We all know that monkeys are quite a diverse group of critters, but you may not realize that what we humans rather arbitrarily choose to call 'monkeys' are actually two distinct groups of animals. Old World monkeys are the monkeys native to Africa and Asia. New World monkeys are native to the Western Hemisphere.
The two groups of primates are only very distantly related to each other.
The unpalatable truth for human beings is that Old World monkeys are closer to us (and chimpanzees, gorillas, and so on) than they are to New World monkeys. A macaque is more closely related to your first-grade teacher than he is to a howler monkey. So the only reason human beings aren't monkeys, scientifically speaking, is an arbitrary naming convention: we're not monkeys because we're not called monkeys.
So that religious nut who insists that if you take science at its word, we're all basically monkeys? He's right. But I'm sure we'll all agree that there are human beings in this world whom we would find it more disagreeable to count as family than the more agreeable sort of monkeys.
(Incidentally, if you really want your mind blown, you could technically say the same for fish. A trout is more closely related to your uncle Frank than it is to a shark. I'll be sure to mention that in my explosive upcoming pamphlet, On the Illogical Arbitrariness of Zoological Nomenclature.)
Now that I've seen the 4th, 5th and 6th episodes of season 3 of Game of Thrones, I can say that this season is good enough that my opinion of the second season has substantially diminished by comparison.
When I watched the second season last year, I found the first few episodes to often be interminable and oddly paced; it was enough to make me fidget restlessly a bit (which never happened while watching the first season). By contrast, the first few episodes of the current season have been expertly edited and strongly held my interest, even when relatively little was happening plot-wise.
I'm sure some people have complained about the sheer number of scenes that consist entirely of a pair of characters chatting, rather than having the show give us some action instead. Not me. I love the way the show is developing characters in these talky scenes.
One complaint I had about the first two seasons, which I concluded was probably unsolvable, was the fact that the budget had some very conspicuous limitations. I felt frustrated that the show couldn't give us a proper King's Landing riot, or show us thousands of Dothraki warriors, or make it seem that when Stannis Baratheon tried to take King's Landing, he had more than a couple dozen soldiers who got killed on-screen, came back to life off-screen, then got killed again. But I felt it was unavoidable. It's a TV show, you've got a TV budget, so what can you do?
And then, in season 3, the show gives us the sacking of Astapor.
Yes. There. That. It may not be a big-budget Hollywood level of spectacle, but this does a far better job capturing a sense of epic scale than every scene in the show's first two seasons combined. Hopefully this is a sign that the show has finally figured out how to effectively make the most of a limited budget, and not that the show just blew half the money allocated for the 3rd, 4th, and 5th seasons on one scene.
Now, let's move on to my main topic. After watching Episode 6, I have an important philosophical question about the nature of fictional universes.
When fans debate the unsolved mysteries of Westeros and speculate on what's coming in the final two (three?) books, they generally ignore the TV series. It's not because they look down on TV as a lower, less literate form of entertainment; rather, it's because the differences between the book universe and the TV universe are significant enough that letting discussion of the two contaminate each other would hopelessly muddle things. (For instance, Ser Loras is the heir to Highgarden in the TV show, but not in the books.) These are two separate fictional universes; they are similar but different.
That said, the TV show is not merely some bit of exceptionally popular fanfic; it is produced under George R. R. Martin's guiding eye. With that in mind...
I must point out that it's never been shown that Melisandre has the power to reanimate the dead -- everyone just assumes she can, since Thoros of Myr can and he's also a Red Priest.
Well, Episode 6 of the new season gives us something that never happens in the books: an actual meeting between Melisandre and Thoros of Myr.
And what do you know, Melisandre seems utterly astonished at Thoros' ability to bring back the dead. To be exact, it's not quite clear if she's amazed that Thoros can revive dead people at all, or just that he can revive the same person again and again and again. Either way, though, it's a data point that I don't believe shows up in the first five books at all.
Just minutes later, we get a much less subtle piece of information:
Melisandre to Arya Stark: 'We'll meet again'. Or, to transpose that statement to the book universe, 'We'll meet for the first time'. Since in the five published books those two characters have never come within a hundred miles of each other.
So here's my philosophical question, sparked by a scene that may well have been written in a giggling fit of trollery meant only to send fans into a tizzy. If I am to speculate about plot developments in upcoming Song of Ice and Fire books, can I legitimately use these two scenes as a source? Have these TV-universe scenes told us something about the book-universe?
Thus ends my question about philosophy.
A few other thoughts:
I must admit that people who find the show problematic about race have a point. It's only in Season 3 when we meet the show's first nonwhite characters who also appear to be trustworthy, decent people. And I hope it occurs to the writers that the series now prominently features a massive army of anonymous brown-skinned foot soldiers led by a blonde white lady. I mean, there's nothing inherently racist here, but you need to be mindful of the tropes you're slinging about.
I hope the Theon Greyjoy scenes continue to show us more psychological torture, not just the really-difficult-to-watch finger-slicing torture of Episode 6. This storyline could be an extremely powerful bit of ghastly storytelling if done well, and I've been (mostly) happy with the way it's been presented so far.
Speaking of horror, so far I'm a fan of the horrific details the show adds that weren't in the books (but don't contradict the books), such as Varys keeping the sorcerer who castrated him confined in a box, and Selyse Florent's morbid shrine to her stillborn sons.
This is as much about the books than the TV show, but after pondering the fact that Hodor is an exceptionally unrealistic portrayal of a mentally disabled individual, I realized that Westeros doesn't have any modern mental health professionals available to render a proper diagnosis. So I've decided that Hodor most likely doesn't have any cognitive deficiency. Rather, he has a glitch in the language center of his brain that prevents him from producing speech correctly. Living in Westeros as he does, the help he needed was never available, so he lacks even the most basic rudiments of a formal education. As he himself would point out, 'Hodor'.
I know that billing prominence is determined by some mysterious Hollywood algorithm that I could never hope to understand, but I'm beginning to feel that the fact that Gwendoline Christie (Brienne of Tarth) still isn't in the opening credits is kind of insulting to her.
βehemoth
by Peter Watts
Published in 2004
Published by Tor
Five years have passed since the events of Maelstrom. The βehemoth life-form -- yes, it's spelled with a beta -- has ravaged North America, causing a general collapse of government and infrastructure. The rest of the world is desperately hoping βehemoth can be contained, and reflexively lobs missiles at any attempt to leave the troubled continent. The North American corporate elite has retreated to Atlantis, a habitat on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, to wait out the end times. They have been joined by the surviving Rifters, cybernetically-enhanced transhumans built for working on the ocean floor for whom the Rifters trilogy is named. The rifters hate the corporate types, or 'corpses'. The corpses hate the rifters. They've already tried to wipe each other out once, and each side still has an impressive array of armaments left over.
But both sides would also like to stop βehemoth, which everyone expects will eventually chew its way across the entire planet and wipe out all life. Our designated hero is Lenie Clarke, the rifter who spent much of Maelstrom spreading βehemoth willy-nilly across the American and Canadian West. To be fair, she is on much more stable mental and emotional ground now that we've reached the final volume, and does occasionally show a flicker of remorse for her past actions.
Other characters include Ken Lubin, a rifter trained as an assassin, who makes your typical Hollywood action movie hero look like a cowardly weakling; Patricia Rowan, spokesperson for the corpses and former high-level mover and shaker; and Achilles Desjardins. Desjardins was one of the people trained to make the tough 'kill ten people to save a thousand' decisions. His brain chemistry had been tampered with by his superiors to give him an artificially tweaked conscience. Then, at the end of Maelstrom, it turned out that a colleague with strong political activist leanings had infected him with a virus that stripped him of all conscience, natural and artificial, so that he'd be able to act on his own moral sense without any interference. That turned out to be a great idea. (Tone doesn't always carry in blog writing. Was that sentence supposed to be sarcastic? Read the book and find out!)
Let's revisit what I said about the previous books in the series. This is from my blog post on Starfish:
This is not happy, optimistic science fiction. This is horror. There are honest-to-God sea monsters down there. Not to mention the psychological tension and continual sense of unease that pervades the book. You don't read Peter Watts for a happy fun time.
So, let's recap. The protagonist is an insane woman spreading carnage and destruction throughout western North America as she tramps off on a perverse quest that has no rational basis, who does not care that her actions cause numerous innocent deaths. The antagonist is the person who is in charge of saving the world. And the Internet is where bizarre inhuman monsters live.
Blindsight has a 'love and cuddliness' quotient of zero. There is no happiness to be found in these pages. No hope, and no optimism, and the only positive emotion is a purely intellectual spirit of discovery, unless you also count the sizable portion of black humor. Depending on your own mindset and background, you might find there are no sympathetic characters at all.
You may be seeing a pattern here. βehemoth is one of the most unpleasant, squirm-inducing works of fiction I've ever read. (If depictions of sexual violence particularly bother you, you might be better off skipping the Rifters trilogy altogether, or at least stopping after Starfish.)
It is also profoundly depressing, the story of a human race which seems to be on its absolutely last legs, and when the first indications appear of a slim hope of survival for the world, it comes as a genuine surprise. It didn't help that Watts set large swathes of the second half of the novel in a βehemoth-ravaged post-apocalyptic eastern Maine, not far from where I grew up. And very, very few of the named characters are still living by the time the novel reaches its conclusion. (That said, with one important character, whether she survives or not is left ambiguous, and it's very frustrating because I got the impression Watts thought her fate was much more clear than it actually was.)
All that said, the Rifters trilogy is fascinating. It's a look at a hypothetical future where humans have really screwed things up on Earth, to the point where in the best of times a large portion of GDP is spent cleaning up our messes and repairing our self-inflicted wounds. In a weird way it's optimistic, as you consider that there's a good likelihood that not all of the bad stuff Watts predicts will come to pass.
I'm happy I read the Rifters books, but now I feel like I need to read some light frippery to cleanse my psyche.
Back when I was a student in the USA, I liked to go to performances of traditional music and dance from foreign countries. We always thought it was desirable to get an 'authentic' experience of that country's traditional culture.
This video was shot by my wife at a temple fair in Lugang a couple of weeks ago. Westerners, this is what Asian culture looks like when nobody's trying to please people who crave an 'authentic cultural experience'.
I've been reading BoingBoing for years, but this is the first time they've posted about an individual whom I have met in real life. Xeni Jardin reports:
Above: Misha, the manager of Fernando's Kaffe, my favorite place for coffee in La Antigua, Guatemala. Seriously, she runs the joint. After the barista made me my espresso, the barista pushed keys next to the creature's paws and tail to ring up my drink without moving Misha; the cat sleeps right through everything.
Misha does indeed run the place. When Jenna and I were at Fernando's Kaffe in 2010, Misha carefully supervised Jenna's coffee consumption, as can be seen here:
Maelstrom
by Peter Watts
Published in 2001
Published by Tor
When I read Peter Watts' Starfish a couple of weeks ago, I wrote the following:
This is not happy, optimistic science fiction. This is horror. There are honest-to-God sea monsters down there. Not to mention the psychological tension and continual sense of unease that pervades the book. You don't read Peter Watts for a happy fun time.
So, needless to say, I went back for more. Starfish was the claustrophobic story of a team of psychologically damaged individuals -- the Rifters -- working in unspeakably close quarters in a station at the bottom of the sea, with honest-to-God sea monsters swimming around outside. Maelstrom is not claustrophobic. Peter Watts has opened up the setting and shown us the world. And what a horrible place this world is.
As the first novel progresses to its climax, something very dangerous is uncovered at the seabed: a microbe dubbed βehemoth. βehemoth is a relic of the earliest days of life on Earth. It is a life form completely unrelated to anything in our current biosphere; it has several structural advantages that would give it a leg up in evolutionary competition with the microbes we're used to, but pure random chance 4 billion years ago consigned it to the bottom of the ocean. If it ever establishes a foothold on dry land, it will very likely breed and breed, and clog up our biosphere, and eventually kill us all.
And this sets up the remainder of the Rifters trilogy, of which Maelstrom is book 2.
Peter Watts thoughtfully set the events of Maelstrom in the year when I will be seventy years old, a year in which I intend to be fully alive and aware. That helps make the screwed-uppedness of the world more immediate for me. Climate change has wreaked all sorts of unforeseen havoc on the world's weather patterns, and natural evolution (egged on by genetic engineering) has produced all sorts of superbugs that the authorities are busily containing by Any Means Necessary. Large swathes of the west coast of North America are refugee camps full of Asians displaced by climate-related disasters. The situation there is not helped by the massive earthquake/tsunami combo unleashed at the end of Starfish, which most people do not yet realize was triggered by a deliberate nuclear explosion meant to annihilate the Rifters, who were presumed to be infected by βehemoth.
Lenie Clarke, the closest thing the trilogy has to a main protagonist, survives. Clarke, like the other Rifters, is psychologically damaged by years of childhood abuse. But she has formidable survival skills, and can handle herself well in a fight. Not realizing she's carrying the βehemoth microbe, she sets off over land on an ill-defined journey to an uncertain destination. The calculating government bureaucrat Patricia Rowan is determined to track her down and stop her.
There are several other viewpoint characters, some of whom have had their conscience tampered with by the authorities. There are also some who only think their conscience is still being tampered with, which raises some interesting philosophical questions about the placebo effect. And then there is Maelstrom itself, which is the vast wild frontier that our Internet eventually evolves into. Maelstrom is an ecosystem where Darwinian evolution, quite uncontrolled by human beings, takes place among the native life at an astonishing speed. The Maelstrom-POV chapters are fascinating, and the Maelstrom-native life ends up impacting the story in ways that are sometimes hilarious, sometimes quite alarming.
Characters get plenty of development and then die with little fanfare. I don't know how George R. R. Martin ever got his reputation for killing off characters. Trust me, you do NOT want to be a character in a Peter Watts novel.
So, let's recap. The protagonist is an insane woman spreading carnage and destruction throughout western North America as she tramps off on a perverse quest that has no rational basis, who does not care that her actions cause numerous innocent deaths. The antagonist is the person who is in charge of saving the world. And the Internet is where bizarre inhuman monsters live.
This novel is highly unpleasant. I also found it compulsively readable. I've already got the third volume of the trilogy on my smartphone, ready to read.
Sometime in the year 2012, David Benioff, D. B. Weiss, and George R. R. Martin sit around a table mapping out how season 3 of Game of Thrones will unfold
GRRM: Okay guys, there's one scene that didn't make it into the final version of the book, but I think we need to include it this season.
DB: Oh?
GRRM: I've always regretted having to cut it from A Storm of Swords, and every year I get mail from fans who noticed its absence and ask why it was never worked into the story.
DBW: Okay, we'll try to fit it in. What happens?
GRRM: Podrick Payne has sex with three women at once.
DBW: Oh, I think we can definitely fit that in. You're right, that scene is absolutely necessary for Podrick's character development.
DB: You know, I've read A Storm of Swords front to back three times now, and I always felt it was missing something, something that, in its absence, made the story less satisfying than it would have been if it were there. Now... now I think I know what that missing something was. You're right, we absolutely must include the scene of Podrick Payne having sex with three women at once.
GRRM: Actually, I think I might discuss with Bantam Spectra the possibility of including the scene in all future editions of A Storm of Swords. The book really is incomplete without it.
---
Snark aside, I think I've enjoyed the first three hours of the new season of Game of Thrones more than the first few episodes of the previous season, which I found to be somewhat interminable and oddly paced. I suspect the Podrick Payne sex scene will be remembered by fans more with humor than with cringing, rather like the now-infamous Littlefinger monologue scene in the first season.
As always, I am an extremely annoying person who likes to analyze the differences between the TV adaptation and the books, rather than enjoying the TV show on its own merits.
But that doesn't mean I'm complaining. A vast number of trees died to make the paper used to record Arya and friends wandering around Westeros in A Clash of Kings and A Storm of Swords. Their wandering was compressed to under two minutes of TV time, which is probably for the best.
And if the show really is doing what I think it's doing with the Theon Greyjoy storyline, it could turn out to be one of the most gut-punchingly powerful story arcs I've ever seen on episodic TV. (But if they're not doing what I think they're doing, and the Theon stuff is just meaningless plot filler, I will not be happy.)
And any book purist who complains that Missandei appears to have doubled in age, needs to remember that nine-year-old Missandei of the books used to help Dany relieve stress by climbing into bed with her and giving her relaxing 'massages'. Not even HBO would be willing to show us that.
Anyway, speaking of homoeroticism! This is more a regret at a missed opportunity than a genuine complaint about the show. I rather wish we hadn't seen King Joffrey musing on making homosexuality punishable by death in Westeros. I realize Joffrey is consciously trying to look tough in front of his bride-to-be Margarey Tyrell and needle her about her dead husband, and the scene is intended to get viewers wondering whether he is aware of Margarey's brother Loras's sexuality, and thus whether he truly knows these Tyrells or not, and so on.
But I guess I'm disappointed to see Western-style homophobia in a world where it doesn't need to exist. I've read plenty of fiction about societies whose perceptions of sexual orientation do not fall along our culturally constructed spectrum running from Western notions of tolerance to Western notions of homophobia. It might have been nice to have a mainstream TV show depict a world where sexual orientation is not perceived by society in the ways we provincial 21st-century people would expect.
Last year I read Shan Sa's Empress, a fictionalized account of the life of the real-life medieval Chinese ruler Wu Zetian. According to Shan Sa's account, Wu had numerous lesbian affairs with concubines, and no one batted an eye -- indeed, if anything, people at court felt it was good for her, and by extension for the empire. What's more, I felt that if some court minister had said 'Now hold on here, we can't have Her Majesty sleeping with other ladies', his reasoning would have been very alien to us, and that would have been interesting.
Transposing this to Westeros, one could imagine if Renly Baratheon had secured his claim as King, his extramarital liaison(s) could have continued as an open secret, and as long as Renly dutifully impregnated his wife a couple of times and produced legitimate Baratheon babies, no one would have cared. (Margarey certainly seemed unfazed by Renly's sexuality.)
A couple more random thoughts on the season so far:
They appear to have dropped Ser Dontos from the TV show. That's not terribly surprising, since the show tends to combine minor characters where it can, but I wonder why they bothered to introduce Dontos at all, back in the Season 2 premiere, in a scene that was very faithful to his book introduction. And then he never had another line.
On the other hand, I feel like they made a mistake by cutting Strong Belwas. It's true that he never did anything truly consequential in the books, and I guess he was judged to be too cartoony. But I could imagine him joining Hodor as a popular character for image macros.
I'm getting slightly confused about why Samwell hasn't become Sam the Slayer yet. I cannot imagine they would cut that entirely, but the most dramatically logical time for it to happen has already come and gone.
And finally, I generally don't find this sort of thing funny, but this time is different. I have to give props to HappyPlace's Facebook recaps of episodes One, Two and Three, which are really well-done. (But 90% of the humor will go over the heads of anyone who hasn't watched the episode in question within the previous week.)
In the past few decades, the fortunate among us have recognised the hazards of living with an overabundance of food (obesity, diabetes) and have started to change our diets. But most of us do not yet understand that news is to the mind what sugar is to the body. News is easy to digest. The media feeds us small bites of trivial matter, tidbits that don't really concern our lives and don't require thinking. That's why we experience almost no saturation. Unlike reading books and long magazine articles (which require thinking), we can swallow limitless quantities of news flashes, which are bright-coloured candies for the mind. Today, we have reached the same point in relation to information that we faced 20 years ago in regard to food. We are beginning to recognise how toxic news can be.
Most people were skeptical, to say the least; most reactions were along the lines of 'So this guy is saying that ignorance is bliss? Give me a break!'
I thought that was a bit unfair. Dobelli had a point. The vast majority of news and analysis does not leave the news consumer knowing more about the world than the consumer did before.
What's more, the news media are absolutely crap at communicating the relative importance of stories. With all the horrible things that happen in the world on a daily basis, the American media seem to spend a huge amount of resources choosing a few murdered children every year, seemingly arbitrarily, and giving their cases enormous coverage. From what I've seen, other countries' media are not much different
And that's not even bringing up people who get all their news from within partisan echo chambers, and the twisted view of the world that they develop as a result.
Charles Stross, an author I like and a man who never strikes me as uninformed or ignorant, wrote approvingly of Dobelli's article. His take on it reminds me of the parallel Earth in Neal Stephenson's novel Anathem, where humanity's intellectuals cloister themselves away in monasteries to shield themselves from the day-to-day distractions of pop culture and world events.
All that said, however, I have to agree in the end with people who bashed the article on Facebook. Dobelli, for all his spot-on criticism of the news media, really does seem to argue that it's better to not know so much of current events in his 'News kills creativity' paragraph. He partially redeems himself in his very next paragraph:
Society needs journalism – but in a different way. Investigative journalism is always relevant. We need reporting that polices our institutions and uncovers truth. But important findings don't have to arrive in the form of news. Long journal articles and in-depth books are good, too.
But that's buried near the end. Much better would have been for him to make it clearer that people need to be well-informed, but genuinely well-informed, not the illusion of knowledge that watching CNN will get you. I like long-form journalism and reading nonfiction books. I wish he'd made that point more central to his article.
And that was where I stood a day and a half ago. Now for my personal anecdote. I live on the opposite side of the world from my native North America, and the Internet greeted me on Tuesday morning with pictures of bloody streets and carnage in Boston. Horrible situation.
There is a prominent blogger I read. He had assembled tweets from various semi-prominent people which represented their early reactions to the Boston bombings.
There were two tweets that made me mad. They weren't from random idiots with Twitter accounts; there are so many of those that if you go looking you can find offensive tweets reacting to any situation, and I frankly don't see any reason to care.
No, these tweets were both from people who called themselves journalists. They were both political commentators. Both are famous enough to have Wikipedia biographies. Both presumably get paid to do what they do. One of them made a really offensive and tasteless comment about the bombings. The other used the bombings to make a snarky comment about a completely unrelated news story.
They both offended me, but what really made me mad was that I knew exactly what would happen next. There would be pushback. People would be offended. The commentator who had made the offensive comment would probably complain she was being lambasted for 'political incorrectness'. The one who made the snarky comment would assume that nobody had 'gotten it', and would 'helpfully' explain what he meant to all those people who had incorrectly been offended.
And I got even madder, thinking about their cluelessness.
And only then, I realized just how screwed-up my emotions at that moment were.
First, I was much madder at these commentators' obliviousness (real or feigned) at their offensiveness, than I was at their offensive comments in the first place. And what's more, I was madder at these commentators' offensive comments, than I was about the fact that some person or people had just torn a crowd of people to shreds with bombs.
Second, there was a funny thing about these commentators' obliviousness. It hadn't happened yet. I was already mad, just thinking about how I expected these dumbheads to react. In other words, I was angry -- really, genuinely angry -- at something I had imagined. I had no idea if they had actually reacted (or would actually react) to the inevitable pushback in the way that I had involuntarily visualized.
In short, I realized that my years of reading political commentators, and getting mad when they said dumb things, had horribly twisted my mind.
One thing I had already done was prune the list of political commentators I read to a very few. (The two chief conditions are that they don't insult my intelligence and they don't try to make me feel waves of anger, for silly reasons, towards political figures I didn't like anyway.) Now, what I'll try to work on is not feeling angry when I see a political commentator being quoted saying something stupid, no matter how illogical and/or offensive their words are.
After five or so years of carefully pruning my news consumption, maybe I'll have developed some rules of thumb that are more useful than Dobelli's well-intentioned but ultimately incomplete advice.
Heart-Shaped Box
by Joe Hill
Published by William Morrow
Published in 2007
Judas Coyne is a middle-aged rock star who lives with his twentysomething Goth girlfriend Georgia in an upstate New York farmhouse. Jude's music is informed by his interest in the occult and the macabre; when his PA helpfully mentions that some crazy lady is offering her stepfather's ghost for sale online, Jude buys it immediately.
Unbeknownst to him, the ghost is real. Unbeknownst to him, the crazy lady is the sister of his previous twentysomething girlfriend, who killed herself after he broke up with her. The living sister and the deceased stepfather are intent on revenge, and Judas Coyne has the most unpleasant time of his life ahead of him...
I'm going to do something that Joe Hill is probably tired of at this point. I can't discuss my reactions to this book without mentioning Joe Hill's father. Horror is a genre I do not read often. I like Peter Watts, but his science-fictional horror seems like a very different subgenre. And while I'm a fan of the short stories of the PseudoPod podcast, I generally won't seek out a big fat supernatural horror novel to relax with. But long ago, when I was a teenager, I read the occasional horror novel, and most of them were written by Hill's esteemed father. Joe Hill, Senior.
I grew up not far from Joe Hill, Sr's house. I never met the man, but he was without doubt the local celebrity, and I read a bunch of his big fat novels when I was in high school. As of now I haven't read any of his stuff in years. However, when I read Heart-Shaped Box, there was no question whose writing style it reminded me of. I suspect I would have thought 'This reminds me of old Joe Hill, Sr!' even if I hadn't known the family connection. That said, this is probably less due to Hill taking after his father and more due to the fact that I haven't read terribly much in this particular genre.
I'm going to admit that I can be a squeamish reader, and there are certain types of bodily injury that reading about can make me feel nauseated and dizzy. Heart-Shaped Box is a very bloody book, and by 'bloody' I do not simply mean violent. I mean this book is full of lacerations and puncture wounds and traumatic amputations, all of them graphically described, and by the final scenes I imagine the surviving characters are leaving trails of blood behind them wherever they go. This isn't meant to be negative criticism; it's more a note that this book hit me in some viscerally unpleasant ways that may have lessened my enjoyment of it; at the same time, though, the sheer bloodiness of it may have also made the story more immediate, more vivid, for me.
With all that said, Heart-Shaped Box absolutely did a masterful job keeping my interest.
About a quarter of the way in, I felt the story (and Judas Coyne's life) was probably about to reach its grim conclusion, and I wondered if I'd maybe unwittingly procured a collection of novellas rather than a single novel.
Then the story threw in a plot twist, and then another, and then another which I did not see coming, shamefully enough. By the time the tale comes around to its grisly, bloody conclusion, I was enthralled.
by Cory Doctorow
Published in 2005
Published by Tor
This is the third Cory Doctorow novel I've read (after Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and Little Brother), and somehow it seems both the most Cory Doctorowiest and the least mainstream of the three. It takes place in Doctorow's native Ontario, delves deep into topics that Doctorow is passionate about, and contains weirdness of a sort that many readers will find odd and perplexing.
Alan is the name our protagonist is most commonly known by. He's an eccentric sort of person who arrives in a new neighborhood in Toronto and befriends the local oddballs. He's owned a variety of small businesses and sees himself as a tinkerer and craftsman. When he meets local oddball Kurt, who plans to blanket Toronto in free wifi (bear in mind this novel was written in the pre-smartphone era), the two of them join forces.
At one point Alan describes his family in this way:
Alan's father was a mountain, and his mother was a washing machine -- he kept a roof over their heads and she kept their clothes clean. His brothers were: a dead man, a trio of nesting dolls, a fortune-teller, and an island. He only had two or three family portraits, but he treasured them, even if outsiders who saw them often mistook them for landscapes. There was one where his family stood on his father's slopes, Mom out in the open for a rare exception, a long tail of extension cords snaking away from her to the cave and the diesel generator's three-prong outlet. He hung it over the mantel, using two hooks and a level to make sure that it came out perfectly even.
You probably think he's speaking in metaphors. When I first read this, I thought he was speaking in metaphors, too.
He's not.
You see, Alan comes from 'mountain folk'.
He has no belly button.
His neighbor Mimi is a lady with wings.
Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town is a novel of consistent, very well-done surrealism, greatly informed by the mood of old folktales while at the same time not only putting them in a modern setting, but also making making the folktales themselves almost modern.
Starfish
by Peter Watts
Published in 1999
Published by Tor Books
Deep down, at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, hydrothermal vents exist where tectonic plates are moving apart. Amid the bizarre sea creatures of the deep, power stations have been built that now, in the mid-to-late 21st century, supply most of the planet with electricity.
The people who work down here are surgically modified to exist in the water outside with a minimum of protective equipment; most notably, they have a lung removed and replaced by machinery to filter oxygen from water. But what are more important are their psychological profiles. Research has concluded that happy, chipper people are dangerously unfit for life in the deep. Rather, the focus has been on training the psychologically damaged. The abused. Victims of child molestation. Abusers. Pedophiles. These are the sorts of people who maintain the equipment down there. They find, in the deep, a calm that had always evaded them up on dry land.
This is not happy, optimistic science fiction. This is horror. There are honest-to-God sea monsters down there. Not to mention the psychological tension and continual sense of unease that pervades the book. You don't read Peter Watts for a happy fun time.
I like Peter Watts in controlled doses. In the second half of Starfish, an overarching plot of truly epic scope begins to coalesce. Starfish is the first volume in what is known as the Rifters trilogy, which I cheerfully await making my way through over the next few weeks.
The Girl Who Played Go
by Shan Sa
translated by Adriana Hunter
Published in 2001
Manchuria, 1937. One of our protagonists is a teenage Chinese girl who plays Go in her village square. The other is a Japanese officer, sent to Manchuria to hunt down anti-Japanese elements disguised as local peasantry.
(Historical Context Note. In 1937 Manchuria was nominally an independent country and ally of Japan. In reality Manchuria had been broken away from China by Japanese effort, and its government was basically a puppet of Tokyo. At the time of the events in the novel, the outbreak of full-scale war between Japan and China is just weeks away.)
Our female protagonist is anxious about her own future. Her best friend appears doomed to be married to a man from her rustic hometown that her father found for her. Her sister is married to a local bigshot who is blatantly cheating on her. Our protagonist becomes involved with two local anti-Japanese revolutionaries. As might be expected, she does not exactly find true love with either.
Our male protagonist's romantic exploits include enjoying the company of prostitutes, though he does longingly look back on a certain geisha back in Japan. His letters back home reveal the nationalistic Japanese mindset, and one thing I can say to Shan Sa's credit is that while the cruelty of the Japanese forces is spelled out in some detail, the book never feels like a piece of anti-Japanese propaganda.
By the time our two protagonists finally meet, the novel is at its halfway point. Events happen. There is fighting. In the final pages there is a coincidence so improbable that you know you're reading a work of fiction. Even so, you saw it coming. And that's OK. You know you're reading a novel in which everything happens for a purpose, generally to make things horrible for the main characters to see how they react.
Actual un-ironic comment I saw appended to a Facebook post yesterday: 'The government can legalize same-sex marriage but I don't think the church should marry gays.' (This was on one of those Facebook posts that thousands and thousands of people follow and comment on in a big unholy mess.)
First of all, as we are not all mind readers, we do not automatically know what that commenter meant by 'the church'. In fact, I'm a little confused about exactly what sort of being would refer to 'the church' and expect thousands of anonymous Internet people to know what they're talking about.
After all, a person open to the idea of a multiplicity of faiths surely wouldn't post about what 'the church' should do in a context where it's not clear what 'the church' refers to.
And as for the opposite sort of person, the more you think that your church is The One And Only Way, and the more rigid and intolerant you are when it comes to religious pluralism, the more convinced you'll be that that other church over there, the one right down the road from your church, is just an express train to Hell for the deluded sinners who congregate inside. So you'd be specific enough to make that clear.
So now that we've got that cleared up, here's my response to that person.
1. I don't think the government should force any church to marry gay people.
2. I don't think the government should force any church to marry interracial couples.
3. I don't think the government should force any church to marry people who aren't virgins.
You see, I am able to mentally separate 'I don't approve of that' from 'I think that should be illegal'. I don't approve of churches denying marriage to any of the above, but I don't think churches should be legally prohibited from behaving in ways I disapprove of.
But that means, if people in the community get angry about a church's position on marriage and start protesting, the church is not allowed to complain that its rights are being trampled on, it is not allowed (in the USA) to say 'What happened to the First Amendment? Freedom of religion? Huh?' or something similar, and it is not allowed to hint darkly that we are now all living in a land of tyranny.
(And of course, when I say 'not allowed' I don't mean 'banned by law'; my meaning is closer to, 'You're the one who insists I cook every night no matter how stressful a day I've had, so you're not allowed to complain when you get reheated leftovers!')
But I can extend this argument even further:
4. I don't think the government should prevent any church from marrying three, four, or five people.
5. I don't think the government should prevent any church from marrying a beetle to an ostrich.
6. I don't think the government should prevent any church from conducting a marriage where one member of the couple is deceased.
7. I don't think the government should prevent any church from declaring that I, Brendan, am now married to, I dunno, let's say George R. R. Martin. Without the permission or knowledge of either of us.
8. I don't think the government should prevent any church from marrying a grown man to a six-year-old girl.
Okay, I threw that last one in for shock value. But I mean it. In that last case, the man can't consummate his marriage without violating actual laws that actually exist. And the six-year-old girl is far too young to legally enter into a binding contract. And if the police hear about a bunch of weirdos marrying kids to grown-ups, they would still have every reason to be suspicious that maybe something very wrong and illegal is going on, and they would be fully justified in investigating further.
Basically, I'm sympathetic to the idea that the religious institution of marriage ought to be teased apart from the institution of legally binding contracts. That's from the point of view of the government, of course; a church can still require you to sign a legal marriage contract if you want it to marry you.
Let's face it: I am basically a civil libertarian. I'm very hesitant to call myself that, since I worry people will expect the next words out of my mouth to be something like 'If poor people want health care, why don't they just save their money so they can afford it?'
But I agree that the government doesn't necessarily need to be involved in every aspect of human society. If a pastor marries two people in a church, and the government validates the union by the signing of a civil contract, those are two different actions and one can exist without the other.
More to the point, the USA is a land of religious pluralism, where any bunch of kooks and creeps can band together and found a church that, unless God is willing to come down and render a decision himself/herself/itself, is not objectively any more legitimate than your friendly neighborhood church on the corner. Or the Roman Catholic Church.
So if you care about your church having the religious freedom to conduct its affairs in the way it sees fit, you'd better hope that the church down the street is also free to declare that the ghost of Benjamin Franklin is now married to the pastor's dog. Because while you might be serene in the knowledge that you're closer to God than those weirdos, you still have to live together in the same country.
And in case anyone read all that and still cares what I think, then as long as the government is inserting itself into the marriage business at all, then it ought to include same-sex couples in on it. Or interracial couples, or couples born on different days of the week. But I can't think of a good reason to include a provision allowing cactuses to marry cuttlefish. Your church can go do something different, for all I care.
New Game of Thrones episodes resume next week. It's the only TV drama I watch nowadays (I know there are other good shows on, but it's a free time issue) and, having read all 5 of GRRM's books released so far, I find the process of adaptation from one medium to another to be fascinating in and of itself.
The first season of Game of Thrones probably followed the original source material more closely than any text-to-screen adaptation I've ever seen. The things that were changed were insignificant in comparison to changes I've seen in other text-to-screen adaptations, such as the later Harry Potter movies where vast swathes of the books were omitted. (In all fairness, keeping every subplot would have made the fifth and sixth Harry Potter films about six hours long each.)
You could probably watch season 1, then move directly to reading book 2 and all the rest, and the story would flow perfectly.
Ironically, this Season 1 recap shows arguably the two biggest deviations Season 1 made
The second season deviated from the source material (book 2, A Clash of Kings) to a far greater extent. Quite a bit was omitted: Arya's travails on the way to Harrenhal were condensed, we never heard about Stannis besieging Storm's End, and the details of the political situation in the North were kicked down the road to be fleshed out at a later date. The Reed kids never made an appearance in season 2; neither did the good, gentle, and kind character of Ramsay Snow; these characters have, however, been cast and will appear in season 3.
Basically, if you do what my wife did and watch the first 2 TV seasons and then read book 3, you'll need a cheat sheet to fill you in on all the omissions and changes.
The primary source of fans' ire in Season 2 was the fact that two storylines in particular were heavily altered. In both cases, I can see why they did what they did:
1. Daenerys' time in the city of Qarth was completely rewritten and reworked, probably because they felt it didn't have sufficient drama before to fill out an entire TV season. The Qarth stuff was self-contained enough that it didn't affect anything else.
2. Robb Stark is much more of a central character than he was in the book A Clash of Kings, in which he basically never appeared after the first few chapters. This has an interesting ripple effect on characters and plotlines.
First, because the focus is on the action at Robb's military headquarters, we never see the castle Riverrun. Jaime spends most of book 2 locked up in Riverrun's dungeon, but on TV his 'dungeon' is a tent at Robb's camp, and when Catelyn makes a certain fateful decision near the end of the season he's clearly a couple of hours away from getting lynched by Robb's men. As a result, Catelyn's choice to spring him from confinement makes much more sense in the TV show than it ever did in the book.
However, one unfortunate effect of Catelyn being so close to Robb at this time on TV is that she sees the romance developing between Robb and whats-her-name, which leads to her spouting cliched 'I will not allow this marriage!' dialogue. I prefer the bit in the books where Catelyn finds out about Robb's marriage after the fact, in a scene that, much condensed, goes something like this:
ROBB: I'll forgive you for letting Jaime go if you forgive me for marrying a random girl you've never heard of. Deal?
CATELYN: Deal. Wait, what?!
That leads us to Robb's choice of bride. In the books, Robb marries a girl named Jeyne who displays no character or personality whatsoever beyond 'I love Robb'. I cannot stress strongly enough that Jeyne is an utter and complete non-entity whose only reason to exist is to marry Robb Stark, which then causes certain other things to happen.
Therefore, I really can't complain that in the TV show, Jeyne's been given a complete transplant of name, background, and personality, and is now a field medic named Talisa who spends her time sawing off gangrenous limbs and is played by Charlie Chaplin's granddaughter (it's true, look it up).
Apart from all that, my feeling about season 2 was that it improved quite a bit as it progressed. The first four episodes, despite some good individual scenes, struck me as oddly paced and never really drew me in. For reasons I can't put my finger on, things improved markedly with episode 5 (which may have marked a first in episodic TV history by killing off a major recurring character in the first three minutes) and episodes remained well-constructed for the remainder of the season.
I think I have two complaints about the adaptation. The first one is unavoidable: it's a matter of budget. Back in season 1, when Khal Drogo is finally persuaded to get up there and give that speech about how he's going to conquer Westeros and smash the Usurper's army, it would be much more intimidating if we had ever seen evidence that Drogo had more than about a dozen warriors under his command. Similarly, in the Battle of the Blackwater in season 2 it never quite looks like Stannis has enough troops to take King's Landing, particularly after half of them are roasted alive in their ships. (That said, I'm not sure I'd be happy with a Lucas-style Special Edition where vast army divisions are digitally added.)
The second is that I suspect the vast scope of the story is making it difficult for people who don't already know the books to follow what's going on, at least without going back and reviewing episode recaps online. In Episode 8 of season 2, Qhorin Halfhand and Jon Snow are captured by the Wildlings, and Qhorin tells Jon the best thing for him to do is to defect and act as a mole, and he'll have to do whatever it takes for the Wildlings to be convinced of his intentions. In Episode 10, Qhorin picks a fight with Jon, who slays him in combat. In between comes Episode 9, which ignores the Jon-Qhorin-Wildlings plotline in order to focus on the dramatic events transpiring down in King's Landing. I doubt many people who hadn't read the books were able to follow the John-Qhorin situation, particularly ones who were watching one episode a week.
Finally, I've found that sexposition doesn't really bother me, although I am grateful that the term, potentially quite useful, has been introduced into the English language because of this show. Just before the Battle of the Blackwater, Bronn exchanges acerbic words with Sandor Clegane while he's got a naked lady in his lap (my wife dryly observed, 'She has no pubic hair'), and I figure this is probably a completely realistic way for a warrior to spend his last hours before battle in a pre-industrial world.
That said, I'm rather hoping not to see many scenes that exist solely for their shocking sex value. I wasn't such a fan of the infamous 'Joffrey's birthday present' scene, in which Joffrey is invited to spend the night with a pair of prostitues in the vain hope that letting off some adolescent steam would be good for him. The problem isn't that the scene isn't in the original book (Joffrey's actions are totally consistent with his character), but rather that it doesn't really serve any plot-related purpose; it's gratuitously shocking without really having earned it.
Apparently it was written to make sure audiences wouldn't rationalize Joffrey's actions by thinking 'aww, he doesn't know any better, he's just a kid'. I think I'd rather have had the show make that point by having him shoot crossbows at rioting King's Landing citizens; explaining why they were rioting would have been a good opportunity for exposition of Westeros politics (i.e., the townspeople are unhappy because food prices are high, because Highgarden is withholding food, because Highgarden is allied with Renly).
Anyway, I'm quite curious to see what choices season 3 will make in adapting the material.
