Fiction
'River of Gods' by Ian McDonald
Though published in 2004, this book is very much a Cyberpunk novel of the old style from the 1980s. Set in 2047 the action largely takes place in an India which has fragmented independent states, sometimes at war with each other. Artificial intelligence has advanced to a level at which it can exceed human thought and its application is policed. In the classic Cyberpunk approach, McDonald weaves together a range of apparently disparate characters whose various stories come together towards the climax. He handles this in a less clunky way than some of the 'heroes' of Cyberpunk, notably William Gibson. Though a westerner, he has done well, in my view anyway, in envisaging a future India, though some traits such as a love of cricket and soap operas, perhaps have been assumed to continue unchallenged.
The level of technology with drone attack devices and surgery that has led to the rise of 'nutes', literally surgically created neuter people, seems appropriate for the coming decades. It even features a sentient soap opera which I liked as a concept. There is some standard science fiction with a device close to Earth which is of ancient alien design and the development by a company which derives power from parallel universes, but they are merged in with the more down-to-Earth Cyberpunk technology without much of a jar. In addition there is a small scale war and climate change that has led to extended droughts. However, to some degree including all of these elements is pretty overwhelming for the reader.
The characters are diverse and believable, with their different motives, some pretty mundane such as escaping a cloying marriage, others exotic such as connecting to another universe. He has done reasonably well in looking at how a different world would shape attitudes, but crucially old world attitudes repeatedly shape the action and the fate of a number of the characters especially those that end tragically. Overall, this is an interesting book and if I had not read as much Cyberpunk as I have I think I would have been excited by it. The prime problem is the length (584 pages in my edition) and so you reach the closing stages of the book feeling worn out and wanting it to be over because you have had so many concepts, so many twists and turns, that by the end, you simply want the climax to be finished. The book is good, but ultimately drowns in all of the ideas, characters and activities that McDonald piles in.
'Pattern Recognition' by William Gibson
It was ironic that the next book I read was by William Gibson who had been one of the leading lights of the Cyberpunk era. However, I have been unaware that he has continued writing, indeed I was not even aware he was still alive. He seems, if 'Pattern Recognition' is characteristic of his post-Cyberpunk writing to have moved on to contemporary novels. This one is set in 2002, only a year before the book was published. Much activity happens in London, especially around Camden an area I visited a lot at that time. The first thing I noticed is how much Gibson has improved as a writer since I read his books in the 1980s. As noted in the review above, I always found the working out of his stories very clunky and you could see where they were heading from very early in the book. Added to that his writing has become far more lucid and there were passages in this book that I really admired for their skill. I cannot remember seeing an author develop so far as Gibson seems to have done and I guess it suggests there is hope for all authors, or maybe he just employed a better editor than before. Perhaps writing contemporary fiction, publishers do not simply bow down before his apparently stunning concepts as they might have once done.
The book focuses on American Cayce Pollard who has an allergy to brand logos and so is used by companies to test out whether their new logo will have impact. She is also alert to global trends and highlights 'the next big thing'. Rather erratically she becomes involved with artists and film makers, but as it progresses the book narrows down to her pursuing the maker of snippets of a film which have been released sporadically over the internet with no contextualisation. A community has grown up trying to read meaning into the snippets. The quest means her interacting with cool people from London to Tokyo to Moscow as ultimately she is successful in locating the source and keeping the information out of the hands of wealthy obsessives and corporations. At times the book is satirical about corporate culture and especially marketing and branding and takes a wry look at life in the capitals of the UK, Japan and Russia. The improvement in Gibson's writing really helps these elements be effective. His characters are interesting, not all of them are likeable and some verge on caricatures, but he creates a rich complex environment both real and virtual which does not go too far the way McDonald does to drown you in all that he has conjured up. While I will not rush out and buy all of Gibson's 21st Century output, if I come across others from this phase of his writing, I would not pick them up.
'Death at La Fenice' by Donna Leon
I have been given a lot of the books in Leon's Comissario Brunetti series, this book, published in 1992 was the first. I think this is because I enjoyed Michael Dibdin's Aurelio Zen series also set in contemporary Italy. I have been annoyed by comments made by Leon in an interview to 'The Guardian' newspaper in which she said while no male author can successfully write female characters, female authors, because they live in a male-dominated world, are well capable of writing male characters. I found that a very arrogant attitude but given that she is an American I suppose such sweeping claims are to be expected.
This book is certainly a feminist crime novel. Though her police detective is a man, much of the story features women who have suffered at the hands of men. All the men beside Brunetti are at best bitchy or short-sighted in their arrogance and at worst repeated paedophile offenders. The story is around a famous German conductor who is found poisoned mid-way through a performance at La Fenice opera house in Venice. The story is pretty straight forward, like many detective stories set around theatres or concert halls. Leon is less concerned about the mystery and in fact the reader may be able to work out the solution from very early on. Her concern is showing how nasty the dead man was in his treatment of women, children, gay men and lesbians. These factors are more important to the story than the conductor's collaboration with the Nazi regime.
Perhaps it is Leon's upbringing, but in many ways I felt this novel was far older than 1992, especially in terms of its attitude to how women and lesbians are perceived. The view that the entire population is interested in opera and familiar with its participants also jarred. Hanging over much of the book is a very old fashioned social attitude. I think Leon, who lived in Italy for man years is chiding the country for not being up-to-date. In passing she notes it corruption, something which often featured in Dibdin's books. However, she does not successfully disengage from the dated social attitudes in her own portrayals which makes her seem complicit in them even while she might be aiming to counter them. Then again, she might not, but given what I have heard from her, I do not believed she sees these things this way herself or maybe she has a range of attitudes that it is difficult to entangle. Thus, overall, the women are largely victims of circumstances and maliciousness and the men are at least incompetent if not nasty in a range of ways. The only exception is her hero.
I do not really understand why the book received so much acclaim, perhaps because of its feminist agenda, maybe because of its detailed portrayal of Venice. It is a standard murder mystery that exposes the author's views on subjects very clearly to some degree removing much of the intrigue and at times compelling characters to be pretty exaggerated. I have a string of these books to get through and hope that Leon's writing improved especially in terms of subtlety.
Non-Fiction
'Rethinking British Decline' ed. by Richard English and Michael Kenny
There is so much going on in this book that it is difficult to review. It was published in 2000, but it is fascinating reading it now because of so many of the antecedents of the current Brexit crisis can be seen in it, even going back to 1962 and the leader of the Labour Party of the time, Hugh Gaitskell, warning about the dangers of European federalism. The first part of the book is a series of interviews with many of the great economic historians of the last two-fifths of the 20th Century, Sidney Pollard, Samuel Brittan, David Marquand and other commentators from that late period such as Corelli Barnett and Will Hutton. Much of their time is spent dismissing the views of the others and in some cases, notably Jonathan Clark, arguing that Britain actually did not decline in the 20th Century, in part due to the more widely held view that its economy has always been more about finance and insurance than manufacturing and emphasis on standards of living and opportunities; Britain still being in the G7.
The second part of the book is a more standard collection of chapters looking at the same aspects often mentioned in the first half of the book, such as problems with British culture and institutions, plus relationship with the European Community and the former Empire. There are no firm conclusions, except perhaps that declinism as a political tool has been greater than actual evidence of decline itself. Interestingly, it is all handled at a very high level of society and politics and aside from comments on the rise of unemployment under the Thatcher governments, there is no reference to rising poverty, debt, homelessness, ill-health and declining education and opportunities across the UK. I do not think an update today would have such a neutral sense, but then it was produced in the days of 'things can only get better' early in the Blair governments. I think this is a good summary of the different angles on British decline and especially on declinism as a ideology usable across the political spectrum. In some ways it also marks a changing of the guard, and despite the persistence of some of those interviewed into old age, it seems unlikely that economic historians will ever have such an impact on politics as they did in the 1960s-90s and that in itself is interesting to see as that breed of academic/commentator was coming to their sunset in terms of influence.
Audio Books - Fiction
'Sepulchre' by Kate Mosse; read by Lorelei King
I felt I had read Mosse's best seller 'Labyrinth' (2006) longer ago than it had been published. I have seen some of her later books, including this one published in 2007, regularly in charity shops, but had been put off by the length of them, so it was ideal to have as an audio book. As with 'Labyrinth' in 'Sepulchre', Mosse uses the approach of parallel stories between two women's lives, one in the present and one in the past, in this case 1891 rather than the 13th Century. Meredith Martin travels to France to research the life of Claude Debussy for a book she is writing and as a side mission to find out a little about her birth family, which it proves, originated in southern France. Martin ends up going to Rennes-les-Baines and staying at a hotel in the Domaine de la Cade. In 1891, with her brother mixed up with a jealous wealthy man's revenge and fleeing creditors, the teenager Léonie Vernier travels to the same house owned by her widowed aunt. A further connection is a sepulchre in the grounds of the house, apparently connected to the Cathars persecuted in the region in the 13th Century and the source of both music and art work, notably tarot card designs, that both Vernier and Martin come into contact.
At first I thought that the book was going to be at a very populist level. King's opening narration, very breathless in the US audio book style, added to this sense. However, I was glad that I persisted. Both King and the book settled down and while you might feel the connections are rather contrived, as the story progressed you had the sense that the motives and behaviour in both times were legitimate. While the genuinely nasty antagonist closes in on the Vernier siblings, Martin becomes involved in investigating the death of her new lover's father. This was the section which jarred most. Martin, in her late twenties, seems willing to hop into bed with a stranger and to become his partner very quickly, involving herself in a dangerous situation with aplomb. I do not know if that is the self-confidence of American women, but given that the author is asking us to accept tarot readings and phantoms and does so pretty well, this aspect really jarred and I felt she had been ordered to include it for some sex rather than to genuinely advance the story. Interestingly, this was a book that I enjoyed as it progressed. However, I do think she did not need to go into the latter years of Léonie Vernier's life and it would have been crisper to end it all in 1891. Thus, at times I had mixed feelings about the book, but was ultimately satisfied by it. I largely believed the characters and what they go up to. The Gothic elements were handled well without becoming overblown or too deeply trope coining. The research and attention to detail was excellent.
While I often have difficulty with US narrators over-exaggerating their readings and really worried that King was going to persist with this, as I have found with other such readers, if you give them a few chapters at the start, they settle down and given a more level tone. She does the range of voices both male and female, in both time periods well. While I feel a reader of a different nationality would have made the story sound more sinister, King's performance was not as much out of step as I initially feared.
'Fever of the Bone' by Val McDermid; read by Michael Mahoney
I listened to the first of McDermid's stories featuring psychologist Tony Hill and police detective Carol Jordan, 'The Mermaids Singing' (1995) last year. This book published in 2009, is the sixth in the series which this year reached 11 books. Hill and Jordan now live in the same building though not together. In large part this is blamed on Hill's impotence which has continued through the novels.Furthermore Jordan, heading a specialist murder investigation team, is encouraged not to call on Hill's services when teenagers begin to go missing and then turn up dead with their genitals removed and instead use a cheaper police psychologist. Hill goes from the fictional Bradfield to work for the police of Worcester which develops the sub-plot of the death of his father who disappeared before he was born and his own poor relationship with his nasty mother. Hill is brought into a case which soon connects to the killings in Bradfield and aided by the arrogant incompetence of the police psychologist is brought into the broader case. While the book is about a serial killer, the motive differs from those which usually turn up and the twist to keep the killer's identity secret is well handled. Overall, the book is competent and engaging with very believable characters. I have another of McDermid's novels on my stack to listen to. Mahoney handles the story telling well and does convincing women, not simply Jordan but also a range of bereaved mothers and female friends of the victims, to the extent that you forget he is there, a sign of a good reader.
'The Secret Adversary' by Agatha Christie; read by Samantha Bond
Most people tend to think of Agatha Christie having written murder mysteries set in English country houses. However, this, like 'The Seven Dials Mystery' (1929) which I read last month, is one of her adventure stories, of the Bulldog Drummond ilk, though with women taking a leading role. This is the first of five books featuring Thomas 'Tommy' Beresford and Prudence 'Tuppence' Cowley who subsequently marry. Though published in 1922, it is actually set just ten months after the end of the First World War, so around September 1919, though is not dramatized as such when seen on television. Seeking work, Tommy and Tuppence set themselves up as private detectives and are drawn into a conspiracy by Bolshevik agents to trigger a general strike, influencing trade union leaders by revealing a secret deal that was to be brokered with the Americans in 1915 but which was thought lost when the RMS 'Lusitania'. At the time it is set the Russian Civil War was still raging and the Russo-Polish War was about to break out. There was a concern about Russian revolutionaries trying to spread unrest across exhausted Europe, so it has a political currency akin to featuring ISIS agents planning unrest in Britain today.
As with 'The Seven Dials Mystery' the tone of the book is almost like an Enid Blyton story with lots of haring around Britain and being confined and escaping. At the heart of the mystery is identifying the prime Russian agent, Mr. Brown and recovering the proposed treaty, which is interesting to speculate on what it might contain. Fortunately the antagonists are not idiots and pull off tricks on the heroes and there are two well handled deceptions by other characters. Again, common with 'The Seven Dials Mystery' it is impossible to trust many of the characters and rather than the bulk being suspects, the majority are trusted until the real malefactor is revealed. This adventure story probably lacks the stately unravelling of a Christie mystery; instead it has frantic action and demonstrative dialogue and is very much of its time. I enjoyed it as a romp but little more. Samantha Bond is now one of my favourite readers and handles a whole spectrum of European accented English as well as catching the energy of the two leads appropriately.
'Poirot's Early Cases' by Agatha Christie; read by David Suchet and Hugh Fraser
This book was published in 1974 but was made up of 18 short stories that had appeared in magazines between 1923-35. You can see Poirot's progress through the stories. At the start he and Captain Hastings are sharing rooms and stories are told from Hastings's perspective, very much like John Watson recounting Sherlock Holmes's cases. By the end of the collection, Poirot is widely renowned, Hastings has moved out and Miss. Lemon has been appointed as his secretary, though she is less enthusiastic than portrayed in television dramatizations. Having seen dramatizations of all of the stories, it is interesting to note how they are fleshed out, I will not say 'padded out' because I do not feel there is anything extraneous in the television versions, but coming back to the original stories, you see their epigrammatic nature and demonstrate that Christie was adept at short story writing, something which requires different skills to writing novels, especially in terms of crime fiction.
David Suchet as Hercule Poirot and Hugh Fraser as Captain Hastings, appeared right throughout the TV series 'Poirot' (broadcast 1989-2013) so it is fun to hear them when putting on the voices they acted with, when presenting these stories. They read alone on different stories. Suchet is far more adept at not only doing his Poirot voice, but a wide range of characters that feature in the short stories. Fraser, puts on the voices far less but I know some listeners appreciated the story being narrated rather than the norm of performing it. Both bring a richness to the stories and conjure up the time in which they are set. The crispness of these stories, interesting characters, the clever ploys used by the criminals and the detective, plus some interesting twists even in a short story, make these very enjoyable without having to become involved in lengthy detail. They do very well at showing up a particular side of Christie's writing. The two actors associated so much with the stories in the public consciousness being the reader just rounds off the success of this audio book.
Showing posts with label cyberpunk. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cyberpunk. Show all posts
Sunday, 31 March 2019
Friday, 4 April 2008
Get A Life! A Second Life?
This posting is looking at Second Life which is a social network system, launched in 2003, that allows users to interact with each other via avatars (i.e. animated three-dimensional representation of themselves) which can be as realistic or fantastical as they like. The space in which they opeate are 'islands' that people and companies and other organisations (the Chinese government famously has recently bought a very large island) and put in structures, buildings, shops and so on. By paying in real money, people have currency within the environment. See: http://secondlife.com/ Second Life now has 13 million members predominantly from the Western countries. There are other less popular ones appearing and so are more game orientated (most controversially the Miss Bimbo one recently launched which encourages young females (from aged 9 upwards) to have an avatar who becomes a model and buys expensive fashions and has cosmetic surgery, etc, in their own words in an effort to: 'Become the most famous and beautiful bimbo in the world..': www.missbimbo.com It is currently being investigated by Ofcom the British communications watchdog see: technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article3628914.ece ). Sorry, I have got on to the controversial aspects already before filling out the background. Second Life is not a game; its activities are created by the users moving around and interacting with each other and the devices and buildings there. Other rival worlds include: IMVU, There, Active Worlds, Kaneva and the explicitly sexually-orientated Red Light Center.
There seem now to be regular presentations how getting into Second Life is an essential part of marketing a company and you see regular reports that IBM and Gap and many others are setting up their own spaces in the system and effectively marketing is what the Chinese government is doing with its own island. People can walk their avatars into your store or whatever and see about your products, your company identity, etc. However, as someone at a presentation said 'why would you want to buy a Gap teeshirt when elsewhere in Second Life you can be a panda'. All over the internet are people creating outfits and bodies for avatars by the hundreds. Searching for real clothing you constantly hit websites promoting virtual clothing for avatars. For other similar, more game orientated sites such as World of Warcraft which I have mentioned before: www.worldofwarcraft.com/ people actually sell products that can be used in the game via the eBay online auctioning site as if they were real items not just some computer coding. So to some extent real world companies are having to compete with the more fantastical items that you can buy to use in this other world.
Right, well this is all well and good, part of our modern society and the step on from more mundane social interaction sites such as Facebook and MySpace. There of course are the usual hazards of online interaction in that 'online no-one knows you're a dog' to quote Peter Steiner from 1993. The avatars which do not even have to be human often do not reflect the individual operating them. This can be liberating as it allows people to play out very different roles, in a 'safe' environment, for example as different genders (or even species) and interact in that way. In Second Life you can be as beautiful and as trendy as you like and never age. Those playing against type might find out useful things about themselves online, notably if they are concerned about coming out as gay/lesbian they can use this as a first step to interact with others on this basis. In addition, it soon becomes clear in any search of the internet that there is a lot of cybersex of all kinds going on and whilst this is 'safe' compared to physical sex in terms of risk of sexually-transmitted infections (STIs) and pregnancy, etc., it can have psychological effects. One interesting blog on that aspect is by Abulia Savant whose avatar over a period became more and more a sexually submissive character ultimately a sexual slave to other avatars, something she initially enjoyed but which has left her very concerned and discomforted. Her blog: http://www.abuliasavant.com/?p=207 shows that what goes on 'virtually' is not totally divorced what who we are in this world. Online a writer called Xah Lee has a tour of some of the more exotic elements of Second Life: http://xahlee.org/sl/index.html Note, some images are sexual, but most are anodyne. He shows also people whose avatars are dragons or humanoid animals, etc. which outlines how some people use it in the way similar to MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons) are used, though lacking the quests and so on of those.
To some extent the use of virtual worlds has long been predicted in fiction going back to the 1980s, especially cyberpunk writing which regular readers will know I enjoy. We have not reached the stage that those authors like William Gibson, Bruce Sterling and Neal Stephenson (interestingly I was once in a college library which had Stephenson's fiction works in its section on technology; he also created a steampunk/cyberpunk crossover in 'The Diamond Age' (1995)) envisaged, with us physically connecting to the computer and our whole consciousness fading into it, but there is nothing to say that will not come. We have virtual reality headsets and controllers that shudder to reflect action happening on screen. In addition people do become immersed, such as the 26-year old gamer known as Zhang (a Chinese surname) who died in a cybercafe in southern China in September 2007 after playing for three days solidly on Morrowind. Many of us having spent a long time at our computers will stand up to find we have a full bladder that we had not noticed because our minds were so taken away with what we were doing on screen, so maybe we do not need it even more immersive than it is. It does seem though we are moving gradually in the direction envisaged by the cyberpunk authors and possibly ultimately even further towards the
The other area of concern that I would bring up stems from this immersion and relates to my recent posting about my failed holiday and the 6-year old's withdrawal symptoms from being away from computer games just for a couple of days. This week I talked with three mothers one who has a 9-year old daughter and a 13-year old son, one with two sons: a 16-year old and an 18-year old and one mother with a 21-year old son. It was agreed that boys/men are much more likely to become seriously addicted to online facilities whether gaming or socialising; girls/women do participate but are more likely to mix it in with other activities. All the mothers said that online involvement had harmfully affected their sons' academic work. One was now moving to set up his access so it chucked him out after two hours. This was a lot easier in the days of dial-up connections (which I was surprised to find are still common in many parts of the USA even) than with the constant broadband flow. To some extent the 6-year old in my house is finding that no-one knows what he is talking about when he goes on and on about the games he has played at home, but I imagine that the reverse will be the case in 5-7 years time and as an adolescent if he lacks a virtual presence people will ignore his physical one. Schools need to work with pupils not only about the potential dangers of the people they meet online (and it does appear they have been quick to add this to the lessons on 'stranger danger' regarding people in parks, etc.) but also how to manage gaming/online socialising in the same way they address drugs and alcohol.
I deliberately used the title 'get a life!' because in the past that was what was shouted at geeks and nerds who were felt to be too obsessed with their hobbies and interests. Things may be beginning to be turned on their heads and people who are simply present in the physical world are going to be seen as the ones missing out. The online world is going to be 'better' because we can be who we want to be. I can be the 25-year old Goth lord with steampunk technology rather than the 40-year incompetent with an old PC, so which am I going to choose? On this point I read that this was the reason why the first movie in the the Matrix triology, i.e. 'The Matrix' (1999) was so much more preferred to 'The Matrix Reloaded' and 'The Matrix Revolutions' (also 2003) because in the first movie the characters much of the time striding around in cool, shiny costumes with big guns whereas in the latter two movies they spent more time in dreary, gloomy settings dressed in shabby clothes. In that context the bulk of us want to remain in the matrix rather than go outside and face the cold, hard real world. This is fine when we can physically load ourselves into a computer and become a stream of electrons. However, for now, we have to work on ways at how we and especially children of today and tomorrow balance the needs of our bodies, to have a job, to interact with physical humans in this boring, mundane, uncomfortable place and leave the other life for an occasional break not the dominant facet of our lives.
P.P. Well, following all of this discussion I decided to give it a go and I must say the results were disappointing. On Second Life I registered on the CyberGoth default as Rooksmoor Oberlander (you get a limited number of surnames and for UK citizens they all seem to be German or Polish surnames) and went in for orientation. It was like a basic point and click computer game. The key difficulty for me was that the graphics clearly clash with my computer as rather than the cool CyberGoth male all I got was what looked like rags hanging from a scarecrow and no feet. Other people either looked the same or as mis-shapen boxes. I talked to a few and then gave up as it is difficult to interact when you cannot see the people as people. I then tried Red Light Center, much more involved in downloading, but seemingly less developed when you get there and you cannot even do the most basic thing there without having to spend real world money. I suppose it is a commercial business and they seem more concerned to push contact websites so I found it difficult even to access the world, so I de-installed that one.
Clearly there are more challenges than I envisaged becoming virtual. No-one could explain my graphics problem on Second Life so it seems insoluble. My computer is only a couple of years old and capable of rendering the complex graphics of 'Medieval II Total War' with hundreds of people in it, far more detailed in image than on Second Life. Maybe my broadband is too slow to render the avatars properly.
There seem now to be regular presentations how getting into Second Life is an essential part of marketing a company and you see regular reports that IBM and Gap and many others are setting up their own spaces in the system and effectively marketing is what the Chinese government is doing with its own island. People can walk their avatars into your store or whatever and see about your products, your company identity, etc. However, as someone at a presentation said 'why would you want to buy a Gap teeshirt when elsewhere in Second Life you can be a panda'. All over the internet are people creating outfits and bodies for avatars by the hundreds. Searching for real clothing you constantly hit websites promoting virtual clothing for avatars. For other similar, more game orientated sites such as World of Warcraft which I have mentioned before: www.worldofwarcraft.com/ people actually sell products that can be used in the game via the eBay online auctioning site as if they were real items not just some computer coding. So to some extent real world companies are having to compete with the more fantastical items that you can buy to use in this other world.
Right, well this is all well and good, part of our modern society and the step on from more mundane social interaction sites such as Facebook and MySpace. There of course are the usual hazards of online interaction in that 'online no-one knows you're a dog' to quote Peter Steiner from 1993. The avatars which do not even have to be human often do not reflect the individual operating them. This can be liberating as it allows people to play out very different roles, in a 'safe' environment, for example as different genders (or even species) and interact in that way. In Second Life you can be as beautiful and as trendy as you like and never age. Those playing against type might find out useful things about themselves online, notably if they are concerned about coming out as gay/lesbian they can use this as a first step to interact with others on this basis. In addition, it soon becomes clear in any search of the internet that there is a lot of cybersex of all kinds going on and whilst this is 'safe' compared to physical sex in terms of risk of sexually-transmitted infections (STIs) and pregnancy, etc., it can have psychological effects. One interesting blog on that aspect is by Abulia Savant whose avatar over a period became more and more a sexually submissive character ultimately a sexual slave to other avatars, something she initially enjoyed but which has left her very concerned and discomforted. Her blog: http://www.abuliasavant.com/?p=207 shows that what goes on 'virtually' is not totally divorced what who we are in this world. Online a writer called Xah Lee has a tour of some of the more exotic elements of Second Life: http://xahlee.org/sl/index.html Note, some images are sexual, but most are anodyne. He shows also people whose avatars are dragons or humanoid animals, etc. which outlines how some people use it in the way similar to MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons) are used, though lacking the quests and so on of those.
To some extent the use of virtual worlds has long been predicted in fiction going back to the 1980s, especially cyberpunk writing which regular readers will know I enjoy. We have not reached the stage that those authors like William Gibson, Bruce Sterling and Neal Stephenson (interestingly I was once in a college library which had Stephenson's fiction works in its section on technology; he also created a steampunk/cyberpunk crossover in 'The Diamond Age' (1995)) envisaged, with us physically connecting to the computer and our whole consciousness fading into it, but there is nothing to say that will not come. We have virtual reality headsets and controllers that shudder to reflect action happening on screen. In addition people do become immersed, such as the 26-year old gamer known as Zhang (a Chinese surname) who died in a cybercafe in southern China in September 2007 after playing for three days solidly on Morrowind. Many of us having spent a long time at our computers will stand up to find we have a full bladder that we had not noticed because our minds were so taken away with what we were doing on screen, so maybe we do not need it even more immersive than it is. It does seem though we are moving gradually in the direction envisaged by the cyberpunk authors and possibly ultimately even further towards the
The other area of concern that I would bring up stems from this immersion and relates to my recent posting about my failed holiday and the 6-year old's withdrawal symptoms from being away from computer games just for a couple of days. This week I talked with three mothers one who has a 9-year old daughter and a 13-year old son, one with two sons: a 16-year old and an 18-year old and one mother with a 21-year old son. It was agreed that boys/men are much more likely to become seriously addicted to online facilities whether gaming or socialising; girls/women do participate but are more likely to mix it in with other activities. All the mothers said that online involvement had harmfully affected their sons' academic work. One was now moving to set up his access so it chucked him out after two hours. This was a lot easier in the days of dial-up connections (which I was surprised to find are still common in many parts of the USA even) than with the constant broadband flow. To some extent the 6-year old in my house is finding that no-one knows what he is talking about when he goes on and on about the games he has played at home, but I imagine that the reverse will be the case in 5-7 years time and as an adolescent if he lacks a virtual presence people will ignore his physical one. Schools need to work with pupils not only about the potential dangers of the people they meet online (and it does appear they have been quick to add this to the lessons on 'stranger danger' regarding people in parks, etc.) but also how to manage gaming/online socialising in the same way they address drugs and alcohol.
I deliberately used the title 'get a life!' because in the past that was what was shouted at geeks and nerds who were felt to be too obsessed with their hobbies and interests. Things may be beginning to be turned on their heads and people who are simply present in the physical world are going to be seen as the ones missing out. The online world is going to be 'better' because we can be who we want to be. I can be the 25-year old Goth lord with steampunk technology rather than the 40-year incompetent with an old PC, so which am I going to choose? On this point I read that this was the reason why the first movie in the the Matrix triology, i.e. 'The Matrix' (1999) was so much more preferred to 'The Matrix Reloaded' and 'The Matrix Revolutions' (also 2003) because in the first movie the characters much of the time striding around in cool, shiny costumes with big guns whereas in the latter two movies they spent more time in dreary, gloomy settings dressed in shabby clothes. In that context the bulk of us want to remain in the matrix rather than go outside and face the cold, hard real world. This is fine when we can physically load ourselves into a computer and become a stream of electrons. However, for now, we have to work on ways at how we and especially children of today and tomorrow balance the needs of our bodies, to have a job, to interact with physical humans in this boring, mundane, uncomfortable place and leave the other life for an occasional break not the dominant facet of our lives.
P.P. Well, following all of this discussion I decided to give it a go and I must say the results were disappointing. On Second Life I registered on the CyberGoth default as Rooksmoor Oberlander (you get a limited number of surnames and for UK citizens they all seem to be German or Polish surnames) and went in for orientation. It was like a basic point and click computer game. The key difficulty for me was that the graphics clearly clash with my computer as rather than the cool CyberGoth male all I got was what looked like rags hanging from a scarecrow and no feet. Other people either looked the same or as mis-shapen boxes. I talked to a few and then gave up as it is difficult to interact when you cannot see the people as people. I then tried Red Light Center, much more involved in downloading, but seemingly less developed when you get there and you cannot even do the most basic thing there without having to spend real world money. I suppose it is a commercial business and they seem more concerned to push contact websites so I found it difficult even to access the world, so I de-installed that one.
Clearly there are more challenges than I envisaged becoming virtual. No-one could explain my graphics problem on Second Life so it seems insoluble. My computer is only a couple of years old and capable of rendering the complex graphics of 'Medieval II Total War' with hundreds of people in it, far more detailed in image than on Second Life. Maybe my broadband is too slow to render the avatars properly.
Friday, 25 May 2007
The Steampunk Genre
Anyone who has read my posts will know I am interested in 'what if?' history whether as a tool for testing history or as an entertainment. Related to that in my interests is what is called 'steampunk', which refers to novels, movies, artwork. For those unfamiliar with this, here is some background.
We have to go back to 1984 when the book 'Neuromancer' by William Gibson was published. Gibson is seen as the 'father of Cyberpunk', though others had already contributed to it, such as Philip K. Dick, publishing from 1950s onwards, who died in 1982 (many of whose books have become movies such as 'Blade Runner', 'Total Recall', 'Paycheck', 'Through A Mirror Darkly') and John Brunner a science fiction author publishing since the late 1960s. Gibson envisaged a dystopian world of the near future with two important characteristics. First that people could physically connect to the internet and send their consciousness into it in order to conduct business or hack. Second, that people would have cybernetic enhancements, such as blades coming from their fists or cameras in their eyes. This latter element Gibson did not invent but what he did was give it a 'sexier' edge. So you had the 'cyber' of cybernetics and the punk of very urban, dirty, sprawling cities. In particular, Gibson's portrayal of a high-tech world dominated by huge, amoral corporations called zaibatsu (the Japanese word for such corporations) seemed to really chime with 1980s 'greed is good' culture. Gibson continued writing with 'Count Zero' (1986), 'Mona Lisa Overdrive' (1988), 'Burning Chrome' (1986 - a short story collection) being the core of his cyberpunk work. I find Gibson's work good on ideas but rather clunky in construction.
Other good cyberpunk autors, if you are interested, include Walter Jon Williams, Lewis Shiner (a European angle on Cyberpunk with references to Michael Moorcock's work too), George Alec Effinger (whose Cyberpunk stories have an interesting Middle Eastern take on the genre) and Bruce Sterling. Sterling is an all round writer who includes historical as well as science fiction stories and I feel his writing is smoother than Gibson's. His 1980 'The Artificial Kid' predates Gibson's work, and whilst not set on Earth has many cyberpunk elements.
Right, you may ask what has all this cyberpunk got to do with steampunk? Well, in 1990, Gibson and Sterling jointly wrote a book called 'The Difference Engine' which envisaged a mid-Victorian Britain in which technology, notably Charles Babbage's computer (the Difference Engine) which in reality was experimented on in the 1840s, was a success and led to a computer age in the mid-19th century (so a kind of 'what if?' which as you know, appeals to me). [Difference engines had been proposed as early as 1786 and after Babbage, Per Georg Scheutz built a number in the 1850s including one he sold to the British Government.] The expansion of computing leads to other things like the streamlining of traction engines for racing and the British House of Lords becomes filled with inventors and explorers rather than simply noblemen who have inherited their titles. This is seen as the first steampunk book, like the cyberpunk books exploring a world where technology is key and creates turmoil in a society of conflicting pressures.
There are older roots to the genre. There was a US TV series 'Wild Wild West' which was a TV series which ran for 4 seasons 1965-9. It seems to have been set between the end of the American Civil War and 1875 and Grant is the President (1869-77) shown. The heroes' nemesis, Dr. Miguelito Quixote Loveless, is supposed to have died in 1880. The spark of the original series was rather overshadowed by a couple of really dull TV movies in the 1980s using original cast members who were pretty old by then, and the rather failed 'Wild Wild West' (1999) movie with Will Smith and Kevin Kline, though it gives you a flavour of the original with their private train and the technology that they had. The first three series were darker and shot in black and white, but matching trends in US television at the time by the end of the run it became more 'camp' as have been the subsequent movies. However, they all included various Steampunk equipment such as concealed guns and a stage coach with an ejector seat. The attempts to dismember the USA as featured in the movie plots are common 'what if?' history scenarios (see also 'The Mask of Zorro' (1998)). After this series there seems to have been little interest in Steampunk in the USA until the 1990s.
In novels you have to mention Ronald W. Clark's 1969 novel 'Queen Victoria's Bomb' which envisages an atomic bomb being developed in the 1830s, testing in India and almost used in the Crimean War. Michael Moorcock's books 'Warlord of the Air' (1971), 'The Land Leviathan' (1974) and 'The Steel Tsar' (1981) also featured what can be termed Steampunk elements. In addition, by having Oswald Bastable as the hero of these books, a character who appears as a child in E. Nesbitt's 'The Story of the Treasure Seekers', Moorcock established the Steampunk approach of having characters from other authors' stories featuring as genuine people (alongside historical people too, as Clark had done extensively), a trend taken further by Alan Moore's graphic Steampunk novel, 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' (starting 1999). The the thread goes back even beyond these novels of course.
It can be argued that the real originators of steampunk were Victorian authors themselves. Jules Verne and H.G. Wells with their stories set in contemporary times to them but featuring huge airships, large submarines, tanks, flying motorbikes, a tunnel under the English Channel (as well as more fantastical devices to travel in time or to the Moon or make people invisible) built on the rush of technology throughout the 19th century and took their envisaging further, usually to look at moral issues in such a context, and like the steampunk authors, looking at the dilemmas that such technologies bring. These stories directly influence steampunk authors today, though their morals questions tend to be more direct and simpler than their Victorian predecessors.
What appeals to readers of steampunk is that it is technology but with elegance. In contrast to the sleek chrome of the model day it is brass and iron cast into elaborate shapes. Just look at any movie version of 'The Time Machine', it depicts a machine of elegance, all spinning, with inlaid knobs and polished buttons. In addition, in contrast to the cyberpunk novels which tend to portray people as playthings of vast multinational corporations, the heroes of steampunk are often ordinary people who can invent, they turn out a flying machine in the shed in the garden. Whilst this can be seen as very British, it has appeal in the USA for readers looking back to Ford or the Wright Brothers and their developments. However, the greatest success has been in Japan and from there have come notable steampunk movies such as 'Steamboy' (2005 - set in the UK) and 'Howl's Moving Castle' (2005) based on British author Diana Wynne Jones's 1986 novel of the same name.
Cyberpunk and steampunk have faded from their positions on the bestseller lists that they held in the 1980s and 1990s, but they have now effectively entered the mainstream. Graphic novelists have taken them up, notably in 'The League of Extraordinary Gentleman' (Alan Moore's novel and a 2003 movie). Cyberpunk has informed how we view the internet (Gibson is credited with inventing the word 'cyberspace') and are likely to view cybernetic implants (especially the potential for dehumanisation from them) and the position of the individual in relation to corporations. Steampunk is likely to have less impact, but my affection for it probably reflects me being British and so an in-built nostalgia for past things. Its impact is most likely to be in the style of items in the future and you can already see examples of people 'steampimping' their computers, much in the same way that people in the 1970s put their televisions in ornate wooden cabinets and those of the 1980s put their video cassettes in fake leather book covers.
In the meantime, for anyone interested in 'what if?' and 'why not?' in history, I recommend steampunk stories. To blow my own trumpet I intend to put a short story in that genre on this blog in coming weeks.
P.P. 26/10/2009: Despite my efforts at the time of writing this posting I have realised that I had missed out a vital slice of the history of the development of the steampunk genre. This was the first use of the term steampunk, which was by author K.W. Jeter writing to the science fiction magazine, 'Locus' in April 1987, so preceding 'The Difference Engine' by four years. According to wikipedia, Jeter was looking for an umbrella term for novels of the time, 'The Anubis Gates' (1983) by Tim Powers, 'Homunculus' (1986) by James Blaylock and 'Morlock Night' (1979) and 'Infernal Devices' (1987) that he had written himself which were set in the 19th century and took on board elements of the speculative writing naturally in the style of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells and so included anachronistic technology. Thus, of course, steampunk even in its latest manifestation predated cyberpunk, but that term was so snappy you can see why Jeter thought it was a good one to mutate for the genre he was writing in and certainly better than the description of Powers, Blaylock and Jeter writing in the so-called 'gonzo-historical manner'! Michael Moorcock noted this year (2009) that there is actually little 'punk' in most steampunk writing and he favours 'steam opera'.
We have to go back to 1984 when the book 'Neuromancer' by William Gibson was published. Gibson is seen as the 'father of Cyberpunk', though others had already contributed to it, such as Philip K. Dick, publishing from 1950s onwards, who died in 1982 (many of whose books have become movies such as 'Blade Runner', 'Total Recall', 'Paycheck', 'Through A Mirror Darkly') and John Brunner a science fiction author publishing since the late 1960s. Gibson envisaged a dystopian world of the near future with two important characteristics. First that people could physically connect to the internet and send their consciousness into it in order to conduct business or hack. Second, that people would have cybernetic enhancements, such as blades coming from their fists or cameras in their eyes. This latter element Gibson did not invent but what he did was give it a 'sexier' edge. So you had the 'cyber' of cybernetics and the punk of very urban, dirty, sprawling cities. In particular, Gibson's portrayal of a high-tech world dominated by huge, amoral corporations called zaibatsu (the Japanese word for such corporations) seemed to really chime with 1980s 'greed is good' culture. Gibson continued writing with 'Count Zero' (1986), 'Mona Lisa Overdrive' (1988), 'Burning Chrome' (1986 - a short story collection) being the core of his cyberpunk work. I find Gibson's work good on ideas but rather clunky in construction.
Other good cyberpunk autors, if you are interested, include Walter Jon Williams, Lewis Shiner (a European angle on Cyberpunk with references to Michael Moorcock's work too), George Alec Effinger (whose Cyberpunk stories have an interesting Middle Eastern take on the genre) and Bruce Sterling. Sterling is an all round writer who includes historical as well as science fiction stories and I feel his writing is smoother than Gibson's. His 1980 'The Artificial Kid' predates Gibson's work, and whilst not set on Earth has many cyberpunk elements.
Right, you may ask what has all this cyberpunk got to do with steampunk? Well, in 1990, Gibson and Sterling jointly wrote a book called 'The Difference Engine' which envisaged a mid-Victorian Britain in which technology, notably Charles Babbage's computer (the Difference Engine) which in reality was experimented on in the 1840s, was a success and led to a computer age in the mid-19th century (so a kind of 'what if?' which as you know, appeals to me). [Difference engines had been proposed as early as 1786 and after Babbage, Per Georg Scheutz built a number in the 1850s including one he sold to the British Government.] The expansion of computing leads to other things like the streamlining of traction engines for racing and the British House of Lords becomes filled with inventors and explorers rather than simply noblemen who have inherited their titles. This is seen as the first steampunk book, like the cyberpunk books exploring a world where technology is key and creates turmoil in a society of conflicting pressures.
There are older roots to the genre. There was a US TV series 'Wild Wild West' which was a TV series which ran for 4 seasons 1965-9. It seems to have been set between the end of the American Civil War and 1875 and Grant is the President (1869-77) shown. The heroes' nemesis, Dr. Miguelito Quixote Loveless, is supposed to have died in 1880. The spark of the original series was rather overshadowed by a couple of really dull TV movies in the 1980s using original cast members who were pretty old by then, and the rather failed 'Wild Wild West' (1999) movie with Will Smith and Kevin Kline, though it gives you a flavour of the original with their private train and the technology that they had. The first three series were darker and shot in black and white, but matching trends in US television at the time by the end of the run it became more 'camp' as have been the subsequent movies. However, they all included various Steampunk equipment such as concealed guns and a stage coach with an ejector seat. The attempts to dismember the USA as featured in the movie plots are common 'what if?' history scenarios (see also 'The Mask of Zorro' (1998)). After this series there seems to have been little interest in Steampunk in the USA until the 1990s.
In novels you have to mention Ronald W. Clark's 1969 novel 'Queen Victoria's Bomb' which envisages an atomic bomb being developed in the 1830s, testing in India and almost used in the Crimean War. Michael Moorcock's books 'Warlord of the Air' (1971), 'The Land Leviathan' (1974) and 'The Steel Tsar' (1981) also featured what can be termed Steampunk elements. In addition, by having Oswald Bastable as the hero of these books, a character who appears as a child in E. Nesbitt's 'The Story of the Treasure Seekers', Moorcock established the Steampunk approach of having characters from other authors' stories featuring as genuine people (alongside historical people too, as Clark had done extensively), a trend taken further by Alan Moore's graphic Steampunk novel, 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' (starting 1999). The the thread goes back even beyond these novels of course.
It can be argued that the real originators of steampunk were Victorian authors themselves. Jules Verne and H.G. Wells with their stories set in contemporary times to them but featuring huge airships, large submarines, tanks, flying motorbikes, a tunnel under the English Channel (as well as more fantastical devices to travel in time or to the Moon or make people invisible) built on the rush of technology throughout the 19th century and took their envisaging further, usually to look at moral issues in such a context, and like the steampunk authors, looking at the dilemmas that such technologies bring. These stories directly influence steampunk authors today, though their morals questions tend to be more direct and simpler than their Victorian predecessors.
What appeals to readers of steampunk is that it is technology but with elegance. In contrast to the sleek chrome of the model day it is brass and iron cast into elaborate shapes. Just look at any movie version of 'The Time Machine', it depicts a machine of elegance, all spinning, with inlaid knobs and polished buttons. In addition, in contrast to the cyberpunk novels which tend to portray people as playthings of vast multinational corporations, the heroes of steampunk are often ordinary people who can invent, they turn out a flying machine in the shed in the garden. Whilst this can be seen as very British, it has appeal in the USA for readers looking back to Ford or the Wright Brothers and their developments. However, the greatest success has been in Japan and from there have come notable steampunk movies such as 'Steamboy' (2005 - set in the UK) and 'Howl's Moving Castle' (2005) based on British author Diana Wynne Jones's 1986 novel of the same name.
Cyberpunk and steampunk have faded from their positions on the bestseller lists that they held in the 1980s and 1990s, but they have now effectively entered the mainstream. Graphic novelists have taken them up, notably in 'The League of Extraordinary Gentleman' (Alan Moore's novel and a 2003 movie). Cyberpunk has informed how we view the internet (Gibson is credited with inventing the word 'cyberspace') and are likely to view cybernetic implants (especially the potential for dehumanisation from them) and the position of the individual in relation to corporations. Steampunk is likely to have less impact, but my affection for it probably reflects me being British and so an in-built nostalgia for past things. Its impact is most likely to be in the style of items in the future and you can already see examples of people 'steampimping' their computers, much in the same way that people in the 1970s put their televisions in ornate wooden cabinets and those of the 1980s put their video cassettes in fake leather book covers.
In the meantime, for anyone interested in 'what if?' and 'why not?' in history, I recommend steampunk stories. To blow my own trumpet I intend to put a short story in that genre on this blog in coming weeks.
P.P. 26/10/2009: Despite my efforts at the time of writing this posting I have realised that I had missed out a vital slice of the history of the development of the steampunk genre. This was the first use of the term steampunk, which was by author K.W. Jeter writing to the science fiction magazine, 'Locus' in April 1987, so preceding 'The Difference Engine' by four years. According to wikipedia, Jeter was looking for an umbrella term for novels of the time, 'The Anubis Gates' (1983) by Tim Powers, 'Homunculus' (1986) by James Blaylock and 'Morlock Night' (1979) and 'Infernal Devices' (1987) that he had written himself which were set in the 19th century and took on board elements of the speculative writing naturally in the style of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells and so included anachronistic technology. Thus, of course, steampunk even in its latest manifestation predated cyberpunk, but that term was so snappy you can see why Jeter thought it was a good one to mutate for the genre he was writing in and certainly better than the description of Powers, Blaylock and Jeter writing in the so-called 'gonzo-historical manner'! Michael Moorcock noted this year (2009) that there is actually little 'punk' in most steampunk writing and he favours 'steam opera'.
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