Authentic Cultural Experience

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'.

Enjoy!

We Know a Famous Cat

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

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.

News consumption

The other day this article by Rolf Dobelli in The Guardian floated around my Facebook feed.

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.

I will also try to read David Wong's 5 Ways to Spot a B.S. Political Story in Under 10 Seconds every day, until it sinks in.

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

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.

Fiction I Read in March

Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town

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.

'You think you're better than me?'

I enjoy reading the Captain Awkward blog. It's become my favorite practical, down-to-earth advice column, and it's one of those rare blogs with comment sections that are almost uniformly well-written and enlightening.

Recently CA published a letter from a young woman who didn't drink alcohol, and was tired of having to justify her not-drinking to others at social occasions. (She was not bothered by other people drinking, and did not lecture others on the dangers of The Demon, Drink.) Apparently, some people are offended by what other people bring into their own bodies, and will keep being offended until they get a reasonable-sounding explanation. And this happens repeatedly.

Fun fact: Some people like to drink this. And some people don't. Feel free to talk about which group you belong to and why, but nobody actually has to submit a defense justifying their choice.

So I wonder, why do people take other people's choices personally? I understand that if a bunch of people are drinking and one person doesn't drink alcohol, the abstainer might be in for a little ribbing -- and the level of ribbing that is acceptable depends on the personalities of the people and the nature of the relationships involved. And if a line is crossed, then that person (the ribber) is being an asshole. That's basic just human relations.

But why act offended when you're drinking and someone else isn't (and doesn't think it's necessary to give you an explanation for their abstinence you find acceptable)? I don't get it. Maybe it's a sense that drinking is a group bonding activity and the non-drinker is sabotaging things?

But the problem with that hypothesis is that, as several people point out in the comments, vegetarians get the same sort of crap from people. As 'cloudninja9' writes: 'People are terrible to me sometimes (questioning my patriotism, telling me I have an eating disorder, making fun of me on and off for hours, trying to force me to try it)'. 'Bluecandles' responds: 'I try to avoid telling people I’m vegetarian if possible because I often get a whole bunch of questions to get me to justify it, or look at me as if I’m judging them for their eating meat. I have had people get real touchy about it and look at me suspiciously as they eat their meal. I don’t say anything or care about how they eat, but they take offence all the same.'

First, 'questioning my patriotism'? What the hell?

Second... no, same as the first. I'm an omnivore who occasionally drinks alcohol, and this is one of those times when I am genuinely baffled, both how someone comes to the conclusion that they should treat a person in a certain way, and how they justify it to themselves afterwards. My 'social bonding' theory is inadequate.

Fun fact: Some people like to eat this. And some people don't. Feel free to talk about which group you belong to and why, but nobody actually has to submit a defense justifying their choice.

Maybe it's because people have a mental image of 'vegetarians' as 'people who go around hectoring others that they shouldn't eat meat and are bad people for doing so'. But I have known many strict vegetarians in my life, and not a single one has tried to 'convert' me to their diet, or implied that I was a bad person for eating meat.

Now, maybe it's the case that 90% of self-described vegetarians want to make meat-eaters feel bad, and it's just plain good luck that I've managed to avoid meeting one. Fine. Let's assume that. If 90% of vegetarians go around judging omnivores, once the words 'I'm a vegetarian' are out of a person's mouth, are the words 'And I think it's JUST DISGUSTING that freaks like YOU eat meat' so inevitable that you're 100% justified in preemptively taking offense?

(Hint: The answer is 'no'.)

Several years ago, some journalist (I believe it may have been Gene Weingarten of the Washington Post) in an online chat proposed a theory that I didn't think much of at the time. This journalist was a meat-eater who was troubled by doubts about the moral rightness of eating meat. He suspected that most meat-eaters were similarly troubled, but most of them had taken these doubts and hidden them away behind sturdy psychological walls of prickly defensiveness. These meat-eaters look down on evangelical vegetarians who lecture about the wrongness of being a carnivore. They attribute all sorts of silly stereotypes to these vegetarians, and are happy that by eating meat, at least they're nothing like THOSE people.

So you put one of these prickly meat-eaters on a collision course with a real-life vegetarian, one who has no interest in preaching, and what happens? Their defensive alarms get set off and they become one of those people that 'cloudninja9' and 'bluecandles' describe.

'You're a vegetarian, huh? You think you're better than me?'

When I first read this viewpoint, I thought the journalist was overthinking things, perhaps projecting a bit onto other people. Now, I think he's onto something.

Especially since you could replace 'meat' with 'alcohol' and the theory still holds up. The reason for inwardly doubting the morality of drinking alcohol is different, but everything follows from there in pretty much the same way.

'Don't like drinking, huh? What's your excuse? You don't have one? Fine, go be morally superior somewhere else.'

I don't have any particular advice for the original letter-writer, but I do want to close with the words that the Captain Awkward advice columnist finished with:

Whenever someone behaves like that, I wonder, are they really THAT insecure about what they like? If the people in your life love drinking so much, they can do it without your validation or participation. Someone making a different choice than you would make is not invalidating your choices.

Feel free to replace 'drinking' with 'eating meat'... or anything else, really.

Fiction I Read in February

The Family Trade
by Charles Stross
Published in 2004
Published by Tor Books

Famed book cover art model Charles Stross is also a science fiction writer of some note. His book The Family Trade is the first installment in his 'Merchant Princes' series. Actually, to be precise, it's more like half of the first installment -- don't buy this book expecting anything other than a cliffhanger and a 'TO BE CONTINUED'.

I'm impressed by what Stross has done here. The Family Trade starts off with a plot right out of Hackneyed Fantasy For Dummies. Our heroine, IT trade journalist Miriam Beckstein, is having a horrible day. She gets fired for exposing a money laundering scheme that, as it turns out, her boss was involved in. Everything's going to hell. Then she finds a magic locket that her dead mother owned. Seriously.

And then the whole thing turns out to be a science fiction story about development economics.

Imagine a parallel-universe Earth with a severely-skewed history, a 21st Century in which North America is lightly populated with poor European peasants. In the grand castles that dot the landscape live the Clan, a group of wealthy families with the ability to jump between their world and ours. In their world, they are the aristocratic elite. On our side, they are a Mafia-like crime family.

In our world, they make their money through drug smuggling. In their world, they live in tacky luxury and watch 'Dallas' reruns while the peasantry lives lives not appreciably different from medieval Europe.

Our protagonist Miriam learns, upon finding the locket that allows her to travel between Earths, that her birth parents were scions of these families. When they learn of her existence, her blood relatives expect her to take her rightful place in their crime syndicate. This is an offer she cannot refuse: birthright is everything in this culture. Miriam's parents were assassinated in an inter-clan feud, and now that her existence is widely known, she would be in grave danger if she gave up the family's protection.

 She can't run from the parallel world her family lords over, but she can try to change it. The merchant princes' understanding of economics does not extend beyond the notion 'we like gold', a fact that frustrates Earl Roland, Harvard-educated lord whose attempts to instigate reform have led to his being sidelined within his own family. Together, Miriam and Roland vow to apply development economics to the unfortunate peasantry, but to do so they must master the labyrinthine medieval politics of the Clan.

...and that's as far as we get in this first installment.



Embassytown
by China Mieville
Published in 2011
Published by Pan MacMillan

After a decade of dancing around the edges of the genre of science fiction, winning himself numerous fans and a Hugo Award in the process, China Mieville finally jumps all the way into the genre with Embassytown, a novel with honest-to-god aliens and spaceships and everything.

It's been a month since I finished this book and I find the characters are receding into the mists. It's not that the book suffers from poor characterization. It doesn't. Rather, China Mieville, who has always been an author of grandly detailed worldbuilding (each of his novels that I've read is centered around a lovingly described, richly detailed fictional city), has this time created a universe that thoroughly overshadows any person who lives within it. There are characters in this book, and they do things which are interesting, but I can't help but feel why should I talk about them when I can talk about the setting?

The Ariekei are the native inhabitants of the planet Arieka. Although they themselves never invented space travel, there is a sizable community of aliens, mostly humans, living within the planet's largest city in an area called Embassytown. Primarily a trading post, base of the interstellar trade in the living machines that the Ariekei breed, Embassytown has been home to generations of humans, the race who make up the bulk of the alien community on Arieka.

The Ariekei are not so terribly important in the galactic scheme of things, but they are seen as a curiosity among linguists due to their Language. They never truly learned to think symbolically. They never developed a written language; they don't even understand pointing at things. Their Language is not capable of metaphors, but it does have similes, and any person who finds it difficult to remember the difference between a simile and a metaphor will never have that problem again after reading this book.

Rather than being symbolic communication, Language is a very direct link between words and thoughts. An Ariekei can not say something it knows to be untrue, any more than a human can believe something she knows to be untrue. Ariekei invite humans to Festivals of Lies so they can watch them tell obvious falsehoods (for example, about a red cloth: 'It is blue'). They find it great, mind-bending fun.

A note about these humans. Human linguists can program computers to pronounce Language perfectly, but to the Ariekei, it's just meaningless babble. As a consequence of Language being a direct auditory extension of thought, Ariekei can only understand Language when it is spoken by a being with conscious will. The problem here is that the Ariekei have two mouths and they speak with both simultaneously.

As a result, all communication between humans and Ariekei go through a small number of Ambassadors, pairs of human clones whose minds have been linked from infancy so that they may act and think as one person. Embassytown locals think this is perfectly normal. Offworlders think it is weird and creepy to have a small caste of dual-bodied people hold so much power.

When outsiders try to break into this Ambassador racket, the main plot of Embassytown begins in earnest, as the unanticipated consequences begin to pile up.

Mieville spends the first hundred or so pages carefully laying out this universe: the world of the remote planet Arieka, its weird inhabitants, their society, and their Language. And then he proceeds to solemnly and methodically wreck the planet's society in an escalating crisis that leads the reader to fear the worst for this poor planet, before he finishes off with the closest thing to a happy ending that appears in any of the four Mieville novels I've read.

Sri Lanka

Note: All pictures in this blog post are by my wife Jenna, to whom I selfishly delegated all photography duties so I could be lazy. Also, she likes taking photos more than I do. For her Sri Lanka blogging, look here.

So we visited Sri Lanka over Chinese New Year. We decided on it because, of the foreign destinations we could fly to relatively cheaply, Sri Lanka was both an entirely new country for both of us, and one not likely to be overwhelmed with tourists from East Asia also celebrating CNY.

As it turned out, we made a good choice. In fact, we both came back from our ten days there absolutely in love with the place.

The most natural place to compare Sri Lanka to is southern India. I visited Karnataka and Kerala a few years ago, and I do think Sri Lankan cities and towns look broadly similar. If you look for it, you can find food similar to what you'd get in south India. But 'similar' does not mean 'identical' -- at a Tamil-owned restaurant in Kandy we got ghee dosa with mutton curry. This was the first time my wife had ever seen dosa served with meat, and she used to live in Tamil Nadu, where dosa is an everyday food!

Sinhalese food for us took the form of a variety of spicy curries served with rice, or occasionally string hoppers. Snacks were vadai or samosa-like entities that one could buy at room temperature from ubiquitous little stores. They weren't the healthiest things to snack on, perhaps, but they were awfully good.

We got these vadai at a roadside rest stop and they came wrapped in some kid's geometry homework. Waste not, want not.
Most people would say that the foremost easily visible difference between Sri Lanka and southern India is the prevalence of Buddhism in Sri Lanka. White stupas and statues of Buddha are common throughout the parts of the country we visited. One time, we were on a bus speeding up a coastal road in the southwest and the driver pulled over at a roadside temple so that the conductor could run out, give a few coins as an offering, and do a quick prayer before the bus resumed its journey (total elapsed time: maybe ten seconds).

But a more general comparison of the two countries? I spent ten days in Sri Lanka, and two and a half weeks in southern India, so maybe these aren't most well-informed observations. Hope I don't offend anyone. But I found (and Jenna agreed) that towns in Sri Lanka looked more prosperous than comparable towns in India. There was less litter on the streets. There were annoying touts at tourist sites, but they were fewer in number and less persistent than their Indian counterparts. Everything seemed to be less of a hassle than in India. (And I say that as someone who likes India and would like to go back there.)

As for the actual trip, we had a pleasant enough time that we would definitely go back. Part of it was the fact that, while Sri Lanka is a small country, it's big enough that we couldn't see everything we wanted. We never made it to the northern half of the country; we were very sad we did not see the ancient ruins at Anuradhapura and Sigiriya. We also want to see the majority-Tamil areas in the north of the country.

A quick run-down of where we did go...

KANDY

Kandy, the old inland capital, gets plenty of tourists who come for the Temple of the Tooth and other highlands attractions. But it's also a real city, not just a tourist town, with well over a hundred thousand residents.

We stayed in Freedom Lodge, which, like all of our accommodation in Sri Lanka, served up excellent food that was easily the rival of any restaurant.

The Temple of the Tooth, while majestic, is almost guaranteed to be crowded with foreign tourists taking pictures (unless perhaps you go in the early morning, which we did not).

I have a bad habit of not bothering to learn any of the local language when visiting a former colony that uses English in an official capacity. I never even committed to memory the Sinhala words for 'Hello' or 'Thank you'. It was probably a mistake to think that knowledge would never come in handy. Jenna speaks a small amount of Tamil from her time living in India. It's not enough for her to carry on a full conversation, but we went to two Tamil-owned restaurants in Kandy, and her Tamil was enough to establish a pretty quick rapport with the waitstaff in both places.

(After one of those meals, when I enquired if there was a restroom available, one of the Tamil guys, looked around, thought for a moment, then led me down the street, into the municipal hospital, through winding corridors, and finally to men's and women's rooms which were signposted only in Sinhala. If he hadn't shown me which one to use, there's a good chance I would have made an embarrassing mistake. I felt wonderfully awkward.)

This lake in the middle of Kandy is magnificently picturesque. Particularly when you're doing your best not to think about what you just read in Lonely Planet:

Dominating the town is Kandy Lake, which was created in 1807 by Sri Wickrama Rajasinha, the last ruler of the kingdom of Kandy. Several minor chiefs protested because their people objected to laboring on the project. In order to stop the protests they were ruthlessly put to death on stakes in the lake bed.

Wow, um, isn't that a beautiful lake?

Finally, I rather liked the synchronicity of this Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal cartoon appearing while we were actually in the old Kingdom of Kandy.

THE MOORLANDS

Yes, this is Sri Lanka.

To get to Ella we took a train that wound along a beautiful stretch of mountainous railway. The train itself, which contained approximately equal numbers of locals and foreigners, was rather nicer than we were expecting (and we were in 3rd class!); we suspect the government deliberately put the nice trains on the route that foreigners were likely to take.

Unlike Kandy, Ella is really nothing other than a tourist town, a base for travelers who want to visit the various sights the Sri Lankan highlands have to offer. It serves its purpose, though, and isn't an unpleasant place to hang out.  (I continue to believe in the ridiculousness of Western travelers complaining about the place they are currently at because it has too many Western travelers.)

Our guesthouse, Green Hill, served some fine food and offered excellent services despite being located at the end of a slippery, muddy trail that we didn't want to navigate in rainy weather.

Horton Plains National Park is a long drive from Ella (we hired a car together with some German tourists). It is a downright wondrous place to hike, though, through scenery that one would never think to associate with a tropical country like Sri Lanka. The Scottish moors was what one of our companions compared it to.

World's End is where the highlands abruptly stop, with a steep drop to the hills below. Supposedly on a clear day you can see all the way to the ocean.

We had to take that on trust, because we got rolling fog that occasionally parted enough for us to see spectacular views.

This lone monkey was at World's End with us. I was pretty wary around him (I imagined him grabbing an expensive camera and hurling it off the cliff... monkeys can be jerks sometimes) but he seemed content to sit and look off the cliff, while keeping a wary eye of his own on us.

THE SOUTHWEST

Mirissa is a town on the south coast, between Matara and Galle. It is another tourist town that doesn't appear to have much of an existence apart from the tourists (actually, there seemed to be several towns on the southwest coast that fit that description).

The beaches are beautiful, I'll give them that, even if the snorkeling was a bit disappointing (the one area with interesting marine life was so shallow that I was terrified of injury-by-sea-urchin).

Our guest house, Palm Villa, had excellent food, as did all the hotels we stayed at. Otherwise, there's not much to say about Mirissa.

Galle is a city of about 100,000 people, in the island's southwest corner. Perhaps like most tourists, we didn't see the bulk of the city where most of the inhabitants live; we went to the Fort, full of charmingly restored old colonial architecture.

Walking around Fort, I kept thinking 'foreigner preserve' despite the many locals who lived there. I felt the same way about Fort Cochin, India, and Antigua, Guatemala. After wandering around the city full of foreigner-friendly businesses in revamped colonial buildings, we finally gave in to decadence and shared three dessert crepes for lunch.

(No worries; we had rice and curry for dinner that night.)

Signs in all three languages (Sinhala, Tamil, English) were encouragingly common in Sri Lanka. A sufficiently ignorant foreigner might never guess the country's recent history of ethnic warfare. 

COLOMBO

We spent very little time in Colombo -- we stashed our bags in Fort Train Station and spent a couple of hours wandering around the city center before leaving to catch our late-night flight.

Street scene near Fort Station, Colombo.

What we saw, on the bus ride in and on our wander through Fort, convinced us that the city was actually somewhat nicer than what we'd been expecting. (And we didn't even get to the parts of the city that are supposed to be really nice, like Colombo 7.)

Granted, it was a Sunday so crowds might have been less, but it was nowhere near as unmanageable as, say, Mumbai. (In all fairness, if one goes by population within city limits, Mumbai has about 17 times more people.)

Anil's Ghost

Anil's Ghost
by Michael Ondaatje
Published in 2000
Published by McClelland & Stewart

The protagonist of our story is Anil, a forensic pathologist of Sinhalese heritage who has been based in the United States for many years. She returns to her homeland of Sri Lanka to take part in a UN-sponsored human rights investigation.

She and Sarath, a local archeologist of uncertain political loyalties, attempt to track down the identity of a corpse dubbed 'Sailor', a recently killed man found in a much older burial site. Sarath and his brother Gamini, an emergency room doctor who gets through his days by heavily medicating himself, seem inured to the realities of the Sri Lankan war; they both appear cynical, or perhaps simply resigned to the slow-burning horror that is life for people enmeshed in the civil war.

Day after tomorrow my wife and I are headed to Sri Lanka to check out the tourist sites over Chinese New Year. After reading A. Sivanandan's When Memory Dies last year, which I felt to be informative (if a little dry), I felt I wanted a little more modern literature in my head, so I picked up Anil's Ghost. Michael Ondaatje is and always will be best known for The English Patient, but in Anil's Ghost he draws on his own Sri Lankan heritage

I'm tempted to cynically say Anil's Ghost belongs to the genre 'novels that explain the world's trouble spots to Westerners who want to be cosmopolitan'. (Also in this genre: The Poisonwood Bible; The Kite Runner.) There's nothing wrong with this particular genre of books; I will say, however, that a comfortable, slightly older person comfortably ensconced in the West who read Anil's Ghost might well immediately dissuade any damned fool younger relative from going to Sri Lanka on holiday.

As it is, the civil war ended in 2009, and Sri Lanka is now considered a safe country. It is actively trying to encourage the development of its tourist industry. I can already tell that the civil war is going to be the sort of topic that we politely avoid discussing with a local unless the local brings it up out of their own free will. That's fine. Hopefully there are some non-historical-horror-related travelogues or fiction floating around out there that can help cultivate a more peaceful image of the country among foreigners. (Most books recommended by our Lonely Planet seem to deal with the years of violence.)

As for Anil's Ghost, it's a very readable literary work, clearly written for Westerners, that has inserted several bits of Sri Lankan imagery into my head.

It seems to lack focus, however. The 'local' characters such as Sarath and Gamini are much more compelling and interesting than Anil herself (who despite her heritage generally comes across as a foreigner). Yet we keep getting lengthy flashbacks to Anil's life in the United States, which could have been cut entirely and the Sri Lankan story would still be intact. They're clearly there to reveal Anil's character (and there are at least three different ways to interpret the title 'Anil's Ghost'), but I felt that Anil's character was never as central to the narrative as Ondaatje probably intended. To me, the narrative was about Sri Lankan society, and the mindset created in the people by the years of horror and violence.

Boxer, Beetle

Boxer, Beetle
by Ned Beauman
Published in 2010
Published by Sceptre

Seth 'Sinner' Roach is a five-foot alcoholic gay Jewish boxer in 1930s London. He's a thug whose instinctive dislike of all things intellectual makes things difficult for Dr. Erskine, upper-class British entomologist and Hitler admirer. Erskine, who reflexively spouts anti-Semitic rhetoric and is in denial about his own homosexuality, is captivated by Sinner and wants to use him for his research into eugenics.

Many complications ensue, culminating in a grisly murder at Erskine's family estate.

The story of Sinner and Erskine is pieced together decades later in 21st century London by the book's narrator Kevin, a collector of Hitler memorabilia who suffers from a genetic disorder that causes him to smell like rotten fish all the time, no matter how assiduously he maintains his personal hygiene.

Ned Beauman plays with a lot of well-established cliches relating to the upper crust of British society in Boxer, Beetle, which in the end is a very well-done, weird and slightly surreal black comedy.

Boxer, Beetle was Beauman's first novel. Every so often I enjoy reading a novel that appears to have been written by an author who was attempting to insert as many bizarre things into a narrative as humanly possible and still have it make logical sense. I wouldn't want every bit of fiction I read to lay on so many discrete variations on life's weirdness, but a tour of the bizarre is quite refreshing once in a while.

You'd never guess, even from a detailed plot summary, that the book contains lengthy asides into the world of modern urban planning. As someone who quite enjoys a good organically grown bustling urban neighborhood, I found the description of a poorly designed postwar British planned community to be hilarious.

I came across Ned Beauman's first novel after coming across glowing reviews for his second novel, The Teleportation Accident.  And I bought it for my Kindle upon realizing that it was going for extremely cheap, whereas for The Teleportation Accident they were asking $16.00. I don't doubt for a moment that Amazon set its pricing precisely so that people in my exact situation would do exactly as I did. I cheerfully followed the script that corporate people created. And that's OK. I enjoyed the book that I got out of it.

American Front

American Front
by Harry Turtledove
Published in 1998
Published by Ballantine

The year is 1914 and the Great War has erupted. Over the next year and a half, the fighting rips North America to shreds.

But first, an explanation is in order.

American Front takes place in a universe that was inaugurated with Turtledove's 1997 novel How Few Remain. The premise is as follows. In 1862, the USA was decisively humiliated by the Confederacy on the battlefield and was forced to sign a peace treaty. The Confederate States of America is now recognized by all as a legitimate country. (Despite the tropes Turtledove has played with in other novels, this happens naturally, with neither time travelers nor aliens playing a role.)

How Few Remain opens in the year 1881, when relations between the USA and the CSA deteriorate to the point that a second war breaks out. What follows is an account of the conflict, narrated by eight viewpoint characters, all actual historical personages (Stonewall Jackson, Samuel Clemens, Frederick Douglass, etc).

I read How Few Remain several years ago and thoroughly enjoyed it. Imagine you're reading a novel that tells the story of a real-life war, like the American Civil War or World War II, and you have no idea how the war is going to unfold. You've somehow remained sufficiently unspoiled that you don't know if the Nazis are going to take over the UK or not, and when Hitler invades the USSR it's a stunning plot twist that you could never have seen coming. I'm a big history nut. I think that would be awesome. It's too bad I've already been spoiled for how WW2 turns out. That's why I find this kind of 'mundane' alternate history (no magic, no time travelers, no sci-fi) to be extremely compelling.

But after reading How Few Remain, I hesitated for several years before going on. You see, Turtledove had far grander plans for this timeline than just one novel. How Few Remain is followed by ten novels, organized into three sub-series: the 'Great War' trilogy, which describe World War I, then the 'American Empire' trilogy, which is about the inter-war period. Finally, he finished his epic with the four-volume 'Settling Accounts' series, about this timeline's analogue to World War II.

The prospect of reading ten fat novels in this universe sounds daunting enough. Even worse was reading online reviews (carefully, as I'm trying to stay spoiler-free) that seemed to say that each book was marginally less well-written than the one that had preceded it.

So it was with some trepidation that I picked up American Front, the first book of the 'Great War' trilogy.

The year is 1914 and the Great War has broken out in Europe. The United States, led by President Theodore Roosevelt, does not dither until 1917; it immediately honors its treaty obligations with allies Germany and Austria-Hungary, and launches full-blown invasions of Canada and the Confederacy. The Confederacy, led by President Woodrow Wilson, throws (almost) everything it has into throwing the Northerners back.

Over the following year and a half, soldiers die by the thousands and we are treated to numerous descriptions of death and destruction (particularly in Virginia/Maryland, Quebec, and Ontario). Unlike How Few Remain, all the viewpoint characters in American Front are fictional, and come from every side of the conflict, both the front lines and the home front.

This is a book with no unambiguous good guys, and it probes morally uncomfortable areas. Two viewpoint characters are southern blacks. Slavery has been nominally abolished in the Confederacy, but it's been replaced by a legally codified system of suppression and degradation that makes Jim Crow seem lenient by comparison. We hate the Confederacy. We want it to fall. Then the viewpoint switches to a Canadian character living under American occupation, and now the USA is the tyrannical government that we so easily hate.

Then the viewpoint switches to a white Confederate citizen. Every white Confederate in the book has racial views that are extremely retrograde and offensive by the standards of the reader (or one should hope), but most of the white Confederate viewpoint characters are entirely sympathetic when they're not thinking about race relations. Kind of like how your weird Uncle Frank is a charming and funny conversationalist as long as no one brings up politics. And if you want to give your brain's empathy circuitry a real test, you can appreciate how these people's views on race are the product of the society they grew up in.

As a result of American Front's fealty to realistic racial attitudes, the book probably has more instances of the 'N-word' than any work of fiction I've ever read. That may bother you, even though Turtledove is an author filled with good earnest liberal intentions. All I will say is that I've read a moderate amount of American fiction actually published during the years that American Front takes place, and the characters in those authentic texts use the word shockingly often, as far as our tastes are concerned.

American Front ends with a cliffhanger. A momentous event has just broken out, one which many of our viewpoint characters, with their cultural blinders, are absolutely astonished by; they didn't see it coming because they were unable to comprehend what was happening until it had already happened. The readers are less surprised because they saw the pieces being laid. As late-breaking plot twists go, it is effective and believable. I'm curious to see how it plays out as the Great War trilogy develops.

I have two gripes with the book. There are an awful lot of viewpoint characters and I occasionally had trouble keeping similar characters straight (like the two different Confederate infantrymen). Also, the scenes of death and destruction did grow somewhat repetitive after a while, even despite the novel setting. (My birthplace of southern Ontario gets blown up real good.)

That said, American Front appealed to the history geek in me, much as How Few Remain did. I will go on to the next book in the series, although with the trepidation that comes from plunging further in. I'll read something else first, though.