Books I've read recently

[mmcirvin]

Rudy Rucker, Spaceland

Rucker wrote this novel before Frek and the Elixir, which I've mentioned earlier; I held off reading it mostly because I've seen so many pastiches of Edwin A. Abbott's Flatland that I wasn't much interested in another one. This one's unusual in that instead of revisiting or updating Flatland (though there's a dream-interlude in which that happens to some extent), Rucker simply pushes the story a dimension up and makes it the tale of a guy in our world who has to deal with visits from extradimensionals.

And he adds more plot. Spaceland has a schema that is becoming awfully familiar in his novels (while writing Frek he consciously tied it to Joseph Campbell): a somewhat irresponsible ordinary Joe goes on a wild Alice-in-Wonderland adventure involving wish-fulfillment fantasies, lands in terrible trouble because he doesn't think anything through, gets repeatedly screwed over by powerful beings he thought were his friends, saves the day, achieves a modicum of spiritual enlightenment and comes home a wiser man. It's not a bad plot, but he's gone to that well enough times, I think.

In this case, the setting is the Silicon Valley world familiar from The Hacker and the Ants (only without the mild futurism, and the hero (brilliantly named "Joe Cube") is an unimaginative middle manager rather than a techie). By bizarre means he ends up augmented for travel into the fourth dimension, does the various robbery and spying things that you can do if you're four-dimensional, and becomes embroiled in the struggle between a four-dimensional woman named Momo and a devilish creature called Wackle, while also dealing with angry mobsters and an endlessly re-permuting love quadrangle with his fickle wife and a couple of engineers. It's typical Ruckerian craziness, and the descriptions of the four-dimensional world beyond Spaceland are great, as are the surrealistic reenactments of the dream sequences from Flatland. There are also some clever illustrations by somebody other than Rucker who can actually draw.

When I read it, though, it seemed as if there were something missing. I think the problem is that none of the primary characters is particularly appealing; they're all somewhat nasty people. This is a problem that Rucker's had before, in part because of his tendency to make his heroes short-sighted and impulsive as a way of getting them into trouble. He often tempers it by making the hero a frustrated idealist by way of an excuse (as in White Light or Hacker), but in Spaceland this isn't even the case. Rucker's immensely satisfying YA epic Frek and the Elixir solved the problem brilliantly by making the hero a kid instead; Frek can act immature sometimes and still come across as a nice kid. In a just world, Rucker would have a bright future in YA novels.

Paul Di Filippo, Fuzzy Dice

This is another novel that closely follows the Rudy Rucker adventure schema mentioned above, written by a good friend of Rucker's with a foreword by Rucker. It also reminded me a bit of Alfred Bester's classic story "5,271,009". The hero here is an impoverished, bitter bookstore clerk and failed writer, who is gifted by Moravecian Mind Children with a magic yo-yo that can take him to any parallel universe he wishes for. Since he's spent his time lately reading pop-science books, the places he goes often end up strongly influenced by fashionable pop-science buzzwords: there's a memetics-gone-wild world, a chaos-theory-gone-wild world, and (I thought this was particularly clever) a world in which Rupert Sheldrake's morphic fields are real, which turns the society into a parody of the anxieties of modern parenthood, with parents' lives carefully policed by the Mom and Pop Cops lest their children's morphic influences be unnaturally warped. Eventually the book takes an excursion into Frank Tipler's bizarre Omega Point theology, in which we end up creating God at the end of time and he resurrects us all in computer simulations.

It's fun, though as in many of these books, the hero's eventual enlightenment and rejection of phantasmagoric thrills rings a little hollow considering all the fun he already got to have along the way, including screwing simulacra of supermodels.

Charles Stross, Singularity Sky and Iron Sunrise

I'm a big fan of Charlie Stross's short stories, his blog and Usenet writings are often interesting, and his shortly forthcoming novel Accelerando has gotten apocalyptic levels of pre-release buzz. So it was with some anticipation that I read his first novel, Singularity Sky.

The novel establishes an extremely clever post-Vinge-space-opera universe. Stross puts a rich human-derived interstellar society with a long history only a few centuries in the future. The pretext is a cataclysmic event in the late 21st century in which an AI quasi-deity with time-travel capabilities, called the Eschaton, scattered most of Earth's population over star systems along the event's past light-cone, left them with nanotech universal constructors, and let them do their thing, subject only to an injunction not to mess with history through time travel or else. There is faster-than-light travel and perhaps slightly too loose usage of all manner of pop-physics and fringe-physics buzzwords, but all in all it's a good backstory.

Some of the characters are appealing and there are many funny moments, but the story is a bit too linear, essentially the tale of spies tagging along on the doomed battlecruiser of a two-bit comic-opera space empire, which is headed for a hopeless confrontation with posthuman merry pranksters who destroy civilizations by bombarding them with wish-granting machines. There aren't many surprises in how it all turns out.

The sequel Iron Sunrise is much better; Stross seems to have gotten the hang of plotting at novel length. An inhabited star system has been blown up by forces unknown, its sub-light-speed vengeance weapons are moving to hit back at a planet that probably didn't do it, and the spies from Singularity Sky, a Goth Teenager of the Future, and a dissolute professional blogger want to prevent that from happening, if super-Nazis attempting to usurp the Eschaton don't get them first. Frank Tipler's Omega Point theology makes an appearance again in parodic form, as the ideology of the super-Nazis.

Not to go into too much detail, there's a subplot here that bears a marked resemblance to the storyline of a very well-known classic science-fiction novel, enough so that it's probably intended as a conspicuous tribute, and around page 245 or so I started to worry that it was just going to play out like that. While in a way it does, there's a lot more to it than that.

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...Concerning Spaceland, I probably should have also mentioned that when Joe Cube dreams of Flatland, Rucker doesn't just recap Abbott's Flatland, but instead describes a world based heavily on A. K. Dewdney's speculations about two-dimensional living, as elaborated in Dewdney's weird quasi-novel The Planiverse.

[ckd]

I did enjoy The Planiverse. Dewdney seems to have gone off into 9/11 conspiracy theorizing of late, however.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Just Googled that. Whoa, man. I'd heard of the ideas in question, didn't know he was behind them.

Singularity Sky

[tomscud.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure what I think of it. The incessant Monty Python & other internet in-jokes kind of ground on me, even though I think I got most of them (Grubor and Boursy? Please.). And the car wreck the fleet was heading towards was a bit too obvious, a bit too well-foreshadowed. It only would have been interesting if somehow it hadn't ended like that.

Re: Singularity Sky

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Oh, yeah, for some reason I had completely forgotten about the cameo by Grubor and Boursy.

Yeah, the plot was very LET X=X. Iron Sunrise has many more twists and turns, and the way the ending plays out is not at all what the protagonists expect. He also manages to slip in a Paddington Bear reference, among other things.