NatCon
I have an enormous amount to say about Convergence 2, and I’m not going to say it now. It needs to sit in my head for a while, and ferment. And brew a little. And… digest… and other appropriate bodily verbs. Basically I need to get around it, my very first convention. It was a bit overwhelming. But the best bit was meeting people, of course – my lastshortstory buddies, and others whom I didn’t know from a bottle of disinfectant beforehand, and now will certainly be keeping in contact with. Incredible what three and a half intense days will do, plus a shared love of scifi and fantasy.
So stay tuned. Ruminations on the con, and the nature of good and evil, to come….
New Ceres
Not a review of mine, but of me! Amazing.
Yes, I have forgotten to mention that I have, amazingly, been published. In a fictional way. You should definitely go and have a look at New Ceres anyway, not just because of me, but I could be an additional incentive…. Of course, you have to pay – but $5 is, like, less that fish and chips. About the same as a block of Lindt chocolate. Easy!
The idea behind New Ceres is that it is a world, set a few hundred years in the future, where the people (the government? the people in charge?) have decided to keep the planet in the eighteenth century. Permanently. So there’s the groovy 18th century stuff – coffee house, manners, clothes – but you’ve got the possibility of illicit technology as well. Nice little combination, as far as I’m concerned. I have to say, I am more fond of issue 1 (which was/is free) – Tansy Rayner Roberts’ story of La Duchesse and Dirk Flinthart’s George Gordon and Dorian Wilde are simply sublime. But the stories in issue 2 are also very cool, and show how the community is meant to work – authors taking up characters suggested by others, which is a beautiful thing.
Go there. Buy a subscription. It’s very much worth it.
Year of Reading Dangerously
So I’ve got together with three other people – Alisa Krasnostein, Ben Payne, and Tansy Rayner Roberts – to try and read all the Aussie short stories published in 2007 and most of the overseas ones as well. Woohoo! Go us.
Are we nuts or what?
Thanks to Ben, the community where we will be discussing the very best we will come across is called Not if you were the Last Short Story on Earth, which I’m quite fond of, myself. Come along for the ride! Read good and useful reviews! Watch us crack under the pressure!
Comfort Reading
As escape and for comfort, I pulled Stephen Baxter’s Space off the shelf on the weekend. Gosh it’s good. I’ve always liked scifi, but I think he’s the one who really got me into hard scifi – credit him with my appreciation of Alastair Reynolds, I think. I really must find my copy of Time, the first one written in the Manifold series – someone out there has it – or maybe I should just deal with it and buy another copy. I feel a bit bereft without it.
History of Writing
Finally finished this today – you know how it is when you’re nearly finished a book, but the last half a chapter just seems like such a slog… yes. Well, that’s exactly how I’ve felt with this book, much as I have enjoyed it.
Let me get the gripes out of the way to start with. Lack of definitions irked me. Maybe Steven Roger Fischer is only writing for experts – although it doesn’t really seem like it – but he talks about graphemes and logography and other such words and doesn’t give a definition for any of them until about chapter 5, and then only defines a couple! So that was a bit annoying. I also should say that I didn’t entirely understand all of it; part of that is me – I am definitely not an expert in the area, and some of it just went over my head, as I knew it would – but some of it is Fischer: while he mostly writes plainly, every now and then he got a bit carried away with fancy-pantsed academic language that may not have been necessary.
Anyway… the first chapter is “From Notches to Tablets” and the second “Talking Art” – fairly obvious what they’re about. Mostly concentrating on the Mediterranean and Mesopotamian area (Fischer is a proponent of the idea that ‘complete writing’ started in just one place, Sumer, and developed everywhere else because of foreign influence), it looks at why complete writing developed, and how, and the advantages that came because of it. Knots, notches, pictography… humans really are quite creative. In the development of writing I particularly like the idea of the rebus – smart cookie, whoever realised that you can substitute a picture of one thing for something else that sounds the same but means something else (eg a bird’s bill for Bill).
Chapter 3 is “Speaking Systems,” It looks at the dissemination of writing throughout the Mediterranean and into India, Phoenicians and the Middle East and all. Basically tracing how syllabaries (where a sign represents a syllable) developed and influenced one another.
“From Alpha to Omega” is the fourth chapter, and there are no prizes for guessing its emphasis: the Greek alphabet. From Greece to the Etruscans to the Romans, and then on into all areas conquered by them, is the story told here. Mention is made of Ogham, Slavonic scripts, and Gothic script too. Very interesting, and lots of pretty pictures showing different writing styles.
Fifth is “The East Asian ‘Regenesis'”, which mostly looks at Chinese writing – its development, changes, and how it has influences cultures within its orbit, such as Vietnam, Korea, Japan and Mongolia. I had already read about the Korean script somewhere else, but the story of it being developed in the 1400s by the king (or at least under his aegis) is a brilliant one. And I had no idea just how complicated Japanese is… crazy, the amount of stuff Japanese kids have to learn just to be literate! And my students complain!
“The Americas,” the sixth chapter, is not one I had expected to be very long, but it was actually quite involved. It looked at who might have had writing when, who influenced who, and what role writing might have played in the different Mesoamerican (primarily) societies. The Spanish have a lot to answer for, with regard to destroying Aztec records, but then I guess we knew that.
Penultimately, “The Parchment Keyboard” looks at the development of handwriting styles in Europe basically from Charlemagne on, the dissemination of them and literacy more generally, and then the development and impact of printing. It always amuses me that we place so much emphasis on Gutenber, in the West, when the Chinese had been using paper and block printing for centuries before him. The joys of Eurocentrism…
Finally comes “Scripting the Future,” which is Fischer’s attempts at prognostication, for the most part. What the impact of computers will be, the likely success of trying create a ‘visual language,’ and the scripts that will still be around in 400 years.
This is a very, very brief overview of the book. I really liked that, in general, Fischer was not triumphalist, smug or assured about the overwhelming use of the Latin-based alphabet. Indeed, he went out of his way to emphasise that this is not necessarily the ‘best’ alphabet – pointing out a lot of the problems with it, calling it deficient, which I liked – and holding up the longevity and usesfulness of Japanese writing systems (three of them!) in contrast. It is mostly readable, and reveals things about writing that I had never thought about. Good for nerds who like thinking about the way things are done, and why, and the history of things we take for granted.
Dreaming of Amber
I read this while we were on holidays. It’s by Tony Shillitoe – and it’s one of the few books I have ever read that is really, truly set in an Australian context: mallee country, numbats, bilbies… and it was very appropriate, since I was in the mallee when I read it. I’ll have a review of it up on ASif! soon.
Galactic North
I finished this a couple of days ago – given it is a set of novellas, it serves as my break from reading about the Chinese Revolution, which book I will also post about at some time – there are some doozies of quotes that I have to share with people.
Anyway, to Galactic North: the latest Alastair Reynolds (although apparently there’s a new novel on the way – hurrah). I am eternally grateful to Kate for getting me to to read short stories, since before she started foisting Urchin stories on me (an example of which can be read here – I do so love the Wild Hunt), I never was much of a fan. This I have since repented, and am doing my part in reading a large stack of Aussie shorts (don’t believe me? Check this out). But back to the point. The first two stories (Great Wall of Mars, and Glacial) of this collection are about Galiana and Clavain, familiar to anyone who has read Revelation Space stories and still fascinating characters for newbies. Representing very different forms of culture and humanity – one a Conjoiner, those humans who exist with what is, crudely, an interweb between them, connecting them irrevocably, the other from a faction implacably opposed to such forms of humanity. They are great stories, and although you can read them as stand-alones, as I said, i think they are best seen as filling in (very nicely) holes from the novels.
Those two stories were probablymy favourites, because they did plug holes. “A Spy in Europa” is excellent, a very clever twisty story; “Weather” looks at both Ultras (space-adapted sailors, basically) and Conjoiners more than usual. “Dilation Sleep” is apparently a very old story, and suitably creepy, although not the most interesting of the set; “Grafenwalder’s Bestiary” allows Reynolds’ macabre side out to play. “Nightingale” (took me a while to get the name; it’s the name of a hospital ship) is also quite macabre, and an anti-war gem. Finally, “Galactic North” reminded me a lot of Time, Space, and Origin by Stephen Baxter, for its sheer scope of time and space. It was really, really good, too – picking up on something mentioned in one of the novels, and running with it to what should be a ridiculous extent, and yet… it works.
All in all, a glorious set of stories. And it just makes me want more from the Revelation Space ‘verse.
The Player of Games
I found Iain M Banks when we were in the UK – reminds me that I should get around to talking at least about the books I read over there, if not about the whole trip. It feels like it was such a long time ago, now, though – 10 weeks in fact. Anyway: I just finished his The Player of Games the second of the Culture novels. I think I’ve decided they can be safely read out of order, which is nice – now I can just go nuts at the second hand book shop, and buy whatever they happen to have.
It’s a great book. Banks is a great storyteller – you know, after you’ve read one, that there is a fair bit more going on than is obvious at the first and that this will be revealed in clever ways, and pretty much logically too: that is, there won’t be ta-dah! moments just to get the hero out of a sticky spot. I have to say, though, that I found the conclusion to this one just a bit anti-climactic. I don’t know what else I was expecting (well, yes actually I do, and it has a lot to do with Janny Wurts and the Empire books), but it wasn’t what happened.
Getting to that conclusion, though, was fun. The main character isn’t much of a hero – just an every-day Culture dude, who happens to be about the best games-player in the entirety of the Culture. He gets contracted, basically, to go and play the highest-stakes game he’s ever come across, and the book is about him learning it and playing it. Which sounds daft, except that the stakes are who gets to Emperor of Azad.
One of the more interesting, if surprisingly understated, aspects is the difference between Azad and the Culture, in politics and morals and pretty much every other aspect of life. There are a few conversation where these things are explored, and – I think deliberately – it’s weird for a reader to try and figure out exactly where they want to position themselves. With the Culture, that tolerates incest and pretty much anything else its citizens can come up with, or the Empire, that goes around subjugating everyone they meet (sounds familiar)? And really, as things are presented here, there are no half-measures. One side or the other.
Interesting. Fun. And, unlike Consider Phlebas (the one I read in the UK), only one page of ickiness that I had to skip over.
Spicy history
I finished Jack Turner’s Spice: The History of a Temptation yesterday. Overall, I really enjoyed it. It’s quite an idiosyncratic history, and deliberately so – writing about absolutely everything to do with spice, even just in western Europe and/or just in the Middle Ages would be an incomprehensibly huge project, I would imagine. So he hasn’t done that: although he does go into great detail in some things, in others he skips over stuff a bit. He does seem to have a fairly good bibliography at the back, so I guess if you were so inclined you could chase stuff up yourself.
The first part is about the spice race – Columbus, Magellan, and their cohort, who opened up the world for Europeans – at least the western ones – all, or at least partly, in the name of spice, I love the idea of Portugese or Spanish explorer getting to Malabar or other such places and finding Italian merchants already there; the look on their faces must have been priceless… much like the spice there were seeking.
The second part focusses on the palate – the thing that I was expecting most of the book to look at, to be honest, despite the fact that I know spices were used in incense etc. Anyway, this section was really interesting: it looked at recipes, it looked at how spice helped to create/maintain class distinction; discredits the idea that spice was used in the Middle Ages to hide the taste of rotting meat (it was rich people who used spice – do you think rich people would be eating rotting meat in the first place? It was at least partly to hide the taste of the salt used in curing the meat, probably).
The third part focussed on the body, in two ways: spice in medicine, and spice for love. Starting with cloves being shoved up Ramses II’s nose, as part of the mummification process, and then talking about the whole idea of pomanders and bad air (mal aria…) being respondible for disease. The section on spice as aphrodisiac was quite funny. And almost entirely male-centred – the remedies suggested, that is, not Turner’s treatment of it, since he himself points it out.
Part four is on the spirit: the use of spice in incense, for example. It mostly focussed, though, on the changing attitude of Christians towards spice in worship. The earliest Church fathers thought it was ok-ish – Christians were often anointed with spices for burial, since Christ was. Then people went a bit off it, because after all if God is incorporeal then presumably he doesn’t enjoy pleasant smells (personally I think this is a daft argument: so you’re limiting what God is able to do, then?). This is a very, very brief overview, of course.
The last chapter is called “Some Like it Bland,” which is a great heading. It talks about the movement – slowly – against spices, for a range of reasons, including that it was a drain of resources away from Europe towards those nasty, decadent Easterners; plus, interestingly, he links the development of the nation-state and national sentiment to the development of a national cuisine, which makes sense, and in England at least this led to a bland cuisine they were proud of, contrasting it with those very spices their forebears used to love.
As I said, this is a ridiculously brief overview, but it gives an idea what the book was about. It’s really well written, and a lot of fun to read; Turner’s not afraid of pointing out the humorous and ridiculous nature of some of the things he discusses.
Reading for pleasure (gasp!)
I feel like it is a long time since I read anything without another agenda in mind: it was for school, or I was going to write a review of it… even history books I read for fun still have the not-very-subliminal purpose of increasing my general (trivial) knowledge. That’s not to say that I dont enjoy those books, of course; just that as I read I’m thinking of things other than just the enjoyment.
To celebrate the start of my break, I am reading Galactic North, by Alastair Reynolds. It has been sitting on my shelf for a while, holding out the promise of complete escapism and masterful writing, for a while now, and it is with a huge sense of relief and relaxation that I dived into it yesterday. It’s 8 short stories – novellas, really – set in the Revelation Space et al universe. The first two are about Nevil Clavain, Galiana, and Felka. I remember them from at least one of the four stories set in that ‘verse, and it’s really nice to get some background on them. It also, of course, makes me itch to go back and read them all again. I think I read them too fast first time around and may have missed some of the subtleties. Plus, they are jsut damned fine stories. Truly, Reynolds is a heroic storyteller.
Randomly Yours, Alex 