Template
Matt Hughes
400 pages (in manuscript)
published in 2008
It was James Nicoll who suggested to hold a Matt Hughes reviewathon of his
latest novel Template, since Hughes was kind enough to offer an advance copy to any reviewer or blogger who was willing to
do something with it. James wanted a reviewathon because he found it "tremendously annoying that Hughes is not better known than he is". I
figured it would be an easy way to sample a writer I knew of but had not yet read so this week I found myself reading my first Matt Hughes
novel.
Had it not been for James and his reviewathon I don't think I would've read this novel, as the plot description didn't sound that interesting.
Conn Labro is an indentured duelist on Thrais, one of the Ten Thousand Worlds, happily fighting all kind of duels and games for his employer,
making them lots of money while never quite paying off his indenture, though he is now one of the top ranked duelists in all the Ten Thousand
Worlds. He was indentured as an infant you see, so has a lot of indenture to work off. But all this changes when Hallis Tharp died. Tharp's an
old man, the closest thing to a friend Conn has, who has been coming to Conn every week for most of his life to play a game of paduay. Conn sets
out to see what happened to Tharp when he doesn't show up for his game, discovers he's died and he has inherited what's left of his meager
possesions, only to see his employer's game house blown up before his eyes when returning home. It then turns out he's inherited a bearers deed
to some offworld possesion and after he and Jenore Mordene, another friend of Tharp are attacked again, Conn sets off with her to find his
destiny elsewhere in the Ten Thousand Worlds.
New Labour lost an elextion, so you know what that means. Yep, it's time for another round of halfbaked, ill-thought new measures and proposals
designed to show how tough New Labour is on crime. Or rather, how tough New Labour is on young people. There must be something in the water
at the home office, to judge by the authoritarian crackpot ideas succesive home secretaries came up with. Jacqui Smith is te latest victim of
the Whitehall braineater, suggesting the police should make the life
of "persistent offenders" a living hell by harassing them on a daily basis. Note that these are convicted people, just people who the
police believes are bad:
Police should be harassing badly behaved youths by openly filming them and hounding them at home to make their lives as uncomfortable as possible,
the home secretary will say today. The crime initiative is part of a government strategy to win back voters by proposing more radical approaches to
tackling deep seated problems.
In a speech in London the home secretary, Jacqui Smith, will acknowledge that the number of antisocial behaviour orders being issued is falling,
but will argue that there has been a shift to the use of parental orders instead.
As part of the crackdown on bad behaviour, she will urge police forces across the country to follow the example of Essex police, who have mounted
four-day "frame and shame" operations by filming and repeatedly stopping identified persistent offenders on problem estates.
The programme in Essex has been successful, even though it may raise human rights issues about such tough tactics, especially if those harassed
by the police have not been found guilty of any criminal offence.
Smith will say: "There is no let-up in tackling antisocial behaviour. We know that getting in early to stop troublemakers works, but I want
stronger action to deal with persistent offenders. I want police and local agencies to focus on them by giving them a taste of their own
medicine: daily visits, repeated warnings and relentless filming of offenders to create an environment where there is nowhere to hide.
"There can be no excuse for inaction while people still fear for the safety of the streets and estates where they live. We will do more to
protect them. We all need to sharpen our resolve to tackle both the symptoms and the causes of antisocial behaviour."
What's worrying me is not just that this is a supposedly serious proposal, but that it is taken as such by the media and political commentators.
Yes, it's criticised, but it's criticised on whether or not it would be effective, or on abstract grounds of human rights infringement, rather
than that it's a bloody stupid idea. The police isn't meant to harass people, it's there to protect the public and solve crimes and this isn't
doing either. But it sells well, if not to the voters, at least to the tabloids.
In a wider context this is all part of the great war on youth the UK seems to have engaged in this past decade or so. Current highlights
include this and yesterday's reclassification of cannabis as a class B drug recriminalising users. Sometimes I wonder whether the state of
hysteria surrounding teenagers is due to the ageing baby boomer population, or because so many more teenagers these days are well, black or
asian...
Eric Flint, science fiction author and editor for Baen Books but most important the guy who got their free
electronic library started, has for the best part of a decade now argued that putting out free e-books as samples is one of the best things
an author or publisher can do to increase sales of their "real" books and he has the data to back it up. As we saw yesterday, Cory Doctorow also
believes this as we saw yesterday, but they're not the only ones anymore.
Enter Small Beer press with their offerings, all with a proper Creative Commons license: Mothers and
Other Monsters by Maureen McHugh, The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories, John Kessel and
Stranger Things Happen, Kelly Link.
On the other end of the business, there's also Tor, which in order to celebrate the fact that they're finally getting a
proper website, has organised a weekly giveaway showcasing their huge range of authors: already
we've had Jo Walton's Farthing, Cherie Priest's Four and Twenty Blackbirds, Robert Charles Wilson's Spin,
not to forget Scalzi's Old Man's War.
All of the above are completely legal downloadable e-books, for free, but the stuff you can get at
Abandonia.com is very much not kosher. All your favourite old skool pc games are available for download there, from Test Drive to California
Games to Eye of Horus. A veritable feast of nostalgia.
Remember the scene in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress where Manny sketches a structure for an underground organization? Now imagine
that, done properly. With X-boxes.
-- Ken MacLeod
You may already have seen the hype for Cory "Boing Boing" Doctorow's latest novel, Little Brother all over the internet; certainly
I've seen it mentioned on a fair few of the blogs I frequent. There's a reason for this, as it's not just another science fiction novel, or even
another young adult science fiction novel, but an attempt to inoculate a new generation against the phony security mindset that swept America
in the wake of the September 11 attacks and arguably the UK some years earlier. We've all have had to deal with the results, in everything from
having to carry an ID with us at all times to stupid rules about how much fluid you can take along on your airplane trip. But for anybody under
twentyone it's worse and it has been worse for much longer. Every inch of their
lives is controlled and regulated these days because it has become so much more easier to do so. As Cory puts it in the preface to
Little Brother:
The 17 year olds I know understand to a nicety just how dangerous a computer can be. The authoritarian nightmare of the 1960s has come home
for them. The seductive little boxes on their desks and in their pockets watch their every move, corral them in, systematically depriving them
of those new freedoms I had enjoyed and made such good use of in my young adulthood.
So what Cory does is to give them the tools to take their lives back. Little Brother is basically one long infodump on, well,
hacking, in the good old-fashioned sense of the word, packaged in a neat near-future thriller. It's a novel in the best tradition
of didactic science fiction --Ken MacLeod makes the comparison with Heinlein, while the title itself is of course a reference to
1984. But didactic doesn't mean dull, as the synopsis makes clear:
Marcus, a.k.a "w1n5t0n," is only seventeen years old, but he figures he already knows how the system works --and how to work the system.
Smart, fast, and wise to the ways of the networked world, he has no trouble outwitting his high schoolÂ’s intrusive but clumsy surveillance systems.
But his whole world changes when he and his friends find themselves caught in the aftermath of a major terrorist attack on San Francisco.
In the wrong place at the wrong time, Marcus and his crew are apprehended by the Department of Homeland Security and whisked away to a secret
prison where theyÂ’re mercilessly interrogated for days.
When the DHS finally releases them, Marcus discovers that his city has become a police state where every citizen is treated like a potential
terrorist. He knows that no one will believe his story, which leaves him only one option: to take down the DHS himself.
Best thing about Little Brother? It's not just a book, it's a movement. And Cory
is putting his money where his mouth is and made the book available as a free, Creative
Commons licensed e-book. In all, this is a noble attempt at not just making people aware of the encrouching security society, but help them
find the tools to fight against it, circumvent it, pervert it.
Joel Spolsky rants entertainingly about Microsoft's next big attempt to get us all to trust them into giving up our computers in return for some utopian webservice world they'd run for us to keep all our data safe and available everywhere and no more need to worry about synchronising and ponies too:
I shouldn't really care. What Microsoft's shareholders want to waste their money building, instead of earning nice dividends from two or three fabulous monopolies, is no business of mine. I'm not a shareholder. It sort of bothers me, intellectually, that there are these people running around acting like they're building the next great thing who keep serving us the same exact TV dinner that I didn't want on Sunday night, and I didn't want it when you tried to serve it again Monday night, and you crunched it up and mixed in some cheese and I didn't eat that Tuesday night, and here it is Wednesday and you've rebuilt the whole goddamn TV dinner industry from the ground up and you're giving me 1955 salisbury steak that I just DON'T WANT. What is it going to take for you to get the message that customers don't want the things that architecture astronauts just love to build. The people? They love twitter. And flickr and delicious and picasa and tripit and ebay and a million other fun things, which they do want, and this so called synchronization problem is just not an actual problem, it's a fun programming exercise that you're doing because it's just hard enough to be interesting but not so hard that you can't figure it out.
Most people don't really need synchronisation services or buy into that whole "the net is the computer" philsophy because most people at most only ever use two computers: their home pc and the one they use at work, with little to no need to synchronise between them. Apart from that, this whole thing is,as Joel puts it, "not fun": too abstract a problem to worry about. Instead we want to be able to read our e-mail everywhere, which we can since almost every ISP now has webmail and if not, there's always G-mail or Yahoo. If we want to keep our bookmarks online we use del.ici.us, if we want quick access to our pictures there's flickr, etcetera undsoweiter. There are specialist, free services for every imaginable thing we need to do online and we don't need to buy into one big monolithic service to do so.
Why Microsoft nevertheless keeps pushing these services is because the company fundamentally does not understand the internet; it never has and likely never will. Microsoft grew big on consumer operating systems and office software, where they could pretty much dictate the environment in which their users work and therefore they keep wanting to do the same for the internet. They're monopolists: it's the only trick they know. Their latest attempt Joel so thoroughly slagged off is basically Microsoft Network (which would replace the internet back in '95, remember?) dusted off for the 21st century, grudgingly accepting the reality of the internet but not liking it.
It's tragic, a disaster, very very serious indeed, that Boris Johnson has won the mayoral elections in London. A disaster for the left,
a sign of how weak New Labour has become, etc, undsoweiter.
But...
For those of us outside London, it promises to be an interesting four years, if only in the trainwreck sense. Boris Johnson's greatest
distinction until now has after all been a certain cackhandedness, a kind of affable goofiness that makes you forget what a nasty rightwing nutter
he really is. So if you're living in London you might not see the funny side of this, because it promises to be four years of retreat, but for
the rest of us, here is Boris Johnson at his best:
His awkward side, as well as his nasty side.
It is going to be a long four years. But London has been through worse.
Another month gone by means another list of books read.
Madame de Pompadour -- Nancy Mitford
Following on from her biography of Frederick the Great. This was written much earlier, in 1954 as opposed to 1971 and I found it slightly
harder going. It's also longer, which doesn't help. After a while Mitford's light, teasing style began to annoy a bit.
The Clan Corporate -- Charlie Stross
The third novel in the Merchant Wars series, charlie's attempt at writing a proper epic fantasy series, though it owns
more to H. Beam Piper than to J. R. R. Tolkien.
London: A Social History -- Roy Porter
This was published in 1994, so it misses the developments of the past fourteen years, but this is still an excellent one volume history of
London and its peoples. It's not as comprehensive as Peter Acroyd's later London the Biography, but it's not as up itself either.
The Year of Our War -- Steph Swainston
Interesting fantasy novel by a new and unknown to me writer.
The People of the Talisman -- Leigh Brackett
Another short Eric John Stark novel, in the vein of the Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom novels, but much better written.
Tanks in Detail -- Panzer III -- Terry J. Gander
What should be an indepth look at one of the more important German World War 2 tanks is let down by its shortness and doesn't
contain much not already known to the tank enthusiast.
Tanks in Detail -- Sherman & Firefly -- Terry J. Gander
Another entry in the same series as above, suffering from the same flaws and with a less interesting selection of pictures and
drawings to liven it up.
Stations of the Tide -- Michael Swanwick
Okay but not spectacular science fiction novel by a writer who has done better. It never quite gelled into a coherent story.
Postwar -- Tony Judt
Flawed history of postwar Europe, too focused on the big countries (Germany, France, Italy and the UK) in my opinion.
The Voyage of the Sable Keech -- Neal Asher
The first Asher novel I've read, not the best starting point as it needs a lot of backstory knowledge to make sense out of.
The Great History of Comic Books -- Ron Goulart
A nicely chatty history of the American comic book, which largely confines itself to the socalled Golden Age (1920s-1950s). Dated, sketchy
but a reasonable overview still.
Worlds of the Imperium -- Keith Laumer
Fun fast-paced adventure sf by the master. Not an unmissable classic by any means, but good enough to pick up secondhand.
A Plague of Demons -- Keith Laumer
Another sf adventure novel by Laumer. It was interesting reading those two so short after each other and see the simularities. Both are
set partially in North Africa - Algeria to be precise, both feature tough loners whose name starts with a B, etc.
The Prefect -- Alastair Reynolds
This is a prequel to Revelation Space and its sequels, set at a time when the Glitter Band was not yet destroyed and as a
consequence somewhat of a less sombre novel than Reynolds usually writes. It took a while for me to get in it, but once it did it was rather
good.
Chain of Command -- Seymour Hersh
A good though dated (written in 2004) overview of the crimes of the Bush administration in their war on terror, going from what happened in Abu Ghraib
all the way back up the chain of command to the crimes at the heart of the War on Iraq.
Rainbows End -- Vernor Vinge
Once upon a time I would've said Vernor Vinge was the science fiction author with the most convincing view of the future. Now however it just
seems old fashioned, even slightly dull. Nevertheless this is still an accomplished novel, though not half as convincing in its depiction of
the near future as e.g. Halting State or Brasyl.
Over at Socialist unity, Tony Greenstein draws attention to the
surprising fact that the fascist, racist BNP might just be the most zionist party in Britain:
The BNP is determined not to make the same mistakes as the National Front did in the 1970’s when they were at one time described as the
four major political party. In the West Bromwich by-election Martin Webster saved his deposit, obtaining over 16% of the vote and in the
GLC elections in 1976 they gained over 100,000 votes. It was to meet this threat that the Anti-Nazi League was formed (and became a mass
movement ). The ANL effectively drew the equation that the NF=Nazi and the 1979 General Election they obtained a derisory vote.
The lesson that Nick Griffin, has learnt has been a painful one. Jews in European society are white. State racism today is anti-Black or
anti-Muslim. It is Muslims not Jews who are demonised, who are the subject of horrendous racist attacks and whose religion is held to be
uniquely backward and regressive in areas such as gay liberation, women’s rights etc, as if the Christian and Jewish religions are somehow
a model of tolerance.
It is therefore no surprise, given that fascist parties traditionally home in on the main and predominant form of racism in society that
the BNP has decided, publicly at least to jettison its anti-Semitism. For the BNP to engage in solidarity with the Palestinians, who they
see as Muslims first and foremost, on account of their traditional hate of Jews would be an act of self-immolation. And one thing Griffin
doesn’t want to do is to see the BNP self-destruct.
As Greenstein goes on to explain, the BNP operates under the handicap of its own anti-semitic and nazi-worshipping past, not to mention that
a fair few hardcore members are unrepentent Jew haters. To a certain extent this makes it far less dangerous than equivalent parties on the
continent. Take our own resident Muslim-hater for example, Geert Wilders. If he had said half the things he has said about Islam and Muslims
about Jews, he would've been tarred and feathered long ago. Instead Wilders is one of the biggest supporters of zionism in the Netherlands
and this support fits in perfectly with his anti-Islam politics.
This is just a place for me to jot down some random thoughts and reactions to the news so I don't have to yell at the television or radio, or mutter to myself whilst reading the news.
Waffle
In which Reinder Dijkhuis, Adam Cuerden, Timm Brand, Geir Strøm and Jeroen Jager talk about comics, music, politics and the impending apocalypse.
Deltoid
A science orientated weblog by Tim Lambert.
Encyclopedia Astronautica
Incredibly cool site about the history of space travel, with lots of info about
the various space programs. Recommended for all spacenuts.
The Loom
A blog of biology and bioscience, written by Carl Zimmer.
Panda's Thumb
On evolutionary theory and the fight against the intelligent design loons
Pharyngula
Science, politics and the intersection between them. By PZ Myers.
Real Climate
A commentary site on climate science by working climate scientists.
