Hm.

Finished Armies. More extensive post coming later. Shorter version: It's good. I hope it isn't actually the conclusion.

Thousand Culture Update

Yes, I have got John Barnes' The Armies of Memory. Haven't finished it yet, so holding back comment. Notice that the top of it announces it as "The Climactic conclusion of the saga begun with A Million Open Doors", which bodes ill for the future existence of A Far Cry, to say the least.

So when Kim Stanley Robinson's Sixty Whatever Whatever (Feet of Ice? Years of Winter?) comes out, will it be billed as a Climatic Conclusion? It should be.

Mini-Memetics

So, what with all the to-do in congress about immigration reform, the old memetic debate over whether to use "undocumented workers" or "illegal aliens" is rearing it's shop-worn head yet again.

Me, I don't like either term. In both cases, the proponents are trying to use the associations of the noun to bring in general connotations through a linguistic backdoor: either a hidden appeal to the nobility of labor or to xenophobia.

My alternative: "immigration criminals."

24: C'mon, Audrey

Who on this show hasn't slept with someone who turned out to be a traitor?

Speaking of Strange loops:

Another glimpse into the future care of Amazon: coming this July, a new book from Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am A Strange Loop.

Post that will make no sense whatsoever unless you came from here.

It's hard out here to pimp a bee.

Strange Loop

There will be no post today. Thank you.

Hugo Nominees released

Check them out here.

Commentful threads here and here, too.

Argh.

Missed 24 yesterday. So can't say much, although, after having read the recaplet on TWOP...

Audrey?

(Also, hope there aren't any cougars in those woods...)

Brief Comment on Steven King's Cell

Preface: I've actually never read The Stand.
But I just finished (the audiobook version) of Cell. And found it fairly compelling. Although, having read Dies the Fire and subscribed to the S. M. Stirling email list, I was constantly wondering about the lurking food production issues...although the numbers of surviving 'normies' are probably small enough that canned food would be an option, I don't see how the flocks could have every begun to survive the winter even without interference or degeneration...

Anyhow, if I can come up with a plausible scenario for the collapse of civilization that manages to leave the internet more-or-less intact, I'll probably try and write it...

Law and Order SVU Season 2

Finished the second season of SVU the other day on DVDs. In spite of fixing the 'problems' with the show (by cutting back drastically on the Worlds Most Boring Family in favor of a new DA who actually brings a 'law' component at least some of the time), it managed to start off poorly with some very weak episodes, but toward the end, was up to about as good as such a show can manage to be.

Still was sliding towards a status as 'Law and Order: Criminal Underuse of Richard Belzer', though.

Political Web Toy

The Gerry index: see how gerrymandered your congressional district is.

(hat-tip: David Brin)

Gnomic Political Post

The desire for socioeconomic equality of outcome is nothing more than the reification of envy.

24: There is no way...

...no way in hell that I'll believe that Tony's really gone without having gotten a silent countdown. Uh-uh, no how.

Blogroll:Collected Editions

It's been a while since I added to the ol' Blogroll, so here's Collected Editions, a nice little comics blog about waiting for the trade. Today is predictions for the rest of the year day...

Speaking of the future...

...here's a link to S. M. Stirling's official site, where you can find preview chapters of A Meeting at Corvallis and The Sky People.

And Another

While I'm on the subject of books of the future, I notice from Amazon that Larry Gonick will have The Cartoon History of the Modern World, Volume I coming out in early October. Excellent. Looking forward to it, although wondering why it isn't called "The Cartoon History of the Universe, Volume IV" instead...

2006, The Year in SF

A couple of days ago, Locus's website updated it's Forthcoming books page.

The highlights (in my opinion, that is)?

Next month we get the multiply abovementioned Armies of Memory, as well as A Dirty Job from Christopher Moore.
In May, a new Julie Czernada (Regeneration; I really ought to take another run at the second in that series; it was entertaining in a bland and innofensive Robert Sawyer-esque way), Charles Stoss's The Clan Corporate, and Vernor Vinge's Rainbow's End .
Nothing in June that catches my eye, but in July, Jasper Fforde's The Fourth Bear , and Steven Baxter's Emperor. And another Charles Stross; Glasshouse.
In August, a new Steven Brust (Dzur), Tim Powers (Three Days to Nowhere), and Harry Turtledove (Settling Accounts:The Grapple).
September brings S. M. Stirling's A Meeting at Corvallis, Steven Baxter's Respendent, and something called The Disunited States of America from Turtledove.
Out in the more sketchy last few months, a new Pratchett (Wintersmith), Richard Morgan (Black Man), Orson Scott Card (Empire), and Katherine Kurtz's Childe Morgan...

It's okay, I shot above the knee, so It'll still be able to post.

Double-length episode of 24 this monday. Single-length (if that) blog post about it.

So, Palmer==no silent countdown of death. Michelle==still no silent countdown. But Edgar gets one?

And since a new Kim boyfriend has shown up, it's time to play "guess which major appendage this guy will lose before season's end". I'll take 'left foot at the knee', myself.

Brief Thoughts on Robert Charles Wilson's Spin

I. The day that a bunch of Alien Space Bats make the Earth subject to local changes in the laws of physics for their own inscrutable purposes, I'm going to be calling them Alien Space Bats, and that's that. No way 'Hypotheticals' is ever going to catch on.

II. Otherwise, a fine book. The book that Chronoliths was trying to be, I think. Better than that one because the characters are simply more interesting and their lives more tightly linked to the SF-nal changes in the world.

III. I'd love to read a sequel to this book, about what happens as people begin to explore the post-Spin worlds(s). But that book, if it existed? ("Arch"?) Probably not a Robert Charles Wilson kind of book.

John Barnes' The Merchants of Souls, Part 2

So, where was I? Oh, right, Girault Leones as unreliable narrator. In addition to the technological issue discussed above, he's also deeply unreliable on a moral matter: the moral status of the human/aintellect relationship.

It is certainly interesting to watch him agitatedly ponder the 'peculiar institution' for humans in Frieport, then, shortly after, go into the necessity of keeping the machine brains well and truly shackled, and, of course, the cherry of hypocracy on the ice-cream Sunday is the bit where he appears confused at how the aintellects can't intuitively grasp the wrongness of slave labor...

After that, the drunken robot abuse scene with Shen is really just gilding the lily.

Even the central problem that they're trying to avoid by keeping the mechanicals enslaved is one of slavery more than anything else: it's only because they are programmed to fulfil human desires that they can fall into the trap of wanting them all in the box with their pleasure centers constantly stimulated. Hypothetical free aintellects who had merely the hardwired burden of respecting the rights of human beings rather than subservience wouldn't particularly want to do such a thing.

Anyhow, after the first time I read Merchants, I thought that book four would be contact with the aliens, and then in book five Addams comes back into play, and on Addams they have a transhumanist society with aintellect citizens and advanced human genetic engineering that turns out to be considerably more alien than the aliens themselves. We'll see...

Infinite Crisis #5/Birthright Geekery

Not going to go page by page this time, but rather going to posit a theory about what's going on and how it could end up resolved.

Immediately after the crisis, Superman was the Earth-1, planet-juggling Krypton-visiting, silver-to-bronze-age model. Along with the rest of his cast. Then, he changed, into the Byrne version. Why? (In-world explanation, that is.)

Suppose he did it himself. Most of the Byrne changes are ones that he might well have made in the process of building a 'better' superman: Krypton isn't so painful a loss, his parents survive through his adulthood this time, Lex Luthor is no longer a friend-turned-bad, Lana Lang gets over him and moves on, allowing Lois a clear field. The only major change that doesn't fit that pattern is the absence of a superboy career. So maybe that's the thing that motivates the change in the first place: he learns that, in the future, the greatest danger to the new universe will be from (a) Superboy.

So, having replaced himself, Superman-1 then can retire, living on as a sort of guardian spirit of the universe.

The next reality shift is with Hawkman, as the Earth-8 Katar and Shayera Hol are knocked into the DCU probably by Superboy-Prime's first attempts to break in. They later get folded back into the current (Earth-2-based) Hawkman and killed, respectively.

Then, Superman dies fighting Doomsday. This sets into motion a chain of events that lead to the creation of a new Superboy, which alerts Earth-1 Superman to a problem. Still being Earth-1 Superman, he can't kill Superboy, so instead he brings Superman back from the grave to hopefully serve as a mentor and stop him from going bad.

This also sets into motion another chain of events leading to Hal Jordan getting possessed by Parallax. Across dimensional boundaries Alex Luthor manipulates the already conflicted Hal/Parallax, putting the idea of restoring the multiverse into his head, but that doesn't work out so well, although the resolution of the Crisis in Time does cause a bit more shifting of reality about.

Then, somewhere fairly recently, we get another reality shift, in which the carefully constructed Superman is subtly replaced with the Earth-8 version (the Birthright version, in other words), and along with that, Superboy's parentage changes to being a blend of Superman and Luthor DNA. This increases Superman-1's suspicion of the kid, and keeps him still distracted from noticing/thinking about Superboy-Prime.

So, if I'm right, Superman-1's return will be the deus ex machina that beats Superantimonitorboy...


(Anyone else think stories of Earth-8 would be fun? A world where Kyle was Earth's first Green Lantern; where Luthor is both rich and a scientific genius...)
More respectable SF blogging tomorrow

John Barnes' The Merchants of Souls, part one

"The whole problem with the artistic project of creating a better human future is that our medium has to be human beings, and they are the most plastic and the most rigid medium there is." ---Dji

There is always a danger in looking into voids in science fiction: drawing inferrences from technologies that are not discussed in the context of the book. But in this case, the book appears dance so carefully around the topic that one really has to wonder.

The topic, in this case, is human genetic engineering. Not only does there not seem to be any in the Thousand Cultures future, but the very concept seems almost literally unthinkable. And John Barnes appears to be deliberately making the reader think about it even while his narrator cannot.

Consider: we have, in a very early scene, uplifted seals that are capable of mimicing complex physical activity. We have, long established in the series, a process of cloning human beings with somewhat accelerated growth that implies a rather healthy understanding of the human genome, as well as the fields related to the neuroscience behind the psyphix. We have vastly intelligenct AIs able to solve technical problems at the drop of the hat, and to go beyond and develop new science and solutions.

And yet: Dji's culture, devoted to creating a genetically pure form of humanity, does all of its work through eugenics rather than doing any DNA editing. And yet: Laprada is born with a chemically (which is to say, genetically) based form of depression: they're not even doing pre-conception genetic screening. And when they start the new clone body, the idea of fixing the broken gene doesn't even get thrown up to get knocked down.

(Incidentally, I've seen some blurb-like text that claimed that The Armies of Memory is going to be the last in the series. I certainly hope that it's as inaccurate as blurb-like text usually is and we are going to see A Far Cry eventually. At the least. Because we still have to see the aliens and the cultures of Addams, about which more speculation in part two.)