lazer-guided commentaries

Charles Yu's 2010 novel, "How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe" includes this little gem:

Thirty-one is a smallish universe, slightly below average in size. On the cosmic scale, somewhere between shoe box and standard aquarium. Not big enough for space opera and anyway not zoned for it.

I've been sitting here feeling smug, because I suspect that I spy a Vernor Vinge reference in there, and I haven't found anywhere else on the internet that makes that particular meaningless little observation. Hooray!

A few of my favourite authors and works of speculative fiction (SF, a.k.a science fiction):

• Vernor Vinge, in particular "A Fire Upon The Deep" and "A Deepness In The Sky". Both are, to me, tremendously exciting books. I particularly enjoyed "Deepness" because of the (at times blunt) allegory with our twentieth century and its accelerating race headlong into the unknown. The climax of the book is thoroughly electrifying. "Fire" has some lovely moments too, both from the viewpoint of a society that has long ago passed the critical moments of a singularity and from the viewpoint of a medieval society undergoing first contact. Vinge is adept at expressing not only the vast potential of the post-human condition, but also its horror and claustrophobia. He is the originator of the very idea of a technological singularity, and his writing has been influential on many other authors whose work I enjoy. (His other books are good, though not great, as well; and the until-recently hard-to-find novella "True Names" is credited with inventing the notion of cyberspace or virtual reality, as well as giving glimpses into what a post-human future could be like.)

• Neal Stephenson, in particular "The Diamond Age" and his most recent, "Anathem", though all his other books are highly stimulating and entertaining as well (in particular "Snow Crash" and "Cryptonomicon"). I have a particular soft spot for "The Diamond Age" for some reason: something about it (the Mouse Army; the way Miranda and Hackworth commit to their charges; the way the Primer teaches) really pushes some kind of emotional button. Stephenson's commentaries on social issues and morality are thought-provoking, too, both in "The Diamond Age" and his other novels.

• Greg Egan, in particular "Permutation City", "Diaspora" and some of his short stories. Another programmer-turned-science-fiction-author, Egan writes the hardest of hard SF. "Permutation City" is a mind-blowing (and at times very difficult) exploration of the fundamental nature of reality and experience that deeply changed the way I see the world and led me down some pretty dark paths in philosophy. His writing isn't quite solely responsible for my current philosophical positions (Absurdism, moral anti-realism), but it certainly helped me get traction on some of the relevant issues.

I've not been reading an awful lot recently; perhaps keeping some kind of record will help get me started again. Pauline's short-story reading at Decongested was great fun — perhaps I'll get into going to more of that kind of thing.

Over the last few months, though, I've managed:

• Lattimore's translation of the Odyssey. The copy I received from a second-hand seller on Amazon was a kind of parallel text, so heavy were the marginal annotations. Still, they were helpful in a way, pointing out internal connections and cultural background I wouldn't have picked up otherwise. I also picked up Lattimore's translation of the Iliad, but having read that a few years back, I'm not ready to read it again yet, even though it's in a different translation.
• Matter, Iain M. Banks. I enjoyed this — I've not enjoyed all of his recent SF work, but this one felt to me like a return to form.
• The Wasp Factory, Iain Banks. I'd read this before, many many years ago, and it was good to read it again. I read it this time in preparation for the Guardian Book Club evening where he was interviewed about it. He's a charismatic speaker, very entertaining. The Guardian published a report of the evening, and you can listen to a podcast of the discussion.
• I've started re-reading The Silmarillion. I read this when I was about thirteen, I think, and I'm enjoying refreshing my memory. So far, no surprises; it's like everyone says, a fairly dry piece of work. One for the nerds.

Next in the queue: The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus; Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche; This Is Your Brain On Music, Daniel Levitin; The Universe Next Door, Marcus Chown; Star Maker, Olaf Stapledon. Most probably interleaved with some lighter fare, too.

I've picked up Bleak House from Project Gutenberg, inspired by the current BBC production thereof, and am about half-way through. It's great, so far! It's enormously satirical, and very, very funny in places. I've only read one other Dickens novel — Great Expectations — and if I recall correctly it wasn't particularly humorous. (On the other hand, I was fifteen at the time and probably wasn't paying attention properly.)

Becky returned my copy of the Bone People, which I'm really looking forward to re-reading — that's next in the queue. After that, Steve's promised to lend me the latest (and last, thankfully) in Orson Scott Card's "Ender's Shadow" series — much lighter fare. By comparison, just reading the table of contents of the Bone People was enough to remind me of enough of the story to provoke an emotional response.

I recently re-read Sophie's World, which was interesting. My philosophical positions have changed quite a bit since I last read it (chiefly because of Greg Egan's books); it's pointed out a few areas I feel like looking more deeply into. One thing I like about the book is the way a few Scandinavianisms have crept through the translation into English: the descriptions of the last day of school before the summer holidays; the description of the Major's cabin by the lake; a few idiomatic puns that only make sense if you know how it would have read in the original Danish.

Finally, I spent a weekend recently ploughing through Ken MacLeod's trilogy about (among other things) space travel, various takes on a bunch of -isms (including but not limited to the usual suspects of anarchism, libertarianism, capitalism, socialism, communism, and their pairwise hyphenated hybrids), and a fairly conservative vision of a post-singularity future (complete with vile offspring).

I've just started The Golden Notebook, by Doris Lessing, and have just found an image (p.68, the description of Anna's room, which mentions the typewriter and what Anna uses it for) which caused an interesting thought. The way I see typewriters — and mid-twentieth-century room layouts in general, with their rotary telephones and old-fashioned everything — is very different from the way I see computers. Typewriters, rotary telephones, gas stovetops, all these are machines at which one performs some task. Typewriters, of course, are aids in writing, which is a fairly abstract task, but nonetheless well-defined. Computers, on the other hand, don't really exist at all as separate objects for me: the moment I start thinking about the computer, I cease to see its external form and instead experience it as a separate realm of sorts. It takes a conscious effort to see the computer as a machine, as a tool, as a typewriter, and when I do, it's novel and interesting, like an alien taste or a poem. The notion of what a computer is good for is so deeply embedded in the way I see the world that it's as if there's some bridge between where the (self that sits in a chair and has a physical body) is, and where the (self that interacts with the computer) is. The way I see typewriters doesn't involve that kind of connection. Perhaps if I used typewriters every day I'd see them differently, perhaps no longer consciously seeing the distinction between the machine and the writing. In fact, perhaps that's what's happening with computers: perhaps I am not seeing the distinction between the computer and the computation. Or perhaps I'm seeing interaction with a computer as a conversation, almost as if with another person. One doesn't converse with typewriters: they don't talk back.

One nice thing about the depths of winter is that you're quite comfortable staying in, hermiting with a good book. I've been reading quite a lot recently - mostly books I've bought. Blyss left me £50 worth (!) of book vouchers as a thank-you present when she left at the end of 2003, and so far I've gotten round to spending only £25 of them.

Huh, I've just realised it could be a bit tricky writing even brief reviews of these books. They've served well as a means of passing time, but I'm embarrassed to say I probably haven't paid them the attention they deserve as I read them.

• American Gods, Neil Gaiman. I'm still only halfway through this one, but it's entertaining enough. I have yet to grasp the book's central metaphor, if there is one.
• The Other Wind, Ursula Le Guin. A fifth Earthsea story. I'm going to have to reread it, since I was coming down with a cold as I read it the other week.
• The Mystery Of Capital, Hernando De Soto. I'm not sure about the thesis of this one, but it's certainly offering me the occasional little bit of new insight into the economies of the world.
• Zorba The Greek, Nikos Kazantzakis. I started this but (I'm ashamed to say) I got pretty bored. I'll give it another go, though, since Hadyn swears it's fantastic.
• The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie. I've read it before, and absolutely loved it. Second time through is harder, but that could just be my general mood, I suppose.
• Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, Douglas R. Hofstadter. An amazing book. Every time I open it up I see new depths to it. Each time a chapter is reread another layer of meaning becomes clear.
• The Collected Stories Of..., Vernor Vinge. Great science fiction. There's a story called The Blabber in here which ties into the universe invented in Vinge's two major novels, A Fire Upon The Deep and A Deepness In The Sky, both of which I think are fantastic.
• Modern Compiler Implementation In ML, Andrew W. Appel. Readable, concise, practical - it's an excellent resource, summarising current best practice in compiler construction. Since I'm a bit of a fan of the subject, I'd even call it an exciting read for me. Lots of concepts I'd picked up piecemeal over the last ten years have come together more clearly after having read this book (and some of the papers it references).

Once I'm finished with American Gods, I'll probably make a start on Speed of Dark, by Elisabeth Moon, and The Golden Notebook and The Summer Before The Dark, by Doris Lessing. I've still to finish my second read-through of The Satanic Verses, too.