varunnangia.com

Playing the Electric Violin is hard. Make sure the conductor gives you a good shoulder massage after.

It’s rare for me to find modern “classical” music that I like. Some time ago, the National Symphony Orchestra decided to perform a piece called Sacred Crap Heart Explosion before Beethoven’s Ninth, that triggered me to boo for the first time in my entire life at a music event of any kind. So I was reluctant in the extreme to see the Met perform John Adams’ Doctor Atomic in the 2008-2009 season – modern music, bah! Gladly, I was wrong about Doctor Atomic, and despite the Met’s wrong-headed attempt to reduce the “shock” value of hanging a giant nuclear weapon above a baby’s crib, I loved it and picked up John Adams’ Doctor Atomic Symphony pretty much as soon as it came out: “All the music and none of the wailing? What’s not to like!”

On Thursday, I had a chance to watch John Adams conduct the Doctor Atomic Symphony along with three other pieces – the four Sea Interludes from Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes, Adams’ own Dharma at Big Sur, and Stravinsky’s Feu d’Artifice. I have come to like, but not entirely enjoy, Peter Grimes – having seen it performed twice in as many years now, I’ve felt the music has often played a distant secondary role to the drama of the gritty title character, and it was refreshing to hear to the pieces played separately from the ever present story. It’s a testament to Britten’s talent as a composer that I could hear the discord and the guilt and shame that Grimes carried with him in these instrumental interludes. What did not work so well was Adams’ conducting. Having heard it twice live and several different recordings of it, I found it to be far too slow, bordering on the ponderous. There was also the minor matter of Adams being a bar or more ahead of the orchestra at times – he’d cue a huge and thunderous noise, only to have more than a couple of seconds pass before the orchestra responded. Alas. Where he and the orchestra were in sync, though, the music was magnificent – the third Interlude, Moonlight, was done especially well.

I’ve never heard Dharma at Big Sur before, which appears to have been an accidental oversight – my immediate reaction to hearing it was “I don’t think I’ve ever heard an Indian raga being played on an electric violin before” and I enjoyed almost all of it. I did feel that the work ssstttrrreeetttccchhheeeddd just a wee bit long in part, but I think it’s a tribute to Adams’ skill that he has managed to combine two essentially uncombinable styles of music into a whole that is delightfully light, yet deeply moving. The electric violin solo by Leila Josefowicz fell into the deeply moving portion of the program – and can I just take a second here to note: SQUEAL an ELECTRIC VIOLIN HOW COOL SQUEAL. I think I have a new favourite instrument. Dharma is definitely going on my list of music to buy. After a short intermission came the odd Stravinsky piece which … simply did not fit the program. Feu d’Artifice is short orchestral piece that was conducted perfunctorily and then it was… done. Good. Onwards.

Adams introduced Doctor Atomic Symphony, as he did Dharma by giving some insight and background into why he wrote the piece. He also showed a video from Doctor Atomic‘s signature piece that climaxes Act I, Batter My Heart from John Donne’s Holy Sonnet XIV, sung expertly by Gerald Finley as J. Robert Oppenheimer, to give the audience, which seemed to be less than familiar with the opera, a chance to see the piece with lyrics. Herein, I find a problem. I’m trying to describe to you with words how powerful Doctor Atomic Symphony is. Just like the opera before it, the symphony is one of the most terrifying pieces of music I have ever heard and I love it for putting me on the edge. The tension that begins at the end of the third movement that eventually becomes the instrumental Batter My Heart, sent chills down my spine. It is, for lack of a better way of putting it, a musical masterpiece of Lovecraftian horror, the tension palpable in every note. It is truly one of the most remarkable (and listenable!) pieces of music I have ever had the pleasure of hearing. If you haven’t heard it, Nonesuch released it on CD and MP3 last year and I urge you to go buy it or listen to it – or of course, you could go tonight or tomorrow night to hear it played by NSO again.

How far into the future have you thought or dreamt about? A decade? Fifty years? One hundred years? A thousand years? I think that’s about my limit of how far out I’ve thought about the future – wondering what the world might look like in 2999 in 1999, I had a heady feeling that we would all be either immortal – or there wouldn’t be an earth left. So, when Alastair Reynolds begins House of Suns with a deliberately ambiguous timeframe, I was sure that the story wasn’t set more than a thousand years or so in the future. And it’s true – parts of the story are in fact set in the beginning of the fourth millennium CE, taking place on a vast torus of asteroids and bodies circling the sun at a distance of about a half a light hour. But the majority of the story takes place 32 circuits in the future. And how long, you ask now, is a circuit? Well, let’s put it to you this way.

Sometime about a thousand years in to the future, humanity splits into two major factions: those that choose to remain gravity well-bound, choosing to establish civilizations on planets and planetary systems, and those who choose not to re-enter the gravity well – and spend years touring the galaxies in guilds known as lines – the Gentian Line, also known as the House of Flowers, is one such line from which we are introduced to two characters: Campion and Purslane, the characters around which the story of House of Suns revolves. The business of all the Lines, organized into cartel known as the Commonality, is to care for the planet-bound civilizations as they rise and fall, and the business of the Gentian Line, in particular, is to ensure that stars close to inhabited systems do not destroy these worlds when the stars explode, or supernova. The galaxy is mostly empty – organic life has all evolved from humans, which have adapted themselves in infinite ways to suit their local planets, or systems, or ships, and machines are all descended from the development of current-day human computers and artificial intellect. There is, however, one rather weird thing: the Andromeda Galaxy, our closest neighbouring galaxy, is missing. For all practical purposes, the galaxy is there – but it can’t be seen from anywhere inside the Milky Way. Since the discovery of this Absence, a project called the Vigilance has been organized to watch over the Absence and try to understand why the Andromeda is missing, and by whom or what agency, the galaxy disappeared. Reynolds excels at Lovecraftian horror. With Revelation Space, there’s the frightening disappearing of worlds. With House of Suns, it’s the frightening disappearance of an entire galaxy. Civilizations rise and fall, lives are begun and ended, as the Vigilance continues to watch what has happened with Andromeda and try to make sense of it. It’s fascinating, and utterly frightening.

So, circuits. Well, Lines are households composed of about a thousand individuals each; each individual is called a shatterling. You’ll find out why they’re called that pretty soon into the book, and it makes excellent sense. Each Lines’ shatterlings takes their ship, usually alone, and proceeds to do charitable work for the Line, acting in accordance with Commonality’s belief that it is their duty to help planet-bound civilizations. The nigh immortal shatterling takes a round of the galaxy, helping where possible – called a circuit – and then returning every so many years for a reunion of the Line – an event called the Thousand Nights. On average, a circuit is about 200,000 years long, and a reunion lasts just three. And the story, to save you the math, is thus taking place about 6.4 million years into the future, at the event of one of the reunions. Or at least, that’s where it starts – it goes on from there.

Reading this book, I had the feeling I occasionally have when I’ve very very sick – this feeling that I’m falling head first off a cliff – but for entirely different reasons. For one thing, One Million CE is a mind-boggling distance away into the future. For another, 6.4 Million CE is the equivalent of the entirety of human evolution. I’ve always known the universe is a big place, and traveling around the universe takes time, but it doesn’t strike me how mind bogglingly large the universe is, until I read stories like this where the distance and time scales boggle my mind. The only other book I’ve read where I’ve had this feeling is Arthur C. Clarke’s Rama Revealed, as various members of the des Jardins-Wakefield family are being split up and told to say their goodbyes as the distances between them are about to grow immense. While Reynolds does a fantastic job tying up the loose ends of this novel in a way that he doesn’t in Revelation Space, I almost enjoyed some of the mysteries in that series more because they went unexplained. It also left a lot of room to grow the universe, while this novel is pretty much done and going to stand alone: he had a story to tell and he’s told it, though you may not realize he’s done when you read the last sentence.

I’m not going to tell you much of the plot of the story, because it really is that good. It will tie up nicely at the end, if you’re looking for that, with almost all of the explanations forthcoming. Those mysteries without explanations are minor at best, so if you do not like loose ends in your novels, this is for you, my friend. You do get dumped into the novel in the middle of all the action, so you might be frustrated until you understand how all the parts are connected and how the terms all match up, but it’s not like a Neal Stephenson novel where every third word is new and people like it for that obtuseness. All I can say is, don’t be surprised if after reading it, you’re not in the mood for some space travel, immediately.

Yesterday was supposed to be Nokia’s big day. After losing market- and mind-share to nimbler, newer competitors like Apple, Research in Motion and Google, yesterday was supposed to be the launch day for Ovi Store, Nokia’s answer to RIM’s AppWorld, Google’s Android Market and Apple’s App Store, as well as Microsoft’s upcoming Skymarket. All of these essentially boil down to something I’ve been saying for a while, starting with my experience with Maemo 4.0: you can build all the potential into the platform from the get-go, but if you don’t provide end-users with an easy way to access the potential through applications (not packages!), there’s no point in building that potential in. So, I woke up yesterday, eager to try out the Ovi Store and, boy… what a day it was.

For the first 16 or so hours, though, I was sure that the Ovi Store was going to fail just because people would give up on trying to use it. After the first 16 hours, I am sure that it will be a modest success, but only if Nokia steps up and monitors the content far more carefully than they have to date. A chronology of my experience is after the break, but the main takeaways thus far:

1. Nokia needs to monitor its content more. Far too many fraudulent and bogus applications are making it into the list of applications. Nokia’s reputation is suffering and will continue to suffer as long as Nokia does not play a more active role in removing demo applications masquerading as the real thing. (For example, MojosMobile should be banned from ever putting an application on Ovi Store again.) I, for one, will never purchase another application from Ovi Store again, since I have no guarantee of receiving what I expected and there is no way to request a refund.
2. Nokia has done an admirable job of abstracting away the different hardware, screen type and other such issues. I am duly impressed. Some would rather have every single such detail available, but these people are the exception and not the norm, as long as all the applications, whatever the format, end up in the same place, or in a logical place for the application, as appropriate. In fact, the more that this is abstracted away, the better.
3. Nokia needs to tweak the UI some. I can’t think of a single reason that I would want to enter letters and other non-numeric characters in my credit card number or security code fields; entering the date was an exercise in madness. Ditto the discoverability of categories.
4. Launch day means lots of traffic. Nokia should have better planned the launch day of the Ovi Store and brought far more server capacity online than it had.

But so far, I’m modestly impressed – even in its early days, there looks to be a lot of promise. That’s not to say it was all fun and games though; chronology follows after the break, and it’s mostly negative.

Read the rest of this entry »

Way back in 2006, Dan Simmons‘ Hyperion Cantos triggered a renaissance of fiction reading for me. With Simmons having fairly definitively closed the door on writing more in the Hyperion universe in his preface to Orphans of the Helix, a short story in his Worlds Enough and Time anthology, I decided to seek out his other major story arc – Ilium and Olympos. I have to admit here that this is the second time I’ve tried to read this; the first time, I stopped confused and bewildered by the opening lines of chapter one of Ilium.

Given this inauspicious beginning, I was not entirely sure what to expect. I persevered through the first few chapters and gradually got into the flow of things. Both Ilium and Olympos involve three (and occasionally, three and a half) separate stories that begin on three separate worlds:

1. Hockenberry’s tale – a first person narrative by a reconstructed 20th century Iliad scholar, observing and taking notes on a recreation of the Trojan War on Mars.
2. Daeman, Ada and Harman’s tale – a third person story of post-literate humans inhabiting a far future earth.
3. Mahnmut and Orphu’s tale – a third person story of two “moravecs“, machines that have formed a separate civilization on the moons of Jupiter.

In theory, this should be sufficient to cover the expansive story from every angle; in reality, Simmons is often forced to create new and temporary primary characters who tell the story, or worse, create a frame story. The primary way he does this is through the use of the “turin cloth”, which seems to be a device that has to be forced into existence because of his trying to stick to telling the tale in specific ways, and by moving back and forth through time. All in all, it turns out to be a more jarring experience than nifty, and I, for one, found it distracted from the storytelling.

The story, unlike the rather unique story structure, is far more mundane: something is going to destroy Earth and the solar system, and someone needs to go about saving it. After reading the breathtaking scale of Hyperion Cantos, which spanned some 300 years and 40 worlds, the story in this arc takes place over a year, about a third on Earth and almost all the rest on Mars. While some of the battle descriptions are breathtaking the same way watching the Battle of Helm’s Deep is, I felt Simmons was almost trying to distract you from the simpleness of story with the elaborate story-telling style.

It isn’t clear exactly how far into the future the story takes place. The 19th, 20th and 21st centuries feature extensively, with large parts of the tale told through modern verse (Proust, Joyce and others). What is clear though: the story takes place at least 1400-1600 years into the future, with dates broadly measured from a traumatic event on Earth called the “final fax”, which ended natural human habitation of earth, and created an artificial zoo filled with post-literate humans. This is in sharp contrast to the setup of the Hyperion Cantos, where events are known with excellent precision; indeed, someone has even developed a complete history of the future timeline based on the events of Hyperion Cantos.

In Ilium, the moravecs set out for the inner solar system, concerned about the weird and unstable quantum fluctuations they see emanating from Mars. The moravecs’ mission is to find out what is causing the fluctuations, and if possible, put a stop to it before the fluctuations destroy the entire solar system. Meanwhile, on Mars itself, a recreation of the Trojan War has been underway for nearly nine years, with the Greek and Trojan armies poised on the precipice of all out war, when Hockenberry is pulled into a plot by one “god” to kill another. Hockenberry intervenes and pushes the story away from the events of the Iliad. Earth, on the other hand, is a mostly empty wasteland, peopled by post-literate human descendants who are devoid of culture and knowledge, and entirely dependent on machines called servitors and voynix, and travel from location to location using only specific, fixed portals. They are permitted exactly one hundred years of an excellent life, but are unable to read anything beyond the numerals 0 through 9, and are encouraged by their machines to remain docile. The Earthbound story involving Daeman, Ada and Harman (amongst others), centers around the discovery of this complicated and extensive past, and how their actions bring an end to this lifestyle.

By the time Olympos begins, more than just the recreation of the Trojan War is off its predicted path: fighting has broken out on Earth between the humans and various other creatures – some machines, others pulled from other imaginary universes; the moravecs are dealing with Greek and Trojan legends traveling between different futures, and even the gods of ancient Greece are plotting to destroy each other. At the end of an exhausting thousand plus page adventure, Simmons very neatly (some argue too neatly) ties together all the plotlines by the use of more deus ex machina than has been dreamed of in your philosophy, Horatio, with rich helpings of contemporary terrorism and the Voynich Manuscript. Along the way, Simmons has detoured into Shakespeare and Proust, Virgil and Joyce and, by my count, at least three or four distinct universes, and hinted that at least 8,000 more exist. Suffice to say, the ending, despite feeling slightly contrived, at least brings closure to the various storylines and ties them neatly together. This, again, is in sharp contrast to Hyperion Cantos, where many questions go unanswered. There is a sense of finality and definiteness to this closing that I found quite satisfying.

What I did not find satisfying, and is something that I’ve repeatedly criticized other authors for, is the dependency on one (or two) cultures exclusively in their storytelling. If you’re familiar with the stories and the culture, then the experience is satisfying; if you’re not, then most of the story goes over your head. For me, this story fell into the second category: full of western civilization to the exclusion of all others, I spent most of time reading it looking up a lot of events, the characters and the mythos online. In short: a story that should’ve taken only a few days to finish, took forever, and I wanted to stop reading more than once. At the end of it all, while I was delighted to finally learn a little bit more about the Trojan War, I am decidedly unhappy that it was not by choice. Nor did I particularly want to read most of the Bard‘s Tempest, but I was forced to do so, just to make sure I understood what was going on. One note: having read Hyperion Cantos helped tremendously, though: a number of the characters in the Ilium and Olympos cycle have nearly identical analogues in the Cantos (Raul Endymion and Harman, Aenea and Ada, TechnoCore and Post-Humans, are some that come to mind). And many of the themes are similar as well: humans overthrowing robotic masters, the idea of a mysterious other – a greater and more powerful being than all the gods themselves – guiding gods and humans alike, the multiple universe hypothesis and so on. So, if you, like me, managed to avoid studying ancient western civilization by virtue of going to school in the Far East, then a familiarity with the themes of the Hyperion Cantos will definitely help guide you through Ilium and Olympos.

In the end, I walked away from the book decidedly unhappy and grateful that it was all over. I found lots of fault with it, and I personally thought of the Hyperion Cantos as the greater of Simmons’ two major works, but given Dan Simmons’ interests, this seemed to be a work that has been long coming. It’s enjoyable regardless of whether or not you’re familiar with ancient Western mythology, but it’s decidedly of more interest to those with more than just a passing familiarity with classics.

If you believe the hype, electronic paper (“e-paper”) displays are going to take over the world. Unlike traditional emissions-based displays like LCD screens, or CRT screens, e-paper displays reflect light and thus look exactly like a piece of paper does. The huge advantage of such a display is that it only draws power when it is changing and that it (supposedly) is easier on human eyes, as it does not flicker and has a wider viewing angle. The Amazon Kindle and the Kindle 2 are the first mainstream e-paper based devices I’ve seen in the U.S. – though e-paper based gadgets have been available commercially ever since the Sony Librie came out in 2004. These are my thoughts about the Kindle 2.

A cousin of mine has the original Kindle. The device was a weirdly shaped wedge, and in the few minutes I had to play with it, I found much to criticize with regard to its industrial design, but I also held out hope that the next generation of the Kindle might have a better designed future. He also was not entirely happy with the catalog of books available, but in browsing the catalog myself, I found that a majority of the books that I am interested in were indeed available in the Kindle shop; since then, the Kindle online shop has only increased in size, though the genres from which books are available have not increased dramatically. Thus, if you’re a science fiction buff, then you’re going to enjoy the Kindle’s selection; a more mainstream fiction person is likely not to enjoy the Kindle store much – and good luck finding any Harry Potter on the Kindle, legitimately.

In its opening letter to you on the Kindle, Amazon states that its goal is to make the Kindle disappear as you’re reading – that they would like you to think of the Kindle as you would any book. After reading a few books on it, I realized that they had largely succeeded. It takes me a few minutes to get into the mode of reading it, but after I do, it goes a lot faster. There are, however, some important caveats that make it possible:

• First, I have always been comfortable reading from a screen – in college, and even to some extent before that, in high school, I was equally happy reading from a screen or from a piece of paper; many people are not.
• Second, I choose to use the Kindle at its smallest font size, which gives approximately the same number of lines on screen as a page from a mass market paperback, meaning my brain accepts the switch reasonably easily; on the other hand, when I was using the Kindle with its default font size (about four points larger), I was getting frustrated how quickly I ran out of text. If I were able to adjust the line spacing slightly down, the Kindle would likely be indistinguishable from the layout of a mass market paperback, but it works closely enough that my brain doesn’t bother distinguishing the two.
• Finally, I do not write in my books or printouts. Call me old-fashioned if you must, but I grew up in a household where murder was less of a crime than writing in books, and I refuse to write in books, or bend their pages to make a bookmark and so on; it pains me to see people scribbling in their books, and I wince if I should end up with a copy of a book that someone else has written in (hence why I rarely, if ever, buy used books). Those heathens of you who do write in your books, however, will find it painful to annotate with the Kindle.

So, there is a target audience that the Kindle can fill the needs of very well. Certainly, it is not yet ready to have replaced the 20 kilos of books and laptop that I was carrying around in college, but it is an important stepping stone on the way to that dream being fulfilled.

Amazon has also gone out of its way (some, including myself, would say intrusively so) to make buying books easy on the Kindle; pressing Menu at any time pops up a menu with “Shop in the Kindle Store” selected by default. From there you can search by starting to type, or by browsing through the Kindle’s quarter of a million books, or hundred odd periodicals. Buying is as easy as clicking Buy; in fact, the combination of a slightly stiff and unresponsive directional pad and Amazon’s decision to make “Buy” the default selection has caused me to buy at least a couple of books accidentally. (I should note here that you are, as always, reliant on Amazon’s continued goodwill in order to return those accidentally bought books). Nonetheless, the store is easy to use, is very convenient (at least, in areas with a Sprint signal) and encourages people to buy books the same way that they would in a bookstore.

Of course, there is a lot more content that is out of copyright, and more recently, available under copyleft licences. Through the Kindle’s free internet browser, a quick visit to a site like freekindlebooks.org or feedbooks.com will net you thousands of out of copyright books, stories and the like – all downloaded directly to your Kindle through the magic of Sprint’s wireless network. More problematic is modern content available under a copyleft licence. For example, one of my favourite modern sci-fi stories, Charles Stross‘ Accelerando, is a collection of nine short stories, all available under a Creative Commons licence, and freely available from accelerando.org. However: 1) Amazon sells a $8 copy in the Kindle store; and 2) Stross does not offer a Kindle optimized file (nor can you, legally, create one, as Stross prohibits creating derivative works); I resorted to sending my Kindle the HTML file and tracking through the story that way, a most unpleasant way of doing so (it also shows me as the author, which is flattering, but wrong).

On the other hand, getting Cory Doctorow‘s Eastern Standard Tribe was as simple as browsing over to Doctorow’s site and downloading the Kindle-optimized file. A proper directory of Kindle-optimized modern stories under a copyleft licence would be very helpful. And I’m guessing that it may even be in Amazon’s interest to establish and provide this directory as it would provide an alternative content stream for their device. Simply adding native PDF reading ability would solve a huge usability gap – even the modern Sony Readers have that ability, and it’s truly a sad day when Sony, that bastion of proprietary formats, has a more open device than any Amazon, a supposedly web- and standard- friendly Internet company.

Ultimately, it’s hard to know exactly what to do with the Kindle – and that comes from someone whose needs are met by the Kindle. As someone who is willing to suspend some of the disbelief that this is not paper, the Kindle 2 is an excellent reading device: light, high contrast and sporting easy access to an extensive content library. To be sure, the always-on connection helps tremendously – it means that I can look up a term on the go (ever tried to read a Neal Stephenson novel?), and download my next book as soon as I finish one. That said, even I, an enthusiastic early adopter, have some reservations with the device itself.

First the form factor is awkward. I would happily forgo the keyboard, or accept a tiny little keypad ala Blackberry, for a much smaller, thicker device. Something physically the size of a paper back, even one of the larger trade paperbacks, would not simply be an easier form factor to carry, it would also make it a little easier to mentally accept the Kindle as a book replacement. Second (and I know this would push the Kindle from book-replacement to full-fledged computer), the OS leaves something to be desired in the customization department. For example, to get to the browser (easily the most used experimental function), I have to go to the device home, click Menu, go down several options to “Experimental” (no easy thing when the screen refresh is so slow) and only then can I open the browser – by which I’ve forgotten what term it was that I was searching for in Wikipedia. Meanwhile, that “Shop in Kindle Store” function is in every menu, sitting unused except for moments when I’m actually interested in buying a book.

Finally, there’s the question of why Kindle the device exists at all. At this moment, I have a very fine little Kindle app on my iPhone, and I cannot help but think that Kindle for Android-based phones, J2ME phones and the like are not very far behind. While those applications certainly lack the all of the Kindle’s features (like shopping in the Kindle store), those are certainly things that can be added to future revisions of the Kindle software. And there are certainly some very compelling reasons to use those existing devices, not the least of which is that they already exist and already have a huge marketplace presence. The Kindle adds yet one more device to carry (and in an uncomfortable form factor at that), and while I go back and forth on the one device or many device argument, a book reader is not one of those additional devices that I would want to necessarily carry – no matter how nicely designed or what advanced screen technology may lie within.

While I don’t doubt Kindle 3 is coming, the only question I have for Amazon is: will the Kindle 3 be the last dedicated device? Because from where I sit, Amazon seems to have solved the most vexing e-book problem of all (content) and is now merely creating more problems by continuing to insist everyone carry yet one more device. There’s a limit to the number of pockets that I have – and I’m not sure the Kindle 2 has earned its own pocket on its own merits. But it is pretty cool to be the first on the block with the future of displays and to have a device that can go weeks between charges.

In 1998, my Father and I went shopping for a top of the line monitor for his then top of the line HP desktop. We came back with a 17-inch Viewsonic CRT that had to be specially ordered, and cost somewhere in the vicinity of $650. 7 or so years later, I acquired a second-hand 17″ Dell LCD  for less than $100. You laugh now that I paid money for a 17″ LCD monitor, but that’s the moral of this story: in 2002, a 720p video camera cost about $20,000, weighed about 20 kg, and required a post-production studio in order to correctly format the video for broadcast TV. A few weeks ago, for 1% of that price, I got a 200 gram 1080p camera that produces video suitable for HDTV broadcasts. Or, at any rate, suitable for broadcast via YouTube. This, then, is a review of the Sony Webbie HD. I should note that this is a review of the MHS-CM1, which looks like a traditional camcorder; Sony also has an upcoming Webbie HD called the MHS-PM1, that looks more like the usual pocket video camcorders.

Read the rest of this entry »

I keep mentioning Alastair Reynolds and his Revelation Space universe whenever I read and review a science fiction book or series. As you can probably see, I’m quite fond of his work, and for some reason, I just have never got around to publishing a review, though it’s been sitting in my drafts since 11th March, 2008. I tossed the old review, and started anew, since I’ve read a few more things since writing the review.

Let’s get this out of the way so you know my biases: Alastair Reynolds is, to date, my favourite author of science fiction and his Revelation Space universe is a compelling story, with characters that are both familiar and alien all at once.

In chronological order, the books are Chasm City, Revelation Space, Redemption Ark and Absolution Gap; sprinkled throughout are the stories contained in Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days and Galactic North. I have not yet read The Prefect; I’m waiting for the Ace paperback version so that the set matches up. The premise of Reynolds’ Lovecraftian science fiction horror is a case of Menschendämmerung – the twilight of man. Set mainly in the next thousand years, the universe is one where humans have split into many factions, the star-faring Ultras, the planet-hugging Demarchists, and the hive-minded Conjoiners, chief amongst them. The main arc of the Revelation Space universe relates the story of the human discovery of Inhibitors – a race of machines that silently seek out and destroy intelligent life. There are a few unique things about the Revelation Space Universe that are worth noting, however.

The first thing you need to know about the books is that Reynolds is an actual astrophysicist. As such, you will get into the nitty gritty of how the ships work, how some of the weapons function, and yes, even gravity will work as advertised. Mostly. So if you don’t have some idea of – or interest in reading about – the Casimir effect, or Brane theory, then you’ll likely find it slow going. And you must have some idea of the Fermi paradox to understand why Reynolds writes in the first place. He’s a scientist and is writing fiction to be able to explore some of the things he can’t publish in a peer-reviewed journal.

No matter. Reynolds writes in an extraordinarily straightforward manner. Sentences are precisely as long as they need to be to get the point across. You need not suffer Virginia Woolf-like run-ons, nor will you be left with incomplete thoughts, like many other authors (*cough*Vinge*cough*). It’s also a very culturally neutral story, as one would hope a sci-fi novel that talks about a world very fundamentally different from today. The nice thing about this aspect of the story is that having grown up in a non-Western culture and household, I don’t find myself running to look up some obscure biblical reference, or extinct gods or such. Excellent. I quite like it. Simmons, for example, requires an intimate familiarity with various Western pantheons, which is one of the reasons I’ve resisted reading Illium and Olympos, for fear of needing to stop and refer to Wikipedia constantly.

Second, because Reynolds is an actual astrophysicist, the universe obeys the same laws as our own: no causality violations, entropy still increases, and time doesn’t suddenly speed up and slow down. As an effect of this, Reynolds’ universe is slower than light. Plus side: humans routinely live a thousand years, both because of the effects of time dilation, and the development of hibernation. In many ways, the period it is set in is quite dystopian, with humans on their way out as a species. Unlike many such dystopian universes, it is also quite optimistic about humans and human chance for survival.

This all makes for a very compelling and very realistic story. Economic booms and economic busts exist and force distinct choices for the characters. Mucking about at slower than light speed means huge risks for traders – the technology a trader has spent a fortune bringing to the isolated worlds inhabited by humans may be obsolete before the trader gets there (similar to Vinge’s A Deepness in the Sky, but far more realistic in its implications). And space is big. Really big. It’s not like Star Trek or Star Wars big, where it takes a while, but you can still get there quickly enough if Scotty or Chewbacca tweaks the engines a little; it’s big the same way the distance from earth to the moon hasn’t been covered more than a dozen times by humans, or the way the Voyager probes have spent two decades in transit to the heliosheath.

I don’t really know what else I can say about the story without giving away large chunks of its plots. Suffice to say, humans make contact with this race of machines committed to eradicating intelligent life – and the humans are not entirely successful in their efforts to contain it. There’s also a dozen dead or hidden civilizations, and many mysteries that cannot be explained – and that Reynolds makes no attempt to explain, indeed. Unlike Simmons, Reynolds doesn’t make an attempt to tie up all loose ends – you’re left to figure out the various (non-human) races and their relationships to each other and the artifacts that humans encounter through space. If you search carefully through the web, you’ll find both on-going debates, and remainders of such debates, about the nature of various artifacts and their relationship to the story.

Ultimately, it’s that kind of story: Reynolds has created a universe, told the story of several important characters and their reactions to a major event in human history, and tossed it out for others to finish, either in their heads, or through fan fiction. It is almost certainly the most exhilarating new series I have read. I find myself both craving more and filling in the story in bits and pieces nearly nine months after I finished reading as insights into characters and events occur.

All I can say is this: read it. It’s amazing.

“There are some arenas so corrupt that the only clean acts possible are nihilistic.”

-Quellcrist Falconer

I’ve been putting off reading Richard Morgan’s Takeshi Kovacs trilogy for a while. Primarily, I had been hoping that he may have written more of a character who I’ve come to, if not like, then at least enjoy reading about; that seems to now have been ruled out. Altered Carbon, Broken Angels and Woken Furies are three very different tales centered around the exploits of one of the more entertaining anti-heroes. The first is a straight noir whodunnit that introduces readers to some of the weirder technologies and some of the background of the universe in which Kovacs lives and thrives. The second establishes some more of the backstory of the universe, and introduces people to Kovacs’ calling in life, via a grail quest. The last is a story of romance and obsession, and reveals a sentimental side to Kovacs.

Altered Carbon introduces Kovacs’ universe: following the signposts established by a long extinct Martian civilization, humans have colonized a few extraterrestrial worlds. Travel is either by slow, sub-luminal colony ships, or instantaneously via transmission. The catch is that you can’t transmit the entire human like a Star Trek transporter device; instead, humans are split in two: the physical body (“sleeves” in, Kovacs’ parlance) is left behind while the memories and, for a lack of a better word, soul, housed in “stacks”, are transmitted and downloaded into a new body. Thus even if the body is damaged, or destroyed, as long as the stacks are recoverable – and they usually are, as long as deliberately destructive attempts are not made – humans can be transferred into a new body. Given that there are no restrictions on how transfers are made (males into females and vice versa, adults into children bodies, etc.), it leads to interesting scenarios for self-identity. For example, during one conflict, a notorious mobster transfers into a child’s body, since adults are still reluctant to shoot children. On the physical side of things, bodies can be cloned, grown with specific enhancements, with or without certain diseases or resistance to radiation, and such.

In Altered Carbon, Kovacs, recently discharged from an elite corps of the military, finds himself on Earth, trying to solve what appears to be an apparent suicide. Broken Angels, several decades later, takes Kovacs to a world ripped apart by civil war, as a military adviser to one of the groups at war. This book was perhaps my favourite of the series, with Kovacs disappearing from the front line to find and investigate a Martian ship. Morgan also gives hints as to what happened to the Martian civilization and why they may have disappeared. The final novel, Woken Furies, takes Kovacs back to his native Harlan’s World. Seeking revenge for an unrequited love killed by a religious order, Kovacs is busy eradicating the leadership of the order when he meets a long dead rebellion leader and philosopher, Quellcrist Falconer (easily one of the most interesting fictional philosophers in recent memory).

All in all, while I liked each of the stories independently, I found that they aren’t tied together much, which could have really provided a tighter universe; indeed, the second story seemed to be establishing a major story arc that simply disappears from the third. And aside from a few throwaway references by Kovacs about his work before, there’s basically nothing other than the single character tying the stories together. I suppose in some ways, this is akin to the pre-Casino Royale James Bond films, where Bond would deal with a crisis, and then it would pay no role in the successor films. Thus Kovacs’ actions have no consequence, no reward, and no impact (I suppose, if I were being nihilistic, then this is a perfectly reasonably position to take; on the other hand, if this story is being told, then it must be worth telling in a cohesive fashion). The second book in particular seemed to almost throw itself away; the conclusion hinted strongly at Kovacs’ group of friends working together in the future – of which, none show up in the third novel.  The net result is a frustratingly disconnected tale.

If you can live with three disjointed tales in the vein of the original Foundation, then you are likely to enjoy Morgan’s fluent writing and acerbic wit. If you were annoyed by novella fashion that Asimov used in that book, or like me, love complete universes, then you’re likely to be frustrated. Either way though, Morgan is one of the more compelling sci-fi authors of modern times, and a treat to read – if you can live with his story-telling style.

I am hard pressed to think of a sci-fi story that has had as much of an impact on me as Dan Simmons’ Hyperion Cantos. The tetralogy, consisting of Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, Endymion and The Rise of Endymion, is a far-future story that tells a tale across 300 years. I was given the first book as a Christmas gift in 2006, and since then, I have made an effort to read at least a book a week that is not related to my work. After 21 months, I decided I had to read it again, given that I’ve read nearly a hundred books in the interreggum.

The first book opens in the last week of existence of a 200+ year-old human empire, the Hegemony of Man, that spans the length and breadth of the Orion Arm of our home galaxy in 2852. Earth is dead – destroyed by a miscalculation during the handling of a black hole (a fact that seems more apropos today than it did when I first read the book). 130 billion humans live on 200 “WebWorlds” stitched together by “farcaster” – an instantaneous teleportation device; tens of billions more live on dozens of world not connected to the Web and travel via Hawking Drive – a superluminal, but not instantaneous, travel method. In addition, countless billions of artificial intelligences live as a separate race – the TechnoCore. Finally, there are the Ousters – a group of humans who have branched off from “mainline” humans living on the WebWorlds, and choose to adapt themselves to space, rather than adapt space to themselves.

Hyperion focuses on the lives of seven pilgrims chosen by the Hegemony to avert a war between the Hegemony and Ousters at Hyperion, a frontline world that is home to some of the greatest mysteries in the galaxy. Amongst the mysteries are the Time Tombs – artifacts from a distant future travelling backwards through time – and the Shrike, a grim reaper. Two priests, a soldier, a poet, a scholar, a detective and a diplomat begin the journey; six of them relate their back stories that brought them there. I’m not going to tell you the stories themselves, but suffice to say, that Simmons’ breadth of vision is pretty amazing: all but one of the stories play crucial roles to understanding what happens in the later books. As you can guess by the title of the next book, the attempt is ultimately futile, and the Hegemony falls – though not quite the way I had predicted when I started reading the book.

The two Endymion books tell the story of Aenea, a new messiah (with a palindromic name, no less!). Told in first person by her companion and love, Raul, the story follows them and their companions through dozens of the old WebWorlds and the Ousters’ collectives. Fleeing a resurgent Catholic church, which portrays Aenea as a false prophet and heretic, they meet alien species living unobtrusively amongst humans, Ousters that can survive in the vacuum of space, and humans so different from the norm as to be aliens. As a foreigner in America, a country which is both big enough and isolationist enough that one can go months without hearing of a major event abroad, reading the Endymion stories shortly after the Hyperion stories was like travelling abroad: an abrupt discovery of the rest of the world and its happenings. Given the fate of most messiahs – self-proclaimed and otherwise – you might make a reasonable guess as to what happens to Aenea, though methinks his editor forced him to make a few changes and end on a happier note.

Simmons’ also brings the hundreds of other threads of the nearly 2,200-page epic to a satisfying close, though he leaves open just enough mysteries to get you to think. He’s also created a huge and well-defined universe that he could return to and he does briefly in his short story Orphans of the Helix (which takes place another 400 years into the future, in the first half of the 37th century). In his opening to that short story, he suggests that he is bored with the universe and that while he may visit, he does not intend to return, which is something of a tragedy. I find myself occasionally wondering what becomes of the characters and their stories; Simmons has succeeded in making the characters and their lives real enough that you think of them as fond friends, and not as figments of a literary imagination. I suppose that writing up to the point a messiah dies is interesting; no one really has explored the aftermath, though Simmons makes a very brief stab at it. The most amazing thing about this epic, though, is the remarkable fluidity it shows. At over a half-million words, one would assume that the story might fall apart, through inconsistency (like Asimov’s Foundation series), through long-winded and irrelevant fixations (like anything by Ayn Rand), through general malaise (too many novels come to mind). It does not. It keeps one interested all the way to the end, and it tells a might good tale, too! It’s not a good first sci-fi novel, but if you’ve read anything else, and been disappointed at the triteness of the story, or the found yourself bewildered by the terminology, or are in the market for another darn good yarn, this is it.

T-Mobile is my “choice” of carrier here in the US, inasmuch as one can have a choice in a closed and stagnating mobile telephony market like the US. Google is my choice of cloud computing platform – from email and IM to news and weather, I use Google. I have also been an ardent supporter of open-source solutions wherever possible. Thus the T-Mobile G1 phone, powered by Google’s Android, an open-source, Linux-based mobile platform sounded like a marriage of all my favourite things: Google, open-source, and T-Mobile. Toss in some Lego, and I think we’d be all set.

Coming from a background of Nokia S60 and, lately, the Apple iPhone, I am a power-user in many ways; except an instance of theft, and an instance of a lost SIM card, I have not been without a mobile phone since I first got one, the better part of a decade ago. What drew me first to the Nokia S60 platform was the applications – and the browser. My experience with the N80 were dismal; an awful in-warranty experience at Nokia’s NYC flagship convinced me of the folly of supporting a company that had no interest in supporting its users. While Apple has much of the same “thanks for the money, goodbye” mentality to its customers, both the community of Apple fans (rabid and otherwise) and the iPhone itself has over the months left me happy with the iPhone experience. That said, I am aware that few companies have the UI and hardware expertise of Apple and was willing to forgo some creature comforts in order to put my money where my mouth is: in open-source products. This is a review of the T-Mobile G1. It’s also a comparison, because I believe that Google has started a quiet revolution, that needs support, encouragement and criticism to make it truly the best product money can buy. (If you’re only interested in the bottom line, though, skip down to the antepenultimate paragraph – begins with “In its current form…”)

Read the rest of this entry »