needs more demons?

(Subtitle: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s On-line Pioneers)

Basically, I loved The Turk so much I’m going to read everything by Standage I can get my hands on. This book explores the meteoric rise (and precipitous decline) of the telegraph from the historical perspective. pretty much, of Web 1.0 (the copyright date is 1998).

Standage’s capable hands bring to life the colorful personalities of the architects of the “Victorian Internet” — not only Samuel Morse and Thomas Edison, but also Claude Chappe, one of the developers of the pre-electric telegraphs; William Fothergill Cooke and Charles Wheatstone, the rivalry-locked British counterparts of Morse, and the hapless Dr. Edward Orange Wildman Whitehouse, who played a ill-starred role in the struggle to lay transatlantic cables.

Along the way, Standage provides ample evidence to support his titular conceit: that the impact of the telegraph on the late 19th century was remarkably like the impact of the Internet on the late 20th century. He provides numerous examples of how technological change caused social change in ways that will seem familiar to modern readers: increasing the pace of business, advancing egalitarianism, online dating, online scamming, government attempts to regulate cryptography with limited success, and so forth.

Standage’s balance of human interest with history and science is, for my taste, just about perfect. He provides enough technical perspective on the electricity that makes the telegraph possible that the book doesn’t feel glib or lightweight, but the narrative is fast-paced and engaging throughout.

needs more demons? Nope.

I read this book in a continual state of bemusement about the audience for which it was written, wondering if, in fact, it exists. Presumably, people in the “buy anything that says Harry Potter” camp are supposed to pick it up. I was mildly intrigued because my biggest gripe with Rowling’s series is that the use of magic is not even internally consistent, let alone scientifically credible. A book that purported to explain Rowling’s fast-and-loose hocus-pocus with physics seemed so patently absurd that I was perversely intrigued. In fact, it’s roughly half wide-ranging popularization of current science and half a history of “magical thinking.” I found both sections fairly interesting on their own terms — I certainly learned some things I didn’t know, although it’s worth mentioning that Highfield discusses some controversial research without mentioning the controversy.

The connections to Potter’s magical universe often seemed awkward and forced to me, if not actually intrusive. Highfield makes a few specific suggestions, for instance, that Hogwarts’ Sorting Hat could have a superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID for short) inside it. I suspect these will draw the same reaction from many readers as explaining the physics of rainbows to people who would rather just think they’re pretty. So if I’m correct that people who’d just as soon read a science book will be annoyed by the Potter-isms every few pages, and true Potter fans will be put off by explaining away the magic of the books, I’m really not sure who’s left.

It did, however, feature a rather unfortunate paragraph that raised my eyebrows a bit:

But if you overhear a conversation and hear the words ball, Hermione, and stranger, it could mean that Hermione either is asking a stranger to a ball or is asked by a stranger to come to a ball. Here word order is important. Indeed, the precise meaning of the word “ball” would also be context-dependent. This sort of conversation uses the grammatical structure of language to the full.

I’m a little surprised that some editor didn’t gently point out that there’s are some precise meanings of the word “ball” that might make it worth substituting an example that’s ambiguous, but not that ambiguous.

needs more demons? needs more something

(Subtitle: The Life and Times of the Famous Eighteenth-Century Chess-Playing Machine)

The Turk recounts the amazing true story of a machine that purported to play chess, and which was seldom beaten except by the top players of its era. “The Turk” and its operators enjoyed a long and colorful career that intersected (and sometimes inspired) the lives of political and scientific figures including Joseph Marie Jacquard, Charles Babbage, Ben Franklin, Napoleon, and Edgar Allen Poe.

From its inception many understood that it had to be a trick, with a human being guiding the machine somehow. But, ironically, no one fully divined “The Turk”’s secrets until the age of machines that actually can play chess.

Standage opens with some background on other automata of the era, including Vaucanson’s amazing creations, and wraps up his book with some interesting perspectives on “Deep Blue,” IBM’s chess-playing super-computer that defeated champion Gary Kasparov, and our evolving attitudes toward “intelligent machines” in general.

Standage’s style is lively and engaging. I try to balance (somewhat) “for fun” books and “good for me” books, and this one truly succeeds on both levels. Highly recommended.

needs more demons? Not a bit of it. Johann Nepomuk Maelzel, in particular, has plenty.

Good golly, I love libraries. I was delighted to have a chance to read Stross’s Missile Gap, a novella published in a small print run without coughing up its hefty price tag. I enjoyed Missle Gap, but truth to tell, if I’d paid the asking price, I would have been kinda bummed.

Missile Gap shares much of the Lovecraft + Cold Warrior vibe of Stross’s fiction featuring Bob Howard, operative of supersecret supernatural spy organization “The Laundry.” I think Missile Gap would appeal to most aficianados of the Laundry stories, although it’s somewhat darker in tone. In fact, I suspect that Missle Gap may have started life as a Bob Howard novella, but Stross either decided that it didn’t fit the continuity he’d established, or (perhaps more likely) wanted to play without the rules imposed by a continuing series. I also suspect that he may have tired of Missile Gap’s conceit before he turned it into a “real” novel; it ends abruptly, and leaves any number of plot threads dangling (although, arguably, that’s part of the thematic point). But even if it’s thematically consistent, I found it less than completely satisfying. It struck me as an interesting but not entirely succesful experiment.

needs more demons? incredibly, yes.

I have mixed feelings about the merits of collections of linked short stories, as opposed to novels. A short story collection is legitimately free from the need to function as a single work. And short stories can explore multiple perspectives on characters and events in a way that’s difficult for a (conventionally structured, anyway) novel. On the the other hand, if the components of the book are short stories, not chapters, then they need to be able to stand on their own as such.

Judged this way, Soft Maniacs is partially successful. The evolving characters of Jody and Katy are explored through the first-person narration of men involved with them. The best of these stories explore the tension between naturalistic and surrealistic storytelling in lean, direct prose and dialogue. (It should probably be noted — regardless of whether you view it as an asset or detriment — that they’re also mostly pretty dirty.) Estep has a real knack for arresting openings, like

When my wife dumped me, I quite my job at the box factory, left Cleveland, and wandered for a few months. I didn’t like my wife that much anyway. And I hated Cleveland.

and

I had a rambing apartment in Brooklyn and I fucked my girlfriend Jody in every part of it. So did a lot of other people.

and

Sometimes I can’t believe the shit that comes out ofmy teeth. When I’m flossing I mean. Huge helpings of white gunk. Amazing that that kind of thing can be in there, in my own goddamned mouth, and I don’t even know about it.

But the book is let down by the concluding story “One of Us”, which revisits the territory of “Tools,” with some unconvincing twists that (it seems to me) are designed to provide exactly the sort of overall thematic linkage that a collection of linked short stories doesn’t actually need.

needs more demons? just a smidge.

I picked up Staked (or as my wonderful girlfriend prefers to call it, on account of the cover art, Stacked) because I thought it looked like a pleasantly trashy read for a business trip. Perhaps unfortunately for it, I didn’t actually read it unitl I got home.

It has a good first sentence:

Somewhere in the middle of my rant it occurred to me that I’d killed whoever it was I’d been yelling at, so arguing was no longer important.

I mostly like the setup, which melds elements of Memento (one of the viewpoint characters has strange blackouts and is not an entirely reliable narrator) and The Sopranos (he runs a strip club and power-jockeying in the underworld is the prime plot driver) with the now-standard Buffy/Laurell Hamilton-style modern world overrun by vampires, werewolves, and other things that go stab in the night.

My biggest complaint is lack of disclosure: the book is free of the usual “first in an exciting new series” cover blurb and the teaser for the next volume tacked after the last pages; it looks like a standalone novel, but it’s not. It resolves some of its conflicts, but structurally, it’s more like an episode of a dramatic TV series than a book that can stand on its own. I don’t necessarily mind that, but I prefer to know when I start a book if I can reasonably expect it to end.

The victory for Lewis is that I do want some what-happens-next satisfaction, so I will probably read at least one inevitable sequel despite the book’s other faults. The lack of internal consistency in the social environment bugged me (to be fair, this also bugs me about plenty of other books in the supernatural romance/thriller genre). Either killing people has consequences in a society or it doesn’t. For the presence or absence of those consequences to be determined by what’s expedient for the plot seems lazy. Staked also pushed my tolerance levels for cartoonish macho posturing and gratuitous violence.

But I do still want to know what happens next. Go figure.

needs more demons? not so much “more” as better use of the ones it has

My expectations for Magic’s Child were very high, and they weren’t quite met. The first novel in the series, Magic or Madness, introduced a remarkably fresh conception of magic in the modern-day world, (as well as exploring the author’s own experiences with transcontinental transitions in a fantastic context). The sequel Magic Lessons deepened and extended Larbalestier’s world.

This, the concluding volume of a more-or-less self-contained trilogy, introduces fewer new elements than the previous books; mostly it lets the characters and situations set up in the previous volumes run toward their resolutions. Magic’s Child wraps up the major plot elements in a thematically appropriate fashion (but leaves plenty of unresolved threads from which to weave possilbe sequels). It continues to effectively exploit tension between the realistically depicted emotional life of its principals and the use of magic powers to actualize adolescent alienation and the growing dread of mortality. I found it satisfying and enjoyable, but markedly less surprising than the previous books.

needs more demons? mmmmaybe.

Most of the ten stories in Russell’s debut collection share the same literary device: the unease and tension of emerging adolescent sexuality is mirrored by strangeness (supernature, surreality) in the external world. Russell has a knack for killer first sentences, like “My brother Wallow has been kicking around Gannon’s Boat Graveyard for more than an hour, too embarrassed to admit that he doesn’t see any ghosts” (”Haunting Olivia”); “Emma and I are curled together in the basket of the Thomas Edison Insomnia Balloon, our breath coming in soft quick bursts.” (”Z.Z.’s Sleep Away Camp for Disordered Dreamers”); and “Barnaby is busy hosing down Paundra, that hoary old carapace, when he first hears the screaming.” (The City of Shells”).

The best of these stories are uneasy-making and potent. They’re rich in unexpected emotional and physical details. Even when they’re too weird to be credible, they have nuggets of gawky truth. The least of these stories are similar, but not quite as strong or resonant. Many share a vague common setting: muggy and coastal, in between tourist seasons. I’m tempted to wonder if “Accident Brief, Occurrence # 00/422″’s glacial setting represents a deliberate attempt on Russell’s part to stretch beyond her comfort zone; I wondered the same about “Out to Sea,” in which she tackles the viewpoint of a much older character.

needs more demons? nope.

Uncanny Tales comprises 16 short stories of uneven quality from the final two decades of Sheckley’s career. “Magic, Maples and Maryanne,” is a fine cautionary fable of magic and morality with an almost Jonathan Carroll-like vibe. “The New Horla” (the title is a reference to a classic Guy de Maupassant short) is grimly gripping in naturalistic, man-against-elements, Jack London-esque mode; the introduction of a fantastic element is a bit of a let down. “City of the Dead” puts a post-modern spin on the characters of the Greek mythical underworld; it uses multiple viewpoints and deliberately distracting authorial devices. It doesn’t go much of anywhere, but it sustains its own weight (”Agamemnon’s Run” mines somewhat similar territory less successfully). “The Quijote Robot” melds Cervantes’ delusional knight errant and Stanislaw Lem’s cybernetic fables better than its transparent title suggest — it evokes its literary templates without being overly predictable. “Emissary from a Green and Yellow World” and “Dukakis and the Aliens” offer two takes on political leaders encountering aliens; they’re both creepy in very different ways.

needs more demons? not really.

Part of the fun of Ventus lies in discovering how Schroeder’s unusual milieu arose, so I will try to avoid spoilers (I didn’t read the book jacket flap before I started reading, and I’m glad). But it’s very quickly obvious that Ventus concerns a collision between two societies — one feudal and pre-industrial, one extremely high-tech. In the earlier chapters, the juxtapositions of tone are so sharp that it almost feels like reading a fantasy novel and a science fiction novel spliced together. Schroeder draws the disparate threads together skillfully, with nuanced descriptive shifts as the feudal folks acclimatize themselves to the advanced technology. There’s a refreshing lack of either glorifying or condescending to the people on either side of the technological divide.

Ventus‘ action-packed plot certainly held my attention, but I found it less than completely successful (it’s Schroeder’s first novel, so the flaws are certainly forgivable). Several minor things bugged me. Schroeder very unambiguously establishes some concrete religious symbolism, but doesn’t really do anything with it (unless he was just sowing seeds for a sequel…). The limitations under which the high-tech society operates didn’t feel internally consistent; at times the reasons for “why can they do that, but not do this?” seemed driven more by plot expediency than anything else. When the Big Bad arrives, it’s disappointingly cartoonish. The resolution is thematically satisfying but awkwardly and hurriedly reached; the pacing in the book’s final third is choppy (I often felt that Schroeder was juggling just a few too many balls).

Schroeder is clearly more concerned with his characters’ emotional lives than many hard SF writers, but his limited omniscient third-person viewpoint kept them at some remove. Nonetheless, “Mad Queen Galas,” the deposed ruler of one of the feudal states, is a remarkably vivid creation.

needs more demons? Just a few. I’ll read more Schroeder for sure.