There’s a lot of discussion in some circles about whether video games can really count as art. Personally, I think it’s a no brainer that any media form which involves the contributions of so many artists (e.g., writers, musicians, graphic designers, etc.) pretty much has to be capable of itself being art. And I also know that some video games have triggered complicated emotional responses in me, such as the usual suspects Monkey Island, Grim Fandango, Shadow of the Colossus, and so on. Just based on personal experience, I definitely think that video games can not only be art, but selected special games can be fine art.
Tomb Raider ain’t one of those. It is a pretty fun mess though.
I haven’t played a triple-A title within a year of release since God of War 2, I think, unless Portal 2 counts. I’ve got a job and I’ve got a family, which means that I don’t have a lot of uninterrupted time, and I’m also not really that into most of the major game genres. I get a fair number of indie titles and retro games, and play Starcraft 2 on Tuesday nights, and that pretty much scratches my itch. But I’ve got this awesome video card that I’ve kind of been meaning to exercise a little bit, and Steam had this on sale for 75% off, and so that’s how I ended up with the newest adventures of Lara Croft.
I wouldn’t say that I’m a huge Tomb Raider fan. I did play the first three titles in the series, but I wasn’t into them enough to actually buy them, meaning that I rented them from Blockbuster Video back when that was a thing. I think I beat the second one. I specifically remember that the third one was so relentlessly, murderously difficult that I only rented it once and probably didn’t even get more than 10 minutes into it. These games featured famous globe-trotting archeologist and murderess Lara Croft, who would make witty quips while jumping 10 feet in the air from a dead stop while dual-wielding submachine guns and personally wiping out all sorts of endangered wildlife and people, all while looking like a parody of a 14-year old nerd’s ideal woman. I guess the series ended up in something of a rut, or at least they wanted to shake it up a bit, so they hired Rhianna Pratchett to do the writing, knocked Lara down a couple of cup sizes so she looks kind of like a plausible human (or at least a heavily made-up fashion model), and re-used the original title in this prequel/reboot.
There’s a huge and fundamental disconnect between the gameplay and the writing which makes it impossible to take this game seriously in any respect. This is what I mean by “fun mess”. The actual gameplay itself is top notch – Lara responds fluidly to user input, combat is varied and flowing, exploring the environment is fun, and this is one of the best-looking games I’ve ever seen, from the character designs down to the environment. Clearly a labor of love, or at least enough money to simulate love, and once you can fake sincerity you can fake anything. It’s also surprisingly violent – Lara can die in a variety of horrible ways, like being dismembered by wild animals, crushed by rocks, upside-down neck impalement in a fast-flowing river, carved up by machete wielding fanatics. And you can reciprocate in kind by setting people on fire, pulling them off cliffs with grappling hooks, disabling them by shooting them in the kneecaps. This one’s rated M for a reason, folks. But it’s strangely satisfying to maneuver this little waif around, staving in grown mens’ heads with your climbing axe.
Guess I should back up one step and say what’s going on. This game imagines Lara on her first adventure as she’s looking for the lost kingdom of Yamatai as a young girl before she’s done any of the stuff that she will be famous for someday, assuming all that wasn’t written out of continuity. She’s part of what seems like a very bad and soon to be cancelled reality television show ostensibly starring her archeology professor, who’s a total venal jerk who is obviously wrong about everything and will clearly be horribly killed at some point. But their ship goes to an island inside the “Devil’s Triangle” and is promptly wrecked, and then everything goes from bad to worse as they find out they can’t leave. Oh, and there’s an evil cult there too. And maybe . . . DARKER THINGS! That seemed worthy of all caps there. But yeah, mystical undead samurai. All of whom will wreck your day.
There was another bit of media that came to my mind during the second time that my character was suspended upside down by the ankle in a snare trap while a half-dozen bearded castaways fired away at her with machine guns and she calmly dispatched them all with pistol shots to the head, and that was the Clive Owen movie Shoot ‘em Up. In that film, Owen engages in lengthy gun battles with armies of goons for pretty much ninety straight minutes, stopping only to do stuff like punch a carrot through the back of a man’s head. This is a film where the main character engages in a gunfight while having sex. I bring it up because I’m pretty sure that Lara Croft kills far more people over the course of this game than Owen did during that movie, and otherwise her fights tend to play out about the same way. I tried to keep a rough count when it started getting insane, but I lost track; it’s probably somewhere on the order of five hundred people. Shoot ‘em Up, however, is a comedy film. Tomb Raider means to be taken seriously, which it can’t, because it’s fundamentally absurd.
For an example of what I mean, besides being one of history’s greatest killers, Lara is also basically indestructible. In the first five minutes of the game she manages to get burned and then fall twenty feet onto some rebar which punctures her abdomen. Now I realize it would kind of suck if she just rolled around in agony for a while and then succumbed to peritonitis after a couple of days, but then why give her this grievous wound? She gets pistol whipped, repeatedly falls off high ledges, walks through snow in a sleeveless shirt and hot pants, and is disturbingly near several large explosions. And that’s just in the cutscenes. They’ve eliminated the health bar, so if an injury doesn’t outright kill you Lara can walk it off in ten or twenty seconds – so you can also sustain literally dozens of gunshot wounds, arrow hits, Molotov cocktails and machete blows to the face without losing a bit of acrobatic ability.
But that’s all fun stuff to do. I don’t know why the writing team didn’t roll with all the insanity and come up with a goofy excuse plot that was equally fun, but instead they seem to have written the plot around an entirely different game, one where you aren’t a mass-murdering parkour fast-healing psychotic, and are in fact a scared young girl who’s plagued by self doubt and fear. Don’t get me wrong, all the plot stuff is also funny, but I don’t think it’s meant to be. And it’s also composed nearly entirely of tired clichés, while recognizing that, but not having enough courage to actually buck the clichés. For an example, Lara confronts her adviser by pointing out that powerful women throughout history have always been accused of witchcraft . . . but it turns out she actually was a witch. Hmm, no points for feminism there. And then the cultists are actually regular guys when they’re talking amongst themselves as you sneak up behind them to slit them up . . . but they all attack you on sight and fight to the last man. Not to mention the fact that the inescapable nature of this island could not possibly have gone overlooked by the world in general considering that thousands of people have been marooned there, along with enough weapons for an Army battalion and enough equipment that the mad cultists have managed to build windmills and complicated infrastructure.
The gap between the game that you’re playing and the description of the game you’re allegedly playing is so wide that I can’t believe that no one from the development team sat down and wondered whether it was really a good idea to have the gameplay contradict the alleged plot at every opportunity. So I really can’t say it was that great. On the other hand, it made me laugh (albeit probably unintentionally) and the actual gameplay was pretty good, so I can’t complain too much. It won’t go on any all-time great lists, but out of the Steam sale bucket I’m counting it as a win.
Thursday, October 10, 2013
Monday, September 23, 2013
Gladiator-at-Law by C.M. Kornbluth and Frederik Pohl
It was with some sadness that I learned of the recent passing of Frederik Pohl; a friend of mine pointed it out to me, and it was in the news once I looked. I will admit that my first reaction was actually to be a little surprised that he was even still alive – he was 93 years old, after all.
Nonetheless he’d actually published something as recently as 2011, so he was still in the game, and although I’m not exactly the world’s biggest Pohl fan, I think anyone who’s a fan of the genre has to recognize that his death (and Jack Vance’s, in May of this year) definitively closes the book on the Golden Age of SF. Admittedly the Golden Age brought forth a lot of crap, but there were some diamonds in there too, and that’s just the nature of every age.
It was just a coincidence that I happened to pick this up on the discount shelf of the used book store two days before his death, and it was more for Kornbluth’s byline than Pohl’s that I got it in the first place. But these two did write some good stuff together, and in memory of the man I moved it to the top of my queue. Otherwise I’d have to go reread Gateway or something, and I’d just as soon not; too much Freudianism in there for my tastes.
One of my other reviews tackled Wolfbane, which was another collaboration by these same authors which had its moments but wasn’t really very good on the whole. I’d have to say the reverse about Gladiator at-Law – it’s got some low points but on the whole was actually quite impressive. I don’t think it’s been in print since 1986, so good luck finding a copy, but maybe they’ll do a Pohl legacy retrospective edition or something.
The protagonist, Charles Mundin, is a recently graduated attorney who’s defending small time crooks in an effort to keep his doors open. He’s got potential, but unlike many 50s – 60s era SF protagonists he’s no superman and he’s not omnicompetent. We’re introduced to him as he first tries to get his sad sack client to plead guilty and then absolutely fails to provide him an effective defense. We then learn that he’s only got clients in the first place due to some small-time political connections he has, and that failure to pay his student loans may very well leave him out on the street. He’s then at a party where he talks to a friend of his who inherited his father’s fat-cat corporate law firm; although Mundin helped his friend get through law school (it took eight years!) it’s the friend who’s getting a $125,000 fee for appearing at one hearing for a corporate merger and acquisition. The merger’s been going on for decades and the hearing was to grant a four year extension - the friend expresses hopes that he’ll be able to pass it down to his son when the time comes.
As an attorney myself I found this bleakly hilarious, and it’s also a great example of showing. Wolfbane was full of narrative telling you how the characters felt about stuff, but this one is much better about just putting Mundin in a situation with some pretentious asshole and letting you draw your own conclusions. Before you know it, Mundin’s gotten mixed up with a pair of siblings who just might have a major minority stake in the corporation that makes the “bubble houses” that everyone aspires to, and which may or may not actually run the world. Before you know it Mundin has to enter into the wretched hive of scum known as the stock exchange and try to buy one share.
To keep everyone’s minds off the fact that there’s really no social mobility and the financial system is just a giant casino, there are organized gladiator games, some of which are in fact as deadly as you’d imagine, others of which are more like American Gladiators. However, I’m sure if anyone actually did that tightrope-walking over piranha tank stunt that it would get a million hits on YouTube. I was sort of thinking that Mundin would be forced into a life of combat based on the title, but that’s really not how it goes – this book is maybe 150 pages, there isn’t any time for that sort of thing, as it turns out.
There are a lot of observations in this book that ring true, and some of the elements that you can tell that Kornbluth and Pohl were trying to take up to 11 have really come to pass. Mundin isn't any better of an attorney when he's got a fancy office but the surroundings make him be taken seriously. So, I liked it. For such a short book it kind of dragged in places, though, and some of that 50s stereotypical prose can be a little flat or a little condescending. Still, very interesting, Pohl was a master for a reason.
Nonetheless he’d actually published something as recently as 2011, so he was still in the game, and although I’m not exactly the world’s biggest Pohl fan, I think anyone who’s a fan of the genre has to recognize that his death (and Jack Vance’s, in May of this year) definitively closes the book on the Golden Age of SF. Admittedly the Golden Age brought forth a lot of crap, but there were some diamonds in there too, and that’s just the nature of every age.
It was just a coincidence that I happened to pick this up on the discount shelf of the used book store two days before his death, and it was more for Kornbluth’s byline than Pohl’s that I got it in the first place. But these two did write some good stuff together, and in memory of the man I moved it to the top of my queue. Otherwise I’d have to go reread Gateway or something, and I’d just as soon not; too much Freudianism in there for my tastes.
One of my other reviews tackled Wolfbane, which was another collaboration by these same authors which had its moments but wasn’t really very good on the whole. I’d have to say the reverse about Gladiator at-Law – it’s got some low points but on the whole was actually quite impressive. I don’t think it’s been in print since 1986, so good luck finding a copy, but maybe they’ll do a Pohl legacy retrospective edition or something.
The protagonist, Charles Mundin, is a recently graduated attorney who’s defending small time crooks in an effort to keep his doors open. He’s got potential, but unlike many 50s – 60s era SF protagonists he’s no superman and he’s not omnicompetent. We’re introduced to him as he first tries to get his sad sack client to plead guilty and then absolutely fails to provide him an effective defense. We then learn that he’s only got clients in the first place due to some small-time political connections he has, and that failure to pay his student loans may very well leave him out on the street. He’s then at a party where he talks to a friend of his who inherited his father’s fat-cat corporate law firm; although Mundin helped his friend get through law school (it took eight years!) it’s the friend who’s getting a $125,000 fee for appearing at one hearing for a corporate merger and acquisition. The merger’s been going on for decades and the hearing was to grant a four year extension - the friend expresses hopes that he’ll be able to pass it down to his son when the time comes.
As an attorney myself I found this bleakly hilarious, and it’s also a great example of showing. Wolfbane was full of narrative telling you how the characters felt about stuff, but this one is much better about just putting Mundin in a situation with some pretentious asshole and letting you draw your own conclusions. Before you know it, Mundin’s gotten mixed up with a pair of siblings who just might have a major minority stake in the corporation that makes the “bubble houses” that everyone aspires to, and which may or may not actually run the world. Before you know it Mundin has to enter into the wretched hive of scum known as the stock exchange and try to buy one share.
To keep everyone’s minds off the fact that there’s really no social mobility and the financial system is just a giant casino, there are organized gladiator games, some of which are in fact as deadly as you’d imagine, others of which are more like American Gladiators. However, I’m sure if anyone actually did that tightrope-walking over piranha tank stunt that it would get a million hits on YouTube. I was sort of thinking that Mundin would be forced into a life of combat based on the title, but that’s really not how it goes – this book is maybe 150 pages, there isn’t any time for that sort of thing, as it turns out.
There are a lot of observations in this book that ring true, and some of the elements that you can tell that Kornbluth and Pohl were trying to take up to 11 have really come to pass. Mundin isn't any better of an attorney when he's got a fancy office but the surroundings make him be taken seriously. So, I liked it. For such a short book it kind of dragged in places, though, and some of that 50s stereotypical prose can be a little flat or a little condescending. Still, very interesting, Pohl was a master for a reason.
Thursday, August 29, 2013
The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
There has never been any private detective as cool as Sam Spade, and I mean that most sincerely. Dashiell Hammett based him on his own experiences as a Pinkerton detective, but unlike his other fictional detective, the nameless Continental Op, Spade isn’t just doing his job, he is the job. Hammett stated once that Spade was the detective that every detective wishes that he could be and occasionally approaches, on their best day. If you’re asymptotically approaching awesome then you’re just catching up to where Spade already is. He’s that kind of guy.
It’s also worth pointing out that you might not actually want to be him, since Spade is also really low-down and mean. In fact he is a colossal prick and not in that “jerk with a heart of gold” way. When his partner gets killed, his first action the next business day is to call the sign painter to get the guy’s name off his door – he reveals that he thought the guy was a dumb son of a bitch and was just waiting for their annual partnership agreement to expire so he could kick him out anyway. In addition, he was sleeping with his partner’s wife, maybe just to spite him, since Spade doesn’t seem to think very highly of her either.
The partner got killed helping out a new client, who in fine pulp detective tradition is a beautiful lady who walked through the door with a story of trouble. Which, of course, Spade and his partner didn’t believe, but they did believe in her cash, so they were willing to go with it. The name she originally gives is a fake; later she claims to be one Brigid O’Shaughnessy, but I don’t know if we’re supposed to believe that either. Spade doesn’t trust her and treats her pretty badly throughout, but she did get his partner killed. That doesn’t stop him from sleeping with her too, of course. But then whatever affection he might have for her also doesn’t stop him from strip searching her when he thinks she might have stolen some money from him and, towards the end, throwing her to the cops to face a capital murder charge. When she pleads for him not to, he seems genuinely surprised that she believes his personal feelings are going to have any bearing on his actions.
Along with O’Shaughnessy come a succession of oddballs and goons, including Floyd Thursby (killed offstage), the morbidly obese Gutman with his henchman Wilmer, and the unfortunate Joel Cairo, a man of undefinable Mediterranean ancestry who the narrative takes every opportunity to insult and degrade for his homosexuality. I guess in the movie version they couldn’t just explicitly come out and call him a “fairy” like the book did because of the Hays code, so they just cast professional weirdo (and real life all-around gentleman) Peter Lorre and gave him a perfumed handkerchief and let it go at that. Subtlety was definitely better in this instance. I mean, Cairo is a bad dude because of all the legitimately bad stuff he does, like murder and arson, his sexual preferences aren’t really relevant to that. It's rough reading for a modern audience, really.
Anyhow. This bunch of misfits is after the Maltese Falcon, which is a priceless, jewel-encrusted artifact. It could have just as easily been a suitcase full of money or a delicious cake recipe; all that really matters is that Gutman and the rest of these jerks want it. Gutman thinks that Spade knows where it can be found, since O’Shaughnessy and Thursby had stolen from him what he’d previously stolen from some Russian general who allegedly didn’t know what he had. But actually this unseen Russian dude is smarter than the whole gang of thieves from the very beginning. As Spade says, “Jesus God, have you people never stolen anything before?” And this is when he’s still trying to ingratiate himself with them. None of this motley crew seem to know what they are doing with regards to crime, only Gutman seems to have a reasonable fence for this treasure anyway, and their ineptitude would be funny, if it weren’t for all the murders. As it is, it’s still pretty funny.
Spade doesn’t personally kill anyone in this book, and doesn’t even carry a gun, for that matter. He does beat up a couple of people and take their guns away, though in one case it’s Cairo and probably wasn’t all that tough. In fact, that’s one of the best scenes – Cairo comes in, pulls a gun on Spade, and demands to search his office. Commence beating and gun-grabbing. After Cairo regains consciousness, they have a brief discussion and Spade gives him his gun back, which is a bad idea since Cairo then steps back a little farther, and searches the office at gunpoint for real.
The whole book is like that. These crazy people are going around doing nonsensical things, and Spade is always a little bit ahead of them. Towards the conclusion he gives a couple of hints that he might not actually be as bad as he’s making out, but I don’t know if it’s true or even if he believes that it’s true. For the ultimate detective, at the end it’s all about style.
It’s also worth pointing out that you might not actually want to be him, since Spade is also really low-down and mean. In fact he is a colossal prick and not in that “jerk with a heart of gold” way. When his partner gets killed, his first action the next business day is to call the sign painter to get the guy’s name off his door – he reveals that he thought the guy was a dumb son of a bitch and was just waiting for their annual partnership agreement to expire so he could kick him out anyway. In addition, he was sleeping with his partner’s wife, maybe just to spite him, since Spade doesn’t seem to think very highly of her either.
The partner got killed helping out a new client, who in fine pulp detective tradition is a beautiful lady who walked through the door with a story of trouble. Which, of course, Spade and his partner didn’t believe, but they did believe in her cash, so they were willing to go with it. The name she originally gives is a fake; later she claims to be one Brigid O’Shaughnessy, but I don’t know if we’re supposed to believe that either. Spade doesn’t trust her and treats her pretty badly throughout, but she did get his partner killed. That doesn’t stop him from sleeping with her too, of course. But then whatever affection he might have for her also doesn’t stop him from strip searching her when he thinks she might have stolen some money from him and, towards the end, throwing her to the cops to face a capital murder charge. When she pleads for him not to, he seems genuinely surprised that she believes his personal feelings are going to have any bearing on his actions.
Along with O’Shaughnessy come a succession of oddballs and goons, including Floyd Thursby (killed offstage), the morbidly obese Gutman with his henchman Wilmer, and the unfortunate Joel Cairo, a man of undefinable Mediterranean ancestry who the narrative takes every opportunity to insult and degrade for his homosexuality. I guess in the movie version they couldn’t just explicitly come out and call him a “fairy” like the book did because of the Hays code, so they just cast professional weirdo (and real life all-around gentleman) Peter Lorre and gave him a perfumed handkerchief and let it go at that. Subtlety was definitely better in this instance. I mean, Cairo is a bad dude because of all the legitimately bad stuff he does, like murder and arson, his sexual preferences aren’t really relevant to that. It's rough reading for a modern audience, really.
Anyhow. This bunch of misfits is after the Maltese Falcon, which is a priceless, jewel-encrusted artifact. It could have just as easily been a suitcase full of money or a delicious cake recipe; all that really matters is that Gutman and the rest of these jerks want it. Gutman thinks that Spade knows where it can be found, since O’Shaughnessy and Thursby had stolen from him what he’d previously stolen from some Russian general who allegedly didn’t know what he had. But actually this unseen Russian dude is smarter than the whole gang of thieves from the very beginning. As Spade says, “Jesus God, have you people never stolen anything before?” And this is when he’s still trying to ingratiate himself with them. None of this motley crew seem to know what they are doing with regards to crime, only Gutman seems to have a reasonable fence for this treasure anyway, and their ineptitude would be funny, if it weren’t for all the murders. As it is, it’s still pretty funny.
Spade doesn’t personally kill anyone in this book, and doesn’t even carry a gun, for that matter. He does beat up a couple of people and take their guns away, though in one case it’s Cairo and probably wasn’t all that tough. In fact, that’s one of the best scenes – Cairo comes in, pulls a gun on Spade, and demands to search his office. Commence beating and gun-grabbing. After Cairo regains consciousness, they have a brief discussion and Spade gives him his gun back, which is a bad idea since Cairo then steps back a little farther, and searches the office at gunpoint for real.
The whole book is like that. These crazy people are going around doing nonsensical things, and Spade is always a little bit ahead of them. Towards the conclusion he gives a couple of hints that he might not actually be as bad as he’s making out, but I don’t know if it’s true or even if he believes that it’s true. For the ultimate detective, at the end it’s all about style.
Friday, August 16, 2013
Conqueror Trilogy by Conn Iggulden
There’s a scene toward the end of the third novel in this series that encapsulates the stakes of this work very nicely – a city hasn’t paid its tribute to Genghis Khan, and he’s ordered an example to be made. Consequently, when the Mongol army breaks the walls, they spend all day rounding up the 160,000 citizens that didn’t die during the siege and then spend most of the next day executing them all before taking everything valuable out of the city and razing it.
This is a bad day for the Mongols since it takes such a long time and all that hacking dulls up their swords.
What to say about a man who would order such a thing to be done? And this wasn’t his first turn at the massacre rodeo, either. The various Mongol conquests caused at least 30 million deaths and as many as 70 million deaths – an astoundingly modern-sounding total considering it’s the thirteenth century and all, and none of our modern efficiencies existed yet, so someone had to personally go out and stab these folks (except of course in the cases of mass starvation or disease in besieged cities). Admittedly some of this continued after Genghis himself died, but we’re still talking about a man who presided over tens of millions of killings of his fellow humans.
Iggulden’s trilogy, which is strong historical fiction, shows Genghis as more than an ordinary man. At the same time, it also shows him making mistakes, failing to see the big picture, and having the sort of ordinary family troubles that beset us all.
The first book in the series follows the future Genghis (called Temujin at that point) as he is a young man in a small clan in a tiny part of Mongolia. He’s a tough kid and he leads a hard life, and his ambition is to one day be the khan of this band like his father is. Since he’s the second son, this may prove difficult. But then his father gets murdered by his enemies, neither he nor his older brother are old enough to effectively assert control, and the new khan exiles their whole family to solidify his own power. Genghis ends up killing the older brother and growing to adulthood in an extremely hardscrabble and desperate way with his mother, sister, and three remaining younger brothers. According to history, that all really did happen. And then there was a spark, or there must have been a spark.
Genghis decides that all the tribes need to stop fighting among each other, but in order to do that realizes that they need an overall leader. Who better than him? And so he begins recruiting a band of men from other un-tribed and exiled men like himself, making a name for himself by raiding the enemies of the Mongols, learning strategy. Eventually he’s got enough men to take control of one clan, then his father’s, then a bigger one. The book ends with Genghis declaring his intention to become Khan of all the tribes.
The second book begins as this ambition is realized. Genghis has been absorbing more and more tribes into his army. Those remaining tribes that don’t want to give their allegiance to him realized that they couldn’t stand on their own, and made their own alliance against him. But it’s too late, the last battle occurred before the book even really starts and the focus is really on what Genghis wants to do next – attack the Chinese kingdoms to the south that he feels have been manipulating and marginalizing the Mongol people for centuries.
In the third novel, Genghis ignores China for a while since the Khwarazmian Empire has made a personal insult to him and he decides that this cannot be tolerated. If you’re wondering why you’ve never heard of the Khwarazmian Empire before, that’s because of what the Mongols end up doing to them here. This, like many of the other major events in these novels, is not fictional.
There’s a lot of brutality in these novels, like you might expect. People get shot with arrows, crushed by siege weapons, starve to death, covered in molten silver, and in one case just get chased until they drop dead of pneumonia. Genghis himself kills probably hundreds of people, with typical weapons frequently, but also with the sleeves of his armor, and in one memorable instance picking a guy up and breaking his spine over his knee. (This individual has always been described as scrawny, this isn’t an 80s action movie move exactly.) At the same time, Iggulden appears to have scaled back some of the atrocities just a little bit – Genghis is portrayed as having two wives, one of whom is a Chinese princess. In reality, Genghis had at least six Mongolian wives, numerous foreign ones, and spent so much time with other women that 5% of the current population of the Earth is his direct descendant. He is tactfully suggested to be raping various captive women on a couple of occasions, but in truth I’m just as happy to not read pages and pages of sexual assault, and probably Iggulden just didn’t want to put that in there.
The central paradox in this series is the fundamental problem of child rearing. People under harsh privation are often tough and awesome as a result, and they want their children to also be tough and awesome, usually in the same ways that they themselves are tough and awesome. At the same time, privation sucks. Intentionally raising your offspring under privation when you don’t have to is a dick move; removing the privation ensures that your kids will not necessarily share your outlook or your priorities. What is a great warlord to do? Adding to this problem for Genghis is that he’s not sure that Jochi, his oldest son, is actually his own son – his wife Borte had been kidnapped by Tartars around the time of Jochi’s conception and, well, you never knew for sure back then. He treats Jochi really coldly as a result and is oblivious to the fact that this harsh treatment has made Jochi into the ideal successor in most ways.
Genghis also suffers from a certain lack of vision. He’s certainly not stupid, he’s a master of warfare and leading his men, and he quickly realizes the importance of certain practical skills, like siege engineering. And his men aren’t out of control barbarians, either, their environment has made them into disciplined warriors. At first, Genghis’ plan is simply to kill everyone who’s not Mongolian, but then his advisors persuaded him that living Chinese can pay tribute, and he also realized the utility of sparing people that quickly surrender. But in truth he doesn’t need the tribute, and by the end his people are carrying around literally tons of silver and gold that they don’t have any particular use for. Genghis doesn’t need money, since he just takes whatever he wants, and he doesn’t really want anything more than to have big feasts, go hunting, ride fine horses, sleep with women, and fight. Silk is useful since he can use it as armor, iron’s good for weapons, but he doesn’t really understand what people want with gold.
Since he doesn’t care about or have any use for cities, he’s not a very good administrator. So it’s sort of a shame that he conquers so many of them. His advisors and sons recognize that the Mongols are going to need to make some philosophical adjustments if they’re actually going to rule an empire and not have to go around re-conquering every city every few years, but getting Genghis to agree with that is more difficult. He didn’t get where he was by listening to people. And in that sense this book is a tragedy, since you can see the seeds of the Mongolian Empire’s dissolution in the decisions that Genghis makes. He makes it hard for his successors to have orderly transitions of power and he isn’t really that interested in making their jobs easier.
It’s also a tragedy, of course, that so many other people had to die for Genghis Khan to achieve whatever it was that he was trying to get out of life. It’s a strength of the series that Iggulden manages to make you feel a little bad for Genghis, and showing some of the Mongols’ genuinely amazing deeds, without dehumanizing their opponents.
This is a bad day for the Mongols since it takes such a long time and all that hacking dulls up their swords.
What to say about a man who would order such a thing to be done? And this wasn’t his first turn at the massacre rodeo, either. The various Mongol conquests caused at least 30 million deaths and as many as 70 million deaths – an astoundingly modern-sounding total considering it’s the thirteenth century and all, and none of our modern efficiencies existed yet, so someone had to personally go out and stab these folks (except of course in the cases of mass starvation or disease in besieged cities). Admittedly some of this continued after Genghis himself died, but we’re still talking about a man who presided over tens of millions of killings of his fellow humans.
Iggulden’s trilogy, which is strong historical fiction, shows Genghis as more than an ordinary man. At the same time, it also shows him making mistakes, failing to see the big picture, and having the sort of ordinary family troubles that beset us all.
The first book in the series follows the future Genghis (called Temujin at that point) as he is a young man in a small clan in a tiny part of Mongolia. He’s a tough kid and he leads a hard life, and his ambition is to one day be the khan of this band like his father is. Since he’s the second son, this may prove difficult. But then his father gets murdered by his enemies, neither he nor his older brother are old enough to effectively assert control, and the new khan exiles their whole family to solidify his own power. Genghis ends up killing the older brother and growing to adulthood in an extremely hardscrabble and desperate way with his mother, sister, and three remaining younger brothers. According to history, that all really did happen. And then there was a spark, or there must have been a spark.
Genghis decides that all the tribes need to stop fighting among each other, but in order to do that realizes that they need an overall leader. Who better than him? And so he begins recruiting a band of men from other un-tribed and exiled men like himself, making a name for himself by raiding the enemies of the Mongols, learning strategy. Eventually he’s got enough men to take control of one clan, then his father’s, then a bigger one. The book ends with Genghis declaring his intention to become Khan of all the tribes.
The second book begins as this ambition is realized. Genghis has been absorbing more and more tribes into his army. Those remaining tribes that don’t want to give their allegiance to him realized that they couldn’t stand on their own, and made their own alliance against him. But it’s too late, the last battle occurred before the book even really starts and the focus is really on what Genghis wants to do next – attack the Chinese kingdoms to the south that he feels have been manipulating and marginalizing the Mongol people for centuries.
In the third novel, Genghis ignores China for a while since the Khwarazmian Empire has made a personal insult to him and he decides that this cannot be tolerated. If you’re wondering why you’ve never heard of the Khwarazmian Empire before, that’s because of what the Mongols end up doing to them here. This, like many of the other major events in these novels, is not fictional.
There’s a lot of brutality in these novels, like you might expect. People get shot with arrows, crushed by siege weapons, starve to death, covered in molten silver, and in one case just get chased until they drop dead of pneumonia. Genghis himself kills probably hundreds of people, with typical weapons frequently, but also with the sleeves of his armor, and in one memorable instance picking a guy up and breaking his spine over his knee. (This individual has always been described as scrawny, this isn’t an 80s action movie move exactly.) At the same time, Iggulden appears to have scaled back some of the atrocities just a little bit – Genghis is portrayed as having two wives, one of whom is a Chinese princess. In reality, Genghis had at least six Mongolian wives, numerous foreign ones, and spent so much time with other women that 5% of the current population of the Earth is his direct descendant. He is tactfully suggested to be raping various captive women on a couple of occasions, but in truth I’m just as happy to not read pages and pages of sexual assault, and probably Iggulden just didn’t want to put that in there.
The central paradox in this series is the fundamental problem of child rearing. People under harsh privation are often tough and awesome as a result, and they want their children to also be tough and awesome, usually in the same ways that they themselves are tough and awesome. At the same time, privation sucks. Intentionally raising your offspring under privation when you don’t have to is a dick move; removing the privation ensures that your kids will not necessarily share your outlook or your priorities. What is a great warlord to do? Adding to this problem for Genghis is that he’s not sure that Jochi, his oldest son, is actually his own son – his wife Borte had been kidnapped by Tartars around the time of Jochi’s conception and, well, you never knew for sure back then. He treats Jochi really coldly as a result and is oblivious to the fact that this harsh treatment has made Jochi into the ideal successor in most ways.
Genghis also suffers from a certain lack of vision. He’s certainly not stupid, he’s a master of warfare and leading his men, and he quickly realizes the importance of certain practical skills, like siege engineering. And his men aren’t out of control barbarians, either, their environment has made them into disciplined warriors. At first, Genghis’ plan is simply to kill everyone who’s not Mongolian, but then his advisors persuaded him that living Chinese can pay tribute, and he also realized the utility of sparing people that quickly surrender. But in truth he doesn’t need the tribute, and by the end his people are carrying around literally tons of silver and gold that they don’t have any particular use for. Genghis doesn’t need money, since he just takes whatever he wants, and he doesn’t really want anything more than to have big feasts, go hunting, ride fine horses, sleep with women, and fight. Silk is useful since he can use it as armor, iron’s good for weapons, but he doesn’t really understand what people want with gold.
Since he doesn’t care about or have any use for cities, he’s not a very good administrator. So it’s sort of a shame that he conquers so many of them. His advisors and sons recognize that the Mongols are going to need to make some philosophical adjustments if they’re actually going to rule an empire and not have to go around re-conquering every city every few years, but getting Genghis to agree with that is more difficult. He didn’t get where he was by listening to people. And in that sense this book is a tragedy, since you can see the seeds of the Mongolian Empire’s dissolution in the decisions that Genghis makes. He makes it hard for his successors to have orderly transitions of power and he isn’t really that interested in making their jobs easier.
It’s also a tragedy, of course, that so many other people had to die for Genghis Khan to achieve whatever it was that he was trying to get out of life. It’s a strength of the series that Iggulden manages to make you feel a little bad for Genghis, and showing some of the Mongols’ genuinely amazing deeds, without dehumanizing their opponents.
Tuesday, August 13, 2013
Papers Please by Lucas Pope
There has been a lot of ink shed (of both the real and virtual varieties) about how much “moral choice” systems in video games suck. Often you’re given the opportunity to be either the paragon of virtue or a monument to vice, without much in between, and usually the “evil” choice involves going around murdering everyone you meet, even when there’s no particular reason for it or direct benefit to you from doing so. There’s really a paucity of nuanced evil in the world of video game design. And that’s why all those AAA game developers need to sit down and take a page from this independent developer who’s managed to put together the best moral simulator that I’ve ever seen. Seriously, if you can get through this and not have an emotional reaction then you need to turn in your Homo sapiens card, no joke.
First, the mechanics. The game takes place in the early 1980s in a fictional shithole Eastern European Communist dictatorship. You have won a labor lottery and been assigned to work as a border control agent. When you open up your shop, a stream of pathetic sad sacks will file into your checkpoint and present you with various documents so they can enter the country. Personally, you’ve got some family members dependent on your salary for food, rent, and heat. You need $55 per day to cover your basic expenses, and you get paid $5 for everyone who gets processed through the checkpoint, so you need to see 11 people per day in order to not draw down your savings. If you run out of money, your family members will get sick, raising your expenses as you need to get medicine for them. If you can't come up with the cash, they'll die. If you go seriously into the red you may be imprisoned for debt yourself.
The interface is claustrophobic and well-designed to never give you quite enough room to spread out. You have sufficient but not ample time, and although the documents start out simple enough, your bosses at the start of every day tend to throw in various requirements and by the end of the game there will be twenty or twenty five different failure points for documents. If you let in someone with a discrepancy in their paperwork, you get cited. If you turn away someone without a discrepancy, you get cited. More than two citations in one day and you start getting substantial fines, meaning you can’t beat the clock by just letting everyone in, or turning everyone away. Your superiors are apparently omniscient about this since if you make a mistake, you will be cited. And you won’t get paid for your last “client” if you go past 6 p.m.
The gameplay itself is pretty simple; the would-be traveler presents you a passport and supporting documents, which you check for internal consistency and accuracy. Do they look like their passport picture? Appropriate identifying information? Does the information on their passport match their visa? Are any of the stamps or seals forged? Have any documents expired? Did they get their polio vaccination within three years? Do they happen to be on a most wanted list somewhere? Did they get the right kind of permit? Okay, proceed, citizen.
All of that said, it doesn’t necessarily sound all that fun. In fact, if you were me, you might say that sounds a lot like that summer job I had in the business office of a tile factory where I had to keep cross-checking dates and SKUs on a bunch of triplicate forms in an ancient computer system. And maybe you’ve had a job like that too. But the presentation is amusing enough that you really get to make a puzzle out of it – it’s satisfying to spot the minor error and hit that red stamp. And then when you do approve someone you tense up for a minute while you wait to see if you made a mistake.
Now if that was it, I wouldn’t have made that statement about “moral choices”. The fact is that this is one of the most interesting game ideas that I’ve ever seen. You are a cog and a peon, and that’s about all you’ll ever amount to, regardless of what choices you make. And right away you start getting to make them.
In addition to the randomly generated wretches in line, you’ve got a fair number of scripted encounters. Some of these are desperate people who need asylum, or want to visit their loved ones, or need surgery, or so forth. These people will inevitably have paperwork deficiencies. Do you want to let them in anyway, despite the fact that you’ll get a citation for that and it may take food out of the mouths of your family? Or do you deny them, in deference to the arbitrary rules of your superiors, who are a bunch of dicks and treat you like a dog? It’s up to you, and while most of these choices don’t have long lasting repercussions, some of them do, and they aren’t immediately obvious.
You also have the opportunity to take bribes to let undesirable sorts such as drug dealers and sex traffickers into the country. You can make your own rules about what you will and won’t tolerate; you sometimes even have the option to take the bribe and then deny the people anyway. At one point along the game you gain the ability to detain suspicious people; this is not necessarily better than just denying them, since it takes longer and interrupts your work flow, but one of the guards offers to split his detainee processing fee with you, which makes it profitable to detain everybody you can, even when they are probably innocent of anything more serious than not catching a clerical error. Is it worth sending people to the mercies of the secret police for minor offenses to pad your own wallet? Up to you.
And this secret society of revolutionaries – do you help smuggle their members through the checkpoint? Do you accept their huge bribes? Can they help you if you are caught, and are they in fact any better than the current regime? Will you help out your friend the border guard and allow his girlfriend through the checkpoint? Will you hang the artwork made by your son on the wall, although it’s against regulations? Are you prepared to refuse your bosses’ girlfriend admission although she has neglected to get anything close to the proper documentation?
Up to you.
This is a rare game where you’re not going to really “win” anything and all of the endings are, fittingly, ambiguous at best. In one path you keep your head down and stick to legitimate graft, and are rewarded with the opportunity to enter an endless game mode, where you can keep analyzing paperwork forever or until you screw up enough. In other words, a pie eating contest with a prize of more pie. Way to go, comrade, I’m sure selling out all your ideals was worth it. Of course if you don’t sell out your ideals it may end up going much worse for you personally, and who even knows about the general population.
In short, this game has managed to encapsulate the typicality of bureaucratic evil. Instead of grand acts of malice for little discernible reason you have the opportunity to engage in petty acts of tyranny for totally understandable, if ultimately futile, reasons, such as if you decide to go ahead and take the citation to reject the perfectly valid visas of people who lip off to you.
If there’s anything negative to say about it, it’s mostly that it’s made by a single developer in a couple of months, so it’s pretty short and I’m not sure that it has all that much replay value. Still, if there were elements like this in bigger titles it would increase the sophistication of video game plots by a huge degree. And you will actually get annoyed at people who hold up the line by forgetting to give you the paperwork, and how you have to keep telling people to check the back of their ticket for the passport phone confiscation hotline. Seriously, don’t these people read the bulletins? I’m trying to do my job here.
First, the mechanics. The game takes place in the early 1980s in a fictional shithole Eastern European Communist dictatorship. You have won a labor lottery and been assigned to work as a border control agent. When you open up your shop, a stream of pathetic sad sacks will file into your checkpoint and present you with various documents so they can enter the country. Personally, you’ve got some family members dependent on your salary for food, rent, and heat. You need $55 per day to cover your basic expenses, and you get paid $5 for everyone who gets processed through the checkpoint, so you need to see 11 people per day in order to not draw down your savings. If you run out of money, your family members will get sick, raising your expenses as you need to get medicine for them. If you can't come up with the cash, they'll die. If you go seriously into the red you may be imprisoned for debt yourself.
The interface is claustrophobic and well-designed to never give you quite enough room to spread out. You have sufficient but not ample time, and although the documents start out simple enough, your bosses at the start of every day tend to throw in various requirements and by the end of the game there will be twenty or twenty five different failure points for documents. If you let in someone with a discrepancy in their paperwork, you get cited. If you turn away someone without a discrepancy, you get cited. More than two citations in one day and you start getting substantial fines, meaning you can’t beat the clock by just letting everyone in, or turning everyone away. Your superiors are apparently omniscient about this since if you make a mistake, you will be cited. And you won’t get paid for your last “client” if you go past 6 p.m.
The gameplay itself is pretty simple; the would-be traveler presents you a passport and supporting documents, which you check for internal consistency and accuracy. Do they look like their passport picture? Appropriate identifying information? Does the information on their passport match their visa? Are any of the stamps or seals forged? Have any documents expired? Did they get their polio vaccination within three years? Do they happen to be on a most wanted list somewhere? Did they get the right kind of permit? Okay, proceed, citizen.
All of that said, it doesn’t necessarily sound all that fun. In fact, if you were me, you might say that sounds a lot like that summer job I had in the business office of a tile factory where I had to keep cross-checking dates and SKUs on a bunch of triplicate forms in an ancient computer system. And maybe you’ve had a job like that too. But the presentation is amusing enough that you really get to make a puzzle out of it – it’s satisfying to spot the minor error and hit that red stamp. And then when you do approve someone you tense up for a minute while you wait to see if you made a mistake.
Now if that was it, I wouldn’t have made that statement about “moral choices”. The fact is that this is one of the most interesting game ideas that I’ve ever seen. You are a cog and a peon, and that’s about all you’ll ever amount to, regardless of what choices you make. And right away you start getting to make them.
In addition to the randomly generated wretches in line, you’ve got a fair number of scripted encounters. Some of these are desperate people who need asylum, or want to visit their loved ones, or need surgery, or so forth. These people will inevitably have paperwork deficiencies. Do you want to let them in anyway, despite the fact that you’ll get a citation for that and it may take food out of the mouths of your family? Or do you deny them, in deference to the arbitrary rules of your superiors, who are a bunch of dicks and treat you like a dog? It’s up to you, and while most of these choices don’t have long lasting repercussions, some of them do, and they aren’t immediately obvious.
You also have the opportunity to take bribes to let undesirable sorts such as drug dealers and sex traffickers into the country. You can make your own rules about what you will and won’t tolerate; you sometimes even have the option to take the bribe and then deny the people anyway. At one point along the game you gain the ability to detain suspicious people; this is not necessarily better than just denying them, since it takes longer and interrupts your work flow, but one of the guards offers to split his detainee processing fee with you, which makes it profitable to detain everybody you can, even when they are probably innocent of anything more serious than not catching a clerical error. Is it worth sending people to the mercies of the secret police for minor offenses to pad your own wallet? Up to you.
And this secret society of revolutionaries – do you help smuggle their members through the checkpoint? Do you accept their huge bribes? Can they help you if you are caught, and are they in fact any better than the current regime? Will you help out your friend the border guard and allow his girlfriend through the checkpoint? Will you hang the artwork made by your son on the wall, although it’s against regulations? Are you prepared to refuse your bosses’ girlfriend admission although she has neglected to get anything close to the proper documentation?
Up to you.
This is a rare game where you’re not going to really “win” anything and all of the endings are, fittingly, ambiguous at best. In one path you keep your head down and stick to legitimate graft, and are rewarded with the opportunity to enter an endless game mode, where you can keep analyzing paperwork forever or until you screw up enough. In other words, a pie eating contest with a prize of more pie. Way to go, comrade, I’m sure selling out all your ideals was worth it. Of course if you don’t sell out your ideals it may end up going much worse for you personally, and who even knows about the general population.
In short, this game has managed to encapsulate the typicality of bureaucratic evil. Instead of grand acts of malice for little discernible reason you have the opportunity to engage in petty acts of tyranny for totally understandable, if ultimately futile, reasons, such as if you decide to go ahead and take the citation to reject the perfectly valid visas of people who lip off to you.
If there’s anything negative to say about it, it’s mostly that it’s made by a single developer in a couple of months, so it’s pretty short and I’m not sure that it has all that much replay value. Still, if there were elements like this in bigger titles it would increase the sophistication of video game plots by a huge degree. And you will actually get annoyed at people who hold up the line by forgetting to give you the paperwork, and how you have to keep telling people to check the back of their ticket for the passport phone confiscation hotline. Seriously, don’t these people read the bulletins? I’m trying to do my job here.
Thursday, August 1, 2013
Vortex by Robert Charles Wilson
Most of the science fiction that I grew up reading was from the 50s-80s, and quite a bit of it featured hyperdrives, interstellar empires, and the uniqueness of humanity. I guess it said something about the cultural mood of the time; most of it was written by men (and I do mean men) who figured they’d beaten the Axis and conquered the atom and that we’d get to the laws of space and time in due course. Now that said, we live here in the year 2013 in an environment which is in many respects vastly more technologically advanced than the worlds proposed by some of these authors, but we remain distressingly Earthbound with nary a space empire in sight. Perhaps as a response to this, perhaps for other reasons, there’s been a surge of stories about what happens when we just can’t get off this rock at all.
There are a couple of approaches to this. Some of the SF examining this question simply involves humanity going extinct over time, but some other works deal with technological fixes. Vortex is something along those lines.
Vortex is actually the third book in a trilogy, the first two being Spin and Axis (I refer to them as the “Angular Momentum Trilogy” but they may have a more official name, I don’t know.) Spin was a Hugo Award winning novel and one I enjoyed quite a bit – the setup for that one was that one day, all of a sudden, the entire Earth gets enveloped in a membrane that separates the planet from local space-time, so that time is passing much, much faster outside the membrane than inside it. It turns out that there are vast networks of computing machines in the depths of interstellar space and they do this to worlds with intelligent biological life.
As to what they do, it’s complicated. The life cycle of tool-using intelligences is short compared to the Hypotheticals (as they are called by some of the humans, although they are very real) and in order to maximize the time they have available, the Hypotheticals use singularities to create warp gates and allow the biologicals to colonize other planets, something that is otherwise infeasible. The Hypotheticals connect Earth to another planet (dubbed “Equatoria”) which is a great place to live. There’s another gate on Equatoria that’ll take you to yet a third planet that people can live on, although it’s not quite so nice. And another gate on that world as well. It takes the Hypotheticals a couple of billion years to set all that stuff up though, which is why they use the time-disrupting membrane to allow them to finish this project. And, I suppose, they’re doing this sort of thing all the time.
All of this is revealed by the end of Spin. You may have noticed that missing from the above paragraph is the question of why the Hypotheticals go to so much trouble to help out alien intelligences that they barely know. Well, first of all, it’s not clear so much that it’s a “favor” since you don’t exactly get to opt in to this project, it’s something that gets done whether you want it or not. And it’s also not entirely clear that it’s for anyone’s benefit at all. There’s a guy in Spin who finds out somewhat more than he wants to about the Hypotheticals, and a whole sort-of-cult in Axis that ends up not necessarily liking the answers they get either.
There are two parallel stories in Vortex, one of which follows Turk Findley, a major player in Axis who has been removed from the galaxy by the hypotheticals for the past 10,000 years. The other story is more of a frame story and involves the planet Earth somewhat before the events of Axis, but after Spin. And although it does tie the story together, I liked Findley’s bit much more, and will be discussing it more.
Findley finds himself disoriented and recovered by a group of people who believe that he’s been touched by the Hypotheticals and will be the key to what I guess I’d describe as apotheosis. They also snag Isaac, a young boy who was packed to the gills with Hypothetical technology back in Axis and who’s also been gone. So they head to Earth back through the gate despite the fact that no one’s been there in a while and things weren’t going so well when they were, and find that it’s been rendered inhospitable to human life. Or, for that matter, multicellular life of any kind. Effects of climate change due to burning all the fossil fuel reserves of both Earth and Equatoria; it seems that caused eutrophication on a massive scale, poisoning the seas and filling the atmosphere with hydrogen sulfide gas. Pretty rough.
Now, this isn’t necessarily the end of humanity since there are still plenty of people left on the various other planets, but the question does arise as to why exactly the Hypotheticals would go to so much trouble to ensure that humanity has the opportunity to expand to other planets but do not take any action whatsoever to either prevent humanity from wrecking its planets, by either technological or more brute-force means. The people that Findley has fallen in with originally believed that the whole point of the Hypothetical exercise was to eventually uplift humanity to god-like status, and this particular problem of evil sort of throws a wrench in that interpretation.
I would remind the reader that one possible solution to the problem of evil is that god is not omni-benevolent, though.
At the same time, the Hypotheticals aren’t mustache-twirling super villains, either. They’re really above most of that nonsense, or possibly aren’t even capable of villainy as such. Way back in Spin one of the characters explained that their computational networks are so vast and so necessarily slow that they had a hard time noticing or even comprehending the life of a single organism, and even that character didn’t really understand what they were doing. Toward the end of Vortex we do finally get an explanation, of sorts, of what precisely the Hypotheticals are up to and why, and the last twenty or thirty pages of the book are amazingly grandiose and spectacular in the absolute finest tradition of SF. Both the time scale and the epic scope are pretty awesome indeed.
That said, some of the middle portions of the book do kind of drag on a bit. And as I said above, I didn’t necessarily enjoy the frame story that much, since it tended to get a little preachy at times. Nonetheless, if you read Spin and enjoyed it, I’d say the last part of this one justifies the admission.
There are a couple of approaches to this. Some of the SF examining this question simply involves humanity going extinct over time, but some other works deal with technological fixes. Vortex is something along those lines.
Vortex is actually the third book in a trilogy, the first two being Spin and Axis (I refer to them as the “Angular Momentum Trilogy” but they may have a more official name, I don’t know.) Spin was a Hugo Award winning novel and one I enjoyed quite a bit – the setup for that one was that one day, all of a sudden, the entire Earth gets enveloped in a membrane that separates the planet from local space-time, so that time is passing much, much faster outside the membrane than inside it. It turns out that there are vast networks of computing machines in the depths of interstellar space and they do this to worlds with intelligent biological life.
As to what they do, it’s complicated. The life cycle of tool-using intelligences is short compared to the Hypotheticals (as they are called by some of the humans, although they are very real) and in order to maximize the time they have available, the Hypotheticals use singularities to create warp gates and allow the biologicals to colonize other planets, something that is otherwise infeasible. The Hypotheticals connect Earth to another planet (dubbed “Equatoria”) which is a great place to live. There’s another gate on Equatoria that’ll take you to yet a third planet that people can live on, although it’s not quite so nice. And another gate on that world as well. It takes the Hypotheticals a couple of billion years to set all that stuff up though, which is why they use the time-disrupting membrane to allow them to finish this project. And, I suppose, they’re doing this sort of thing all the time.
All of this is revealed by the end of Spin. You may have noticed that missing from the above paragraph is the question of why the Hypotheticals go to so much trouble to help out alien intelligences that they barely know. Well, first of all, it’s not clear so much that it’s a “favor” since you don’t exactly get to opt in to this project, it’s something that gets done whether you want it or not. And it’s also not entirely clear that it’s for anyone’s benefit at all. There’s a guy in Spin who finds out somewhat more than he wants to about the Hypotheticals, and a whole sort-of-cult in Axis that ends up not necessarily liking the answers they get either.
There are two parallel stories in Vortex, one of which follows Turk Findley, a major player in Axis who has been removed from the galaxy by the hypotheticals for the past 10,000 years. The other story is more of a frame story and involves the planet Earth somewhat before the events of Axis, but after Spin. And although it does tie the story together, I liked Findley’s bit much more, and will be discussing it more.
Findley finds himself disoriented and recovered by a group of people who believe that he’s been touched by the Hypotheticals and will be the key to what I guess I’d describe as apotheosis. They also snag Isaac, a young boy who was packed to the gills with Hypothetical technology back in Axis and who’s also been gone. So they head to Earth back through the gate despite the fact that no one’s been there in a while and things weren’t going so well when they were, and find that it’s been rendered inhospitable to human life. Or, for that matter, multicellular life of any kind. Effects of climate change due to burning all the fossil fuel reserves of both Earth and Equatoria; it seems that caused eutrophication on a massive scale, poisoning the seas and filling the atmosphere with hydrogen sulfide gas. Pretty rough.
Now, this isn’t necessarily the end of humanity since there are still plenty of people left on the various other planets, but the question does arise as to why exactly the Hypotheticals would go to so much trouble to ensure that humanity has the opportunity to expand to other planets but do not take any action whatsoever to either prevent humanity from wrecking its planets, by either technological or more brute-force means. The people that Findley has fallen in with originally believed that the whole point of the Hypothetical exercise was to eventually uplift humanity to god-like status, and this particular problem of evil sort of throws a wrench in that interpretation.
I would remind the reader that one possible solution to the problem of evil is that god is not omni-benevolent, though.
At the same time, the Hypotheticals aren’t mustache-twirling super villains, either. They’re really above most of that nonsense, or possibly aren’t even capable of villainy as such. Way back in Spin one of the characters explained that their computational networks are so vast and so necessarily slow that they had a hard time noticing or even comprehending the life of a single organism, and even that character didn’t really understand what they were doing. Toward the end of Vortex we do finally get an explanation, of sorts, of what precisely the Hypotheticals are up to and why, and the last twenty or thirty pages of the book are amazingly grandiose and spectacular in the absolute finest tradition of SF. Both the time scale and the epic scope are pretty awesome indeed.
That said, some of the middle portions of the book do kind of drag on a bit. And as I said above, I didn’t necessarily enjoy the frame story that much, since it tended to get a little preachy at times. Nonetheless, if you read Spin and enjoyed it, I’d say the last part of this one justifies the admission.
Friday, July 19, 2013
Shogun by James Clavell
Yes, really.
I first read this book several years ago, on vacation, but was interrupted by a pretty severe case of food poisoning and didn’t really pay that much attention to the last third or so. So I recently decided to give it another shot without the horrible disease, and also in the interim having learned more about the time period and the writing itself. You know what? It’s pretty good for a forty-year-old doorstopper.
That said, it’s also slightly strange if you know anything about the context. It’s sort of like if a Chinese author wanted to write about the American Revolution, but didn’t want to necessarily commit himself to 100% complete historical accuracy if it got in the way of telling an entertaining story as he saw fit. So you end up with the totally fictional character of “Joe Rashington” who is a Virginia planter leading the Continental Army while his associates “Jake Addams” and “Hamilton Frankleen” are over in Europe trying to get allies. And they do pretty much all the same stuff as Washington, Adams and Franklin did at the same time period, but stopping to have long conversations with a Chinese man who happens to be in America at the time and who turns out to be critical to the Revolution, and who also has an affair with someone who is clearly, I don’t know, Betsy Ross. You can see how American audiences might be a little annoyed by it, and it explains why Toshiro Mifune caught flak in his homeland for agreeing to be in the television miniseries.
Anyway, this novel deals with the late Sengoku period, which in real life was concluded by the famous Tokugawa Ieyasu starting a dynasty that would last over 250 years. In this novel there’s some guy named Yoshi Toranaga who accomplishes the same feat. (It’s said that he’s the head of the Yoshi clan, which would imply that Yoshi is his last name, but everyone calls him Lord Toranaga, also implying that Toranaga is his last name, and is just one example of Clavell probably knowing better but just throwing it in there anyway. There are a lot of these issues with Clavell’s handling of the language, but I just have to take that on other people’s word since I don’t really know enough to have my own opinion on it.)
But maybe even that is getting ahead of things a little bit, since the book really focuses on one John Blackthorne, who is the pilot of a Dutch flagged ship that runs aground in Japan. The ship is the remnant of a small fleet that was looking to circumnavigate the globe and harass the Spanish while they were at it. As it turns out there was an actual sailor by the name of William Adams who actually did many of the things that Blackthorne does in this novel, including becoming a samurai, although I doubt he was quite as much of an arrogant hothead as Blackthorne is, and hearing about him was actually what inspired Clavell to write this novel in the first place.
From a storytelling hook angle, the shipwrecked sailor thing is golden. Since the audience for the book is primarily English-speakers, here’s a British guy who has something of a backstory we can appreciate without having to go into too much detail about it. There aren’t any fellow English speakers in thousands of miles, of course, but Blackthorne is a polyglot – most of the conversations that he has in this book are probably in Portuguese with a couple of forays into Latin, but he’s reasonably capable of speaking Japanese himself by the end. And he doesn’t know anything whatsoever about the customs, the language, or the political mess he finds himself in, which means that other characters spend inordinate amounts of time explaining this stuff to him, and by extension, us.
Blackthorne only landed in Japan because he didn’t have any other options, and as it turns out the inhabitants aren’t exactly friendly. He finds, to his surprise, that Catholic missionaries are already there. This is bad, since he’s a Protestant and this is after all during a time of religious strife; however, it’s also perversely good in some ways since this means there are other Europeans that he can talk to, and they’ve also taught some of the locals to speak Portuguese. He also finds that the local samurai are used to being obeyed quickly and without question; one of his crew members gets boiled alive at the whim of a particularly unpleasant local nobleman. Then he quickly ends up in prison under suspended sentence of death as a captive of Toranaga, who’s having some personal difficulties of his own at the moment.
Toranaga’s difficulties stem from the fact that the land is suffering something of a cold war succession crisis. A man by the name of Nakamura (a pastiche of the real-life Toyotomi Hideyoshi) had managed to unite all of Japan under his personal rule, but he’d had a son late in life and died not too long afterwards, leaving the country under a council of five regents until such time as his son could inherit. The regents, including Toranaga, were all powerful and ambitious men, and it was Nakamura’s hope that their mutual dislike would keep them balanced. Nonetheless, just as Blackthorne arrives, the other four regents have joined forces against Toranaga and it’s unclear whether he’ll be able to keep his position or, for that matter, his life. This, too, is more or less the situation as it occurred in real life.
In many ways, Toranaga is portrayed as a total dick (one of the first things he does is order the death of a man along with his infant son for a relatively minor infraction). But as the book progresses it focuses less on Blackthorne and more on Toranaga. And while he really doesn’t think that much about breaking his word and doesn’t really regard people as having too much value apart from how they can help him achieve his goals, he also does show genuine affection for some people and does at least enjoy life. His duplicitous nature and harshness are actually pretty typical of the regents and the other major lords, so at least he has style going for him.
There is really quite a lot of the white-guy-culture-shock, as you might expect, some of which is handled well and some of which is a little “meh”. Clavell does occasionally veer a little bit too far into the whole “mysterious and inscrutable Orient” thing, but at the same time it’s pretty clear that a lot of the cultural differences are just different expectations around the same fundamental experiences. Blackthorne is stunned by how composed some guys are on his ship in the middle of a storm, and most of the Europeans discuss how the Japanese don’t seem capable of fear. But we find out that these characters are secretly terrified, and hoping that they don’t shame themselves by revealing it. So there’s a sense of shared humanity there, which is nice. It’s also pretty clear that the best aspects of Japanese culture as Blackthorne experiences it are limited to the aristocracy and the samurai class, and that he’s basically enjoying himself on the lifeblood of peasants. His increasing embrace of the culture is not portrayed as entirely a good thing, although his flexibility to be able to is (unlike his surviving Dutch crew, who are a bunch of superstitious ghastly wretches that could be extras in a Monty Python short).
There are a fair number of action scenes in this book (one of which, a boat chase, is just perfect, and another, a ninja attack, which goes on way too long) but in many respects this is a non-action work. Since there’s technically no state of war, the major parties can’t officially attack each other. They do anyway, of course, but through proxies, via technicalities, by holding hostages, etc. There’s a surprising amount of time discussing safe conduct passages and who can leave where when. A bunch of Toranaga’s allies’ relatives are held hostage in an unassailable castle by one of the regents, but since hostage taking is forbidden they aren’t technically hostages. At the same time, if they ask to leave, the regent will think of a reason why it’s probably not in their best interests to do so, and if they try anyway there may be an unfortunate accident. You might think that one of them would just flat-out demand to go, but it turns out to be more complicated than that. In addition there’s a lot of written threats, and questions about who is under whose orders, and whether they’ve adequately completed the orders, and a lot of minutiae.
Anyway, I liked it. Although parts of it are kinda overwritten and repetitive, the actual cloak-and-dagger intrigue stuff is worthwhile. I can see how it was a phenomenon, for a while, especially at a time when less was known about the time period. It’s definitely not the sort of thing you’d see written today, for good or for ill. The seventies were weird like that.
I first read this book several years ago, on vacation, but was interrupted by a pretty severe case of food poisoning and didn’t really pay that much attention to the last third or so. So I recently decided to give it another shot without the horrible disease, and also in the interim having learned more about the time period and the writing itself. You know what? It’s pretty good for a forty-year-old doorstopper.
That said, it’s also slightly strange if you know anything about the context. It’s sort of like if a Chinese author wanted to write about the American Revolution, but didn’t want to necessarily commit himself to 100% complete historical accuracy if it got in the way of telling an entertaining story as he saw fit. So you end up with the totally fictional character of “Joe Rashington” who is a Virginia planter leading the Continental Army while his associates “Jake Addams” and “Hamilton Frankleen” are over in Europe trying to get allies. And they do pretty much all the same stuff as Washington, Adams and Franklin did at the same time period, but stopping to have long conversations with a Chinese man who happens to be in America at the time and who turns out to be critical to the Revolution, and who also has an affair with someone who is clearly, I don’t know, Betsy Ross. You can see how American audiences might be a little annoyed by it, and it explains why Toshiro Mifune caught flak in his homeland for agreeing to be in the television miniseries.
Anyway, this novel deals with the late Sengoku period, which in real life was concluded by the famous Tokugawa Ieyasu starting a dynasty that would last over 250 years. In this novel there’s some guy named Yoshi Toranaga who accomplishes the same feat. (It’s said that he’s the head of the Yoshi clan, which would imply that Yoshi is his last name, but everyone calls him Lord Toranaga, also implying that Toranaga is his last name, and is just one example of Clavell probably knowing better but just throwing it in there anyway. There are a lot of these issues with Clavell’s handling of the language, but I just have to take that on other people’s word since I don’t really know enough to have my own opinion on it.)
But maybe even that is getting ahead of things a little bit, since the book really focuses on one John Blackthorne, who is the pilot of a Dutch flagged ship that runs aground in Japan. The ship is the remnant of a small fleet that was looking to circumnavigate the globe and harass the Spanish while they were at it. As it turns out there was an actual sailor by the name of William Adams who actually did many of the things that Blackthorne does in this novel, including becoming a samurai, although I doubt he was quite as much of an arrogant hothead as Blackthorne is, and hearing about him was actually what inspired Clavell to write this novel in the first place.
From a storytelling hook angle, the shipwrecked sailor thing is golden. Since the audience for the book is primarily English-speakers, here’s a British guy who has something of a backstory we can appreciate without having to go into too much detail about it. There aren’t any fellow English speakers in thousands of miles, of course, but Blackthorne is a polyglot – most of the conversations that he has in this book are probably in Portuguese with a couple of forays into Latin, but he’s reasonably capable of speaking Japanese himself by the end. And he doesn’t know anything whatsoever about the customs, the language, or the political mess he finds himself in, which means that other characters spend inordinate amounts of time explaining this stuff to him, and by extension, us.
Blackthorne only landed in Japan because he didn’t have any other options, and as it turns out the inhabitants aren’t exactly friendly. He finds, to his surprise, that Catholic missionaries are already there. This is bad, since he’s a Protestant and this is after all during a time of religious strife; however, it’s also perversely good in some ways since this means there are other Europeans that he can talk to, and they’ve also taught some of the locals to speak Portuguese. He also finds that the local samurai are used to being obeyed quickly and without question; one of his crew members gets boiled alive at the whim of a particularly unpleasant local nobleman. Then he quickly ends up in prison under suspended sentence of death as a captive of Toranaga, who’s having some personal difficulties of his own at the moment.
Toranaga’s difficulties stem from the fact that the land is suffering something of a cold war succession crisis. A man by the name of Nakamura (a pastiche of the real-life Toyotomi Hideyoshi) had managed to unite all of Japan under his personal rule, but he’d had a son late in life and died not too long afterwards, leaving the country under a council of five regents until such time as his son could inherit. The regents, including Toranaga, were all powerful and ambitious men, and it was Nakamura’s hope that their mutual dislike would keep them balanced. Nonetheless, just as Blackthorne arrives, the other four regents have joined forces against Toranaga and it’s unclear whether he’ll be able to keep his position or, for that matter, his life. This, too, is more or less the situation as it occurred in real life.
In many ways, Toranaga is portrayed as a total dick (one of the first things he does is order the death of a man along with his infant son for a relatively minor infraction). But as the book progresses it focuses less on Blackthorne and more on Toranaga. And while he really doesn’t think that much about breaking his word and doesn’t really regard people as having too much value apart from how they can help him achieve his goals, he also does show genuine affection for some people and does at least enjoy life. His duplicitous nature and harshness are actually pretty typical of the regents and the other major lords, so at least he has style going for him.
There is really quite a lot of the white-guy-culture-shock, as you might expect, some of which is handled well and some of which is a little “meh”. Clavell does occasionally veer a little bit too far into the whole “mysterious and inscrutable Orient” thing, but at the same time it’s pretty clear that a lot of the cultural differences are just different expectations around the same fundamental experiences. Blackthorne is stunned by how composed some guys are on his ship in the middle of a storm, and most of the Europeans discuss how the Japanese don’t seem capable of fear. But we find out that these characters are secretly terrified, and hoping that they don’t shame themselves by revealing it. So there’s a sense of shared humanity there, which is nice. It’s also pretty clear that the best aspects of Japanese culture as Blackthorne experiences it are limited to the aristocracy and the samurai class, and that he’s basically enjoying himself on the lifeblood of peasants. His increasing embrace of the culture is not portrayed as entirely a good thing, although his flexibility to be able to is (unlike his surviving Dutch crew, who are a bunch of superstitious ghastly wretches that could be extras in a Monty Python short).
There are a fair number of action scenes in this book (one of which, a boat chase, is just perfect, and another, a ninja attack, which goes on way too long) but in many respects this is a non-action work. Since there’s technically no state of war, the major parties can’t officially attack each other. They do anyway, of course, but through proxies, via technicalities, by holding hostages, etc. There’s a surprising amount of time discussing safe conduct passages and who can leave where when. A bunch of Toranaga’s allies’ relatives are held hostage in an unassailable castle by one of the regents, but since hostage taking is forbidden they aren’t technically hostages. At the same time, if they ask to leave, the regent will think of a reason why it’s probably not in their best interests to do so, and if they try anyway there may be an unfortunate accident. You might think that one of them would just flat-out demand to go, but it turns out to be more complicated than that. In addition there’s a lot of written threats, and questions about who is under whose orders, and whether they’ve adequately completed the orders, and a lot of minutiae.
Anyway, I liked it. Although parts of it are kinda overwritten and repetitive, the actual cloak-and-dagger intrigue stuff is worthwhile. I can see how it was a phenomenon, for a while, especially at a time when less was known about the time period. It’s definitely not the sort of thing you’d see written today, for good or for ill. The seventies were weird like that.
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