textiplication.com

"…[the longbow] was six feet long and three inches in circumference, made of yew, and required a force of one hundred pounds to draw it.  (When the body of an archer was recovered from the dredged-up Mary Rose, lost in 1545, the bone of the left arm was noticeably thicker than that of the right, and his shoulder and spinal bones were noticeably deformed) …"

Think about that.  Longbowmen had thick, muscular left arms - I think we can assume that they were all shooting right-handed, since it would be difficult to arrange lefties and righties together in formation - so much so, you could probably tell by looking at them.  Longbowmen probably stood crooked, left shoulder high, spine twisted up between the scapulae. 

If they shot enough that their arm bones thickened on the left side, can you imagine what their right hands looked like from pulling back the string?  Probably, something like this guy’s hand:

  Imagine shooting a longbow for hours during a battle.  Could anyone do that, pull back a draw of a hundred pounds, over and over again, throughout a battle?

This from By the Sword, by Richard Cohen, who was selected to fence for the UK in the Olympics in 72, 76, 80, and 84.  He would have been hit by the boycott in 80, I suppose.  By the Sword is a fun read, and a fascinating history.  Highly recommended.

How did we all live without blogging?

Charles Stross mentions a paper describing a solution for the Traveling Salesman problem using white-light interferometry instead of a digital computer. What do I love about this? Let me count the ways…

1. A pro hard SF writer is doing research from primary sources for one of his fave topics
2. He links to a free pre-press copy of the journal article so we can read the paper for ourselves
3. His unruly bunch of commenters nail the practical limitations of the theoretical approach by comment #16 or so, and then keep going into a discussion of analog computing vs. digital computing vs. quantum computing. And provide references!

I’ve only got one so far:

My friend Pyegar recommended this to me. A history teacher and textbook author, James Loewen was frustrated by the way that history textbooks cloud the real stories in American history. The book reexamines a number of personages, events, or sequences in history, the stories we all think we know, in the light cast by primary historical sources. How important was disease in the early colonization of the Americas? Why did my mother learn a different version of the Civil War and Reconstruction growing up in Louisiana from the one I learned in in the suburbs of DC? What shadows does the largely revered Wilson presidency cast on us to this day? How nasty was Columbus, anyway? Pretty nasty. Beyond a doubt the worst human being we celebrate with a holiday, even if you include all of the Presidents in Presidents’ Day.

It’s a very judicious, careful, open-handed book, not a shrieker. It’s not another People’s History of the United States, which I found so one-sided that I trusted it less the more I read.

I have to say that this book changed the way I think about nearly everything.

What other books are so good and so important that everyone should read them?

Over at DeepGenre, David Louis Edelman muses thoughtfully on whether hard science fiction is itself at risk because our current times are already so SFnal.

So maybe that’s the problem with science fiction these days. We’re losing market share because we’re losing our capacity for wonderment at the future.

The question of why SF is losing print market share while it’s doing pretty well on TV and film is very interesting - see Jason Stoddard’s thoughts on the subject, for one, or my own, for that matter. I can sympathize with some of David’s sentiments; after all, at the moment, I’m blogging over free wireless in a cheap hotel on a Tablet PC that’s three years old. I’m in a small town in New Jersey (exit 5) for a wedding. The future is here, and it’s completely small-M mundane. Wireless internet is everywhere, but Trent the Uncatchable isn’t a gengineered interplanetary hacker revolutionary –he’s some dude who blogs about playing Farcry.

By the way, The Long Run is absolutely the greatest cyberspace-hacking-revolt-against-the-UN novel you’ve never read.

David’s commenters have hit some of the obvious responses to David’s argument. Is he talking about science or technology? If we lose our wonderment at science and technology, does that mean we can’t still write compelling commercial fiction about human interactions? However, David’s post sent me on an interesting chain of thought.

I think that it’s relatively rare in fiction to come across characters who spend any amount of time reading, in any genre whatsoever. Entertainments about people consuming entertainment being somewhat difficult to make entertaining, as it were. It’s really unusual in SF&F to find characters absorbing entertainment, though, because SF&F protagonists are uniformly heroic. With very few exceptions, SF&F heroes are unique, or uniquely important, in the scope of world. They’re the fulcrum of what’s happening not just in the story, but in the whole world. Let’s look at the last ten Hugo-winning, novels, for instance.

2006, Spin, Robert Charles Wilson. Main character is intimately connected with people who are running much of the world, does things that almost nobody else does.

2005, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, Susannah Clarke. Main characters are the only wizards in the world.

2004, Paladin of Souls, Lois McMaster Bujold. Main character is selected by gods as demon-removal agent.

2003, Hominids, Robert J. Sawyer. Haven’t read it. According to the Pub Weekly summary on Amazon, it’s about a Neanderthal physicist who crosses between timelines and…. nuff said.

2002, American Gods, Neil Gaiman. Protagonist buddies up with Odin for refighting of the war of the Gods. Simple little slice-of-life story, in other words.

2001, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, J. K. Rowling. Through luck, accidents of history and heredity, and a knack for being in the right place at the right time, main character is the main bulwark against the triumph of evil in the world. Nonetheless, a fair commercial success.

2000, A Deepness in the Sky, Vernor Vinge. First trade mission to newly-discovered alien civilization uncovers solutions to the technical problems that have stagnated civilization in the galaxy for centuries. [Vinge is one of the great hard-SF authors like Reynolds and Stross whose works pose particularly formidable learning curves to people who don't read a whole lot of science and SF].

1999, To Say Nothing of the Dog, Connie Willis. A time travel agent get mucked up in paradox-avoidance in the middle of a routine ancient-building-parts retrieval mission. So far, the least extraordinary protagonist in this list, but still - he’s a time-travel agent spending a lot of time avoiding world-ending paradox. Also, the only comedy, and gut-bustingly funny [possibly even funnier, though, is its inspiration, Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men and a Boat]. Is this the only Hugo-winning comedy ever? Topic for another post.

1998, Forever Peace, Joe Haldeman. Haven’t read it, again going from the summaries on Amazon, the protagonists save the solar system from… never mind. Heroes again.

1997, Blue Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson. In the liberal’s answer to Moon is a Harsh Mistress, centuries-old Nobel-winning scientists synthesize new forms of government for the terraformed colony on Mars. Movers and shakers

1996, Diamond Age, Neal Stephenson. OK, the main character is basically a really, really good engineer, who does a little moonlighting for an important client. But the project winds up altering the political fabric of China and nearly, as a by-product, destroys the e-commerce infrastructure of the entire world.

SF&F novels embrace great and global themes. Some SF writers destroy the world in every single book - I’m thinking of Jack McDevitt and Stephen Baxter, right off the top of my head. The greatest SF novels also are moving portraits of human beings, as well; Wilson’s Spin may be the finest combination of character-driven story and hard SF I’ve ever read, and I’m a huge Kim Stanley Robinson fan.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with embracing great themes. War and Peace is about not just the defeat of Napolean, but the very nature of history itself. I think, though, that the dominance of truly heroic themes says something about SF and its traditional markets.

Going through the list of the last ten Pulitzer Prize winners (right here), I don’t see a single story that concerns global cataclysm, or characters who change nations. Not one. The Road shows characters in reaction to apocalypse. The Hours is an interesting case, since one of the characters is one of the century’s greatest novelists, and it’s a rare case of a novel in which the nature of fiction itself is important. The heroes of these stories are heroes only in an intimate, personal sense.

It’s not that non-SF books don’t destroy the world, or the country; Robert Ludlum risked the republic in every book he wrote. Thriller writers blow things up all the time, and their heroes always prevent worse from occurring. The difference is that the world of mainstream fiction does not value the huge drama as highly as does the world of SF. I think that the preoccupation with the larger scale may be the hallmark of genre fiction.

Ian McDonald’s River of Gods is a beautiful, passionate exploration of a future India that turns into a novel in which AI’s force zero-point physics to provide them a way off the planet. Was I the only one who found that conclusion frustrating and disappointing? Not because of its lack of resolution (which I’m OK with) but because a sensitive novel of people and cultures suddenly turned into one of physics?

Peter Watts’ Blindsight does more than any other SF novel I’ve read to explore the different consciousnesses of altered or impaired human brains - but does it in the context of an alien first contact. I’m tempted to compare it to The Corrections, a novel which probably goes further to explore the impact of Parkinson’s on consciousness than any other, but in the context of its impact on the self and on a family around one of its victims.

This contrast has to be important. The mainstream of fiction is blowing up families, and science fiction is blowing up the world. I think the principle holds out when we look at some of the more obvious SFnal works to gain mainstream acceptance, like Infinite Jest. Despite all its outrageous near-future satire, the real appeal of Infinite Jest lies in the touching dysfunctions of the Incandenza family and the pathos of Don Gately’s struggle to stay straight. And the fact that David Foster Wallace totally ownz0rs the English language, of course.

Interestingly enough, one of the major exceptions I would highlight is Infoquake, by one David Louis Edelson. Infoquake concerns the experiences of a young wizard brilliant military strategist madman entrepreneur who takes over the world starts a new company so he can take over the world make some money using alien technology skills he learned apprenticed to a mad genius his father. In order to succeed, he has to master alien technology a deadly martial art based on wheat germ marketing. And yet, there’s a compelling story and characters we can care about.

Maybe we’re trying to do too much.

Here’s one I hadn’t seen before.  Blog widgets! (via Miss Snark!)

LibraryThing is a cool way to track your books, find recommendations for new books, review books, find books you would probably hate.  I’ve only added a hundred or so books from a few of my favorite authors, so Terry Pratchett, Glen Cook, Lois McMaster Bujold and Steven Brust will be overrepresented for a while.

I just installed a widget for random selections from my library.  I plan to enter in books as I buy them with a To Be Read tag, so I can keep a list populated here in one swell foop.  Of course, that list is embarrassingly long at the moment; in my car alone, I have at least thirty books waiting to be read.  (Overlap with the fifty-some I had the last time I mentioned this is fairly low, though).   I have an Amazon Rewards certificate I’m holding off on, at the moment, because I have so little time to read.  Maybe I’ll buy some of these, instead of books.  Or these.

Jet lag and an interesting book…a fatal combination for hopes of a good sleep the night before flying back to my own time zone.  Back in Lexington, it’s around 10:10PM, the earliest I ever think of going to sleep unless I’m sick; here it’s three in the morning, and I’ve been awake since seven.  Dog, god of the Egyptians, only knows what time my body will think it is when I step off the plane tomorrow at 11:30 AM six and a half hours after getting onto it at ten.

The title of this post refers not to anything I’ve learned about how Peter F. Hamilton used to spend his summer vacations, but to the title of an interesting book of his I was unfortunate enough to attempt to use to put myself to sleep.  The book is Peter Hamilton’s Misspent Youth, which I had assumed to be new, since I hadn’t seen it yet in the States; I didn’t suspect otherwise until an infodump revealing that the music and movie industries had completely collapsed in 2009.  Collapsed, in that they ceased to exist.  Wow, thought I, pretty agressive forecasting for a new book, before finally thinking to check the copyright page.  2002, meaning that he wrote the infodump probably in 2000 or 2001, when information still wanted to be free and Napster was going to lead us to a brave new world. Hmm - an obvious occupational hazard of writing seriously-intended near-term extrapolation based on current events.  All that can be said of that failure of extrapolation is that Mr. Hamilton has excellent potential as a venture capitalist.

Misspent Youth is very different from anything else I’ve read of Peter Hamilton’s - I used to think I’d read everything of his (the Night’s Dawn Trilogy three times, I swear).  It’s essentially Mundane SF - earthbound, no nano-magic.  The technical extrapolations he makes are entirely reasonable; the hardest stretch, the restoration to effective mid-twenties youth, is the result of a trillion-euro program to restore a single man in a one-shot process.  All of the reviews on Amazon.com and nearly all of the reviews on Amazon.co.uk express disappointment in the book, largely, I feel, on this basis.  His other books describe high-tech futures with grand scale, titanic motions of populations, and world- or galaxy-spanning derring-do.  This book is largely about a rich man fucking up his family; one review even notes disappointedly that it’s “character-driven,” as if that would be bad thing.   It’s largely character-driven, which I think is a great step for Peter Hamilton (Britain’s No. 1 science fiction writer, the book’s cover informs us) to the extent that it’s true, but not wholly, which is actually what I wanted to discuss.

What I find charming about the objections that most of the reviewers made is that in their adorable SF-centric approach to the book they seem to have missed exactly one half of the point of the book.  Yes, it’s an exploration, in occasionally moving detail, the reality of the conceit that youth is wasted on the young — as it turns out, it’s partly because they’re generally too wasted themselves to take advantage, and partly because it takes the experience of years to learn how to really fuck things up.  But how is it that of six of its most motivated readers, those who took the trouble to review it on Amazon.com, three of them from the UK, only one was able to notice that the book is a passionate diatribe against the EU? With particular concern paid to the ills of Britain ever joining it?  It’s not at all subtle. 

Let me put it this way.  The EU causes triffids.

This book is a political statement every bit as clear as Orson Scott Card’s Empire (no link, I’d prefer you not buy it).  Here is a list of things that are bad:

• GM plants (they cause triffids)
• Unlimited storage and bandwidth, without the soothing cushion of monopoly power enforced through patents (causes death of apparently the entire entertainment industry, with a long and loving lament for the days when copyright allowed science fiction authors to make big bucks)
• Content-wants-to-be-free zealots (they foist unlimited storage and bandwidth on an unsuspecting world, to the particular detriment of SF authors)
• The EU (taxes, one-shot rejuvenation projects focused on the wealthy [particularly problematic since they foster otherwise inexplicable resentment on the wealthy], taxes, Brussels, continentals coming to London and burning it down in anti-pseudo-Davos protests, taxes, loss of sovereignty, taxes, and Brussels.  And GM plants, which cause triffids)
• Global warming (makes it rain a lot in London.  Also, you can’t drive decent cars any more)
• Globalization (it makes Davos come to London, then continentals come to protest it, and burn down the city)

I could go on.  All of the above are things that Peter Hamilton is concerned about.  Other things that he’s not so concerned about:

• Recreational drug use (Sure, the young get wasted and piss off their girlfriends.  But it’s easy to stop cold turkey, and people who complain about everyone having small portable drug-synthesis machines that can synthesize open-source versions of uppers or Viagra [technically, not an upper] are pickle-puss spoilsports )
• Global warming (makes it rain a lot in London.  Also, you can’t drive decent cars any more.  But don’t mistake him for Kim Stanley Robinson)

All in all, Hamilton’s politics don’t fit into any easy categories, at least to my American eye - for all I know, the above list could make him a bulletproof Tory, and I’d have little more knowledge of that than whether he’d make a good Whig.  I’ve read a criticism of Hamilton that “he’s never met a corporation that he didn’t like,” which to me has always seemed an oversimplification - does he appear to like the Earth corporations in Fallen Dragon? At all? - but in this book seems unapplicable entirely. 

• A foursquare proponent of corporate virtue would mention GM foods in a book like this only to emphasize their importance in feeding the world, clothing our children, paving our roads, and my, they’re tasty, too. 
• An unambiguous corporate champion would, in a book like this, have its characters marveling at the foolishness of prior generation’s bootless panic at the perils of global warming, not complaining about the changes that have already occurred in the 2020’s.

Again, he’s no Stephen Brust, and he’s especially not Cory Doctorow.  Hamilton’s pages on the death of the content industry come right out of the RIAA playbook for the 2001 season. 

Misspent Youth is a complex and interesting book.  It’s rare to find an SF book that is so open about its opinions on current politics, while still trying to be a novel; I think an American equivalent to its major theme might be a novel that attempts to advance the abolition of the Electoral College for instance, or term limits for Supreme Court justices, without descending entirely into ridiculous polemic (cf the aforementioned Empire, by the aforementioned Orson Scott Card). 

Even more interesting, though, I believe, is the reaction of Peter Hamilton’s fans to it.  They didn’t notice the politics.  Character driven? Much of it is about as character-driven as Paul Revere’s account of the Boston Massacre, and for similar reasons.  I’m baffled.  How could anyone not notice this?

I’m still thinking a lot about Jason Stoddard’s thoughts on the necessity of marketing SF to people who read BoingBoing.  Boingers would get the politics in this book in a second - most of them would disagree with most of them (as it were), but they would understand the issues.  And I think that insofar as the evolution of the EU is part of the trend to globalization, many Boingers would even find common ground.

But I’m not trying to market Hamilton to Boingers; I’m amazed that SF readers don’t read BoingBoing.  Is it a real-world, interacting-with-people thing? By which I mean, BoingBoing is largely impressed with people who find new ways to interact with other people and the world at large, and SF readers are largely people who, er, tend not to do that.  (Wait a minute, Cory Doctorow is an SF writer? I know that, putz.  But how many of Xeni’s readers are buying Cory’s books?) 

It’s an important question for Jason’s marketing strategy - if the traditional SF readership doesn’t read BoingBoing (and few SF readers I know do), then Jason’s strategy seems to mandate moving on from them.   I hope we can bring everyone with us.

SF readers: feel the Boing!

I realize the wisdom of my friend Chris’s words:

I’d rather be stalked by Jar-Jar Binks than have to spend five minutes with Anakin Skywalker.

Apex Digest is an excellent sf/horror magazine, and it needs some help.  You can buy raffle tickets here, or just subscribe.  I subscribed, and I may buy some raffle tickets, too.

Ruby on Rails folks may notice that the Apex store site is running on Shopify, Tobias Luettke’s Rails-based e-commerce host.  How cool is that?