Review « 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 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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April 3, 2010

New Who: Probably Not as Good as That Other Who

I get unstuck when people say that they think the new Doctor Who is good. The TV program itself is a fairly mediocre production, which lurches from set piece to set piece with some spectacularly bad character development. I think people are so attached to it because it’s one of the few programs that are exist today that you are allowed to be a fan of – you’d look a bit silly in an Eastenders t-shirt, and there isn’t a lot of PM merchandising available at the BBC store. No matter how many letters I write asking for a “Team Eddie” badge set.

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.

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March 23, 2010

GTA:CW – GTFO

I had Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars on my iPhone for about 72 hours before I deleted it.

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.

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January 26, 2010

Lord of Light: Why Cameron’s Avatar is just the latest reincarnation of Barnum-style showmanship

I knew it was a bad sign when, halfway through the film, I started regretting not going to Maplin’s. That’s not how it should work if you put the cash down to go and see the latest Hollywood blockbuster; you shouldn’t have the urge to stifle a yawn halfway through, let alone think about checking your emails, or going shopping for obscure electronic parts.

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.

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January 4, 2010

Review of “The Wikipedia Revolutions”, by Andrew Lih

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.

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July 10, 2009

Infinite Jest Interim Report (Palimpsest Review)

My reading of Infinite Jest is part of Infinite Summer, an online reading group of the novel by David Wallace Foster

Infinite Jest: is it really that great a novel, or is it merely called a great novel owing to its size? After all, American’s like big things: Buicks, skyscrapers, Texas. And Infinite Jest is a big book, at 1079 pages in total.

Although currently on track with the reading schedule as laid out on the Infinite Summer website, I’ve been holding myself back. I’ve got a really high reading speed, and I’ve been reading other books at the same time, as I’m not finding Wallace’s writing style that interesting. Yes, it has some good points, and some amusing funny parts, but it’s sheer length finds it unfocused, the narrative is all over the place (despite being a few hundred pages in), and the over-reliance on footnotes is a distracting affectation.

(For instance, in this paragraph I’m writing in the main body of the text to tell you that the footnotes are considered one of the novels main strengths by IJ’s aficionados, pointing to the fragmentary nature of reading via the internet as an excuse for this strange writing quirk. But by writing in the main body of the text you keep the narrative flow but still impart information like I’m doing here. I think authors refer to this as ‘writing skills’.)

Infinite Jest is, no doubt, an interesting book. But whilst reading it I’ve been reminded of all those short novels that you are heartbroken to leave behind once finished. One such book that I’ve been using as ballast for my reading speed is Catherynne M. Valente’s Palimpsest, a story about searching for a way to a magical realm. I’d heard it was a good book via the underground sci-fi grapevine, but not paid too much attention to the plot. I probably should have done, because the mcguffin that gets you into the magical realm of Palimpest is having sex.

Valente’s book has a lot more sex in it than the ordinary fantasy books I come across – er, I mean read. But it is sensitively handled, and belies the underlying theme of the book – that of seduction. Those who wish to travel to Palimpsest are seduced by the city, and it’s promise of a different life, but Valente makes it clear that sometimes those promises are lies.

While Palimpsest was in no way the novel I was expecting, it’s concise effort to tell four interleaved tales served as an ideal counterpoint to Wallace’s rambling style. Valente knows how to write the sort of punchy prose that made me keep reading, her style reminiscent of a sexier, gothic-ier Neil Gaiman. Having finished Palimpest I only wish that there was a sequel I could pick up – I doubt I will be left with a similar yearning once Infinite Jest is finished.

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June 29, 2009

Confederacy of Dunces: Book Review

Confederacy of Dunces is a book from the late 1960’s, set in New Orleans. I first heard of it from the writer/speaker/internet guy Merlin Mann, who uses a line from it as his Twitter ‘handle’, differentiating his presence on the mighty microblogging service from his more professional website, 43folders.com.

As I said in my last post, I’m trying to read my way out of the sci-fi genre. More accurately, I’m trying to expand my knowledge of literature, and as I consistently find Merlin Mann’s web writing approachable and interesting, I wanted to see what sort of book he find inspiring. I came across my copy by accident in Black Flame Books – after guiltily buying another SF book to add to my collection, I turned to the non-genre piles, grabbed the first book at random, and it happened to be Confederacy. Score!

Confederacy is a book that belongs wholly to a subsection of American literature, the humorous look at American society. Other authors working in that subsection might be Pynchon, Dave Eggers, and David Foster Wallace, all of whom have written books that use wry humour to reflect on contemporary American life. I have to say “might be” because I’m just not an expert, and I don’t have a lot of literary knowledge about American writers.

I was prepared to not enjoy this book. I’d brought it on a whim, and I have plenty of other books that I could have switched to if I had found it tedious. But much to my surprise, I enjoyed it and found myself reading it quicker than I thought I would. It’s main strength is the way the author, John Kennedy Toole, manages to create a wide range of interesting characters, and yet keeps them as separate individuals. There is no sense in this book of the individual characters merging into one, as can happen with some novels.

Not one of the incidental characters seems to drop in to serve a plot function, unlike, say Paul Coelho or other Magical Realism authors. By using New Orleans as a backdrop, perhaps Toole has a easier time of it – the city is famously strange – but instead of the shorthand “N’awlins” that you see in films such as Easy Rider, it is the strangeness of any small community. Everybody knows each other, and the interconnected actions of the characters drive the plot in an understandable manner that actually makes sense.

Despite the tone of the book, it does have a happy ending – not that I’m against sad or sorrowful books, I just don’t want to wade through a few hundred pages of misery to find that all the characters die in the end. In fact, the ending is almost setting the book up for a sequel, but one of the saddest things about this book is that it was published posthumously, eleven years after the death by suicide of the author.

The fact that the book is so good, is commonly regarded as so good, and yet the author never saw any acclaim for his work is very thought provoking. Like Infinite Jest, it’s a book that today’s leading internet writers and commentators are really keen on. Are these long-form texts the product of the same drive to making jokes that we see in the writing of Gruber and Mann? As extremely short-form texts start to dominate – shorter even than blogging – will we lose the future novelists who would make us laugh in a way that questions our short-termist society?

I don’t know the answers to these questions, but reading Confederacy of Dunces made me want to both read and write more. That’s surely a sign of a good book, right? I’d advise you to pick it up if you were looking for something new to read, because in it’s dense text we see the sort of authorship that might be dying out now.

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June 26, 2009

Summer Reading

Now that the scary ’100th post’ is out of the way, this seems like a good time to talk about the program of reading I’m undertaking this summer. For my coursework, I’m slogging through what seems to be an unending amount of PDF’s and websites which suck all the joy out of reading. I even have a automatic folder of PDF’s that I’ve collected over the course of the year that refer to things that are Worthy and To Be Read.

To counter-act this, I’m reading a lot of different stuff. Stuff that is out of place from the usual stuff I read. I’ve just finished Confederacy of Dunces, and have a small pile of interesting fiction to follow it up with. Part of that involves doing the Infinite Summer challenge, where I’ll be reading Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace over the course of the summer. This all stems from last year, when I realised that I’d pretty much read all of the SF that I was interested in. That’s not to say that I’m no longer interested in SF, it’s just that I read so darn fast that I’m going to have to wait for more books to be written. I was also stymied in conversation when talking about books – I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve got blank looks after making reference to classics of science fiction literature. (It’s not my fault you’ve not read your Bester) In an effort to both better myself and have more conversations about books then, I’m now announcing my summer reading list: Confederacy of Dunces (completed!) Child 44 (lent to me by the lovely and kind Colleen) Palimpsest Infinte Jest Hell’s Cartographers Douglas Coupland (no, it’s a book about Douglas Coupland, I’m not being stupid) Queen of Candesce McSweeney’s 29 As you can see from clicking those links, a lot of those books are still quite SF in nature, so I’d be grateful for any suggestions as to other stuff I could read. I’m not sure that I’m up to reading any Bronte quite yet, but anything more intermediate than straight-up regency would be interesting… (just not Georgette Heyer, okay?)

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