In Which We Command The War From Our Laptop

Go Play Your VG

by ALEX CARNEVALE

Reamde
by Neal Stephenson
1056 pp

I had a creative writing professor who once gave our class a fascinating assignment. Her idea was that we had to compose a story that would contain everything in it: every aspect of the world, no matter how niggling or inconsequential, would have to be factored in somehow. Neal Stephenson takes this joke to its ultimate extreme in his stunningly brilliant, massively entertaining 1056 page novel Reamde.

Reamde was probably not the best title for Stephenson's novel. In Robert Louis Stevenson's era Reamde might have been called Fight to the Finish! or alternately, Fighttothefinish.org because of the hundred page action sequence that concludes the work. Regardless of what you call it, the novel is of the tech adventure variety, and not in the sense you're probably thinking. There's a point where Stephenson's protagonist, multimillionaire Richard Forthrast, who is kind of a parody of Steve Jobs/ glowing tribute to the best Silicon Valley has to offer, realizes that his virtual self in the MMORPG of T'Rain is essentially doing the exactly same thing his physical self is doing, at the exact same moment - entirely by accident.

We realize that it is no accident. Many of the appalling coincidences (terrorists living one floor below hackers!) on which the international abduction story of Reamde hinges are not actually coincidences. We might be forced to puzzle out some of the thornier moments ourselves if we were not so used to having Stephenson explain them at length. In order to introduce a minor jihadist who dies by shotgun shell to the head mere pages later, Stephenson unfurls a 1000 word description of his life experience before this moment. He has taken the absurd writing cliche of "show don't tell" and flipped it so far upside down it becomes exciting again.

At times Stephenson's discursiveness borders on what it must have been like to shepherd Rain Man to and fro. This is no more evident than in the lengthy sequences where characters in Reamde play the online roleplaying game T'Rain. (It's heartening to know the graphics are evidently superior to anything World of Warcraft has ever produced.)

The innovation perpetrated by Forthrast's version of the familiar world is that he has utilized real life geological science in order to maintain the verisimilitude of reality. In other words, when you dig beneath the wintry mountains and open fields of the T'Rain simulation, you actually encounter ore and various mineral deposits in varieties like you might see on Earth. The backstory of the world implies that a rogue asteroid composed of alien matter struck Earth and such deposits lurk within our home planet, whereas the moon is a part of Earth that broke off in the collision. It's a masterful moment when Neal breaks off to think of how weird it is, for part of them to be in us, and part of us to be out there. It's also breezed by like a traffic light.

Richard Forthrast's niece Zula Forthrast is actually the protagonist of Reamde. She is the adoptive scion to a troubled Iowa family. Zula is abducted by the Russian mafia because of her hipster boyfriend Peter selling credit card numbers, and then subsequently by an Islamic jihadist named Abdullah Jones in a manner so haphazard that it's clear the switch is something of a joke about how we believe all terrorism is indistinguishable, when it is not. The Islamist who abducts her is an educated British man commanding a group of warriors he can barely comprehend.

Zula finds out 90 percent of what she knows about the villain and her predicament from Wikipedia, and the accuracy of the information tends to vary. Stephenson gets many of his jollies mocking the database's inadequacies; he does not subscribe to the maxim, "Beware of making the best the enemy of the good." In his view (and many others) a technology that is just short of being perfect is worthless; the same is true of ideology, in fact, all ideology.

Stephenson's technological and political views are easily extrapolated to the world of literature. He prominently features two writers in his novel, both of which never leave their homes and barely even serve a function in the plot other than to allow Stephenson humor at their expense. There is Devin "Skeletor" Skaerlin, the kind of mass-market fantasy writer that Stephenson both abhors and harbors a grudging admiration for because of the man's prolific abilities.

The second is Stephenson's Oxford-educated parody of Tolkien named Don Donald, or D-squared. Stephenson incorporates D-squared - an expert in many languages who revises the world of T'Rain, mostly by removing the apostrophes that Skaerlin added to the world's backstory. There are many jokes about how seriously such people take themselves, which is also possibly Neal's tongue-in-cheek way of apologizing for his more pedantic moments.

It is not simply the writing style of these men that Richard Forthrast does not understand. He is a businessman, an entrepreneur, and it entails a completely different sort of creativity. He cannot conceive of what even makes them tick, allows them to spend time in their own respective fantasy worlds, the ones he is paying them to create. He does play T'Rain at length, but only because he must to run his business, and then again when he has to use the virtual world to track down lost Zula. There's a moment where he returns to the game and finds his character simply sleeping and eating as he waits for him, and nurses a pang of guilt. He has stumbled on a great truth - that everything that thinks for itself is alive, as well as a great many things that cannot think for themselves. He is ashamed to be their god.

The fact that Stephenson understands this feeling explains what he does to his own characters. Almost all receive happy endings to their abduction stories, a great many find both love and happiness as a result of their alienating behavior. Connecting with people, even when you are known or worshipped by many, is still a problem for Stephenson, and he does want us all to get along. This sentimentality and weakness in his writing is potentially the only thing that saves Reamde from the cold esoteric fact-telling that it stumbles into at times.

Part of the great fun of Reamde comes because no other human being could have written it. Whenever I see a work of art that pretends technology doesn't exist, I inwardly groan. For Stephenson, the relationship between man and machine is the fundamental one, and there are not many writers willing to write fictional narratives that can't happen unless every character has both a constant connection to the net and a healthy disgust of actual people. Sure, William Gass might have conceived of some of the ideas, but he would not be sufficiently tech-savvy to elucidate them the way Stephenson can. It can even be said of most of the man's books that they are so astoundingly original that nothing like them will ever be produced again.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He is a writer living in Manhattan. He tumbls here and twitters here. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here. He last wrote in these pages about the BBC's Sherlock.

"Chimney Sweep" - The Abodes (mp3)

"850" - The Abodes (mp3)

"Oh Lucile" - The Abodes (mp3)

In Which We Boomerang Across The Pond

Uncle Sleuth

by ALEX CARNEVALE

Sherlock
creators Steven Moffat & Mark Gatiss

The detective work of Sherlock Holmes in the BBC's version of the character is only impressive if you have never seen House or CSI, even once accidentally while waiting for something else to come on. "Noises can tell you everything," the sleuth opines, and somehow everyone around him resists vomiting in their tea. Cumberbatch's Sherlock Holmes treats women as if they were mentally disabled idiots incapable of understanding the logic (of noises). If Holmes treated people this way in America, he'd be qualified for the Republican presidential nomination. For christ's sake, the man smokes indoors.

Bringing this UK icon "into the 21st century" actually consists of bringing it into the late 1990s. This younger Sherlock Holmes (Benedict Cumberbatch) is barely aware of what a blog is, even though it is the major source of his notoriety. Holmes reads the newspaper every morning like a 60 year old retiree, wakes up in a bathrobe and has a servant, even though he lives in a shitty Baker Street apartment. When he is abducted to Buckingham Palace, Holmes refuses to put on clothes, but he is still super impressed: he becomes so giddy he steals an ashtray as a memento. This Sherlock is about as modern as the Queen's corgis.

There is a certain Luddite sensibility to Sherlock. Sure, Watson (Martin Freeman) uses a computer, but (1) he appears to be running Windows Vista and (2) he doesn't use much more than the thing's webcam and google search. In fact, Sherlock focuses on the insights that man can achieve without a computer, which is merely another tool in his psychic arsenal. While in a literary sense this assertion might be slightly plausible, in the real world detective work without forensics, computer science and DNA testing is about as likely as a grown man with an ex-military manservant.

To solve the crucial riddle of the show's second season premiere, Sherlock Holmes merely has to input a four character code into a mobile phone. Deciphering such a problem would merely be minutes in the life of any decent cryptographer or tattoed waif, but it takes Holmes the entire episode. Unless he is merely dragging it out to be dramatic, the display of his intuitive abilities is underwhelming at best, criminally negligent at worst.

The villain of this Sherlock is a black widow named Irene Adler. She is both a dominatrix and a lesbian, which I suppose incriminates her twice. Her lack of true interest in men is inevitably her fatal flaw. When Holmes and Watson first meet her, she shows up naked — the true villain is all woman. By the end, when he claims his final victory over her naked carapace, it is not simply enough that she begs for his indulgence, but she must also be reduced to tears like the simpering whore he believes her to be. As a final insult, he calls her, "The woman" and dresses her in a burqa.

As bad as the female gender is, Americans drive Sherlock absolutely bonkers. If a British person offends him, the ensuing Oscar Wilde-like dance constitutes an elaborate game he's going to win anyway. When Holmes encounters an American, he pepper sprays the poor guy and throws him out a window like some kind of reverse Captain America. I expect this kind of inferiority complex from Sarkozy, but threatening the people of the United States with a fractured skull just seems below the belt.

As it happens, the central plot of Sherlock's premiere (it's the show's fourth overall episode — a teleplay takes at least four times as long to write when the government is involved) concerns a grotesque caricature of 9/11. For shame. I had to watch this youtube over 40 times to get the bad taste out of my mouth and quietly sing "Neeeeen elevvvvvvven" to myself until I nodded off from patriotism overload.

Arthur Conan Doyle tried to kill the original Sherlock Holmes, but he was unsuccessful in this attempt. Such a move would be too original and creative for such a predictable character. Moffat's Sherlock is just as obvious — he is more focused on what would be the most suitable quip than ever engaging with the people around him. The most surprising move he ever makes is to not have sex, another affectation that seems decidedly anti-modern. "Are you really so obvious?" his brother Mycroft asks him, which I suppose is his attempt to explain the program's inadequacies as part of its charm.

Three things manage to save Sherlock from being an outright bomb. The first is that the show looks astonishing; the Fringe-esque twists, cuts, and special effects of the show manage to make it visually stimulating even when you can see the next plot "twist" a mile away. The show's sets are also magnificent and, from all evidence, insanely expensive.

The second saving grace of Sherlock is Moffat's talent for dialogue — it's what made his version of Doctor Who and his sex comedy Coupling more than a rehash of Quantum Leap and Friends. Bouncing back and forth, Freeman and Cumberbatch are both very entertaining in their roles, each containing more charisma in their fingertips than Jude Law has in his entire body. Essentially Sherlock is a delicious but not-so filling pastry. Perhaps the real problem is that Sherlock Holmes wasn't a very good character to begin with.

The idea of the know-it-all detective actually represented a regressive move in the mystery genre. Far more interesting than the detective who knows everything is the detective who drinks too much, or the detective who is employed in a more intriguing job like that of a businessman or priest. The ideal detective doesn't even know he is one, or better yet, isn't a he at all.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He tumbls here and twitters here. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here. He last wrote in these pages about a new novel from Vernor Vinge.

"Either Nelson" - Guided by Voices (mp3)

"The Things That Never Need" - Guided by Voices (mp3)

"Cyclone Utilities" - Guided by Voices (mp3)

In Which We Stoke The Fire Upon The Deep

Singular World

by ALEX CARNEVALE

A Fire Upon the Deep
by Vernor Vinge
391 pp.

The Children of the Sky
by Vernor Vinge
448 pp.

In 2007, Vernor Vinge won another Hugo award. This is nothing in itself. The one-time computer scientist has been winning science fiction's greatest prizes since 1981, when his widely influential novella True Names changed the genre forever. But the fact that he won it for his worst book was something of a surprise. Rainbow's End certainly had its moments, but at times its plot was so jumbled it was difficult to follow from scene to scene. The novel was most compelling in its predictions about where contemporary technology was headed. (The intelligent contact lens could be the most enticing.) But much of Rainbow's End came across as sloppily done, so much so that it was easy to fear Vinge was on the verge of a George R.R. Martin-esque situation where he become so obsessed with what fans of his work expected that he could not focus properly on writing well.

Despite being twice the novel A Game of Thrones ever was, Vinge's 1993 novel A Fire Upon the Deep never had a gaudy Hollywood adaptation, and its cult of admirers remains small in comparison. Naturally, it did win the Hugo that year, although it had to share it with Connie Willis' endless Doomsday Book. In fact, A Fire Upon the Deep could never be adapted into pablum for the masses, for several reasons.

First and foremost is that A Fire Upon the Deep is an extremely complex novel. Not so much in its prose, which was in line with Vinge's usual straightforward style. No, it was the author's conception of the universe that made A Fire Upon the Deep so rewarding and also so difficult. The book contains action sequences that take place over light years and fully grasping the consequences of events takes hundreds of pages, not seconds. Some editions of Vinge's books even came with an accompanying CD.

The opening of A Fire Upon the Deep represented a tour-de-force. As a technology writer who foretold the creation of the internet, Vinge's central theory has always been that the creation of a superhuman intelligence is inevitable. In A Fire Upon the Deep, a group of well-intentioned scientists and researchers at the High Lab accidentally create such an entity, known as The Blight.

With the help of his now-ex wife Joan D. Vinge, Vernor created the idea of Zones of Thought, a sensible take on the universe in which cross-sections play by different quantum rules. Fleeing the entity they created, the High Lab spaceship lands in the pre-technological zone, on a world occupied by aliens called Tines. Since the cliche of a crash on an alien planet is as old as science fiction itself, Vinge's unique alien creations are all the more remarkable.

Essentially, Tines are dogs, but each individual is composed of one dog pack. A Tine consists of 4 to 8 dogs who, through an organ extruding from their brain, create an individual identity through nonverbal communication. (Less than four dogs struggle to have enough brain power to speak and act, more than 8 dogs usually results in a split into two individuals.) Because of their resemblance to man's best friend, and because the idea not only made logical sense but created a million different literary possibilities, the parts of A Fire Upon the Deep that take place on the Tines World were not only the most fascinating part of the novel, but immediately constituted a sensation in themselves.

Switching between a dramatic, skin-of-your-teeth space opera and a fantasy-inflected world where dogs ruled resulted in a breakneck narrative that unfurled at the speed of light. Between these two simultaneously unfolding stories, Vinge inserted his satire of Usenet postings, foretelling how internet communication could be interpreted and ultimately misinterpreted by different groups. It was this analysis that lifted A Fire Upon the Deep from being the most readable and entertaining novel of its type to also being both incredibly amusing and prescient.

The Children of the Sky, released in October from Tor (undoubtedly the most exciting publisher in the genre), follows up on the promise of A Fire Upon the Deep and then some. A direct sequel to his classic space opera, The Children of the Sky narrows the focus of the story. Now settled on Tines World, Ravna Bergsdot is the sole individual on the planet with a working knowledge of what the outside universe looks like — the rest of the shipwrecked humans were children at the High Lab, and have all been roused from coldsleep. Positioned as something like a matriarch, she has to navigate her command of the young people along with difficult diplomacy required to deal with the kingdom's co-queen, a six-dog pack known as Woodcarver.

Vinge has become a markedly better writer over the years. One of the most difficult things for him (or any fiction writer) to get down was the concept of character. We're so used to archetypes from movies and television that it's easy to forget that real human beings tend to have a variety of flaws and vices. In contrast with the immaculate technology of her no-longer flight capable but still powerful spaceship Oobii, Ravna Bergsdot has so many blind spots it's amazing she is able to wake up in the morning, and yet at base we're dealing with an incredibly intelligent and resourceful librarian.

Unlike its predecessor, The Children of the Sky features nothing in the way of space exploration or high theory. It is concerned with how a suddenly industrial civilization establishes a technological base to change how its inhabitants live their day-to-day lives. (Sound familiar?) There's also a lot of political intrigue in The Children of the Sky, a new subject for Vinge. His basic point is that individuals who use religion or feigned political necessity in order to gain power are still at the mercy of programmers and scientists who hold the real control through innovation. Politics is simple, stupid and deadly in contrast.

Ravna Bergsdot knows that an invading force is coming to destroy Tines World as a result of the actions of scientists who created advances beyond their ken. She has raised the coldsleep children to believe that they must focus all their resources on improving technology instead of biomedical research. Her foes are blind to this prioritization; they see a woman who does not age the way they do because of treatments she received offworld that are no longer available to them, and who necessarily cannot share their priorities.

Ultimately, Vinge is on Ravna's side of the argument. He believes that the endgame of biomedical research is to extend human life at the cost of civilization itself, and so preserving people indefinitely is useless vanity. Instead, he is arguing, it is technological innovation which should occupy the majority of our resources.

The dog packs that make up each individual Tine are more akin to us, at our stage of technological development, than we are to the humans of The Children of the Sky. The literally-named Tycoon and Woodcarver may be laying the message on a bit thick, but Vinge turns the hokey names into complex, transformative figures capable of change. This is not simply because the dog characters are at least as real to us as the human ones; it is also because Tines actually alter their personalities as they incorporate new puppies and old members die.

In A Fire Upon the Deep, Vinge also created another memorable alien, the skroderiders who accompany Ravna Bergsdot and her lover Pham Nuwen as they enter what Vinge calls the Slow Zone, where the internet cannot viably reach planetary civilizations. These leafy tree-beings, immobile and mute without manufactured transport appendages and voders, make their return in The Children of the Sky, thematically proving that Vinge is as insightful about how the boundaries of living organisms evolve as he is about tech.

To write so well about the hard sci-fi elements of technology while fashioning a compelling plot and characters is the most difficult feat in literature, for it requires an expertise beyond the capacity of most. That A Fire Upon the Deep and The Children of the Sky are not so easily translatable into films or television is one of their cardinal virtues. There is nothing wrong with such a transposition, but both of these novels contain a complexity of emotion within their characters that is not so easily represented by a staid image or reproduced dialogue. These novels contain an experience than could never be replicated in another art form.

The Children of the Sky is above all a thrill ride. Whatever Vinge has been reading lately, it most likely featured steampunk, because The Children of the Sky takes advantage of every wonder a newly-industrial civilization has to offer. At times Vinge's new work, the second in what one presumes will be a trilogy, approaches the astonishing emotional ups and downs of its predecessor, a heady compliment considering A Fire Upon Deep leaves most thinking people in tears. Hot air balloons, plasma weapons, guns that dogs as well as people can hold comfortably, interspecies love and coordination, Jacobean betrayal: it's all there waiting in the Slow Zone.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He last wrote in these pages about Alexander Payne's The Descendants. He tumbls here and twitters here. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here.

"We Are The Tide" - Blind Pilot (mp3)

"The Colored Night" - Blind Pilot (mp3)

"White Apple" - Blind Pilot (mp3)