It begins by catching up with those 1714 chapters from Quicksilver that made such little sense at the time, which was ok since being chased by pirates is cool. Daniel returns to a very different London to the one he left, and this time arrives via a circuitous route through the English countryside. It gives him time to apprecoiate the lifestyle of the Tory landowners he has always opposed.

In London his old comrade Sir Isaac Newton is trying to run the Royal Mint, and forever chasing a criminal known only as Jack the Coiner. No prizes for guessing who that is.

I won't spoil any of the details. Like the other two of this series the book may be long, but every page, every sentence has been crafted to keep you reading. I won't deny anyone the experience of turning each page with trembling fingers, eyes struggling to stay open for just one more chapter.

The System of the World is a grand finale to a grand series.

Sangamon Taylor is an eco-vigilante (equal parts Jack Bauer and MacGyver), a one-man army taking on evil corporations with single-minded ingenuity. Eschewing bombs in favor of a souped-up inflatable boat and a gas chromatograph, he uses scientific evidence and media savvy to achieve his ends. When local lobsters register catastrophic PCB levels, Sangamon uncovers an audacious toxic crime that could turn Boston Harbor into a "harbor of death." While Sangamon Taylor is not his most compelling hero/protagonist, Stephenson creates an engaging novel, where hard science becomes the star of the show.

You will enjoy this book if you are a fan of: dust-head heavy metal Satanists, daredevil Zodiac maneuvers, Duck Squeezers, ungodly stink bombs, mediapathic escapades, nighttime bicycle jaunts, Greenpeace, sewer diving, benzene rings and covalent chlorine, cigarette boats, and nitrous oxide.

Clavinism (stuff that will not make you look cool in a bar): Actually Norm, Sangamon Taylor is modeled after environmental chemist Marco Kaltofen.

Neal Stephenson y su novela “Snow Crash”, escrita en 1991, describe un mundo no mi lejos del nuestro.

Si quieren tener una idea de lo que el Net (entre otras cosas) puede reservarnos…

En Francia, esta novela salío bajo el titulo: 'El samuraï virtual'

... So rather than trying to salvage anything from the standard model [of genres], I believe that it makes more sense to speak of a bifurcated culture. Of course, the bifurcation isn't absolute or perfectly clean, but it's clear that there are two distinct audience groups and that they have different characteristics. One carries swords in elevators and the other doesn't.

A couple of months ago, I wrote briefly about Steampunk.  Since then, I have been looking out for anything related to the genre/artists/movement - it so fascinates and delights me.   This book came out months ago, but it is just now on my radar.  I cannot wait to read this.  Here is the entire review. Here is an excerpt:

The VanderMeers’s anthologies seem to be establishing a new landmark for the oughts with their mixture of fiction and non-fiction pieces. After not only publishing articles in The New Weird, they also published (for the first time in an SF anthology, as far as I know) a web discussion list thread in order to get their readers more acquainted with their experiences during its compilation.

The same applies to their new and much-awaited anthology, Steampunk. The anthology begins and ends with short articles on steampunk arcana.

It sounds marvelous AND included in this anthology is writing by Michael Chabon, who you all know is a favorite-favorite and Neal Stephenson, who's writing floors me and makes me feel stupid, but in a good way. (Someday...  in a remote location, in the deep of winter, when I have found the perfect tea and I'm completely snowed in and I have nothing to do but blissfully read for a few months in a comfy chair by a fireplace... I will finish Quicksilver. I swear.  It's the kind of book that deserves complete attention in perfect conditions for reading it, and seeing that it's unlikely I will ever make an ocean crossing at the turn of the century, I will continue to cling to my deep winter-snowed in-perfect tea fantasy.)

Also
Note to Self:  Read more writing by and anthologies edited by the VanderMeers.
And for the second time in a couple of days, the voice of Rossi is in my head.  He told me to read Jeff VanderMeer ages ago.

Errr... Note to Self: Listen to Matt Rossi more often.

En gros, le Cyberpunk, c'est un avenir bien plus proche qu'on ne le croit, plus ancré dans notre quotidien, mais un quotidien décalé, où la technologie prend une dimension si importante qu'elle finit par redéfinir l'Homme et son environnement, l'Homme avec son identité.

Que ce soient des implants cérébraux, des prothèses cybernétiques ou encore des voyages virtuels dans les réseaux des ordinateurs, tels sont les ingrédients du Cyberpunk. Sans faire l'impasse sur l'environnement bien souvent noir et décadent de ces nouvelles sociétés de l'information, avec leur lot de désenchantements et de dérives. Tout cela est présenté bien souvent dans un style haché, télégraphique qui colle bien avec ces époques que les auteurs nous décrivent.

Un fil rouge "très large" pour s'y retrouver: Tout d'abord le "Dr Adder" de KW Jeter. "L' orbite déchiquetée et "Tous à Zanzibar" de John Brunner.

Les années 80 débutent avec "Fragment en verres miroir " de Bruce Sterling, l'anthologie qui a véritablement donné le nom a ce sous-courant littéraire et donné le coup d'envoi.

Ensuite viennent ceux qui ont donné leurs lettres de noblesse au Cyberpunk, c'est à dire William Gibson avec le "Neuromancien" et son recueil de nouvelles "Gravé sur chrome" ainsi que Walter John Williams qui un peu plus tard édite "Cablé", un classique du genre.

Une multitude d'autres auteurs se sont essayés au "Cyberpunk" avec plus ou moins de succès mais on notera surtout un nom: Neal Stephenson qui avec beaucoup de brio conclut en quelque sorte le genre avec son "Samouraï Virtuel" sortit au début des années 90.

Actually, the price of admission might have been worth it just to take a shortcut. Instead I had to hike however many miles around it to get between the conference center and my hotel. But that's not why ALA sucks for librarians.

No, the problem is I spent most of my time on panels or in committee meetings. You know, stuff I have to do for my job. Work. Librarianship, not books. Meanwhile, I missed cool programming, like the luncheon where Orson Scott Card received the Margaret A. Edwards award for his lifetime contribution to teen lit (amidst some controversy over whether his personal beliefs should disqualify his work from such recognition, which I'm sure amused him greatly if he noticed it). Or the panel with Cory Doctorow, Verner Vinge, Brandon Sanderson, and Eric Flint.

On the plus side, I did get to say hi to Brandon before his book signing, and I got to tell Neal Shusterman that I consider Everlost the gold standard of middle-grade spec-fi. I also picked up an ARC of Neal Stephenson's Anathem. I made great strides in my efforts to be selective in the exhibits hall and not come home with my luggage stuffed with dozens of ARCs I may or may not ever read. But with one 900-page book Stephenson covered the spread.

I did pick up several graphic novels for young readers, the best of which is David Petersen's Mouse Guard: Fall 1152. It's like Brian Jacques's Redwall, except the mice are hard-bitten. Cute, but dangerous. More like The Secret of NIMH in the sense that you enjoy the story but you wouldn't really want to live it. It has a dark mood that I quite like, and that makes it feel more grown-up, though I have no qualms about letting my kids (all under eight) read it.

So I suppose the weekend wasn't a total loss. But it would have been a lot more fun without so much library stuff getting in the way.

Notes on psychic wars: they are harder to win then you'd excect, but the real difficulties are determining victory and defeat, and keeping track of the teams.

Psychic wars I don't keep private:

Me vs. (coked up) cashier at the convenience store on Main and 26th

Me vs. old Land Lady

Me vs. strange neighbor that kept odder hours than me

Me vs. (wierd) cashier at Rising Star market

Me vs. the world

• Quicksilver
• King of the Vagabonds

And now:

Like King of the Vagabonds, Odalisque opens with a step backwards. It's Daniel Waterhouse's turn in the spotlight again, specifically attending the death of Charles II in February 1685. As in Quicksilver, this strand delves into the scientific happenings of the day – notably the eventual publication of Principia Mathematica, complete with a review from Leibniz that basically predicts special relativity – but the primary focus, I felt, was the politics leading up to the Glorious Revolution of 1688. It's the same in the book's second strand, which picks up Eliza's story in Versailles, where she appears to be working as a governess but is fairly quickly really working as a sort of financial manager to half the resident nobles, and all the time really really working as a spy, sending letters encrypted in a cypher she knows is broken to William of Orange (and, for reasons that I missed, letters encrypted in a much stronger cypher to Leibniz). Two very different courts, then, and although there are some similarities in how the two strands unfold -- such as the complete uselessness of royal physicians -- of course there are two different outcomes, for in France the story is of a rebellion quashed. The title at first suggests we're going to be primarily reading Eliza's story, and certainly her continuing progression from slave to noble takes up more pages than Daniel's antics; but I think the title also has a more ironic sense, which ties in with the exploration of freedom in King of the Vagabonds, in which both Daniel and Eliza are slaves to the increasing complexity of the world.

On finishing Odalisque, which is the last part of the volume Quicksilver, I am struck by two main thoughts. First, I feel entirely vindicated in, and indeed grateful for, my decision to consider the volume as three novels: it simply makes no sense as one. It may be that The Baroque Cycle as a whole should be considered as a single, three-thousand-page novel, but it certainly isn't three thousand-page novels. There's no sense in which the volume as a whole achieves closure – but the individual books that make up the volume do, at least as much as, say, Snow Crash does. It will be interesting to see whether the decision to interleave Bonanza and Juncto -- the two novels that make up The Confusion -- gives that volume more of a unifying shape. If by this you infer that I've been won over enough to complete the Cycle, you'd be correct, although I still have the feeling I'll enjoy having read it more than I'm enjoying reading it.

Because the most common emotion Odalisque evoked, like the two novels before it, is frustration. There is the question, for example, of what exactly Odalisque adds to the Cycle. Why do these 300-pages exist? The basic ingredients, after all, haven't changed. The style is the same, pages and pages of talk relating events that happened elsewhere to other people; the overwhelming dumping of information is the same; and the sense that Stephenson's main argument is that this period encapsulates the birth-pangs of the modern world is present and correct. The strongest justification I can come up with for Odalisque's existence is that it's a bit less annoying than Quicksilver and a bit more coherent than King of the Vagabonds. At times, it even seems like the book is in danger of developing a plot, although it always turns out to be just the natural momentum of historical events keeping the characters on the hop.

So you can look at the basic issues raised in the earlier books, and find that if Odalisque doesn't have anything new to say, it at least says the same things more eloquently. For instance: all three books so far have, to one extent or another, foregrounded the question of historical accuracy, and of how history can (perhaps should) be represented in fiction; but Odalisque lays out the terms of the debate most clearly. Right at the start, the issue is cued up by a conversation between Daniel and Roger Comstock. Daniel describes Leibniz's thoughts about the perception of reality, starting with the trivial observation that London "is perceived in different ways by each person in it, depending on their unique situation" (621), going on to argue that there is a sense in which the only meaningful description of London would be the sum of the descriptions of all of its inhabitants, and concluding by suggesting that some individuals' descriptions will be more meaningful than others:

"Normally when we say [someone is distinguished or unique], we mean that the man himself stands out from a crowd in some way. But Leibniz is saying that such a man's uniqueness is rooted in his ability to perceive the rest of the universe with unusual clarity." (621)

On one level, this is a way of explaining of why we read any writer: because their particular vision of the world reveals aspects of it that we did not see, or did not see as clearly, or because their vision chimes with ours. (We read Neal Stephenson because we like his geekiness.) But it's also implicitly both an argument for Stephenson's focus on the Great and the Good of seventeenth-century Europe in his narrative -- being the people who, via Stephenson's protagonists, can express the nature of the times most clearly – and, perhaps unconsciously, a way of highlighting the arrogance of that argument.

With this in mind, it's notable that most of Eliza's narrative in the book is couched in epistolary form. Initially this is satisfying because it gives us direct access to her way of seeing the world, but the ultimate point is that this form -- a single viewpoint -- never tells the whole story. In her last letter to Leibniz, Eliza meditates on the limitations of historical knowledge, with reference to the birth, or not, of James II's heir. Was there really a birth, she wonders? If their was, was James II really the father? If he was, did the child really survive? And so on. "In a sense," Eliza writes, "it does not matter, since that king is deposed, and that baby is being reared in Paris. But in another sense it matters very much..." (895). Truth exists, and truth can be sought, and in certain ways -- such as Principia Mathematica -- it can be found. But in other ways it cannot, and both kinds of truth (revealed and hidden) shape our world. Put another way -- and Stephenson loves nothing more than to put something another way -- all history is a form of cryptography. "In the plaintext story," Eleanor writes, putting the unencrypted description of the burden she felt after the birth of her child into context for Leibniz, "it is a burden of grief over the death of my child. But in the real story -- which is always more complicated -- it is a burden of uncertainty" (906).

That in a thousand details the Baroque Cycle is repeatedly and visibly not "what really happened", then, is irrelevant. (If, to me, annoying.) The standard by which the story is asking to be judged (I think) is not a standard of detail, it's a standard of the big picture: whether or not it fairly represents how the system of the world changed during the time in question. Again, this was clear from the start of Quicksilver, but Odalisque is more convincing as an argument for this particular slant on this particular period of history, largely because the Glorious Revolution feels like more of a meaningful change than (for example) the Declaration of Indulgence. It feels like an event that can function as a synthesizing narrative without having to be forced into an unnatural shape; and the pursuit of synthesis in politics mirrors the pursuit of synthesis going on elsewhere in science. In Daniel, in fact, the two come to be inextricably intertwined. The first mentions of Newton in Odalisque point out how irreconcilable his divergent interests seem. As Daniel puts it, observers are "trying to figure out whether there might be some Reference Frame within which all of Isaac's moves make some kind of damned sense ... You want to know whether his recent work ... is a change of subject, or merely a new point of view" (665). Of course, in this instance we can see the Reference Frame before the characters, because we know how gravity links tides to comets and to the movements of Jupiter and Saturn. But Daniel, in particular, becomes obsessed with how the new scientific understanding of the world might link to a new political understanding of the world; as Eliza notes, he stakes everything on the Glorious Revolution, "not in the sense of living or dying, but in the sense of making something of his life, or not" (746).

I said in my first post that I wanted to leave the question of whether or not the Cycle is science fiction for later. This seems to be a good time to visit that question, at least to reach an interim conclusion, and not just because Quicksilver was awarded the Arthur C. Clarke Award as the best science fiction novel published in the UK in 2003. The Cycle as a whole was later awarded the Locus Award for best sf novel, so clearly it's not just an isolated group of judges who're prepared to consider it as sf. There are several ways of responding to the question, I think. One is to say that it just doesn't matter, to which all I can say is that I think it does: if we can read the novel as sf, it says something about the way sf is working in the early 21st century, and that to me is an interesting subject. Another response is to say that it's trivially obvious that it's sf: there's Enoch Root's longevity, for starters, not to mention the alternate-historical flavour of the whole project. But the most interesting response, I think, is the one that argues that Quicksilver is sf because it appropriates the tools of sf, because it forces us to ask what those tools are. One, perhaps, is the portrait of the world that suggests it is best described in terms of interconnection and the flow of information; that's a familiar approach in sf, from Stand on Zanzibar through cyberpunk to a work like River of Gods; and it's not only sf that does this, but it tends to only be sf that has the characters recognise their position in such a world and comment on it. (In fact, it's possible to read Stephenson's extreme enthusiasm for trivia as an argument that a way of looking at the world that emphasizes information to this degree will inevitably become overwhelming.) The build-up to the Glorious Revolution as portrayed in Odalisque struck me as sfnal for two more specific reasons, as well. First is the way that Stephenson clearly teases us with the alternate-history possibility of assassinating William of Orange: "If they happened to light on the particular stretch of beach where William goes sand-sailing, at the right time of the morning, why, they could redraw the map, and rewrite the future history, of Europe in a few minutes' work", says one character, to which another responds that "It is a clever conceit, like a chapter from a picaroon-romance" (652-3). And second, there seemed to be something sfnal in the way that Daniel perceives the coming revolution: as a gateway to a new world.

It is characteristic (although not universally true) of sf revolutions that they elide the pragmatic details of their construction, and focus on the world to come. There is something almost religious about this view of historical progress, and it's a tendency Stephenson neatly draws out of Daniel, who initially argues that the Puritans who believed the Apocalypse was due in 1666 were on to something, and that they "merely got the particulars wrong ... If idolatry is to mistake the symbol for the thing symbolized, then that is what they did with the symbols that are set down on the Book of Revelation ... I would say that we might bring about the Apocalypse now with a little effort ... not precisely the one they phant'sied, but the same, or better, in its effects" (743). Later he glorifies the process still further: "rebellion is ... a petty disturbance, an aberration, predestined to fail. Revolution is like the wheeling of stars round the pole. It is driven by unseen powers, it is inexorable, it moves all things at once, and men of discrimination may understand it, predict it, benefit from it" (810). Since we know that there are still two thousand pages to go, we can assume that Daniel's idealism is going to be sorely tested, but it falls, significantly, to Enoch to sound the cautionary note, when Daniel reiterates his grand desires:

"In a few years Mr Hooke will learn to make a proper chronometer, finishing what Mr Huygens began thirty years ago, and then the Royal Society will draw maps with lines of longitude as well as latitude, giving us a grid -- what we call a Cartesian grid, though 'twas not his idea -- and where there be islands, we will rightly draw them. Where there are none, we will draw none, nor dragons, nor sea-monsters -- and that will be the end of Alchemy."

"'Tis a noble pursuit, and I wish you Godspeed," Root said, "but remember the poles."

"The poles?"

"The north and south poles, where your meridians will come together -- no longer parallel and separate, but converging and all one."

"That is nothing but a figment of geometry."

"But when you build all your science upon geometry, Mr Waterhouse, figments become real." (881)

It's not just that who is looking matters; it's how they're looking. How very -- dare I say it? -- postmodern. The system of the world defines the world: it's immediately after the Glorious Revolution, with its promise of a truer participatory democracy, that Stephenson tells us the word "shopping" has appeared in the English language. Welcome to consumerism. Equally, reality will always fall short of the idea, and it's not a surprise that Daniel finds the Revolution, when it comes, somewhat anticlimactic, and makes plans to leave for another New World: he's a utopian. He can't stop chasing the future.

All of which probably makes it sound as though I really liked Odalisque, when in fact I thought it merely not bad. Certainly the problems with the book are less pronounced than in the earlier installments – as all of the above hopefully demonstrates, I think this time you can actually draw a coherent argument out of it – but there is fundamentally too much stuff. Individual threads may be beautiful, but the tapestry as a whole is no better than workmanlike. To be clear, I don't think this is a case of bloat: I think everything that is in the book is meant to be in the book, because I still think Stephenson wants us to see the hints of a System of the World that makes the relations between all the disparate elements of the narrative as clear as the relations between the disparate items of Newton's research. That, I think, is meant to be the key, which like the key to Eliza's letters would explain why there have to be five words every time one would do, which would unlock the encryption of this history, which would reveal the plaintext. It just seems like meagre reward.

A couple of months ago I'd never heard of Buckminster Fuller, but seemingly all at once he started popping up in my reading everywhere. It's partly because he's the subject of a new exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art (with Robert Mapplethorpe polaroids going on in another gallery, damn!).

But it's partly not.

It started with a great 2006 article by Fred Turner on the original cyber-beatnik-technoartists that had me engrossed. Stewart Brand Meets The Cybernetic Counterculture delves into the 1960s period of USCO and the Merry Pranksters. These were guys like Brand, Timothy Leary, Robert Rauschenberg, Allan Kaprow, Marshall McLuhan, John Cage, Ken Kesey and... well, Bucky.

They were sometimes loosely connected, drawing inspiration from each other or working in parallel paths, and sometimes working together, exploring a new intersection between art, technology and altered consciousness. It's a fantastic story and it traces cyberculture from it's beginnings in military/academic applications, through to art happenings and the Whole Earth Catalog, and on to digital culture that distributes computing power to the many, and the informational "global brain".

"In McLuhan's writing, and in the artistic practice of groups like USCO and, later, the psychedelic practices of groups like San Francisco's Merry Pranksters, technologies produced by mass, industrial society offered the keys to transforming and thus to saving the adult world. No one promoted this doctrine more fervently than the technocratic polymath Buckminster Fuller. Architect, designer, and traveling speechmaker, Fuller became an inspiration to Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth network, and the New Communalist movement as a whole across the 1960s."

My most interesting take-away about Bucky from the story was his vision of the Comprehensive Designer, who sounds a lot like today's T-shaped Person:

"According to Fuller, the Comprehensive Designer would not be another specialist, but would instead stand outside the halls of industry and science, processing the information they produced, observing the technologies they developed, and translating both into tools for human happiness. Unlike specialists, the Comprehensive Designer would be aware of the system's need for balance and the current deployment of its resources. He would then act as a "harvester of the potentials of the realm," gathering up the products and techniques of industry and redistributing them in accord with the systemic patterns that only he and other comprehensivists could perceive. "

Then Noah Brier tipped me off to a sweet New Yorker profile of Buckminster Fuller that focussed on his Dymaxion inventions... most famously his 3-wheel car shaped like a blimp and his geodesic dome structure that was widely adopted but never really got over its technical construction problems.

The New Yorker article leaves you in no doubt that Bucky had blue-sky thinking, and I think it's inspiring that in his later years he had a lot of success, as a speaker and consultant, and in getting commercial backing for his ideas.

"He also envisioned what he called Cloud Nines, communities that would dwell in extremely lightweight spheres, covered in a polyethylene skin. As the sun warmed the air inside, Fuller claimed, the sphere and all the buildings within it would rise into the air, like a balloon. “Many thousands of passengers could be housed aboard one-mile-diameter and larger cloud structures,” he wrote. In the late seventies, Fuller took up with Werner Erhard, the controversial founder of the equally controversial est movement, and the pair set off on a speaking tour across America. Fuller championed, and for many years adhered to, a dietary regimen that consisted exclusively of prunes, tea, steak, and Jell-O."

Two articles I would have put down to coincidence, but then yesterday I picked up a book I'd put down a while ago, Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age, and there he was again. In Stephenson's future world, smart paper is created with two nano-thin layers of paper sandwiching "airless buckminsterfullerene shells" (or buckyballs as they're affectionately known). The network of buckyballs is linked by buckytubes to form a parallel computer network.

And it's then that I thought... this is odd.

Am I the only person who gets these serendipitous rushes of information or do other people get them too? Is the universe trying to tell me something? Should I start shopping for a dome to live in?

"Includes a bonus CD" ... I can't wait to hear what that's all about. This comes to me by way of the LibraryThing Early Reviewer's program. I can't express how excited I am to read this. Anathem hits stores on September 9th, but I'll get you a review before then.

Of course, my job as a full-time student makes reading a mandatory part of my life. And my interests tend to diverge across wildly different fields, so the volumes I handle tend to be just as numerous. Through all the time I've spent digging into the mazes of phantasm and ideas, I've come to notice something about the nature of my captivation with the act of reading. While I do enjoy reading through the informationally intense texts, I much prefer well written fiction of somewhat classical setting and witty writing while I'm winding down. Strangely enough, occasional feats of such 'light reading' helps me concentrate even better while reading through the academic texts and papers, and the performance boost is very significant.

So I'm thinking of designing a reading schedule for myself that should be able to satisfy my urge for reading and academic performance in one fell swoop. I remember reading through the 'Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell' a few months ago. I was completely immersed in the story and character of the mysterious yet whimsical world created by the gifted author Susanna Clarke, and even now I can picture some of the scenes of the book in front of me as clear as the daylight. I've already finished the City of Dreaming Books by Walter Moers, which I loved as much as I've loved reading the Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. I'm almost at the end of the Baroque Cycle series of three books written by Neal Stephenson, who I believe is a thoughtful yet humorous writer, with certain charmingly irreverent attitude woven into every pages of his books. His newest work would be Anathem scheduled to be released somewhere in September, so I need to find some book to tide me over until then. Just what kind of book would be able to satisfy the strange bibliophile in me? I prefer to hold the book in my hand while reading, absorbing the subtle shades of light and the texture of the pages just as rich as the stories and characters themselves, forming the icing on the cake that is the activity of reading... So no ebooks or internet books at the moment. I get plenty of those from my school in forms of scientific papers I have to report on.

I'm burning through amazon and librarything web pages trying to find my next leisure reading right now. I just hope I'd be able to find another amazing book soon. I feel like someone searching for water in middle of a vast desert, its borders continuing throughout the stretch of my lifetime.

I know that's true for me, stupid finances. My replacement for this temporary bit starts Monday, thank goodness. I can't take much more of this, my head might explode. Or, I might find myself led off by two kindly, acquiescent ushers... but I spoil.

Next up, Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, which seems to me like an Umberto Eco for the xkcd generation. Sweet.

So it was a pretty nice compliment to get an email from a friend asking what to do when heading on a particularly long stretch of airline flight - particularly if you're a fan of science fiction and most of the airline bookshops are packed to the earplugs with bestseller pulp.

Since I'm heading around the world again later this year as well as a few more Australian trips, I've been researching a bit already in preparation. One of the things I've noticed is that a good read that can take you out of the real world of turbulence, squished seats and rumbling stomach of the seat-mate next to you. A bad read can just mean more sodding bulky hand luggage and a lump in the back pocket of the seat-mate in front of you. So get into the bookstore with time to spare if you haven't loaded up your computer carry-on with some selections, so you can flip through and find out if you're really going to enjoy the trip with your reading.

First, science fiction. This is with the expert help of my partner, who has never really let me down in this genre with his suggestions. Despite this, do get flipping ahead of time to see if it's your complimentary cup o' tea.

Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan. If you choose nothing else from this list, choose that - the only excuse for NOT reading that is if you have already done so. Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson; you might also like to start on the The Baroque Cycle, in preparation for Anathem. I would first suggest trying his Cryptonomicon, though, but if you don't like it, that's cool - it's not to everyone's taste. If you DO like it, then the Baroque Cycle is kind of prequel - is hard going in the middle but still pretty decent. Try Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny - also a "must have". Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon are already classics - if you can, see if you get into Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and other novels that aren't science fiction but well worth finding on the book carousel at the airport terminal.

Unfortunately, many of the best books are past of a series. The above are a few that spring to mind as "teh awes0mmeee!!" that aren't in a series - and technically, I'm cheating with Altered Carbon (though it stands alone). If series are OK, then try: Chronicles of Amber by Roger Zelazny; the Lensman series by E. E. Doc Smith is worth a shot but difficult to find. There's also the Foundation trilogy (Isaac Asimov - there are more than the three books, but stick to the first three or prepare to be a bit disappointed).

Speaking of Asimov, I once sent a copy of Asimov's The Complete Robot series to a 'friend' - although she turned out to be more fair-weather than fair-minded, it's a great book if you enjoy science fiction short stories and novellas and I certainly don't regret getting my own copy. I have revisited Frank Herbert's Dune recently and wasn't disappointed. Another series that I have found here and there (usually in second-hand bookstores) - The Stainless Steel Rat series by Harry Harrison.

There's A Song of Ice And Fire by George Martin; Peter Hamilton has a couple of series that are both pretty good - grab anything of his that says "volume 1" and see if you like it. And of course Terry Pratchett. Pratchett has gone from great to middling and back to pretty great... sadly he has been reported to have early onset Alzheimer's. Do see if you can catch some stage versions of his books if you have the chance. If you don't have his co-authored book with Neil Gaiman, Good Omens, then go no further - go forth and get it.

Neil Gaiman is, of course, de rigeur - if you're the sort to enjoy a good graphic novel read, then you should be tucking copies of books by Alan Moore into your inflight pockets. Although From Hell is rather bulky in that case, Watchmen and V for Vendetta is good escapism when stuck with in-flight films you wouldn't pay to see on dvd.

Which brings me to the issue of explicit books - would I take Moore's Lost Girls with me on a flight? Honestly, I've picked up left-over broken-spined books of more luridly written and less intellectual content (usually by King, Collins or Krantz), stuffed down the sides of chairs and abandoned in the seat pocket by previous passengers. Yet although I've yet to be asked by fellow passengers 'what are you reading??', it might be a little awkward trying to explain just why you're engrossed in the likes of Belle DeJour's latest adventures, Diablo Cody's work before she dreamed-up Juno, or even the more graphically Australian heroin-addict-turned-prostitute-turned-novelist Kate Holden's In My Skin. I'd say if you can handle the risk of having someone double-take at the title you're holding, then those are a 'on the other side of the streetwalker' time-passer when stuck en transit. You can always try the 'douche-inspired' bestseller Wetlands by Charlotte Roach, if you think that you will be intellectually engaged at the same time as grossed-out by the over-dilapidation tale of the main character:

Does "empowerment" even mean anything anymore when women claim to be "empowered" by pole dancing lessons and Botox? Where is the intersection of sexual liberation and societal progress for women? I imagine we'll be discussing these questions long after 18-year-old Helen Meyer takes her place in the literary "slut" pantheon with Isadora Wing and Emma Bovary.

Regardless of that warning - Chuck Palahniuk, Chuck Palahniuk, Chuck Palahniuk. Who gives a damn what nearby seat-mates think, just leer at them and wave the book in their face until they quickly nip back behind their boring magazine whilst you read about the plane going down in flames, the porn star heading for imminent death or the filth behind the wallpaper. Die laughing if it happens for real.

Which then takes me to general fiction - Mil Millington is a god with fake red hair and even if you're not on his sporadic mailing list then you will still love his book Things My Girlfriend And I Have Argued About and others, regardless of your sad deficiency of what is da shiznit. Ben Elton is also a staple of the pulp-fiction section, but at least his heart and mind is in the right place and he certainly knows how to hit every modern issue and international concern that pop culture magazines cover. As for Blind Faith - I reviewed that earlier this year here.

I admit that I got into studying Classic Philosophy and read Ezra Pound cantos in the rain for about two years of my University career because of Donna Tartt's The Secret History and its successor is Special Topics In Calamity Physics - A Novel By Marisha Pessl. Pretentious tales of brats in New York only wish they could be half this literate when it comes to school-yard politics and murder. Speaking of which, Daniel Handler's The Basic Eight is a glass full of absinthe with a chaser of insanity. Go crazy.

Australian author Matthew Reilly has his own legendary story behind the publishing phenomenon of thriller-meets-sci-fi and he's onto his next homegrown blockbuster at a rapid pace - so a lengthy airline flight is a great way to get into his Michael Crichton-with-less-of-the-highly-unlikely-technological-fidgeting books. Susanna Clarke's fantastical Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell is weighty but wonderful and I was lost for at least a thousand miles because of it.

If you're able to enjoy non-fiction books whilst on a lengthy trip, I've written about several great reads before - they include the works of Mary Roach, Richard Wiseman, Rose Shapiro and more than a dozen books in the 'children's section' that could just as easily make for a good read on a long trip.

At this point I better stop before I start going through the second of my twenty-five bookshelves. No, I'm not kidding. Enjoy the trip.

I'm pretty stoked about reading this book (again) for class.  I've always loved Neal Stephenson's stuff and this short essay (long essay? short book?) is no exception.  Although I must confess I never read Crytonomicon or anything past it.  I have the same problem with William GIbson: once they abandoned the cyberpunk genre they were basically dead to me.  I read Pattern Recognition and didn't really care for it.  I tried Cryptonomicon and couldn't slog through it.  But Count Zero, Diamond Age, and Neuromancer I count among my favorite books of all time.

Anyway, this was supposed to be a post about cyberpunk.  In the Beginning was really influential on me when I first read it as an undergrad.  It inspired my first foray into Linux: a failed attempt at installing Mandrake (now Mandriva) on my desktop.  The stupid video drivers didn't work and after installing and booting I was presenting with a big black screen of nothing.  Intimidating enough that I attempted to load Linux again 4 years later :-P

For the technically challenged:

Don’t dismiss this blog because of the terms you see here. Just note that I have hyped both memory units and time – memory units are large and time is extremely small. So forget the yottas and the zeptos.

---------------------

It is the lordless year of 200981 AD.

3day r@m wakes up from his slumber and starts planning his day’s itinerary. He syncs up with the Solar Power Grid placed on Mars to see if he has been allocated his daily quota of power. He has been. He checks his inbox to see if he has any new mails. 754. He does a quick scan and deletes the spam, reads the personal ones first and keeps the office ones for the last – the most important of them being the one from his boss who has asked him to master some robotics related topic. The mail contains a 25 Yotta byte attachment and he goes through it completely. All this takes him 0.36 micro second.

Really ain’t a big deal if you got a partitioned brain with independent processors governing each half-lobe. The right brain is creative so he has got a processor that enables him to paint, dance and flirt and he reserves it for his personal and social purposes. The left brain being logical, he has a processor that solves complex problems, finds patterns, sifts through information and this half of his brain is dedicated to all office and professional work. Not that he ain’t a “professional” when it comes to flirting ;) Well, what if some creativity is required at his office? In that case, he replies like Presented Bai of Channel [V] – itna paisach mein itna hich milenga!

Having a separate processor for each of your brain lobes is really cool man. Takes the least amount of time for any shit you can think of. For chaps who freak over multi-tasking, this is the thing to get. Imagine you are attending a meeting and the presenter is damn sexy. You can understand and analyze all that she is saying with your left processor and ogle at her and make plans to invite her out for lunch with your right without each disturbing the other! You are doubly efficient!

Of course, the PROM containing morals and ethics runs across both lobes and this is a government mandate. You can’t avoid it and it is inserted by the doctor even before you are spanked alive and brought into the world. So you are almost born with it.

Sitting in his office he is applying the robotics concept to some complex algorithm. Nothing is impossible now because everyone knows everything. Competitive tests have been done away with and meritocracy is a thing of the past because everybody has equal access to every single bit of info. You might have better RAMs than a few others so you might get it a zepto second earlier. Big deal, huh?

An alert prompt flashes in front of his eyes as he is working: “Call from Pete – Accept | Ignore.” He wonders which Pete this is and considers himself lucky for having such a unique name. His parents had really seen the info glut coming and had given him a name so unique that all the search engine related queries for his name would throw results pertaining to him alone.

He triggers his social processor to accept the call and one part of his brain dedicated for receiving calls gets activated. You don’t have to open your mouth and form words when the call hits your brain directly. It is brain-to-brain communication and you don’t need those old, redundant fancy gizmos called mobile phones.

“Hi 3day”, brains Pete.

“Oh hia there Pete”, 3day brains back as his brain recognizes. It is his good friend from the days, or rather, zepto seconds of electronics engineering.

“You in India right now?”

“Yea”

“Well, I got a party tonight, make sure you attend. You’ll love it”

“Oh great! What time and where?”

“Well 7:00 pm. And all folks wanted to have it in Paris. So it’s Paris”

“Damn! 7:00 pm is just 2 nano seconds away. Paris is fine but I got some things to wind up dude”

“See if you can make it. Will wait for ya. Chao” and he brains off.

Now attending Pete’s party is no big deal because of the processors. Going to Paris isn’t as arduous as it used to be because all the world is nothing but a computer generated 3D rendering and you can teleport your mind from one place to another easily. Earlier you had to lug around your entire body just to get your brain to experience a few things about the new place and people. But now, thanks to the microprocessors linked with the 3D virtual rendering of all places across the earth, physical travel is passe. Now, it takes as much time to go from Bangalore to Mysore as from Bangalore to Greenland; the only constraint is your bandwidth. Distance has collapsed and you can no more vent your frustration on the government for bad roads in your city.

What 3day is actually worried about is the power levels. Both partying and working takes a heavy toll on the processors. Since power is rationed from the Mars Solar Power Grid, he might just run a blank and might mean shut down until he gets it exactly 24 hours after he got his previous quota.

He decides to risk it. He puts his robotic algo on self propagating mode, throwing in a sub-routine to generate only critical alerts and teleports to Paris.

The party is live and happening. Takes him no time to spot a blue-haired babe dancing seductively in the corner. He runs a semantic search on her – giving descriptions as he sees her and has all info about her. She is N*ksh*t* - hmmn that’s a cool name. Her bio data, qualification and every other possible info floats in front of his eyes. And the way she is looking at him in the eye, he knows she has all his info floating similarly in front of her lovely hazel eyes. It takes both of them only a fragment of a nano-second more to know that each is interested in the other because they searched each other’s brains out. This search is possible only if the feeling is perfectly mutual and the firewalls are temporarily down to enable this.

Ok it’s fun time. They embrace each other and begin to dance. 3day looks into N*ksh*t*’s eyes and gets the shock of his life. The colors are changing from red, to blue, to black to, white. He pushes her away – damn she might be a virus! He looks at her and her whole self is turning black and white and then fuzzy. He runs a full system bio-scan and it returns normal – 0.000000 infections. The logical part of his brain throws up a critical alert with a red exclamation mark and then….piff! blank!

--------------

His worst nightmare came true – he ran out of power and now with the processors totally dry he has to make do with his biological brain, which has taken over automatically. He is now in what his ancestors called “The Real World”.

Ha! He mocks his ancestors – those bloody wasteful bastards. Imagine living a life like that – having a house for yourself, wasting so much fuel on travel, inventing all crappy gizmos like television, laptops etc. Really ridiculous. And to top it all, they even went berserk over “environmental conservation to save future generations”. Save trees, save ozone layer, avoid plastic etc so that future gens also follow their wasteful example. And the amount of effort, money and resources they spent on entertainment and work was just too much. Mindless buffoons.

Little did they realize that mankind will evolve. "The trees might have vanished. So what? We live great on plastic. Our clothes are plastic and I think they are far better than those cotton Arrow shirts they used", thinks 3day. Suits the current environment conditions. And all of that colossal space and effort wasted on travel, communication, entertainment and work is now just a small silicon molecule in everyone’s brain !

He is settled on his row and watches all the hundreds of others around him on other similar rows. It is like an MS Excel file and each has his/her own cell space. They are all plugged into the virtual world because they have power, lucky guys. He eats his vitamin dry soup – a small pack containing all the 26 essential vitamins and minerals identified by research, to keep human life going. He smirks again as he thinks of all the farm lands and restaurants that his ancestors had once maintained in the pretext of eating and staying alive. And yeah! Those crimes, wars etc that one human being perpetrated on the other - just ruled out now because every one had the same set of morals and ethics in his/her PROM. And how can one forget the healing procedures, doctors and dentists who pretended to cure/heal you. One didn’t even know if one was sick and had no way of finding out. No self-check, no auto-heal. Bah! He just couldn’t understand the world before 3000 AD.

--------------

Only 2 seconds had elapsed since he had woken up from his slumber. And in that time, he had done enough work that would otherwise take 1000 man-years for his ancestors. And he had entertained himself quite a bit. Now he had to wait for another 23:59:58 hours to get his power quota replenished and considering the way time and things moved in the “real” world, it was a heck of a painful wait.

-------------

Author’s note: (pinch of salt advised) ;)

First things first. This entry is certainly inspired by Neal Stephenson’s ‘Snow Crash’ that I am currently reading but I really believe in the following things:

One: is the migration of the human existence onto the virtual platform with a processor to control most mundane processes and also to assist decision making. Our life is governed by information and its processing. An IITian, for example, is considered special only because of his superior brain – in other words, superior source of information and its processing. I believe in democratizing meritocracy and making all info available to everybody. Also, I seriously fail to understand the word ‘Real Life’. Who told you what is real? Can I choose my reality?

Two: is the futility of environmental conservation. I know this is the hep thing right now and my anti stance on this issue might raise a lot of hackles, but I think it is futile. I might switch off a bulb now and turn off a tap which might help one of my great grandsons to keep his bulb and tap on for 3 more minutes, a few centuries down the line. But what the heck is a few centuries as compared to geological time? Every species and entity has its span and nothing can prevent its elimination. Environmental protection stems from man’s ego of being the most supreme creature to ever walk the earth and the desire to keep mankind alive always. So, at the root of it is pure human selfishness with a pretext of temporary sacrifice. Sorry my dear great grandson, I am headed for a 30 min shower right after posting this blog! You mind?

-----------------

PS: Whew, these after-notes look like an entry in itself. Well, I have used a few subtle things in this entry most obvious of them being 3day r@m. (or is it?). Can you guess the significance of the digits in the year mentioned in the very first line? ;) And you of course can’t get Pete, but I hope Pete will!

]]> http://mentatjack.wordpress.com/?p=17 Fri, 30 May 2008 16:08:17 +0000 mentatjack http://mentatjack.wordpress.com/?p=17 While I was writing my review of Blood Engines last night I thought about how fun playing with all the various magic systems probably was for Pratt, and I thought back to the itty-bitty-robots (IBR) novel I started in high school. I'd wanted to come up with various ways to enable shape shifting, and they all started collecting around this concept of really small robots that had been created to battle cancer. I wrote what I wrote of that novel (not really more than a chapter or 2 really) summer of 1995.

I got it into my head to pick up my IBR novel while I was in college, and promptly ran across Drexler's Engines of Creation. Looking back I should have considered this research, but at the time I was floored that my idea had already been thought of and I shelved the novel. After reading the short story Blood Music by Greg Bear and reading Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson, I was convinced that I would NEVER be able to compete with other published authors. I quite enjoyed those stories and pretty much decided to just be a science fiction reader.

This morning, I was listening to I Should Be Writing. The topic was "fun." My mind returned to my IBR novel, and I realized it could still be a TON of fun to right, even if I purposely stuck to my naive nano-technology source material. I was starting to run back through scenes from my novel when I finished the episode of ISBW and started up the morning escape pod story, Blink. Don't Blink. ... a brilliant nano-technology story ... this one about as close to some of my ideas as I've ever run into. The universe is talking to me. I'm going to flesh out an outline and prepare for a NaNoWriMo of my IBR novel.

Update (6/6/08 9:25) I Should Be Writing #70 touches on the "depressed by finding out that your ideas have already been done" concept. Her advice is the title of the episode, "Just WRITE the damn thing!"

Frustratingly, I could find no option to use XP instead of Vista, so I've spent the last week or so beating the OS over the head until it understands what I want it to do. I also did some optimization on it, because Vista's a giant resource hog. I found a pair of YouTube videos fairly helpful in this regard if you are in a similar place.

I've been experiencing something pretty interesting with Cryptonomicon. Now, I've said many times previous how much I love the book - and I still do. What's interesting is how the few years since I've read it have actually put me more in tune with the book's content. Everytime you reread a book you get something new out of it, but this time around it's like a whole new book. And I'm reading it on my favorite superfluous technology device. It's pretty fantastic all around.

So: tomorrow I head to the DC area to take a look at Warhammer Online. Coverage on Massively, of course, with commentary at MMOG Nation and (I expect) here as well.

Ein eindrucksvoller Roman! Er entwirft ein für mich bis dahin völlig neue Sicht auf die Zukunft. Wie wir uns entwickeln und wie sich die Technik entwickelt.

Ein Zufall, dass ich anschließend Diamond Age von Neal Stephenson lese.

Stephenson entwirft hier ebenfalls eine faszinierende Weld, die gar nicht so weit in der Zukunft liegt.

Die Basis beider Romane ist die Möglichkeit, sich quasi alles per Automat herstellen zu können, was man so gerne hätte.

Bei Glashaus ist das ein Assembler

Bei Diamond Age ist das ein Compiler.

Diamond Age ist mehr als 10 Jahre früher als Glashaus auf den Markt gekommen. Sicher hat sich Stross von den Ideen Stephensons "inspirieren" lassen...

Ist das noch jemand aufgefallen?

Oder sehe ich Gespenster? ;-)

Lev Grossman got the scoop on "Anathem" in March. Please read his post here. Here is a little snippet of the catalog copy to wet your whistle:

"Raz has lived behind the walls of a 3,400-year-old monastery, a sanctuary for scientists, philosophers, and mathematicians-sealed off from the illiterate, irrational, unpredictable "saecular" world that is plagued by recurring cycles of booms and busts, world wars and climate change."

Hmmm... an "illiterate, irrational, unpredictable 'seacular' world." Maybe I am on to something with this whole "unliterate" angle.

Most importantly, Eos Books, is giving all of us a chance to "Ask Neal Stephenson About Anathem." I agree with crazymonk's question asking if there will be a reappearance of Enoch Root. What a great character.

I will definitely pre-order this. I'm all moist with geeky dew.

A partnership of convenience is formed when Y. T., Lolita-esque blonde skateboarding "Kourier," saves Hiro's bacon by delivering his last-ever pizza (last ever 'cause his car was at that time sitting at the bottom of a swimming pool). They'll partner 50:50 to deal in information, the only real currency in an age where trillion-dollar bills ("Meeses") are most useful when shredded for kitty litter, and most worldwide franchises print "local" money that's far more stable than the poor ol' greenback.

Hiro may have uncovered an information mother lode when he witnesses one of his oldest friends succumb to a new designer drug called Snow Crash: poor Da5id's brain undergoes its own form of crash upon first exposure; a juicy tidbit of information that the newbie partnership can surely sell somewhere. Problem being that there's a war going on out there, and Hiro and Y. T. have been swept up in its middle. Players like the Mafia, Reverend Wayne's Church of the Pearly Gates, and Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong are going at it tooth and nail out there; mainly on some gigantic Sargasso of a floating Asian refugee camp that's spent the last decade drifting clockwise on the North Pacific Gyre. At its center? the "yacht" - a converted aircraft carrier - belonging to the richest man in the world (too much, L. Bob Rife believes, just ain't enough). Hiro's suddenly found himself with a damsel in distress, a world on the line, and a nuke-toting Aleut warrior to dodge both in RL and VR. That, and the very real possibility that he'll undergo a Snow Crash of his own.

Mmm-hmmm: things are about to get busy.

Following crookedly in the footsteps of William Gibson's Sprawl Trilogy, Neal Stepehnson's third novel has been touted in many a quarter as a novel of cyberpunk on the same level. Mmmmmmmm, maybe... What Snow Crash most certainly is, viewed from sixteen years after its publication, is surprisingly visionary - and surprisingly fresh. With the exception of the occasional outdated reference to '80s cultural icons (how many cyberpunk readers today will know where quadrillion-dollar "Gippers" get their name, much less trillion-dollar "Meeses"?), Snow Crash might have rolled off the presses a few weeks ago.

Stephenson's vision of early Century-21 LA features little that's completely new - the "Burbclaves" (Suburban Enclaves) are old hat to SciFi fans, as are the concepts of the franchising of America, hyperinflation (ask any modern Zimbabwean...), and the use of religion to control the masses (ask Karl Marx...). Yet Stephenson clearly manages to cast old pieces in a new light; much as he did by draping the Cosa Nostra's code over delivering pizza. Likewise, Stephenson's virtual reality Metaverse is much like the VR world constructed by Gibson before him, as is the sprawling (pun intended) cityscape of LA. Where Stephenson differs from his cyberpunk predecessors (and those who followed) is when he veers into the anthropo-mythological world of ancient Sumer; propounding for his villains the resurrection of a long-dormant virus carried by... well, you'll see. Though at times bordering on the pedantic, Stephenson's intercalation of the Sumerian connection remains readable, even nearly plausible.

Where Stephenson gets a little on the icky side is in choosing to place Y. T.'s age at fifteen - a decision that in some circles is most certainly looked upon as tantamount to kiddie porn. That a fifteen-year-old is sexually mature (and that some of them are sexually active) goes without question, but the plot would have been just as well served if his nubile young skateboarder were old enough to vote. Stephenson clearly revels in the naughtiness, however, for in Y. T.'s first encounter with Hiro she "poons" him. Never mind that the poon's har- and not -tang, the imagery remains crystal clear.

Justifiably renowned for its vision, its heroic (and Hiroic) characters, its complex villains, and its deft plotting; Snow Crash also led the first wired generation out to the end of the Internet and showed them the future. We who inhabit the real 21st century may not like every last aspect of that future, but Stephenson's is quite as valid a prognostication as any before his - and as many a prediction afterwards. That he was capable of slipping in the occasional sly dig at the culture of the '80s is just gravy.

Highly recommended: if you haven't read it, you should - and if you have, maybe you should read it again.

Buy Snow Crash at amazon.com

• Quicksilver

And now:

Well: I wasn't expecting that. King of the Vagabonds is recognisably by the same author and in the same style as Quicksilver, but for the most part it reads less like a continuation of a story in progress than it does the start of something new.

We take a slight skip back in time, to 1665 London (pre-plague, pre-fire) to meet the oh-so-literally "half-cocked" Jack Shaftoe, one of seven brothers in a working-class family. Soon enough the eldest brother is dead, thanks to a blackly-humorous accident during an attempt to steal a boat's anchor, but via his execution Jack and another brother, Bob, find themselves paying work as hangers-on. Specifically, they are paid to hang on the legs of execution victims in order to hasten their death. Jack's character and circumstances established, we jump forward to 1683 (mid-way between the two Waterhouse narratives in book one), and find that Jack has become a vagabond (and, offscreen, a widower and father), although he signs up as a mercenary just in time for the Battle of Vienna. During the battle, for reasons that don't need exploring at this juncture, he ends up chasing an Ostrich into a harem and there rescues an actual female character. Eliza is (1) young, (2) a native of Qwlghm, (3) extremely smart, (4) extremely beautiful, and (5) generally all-around perky; and after her rescue she and Jack travel across the continent together, each spending a good deal of time lecturing the other about their personal history. They spend some time in Leipzig, where they participate in "the Doctor's" scheme to sell shares in a silver mine, before eventually fetching up in Amsterdam. There Eliza becomes a businesswoman and helps to finance the Monmouth Rebellion; meanwhile, Jack goes for a wander around France, ostensibly with the goal of raising some money to care for his children.

For a while, I was convinced that King of the Vagabonds is hands-down better than Quicksilver; having finished it, I think it's no less flawed, but at least it's flawed in different ways, and has some strengths that Quicksilver lacked. As I said, the novel is recognisably of a piece with its predecessor -- it has the inconsistently anachronistic language, the engagement with famous figures and events, the skewed perspective on what matters about these things -- but they're put into what to my mind is a better and broader context. The single thread, while it lasts, helps the whole story feel more focused and coherent, while the continent-spanning scope of the story provides a more useful backdrop. There are also fewer, or at least less violent, authorial prods about the Meaning of the Story, and a bit more demonstration. The underlying concerns are the same, but you could say that Quicksilver was Theory and King of the Vagabonds is Practice.

And thanks to the dynamic between Jack and Eliza, King of the Vagabonds is also a much more readable book – at least in its first half. Neither character has what you'd call great depth, and Eliza in particular is unconvincing as a person; sometime there's a comparison to be written of her, James Morrow's Jennet and (though she is from a slightly later period), Adam Roberts' Eleanor as willful historical women interested in the workings of the world, written by men. (For what it's worth, to my mind Eliza is more convincing than Jennet but less so than Eleanor.) Moreover Stephenson's character decisions (particularly the contrivance by which Jack and Eliza are separated at the end of the book) tend to the worst excesses and implausibilities of soap-opera plotting. But while it lasts, the relationship between Eliza and Jack is lively and engaging and makes many things forgivable. I think it's no coincidence that they separate the novel loses its way dramatically, and that the sections dealing with them individually – and Jack's adventures in particular -- are far less interesting than anything they get up to together.

The simple fact of having two non-historical characters talking to each other means that you can have, for instance, Eliza expressing disbelief at Jack's encounters with the high-born and famous. It grounds the story -- there isn't the sense, which there was in Quicksilver, that there are only famous people in the world, even though quite a lot of famous people eventually turn up – and as a result, I believe in the verisimilitude of Jack and Eliza's experiences much more than I ever did in those of Waterhouse. And because they offer a radically different view of the world -- from their lower-class perspective, you wouldn't know that Waterhouse and the Royal Society exist -- the encounters they do have with historical figures (who tend to be of rather higher class) feel more like the atypical events they should be.

An obvious example is the Doctor – and conveniently he also ties in, I think, to the question of historical uncertainty that we talked about last time. Specifically: The Doctor's identity seems to be obvious, but he is only actually confirmed to be Leibniz long after he's left the stage. For a while, when he's introduced, it's at least plausible that he could be Newton, or even Waterhouse. This uncertainty of identity – not to mention the pop-culture echo, which I'm sure is deliberate – positions Leibniz as a figure of wonder, rather than the near-equal he was in Quicksilver. His pronouncements are on the edge of plausibility, and the edge of comprehensibility to Jack and Eliza: "It is a mathematical technique so advanced that only two people in the world understand it [...] People will use it to build machines that fly through the air like birds, and that travel t other planets" (431). Later, another character summarizes "what the Doctor wants" this way:

"To translate all human knowledge into a new philosophical language, consisting of numbers. To write it down in a vast Encyclopedia that will be a sort of machine, not only for finding old knowledge but for making new, by carrying out certain logical operations on those numbers -- and to employ all of this in a great project of bringing religious conflict to an end, and raising Vagabonds up out of squalor and liberating their potential energy -- whatever that means." (476)

Because this is being said by someone who finds the Doctor outlandish – as we do – rather than by someone like Waterhouse who might accept these concepts without blinking, the self-conscious improbability of it is easier to bear. Moreover, because it's embedded in a more conventional historical narrative, its extraordinariness is more powerful. This paragraph, and a couple of others like it, actually reminded me of nothing so much as Stephen Baxter's Time's Tapestry sequence, in which modern concepts are transmitted back through time with the hope of changing the course of past events. Almost all the attempts fail, but they fail in ways that highlight the contingency of history; and the "great project" here sounds like it could be exactly that sort of intervention. We should know how this story ends, because it ends with us; but we start to wonder whether that's the right ending. (Tangentially, it seems odd to me that Baxter skipped over this entire period in his series; it seems ripe for the sort of story he was telling.)

I've mentioned the broader canvas of the book a couple of times. There's a sense that there's a whole continent in play, and a world beyond that, all gradually being knit together by the developing systems of the age, most notably trade. Against this Jack and Eliza are figures in a landscape; and when, for instance, deus-ex-Enoch turns up and drops some more hints that he's engaged in (or the motivator behind) Leibniz' utopian project to lift humanity up and better us, they seem truly improbable because of the vastness against which they are cast. That said, I have to admit there's a whole level of information in this novel that I'm missing, because my eyes glaze over at the gossipy way in which Stephenson tends to have his characters relate Royal politics and high-level shenanigans. But for whole pages at a time, the sprawling messiness of the Baroque Cycle seems like it might actually be worth something, it seems that the absurd -- I can't think of a better word for it -- excess of historical detail might be intended to draw just such a contrast between the landscape and the figures in it. Unfortunately, that theory gets dashed late in the book, when Stephenson suddenly elides part of Jack's story to get him back to Eliza, and has him comment on it as like "a play, where only the most dramatic parts of the story are shown to the audience, and the tedious bits are assumed to happen offstage" (578), as though Stephenson actually believes that everything he's told us up to that point is important and directly relevant to the story of Jack, when it so patently isn't.

I suggested that King of the Vagabonds was the practice to Quicksilver's theory, and I think it inverts the earlier novel in another way, too. If Quicksilver was about the developing systems of the world, King of the Vagabonds asks simply: what does it mean to be free? And in particular, what does it mean to be free when the world's web is tightening around you? Jack's answer, for most of his life to the point we meet him, has been the freedom to roam, the freedom of the vagabond; through his experiences with Eliza (after freeing her), he comes to appreciate the importance of economic freedom. And of course Leibniz' maths would give humanity as a whole more freedom, freedom to do and act in the world. In its approach to examining this question, King of the Vagabonds feels less like an attempt to convey a historical agenda, and more like an attempt to translate its period for a particular audience. When Jack claims that "I know the zargon [zargon being to this book what phant'sie was to Quicksilver, i.e. annoying] and the code-signs of Vagabonds who, taken together, constitute a sort of (if I may speak poetically) network of information, spreading all over the world, functioning smoothly even when damaged ..." (387), it's still transparently artificial, but because it's even further removed from the reality of what's being described than were similar statements in Quicksilver, it's easier to see it as a gloss.

And you can see the same sort of approach in Stephenson's descriptions of 17th-century Amsterdam:

In the end, it took Jack several minutes' looking to allow himself to believe that he was viewing all of the world's ships at one time -- their individual masts, ropes, and spars merging into a horizon through which a few churches and windmills on the other side of it could be made out as dark blurs. Ships entering from, or departing towards, the Ijsselmeer beyond, fired ripping gun-salutes and were answered by Dutch shore-batteries, spawning oozy smoke-clouds that clung about the rigging of all those ships and seemingly glued them all into a continuous fabric, like mud daubed into a wattle of dry sticks. The waves of the sea could be seen as slow-spreading news. (477)

Stephenson clearly fell in love with this setting -- more, I would say, even than with London -- and though there are awkward bits in paragraphs like this (is that "on the other side of it" really needed? For starters), you get occasional perfect images, such as that last line. "The waves of the sea could be seen as slow-spreading news". It's a clear and very precise evocation of the Amsterdam of Stephenson's imagination: a place of fluidity, a place of trade, and a place where information is king. If the Baroque Cycle can be reduced to anything, this early in reading it, it seems to me that it's reducible to this: that it's an expression of information theory; that it's at pains to show how every human transaction can be described as an exchange of information; and that the process of modernization is the process of learning to recognise and use that fact.

Next up: Odalisque. Date: Friday 6 June. In the meantime, I'm reading the Mundane Interzone, and expect to post about it this time next week.

Enoch tourne le coin au moment précis où l'exécuteur lève le noeud coulant au-dessus de la femme. La foule du Boston Common s'arrête de prier et de sangloter tandis que le bourreau reste immobile, les bras fixes, pareil en tout point à un charpentier installant une poutre. La corde saisit un disque du ciel bleu de Nouvelle Angleterre. Les Puritains le contemplent et, selon toute apparence, méditent. Enoch le Rouge tire sur les rênes de son cheval d'emprunt en approchant des spectateurs, et constate que l'intention de l'exécuteur n'est pas de soumettre son savoir-faire à leur inspection, mais de leur offrir un avant-goût bref - et fascinant, pour un Puritain - du portail par lequel ils devront tous passer un jour.

Boston, c'est un bon morceau de collines nageant dans une cuiller de marécages. La route qui forme le manche de la cuiller est barrée par un mur, avec les habituels échafauds devant, et leurs victimes, ou certaines parties d'icelles, attachées ou clouées aux portes de la ville. Enoch en vient, et il se dit qu'il a vu la fin de ces spectacles - ensuite, ce ne seront plus que des églises et des tavernes. Mais non : les morts devant les portes sont de vulgaires voleurs, tués pour des crimes commis ici-bas. Ce qui se passe en ce moment sur le Common est de nature plus sacramentelle.

Nous sommes le 12 octobre 1713. Enoch le Rouge, alias Enoch Root, bien connu des lecteurs du Cryptonomicon, le précédent cycle de Stephenson, vient d'arriver à Boston pour transmettre une lettre à Daniel Waterhouse. A la lecture de cette missive, Waterhouse pourtant fort âgé se précipitera vers l'Europe. Il doit y retrouver son ancien camarade, Isaac Newton, qu'une féroce disputatio scientifique a opposé à un certain Leibniz.

En chemin, Waterhouse se souvient de ses jeunes années à Cambridge, de ses premiers contacts avec la Royal Society of Science. Les dissections de grenouilles géantes. Les théories sur la génération spontanée. Newton s'enfonçant une aiguille (émoussée) dans l'oeil pour tester les variations optiques dues au globe oculaire. La Grande Peste de Londres. Les Puritains traqués par le nouveau roi. Les théories sur la lumière, l'adaptation des calculs de Descartes. Les orgies universitaires des jeunes nobles, d'autant plus arrogants que Cromwell est mort...

Dans ce premier tome d'un cycle colossal, Neal Stephenson nous convie à une plongée dans les XVIIe et XVIIIe rugissants. Les siècles des débuts de la science. Des premiers Etats-Unis. Des pirates, des pestes, de Londres et de Boston. Une érudition impressionnante, teintée d'humour, donne souffle et richesse à ce voyage dans les coeurs et les cerveaux de l'âge moderne, comme le Cryptonomicon chantait l'âge des ordinateurs...

A lire (en anglais)...et à traduire donc !

(Traduction des premiers paragraphes par votre serviteur).

"The simpler the molecule, the better the drug. So the best drug is oxygen. Only two atoms. The second-best, nitrous oxide - a mere three atoms. The third-best, ethanol - nine. Past that, you're talking lots of atoms."

- Zodiac by Neal Stephenson

Sangamon's Principle is named after a character in Neal Stephenson's second book, Zodiac. In the book, the character is a fan of using nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, as a recreational drug. He claims this is the best recreational drug due to the simplicity of the molecule; the idea is that more complex molecules are more unpredictable (and hence possibly more likely to have a variable effect on different people).

I avoid recreational drugs, but I am a fan of Stephenson's work and thought this concept was really cool. Someone on Wikipedia apparently agreed with me and had made a list of recreational drugs ordered by the number of molecules, but the Wikipedians deleted it! Such an outrage! So, I'm going to put it here, and I'm going to add a few more things to the list, mostly some prescription "brain medicines."