Part One: The Introduction

The following is a review I really laboured over. I’ve joined a book group, and as part of that group’s activities we’re doing a bit of writing on the books over at a blog devoted to that purpose. Being a sort of informal, often drunk, slightly shouty book group, the blog hasn’t really been fully sorted out, and anyway, it’s purpose is to host the reviews of books.

About somewhere in the second draft of this review, I felt that the material I was throwing out was as interesting as what I was keeping in. On my own blog, I can bore the pants off you about deserted supermarkets as much as I want; I think writing for somebody else’s blog means sticking to a point, or at least agreeing to set of rules. Those rules are what makes blogs like Daring Fireball or Coilhouse great – focused entertainment. A topic, around which to circle about, diverge from, and return to. Both the audience and the writers know that there will be a pay-off for attention.

So the essay I was going to post on that site would have been shortened. It would have missed out some stuff that I really wanted to mention. Those topics will be mentioned briefly, as a list of links, in a third part. For now though, here is the review.

Part Two: Review of Warlock of Firetop Mountain

The nerdery levels of the 1980s were high. In the 1960s, and for a long period in the 1970s, Lord of The Rings had carved a massive swathe through popular culture. This wasn’t the same swathe that the  movies would carve in the 2000s; instead, people read the books, devoting a huge period of time and mental energy to imagining – for themselves – Tolkien’s world.

Some people did it because it was the done thing. Some people did it because they were massive nerds who wanted to live in Middle Earth. And, I suppose, some people just wanted to read a good story (although I won’t get into the literary merits of LotR at this time). But if you ever wonder why Tolkien’s world of Middle Earth is a sort of ur-myth for fantasy, it’s because we live in a time when the nerdy kids of the sixties and seventies have worked hard, created art inspired by Tolkien, and in turn inspired others.

The range of Fighting Fantasy books is one instance of that inspiration. It’s authors were steeped in the subculture of roleplaying games, where nerdy individuals acted out fantastic stories. Contemporary roleplaying has been co-opted by the computer industry, but in the pre-internet eighties roleplaying was about meeting with some equally nerdy friends, rolling some dice, and acting out a story co-operatively.

What made the Fighting Fantasy books (and their American Cousin, the Choose Your Own Adventure series) such a hit was that they made the roleplaying experience a solitary one. As computers got better they replaced the need this unwieldy combination of book and game, and instead offered the same experience in an easier-to-consume package.

That experience is that of a person who acts. Somebody who does things. In the Warlock of Firetop Mountain, the things you do are an awful lot of killing. Mainly, you are killing the henchmen of the evil warlock. You act decisively and without regret, never thinking about the trail of devastation left behind you.

What is lost is twofold; both the original roleplaying experience (perhaps you would befriend the minions of the warlock, and – by play-acting with your friends – convince them to help you, like Frodo convinces Gollum in Lord of the Rings) and the experience of becoming wrapped up in a narrative.

This review is, therefore, not a book review. Rather it is a review of a book-like object; it has pages, but you do not turn them one by one, forgetting where you are as a story whisks you away. Instead, you shuttle back and forth between different numbered paragraphs, roll dice, and consider whether going “north” up the corridor is better than going “south”.

In truth, it doesn’t matter. Your character is alone in a maze of choices, trying to find that individual path to victory, and if you succeed you have succeeded alone. The experience is so unique that you cannot even discuss it with somebody who has also succeeded in the quest, because they will not have read the same parts of the book as you. You can discuss something similar, but without a joint entry into some other narrative, it isn’t a shared experience.

And without that commonality, there is nothing to review.

Part Three: An Appendix in the Form of Links

• One Book, Many Endings: an analysis of the American counterparts to Fighting Fantasy, using sophisticated animations to show how they progressed. Worth reading.
• Fighting Dantasy: a blog which reviews individual Fighting Fantasy books.
• Firetop Mountain iPhone App: the contemporary version. Reviews of this game often skip over explaining exactly what it is
• Enemy of Chaos, Leila Johnson’s witty and affectionate take on gaming books. I played it as an iPhone game, but it is also available as a real physical book-like object.
• Nethack, the venerable dungeon-crawling game, dates from around the same time as the Fighting Fantasy books.
• LotR in the terminal: type cat /usr/share/calendar/calendar.history | grep "LOTR"
at the command line of any Mac to see just how influential Tolkien was. When the basics of the computer age were being written, some neck-bearded nerd snuck in a lot of references to LotR into a file. They’re still there.

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.

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.

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.

I picked this book up because it has an amazing cover by Don Maitz, which you can see here on his website. I love the look of older SF book covers, which put to shame the cleanly designed lines of more modern books.

Sadly, the plot wasn’t great – one of those confusing 1970s plots which are just a little bit too clever. It tells the story of two worlds, one always in daylight, one always shrouded in night, but unlike Zelazny’s Jack of Shadows (which uses the same day/night world divide) it’s not something I would pick up again. While it’s interesting to see the effect of the great countercultural boom on writers, sometimes (like Delauny’s Dhalgren) it makes for an unreadable mess.

This new Doctor Who is guilty of one of the worst things about contemporary TV; it talks down to it’s audience. Whereas really old Who episodes had an educational feel about them, any educational content in new Who is about as didactic as you can get. This isn’t to say that I like old Who a huge amount either; it’s super-clunky and very often boring. What I like about Doctor Who are the things that stray off the accepted TV path.

In the 1960′s, in the first burst of Doctor Who’s existence, the program was very popular. This led to two Doctor Who movies staring Peter Cushing, because there was a common movement of British TV shows being turned into films around that time. The films don’t really follow the accepted story, but all the right elements are there, and I find them amazingly fun to watch.

After the cancellation of the show in the late eighties, the novelisations continued. As there were no new adventures of Doctor Who, writers were allowed to make up their own adventures for the character, which eventually gave birth to one of my favourite ideas in SF: Faction Paradox, an evil time-travelling organisation, who lived in a dimension split off from ours in the spare days caused by the shift to the Gregorian Calendar… complicated? You bet. This is one of those times that even reading the wiki page won’t give you a full rundown.

But that’s what this new Who won’t have: the guts to make things complicated. It doesn’t have the background of Star Trek, or the building of mythology that we saw within Buffy… instead, every episode has a few cursory nods to the in-show history before producing this weeks nifty explosion.

GTA:CW is supposed to be one of the best games out there for the iPhone. It offers an immersive world, with full sandbox features, and it’s a continuation of one of the best game franchises around. So why is it so terrible on the iPhone? It’s not a straight port of it’s earlier incarnation on the Nintendo DS, but a well-crafted rejigging of the game for the iPhone’s particular aesthetic.

What it fails to do is to take into account the situation it will be played in. The most successful iPhone games offer the chance to step out of whatever mode you are in (say “waiting for the bus” mode) and indulge in some frantic button-bashing. Nobody can resist the simple charms of Canabalt (also available online as a free flash game), but GTA:CW is a far more complex affair. And, as a more complex affair, it suffers from needing more complex controls.

It’s been mentioned in other reviews that GTA on the iPhone suffers from control issues. This is true. It’s almost impossible to control the game “in the heat of the moment”, and I struggled to drive cars around corners when not being chased by the police. It was like playing whilst wearing gloves, and led to a lot of aggravation when trying to complete some of the missions.

This game cost me six pounds, and unlike nearly every other game I’ve brought (on any platform) I realised it was a lemon. I think what really did it was the inclusion of mini-games, something I’ve always found annoying. Why would I want to break the flow of one activity I’ve committed to to play another, smaller game? This was an essential flaw in all of the later Final Fantasy games following FF7 – if I wanted to play cards, I’d play a card game. Quit wasting my time. Similarly, if I want to buy molotov cocktails, I will resent any time spent playing the “make molotov cocktails” game. Particularly the little stroking motion required to stuff the rag into the bottleneck.

This is a game that demands attention, but this is the wrong format for that. iPhone games are about distraction, not immersion, and GTA:CW requires you to log in some long hours, focusing on a (simulated) life of crime. If it had an adequate control system, allowing you to rampage across the city (as the earlier console versions did) then I could forgive it and utilise it as a cathartic release. But it doesn’t, and I can’t.

GTA Chinatown Wars might be the iPhone game most likely to appeal to hardcore gamers. For everybody else, it’s a bad introduction to what gaming can be.

Steph Swainston’s Fourlands is the setting for her novels, which are part of the New Weird, an extension to the fantasy genre that allows authors to escape the sword-and-sorcery crap that they’ve been stuck with by certain best-selling authors. Where fantasy had become reliant upon pastiche and re-invention of Tolkein-esque themes, writers operating within the New Weird allowed themselves to create truly new worlds.

Swainston’s books are set in a world ruled by immortals, who fight an endless war against giant insects. There is no orcish horde to defeat, but instead an unknowable enemy who seems to only operate by instinct – something we can all understand, especially if you’ve ever found a cockroach in your kitchen. Familiarity doesn’t end there though, as despite living in a feudal world, her characters wear jeans and t-shirts, know what serial numbers are, and are generally as badly behaved as us in the modern world.

Slint’s work came at a time when Grunge defined what rock was, but they weren’t working alone. Shellac and Helmet released albums around the same time, opening up rock music to a wider range of textures than the pop-orientated sounds that were prevalent within Grunge. The influence that these bands had opened up the sound of rock music in a post-modern sense, meaning that not only could things be heavier but that they could also sound different.

The New Weird is a similar movement in fantasy writing. Swainston’s work, and that of others who accept the genre, are swimming against the idea of fantasy as ‘epic’, or the introduction of vampire mythology into the humdrum present day (such as the Sookie Stackhouse series). It’s a reinvention that enlivens a creative discipline, and while both Slint and Swainston share a common theme of narrative and flawed characters, the best link between them is to see how revolutionary they are.

Avatar is, as I’m sure you know, the latest film from James Cameron. His previous works are mostly massive hits, with a strong sci-fi flavour, and Avatar just happens to be his most sci-fi flavoured yet. It’s about blue aliens on another planet, but it also happens to be in 3D.

Most of the computer animated films that have come out recently have been available in 3D and regular 2D, so it’s not so unique for a film to be in 3D. And, at the start of the showing (after the trailers, so you knew it was important), there was an advert for Sky TV, which promised to deliver 3D television to your living room, starting later this year.

Take away the uniqueness of being in 3D, and Avatar becomes a slightly silly retelling of Pocahontas. The film is designed to be seen in 3D, almost as a textbook of ‘filmography using 3D techniques’, and thus we have a lot of very crass shots that utilise the new techniques for changing perception of depth.

Cameron’s previous sci-fi work used urban locations in a sinister way, reflecting the future from darkened streets, giving us paranoia about the urban and suburban surroundings of everyday – but Avatar’s computer-generated forest removes any skill needed to compose a shot using existing locations. Between the lack of mise-en-scene and the need to force three-dimensionality into every shot, this film become the most visually boring blockbuster that I’ve seen in a long time.

This isn’t the first time that Hollywood has become obsessed with 3D filmmaking. The late seventies and early eighties saw a bunch of movies made in three dimensions using the old red/blue glasses technique. And then, later on, all those movies were de-3D’d, so that they could be released on video and DVD, because people didn’t want to sit around and watch Amityville 3D whilst wearing stupid glasses.

The new technique for 3D also requires stupid glasses, which come in different styles depending on what cinema chain you go to. Mine were uncomfortable, and gave me a bit of a “Buddy Holly/Hoxton twat” look (see above). After about an hour I started occasionally slipping them off to relieve the pressure building up around my eyes – badly designed glasses give me weird face-ache – and found that watching Avatar without the 3D-enabling devices wasn’t that bad. Not great, but not that bad.

The idea of this new wave of 3D is to make watching a screen an unbelievable experience, but it’s misguided because it’s just a a screen. When you’re in a cinema, you might be happy to wear an odd pair of glasses to get that special effect, but at home? With the kids and the dog and the dinner on your lap? If you do invest in the ultra-swish home 3D cinema system, at some point you’ll be bound to end up watching 3D programs without the special glasses.

And that’s when you’ll find out that it’s not that much different. A little less focused, a little less worth watching – the fuzzy backgrounds of 3D films without the special glasses on make the craft of cinema inaccessible.

Avatar’s great failure is that it thinks 3D is important enough to overcome plot and pacing, and whilst it is visually impressing, it’s not visually stunning. But it was a film that could not fail – too much money had been poured into it. Perhaps backing was secured because 3D films would be impossible to pirate, or because the new technologies would sell thousands more flat-screen TV’s. The film obviously lies at a pinnacle of complex capitalist network, with layers of merchandising, advertising, and even advances in technology behind it. It is a great spectacle to behold.

But it’s failure is it’s function as entertainment – it’s so slick, so perfectly presented that there’s almost nothing for you to wonder over, after you leave the cinema. And I literally mean wonder, in the sense of wonderment, because the crass materialism at play behind Avatar leaves nothing fantastical in the film.

Endnote: While I was deeply disappointed in Avatar, I have managed to sneak in two SF references in this blogpost. There’s no prize, but feel free to drop me a line (or leave a comment) if you spot one.

This book starts with a potted history of Wikipedia, beginning at it’s predecessor Nupedia, and then follows the development of the site until sometime in mid-2008, when the book was published. As an effort to keep up with both change and the technology, a wiki was set up to act as an afterword. Weirdly, although it’s mentioned in the text of the book, the only place I could find a link to it was the Wikipedia page for the book – not the books flashy website.

The book itself isn’t shy of the typical criticisms of Wikipedia, which are over-reliance on volunteers and exclusion of expert voices, but also adds a new practical consideration by noting that costs might exceed the budget set out. This is something that has obviously turned up in the research of the book, as it is an ongoing concern for the Wikipedia foundation (and at the time of writing in 2010, wikipedia is plastered with “personal appeal” banners from Jimmy Wales).

Obviously a work of considerable sophistication, the book will stand as that rare type of useful academic research that can be read by interested laymen. It does seem that researching the earlier days and structure of wikipedia was easier than discussing the later, more recent days, but considering the charges of revisionism laid at Jimmy Wales’ self-aggrandising claims, this is research that might actually become more useful as time goes on.

Tricker details – as referred to by the case of RickK, the admin who left owing to difference with others of the elite wikipedia admin corps, despite the goodwill he had generated in the community, are briefly touched on in the end. The book was published too early to touch the controversy of when it was found that the short-stock articles explaining several financial practices central to the recent economic meltdown were written by a journalist directly employed by Wall Street investment banks (although it’s hard to fault a book on things that happened after it was published).

Personally, I found the book interesting, if a little too willing to explain some of the easier-to-grasp ideas behind wiki’s. Some of the technological advances that wikipedia had been responsible for were news to me, but the more interesting stories of clashes within the new online/wikipedia culture seemed rushed the further the book went. I’d say that while this book isn’t the definitive history of wikipedia, it’s certainly a start on documenting the massive effect the wikipedia foundation is having upon contemporary culture.