andyhat | (no subject)

If anyone has a few million dollars to spare, Tower Records is up for sale. Back in college, I used to love making trips up to Tower on Clark Street (often combined with a meal at Max's Deli (matzoh ball soup & chocolate chip pancakes, with Dr. Brown's Diet Cel-Ray to drink. Cheap and yummy)). Back then, they had a fantastic Classical selection, their prices were discounted, and they always had extra discounts for CSO subscribers. It's sad to see how badly they've screwed it all up in the years since.

Recent reading:

Leo Szilard. The Voice of the Dolphins and Other Stories: Expanded Edition. Stanford University Press, 1992.
- "The Voice of the Dolphins", 1960, Novella.
- "My Trial As a War Criminal", 1947, Short Story.
- "The Mark Gable Foundation", 1948, Short Story.
- "Calling All Stars", 1949, Short Story.
- "Report on 'Grand Central Terminal'", 1948, Short Story.
- "The Mined Cities", 1961, Short Story.
  
  Leo Szilard was a nuclear physicist who worked with Fermi to produce the first self-sustaining chain reaction at the University of Chicago and then went on to work on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos. By 1947, however, he apparently had come to feel guilty about his own involvement in the creation of the bomb, and he had become quite pessimistic about mankind's chances of surviving the nuclear age. As his ideas became more radical, Szilard turned to fiction as a means of promulgating his thoughts.
  
  The earliest story in the collection, "My Trial" describe Szilard's war crimes trial for his involvement in producing the bombs dropped on Japan. Modeled on the Nuremberg trials, his trial is conducted by the Soviets after they win World War III. Written for the University of Chicago Law Review, the style is rather dry (as with all these stories), but it's an interesting take on the United States' moral position at the time.
  
  In "The Mark Gable Foundation", a man cryogenically freezes himself for 300 years so he can see the future. Awakened after only 90 years, he discovers a world in which science has continued its relentless advance much faster than society can develop the moral, ethical, and religious framework to absorb the changes. In "Calling All Stars", an alien intelligence sends a message to the stars seeking help in identifying the nature of the apparently irrational beings on Earth who have detonated atomic devices. And, finally, the "Report on 'Grand Central Terminal'" describes an alien archaeological expedition to Manhattan after all life on earth has been exterminated in a nuclear war. All three stories lack any sort of characterization, and have only minimal plot, but they're still interesting views on the progress of science, especially as Szilard projects his own agenda on his aliens.
  
  Finally, we come to the major work of this volume, "The Voice of the Dolphins". This story is a future history of the years 1960 to approximately 1985, and attempts to describe a way that the US and USSR might escape from the trap of the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction. Reflecting the fact that he didn't entirely believe humanity alone could achieve this trick, the story starts off with the development of a means to communicate with dolphins, and the discovery that dolphins are far smarter than humans. Acting behind the scenes via the Vienna Institute, the dolphins are able to bring about the political results necessary to achieve eventual disarmament. The story reads more like a history book than fiction, but the ideas alone were enough that I found it a fascinating take on what might have been.
Ray Aldridge. "Soul Pipes". In F&SF 12/02. Novella.
- This is an account of an archaeological expedition to a failed human colony as told in first-person by a former artist whose brain has been modified so he can no longer feel the effects of pleasurable drugs, a procedure which had the side effect of leaving him with no imagination. Naturally, the members of the expedition start to see things, and only the one with no imagination can be trusted to report on the events (or even to survive the experience). Nothing terribly original, and the most interesting parts are the snippets of back story about the society from which the artist and his colleagues have come. But it was still a good read.
Eleanor Arnason. "The Potter of Bones". In Asimov's 10-11/02. Novella.
- Told in the style of a bedtime story for children, this is the story of a potter in this planet's distant past who likes to collect shells and bones and other fossils. By the end of the story, she's worked out the beginnings of the theory of evolution. Someone who likes Le Guin's xenology stories would probably like this, but as with many of Le Guin's stories, I just don't care enough about any of these aliens to care about the details of their society. And Darwin himself makes the discovery of evolution a whole lot more interesting than Arnason.
Cory Doctorow. Down And Out in the Magic Kingdom. TOR. 2003. Also available for free electronically.
- It's cyberpunk without the dystopia. Instead, we get the usual assortments of brain implants, and memory uploads and downloads, and other cyberpunk trappings in a world in which capitalism has been entirely replaced by the Bitchun Society. Currency has been replaced by "Whuffie", a measure of the esteem in which you are held by those who know you. In this world of plenty, nobody starves, but only those held in high regard (as measured by their Whuffie) get to eat in the best restaurants. As the title implies, this story is set in the Magic Kingdom and describes the battles between two "ad hocs" (temporary gatherings of like-minded individuals that have replaced corporations) to attract Whuffie by making their attractions the most popular. Doctorow throws in so many ideas that the whole thing becomes rather implausible, but taken as a light-hearted comic cyberpunk novel, it's a lot of fun.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Wow! Commentary!

Excellent. Commentary is better than just cataloging. Woot.

I was surprised that I didn't get any comments last week when I made my first post with actual commentary (though only for my post-vote reading). It definitely takes longer to produce an LJ entry with commentary than one that merely lists, so I'm still not sure if I'll keep it up (though it is sort of fun to do, even if nobody will really pays any attention to my opinions).

re doctorow:

didn't you think that the title for his society, 'bitchen', was a bit of a joke that had played itself out by the third time it was used?

anyhow, one of the problems i had with the plot of novel circled around dan and julius' relationship. especially at the end. i mean, hey, if they'd been shagging and it had turned out to be an unhealthy relationship in which he couldn't get himself out of, i would have been more likely to believe that :)

but, you know, it was a light, fun thing to spend an afternoon reading.

Yep. "Bitchun Society", "Whuffie", "Magic Kingdom". Lots of silly names in this book. But that didn't really bother me, since by the 3rd time I read a name, I'm no longer hearing the sound of it in my head, and the joke is reduced to a subliminal memory attached to the word.

For those who haven't read the book, there are spoilers beyond this point.

I thought the ending worked reasonably well. Dan wasn't leaving because of anything to do with the events of the book or because of the problems in his relationship with Julius and Lil. He was leaving to escape the ennui of living in a world where there was no longer any need for the things he was really good at. He was only hanging out with Julius and Lil in the first place so he could go out with some dignity, and in the end, he gets to do that. In a world without death, and where deadheading is de rigueur, it is inevitable that friendship would look rather different than it does today.

I think Doctorow actually did a pretty good job of showing just how different human psychology would become in his society. Yeah, Dan has Julius killed, but he makes sure to do it only 15 minutes after Julius gets a backup, so there are no hard feelings about it. Everyone lives so long that relationships are never more than temporary, so it's not a big deal when your best friend steals your girlfriend; I don't think Dan would have even felt guilty about it if he weren't a bit old-fashioned. On the other hand, when it's hard to find anything to really care about, life gets pretty boring; hence the escape of deadheading until something interesting comes along.

For me, the biggest hole in the plot was Julius' implant problem. In a world where people are constantly restoring to clones, he just happens to get the one in a million defect. It always bugs me when a huge chunk of plot depends on an unlikely coincidence.

i didn't have so much a problem with dan not killing himself. i never actually believed that this would happen. and yeah, i bought the whole difference in psychology for certain parts, but i also think that a really strict look at that necessarily holds up. like, when dan cheats on him with lil, he gets more upset of the thought of loosing dan, which seems at odds with the idea that he's okay about losing his love. (which, i think, is even at more odds with dan's guilty conscience.)

but the main one that bothered me, was that julius spends a good part of the book obsessed with debra and the fact that she killed him. dying clearly meant something to him, (even if it was just the insult) and he wanted revenge. but when he found out it was dan... it just didn't really turn into anything. granted, dan was turning on everyone by julius, but i just felt that if you spend that much book on having your character wanting revenge for his murder, perhaps when he finds out it's his friend, he should do something with that, rather the, 'oh, well that's okay.' i could see how you were suppose to think that it was the different psychology at work, but the set up for that resolution simply wasn't in the rest of the book for me. it was ending with a wimper.

but, you know, i didn't have a problem with the implant problem. i did have a problem with them just recording his life down, or cross dumping some memories from lil and dan to solve the time delay, and so he'd be up to speed and healthy, however. (after all, that's what they did when he died earlier.) i suppose you could say he didn't want to do that because he didn't want to die, but the point was kind of murky and i don't think the reader was meant to spendmuch time thinking about it.

er... the psychology doesn't hold up.

that'll teach me to post in a rush, won't it?

Well, Julius did get his revenge. Debra was punished in the only way that means anything anymore: she lost all her Whuffie, and she was forced to leave Liberty Square to the care of Lil's ad hoc. And Julius was never really concerned with the one who pulled the trigger; he just wanted the proof that it was all masterminded by Debra, which Dan provided. And, as it turned out, it wasn't just coincidence that the assassination happened right after a backup; that was Dan being considerate of Julius while also doing what he had to do to try to get his Whuffie back.

As for the memories, I think Julius was just a bit old-fashioned. He didn't want a composite of Dan's and Lil's memories filling the gaps; he wanted his memories. And, really, I'd say that belief would be integrally tied to a desire to go on living in the real world in the Bitchun Society. If you believe that other people's memories are interchangable with your own, why bother experiencing anything first-hand?

At any rate, for what is basically a fluffy humorous novel of ideas, the characters were better done than I would have expected.

yeah, i understood the memory thing.

i figure i just thought the end with dan should have been something different, what i thought the book needed to be satisfactory to me. go figure, huh?