Incandescence

Posted on Tuesday, 2009 April 14 by Anton

Greg Egan complains about sloppy reviews of his latest novel:

About half the reviews of Incandescence made at least one of the following false assertions:

  • The Splinter orbits a neutron star.
  • Rakesh visits the Splinter.
  • The relationship between the novel’s two threads is never revealed.
  • The reader learns nothing about the Aloof.

The first two errors result from failing to notice that Egan violates a common pattern of First Contact stories: chapters alternate between two sets of characters who would conventionally meet in the end. Odd-numbered chapters of Incandescence are about Rakesh, a human who learns of evidence of DNA life in an unexpected place and follows the trail; even-numbered chapters are about the discovery of general relativity by the inhabitants of the Splinter, an artificial worldlet orbiting a black hole. Rakesh never finds the Splinter; he arrives at another artificial worldlet, with the same origin as the Splinter but orbiting a neutron star. So there is a clear link between the two threads, but it’s at the wrong end.

And unless I missed something the Aloof remain as mysterious as ever, though slightly less aloof than they seemed before.

Two stories in the same universe as Incandescence are online: Riding the Crocodile and Glory (pdf).

Posted in prose | 5 Comments

de-skinned

Posted on Thursday, 2009 April 09 by Anton

April 9 is CSS Naked Day, a concept amusing enough that I installed the WordPress plugin to comply with it. As I should have expected, it makes this blog rather less readable than it was before I converted from Blogger and learned enough CSS to make WordPress’s (then) default template less ugly. Back then, I used <h#> and <hr> tags for visual structure; whups, that’s all gone. Next time I fiddle with my Theme, I should give such things some attention. Meanwhile I’ll just turn off the Naked Day plugin.

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deathist movie

Posted on Thursday, 2009 April 09 by Anton

In Renaissance (2006) there’s a Big Sinister Corporation whose advertising tagline is “Health, Beauty, Longevity.” Oo, scary! I don’t think we’re ever told what Avalon sells (vitamins? cosmetics? medical treatment?) but it doesn’t matter. The noirish visual style suffices to notify us that there are no white hats.

Some years back Avalon’s top scientist Jonas Muller, who had been studying progeria, dropped out to run a charity clinic. Now another promising scientist, Ilona Tasuiev, has vanished.

Eventually we learn that Muller dropped out because he found the secret of immortality; to let Avalon bring it to market would be a Really Bad Thing. Muller has kidnapped Tasuiev because she found the same secret and does not share his fear of it.

I kept expecting someone to reveal that the Muller Protocol involves sacrificing children, but no: immortality is bad because “without death, life has no meaning,” a truth which the writers hold to be self-evident. So in the end Karas, the detective assigned to find Tasuiev, shoots her in the back to save humanity’s soul; and tells her sister that she needed to disappear for her own safety, but don’t worry, she’ll be fine.

Oddly enough the movie does suggest a better reason to think immortality isn’t all good. Muller’s progeria subjects included his own brother, who apparently is now immortal but mentally damaged – though he doesn’t get enough attention to make this clear.

The movie is animated in (mostly) one-bit monochrome. This gimmick is occasionally used very well, as when Tasuiev finds herself in a surreal arboretum; but the show is long enough to use up its novelty. I found myself wondering whether the characters see their world as we do.

. . . In recent years I’ve read a fair amount of fiction (e.g. by Greg Egan) in which the abolition of senescence is treated as an unremarkable feature of the background. Is there anything like that in visual media?

Posted in cinema, luddites | 2 Comments

fun with paranoia

Posted on Sunday, 2009 March 29 by Anton

I’m reading Cory Doctorow’s novel Little Brother, which has been nominated for a Prometheus Award. In another tab I’m reading an autobiographical comic-strip by a boy of the same age as the novel’s narrator; switching between them is sometimes surreal.

Though he has lived in San Francisco, Doctorow makes occasional errors.

Even if you’ve never been to San Francisco, chances are you know what the Golden Gate looks like: it’s that big orange suspension bridge that swoops dramatically from the old military base called the Presidio to Sausalito, where all the cutesy wine-country towns are with their scented candle shops and art galleries.

Sausalito is indeed the nearest town north of the bridge, but it is only one of the cutesy towns in Marin County (which isn’t usually called part of “wine country”).

“He was going to take the BART over.”
“Don’t you know about the BART?”

Only a tourist says “the BART”.

“. . . But it used to be impossible to fly or go to the moon or get a hard-drive with more than a few kilobytes of storage. . . .”

Hm, given the narrator’s youth I guess I can believe he has the impression that the first HDs were so small.

… one of her favorite Brazilian tecno-brega bands, Carioca Proibidão — the forbidden guy from Rio.

That ‘ã’ looks out of place. Andre, shouldn’t it be –ido?

Mom’s a freelance relocation specialist who helps British people get settled in in San Francisco. The UK High Commission pays her . . . .

Most of the members of the (British) Commonwealth have the same head of state, so they don’t send each other Ambassadors; they have High Commissioners instead. Doctorow, being Canadian, may have forgotten that the UK has an embassy to the US.

Ocean Beach is way out past Golden Gate park, a stark cliff lined with expensive, doomed houses . . . .

The clifftop houses are at China Beach, further north. The area of Ocean Beach (where I lived, 1988–92) is mostly flat.

“Mr Governor” sounds alien. I never thought of that before: why do “President” and (usually) “Mayor” get the prefix, but not “Governor” or “Senator”?

Qaeda is misspelled Quaeda two times out of five.

Posted in cartoons, prose, security theater | 2 Comments

two small mysteries of the animal world

Posted on Saturday, 2009 March 28 by Anton

Around noon the other day, I saw a steady stream of moths flying north along the BART track: not dense enough to call them a flock, let alone a swarm, but enough that I always had a few of them in view. (Maybe they do that every day; I wouldn’t know.) When I came back a few hours later they were gone.

In the dawn’s early light, Pillow (a cat) often sits at the one window that’s near a tree, seeming to watch the birds. He sometimes makes a queer choking noise, like kekekekek; Dad says his cat sometimes makes the same noise. I conjecture that they’re trying to sound like a bird, though I wouldn’t have thought their little brains could conceive of such a trick.

Posted in California, pets | 3 Comments

Wednesday filler

Posted on Wednesday, 2009 March 18 by Anton

meme goes meta

When I decided I wanted a domain, about ten years ago, .nu was the cheapest registry. It’s now €60 to renew for two years; I suspect I can do better than that. So don’t be surprised if my address changes on March 28.

Posted in cartoons, me!me!me!, neep-neep | 4 Comments

sad Mac

Posted on Sunday, 2009 March 15 by Anton

My computer killed itself to protect you from more cat pictures.

Later it occurs to me to mention the symptoms. It comes alive long enough to show a gray Apple screen, the spinner spins for a bit, and then it shuts itself off.

Posted in neep-neep | 4 Comments