally had the experience of someone guessing that I was female instead of male, but only based on reading my name, which is ambiguously gendered to most Americans, and never in person. For trans people though, it’s a different story. Imagine reading a whole book where a man spends the whole book assigning gender to people regardless of what they feel or think while living in a world where that exact thing happens to your face. It’s appalling. The best explanation that I’ve heard is that Mycroft’s habits are derived from how he was raised. That’s a spoiler though, so I won’t go into detail here.

Too Like the Lightning is filled with ideas. In addition to what I mentioned already, there’s a child with the ability to bring toys to life, a group of people who have had their senses trained from birth to do math, and an esoteric mystery involving a list of names. With the world filled to the brim, the plot actually doesn’t go anywhere for large sections of the book. The fact that this is only the first half of a book that was split into too is imminently clear when the ending arrives and nothing has been resolved. If you like those idea, enjoy the writing and/or just want to see where it all goes, I think you’ll have a good time with the book. The work is ambitious and Palmer should be commended for bringing all of those idea together in a coherent way. I just can’t read anymore of Mycroft’s thoughts.

 

Armada By Ernest Cline

I was out of town when my book club read Ready Player One by Ernest Cline, but I did listen to what they said afterwards. According to them, the book is filled with dozens of pop culture references, the main character is the worst example of a chosen one, and the side characters are stereotyped paper cut outs. The book was popular among people who were nostalgic for the 1980’s and who could remember all of the references. So after that I didn’t really want to read Armada, but when my mother read it, I decided to pick it up despite her warnings.

And yeah, all of Ready Player One’s criticisms apply to Armada too.

Our hero is Zack Ulysses Lightman, a high school senior who plays the titular video game Armada religiously. His long dead fathet left him a ton of 1980’s memorabilia (including a whole car) and a crazy theory stating that all of entire science fiction from Star Wars to Transformers was created in order to prepare humanity for an upcoming alien invasion. There are interesting routes from that starting point. Zach could learn more about his father while following his clues. He could have worked with his mother to prove his father right. He could have acted on this information. Instead he does nothing and an impossible ship lands in front of his school without him having to lift a finger.

Ernest Cline’s writing style is to shove in pop culture references where actual metaphor and emotional description should be, and the first quarter of the book is particularly rife with clumsy similes and awful nostalgia. For example, after seeing an alien ship hovering outside his classroom window, Zach returns home and, before going inside, states that “he felt like Luke Skywalker standing in front of the tree on Dagobah.” The first question I had was “what does that mean?”. Sure Luke was feeling anxious as his mentor had told him that he would find himself in the scary tree, but Zach was going home to his beautiful mother (Cline makes sure that we understand that). That’s just the one I could remember. Over and over again, Cline’s reliance on movie references forced me to put down the book multiple times and recovered from the whiplash. To be fair, there’s a style of writing that uses real world brands like Coca-cola and Toyota to add verisimilitude to writing, but people only occasionally communicate in brands. When Zach’s boss starts talking about his IPhone instead of just calling it a phone and when Zach keeps referring to his car by it’s full year and make, the constant calls to reality just wear me down. Luckily when the aliens attack, the pop culture references die down as story specific jargon (which are only sometimes 1980’s references) takes their place.

That’s not to say that pop culture references don’t have their place. There’s a cute moment when Zach’s mother imitates Gandalf and shouts “you shall not pass” in order to keep him from leaving. It’s something I can imagine my own mother doing, and it emphasizes how such things are used in the real world: to communicate complicated ideas with short hand. Unfortunately moments like that are undermined by Zach’s constant use of them, dulling the effect of the ones that really work. Of course then the characters would need to be filled out more. Once you remove the references from Zach, you’re left with a kid who has a dead dad, a lot of money (from the dead dad’s settlement), anger issues, and a lot of video game experience. The secondary characters are a little better.

I will give Cline some credit; he knows how to subvert expectations. The gamers in the novel are not all like Zach as there’s ethnic, gender, age, and queer diversity in there, and I was pleasantly surprised to find it, though the novel was half over by the time they showed up. Each of these characters has the core of potential that’s wasted by how Cline uses them. Early on Zach points out a bully and his ex girlfriend. They are not important, just details that really add nothing to Zach. We’re introduced to Zach’s two best friends and a boss he really likes, but they are sidelined for the entire middle of the book in favor of a new romantic interest that the aforementioned diverse cast of gamers. It’s annoying because as one of the top ten players of Armada in the world, Zach should have been part of a pretty close knit community, but instead whole casts of characters are cycled in and out, making impossible to get attached to any of them. This extends to the romantic interest, who only shows up in the second quarter and then disappears for a quarter of the book and makes a cameo in the last few pages. She doesn’t drive the plot or sits at the emotional heart of the story where Zach’s father resides.

That leaves the plot. While the book opens with the question of whether or not Zach is going made, it decides that badly written Ender’s Game is what we wanted instead. It manages to up the tension with a pretty good video game action scene full of tension and excitement (it even explains the stakes pretty well), but it comes after a pointless day at school, a lecture from Zach’s mother, and a whole lot of pop culture references. By placing that scene first, the story’s stakes, tension, and theme would have come into focus a lot earlier and the heightened tension would have bought time for Zach to exposit his little heart out about his dad. The second quarter of the book is burdened with a pointless romantic subplot and way too much exposition that honestly was covered in the video game scene. More character interactions would have worked better here, giving Zach something to do while the main conflict ramps up, but sure a description of a video narrated by Carl Sagan works.

So those are my criticisms of Armada. I do not recommend it. I do recommend Skyward (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyward_(novel)) by Brandon Sanderson, Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card and the X Wing series by Micheal Stackpole and Aaron Alliston. All those have tensions, space, aliens, and characters who feel like real human beings.

 

And I’m done!

Too Like The Lightning is definitely not my kind of read. I’ll write an essay on it later