Writing « Pete Hindle

February 23, 2011

Anathem

I have read the novel Anathem at least once a year since it came out in 2008. It’s 928 pages in length, or just over 31 hours if you listen to the audiobook, which is not an insignificant investment of time in whatever form you choose.

Neal Stephenson is an important author for me. I have an ancient copy of Snow Crash, which I remember tracking down as an import in ’92 or ’93. I had heard it was like William Gibson, but it wasn’t; it was better. It was better in every way. And, while I didn’t become an excellent skateboarder after reading that book (no matter how much I tried) it did give me an introduction into certain areas of thought.

I wasn’t the only one: Second Life is an attempt to makes some parts of Snow Crash real, and the use of the word “Avatar” to describe your character in a computer game also comes from it’s usage in this book. But, as influential and as ground-breaking as Snow Crash was, it’s Anathem that I prefer.

One of the criticisms levelled at Snow Crash is that it’s characters choose knowledge over hope; the fictional world within Anathem has institutionalised that choice. The main character is a young mathematician who lives in a sort of monastery-like institution. In the fictional world of Anathem (an alternate Earth called “Arbre”), these institutions are where all the smart people go, confining themselves to a life without consumer electronics and media saturation for periods of one, ten, or a hundred years.

Outside the walls of the institutions civilisations rise and fall, and a sort of lifestyle pretty much like ours takes place. Technologically, they are a bit more advanced, but Stephenson skewers religious pomposity and the mindless indulgence of contemporary society when he exposes his mathematical monks to a wider world.

I’ve looked at the reviews online for this book, and a common refrain in them is that readers say something like “I read the first 100-200 pages of the book and wasn’t into it, but then I started getting into it and I really liked it” to which I might say, “if you read the rest of the nearly-1000 page book, then I’m glad you liked it for the last 800 pages”. But in a way, that is the point of the book; it is not a passing concern.

Whereas other, more popular books do wrap up their plot lines in the same kind of word-count as Anathem’s first 200 pages, Stephenson is challenging the reader to become more literate – and numerate. What seem like digressions into explaining the many-worlds theory of quantum mechanics prove to be important infodumps for later. It’s a mark of Stephenson’s growing skill that sharing his hard-earned insights into some of the more far-fetched worlds of mathematics don’t read as didactic mouths spouting off, but simply as human interaction.

I’ll admit, this book isn’t for some people. On the other hand, the fact that it isn’t for everybody is one of the things that make it special – not everybody wants to read a book about nerdy mathematician-monks saving the world. At its heart, this book is a sci-fi book, but it’s also a book about growing up, about duty, about home, and about loss. That’s why I keep re-reading it, and why I’ll probably read it again next year.

That is, if I can wait that long.

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December 31, 2010

Ten Years After

The year 2000 was a big one for me, as I’m sure it was for many people. For me, It was the year that I decided to get my shit together. I had spent most of the late 90s in various altered states and I could see that unless I did something drastically different, I would be stuck in the small town that I hated. By this stage, I’d already done (and failed owing to my slackness) a GNVQ in art and design, so I knew that the quickest route to university was to do a foundation in Art and Design.

I didn’t see myself getting into the college (and passing) unless I pulled my finger out, so I stopped smoking pot, got a job, and learned to draw. Drawing was what I did instead of smoking, keeping my hands active while I hung out with friends. As part of my application I made and sold a comic, flogging enough copies to recoup the cost of a long-handled stapler. It’s a comic based on the sort of conversations I used to have with my friends, but looking back on it I was a bit dubious about putting it online. However, it took me so long to find it that this might be the best chance I have of being able to find it in 2020!

Making the comic was incredibly hard – it took me somewhere around three months to get done, probably due to a massive depression when I stopped smoking pot. Another thing that was hard was learning to draw well enough to be able to make these very basic characters different enough to tell a story. Finally, compiling the pages in the right way to print, using my dad’s printer, was a complete mindfuck.

Like a big hypocrite, I’m pretty anti-drugs these days. It’s not so much for what they are, but for the reason that people who take drugs are criminalised, forcing them to act in ways that end up hurting them as much as the effects of whatever they’ve taken. If we accept that hanging out in pubs (smoky or otherwise) isn’t healthy, why do we force casual drug-users to become radical law-breakers?

Having moved back to that hated small town after ten years, I think my friends and acquaintances who’ve suffered the worse are the ones who found themselves with something to hide through casual drug use. For me though, I’ll never touch any drugs again and I’m happier for it, making this comic an interesting view into who I used to be.

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December 28, 2010

Nice One, Dan!

“A man named Dan killed himself in 297 BC but was released again from his tomb three years later, after much digging by a numinous white dog. It seems that he was not really meant to die at that time and it was the ‘result of faulty record-keeping by the netherworld bureaucracy’ was was subsequently rectified.”

The First Emperor of China, by Frances Wood

I’ve been reading Frances Wood’s history of the first Chinese emperor, which can basically be boiled down to “the first emperor was a bit of a prick, but on the plus side he really got that China project up and running”. However, it is full of strange comments that make very little sense to me, and taken out of context – like the above – seem amusing.

On the other hand, good for Dan!

Apparently, suicide was a bit like appealing to an ombudsman in those times – if you offed yourself at the house or workplace of those who “did you wrong”, the officials would investigate. However, the officials were often incredibly busy killing vast numbers of people, such as during the emperors edict to ban all books which were considered of no use to the empire.

460 scholars were killed in the capital alone, which must have taken some work. Ancient scrolls recording the killing states that the First Emperor tricked them into coming to admire his “unusual winter blooming melons”, which were just over a hidden pit. Other accounts say that the reference to melons is actually a misspelling of “killed”.

Although the emperor might have been a melon-loving murder, one of his great actions was to standardise Chinese – at the time he was around, Chinese was a fiendishly complicated language of local spellings and pronunciations. I’m not sure if he did this before or after the fruit-induced death of scholars, but I like to think that might have made it a bit easier.

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December 24, 2010

NO END-OF-YEAR LISTS, NOT EVER

Why have I been writing game reviews on my blog? Because I need to kickstart the writing process somehow. I need to make the little cursor go across the screen sometimes, and to make the clickety-click noise with the keyboard sometimes, because otherwise I feel rubbish.

I joined a book group this year. It’s not what I was expecting; on my second visit I got invited to Hooters. It’s also not a very focused book group – one of the participants often spends time trying to throw things into the cleavage of the woman who organises it. But it’s pretty much my only chance to get conversations outside of my family unit.

So the reviews are just a way of starting to get some mental stimulation going before I write something else. I wrote a NaNoWriMo book this year, which took a fair amount of dedication, and I’m really not very happy with it. I think the format of NaNoWriMo stopped me from really exploring the things that I would want to get better at with writing, and instead caused me to focus on the things that I can just produce in bulk. In terms of getting better at writing, it was a failure. In terms of getting something like a book under my belt, it was a success.

But that’s why I don’t want to do an end-of-year list. I see a lot of blogs doing them, and I don’t think they have a great amount of interest. Perhaps if people really like music, or they are blogging about a particular topic, then the list format could be used to recap what just went before. But I’m not interested in that, and that means that I’ll never kickstart writing my crapping out a list of top tunes here. I still have a few games to write about.

Also, if I write anything more interesting, I run the risk of catching my parents reading it when I walk into the living room. Hi Mum, hi Dad! *Waves*.

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December 18, 2010

Games I have deleted from my iPhone: Game Dev Story

I don’t know why I buy games for my iPhone. Maybe I get suckered by the advertising. Maybe I want to have fun. Maybe I like being stuck in the repetitive skinner box mechanics of gameplay. But what usually happens is that I complete the game in a matter of hours and then delete it from my phone.

Game Dev Story is a weird one – in it, you run a small game studio, and using a small budget you create games for several consoles. The whole game is deeply steeped in the history of gaming, and operates a as sort of parody of that world – but the only thing that really made me laugh was when the new “Playstatus” console was announced.

The aim of the game is to create hit games. You do this by training up your employees, who then work hard to create a game that will get good reviews. After a certain point, you have trained your minions employees hard enough so that success is guaranteed, but the game is still somewhat enjoyable.

It’s cartoon style and lack of seriousness make Game Dev Story an OK game, but there isn’t much replayability and it’s got a few glaring errors – for instance, you can’t skip any of the repeated scenes, the grammar and spelling are weak, and there was a persistent bug in the program which ate up the memory on my iPhone.

In the end, I only deleted it because I wanted my iPhone to stop being a bit weird from low memory. I could have replayed it once more, but I’d done all the major achievements in the game, and after playing for an in-game length of twenty years a pop-up screen told me that the game had “finished” although I could keep playing if I wanted to. Uh… no. As entertaining as it was, it was not a game with the longevity or complexity that would convince me to keep going.

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December 14, 2010

Games I have deleted from my iPhone: Mirrors Edge

Mirrors Edge stands out as one of the worst games I have ever played on my iPhone. It was a terrible waste of money that gave me nothing to show for it. It was made by Electronic Arts, a game company that has existed for so long that they seem to have become a fundament of computing now.

On other gaming systems, Mirrors Edge is a considerably different beast. It won awards for its new slant on the traditional platform game, turning the familar mechanics of running/jumping into a sort of first-person-shooter parkour game. So, for the iPhone, Electronic Arts decided to strip away all the innovative bits and hand out a standard platformer.

This might not be so bad – the graphics are fairly good, and there is a story – but the problem of the touchscreen really baffled the team of programmers who put this together. Perhaps they didn’t have fingers and programmed the game with some sort of hand simulator, because I found it almost impossible to get the main character to react quickly. This was not a problem in the early levels of the game, but later levels which were harder and involved more conflict were infuriating.

I’d give this game two out of five, because it’s shiny and pretty. But it’s too short, and relies on the idea of uploading scores to F***book and Time Trials for it’s longevity. If you find both those things boring – as you should do – you should save your money and buy yourself a pint.

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November 23, 2010

A Short Story Concerning Reading Matter

A few years ago I had a girlfriend who I was very fond of, and as we parted for Christmas we exchanged reading matter. I gave her a copy of Timequake, Kurt Vonnegut’s most life-affirming book. In return, she gave me a copy of Flannery O’Connor’s depressing-as-fuck Wise Blood.

A few weeks later, the relationship would come to a crushing end – but at least I didn’t have to read any Flannery O’Connor.

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October 29, 2010

Ce n’est pas un billet de blog sur la China Miéville

I’m not the only person to have “beef” with major internet corporations. For instance, here’s the full text of a letter from China Miéville to Facebook, asking for them to stop impersonators on their site.

Facebook
1601 S. California Avenue
Palo Alto
CA 94304
USA
6 October 2010

Dear Facebook People,

URGENT COMPLAINT– PLEASE READ, MORE ACTION TO FOLLOW SHORTLY

1) The short version:

At least one person, if not more, is/are impersonating me on Facebook, with (a) fake profile(s) claiming my identity. Despite me repeatedly bringing this to your attention, you have taken no action to remedy the situation. And I’m getting very annoyed.

2) The full version:

This thing you hold is called a letter. This is the third time I’ve contacted you, and I’m doing so by this antiquated method because, and I realise this may shock you so brace yourself, I have no Facebook account. Which means it is nigh-on impossible for me to get in touch with you. Kudos for your Ninja avoidance strategies.

Back when you had a button allowing me to alert you to a fake profile despite not having an account myself, I contacted you that way. I was answered with a resonant silence. Subsequently, when the problem persisted, I hunted lengthily for, found and left a message on the phone number you go out of your way to hide. Absolutely nothing happened. So here we go again: third time’s a charm.

I am being imitated on Facebook. I believe the only reason anyone is bothering to do this is because I’m a novelist (published by Macmillan and Random House), a writer and broadcaster, with a minor public profile. I think there are one or two community pages about my stuff on Facebook – that of course is very flattering and nice of people to bother. The problem is that there is or are also pages by someone(s) purporting to be me. This is weird and creepy. What’s worse is I know for a fact that some readers, friends and colleagues are friending ‘China Miéville’ under the impression that it is me, and that others are wondering why ‘China Miéville’ refuses to respond to them. And I have no idea what dreadful things or ‘likes’ or ‘dislikes’ are being claimed as mine, nor what ‘I’ am saying.

I know lots of people enjoy being on Facebook. Great. More power to them. Vaya con Dios. Me, though: not my thing. I have absolutely no interest in it. I am not now nor have I ever been a Facebook member. Short of some weird Damascene moment, I will not ever join Facebook – and if that unlikely event occurs, I promise I’ll tell you immediately. In the meantime, though, as a matter of urgency, as a matter of courtesy, as a matter of decency, please respond to my repeated requests:

• Please delete all profiles claiming to be me (with or without the accent on the ‘é’ – last time I looked, I found one ‘China Mieville’, and one more accurately rendered).
• Please do not allow anyone else to impersonate me. I have neither time nor inclination to trawl your listings regularly to see if another bizarre liar has sprung up.
• And while you’re at it, please institute a system whereby those of us with the temerity not to sign up to your service can still contact you on these matters and actually get a [insert cuss-word] answer.

I appeal to you to honour your commitments to security and integrity. Of course as a multi-gajillion-dollar company I have absolutely no meaningful leverage over you at all. If David Fincher’s film doesn’t embarrass you, you’re hardly going to notice the plaintive whining of a geek like me. All I can do is go public. Which is my next plan.

I’m allowing a week for this letter to reach you by airmail, then three days for you to respond to me by phone or the email address provided. Then, if I’ve heard nothing, on 16 October 2010, I’ll send copies of this message to all the literary organizations and publications with which I have connections

…

some of the many books bloggers I know; and anyone else I can think of. I’ll encourage them all to publicise the matter. I’m tired of being impersonated, and I’m sick of you refusing to answer me.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Yours sincerely,
China Miéville

Miéville’s an amazing writer, and I picked this story up not via my usual nerd-stops of io9.com and tor.com, but by Google Reader’s ‘explore’ feature (where I found it was featured on many blogs). I don’t think it came up via Miéville’s own site at Rejectamentalist Manifesto. I saw him talk early this year, and from what I could hear he’s not that impressed with the Internet as a whole, so I think his site is more a way of distracting people from whatever footprint he might be making online.

What it says to me is that we have identities beyond our mere physical bodies, and that it takes work to control them, and it takes more work to control them as you become more famous. An “online presence” is a sort of metallic aura, and the more we engage with the online world, the more apparent our aura becomes – but famous people, or people who have some sort of cultural cachet, like Miéville, have an aura that might be beyond their control. For instance, cat-bin lady suddenly became famous and well-known, and lost all privacy she might have had.

Miéville’s specific complaint was not that the virtual dopplegangers were passing themselves off as him, but that they were independently claiming to “like” things. Stelarc, the Australian artist who has an ear on his arm, tried to create autonomous networked copies of himself back in the early 2000s, recognising that at some point our self, our animus, would be replicated – probably imperfectly – by machine. Where this leaves the singular voice of the author, or any individual who would seek to make money from presenting a unique world-view (examples might include comedians, chess-players, and international bankers) is having to defend their uniqueness.

Unless, of course, licensed copies can be made.

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October 24, 2010

So, Berlin:

After packing up my flat in Newcastle and returning to my parents house in Bedfordshire I was exhausted. Not just slightly tired, but borderline needing-medical-attention exhausted. I spent a week watching cartoons in bed, and a further week laying on the sofa watching bad TV, just to recover from my time away. During that period, an advert for Easyjet’s sale grabbed my attention more than one of the films I was watching, and I booked two return flights to Berlin.

About six weeks later my girlfriend and I stepped off the plane. It had been a beautiful flight all the way over to Germany, with the in-flight magazine mentioning my online friend Cassandra Harrison. When we started to land the pilot mentioned it was a brisk 8ºc outside, and our first steps through the airport reminded what that meant. However, we got to our hotel and collapsed for a little while, before dashing out to meet Pippa Buchanan and her fiance (of course, we got totally lost and went to the wrong station first, but that’s par for the course during the first 24 hours in a foreign city).

I’d been to Berlin a number of times before, and so I said that aside from meeting my friend Pippa and going up the TV tower, I was fine with whatever my girlfriend wanted to do. The next day we gorged ourself at the hotel breakfast and waddled out to do some sightseeing around Oranienburg Strasse, taking in the Kunsthaus Tacheles, the Synagogue, and the Ramones Museum, before heading off to the Reichstag to meet Pippa again.

(I would totally recommend the Ramones Museum, which showed you the history of the American punk group for €3.50, and also doubled as a really nice cafe. Kunstalle Tacheles was it’s usual pee-smelling graffiti-stained sixth-form art self, but it’s worth gawking at once. I can’t say I’ve ever seen any worthwhile art there though.)

Pippa had a cunning plan to get us into the Reichstag without queuing, and as we were not standing for election that involved going to the extremely fancy restaurant on top of the building. This meant queuing in the much shorter disabled entrance and taking a lift upstairs, which was a great relief to me as I was already starting to feel tired. It was also here that my phone had a freak-out, making me think that I wouldn’t have any of the photos from the trip – this caused me much nerd-consternation, but I tried to hide it and not let geekery spoil my time away.

The next day I woke up and felt awful. Fatigue hits me like that sometimes, when even a nights sleep won’t make me feel better. It’s like I’m too tired to sleep properly. I woke up and tried to force breakfast into myself, but had to give up and rest in the morning while the other half did cultural activities without me. I recovered enough for some less strenuous activities in the afternoon, and so we took the train down to Kreuzburger and wandered around. I saw Etsy Labs (from the outside), and the fabulously named Kreuzburger (try the haloumi burger!) before heading to spend a few hours at the Hamburger Bahnhof art gallery.

We were pretty tired after all that culture, although it was great to see some of the works on show there, and availed ourself of the very Germanic market at Alexanderplatz on the way back to the hotel. We had a meal of potato pancakes and hot sugared nuts, while watching a live duo sing polka songs for the entertainment of the masses. A holiday in Germany isn’t complete without that sort of omska-omska casio beat, but I was too tired to work out how to buy beer. The civilised European method of “paying a deposit for your glass” defeated my tired self, and so we returned to our hotel room and had an early night, watching subtitled movies and adverts for German TV shows (there seemed to be a TV show about crime-fighting monks who used kung-fu and BMWs. It looked awesome, but I might have misunderstood something owing to my near complete lack of German.)

On our final day we rose sluggishly, ate our body-weight at the buffet breakfast, and then brought more hot sugared nuts at the market. I was feeling decidedly slow and we had a long day ahead of us, so we met up with Pippa again for a guided tour of Kreuzberg that ended up at a delicious Somalian felafel place. Then we staggered around the Film Museum at Potsdammer Platz before attempting to catch a train back, a process which shocked me having not one but two cancelled trains. We made it in time, however, and on my return I felt inordinately grateful to be able to understand the London Underground signage.

What I did miss from Berlin was the sense of being somewhere with wide open spaces, where transport hubs smelt of the bakeries in their basements at night, seeing young people in the streets, and discovering a whole new city (again). But at the same time it’s also taught me that I’m nowhere near fit enough to be galavanting around, and so I’ll be hibernating for the winter. By which I mean “resting up until it’s warm”, not “sleeping in a cave for four months”.

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September 26, 2010

On Bullshit and Belief

This is my penultimate email from NewcastleGraft, an email group that I ran for over three years. As all email groups do, we had our off-topic conversations, and this is my reply to something I found particularly annoying…

It’s no fun running an email group. You end up doing a lot of work that nobody really acknowledges, and having to spend time listening to crazy people who just happen to have your email address, so therefore feel it’s applicable to send you any old bullshit they believe in. I can’t tell you the amount of unasked-for crap that ends up in my inbox these days.

At least most of that crap is about art though.

Now, in the past I’ve been somewhat respectful but disinclined to believe this stuff. Of course, I’m quitting ‘graft and have left newcastle, so I can just annoy people and not worry about it now. Hurrah.

With all due respect to (redacted), she’s one of those nice people who believe in a lot of airy-fairy bullshit. I have friends who are deeply into auras, chanting, magic, etc, and I’ve observed a few things about them. I’ve noticed that being inclined to believe in that sort of thing (auras, etc) seems to mean that you don’t have a very good critical facility; they tend to go on what “feels” right to them. They have trusted networks that send them emails – which I would consider to be spam – warning them about whatever cause du jour they consider important now.

Some people refer to this as relativism, meaning that what is important to one person must be given the same weight as what is important to another person. Or something. That’s not really a great explanation, but it’s one of the terms used to describe airy-fairy thinkers. It’s actually a bit of a bending of the term relativism, but that’s not so important.

I’m currently reading a Stephen King book about writing, and he describes how poetry in the sixties and seventies was full of relativists. They would write poems about the mountain – using it as a never-fully-explained analogy, and if you asked them to explain the analogy, the poet would decry you as somebody who doesn’t “get it”. King’s attitude to this sort of poetry seems to be “fuck you, I just wanted to know what you were talking about”.

That’s the problem with arguing the toss over geo-engineering, vaccines, or any of the other hot-button topics that airy-fairy thinkers favour. You make a logical reply and it’s all “you don’t understand”, or “but what about this proof from <a dodgy blog on the internet>” or “if you love science so much why don’t you marry it”.

I mean, it’d be perfectly possibly for me to go through those links and say what they really mean. I was even considering doing that. But we’ve been down that road before and it just leads to people asking me why I’m not getting gay married to science because I obviously love it so much. So bollocks to that. Did you expect me to sit here and let you pelt (metaphorical) rotten vegetables at me? No thanks!

Anybody who believes in airy-fairy bullshit because they “feel” it to be true, anybody who ignores the evidence that contradicts them because they have a set of beliefs, anybody who talks down science because “it doesn’t know all the answers”, is basically out to fuck you up. They want you to believe in something rather than think for yourself. They want your trust.

Because then they can feed you any bullshit they want.

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Category: Writing