In some books characters who we, should we encounter them in real life, would consider neither nice nor personable and still the author makes us sympathise with them, or at least makes us understand why they are who they are. And some characters can be so interesting that we stop connecting their morals and aims with those of our own, respecting them for who they are, in their own right.

The Dervish House had NO character that I cared for, and there was several to chose from – a nine year old boy with a heart condition, an old side-stepped economics professor wallowing in self-pity, a flash yuppie futures trader and his überclass wife dealing in religious relics, and a whacked out junkie and his Islamist brother.

So, no “connect”, no one whose future I cared about.

Yet – an enjoyable book. How come?

First of all, like all of Ian McDonald’s books that I’ve read it is well written. Presumably well researched, oozing of local colour. No loose ends. Poetic.

Second, the world he describes is not ours, yet a plausible future extrapolation of it. He chooses a technology – in this case nano – and shows how the tech and human behaviour (and politics) combine to make up this new, changed, world. Not really a mirror world, the classic science fictional treat, but an idea of what might become of us if certain things happen. And at heart is human drives, human passions, human conniving; eternal themes, in fiction, in news reporting and in the history textbooks.

Lastly, they story itself is interesting enough to make me want to know how the jigsaw pieces he show, one after the other, me will fit together, in the end. And come together it did, in a very good way.

Poetic, even.

So, definitely worth reading, and recommended. Perhaps especially to those who don’t often read science fiction as the fictional science of The Dervish House isn’t far out, nor placed off-planet, and thus easier to accept.

On the other hand this DID change and I reconnected with computers during the late 80′s. Since 1991 they have been my livelihood and at that point I did take to gaming, but only for a few years. I lost interest somewhere at the time Doom turned to Quake. I just don’t have time for such things. Fun, but not fun enough to be prioritised above my family, or to take the place of reading.

Just to say I’m not clueless and that’s why Ready Player One didn’t do it for me ;-)

The tale is told as from the memory of Wade Watts, an orphaned kid growing up in poverty, in a white trash trailer park on steroids. His only escape is the virtual world of OASIS, and he is not alone. Millions of millions of people look at the unreal as their only way out of the misery a collapsed global economy and ecological disaster has left for most of humanity to live in. When the mega-billionaire OASIS founder dies, leaving as his will a riddle and the promise of a quest for his heritage, Wade decides to make a try at it as his off chance to a ride out of misery. The tale is the story of his quest, and as the OASIS founder was obsessed with 80′s culture the quest is a ride through 80′s music, film and gaming.

Definitely recommended to anyone who actually spent time in the pop-stream of the 80′s, not to mention anyone who was obsessively playing computer-based games back then, arcade or not.

For those of us who spent our 80′s time  in other ways – well, it IS a good read. Just not the ultimate nostalgic experience it might be for those who did ride the wave, way back.

Ian McDonald is one of these great “what if”-people. In Cyberabad Days he explores the “what ifs” of artificial intelligence, man and machine and the self-interested middle class and its hunt for ever more personal glory against a background of  ”what if” India got balkanized. The means is a series of short stories, some would call it a short story collection. But this is to belittle the book because each of the stories, together with River of Gods, build to something that is far more than a series of disconnected tales – it is a suite of different perspectives on the suicidal trip India’s upper middle classes enters upon as they try to outdo each other in wealth and glory; the stories showcases the effects on society as a whole, without never ever leaving the little person behind.

My favourite stories are The Dust Assassin, An Eligible Boy, The Little Goddess, and The Djinn’s Wife (which made me think of Iain M Banks‘ Culture books in general and Surface Detail in particular), but all are very good. And most of all – without the rest of them the last story, the one that actually relate to River of Gods in a more substantial way, would lose some of it’s impact.

Anyone who have read and enjoyed River of Gods should read Cyberabad Days. Anyone who have not read River of Gods yet should do so first to be able to wholly appreciate Cyberabad Days but it IS readble on it’s own, too.

And any which way Ian McDonald is one of the most important of our current authors, SF genre or not. Not only because he has something to say but because he says it well, respecting his readership and our brains, to think for ourselves.

Go support a living author. Go get one of his books. And start thinking.

Just like everybody else I now and then smile at a memory – things done and experienced; places; music; faces. Those are short moments, though, because I live here and now and as here and now is the only place in which I actually am here is where I spend my energy. Possibly I spend energy on the future as well, on the principle that the future is now, making now liveable.

However, this doesn’t make it possible to successfully evade other peoples’ nostalgia.

People spending an evening reminiscing on their youth. People who go to nostalgia concerts, listening to old heroes regurgitating old hits, meeting people they don’t socialise with anymore, to get a waft of the “good old times”.

True, sometimes this “don’t socialise with anymore” is due to hard facts of life, of living in different areas and having schedules that doesn’t match without applying a jack-hammer. But when conversation is down to “do you remember when…” I feel like I’m being walled in; roofed over; chained to the bottom of the sea.

What irks me even more is when people who spent their youths raging against nostalgia recline against their memories, like a soft pillow, without even reflecting over how they now do what they rallied against; once money started to roll in they got corrupted; still praying to the same gods, out of convenience? Talking the talk without walking the walk.

I get a heart attack only writing about it, I tell you.

Get laid, get paid, owe your life to the bank, push “pause”. Eternally frozen image. Futureless and hence hopeless. Stuck. Digging up corpses, hoping to find some of the essence that once made life interesting. And then wonder why I don’t attend all those nostalgia events, thinking I’m the one who is anti-social?!?!

Excuse me, don’t spend energy trying to convert me to your belief.

I have a life to live.

Now, you might this is over-reacting just a wee bit. I think not.

Almost everyone I meet feel some kind of pressure when December approaches – presents, foods, relatives; a pressure to conform, to live up to expectations. We once went to Thailand over Yule, to get away from it, but while we spent it at a smallish low-key place with small establishments hidden under the Casuarina trees, some of them with only sand for a floor, it was impossible to evade the Yule decorations. Given that the Thai don’t even celebrate it themselves we had expected else. This only imprinted the Holocaust-premonition even harder. What kind of culture are we that force ourselves so relentlessly on others?

We march in step to Jingle Bells, living the hegemony of archetypal western civilisation, while at the same time stressing out – almost imploding with the pressure to perform, not to mention all those not so well off people who can’t afford to shop all those expensive presents and all the traditional food.

Most people aren’t happy during the Holidays. Most people are the exact opposite – at the final fraying end of the madly dashing tether. Still we ache to be like everyone else, to not stray from the Middle Road. We are exactly soo close to genocide, in our behaviour, whatever we would like to think.

All of which goes through my mind every time someone mentions their list of Yule Themed Books/Films/whatever they go through every single Yule. And I don’t want to offend anyone so I just grumble-mumble and walk on. But I am really the only one who see Yule mainly as an exercise in mob thinking?

Geographically the story starts in Iowa, then romps on to Seattle and China, before returning to north America via a side-trips to Taiwan and the Philippines respectively, and the plot-lines are equally disparate, romping, and – not to forget – with a body count on par with that of the goriest action flicks.

I chose the word “romp” because in some ways and despite the terrible things happening to unsuspecting and, to borrow a term from Stephenson himself – mundane, people, it is a book that is a pleasure to read.

The first person we meet is Richard. He is a fiftyish entrepreneur in the gaming business who decides to help his niece Zula, whose expertise is in magma flow modelling, by giving her a job in the company. Soon after her boyfriend Peter becomes entangled with shady people, for the simple reason that he needs money to stay afloat during the recession. Accidentally he transfers a virus to one of the mobsters, the result of which is that all the data the mobsters need to make money gets encrypted and held hostage in the World of Warcraft-like game T’Rain – the game made by Richard’s company. Pointers leads to China so the Russian mobster grabs his in-house Hungarian hacker Csongor, Zula, and her boyfriend and goes to Xiamen, to find the Chinese hacker and take him out. The mobster’s head of security, Sokolov, is secretly worried about the clinical sanity of his boss but doesn’t dare break a contract. And so it starts…

The people we learn to know are only trying to stay alive, to keep a head above the water and to continue to breathe, and by each of these moments they step by step slip so far into the realm of the outright unbelievable believability becomes a moot point – each step was reasonable so the end result must be reasonable too, right?

No. The end result is not reasonable, it is way over the hill. People gets humiliated, people get shot, people dies. The bad guys kills indiscriminately. They also get killed that way, whenever possible, because soon enough it is clear to the reasonable mundane people that it is the only way to stay alive.

A real thriller, in other words, and in the true sense of it. And I loved it. Absolutely loved every bit of it.

And yet I am a wee bit disappointed. Even when smiling a bit over the brief stop-over in the Philippines, a country featuring heavily back in Cryptonomicon, and even as I was worried over the fate of this character or that, I missed the Big Ideas part that often are so central to Stephenson’s books. In this Reamde is more kin to Zodiac or Cobweb (of which Cobweb is the one worth picking up – it dates back to the anthrax fears of the late 90′s) than it is to Anathem.

Anathem, on the other hand, was the ultimate Big Ideas novel, so admittedly it is unfair to compare the two. Because a good romp, a good thriller and some decent well-written suspense, can be a fantastic experience too. And that Reamde is.

Definitely recommended.

Ten thousand years ago, after an age of massive segregation and ecological disaster resulting both from conflicts, overconsumption and a general disregard for the ecological balance, certain people – the cybs – were ostracised from Old Earth. They now return to exact revenge on the descendants of the perpetrators. The Old Earth people have learned and changed, something the returning cybs are unwilling to see.

I had absolutely no idea of either book or author but the cover hinted at hard SF of some kind. Soon enough it became clear that the book was written mainly as a way to put forward certain ideas, ideas regarding ways to conduct one’s life, both as an individual and as a society. At times this made the book hard going, with conflicts and scenes engineered not to drive some kind of story but to act as an arena for dialogues in which the ideas put forth could be displayed – a classic allegory. This puts characters in the passenger seat. Sometimes this is no trouble. For example if the ideas are interesting, or the way in which they are examined, are novel enough, or if the author is an exceptionally skilled writer, this may work. In this case it worked so and so – I would not venture as far as saying the prose was bad but it had a certain Clarkesian feel, in the way there is a tangible distance between protagonist/s and reader, despite the story being told in a first person perspective.

The cybs are representatives of ideas persistent in our present society, with the right and might of the strong prevails, and with the Old Earth people acting as advertising board for a philosophy where people respect the environment and have done away with money (instead you work up debts when you spend resources, debts you work off in different ways). Some aspects of this philosophy, like not protecting the weak or stupid (“because stupidity breeds”) instead letting those be killed off by the aggressive mutated wildlife, is entirely revolting.

In the end it was an OK read but nothing I’d recommend anyone, except if it was the only SF available from the airport kiosk and you really REALLY needed something for that flight ahead of you.

First perhaps some words on why the “belatedly” in above paragraph. The book was published in January last year. Normally I am holding an eye to the “upcoming” list at my local dealer (SF Bokhandeln) but this list is partitioned into SF, Fantasy and Horror. Of these I only ever check the SF one on something approaching regular basis but by chance I glanced over the Fantasy list recently and found JCG was to publish a new novel in early 2012. I followed the link and realised the 2012 release was a “part 2 of 3″. I was aghast at having missed a release from a fave author and hurried to the physical bookshop the very next day, to get part 1, which is The Fallen Blade.

To me the book was a pleasant surprise. We follow the nameless boy who doesn’t really know who he is or where he’s from. His voyage takes him through Venice’s upper and lower levels – some of which is closer to each other than one would think…

While still relying on classic JCG archetypes – the outcast who doesn’t understand who or what he is, a real place but an alternate history, upper crust politicking, and a dedication to describing texture, look and smell that makes most scenes an inner eye visual explosion – the writing feels more mature, as he is in his natural element, for once. And then I’d never call his other books immature. It’s just that he seems to have, step by step, distanced himself from his cyberpunk and very Gibsonian background far enough to finally do something that is more wholly his own. And this despite this latest book being in a genre that I would not hesitate to call over-exploited and tired.

A definite recommendation for anyone who enjoys the voice of Jon Courtenay Grimwood. It would seem the trilogy format suits him so much better than the standalone novel. Definitely looking forward to the next instalment.

Anyway, in the course of this search for some other place to live I have looked at a gazillion of photos depicting the homes of other people. And you know what? Most of these homes are totally devoid of books!

I am not so deluded as to thinking everyone has thousands of books in their homes. But perhaps fifty wouldn’t be too bold?

Apparently it is. Because a huge lot of people doesn’t seem to own any books. And I mean ANY books. At all. Zero. Zilch. Nada. Nothing. Walls full of empty white space!!!

Here’s some ideas why this is so -

People who read and discard
Yes,  they exist. I know people who is like that. People who read and read and read but once a book is read it is given to charity or sent to the dustbin or passed on to someone else. So they don’t accumulate any books.
They do have books laying around, though, so aren’t truly bookless.

People who have moved to ebooks
ebooks are convenient. They doesn’t use up space, and they are extremely portable. So this could be why the visual absence of books. But as ebooks haven’t had much impact on the Swedish market – yet – I find it unbelievable that so many people should had discarded all their paper books in favour of ebooks.
But it IS an option.

People who doesn’t read
So, I do know they exist. But so MANY?! Perhaps they are cold rationalists, denying the “false” joys of the fictional novel? But then they ought to have non fictional works. Alas, they don’t. Perhaps they find reading hard? But many of these flats seems to be lived in by people who have incomes in the higher regions or they should not be able to afford either them or the designer furniture they display.
Do they get their mental challenges from the tabloid press and the teen-blog squad that writes about the woes of the designer handbag life?
I simply don’t know.

A mystery.

And a scary one.

A teacher I once had said “an empty desk is an empty brain” – she was about as keen on tidying up her workspace as I was. In other words – not at all. And I think that sentiment apply across a wast dimension of media and storage spaces, books and walls included.

Of course this is very judgemental of me. But I can’t help it. I just can’t.

I do understand that these things costs an awful lot of money to produce. Unfortunately buying a course for something between US$200 and 400 is not within my ordinary book-buying budget. I was still interested enough to find different options so one day I started to search the national Swedish library catalogue. No luck.

The case was laid to rest. Until one day when I heard about Story of Human Language. I was piqued enough to search for it and found it at a staggering discount – “only” about US$50! A 36-lecture course on language, for the price of a non-fiction hardback. I just HAD to get it.

So get it I did. And was rewarded.

There’s no way a layman like me can look at a course like this and judge its content from a scientific viewpoint. But to me McWhorter did his very best to try to present and represent the differences and disputes that necessarily exist when theories are built on assumptions rather than facts. But whichever way this is it is still a delightful lecture series to listen to because McWhorter has a good voice and is clearly enthusiastic about his topic, generously telling stories about himself coming up short when trying to make himself understood, or showcasing misconceptions he has held.

He starts out easy, laying out the basis by means a layman can understand, before taking off discussing more complex issues. As a Scandinavian I thought it especially interesting to think on his discussion on how Swedish, Danish and Norwegian are treated as distinct and separate languages while some English dialects are even more separated from each other… while still being perceived to be one language.

So – fun, educational, and a pleasure. I actually found myself trying to conserve the experience, to make it last longer, feeling a bit disturbed over the fact that there would be one day when I had no more lectures of his to listen to.

Highly recommended.