I like reading other peoples’ Christmas presents: if you’re quick, you can finish them before they get taken away. Reading your own books can be done any time. And so I read this:

Eats, Shoots & Leaves

While looking on amazon.co.uk for reviews (to see what my opinion should be, obviously) I found this one:

fantastic book well written and taughtme loads, of stuff. And very funniable.

Now: this is a book about punctuation. The sarcastic comment about how interesting it is can come later. For now, let us bask in the imagined horror of what this reader’s punctuation, grammar, and spelling must’ve been like before reading the book. It’s possible ve’s being funny, but if ve can’t even spell vis own town’s name properly, I doubt it.

As for the book itself, it’s OK. The author, Lynne Truss, writes as if for Radio 4 (or maybe the Daily Mail). Funny in places, but overall coming across as someone who hasn’t spent enough time on the internet. That’s probably a good thing overall, but her characterisation of the net as a force for language destruction is poorly researched.

One thing I wasn’t aware of before is the existence of scriptio continua and how punctuation cures this. The current trend of compound-word coinage is thus a disturbing throwback.

Apart from the pop-culture name dropping (always fun), the rest of the book was quite good. Hmm, well, maybe it was just OK.

Guards! Guards!

For some reason, I also read this. Disjointed. Funny. Sort of nihilistic. Not the hack fantasy I always assumed Terry Pratchett wrote, but in fact clever fantasy parody. Very clever. Douglas-Adamsy (yay!). Web-censors will need to be fully sentient before they recognise the subtle rudeness.

I enjoyed reading it, but it was in no way gripping. Maybe that’s not the point.

Diaspora

My usage of the word ‘ve’ above might make one think I’ve fallen into the transhumanist webgulch, but in fact it was coined by Greg Egan, and used extensively in Diaspora. Useful too, as long as you’re not obnoxious about it. Which I am, muahaha.

Diaspora, if it really is anything more than a thread of short stories, casts the transhuman condition as a struggle between realism and abstractionism. As an immortal near-god, do you explore the universe, or create your own? I vaguely recognise this as something big-A Art tries to deal with, but hard-SF seems to deliver more results than that has so far.

Both attempts are quite silly, but that doesn’t stop them from being in some ways fun. I didn’t really enjoy the speculative particle physics part of Diaspora, but I liked the psychogenesis section and the idea of life as an emergent phenomenon of some kind of chaotic function space. Very Permutation City. Very mathematical. In fact, right now, I’m supposed to be revising stuff that is actually in the book!. The Gauss-Bonnet theorem, Euler characteristics, topology, manifolds, metrics, curvature… all part of the novel, and all on the January 2004 exams. What astonishing luck!

Mixed in with the maths is a feast of cool ideas, which is what SF is about. Character development means funny things in books like this. It’s done quite well, but nevertheless comes across as a loosely glued together collection of episodes. You can almost imagine that the reason why the section prologues are un-numbered is because they were spliced in at the last minute to make sure the book isn’t reviewed as a short story collection. No, that’s too harsh. There is coherence here.

Some might blither at the rather bleak ending. I think it’s quite powerful, maybe even romantic. Imagine if the last episode of The Office hadn’t gone the way it did. I wouldn’t have complained; sometimes a nasty dose of reality is what Art is all about, although in the case of Diaspora, perhaps that should read: a nasty shock of abstraction.

I don’t subscribe to the author’s Dust hypothesis, which he apparently really believes in. I believe continuity is important. That’s why I don’t like his bandying about of clones; too many times a character cloned verself and then effectively committed suicide, reasoning, “it doesn’t matter; my clone will live on for me.” No, no, no! If a twin dies, he doesn’t carry on living in his twin’s body. He dies. Clones are merely twins; entirely separate. I think the author knows this and uses his Dust hypothesis to gloss over it.

There is a glossary of terms at the back of the book which I missed completely, but if you’ve read any other Egan*, or any other kind of post-human speculative fiction or literature, you won’t have any trouble working out what he means. One thing he doesn’t explain is how big polises are. He gives clues though; a quick calculator session mid-read suggested they are about 6 metres across, assuming they are spherical.

Greg Egan’s nicely retro webpage (it even has Java applets!) is a good companion to his books. It has explanations, diagrams, equations and other things. Groovy.

*Ugh. I hate hate hate using the author’s name to refer to vis books. I feel like a port drinker. Too old, and too cryptofascist.