Paul Krugman (PK). Nobel Prize winning economist and columnist for the New York Times.
Charlie Stross (CS). Hugo-winning science fiction author.
Anticipation World Con, Montreal, Quebec
August 6, 2009
Transcription by Edwin Steussy, Apogee Communications. Please send corrections to ed “at” my last name “dot” com.
CS: Good evening, we’re very pleased to be here and thank you very much for inviting us to talk.
I wrote earlier about how impressed I was with Neil Gaiman. American Gods (winner of the Hugo and Nebula awards) is the first traditional novel I’ve read by him. What impressed me? Not the fantasy elements, nor the universe created. No – it was the American Midwest: Wisconsin and Illinois. I have rarely read a non-native (read East or West Coast) novelist who can adequately handle the laid-back attitude of my home region. I have never read a non-American author handling Midwestern characters adequately (yes, I’m looking at you! Mr. Smarty-Pants Vladimir Nabokov – I’m looking at you! Mr. Smarty-Pants Economist). It probably helps that Gaiman lives in Minnesota – but, dang!, he has the character and cadence completely down pat.
Very impressed.
Wow. I thought I was beyond the stage when I would suddenly discover a startling new author, with a full back catalog of unread books. Neil Gaiman is definitely such a writer. And the reason I missed him? He works almost exclusively in graphic novels.
After running into no fewer than three references to the Sandman series of graphic novels in a few days (“…the novel we’re reviewing here is not as good as Gaiman’s Sandman series from 20 years ago, but …”), I found it at the local library. Great stuff – Norman Mailer described the series as “a comic book for intellectuals” – and it’s true. References to Herodotus, Shakespeare, Dante, the great myths (in their original, unsanitized forms), Arthur C. Clarke and so many others, it would be hard to list them all.
But this is more than a collection of references – this is a living, breathing series that stands on its own (albeit, on the shoulders of giants). I spent a month reading through the full collection, and loved them all. Highly recommended.
Amazon link for Volume 1 of 11 here.
While I was in Wisconsin, I was rereading Jared Diamond’s The Third Chimpanzee for the third time. A great book, and clearly a forerunner to Guns, Germs and Steel.
The book deals a bit more with Diamond’s work and personal experience in New Guinea. The most fascinating aspect is that the central highlands where the last major population center of Stone Age people living into modern times with no knowledge of the outside world were discovered. Estimates range from 250,000 to one million people living there.
There were two regions of people – one in the east that was discovered in 1930, and a western group that was discovered in 1938. The First Contact with the Eastern group in 1930 is fully documented and readily available on the web in a fifty minute video here. Quoting from the Third Chimpanzee:
First-contact patrols had a traumatic effect that is difficult for those of us living in the modern world to imagine. Highlanders “discovered” by Michael Leahy in the 1930′s, and interviewed fifty years later, still recalled perfectly where they where and what they were doing at the moment of first contact. Perhaps the closest parallel, to modern Americans and Europeans, is our recollection of one or two of the most important political events in our lives. Most Americans my age recall that moment on December 7, 1941, when they heard of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. We knew at once that our lives would be very different for years to come, as a result of the news. Yet even the impact of Pearl Harbor and of the resulting war on American society was minor, compared to the impact of a first contact patrol on New Guinea highlanders. On that day, their world changed forever.
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A book by Bob Connolly and Robin Anderson entitled First Contact poignantly relates that moment in the eastern highlands, as recalled in their old age by New Guineans and whites who met there as young adults and children in the 1930s. Terrified highlanders took the whites for returning ghosts, until the New Guineans dug up and scrutinized the whites’ buried feces, sent terrified young girls to have sex with the intruders and discovered that whites defecated and were men like themselves. Leahy wrote in his diaries that highlanders smelled bad, while at the same time the highlanders were finding the whites’ smell strange and frightening. Leahy’s obsession with gold was as bizarre to the highlanders as their obsession with their own form of wealth and currency—cowry shells—was to him.
This is a truly amazing document. I sat fascinated for the full 50 minutes. Again, the link is here.
I’ve been reading science fiction off-and-on for three and a half decades now. The 50′s and 60′s were full of great science fiction. For whatever reason, the 70′s, 80′s and 90′s had only a few titles or concepts that truly stirred the soul (Larry Niven’s Ringworld comes to mind as a positive example).
Since 2000, there has been a resurgence of good science fiction from a new set of authors. I’ve frequently sent friends and readers to Marc Andreesson’s second or third blog post (a blog he no longer updates, unfortunately), which had the best list of new science fiction works available. I’ve enjoyed several of them.
I point to three who seem to have taken over the world of science fiction: Cory Doctorow, John Scalzi and Charles Stross. All three have active blogs (which are the links I’ve set up).
Doctorow is the only one not on Andreesson’s list, and I can see why. His writing is very work-a-day, his fictional insights are not great and his characters (never an SF strong point) suck. However, primarily through his blog, he wields considerable clout with the internet generation, taking on issues of copyright, intellectual property and such. He’s virtually required reading on these topics.
Scalzi is a young author whose works are incredibly entertaining. They tend to follow a Robert Heinlein sensibility, which really appeals to me. Old Man’s War is one of the best science fiction reads in the last decade.
Charles Stross, however, is untouchable. His works bristle with new ideas and new concepts. Accelerando has more new ideas in it than most people will have in a lifetime. All of his novels twist the world in unique ways, which make his writing fun to read. His Family Trade series has been quoted and referenced by Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize winning economist writing for the New York Times. I’m finishing the Atrocity Archives just now from the Laundry series, which is truly great. Highly recommended.
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ADDENDUM: I just remembered that the reason I started this blog was due to a Charles Stross speech – made before I started pursuing his books. Prior to starting the blog, I avoided any personal reference on the internet – now I embrace it. Read my link and the speech to see why.
This book was recommended by one of the economist blogs that I frequent. The author is a cognitive psychologist who bristles at the concept that 75% to 80% of intelligence is inherited. For all of the faults of the book, he gives very good data against this. The numerous problems in the book include:
I’d hoped for a more closely defended book, though the first three chapters are really quite good. A moderate recommendation from me at best. I can boil it down to a simple phrase for you: “Intelligence (as defined by IQ testing) is somewhat hereditary, but not to a level higher than 50% of the final attained score. Health (prenatal, perinatal, and juvenile), education, home environment, extended environment and the like account for the other parts. Heredity may be much less than 50% of the factor involved.”
The reason I’m blogging this here (I don’t normally comment on mediocre books that I read, there are too many of them) is that the author discussed home environments of high-IQ families vs. medium-IQ families. He mentioned that not only do high-IQ families read to their children, but they also participate in discussions. Hmm.
I normally just read to the kids. I make a big show of it – lots of voices, making myself quiet or very loud, jumping when there is a lot of action, etc. But I never really talked much about the books afterwards.
Two nights ago, I was reading the Cat in the Hat to all three. Afterward, I asked if the Cat was a good person or a bad person. That was the only question that I had to ask. It’s like they’d been waiting for all these years for a chance to talk about the Cat in the Hat, but hadn’t had a chance to do it.
They went on for fifteen minutes about characters, who was bad, who was good, what they would or wouldn’t do. You couldn’t stop them. And I didn’t want to. It was a very educational moment. For me.
Camilla just finished her first reading book – all 120 pages of it. It’s a shared book from Temecula Montessori, so we don’t get to keep it. I thought I’d take a few photos of the pages just to show off the work that Camilla has done over the last four months.
The first seven pages took us four days to complete, then she did the next seven pages in one day. Wow! After that, it was in fits and spurts. Very good job, Camilla!
Gerbeaud is the most famous cafe in Budapest. The opening scene of the book “Prague” is here. As a proud member of the diaspora of Americans who moved to Eastern Europe in the early 1990′s, I can personally vouch for this book’s authenticity. The characters all ring absolutely true, as does the setting. I never finished the book; I didn’t want to. As long as I have not read the last page, the characters have not finished their journey and still live and breath, and I can yet come back to them. Lying there unfinished, it is among my favorite books of all time.
Gerbeaud, the cafe in the opening of the book, sits in the middle of Budapest’s most central square, at the start of the oldest subway in continental Europe. It’s a beautiful setting on a sunny day and great for people watching.
The cafe, with stairs to the subway in front.
Years ago, I read a restaurant review which stated that the quality of a cuisine’s desserts is inversely proportional to the capital’s distance from Vienna. And Budapest is spitting distance from Vienna! Note Baby Aaron waiting quietly, wondering when he gets his dessert.
“Hi, everybody!”
When I was living abroad before, English bookstores were almost impossible to find. There was one large used bookstore in Prague (the Globe), which had at best an eclectic selection (the owners had people buy books at garage sales in the US and ship them over). There was a very expensive, very nice English bookstore in Moscow next to the KGB building in the early 90′s.
I was very surprised at how well-stocked the Libri bookstore on Vaci Utca in Budapest is. Two floors of English language books. The second photo is just their selection of recent science fiction titles. Certainly beats Readmore in New Castle, Indiana …
One thing about blogs on the Internet – I get a lot more interesting feedback on books (past and future) than I did before. Two of them from this morning:
Four or six draught animals were needed to pull a coach and they had to be changed every 6 to 12 miles, depending on the condition of the roads. In England it was calculated that one horse was needed for every mile of a journey on a well-maintained turnpike road. So, for the 185 miles from Manchester to London, 185 horses had to be kept stabled and fed to deal with the seventeen changes required by the stagecoaches which traveled the route. Those horses in turn required an army of coachmen, postillions, guards, grooms, ostlers and stable-boys to keep them running. As a coach could carry no more than ten passengers, fares were correspondingly high and out of reach of the mass of the population. A journey from Augsburg to Innsbruck by stagecoach, although little more than 60 miles as the crow flies, would have cost an unskilled laborer more than a month’s wages just for the fare.
This is from The Pursuit of Glory, Europe 1648-1815. I’ve already seen three reviews of this book, and it is the very next one on my reading list.
The following is an older article on Holden Caulfield from Catcher in the Rye by John Scalzi.
I never got Holden Caulfield anyway. This partially due to having my own reading tastes bend towards science fiction as a teen rather than the genre of Alienated Teen Literature, of which Catcher is, of course, the classic. If you were going to give me a teenage hero, give me Heinlein’s Starman Jones: He traveled the galaxy and memorized entire books of log tables and became Captain of a starship (for procedural reasons, granted). All Holden did was bitch, bitch, bitch. Put Holden at the controls of a starship and he’d implode from stress. Not my hero, thanks.
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Fact is, I liked neither Holden nor the book. One can recognize the book has a certain literary merit without needing to like the thing, of course. But it’s more to the point to say that Holden has a certain fundamental passivity that I dislike — the desire for people and things to be different without the accompanying acceptance of personal responsibility to effect those changes. To go back to Heinlein and his juvy novels, his teenage characters are not very big on internal lives, but they’re also the sort who go out, do things, fail, do things again, and eventually get it right. Holden merely wishes, ultimately a man of inaction. He’s a failure — a particularly attractive failure if you’re of a certain age and disposition, admittedly, but a failure nonetheless. I remember reading the book as a teen and being irritated with Holden for that reason; I couldn’t see why he required any sympathy from me, or why I should empathize with him.
March Field, CA
