Theodicius
Good. Evil. Bratwurst.

Just read in Locus about the death of Algis Budrys. Ruined what was promising to be a perfectly good day.

Some will write about how good of an editor he was. And there will the obligatory homages to Rogue Moon and Who?, his classics in the genre. All of that will be covered by others who will do it much better than I, so I will leave them to it.

Instead I’ll talk about Michaelmas, a flawed book with a conventional alien invasion plot, but with a more personal meaning. It was the novel that brought me into the computer industry. Besides being a forerunner to (and better than 99% of) the cyberpunk subgenre in science fiction, it was the first novel to explore the potential of human/computer teams, without making either one the slave of the other. Oh, there was no doubt who was in charge (Michaelmas, the human). But he listened to and often accepted the advice of the computer (Domino) and in general treated Domino as he might a human member of his staff.

That was what excited me. It made real to me the possibilities of computers not as calculators, but as assistants in the real meaning of the term: as things to assist us in what we do best. It was the synergy between Domino and Michaelmas that excited me. I wanted to make that happen in real life.

I was happily on my way to becoming a chemist when I read that book. It was a life-altering experience. Call him cranky, curmudgeonly, call him whatever you want. Just remember it takes a whale of a writer to reach into someone’s life like that.

I never knew Budrys the man, but that doesn’t matter. My world is a little darker today for his absence. And for the umpteenth time, I’m going to re-read Michaelmas.

…, a book by Robert J Sawyer, was the latest to leave its imprint on the wall.

You know how it is, the story is going along nicely, you’re getting in to the characters when suddently the author slips, and destroys the illusion that he’s been building up and that you’ve been enjoying. You want to scream, but settle instead for throwing the book across the room. (more…)

This one hurts. Just got word this morning that long-time fan rich brown died.

I never met him face to face, something I was hoping to rectify and now will never have the chance. Our opinions and beliefs diverged more than they converged, which you might think was a good reason not to meet. But if you do, then it’s clear you never knew rich.

You didn’t need to agree with him; in fact I often got the impression he preferred it if you didn’t. Not because he was scrappy old curmudgeon, lusting for the cut and thrust of a good fight (though if it happened, he was able to keep his end up nicely). But it seemed somehow, just by disagreeing with him, you uplifted him. The existence of contrary points of view was interesting in itself, and was a phenomenon to be respected and studied for what it was: confirmation of the diversity of the universe, and the strength that flows from it. There was something to be learned from every person he met.

Dr Gafia has now left the planet. And the planet is the bigger loser.

“We are such stuff as dreams are made of, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”

Some naive folks from Utah invited me to join their concom recently. They were bidding on the World Horror Convention.

We got the bid! Have patience. It’s a new site and we just got the bid for 2008, so there’s a lot of decisions that are just now being made. I’d tip you off to them here, but Robert Bloch promises me he’ll stop haunting me if I do, so you’ll just have to be patient. Just expect to come and have fun.

Wow. Me on a concom. Now that’s horror.

Just worked Program Ops for the recent NASFic, CascadiaCon, and I’m home, tired but happy.

Starngely enough, I really like working conventions, and working with this group was a new experience, and a good one. Miriah and her support team from ISS worked heroically, and thanks largely to them I actually looked like I was capable of doing my job. Both Lea Farr and Charlie Harmon went far above the call of duty to make my time in the Program Ops office an enjoyable one, and the entire staff had enough enthusiasm for the job to make it an altogether fun experience.

One of the hazards of working Program Ops is you don’t get much feedback on what is going right with the convention, all you hear are complaints. And there are always complaints; you can’t please everyone. One example: We were told we should have cut the number of kaffeeklatsches in half, because holding two different ones in a 600 square foot area made it hard for the hearing impaired. Doing so would, of course, have disappointed some pros and their fans, who would not have had the chance to get together at all. So either way someone gets irritated with us. (Personally, I was on the side of the hearing impaired complainer until he as much as called me a liar to my face when I told him we were noting the complaint as something to be more heavily considered for the next con. Just a note for his future reference, if he’s reading this: It never helps your case if you go out of your way to insult the person you’re trying to convince to help you.)

The intent of the programing head was to provide as varied a program as he could, WorldCon-class programming in a space that was certainly not WorldCon class in size. A laudable goal, and one which was achieved, although achieving it made several panel audiences much smaller than they otherwise would have been, and made getting to some panels problematic.

There were rough patches, some made worse by the cultural differences of the staff (we’d all worked different conventions, and so were used to doing things in different ways) but those got smoothed out by mid-con. At something over 1500 attendees, this was the smallest con I’d worked in over two decades, so the looseness of some of the operation scared me at first, as did the low number of volunteers. You need bodies and a more rigid system to run a large con, but smaller cons can spend more time in improv mode and still succeed. And smaller numbers of attendees means a smaller number of volunteers; there’s no valid reason to suggest the percentage of volunteers would go up as number of attendees goes down. But once I’d had time to think about it rationally, I understood and adjusted, just as other con staff began to understand me and adjust.

It was a fun time. If you were there, thanks for making it fun. If you weren’t. you missed out on something good.

The rise of the mega-book.

Susanna Clarke’s first novel has a good sales run at the moment, and it’s up for Hugo. With some difficulty, I read it. Well, perhaps “read it” is too strong a term. At several points along the way, my eyes frankly glazed over, and I skipped pages. An actual page count of what I read vs what I skipped would reveal I probably read about 85% of it. And that was too much.

She seems to have a full-blown case of the disease that has been afflicting George RR Martin, JK Rowling, and many other writers today. I’m not sure what the exact cause of it is, but the result is The Big Book, the book that’s too long for the story it’s telling. I don’t know if they think readers want more pages to justify the higher price, or if the cutbacks in staff at the publishers are resulting in editors that are incapable doing their job because of time constraints, or what. But many books today are just too long.

This is an excellent case in point. This 782-page monstrosity shouldn’t have been over 500, and probably could have been less than that. The plot is rather good, as are the sub-plots, but they get so bogged down in detail that on more than one occasion I had to resist the urge to throw the book across the room. Come on, get to the point already!

The Big Book has always been with us, but not in such large numbers as today. Yes, Lord of the Rings was long. But, to tie the two together, JS&MN reads as if Tolkien had included all of the Silmarillion as footnotes in the Rings trilogy.

The basic idea here is that a mean-spirited magician (Henry Norrell) is wanting to be the only magician in England, when a young pup with some talent comes up; Norrell can’t resist keeping him around (you know the story, it’s as old as the hills) and Things Develop. Mix in the idea of a long-disappeared English King that his subjects expect to return and let simmer.

This is generally a good dish to preprare, but Clarke has decided it needs to be garnished with a dry-as-dust academic tone, including footnotes that go on for pages(!) and all sorts of irrelevancies that serve mainly just to brag about the back story she’s created for the book. Yes ma’am, it’s a well-crafted deep back story, and you’ve certainly done your homework. But every good fantasy tale has one of those, trotting it out and putting it on display is tacky at best, and boring at worst. In the case at hand, it oscillates between the two poles.

I can’t explain why the book has sold the copies it’s sold; I haven’t yet got around to the other Hugo nominees, but this makes me dread going through the rest of them. If the art of writing is knowing what to leave out, then this book is truly artless.

Maybe I’m just being silly, but I expect the book to tell me a story, and hopefully through the story’s development learn something more about myself or the people around me. This book has a good story buried in it, struggling to get out, but the excavation process is painful, and frankly, not worth the effort. I can only recommend this book for those who think doctoral dissertations make good reading.

I know, it’s foolish to think of the Sci-Fi Channel as actually accurate, but I’m really getting depressed over the number of times the term “science fiction” is abused. The latest instance apparently includes horror and fantasy.

This is just silly. I suspect, however, it just is keeping in step with the general erosion of our societal attitude toward truth and facts. “Science Fiction” used to mean “no supernatural effects need apply.” The premises of a science fiction story had to be either demonstrable as fact, or at least possible/probable given what we know.

We have relaxed our collective definition of truth. It used to mean, “that which we can prove.” It now appears to mean “that which we cannot disprove.” There is a large distance between those two points that we have leaped, without good reason. I hope someday we recover our senses, before it’s too late and we’re lost.

I have to admit, the cover painting played a part in my purchase of this book. One of the rare times that has occurred, because it’s been my experience that most cover paintings seem to be done by an artist who has read (or at least paid attention to) little more than the title of the book. Most of the time, they’re useless as a tool for making decisions about the book. But Christian McGrath’s depiction of a monk with a keyboard tucked under his arm against a double-exposure backdrop of a circuit board and the wals of a gothic cathedral was nothing short of delightful. Match it with Christopher Stasheff, he of The Warlock In Spite Of Himself, and I figured I was in for an enjoyable ride.

And I was. The premise is that the blessed Father Vidicon is walking down the throat of Hell (having, of course, passed successfully through the Hellmouth) and hears the pleas of those who are struggling against Murphy. A young man, Tony, a computer troubleshooter, stumbles across a message from the blessed father, and becomes pressed into service, falls in love, and tries to maintain a relationship with both a beautifule woman and the blessed father.

All the while Tony strives against a delightful bestiary representing the problems we all encounter, Father Vidicon continues his walk, struggling with the more powerful sendings.

Stasheff has put together an allegory for our time, sort of a Pilgrim’s Progress, albeit with both a technological and philosophical twist. While the former would, no doubt, delight Bunyan, the latter I’m equally sure, would not.

Definitely a Good Read, though perhaps we techno-dweebs are most likely to identify with Tony. There is a low probability of this becoming a series, which is a Good Thing (I’d call it impossible, but I know better; still I hope it doesn’t as the story is complete as it stands) because I think the tale would lose something were it to continue.

Brain Sludge, by the infrangible Bill Roper. And he looks like such a nice man, too! (I’d point to the lyrics, but Bill hasn’t posted them anywhere.)

And let me give a shout to Filk Radio while I’m at it. Especially made for those who like their music on wry. (If you have iTunes, you don’t need their dedicated player, but you won’t get the song titles if you don’t.)

The Cat is bemoaning conversations with someone who doesn’t believe in evolution. It’s a topic I’ve grown tired of “debating” on the net, but I’ll visit it One More Time, in the hope that perhaps I can shed some light.

A big problem, as evidenced by the comment thread, is that both sides never tire of turning the opposition into a straw man, and both keep trying to win the argument by definition. A good case in point is the description of the “anthropomorphic all-God” in the comments. It’s a misstatement of Christian positions to say God is “man-like.” Man is, in fact, God-like. (”Let us make man in our image” — KJV) Is “theomorphic” a word? The point is God is the original, man the derivative being. Characterizing God as “anthropomorphic” is a good way to antagonize your respondent.

What’s my position?

1) I find many of the suppositions made following the theory to be suspicious, to say the least. They may be true, but they don’t make sense to me, and there really isn’t way to test them. They are assertions, which make a sincere (at least most of them do) attempt to cover/explain the currently known facts. But several explanations can manage that, so without being able to test the theories, I don’t see a compelling reason to select one over another.

2) Just because I find it unlikely, I’m not going to tell you that you can’t believe it (there’s another problem in terminology — one doesn’t believe in evolution, one believes evolution; there’s no person there to believe in, after all) and forbid you telling other people about it. This attitude, alas, sets off the howler monkeys on both sides of the question.

3) Also, simply because I don’t see it as true doesn’t mean that it isn’t true. I’ve learned long ago not to limit God’s behavior by my own understanding. I don’t have His brainpower; when I know more, I’ll understand more.

Just to explain more about my point #1 above: Let’s say you know nothing at all about the world. You see a video which shows someone entering rooms in a house and turning on lights. Without being able to set up an experiment to test, you can theorize:

1) There is pressure plate under the floor which turns on the light.
2) There is a motion sensor which turns on the light.
3) The house demands you scratch it on a sensitive area and the light is its pleasure response.
4) The beings in the house have an abundance of energy and they power the lights by touching a contact plate.

(I’m sure there are other theories possible, but that’s enough, I think, to make the point.)

There isn’t an experiment we can perform that will *prove* that life on this planet emerged and developed according to the current theories (I use the plural, because there’s not complete agreement among those who accept evolution — nor is there agreement among those who do not, for that matter) this side of time travel. At best we could demonstrate that it could have happened that way, but even that hasn’t been done, yet.

We look at old bones, and we build fleshy creatures that may only vaguely resemble the actual being in question. You would, for example, have a hard time reconstructing my fleshly body from just my bones. I’ve had the same bones all my adult life, yet my height varies by 5% or more routinely, and occasionally by more. My weight has varied by 60% and more. Now imagine you’ve never seen a human and explain where they carry their body fat. They’re just guesses. Do they hold tegether, yes (for the most part) they do, but so does the future histoy of Miles Vorkosigan, does that mean he’s real? Or the Tharks? How about the Puppeteers and the Kzinti?

You see what I mean? Evolutionary theory is largely guesswork and suppositions, unproven and unprovable. (I once ran in to someone who claimed a computer simulation could prove it. Try as I might, I couldn’t get him to see it was tautaulogical: You build a simulation that runs according to the rules of evolutionary theory and behold, the result supports evolutionary theory! Yah think? Computer simulations are useful tools when we understand the problem domain; we don’t know enough about this one. The problem is when you build the solution into the test, you never can learn anything.) It’s just a case of choosing the set you find yourself comfortable living with.

This is the fourth book in the “Steerswoman” series from Rosemary Kirstein. I’ve not read the entire series so I can’t comment on it in detail as a whole. (I found “The Outskirter’s Secret” and read it a few years ago, but never found the first book in the sequence, and the third, “The Lost Steersman” somehow escaped my notice. Her first two have been re-released in omnibus form from DelRey, so all are currently in print, in trade paper size if your bookstore shelves by size as well as author and genre.)

The book stands on its own. Having knowledge of What Has Gone Before can lend a little more significance to some events but such knowledge isn’t necessary for the enjoyment of the story. However, I have to note that it is less independent than the earlier book I read. She may be in the process of moving towards episodic novels in a larger story, which is unfortunate. I stopped reading James P. Hogan for this reason, and have put George R. R. Martin in abeyance until he claims to have finished the Fire and Ice saga he embarked on since being so disappointed in the lack of significant movement in Episode 2. I understand the economic impulse behind it, though, so I don’t condemn the practice out of hand.

While the sequence isn’t a single tale broken up into book-sized chunks, a la Tolkien, it’s more than a collection of tales set in a common fantasy world. It has an overarching story arc that it follows. The Steerswoman (a Steerswoman, by the way, is an itinerant collector of knowledge; she is allowed to ask any question, and she will truthfully answer any question put to her) has discovered something momentous (a geosynchronous satellite, which the people call a Guidestar, has fallen) and there is A Plot Afoot by someone which is resulting in a lot of deaths among the frontier folk (called outskirters) and maybe the entire world.

One of the reasons I’ve looked for these books is that I served on a panel at PhilCon with the author, and found she possessed one of those minds that really enjoys turning things upside down to see what they look like from angles usually unseen. I don’t know, but I rather suspect, she would enjoy those puzzles Games magazine runs from time to time where you are asked to identify an object from a very close-up photograph of a small part of it. I’ve always found that sort of mind enjoyable, even fascinating, and I wanted to see what she did with her plots.

She didn’t disappoint. It’s not difficult to see the technology behind the “magic” or “charms,” but the terminology her unsophisticated folks use for the intrusions of hi-tech into their world is more reasonable than McCaffrey’s “agenothree” (from Pern; the etymology of this term never did satisfy me).

I found the concept of the Steerswoman office to be especially intriguing. In a nutshell, they collect and store knowledge for the world. They are entitled to pry into anything, and the price for not answering them (or worse, lying to them) is to be placed under ban, in which case no Steerswoman will ever tell you anything. It presupposes, of course, that you actually care whether you learn anything from a Steerswoman. Kirstein quite evidently considers this to be a horrible punishment; my experience with humanity leads me to believe that viewpoint is a minority one for the species, but it works well in the society she has created, so it’s hardly a serious complaint. In any case, it’s a creative way to solve the age-old problem of how to get strangers to talk meaningfully to your viewpoint character and, by extension, your readers.

To return to the book in hand, our heroine has been tracking the wizard, trying to find out what he is up to, and found the place where he served his apprenticeship. Wizards have a bad rep in this society, but here she finds the tale of one who suddenly changed to a Nice Guy. The larger arc is concerned with the why and when of the change; the immediate problem is how will the steerswoman survive being discovered there by the one she is investigating.

Kirstein paints well; my enjoyment of the characters and the society almost completely obscured how dependent the plot of the book was on What Has Gone Before (which is an achievement, considering I had missed 2/3rds of The Story Thus Far). The larger arch is definitely of the “puzzle” variety, but the individual stories themselves are character-driven. Recommended.

In the warm afterglow of Christmas, while my oldest was putting together the CSI puzzle (complete with UV light) that was the hit of her Christmas, I decided to checkmy email. Reggie White is dead, and Dave Locke is in a coma.

Reggie was one of the finest defensive lineman ever to play the game of football. There are a lot of memories of him to choose from, but the one I’ll always remember is from a Denver game. The offense had a lot of trouble scoring, but finally had moved ahead of Denver late in the fourth quarter. Elway came out on the field to lead another of his patented comebacks, and almost single-handedly Reggie shut the door on him, sacking him twice in four plays. It was a lesson on what a great player can do, when the game is on the line.

Dave is a science fiction fan, in every meaningful usage of the term. While he has a reputation that would kindly be described as “prickly”, I have to say I’ve never found him so. I’ve always found him intelligent, quick-witted, and, in short, someone I’d be happy to chat with beside the fire on a long winter’s evening. It would be great to know him better, but if this is all I’m going to have I still count myself lucky.

Freedom’s Gate by Naomi Krivitz is the next up. It was part of the recent WorldCon swag, and while it was above-average for the books that get handed out there for free, I’m not sure I’ll continue with the series.

I can’t really say why, either, which bothers me. Usually if a book leaves me cold (or luke-warm, in this case) I can easily point to a reason. For whatever reason, I just found it hard to care about this lead. Maybe it’s the new geographical hotspot (is it just me or are there suddenly a huge number of fantasies based in the myths of Kazakhs and their immadiate neighbors?) that just doesn’t reach me. Consciously, the biggest fault I can see with the book is that I felt smarter than the lead. Since the story was really unfinished (it’s part one of a cycle) I can’t be sure I truly am, but that’s the way I felt.

And maybe that is part of the problem. It’s Yet Another Epic. I declare, is there some sort of publishing conspiracy that forces writers to pad out their stories to make multi-book epics? I suppose it’s an easier sell than simply tripling the price of a single, well-crafted book, but I’ve [tried to] read too many novellas masquerading as novels int he last few years. I’ve decided it’s time to go back to the magazines. At least there I can get real short fiction, instead of artificially lengthened stories.

This complaint doesn’t apply to all writers in Science Fiction today, but to a depressingly large proportion of them.

I’ve just finished Forge Of Heaven by C J Cherryh. It was a rough beginning, as witness my spelling rant earlier, but after the editors got their act together, it settled down into the usual fine read I’ve come to expect from her.

Before going on, I should note that I have met and talked with the lady before; we shared the GoH stage (she was GoH, I was Gaming GoH) in Omaha more years ago than a gentleman should remind a lady of. She is a delightful and intelligent lady, one with whom I would gladly spend an afternoon or evening talking about nearly any subject. (And the only reason I didn’t go farther than that is that I am quite happily married.) It’s wonderful to spend time with an active mind, especially when wrapped with such charm and grace.

Interestingly, I’d sworn off Cherryh before that time, having been disappointed by the first serialization of the Faded Sun series. Later, when I returned to her writings after a friend insisted, I realized I was Just Being Stupid. Since then I’ve been backtracking to catch up on what I missed.

In some ways we have a formula story, with the Honest Man Trying To His Best, while beset by The Troubled Little Sister and of course The Parents Who Don’t Understand. All the while surrounded by Political Intrique and watched closely by The Unimaginable Power No One Understands And Everyone Fears.

But don’t take this as a criticism of the story. I never mind traveling even the most familiar road as long as I’m in good company. The tale is well-spun and complex, with more than enough entertaining diversions to make the trip immensely enjoyable. Cherryh is a master (mistress?) of this sort of tale, and it shows. The main characters are ones I wouldn’t mind having to my home for dinner; spending time with them is fun.

The story is a sequel to Hammerfall, and takes place a long time after the events in that novel. It’s always a question whether a sequel can be read without reading the first, but in this case it’s possible, as she includes a Reference section which will fill in the important backstory. (I would have preferred the backstory to be filled in within the story itself, but failing that, this will do.

There’s not enough detail of the planet itself to satisfy me, but then I’m a world-building geek; She supplies everything you need to know about it before you need to know it in order to make sense of the story, which is all that is required of her.

If you’re after Hard Science Fiction I’m not so sure you’ll be satisfied. Cherryh’s favorite “science” is the science of species interaction. She builds wondrous civilizations, solid and believable, and turns them loose on each other, with at least one “wild card” that tries to be the bridge between the different societies. She is at her best using an individual to explore the range of conflicts between completely (or nearly so) different social mindsets. Anthropology, rather than Physics, is her metier. If you’re after the nuts and bolts of the station’s operation, you’ll be disappointed, I’m afraid.

There is science fiction and then there is science fiction. Cherryh is one of the finest writers currently practicing the craft of the latter. Enter her domain and enjoy.

It appears my earlier rant about the spelling in Forge of Heaven was premature. After a shaky 50 pages or so, it’s settled down, and I haven’t been jarred out of the story by language issues since. More on Cherryh in general and this book in particular later (probably tomorrow).

Caught a rerun of an Odyssey 5 episode tonight. Why does the Good Stuff always get cancelled and the dreck go on forever?

This thought occured to me as I was reading Forge Of Heaven by C J Cherryh. I’m finding an annoying spelling error every dozen pages or so. And they all share a similar pattern: the substitution of one correctly-spelled, but wrong, word for the correct one.

So far I’ve run into “what” (should have been “that”) and similar innocuous substitutions, nothing earthshaking, but it’s shame to keep getting jarred out of the story because the publisher wanted to save money by running it through a spell-checker rather than using a real live human.

Moral: There are some tasks that technology still can’t handle properly.

Teresa Nielsen Hayden points to an EBay auction that is almost heart-rending.

Somebody who obviously has some trouble with self-editing is selling a manuscript, hoping to hit the Big Time financially. So far it appears he wants $150K(US), and the best offer he’s received as of the writing of this is a negative $698US (IOW, instead of buying the manuscript they want him to pay the costs of publication). I’ll give him this: it’s an interesting stunt to pull publicity towards it and himself. I haven’t read the manuscript, but I have read the sample paragraph, and I flashed back to the Star Wars kid. Be careful of the attention you draw, it may find you wanting.

“Oh, if only I had a Name, then I could sell millions of copies of my book!” In some ways, this unspoken claim is true. Some books do get sold to a publisher by Name Only. But not many. And if the first doesn’t merit it, the second won’t be sold that way, barring a very few exceptions. (Please don’t mention Jeffrey Archer in this context.) Likewise with the audience. Yes, I think Stephen King’s name on it could put the Portland, Maine, telephone directory on the bestseller list for a short while, but no longer than that. And it would greatly damage sales of his next few books, as the audience continued to hold a grudge against him for tricking them this time round.

As one who has a modicum of experience in this field, let me say that good writing is Hard Work. It’s not as easy as it looks, children. I can’t pass on the quality of the whole manuscript, but from the looks of the sample paragraph (and extrapolating from the assumption that the sample is what the author considered if not the best writing in the book, at least representative of the writing in it) there’s a lot of work to do on this. Find any currently selling novel with something resembling the final sentence in that paragraph, I dare you. Calling it purple would be an insult to purple prose. Words must be cut and polished, like gemstones, before they will shine.

“I’ve spoken the language all my life, it’s not very hard to write it,” is an attitude I’ve encountered too many times along my journey. It’s Not True. Reality Check? To say someone “speaks like a novel” or “sounds like a novel” is a criticism of their speech patterns. Spoken word and written word are different beasts. While the written word contains within it pieces which pretend to be spoken (next time you and your friends have a conversation, imagine what it would read like if every word, every sound, were transcribed, and you’ll see what I mean by “pretend”) it’s more than that. And it’s the more that causes the problem.

To write, read. Don’t read for ideas, but read for the sound of the language used. Read until the rhythm and sounds of the language become ingrained. I don’t care what the subject is, but you should. You should be reading the kind of book you’re trying to write. I don’t mean this too specifically; you don’t need to read books similar in plot to what you’re wanting to write. But read the genre. If you’re going to try for a bestseller, read bestsellers. You will write like what you read, at least at first, so be careful what you put in your mental hopper. Don’t settle for poor quality. The computer maxim, “Garbage In, Garbage Out,” applies here as well. To write like the best, read the best.

Best news I’ve heard in a long time: Mel Brooks is writing a sequel to Spaceballs!