Raising Steam by Terry Pratchett

Back in the year 1991 in the novel Reaper Man, a tinkerer by the name of Ned Simnel had invented a steam-powered harvesting machine that was somewhat unceremoniously disposed of by Death, who didn’t exactly approve of industrialized reaping.  At the time, Death was working as a farmhand and his preferred method was to scythe each blade individually; it’s those personal touches that matter.  Anyway that’s sort of beside the point since Ned only appears posthumously in Raising Steam; he continued to tinker with steam engines and discovered the wonders of boiler explosions.  Terminally.
But his son Dick is following in his old man’s footsteps – or mostly so, given that he’s really, really big into safety testing before getting everything up to full pressure – and he’s ready to move on to the big city with his new invention and just incidentally kick off the Discworld industrial revolution.
I find myself very torn about this one.  I’ve read most of the Discworld novels by this point; many of them are great, and a majority of them are at least better than average.  But there have been some stinkers in there too, although there is some disagreement about which those are.  If I had to rank this one, it would probably go somewhere in the middle of the pack, but at the same time I’ve got some issues with it that I’ve never had with one of Pratchett’s books before.

Ever since Pratchett has received his Alzheimer’s diagnosis and switched to dictation, his writing has been noticeably different.  It wasn’t clear if that was related to shock or just ongoing mental changes.  The shift continues here, to a larger degree than I can recall in any of his previous works.  It actually reminded me somewhat of the prose style of The Long Earth and The Long War, his collaborations with Stephen Baxter.  So although there’s no co-author credit on this one, I wouldn’t be surprised if Baxter or perhaps Pratchett’s daughter Rhianna polished some of the chapters before they went to press; or perhaps his style has simply changed.  Nonetheless, there were parts here that just didn’t sound quite right.

There’s also something slightly off about the plot, as well.  Simnel moves to the city of Ankh-Morpork to sell his idea – which makes sense, that’s where everyone ends up eventually.  And he manages to sell his idea to Harry King, who has been an important if minor presence in some previous Discworld novels.  He’s got the capital, Simnel’s got the idea, and then they start building a railroad.  Vetinari, the dictator of Ankh-Morpork, can’t let something as potentially destabilizing as this be handled by just anyone, so he puts his number one fixer Moist Van Lipwig onto it.  Oh, and the dwarfs are having a looming civil war.

Unlike most of the Disc books which take place over one particular crisis (with prologues and/or epilogues that occur at various lengths afterwards), this one is somewhat more sprawling.  I’m not entirely sure how long this one takes, but it isn’t less than two years and probably no more than six or so.  Building a railroad doesn’t happen overnight, even in fiction.  Lipwig has to do a bunch of things, like oversee construction, order materials, and negotiate rights of way.

Vetinari motivates Lipwig by threatening to have him killed.  And while that’s technically been the basis of their relationship from day one, it’s a little jarring for Vetinari to issue naked threats like that.  He normally doesn’t.  And here, he does it repeatedly.  Vetinari also personally and openly kills some people in this book, which is not something that I can recall him doing since he became Patrician, although he was an Assassin in his younger days.  This is part of what I am saying about how things don’t seem quite right.

There’s a lot more description in this book of events that the book does not show.  At one point, Lipwig has to fight some guys.  He psyches himself up, but the battle itself is not described.  The aftermath, however, is gone into in some detail.  This is not infrequent throughout the book.  We’re told what’s going to happen, then we’re told what’s happening, and then told what happened.  For instance, Vimes prepares to interrogate some prisoners.  We’re told that Lipwig is impressed by the interrogation.  Then they talk about how good an interrogator Vimes is.  Notably, we don’t get details of what was said.

I don’t use these examples trivially, since they basically mirror other, better scenes in previous Disc books.  Lipwig fought the banshee hit man Mr. Gryle in Going Postal, one of the more exciting scenes in all of the Disc canon for my money.  And Vimes’ interrogation of the hapless dwarf Helmclever back in Thud! was important in examining Vimes’ character.  Those scenes were both detailed and awesome.  In Raising Steam there are a bunch of callbacks like that which require you to know and remember previously exciting scenes in prior Disc books, and there are walk-ons by characters who you will only know if you’re familiar with the series, and who don’t do anything either.  So unlike some previous Disc books that basically were mashups of too many plots, this is almost like a meta-Disc book – it tells you about a Disc book but isn’t actually one.  Or rather, it requires you to bring your own emotional reactions from previous novels to bear in similar situations, rather than actually establishing and following through on its own merits.

What we do get could use some editing.  There are a couple of scenes that are basically verbatim, thematically if not exactly, such as repeated scenes of Lipwig coming home from work tired and then having a nice dinner with his wife.  One such scene is character building, two makes you wonder where the red pencil got to.  And the goblins, introduced in Snuff, continue to be too good to be true.  All of the various species that inhabit the Disc have their flaws and foibles, but the goblins are turning out to have no downsides at all, other than possibly a musty smell.  For that matter, the tension in this book continually gets drained by the narrative reassuring us that everything’s going to work out.  Simnel and King reach a ludicrously mutually beneficial business deal, Lipwig has little trouble getting the better in negotiations, and things in general go pretty smoothly.

The dwarf civil war is also uninspiring.  There have been hints ever since back in The Fifth Elephant that the tensions between the modern dwarfs and the traditionalist dwarfs would inevitably lead to bloodshed.  And I suppose that it does, sort of.  They say it’s a civil war.  But it’s also made pretty clear as to who is going to win – all the Low King needs to do is get back home.  Pretty convenient that there’s a new, speedy mode of transport, isn’t it?  It also helps that the traditionalists have become full-on villains here.  That’s not entirely unprecedented; after all, they did use suicide assassination squads as long ago as Thud!, but here they’re just completely evil and have no nuance.  Dwarfs of good will easily change their minds here.  Dwarfs who don't change their minds are not of good will.  This is a considerable variance with previous novels which have established that the traditionalists do have some valid points even if they do tend to be assholes.

So I approach this one with some hesitation.  It’s not bad, not by any means.  But it just has a sense of wrongness about it.  Even the railroad is a little strange to have in a Disc book.  If they’re having a straight-up industrial revolution then it’s becoming more and more like our world all the time, which is maybe the point.  And it absolutely does not stand on its own; if you’ve never read a Discworld book then this is not for you.  So if you’re a Disc fan and want to have a potentially bittersweet book that’s probably the end of an era?  Check it out.  Otherwise?  Go read Feet of Clay.

Niketown by vern

There’s a quote – attributed to Oscar Wilde but of questionable providence – that “every first novel is the author as Jesus or as Faust”.  Although I suspect that Carter Chase, the protagonist of Niketown, is super heavily informed by vern, he’s just kind of some asshole.  And for that I am glad.

I admit that I love vern’s movie reviews and his classic work Seagalogy, so when he announced on his site that he’d written a novel I was intrigued and perfectly happy to give it a try.  He talks about literature sometimes in his reviews, so I know that he really likes Donald Westlake’s “Parker” books and Elmore Leonard, stuff like that.  And he classifies it as a crime novel, so I was wondering if this was going to be something like The Hunter.  Which is something I can totally get behind, after all.

And it sort of starts out that way.  Carter Chase has just gotten out of the joint after doing a bid of unspecified length for burglary.  We know his passport is almost but not quite expired, so it was less than ten years; it probably wasn’t too much less though since he’s not really used to the ubiquity of cell and smart phones.  So we get to find out a little bit about him, the robberies he used to do, how he ended up in prison in the first place.  We quickly find out that Carter’s an intelligent guy, but as a criminal he’s no Moriarty or even Parker.  Mostly he just grabbed stuff and ran off with it.  And when he finally does get busted, his comment on reviewing the security footage in holding is simply “I was told it would be blurry”.

So he did that time for stealing a bunch of shoes from a Niketown store, and you think at first that maybe he’s out to get revenge on his co-conspirators who fingered him and didn’t go down themselves.  Those guys, incidentally, are also a bunch of complete asshole losers as well.  I’m pretty sure that vern must have actually known people like this, they just seem perfectly rendered.  For that matter they’d all be perfectly at home in an Elmore Leonard novel, and I mean this as high praise.

Then . . . it doesn’t go exactly like I was expecting.  I figured maybe we were going to do a classic revenge tale where Carter gets his own back from these guys, or possibly a big score novel where he gets pulled back into a life of crime.  But no, he gets a straight job as one of those guys who wears the mattress outside on the street by the mattress store, later at a hot dog stand.  He develops an appreciation for avant garde food, although it’s against his initial principles to pay more than $10 for a meal.  Oh, and he’s also crashing in his brother’s duplex, since he was supposed to pick Carter up from prison and then can’t be found, although he left his phone and computer there.  Odd.  Coincidental?  Carter’s not sure, but among the things he isn’t, he also isn’t Philip Marlowe.  Nonetheless, he does try to find his brother.

There’s also quite a bit of culture shock for Carter getting out of jail, not being used to the world around, never having seen an iPod or a smartphone and wondering if they even make CDs anymore.  The real world hopefully isn’t quite this bad, since they’re also putting advertisements on gravestones these days.  When Carter is burying his mom he has to choose which sponsor should appear when people walk by.  The director suggests Pepsi, since they’ve got the best residuals.

It’s certainly not out-and-out slapstick, though.  Carter is afraid he’s an asshole, but he’s also surrounded by assholes.  He doesn’t go around trying to scare people, but that time in the joint has been pretty rough on him.  For that matter he’s pretty good in a fight, too, but the fights he can win aren’t the ones that end up mattering to him.  And maybe a little revenge is in order too.

Throughout this book there are a couple of major shifts in tone and a couple of major surprises.  For a first novel this is handled in probably the best form I’ve ever seen.  There’s good foreshadowing without anything being telegraphed ahead of time.  And some of the stuff is maybe a little implausible, but only to the extent that this is a work of fiction and that there is in fact a point being made here.  In fact I feel like even talking about it too much will spoil the fun.

This isn’t the sort of thing that gets read in upper-class literature classes fifty years from now, but it’s the best damn thing I’ve read in months.  I bet that vern could have written a straight-up hard boiled crime thriller if he wanted to, but he didn’t, and it’s even better this way.  And it’s on sale for $4.99 on the Kindle store right now, so why wait?

Broken Age

The adventure game genre is famous for being one of the very first major genres of PC game, and the mainstay for a while during the mid 1980s through mid 1990s.  The genre is also famous for producing some of the most famous and beloved games of all time, no small number of which are associated with Tim Schafer, the designer of Broken Age.  When he announced that he was going to eschew traditional development models and crowd-source a new adventure game for the modern age, fans came out of the woodwork to shower money upon him – no small feat to get over $3 million when you haven’t even finished a proposal yet.  Then came the inevitable development delays and cost overruns, finally culminating in the game being released in two parts, one now and the other (hopefully) later this year, completed with (hopefully) funds from selling the season pass.  But if you buy it, you'll eventually get the whole thing.

But I’m not necessarily complaining about that; after all, I got the early version of the game since I was also doing some money-showering back when the Kickstarter campaign was ongoing.  So I knew that I was pitching $15 into a bucket that might get me something cool or might not; let other people argue over the money and business plan side.  The question that I will tackle is:  should you rush to your Steam client and order this thing?  To which I answer:  weeeeeeeell.  Maybe.

First, more background.  To the uninitiated, adventure games can be sort of odd.  They’ve always focused more on storytelling and puzzle-solving rather than twitch gameplay, more like a novel or an interactive story than a traditional “game”.  As a rule, they don’t have that much replay value unless you’re really into the story or the performances, and they’re also somewhat formalized in terms of the playing experience.  Typically in anything post 1990 you’re expecting voice acting, and probably really good voice acting.  Given the high up-front costs and the somewhat limited replay/multiplayer potential, it makes sense that the genre has faded into something of a niche market these days. 
Various sorts of people have been predicting the death of adventure games for years, but they seem to continue on regardless.  There are a couple of well-regarded American developers like Telltale Games and also quite a bit of action in Europe, with developers such as Daedelic making really great efforts.  For my money, Daedelic’s Deponia trilogy is right up there with any adventure title ever made, and I’ve played quite a few.  I also understand that there’s still something of a market for these sorts of games in Asia, but there aren’t as many puzzle elements and more of an interactive novelization paradigm.  There’s also the fact that adventure game elements have tended to trickle into other sorts of games of all genres over the years.

Back in the day, when adventure games were king around these parts, there was competition between two different schools of thought.  The first and traditional sort was exemplified by Sierra On-Line, but the idea itself goes back to the very first text-based adventure games like Zork and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.  In those sorts of games the idea of the player actually winning the game was treated as something of an affront to the developer.  You’d need infinite patience or something like clairvoyance to beat some of these games, and you could render your game unwinnable easily and without warning.  For example, in King’s Quest VI, your character can visit an island at one point, and you had better find and pick up a scythe on your first trip there.  You have to visit the island again in order to beat the game, and if you haven’t done a couple of tasks first (one of which requires the scythe) then you’ll be killed upon your return with no way to avoid it and no indication of what you should have done differently.  This was not an atypical situation to find yourself in, meaning that hint books were an important secondary income source for adventure game companies.  Given the sort of people who were early adopters of computers, the fact that these games were so mean and impossible makes sense.  And by that I mean that these people usually had puckish senses of humor, a lot of attention for detail, and outright contempt for people who couldn’t keep up.

The second school of thought has eventually won out in modern adventure games; unless the designer is deliberately making a retro game to troll the audience with cruelty you can be relatively certain that you won’t be able to screw up your game beyond repair and if you can die at all you’ll know right away.  This style was popularized by the LucasArts adventure game division and therefore partially by Schafer himself, who was of the opinion that games should primarily be about fun, and the player shouldn’t be penalized for inquisitive behavior.  Therefore you can try absolutely anything you want, just to see what will happen.  It seems a little odd that there should have been a dispute as to whether game designers should treat their audience without disdain, and so the fact that Schafer's side won this argument isn't that surprising.  Schafer’s games of this era include such gems as Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, and Grim Fandango.  All of his games have featured outlandish characters, tricky puzzles, and excellent storytelling.  I would personally put Grim Fandango in the very top tier of games ever made and this is not a minority position.  Unfortunately it wasn’t commercially successful, and also marked the end of “mainstream” adventure titles.

Given Schafer’s track record, it makes sense that there was enthusiasm behind this project, and also that there’s a lot of incentive for people to say that it’s another masterpiece.  I’ve been reading some other reviews and they are generally positive to very positive; nonetheless, there’s a sticking issue that affected my view of the game and that everyone also seems to be having:  the game is short, and it’s easy.  Tycho over at Penny Arcade mentioned this in his review, but also did a bit of a meditation on whether “too short” is even a fair critique of a game at all.  And this too is a reasonable question; for instance, the original Portal is probably about the same length and it’s generally considered as being just about perfect in every way.  And it’s certainly possible to stretch out a game with some stupid padding just to get the playtime up, in fact it happens all the time and it is super annoying.  So not doing that is a positive.  But in the end, a game has to be a game.

The game follows the adventures of two main protagonists – Shay and Vella, both about 14, which turns out to be pretty significant later on.  Shay lives on a spaceship; he is apparently the sole human occupant, and it’s designed around meeting his needs.  The ship is run by a mostly benevolent but somewhat smothering AI who refers to herself as “mom”.  (Incidentally, every single bit of voice acting in this game is fantastic, but Jennifer Hale as the voice of the AI is the best of all.)  The ship has various entertainment modules revolving around semi-autonomous yarn robots, and they give Shay “important missions” to do every day.  Unfortunately these missions are designed for maybe a four-to-eight year old and are just as clearly designed to keep Shay occupied and not messing with anything important.  His increasing boredom with and resentment of his condition is to be expected.

Vella lives in the town of Sugar Bunting, a location for bakers, and is about to be offered up in sacrifice to a horrible Cthuloid beast called Mog Chothra which appears out of the ocean every fourteen years or so.  How she in particular was chosen isn’t especially delved into; it’s considered quite the honor by everyone in the town, including her parents.  Even the other designated sacrifices claim to be okay with the situation, and considering that they believe their town will be destroyed by a vengeful Chothra if they don’t go through with it, perhaps it’s not too out of line for them to consider themselves heroes.  Nonetheless, Vella thinks maybe fighting the monster is a better plan than just offering up human sacrifices to it.  I approve of her mettle.  Unfortunately, her story just isn’t as coherent.

You can choose which character you want to follow at any point and you can switch if you get stuck, or just want to.  Despite some teasers throughout it’s not entirely clear how these stories relate until the very end, though.  I chose to play through Shay’s story first, which if you were asking me is probably the way to go.  It’s actually quite well done – Shay gets the opportunity to maybe go outside what the AI would approve of and even possibly escape, but the person he’s taking advice from is obviously not 100% trustworthy.  It is not clear whether Shay’s being manipulated for someone else’s ends or if this is just another phase of keeping him occupied, and as the game proceeds it becomes clear that he’s not being told everything that would be good for him to know.  And after I’d completed his segment and then Vella’s I really had to go back and reinterpret stuff, which was nice.

Vella’s segment is probably slightly better in terms of puzzle design, but the story is much less focused.  She wants to fight the monster, which everyone tells her is nuts.  But she perseveres.  Unfortunately she perseveres without any particular plan, and then at the last second a monster-killing weapon falls into her lap without any indication that something like that was even possible.  I will give it some points for actually being a plot-relevant reveal.  She is surprisingly unconcerned that she may have caused the deaths of everyone she knows or cares about, though, and so are the other townsfolk she runs across.  I have to wonder why I have to take it seriously if no one else around seems to be.

Anyway, game design.  Adventure games have always revolved around picking up items and using them on other items, and that’s the case here too.  Unfortunately there aren’t really that many items, and the solution to puzzles is usually glaringly obvious.  At one point you’re asked (as Shay) to accomplish three tasks, which is a mainstay of adventure games as well.  But it turns out you can just go and accomplish them right away, which is not how things typically work in a game like this.  Usually that’s the point when the game branches out and makes you do a bunch of sub-goals before you can do what you want, and then when you do you get that feeling of accomplishment.

As a specific example of questionable puzzle design, there are at least four items that you obtain by simply talking to other characters and getting them handed over.  I’m not necessarily advocating hoops for hoops sake, but expecting you to complete a task for the character first or solve another puzzle beforehand is not unreasonable.  For a game that has such limited inventory in the first place, I kept having the same feeling that Shay does in his ship – that this is some sort of hand-holding adventure game that is not really respecting me.  That feeling is hard to overcome.

So I’m in the position of saying that this game looks and sounds awesome, but is by no means the renaissance of adventure gaming.  I even liked the reveal at the end, and I will definitely finish it if and when the second half is released.  If this was a movie, I'd watch it; the plot and characterization is quite intriguing.  But I really hope that there’s a little more puzzle and a little less movie going on in the conclusion.

Rule 34 by Charles Stross

Sorry for the long delay, but I’ve been dealing with work backlog, work frontlog due to vacation, and an entirely depressing round of what appears to be my very first chronic health issue.  At least it’s not debilitating, but taking all those pills in the morning really drives home the fact that at the end of the day I’m a sack of meat with some glands in, and will not last forever.

With that cheery thought, it’s a great time to examine Rule 34, which is a really good story about AI wrapped up in enough bizarre affectation to almost but not quite bury the really good part.

I’ve gone on at some length in my previous reviews about how many classic SF authors thought we’d have much cooler stuff in the near future than we actually do (e.g., faster than light travel, mental telepathy, genetic supermen) while missing out on many of the actually cool things we do have (like microcomputers, cell phone cameras, the Internet) and totally missing social changes, like women’s liberation and gay rights.  Today’s SF authors feel emboldened to grab stuff from the old playbooks where necessary, but have also started to get heavily into the implications of social media and wide-net data collection.  I suppose that SF has really always been more about contemporary social commentary than anything else, so it makes sense.  This one is so contemporary that's it's actually named after an Internet meme, which states that everything that exists has a pornographic representation on the Internet somewhere.

One of the things that authors like Stross have been examining lately is also the nature of intelligence.  Isaac Asimov may have written stories about how someone would buy the latest positronic brain model from US Robots & Mechanical Men and plug it in, but these days it seems like an artificial general intelligence is as far removed from us as it ever has been.  At the same time, neuroscience and brain imaging demonstrate that even human intelligence is deeply weird.  There are implications that much of what our conscious mind does is create elaborate justifications for decisions which have already been made at deeper levels not subject to what we would call “personal” control, with corresponding questions about what a person is and to what extent we can be said to have free will at all.  Not to mention that the evolved nature of our intelligence means that any use that it has besides helping a bunch of primates survive day-to-day out on the savannah is more or less a fortunate side effect.  Or, occasionally, an unfortunate side effect.

So if we do succeed in making some sort of general intelligence, it probably won’t resemble human intelligence any more than an F-35 resembles a harpy eagle.  Sure, they both fly, but the eagle flies because feathers were an evolutionary advantage to one of its distant ancestors, and it’s got concerns like eating, sleeping, and making more eagles.  The airplane was built with its function in mind, so it can do stuff that the eagle can’t, like go the speed of sound, straight up.  This leads to the question of what function or purpose a machine intelligence would or should have.  Stross wrote a short essay once that the most likely result is that the AIs’ purpose in life would probably be to identify humans’ goals as their own; there’s really no point in creating something that’s just another human, since we can make as many of those as we want anyway.

Of course that’s not very dramatically exciting so in this book some assholes make an AI that wants to fight crime.  But since it doesn’t have much of a physical incarnation it goes about this by arranging serendipitous deaths for unpleasant people, such as the gentleman who is discovered having been overdosed on protease inhibitors and Viagra by a reprogrammed Romanian enema machine.  The cops responding to this particular call refer to this as a “two wetsuit job”, referencing the highly weird.  And it gets referred to the Innovative Crimes Division, a future unit of the police who spend much of their time trying to determine whether any laws have actually been violated by the increasingly bizarre activities dreamed up by the highly-networked world.  They're the ones who are the Rule 34 references, since they basically spend most of their time dredging through the worst the Internet has available and see if anyone's trying to actually do it.

That paragraph right there is way more straightforward than the explanation given in the book, by the way.  Stross has an affinity for the outlandish which falls somewhere between “compulsive” and “batshit insane”; in one of his previous works the entire planet Earth got disassembled between chapter breaks and rated barely a shrug in the grand narrative.  Saying that Rule 34 is “about” anything in one paragraph does not do it justice.  There is also a plot involving Central Asian sovereign debt issues, unlicensed trafficking of matter fabricators, a worldwide economic collapse, a panopticon surveillance society, police department promotions based on blog hits, an organized crime ring which makes heavy use of MBAs, and insect-free bread mix.  These things do basically all intersect but Stross doesn’t go out of his way to hold your hand about it.

The action is narrated in the second person, which is highly weird.  I’ve always been of the opinion that second-person is okay for advertising copy and blog posts, and possibly third graders.  At first I considered it grating and annoying.  Then, as the book continued, I thought I began to see what Stross was going for with the AI theme.  Hmmm, sez I, it’s trying to make the reader identify with these people and their actions through the narrative itself, and it became interesting.  And then I oscillated back into deciding that it was grating after all when I decided that I’d gotten the point already.  There’s also quite a bit of non-localized Scottish slang in there, which in my opinion is really fun to read, but combined with the non-standard narrative structure can make getting through parts of it kind of a slog.

Narrative strangeness aside, the main characters are entirely well-developed and interesting.  There’s a Scottish police officer, who is basically the main character insofar as there is one, whose career has sort of stalled out and has a messy personal life.  There’s a theoretically Muslim individual who’s into beer and gay sex a little much to be truly devout, who is sort of a sad sack and bad luck magnet who could be in an Elmore Leonard novel and should be happy that he isn’t.   There’s also a psychopath who also happens to suffer from paranoid schizophrenia due to an unfortunate treatment regimen for the psychopathology in his youth.  Now he’s on different medication so that he won’t see the lizard people.  Doesn’t do anything about the psychopath part, unfortunately; he does at one point get asked by his handlers in the organized crime ring he works for to go somewhere and “downsize” a couple of guys.

On the whole, I really liked the anarchic weirdness of this book, and it’s probably one of the finer examples of modern SF that I’ve seen lately.  At the same time, it’s also just so painfully self-aware at times that it’s not always the most enjoyable read.  I keep thinking I’d like it more if it weren’t trying to show me that it didn’t care about my conventions, man.  After all, they are conventions for a reason.  But maybe that’s why they have all those monitors down at the Innovative Crime Division.

The Steel Seraglio by Mike Carey, Linda Carey, and Louise Carey

Our library recently has started a transition to RFID tags from bar codes, so instead of the librarian scanning the books that you hand over, the librarian simply watches you as you put your books on a mat and they scan themselves, and takes about as long.  I’m not sure if the librarians themselves decided on this plan, or if there was some sort of shadowy cabal that decided this was the next step in library management.  What I do know is that I still needed a librarian to scan this one, since it was an interlibrary loan, all the way from the exotic city of Plano – which may very well have been closer to my house than the actual library in the town where I live.  An exciting life I lead and no mistake.

Anyhow, in talking about The Steel Seraglio, I feel like there’s an angel on one of my shoulders and on the other one, the Satan.  Not the modern Armani-clad one with the binder full of deals, or even the solipsistic monster in Carey’s own Lucifer comic book, but rather the old-school Adversary, the one that never quit but is grim faced and charged with pointing out all of your numerous sins.  The story in The Steel Seraglio is rambling and expansive; the frame story itself doesn’t take up all that much space as much as the various sub-tales, discursions and examinations do.  But the frame of the plot is this:  the Sultan of the city-state of Bessa has 365 concubines, and following a violent revolution they are tossed from the city into the desert and then condemned to death.  But they don’t die that easily.

And the story is accordingly disjointed, says the Satan.  You know very well that this sort of story structure works just fine in fairy tales or in something like The Thousand Nights and a Night, but in a modern type of novel the “story about stories” only works if your name is Neil Gaiman or Terry Pratchett.  I don’t mention those names frivolously either, since you’ve read a bunch of Carey’s work, and it’s at his weakest when he’s trying to be Neil Gaiman, which no one but Gaiman can really pull off and even he screws it up sometimes.

The angel counters, but you sure tore right through it, didn’t you?  Some of the stories were surprisingly poignant and many were beautiful in both execution and form.  Many of these vignettes couldn’t have necessarily supported an entire novel on their own, and they brought the atmosphere home in a way that other sorts of structures couldn’t have accomplished.  And if you have to write a collaborative novel, this is a great way to give everyone their voice without the general problems that collaborations are prone to.

But isn’t that a gentle way of stating that some of the stories are correspondingly weak?  And while I wouldn’t say that any of the writing is not ready for prime time, as it were, it’s clear that not all of the voices match and that some of the sections are much more strongly written than others.  For that matter the characterization isn’t so great either – you’ve got the 365 concubines and their servants and hangers-on and really only explore maybe a dozen of them, and fewer really because of the non-core characters that the narrative has to focus on as well.

But aren’t some of those great?  It was genuinely surprising when the story of the dancing girl turned out to reference one of the characters, wasn’t it?  And the villain of the first book, Hakkim Mehdad, is a truly wonderful character, scary and evil.  Here’s a man who isn’t that far off too many real figures, who preaches a doctrine of abnegation of the self on the grounds that most of life’s real pleasures aren’t to be trusted.  And while his speeches are convincing, he’s gone the extra mile to learn to kill those who he can’t persuade or who are especially persuasive to his opposite.

Ah, but isn’t that also a weakness in the plot?  He could be a great villain but here he is a preacher without a doctrine (except he doesn’t eat meats or spices).  Even though the story takes place in a seraglio in an Arabian Nights-esque fantasy land, they don’t practice any kind of real-world religion, and so it’s hard to understand what impulses exactly Hakkim is tapping into.  In our world this story would make sense, in this one it’s just understood, but that understanding requires the use of out-of-context referents that might not even apply.  And he’s really no threat once he’s taken Bessa; he dreams of spreading his particular cult of ascetics throughout the world but if so he’s going about it in a terrible fashion and there’s no indication as to why his doctrine takes off in Bessa and not anywhere else.  And in the end he frankly goes down like a chump.

But, says the angel, defeating Hakkim wasn’t exactly the point of the book.  The new society that the women manage to raise in Bessa is a paean to human rights and gender equality.  And the story of the former Sultan’s youngest son is fantastic; in other stories he’d be the hero and would fight to restore his rightful rule.  Here it’s clear that his rule wouldn’t be rightful and so begins his disappointment.  It’s telling that in a story about stories the ultimate danger would come from someone like Jamal who fundamentally misunderstands the sort of story he’s in.  And it’s done with such a light touch that it never comes off as preachy or heavy-handed.

Right, says the Satan, it’s got such a light touch that it can’t even make coherent sense in its own universe.  In what situation exactly is a modern pluralistic democracy going to exist in a despotic city-state where there was enough support for a Taliban-like regime not two weeks earlier?  It’s so implausible that one suspects the reason the details are not explored are that no details would be sensible.  It’s certainly not more plausible for lack of explanation.  And Jamal actually is a potentially interesting character, but his motivations are all over the map and his level of competence varies so widely that he’s just a plot device.  When it’s time for the women to win, they win despite impossible odds; when it’s time for them to lose, they lose to insufficient ones given what we’re told about how well things had been going for them.

That may be true, says the angel, but you were moved anyway, weren’t you?  Besides, there’s an added poignancy in the fact that they end up ultimately screwed by not always killing their enemies.  And admit that the story of how Zuleika got her first four kills is worth the price of admission all by itself.

Hmph.  Why don’t you admit that the second half of the book is almost entirely unworthy of the promises made in the first half, and that there’s so much subtext there’s hardly any room for the text?

And then they go on for a while like that.  The angel thinks that this is a really good book, with some serious flaws in it, but the Satan believes that it’s a seriously flawed book, with some really good bits in it.  Since I can’t decide which one is correct, I am forced to agree with both.

Gravity (the film)

I don’t do a lot of movie reviews here, partially because I don’t see too many movies at the moment and partly because there’s lots of other people who do movie reviews better than I do.  That said, Gravity was an amazing movie, and I loved it, and there’s no purpose of even keeping this blog if I don’t talk about the things that move me.

The curse of much of our modern media is the illusion of substance.  I don’t know exactly why that is, and I’m not really much for psychoanalysis.  Perhaps it’s fear of being thought uncool by actually committing to an emotional response.  But instead of doing the hard work of building character and having arcs, we get pre-formed characters that we’re told have emotional relationships with each other and we’re supposed to care about these relationships . . . just because.  In many cases movies will take the emotional responses that the viewer has from previous seminal works and repurpose it rather than try to actually be great, all the while having a self-referential smirk.

Add to that the curse of the overcomplicated, omniscient villain and effects that allow everyone to punch people forty feet through walls, plots that confuse complexity and length with depth, and the ubiquitous shaky cam.  There are some recent blockbusters that I’ve enjoyed, but there aren’t that many classics among them.

Enter Alfonso Cuarón to gently shoulder everyone aside and show how it’s done.  That a movie like this could be made right now is amazing to me, since it does almost everything right.  It’s a major studio effect-driven film, but channels the effects in service of its story, and in 90 minutes leaves you feeling a new thing.  It’s not perfect, especially being a little thematically heavy-handed, but it’s certainly an amazing experience.

The movie begins in orbit, with scientist Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) spacewalking near the Hubble Space Telescope, installing some doohickey that she helped develop onto it.  If they ever explained exactly what it did, I didn’t notice.  But mission commander Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) seems impressed that NASA funded it, since it’s apparently a prototype.  It’s so cool, in fact, that it was worth training Bullock as an astronaut so she could put the thing in personally.

Clooney is screwing around in an experimental jetpack, clearly having a ball.  But waiting for Bullock to do whatever it is she’s doing isn’t really that exciting, so he’s telling interminable war stories and joking around with Houston (the ground controller is played by the voice of Ed Harris, a nice casting gag).  This opening shot lasts for over ten minutes without a cut, and is frankly perfect.  They don’t tell you that Bullock is a genius, they just have the engineering department apologize to her for not listening to her about a possible failure mode for the device.  They don’t tell you Clooney is a badass, they just show it.  And in an offhand manner, Houston reports that NORAD informed them that the Russians have fired a missile at a satellite of theirs to demobilize it, but that shouldn’t be a problem, before going back to listening to Clooney’s story about some girl he was with at Mardi Gras one time.

Then in about five minutes, Houston interrupts them and tells them to forget about what they’re doing and come back right now.

Gravity doesn’t really have a villain as such, although the Russian attempt to bring down their satellite ends up causing an ablation cascade.  We never see those guys and they clearly didn’t mean to do what they did, but their debris jacks up the shuttle and kills all the shuttle crew besides Clooney and Bullock, as well as knocking out their communications with the ground.

The rest of the movie is spent in orbit, as these characters are trying to figure out how to get back and not die.  That’s it.  No cuts to the frantic ground operators, no frenzied communications, just an orbiting cloud of space crap and Newton’s laws of motion (occasionally manipulated for dramatic effect).

I wouldn’t consider myself a Sandra Bullock fan, having been subjected to a few of her romantic comedy films in the past, but she nails it here.  There’s a part where she’s sitting in a burning Chinese knockoff of a Russian escape pod, looking at the characters one the panel that she can’t read, and every single molecule of her being expresses “I am truly questioning the life decisions that have led me to this situation”.  She also manages to really sell her emotional dialogue, which is impressive since in many instances she’s having to talk to herself, since there’s no one around, since, you know, space.  If I did have a complaint about the movie it would be the dialogue, since in a movie that’s otherwise very subtle it acts like a jackhammer to the back of the head in terms of getting the point across.  But that’s not her fault.

And it does tend to get a bit Hollywood-y at times; it’s pretty clear that this wouldn’t be a survivable situation, but they soldier on regardless.  And there’s a portion of the movie where it basically kicks into high gear and Bullock starts to have everything go right for her for a change.  So that’s not perfect.  Nonetheless, this is one of the best-looking movies that I’ve ever seen, and although occasionally a little maudlin it at least means those feelings.  Do yourself a favor and see this one on the big screen.

Tomb Raider (2013)

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.