Posted on

The Problematic Ethnic Stereotypes Are Coming

I’ve been reading Where the Sidewalk Ends to my son, and I noticed a change in the poem about people coming to town to buy various sorts of children at various rates. It is called “The Googies Are Coming.” I’m fairly certain it was called “The Gypsies Are Coming” when I was a tot.

I can understand why one would want to change it, but the publishers kept the original illustration of a hook-nosed babushka with a big sack full of children. The net effect is that now the poem slanders some indeterminate Eastern European ethnicity. Possibly the good people of Guzhe, Lithuania.

I mean, what, “goblin” was too fantastical for a Shel Silverstein book?

Originally published on Google Plus
Posted on

Book Review: Checkpoint by Nicholson Baker

Checkpoint is an absolutely terrible book. Baker more or less writes by pouring out raw id onto the page, which in the past has made for entertaining if rather pervy prose. However, Checkpoint is a 2004-era Bush assassination fantasy rendered as a dialogue between two old friends, one of whom has apparently gone off the deep end and decided to kill the president. While Baker accomplishes his usual feat of expressing clearly and accurately the things that people think but would never, ever say, in Checkpoint that insight doesn’t lead us anywhere.

In large part this is, I think, because after the two characters have between them expressed the key dilemma of an assassination fantasy — the target deserves to die, but it would be Wrong to kill them — there’s not really anywhere to go. It’s basically the dramatic equivalent of a long blog thread on “Bush: Worst President Ever?” It would, I think, have been much more interesting if Baker had written a book about someone actually killing the president. There’s interesting conflict in killing the president, but not so much in wanting to kill the president, and only slightly more in admitting that you want to kill the president.

Originally published on LiveJournal
Posted on

Book Review: Out of the Silent Planet

Recently, I read Out of the Silent Planet, which is the last book of C.S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy that I hadn’t read (though it’s actually the first book). It’s a good book, and I recommend it (primarily for its worldbuilding), but this is going to be one of my reviews wherein I talk relatively little about the book itself.

A lot of people I have known feel somehow betrayed by C.S. Lewis, mostly because of the role of Christian allegory in the Chronicles of Narnia. You’re reading along in a perfectly nice fantasy adventure series, and then one day — maybe years after reading the books — you find out, holy crap! Aslan was Jesus! (I’m sorry if that was a spoiler for anyone. Rosebud was a sled, too.)

I’m not sure if it works the same way in other countries, but I think Christian children’s fiction has really shot itself in the foot in the United States. So many extremely earnest people work so hard to make sure that kids get their regular dose of Jesus that Christian allegory has become the green vegetable of kids’ narrative. Finding out there was spinach in the chocolate cake is … well, disappointing. As if the Establishment put one over on you, the bastards. Hiding Jesus in a fairy tale; it just ain’t right.

I begin to think that this is unfair to Lewis. Reading the Space Trilogy, I realize that Lewis doesn’t write allegory at all. Rather, he writes fantastic stories in settings which include our own world, a world which for him is framed by the existence of the divine. Aslan and Maleldil don’t symbolize Christ; they *are* Christ. And yet, on some level, it doesn’t matter. The books aren’t parables; the stories are meaningful on their own terms. Perelandra isn’t Eden; neither is Narnia. They’re just places which went through similar histories after arising from similar origins.

It’s interesting, in passing, to contrast many modern comic books which rely heavily on Christian mythology, but in which God is a vague and distant presence and Jesus barely figures at all. It’s sort of the Apocalypse Now of the War in Heaven: angels and demons beating the crap out of each other with minimal supervision. It always seemed like sort of a dodge to me to tap the geekish glory of angelological hierarchy while avoiding the cosmology of which that hierarchy is a part. I would totally buy a comic about superheroes in the intertestamental period. (Yeah, I’d probably be the only one, but still, an apostle superteam would so totally kick ass.)

Originally published on LiveJournal
Posted on

Book Review: The Art of the Start

One of the nice bits about the GDC was that I wound up riding BART for 45 minutes every day, which gave me some time to catch up on reading. Not that the mighty backlog of stripped books, using-up-the employee-discount purchases, and holiday loot is anywhere near expunged, but I did manage to get through the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (which I’m not going to talk about except to say that I enjoyed Runaway America more; got to give a shout out to Yale AmStud) and The Art of the Start (which I am).

The Art of the Start is the latest book from Guy Kawasaki, who made his name back in the 80s as a product evangelist for the Macintosh. These days, he writes books and runs a venture capital firm. The book bills itself as “the time-tested, battle-hardened guide for anyone starting anything”. I liked The Macintosh Way a lot; Kawasaki has a knack for drawing expansive lessons from amusing anecdotes, and so I thought I’d give this one a shot.

Alas, the book oversells itself. The entire thing would be useful for someone assembling a startup firm; maybe half of it would be useful to someone starting any sort of organization; the first chapter or so is worth reading in the context of any major project. As I am not establishing an organization, this made it interesting but not terribly useful.

That said, it’s good at doing what it does. His discussion of mantras versus mission statements alone makes it worth reading, and the chapter on pitches is excellent stuff as well. The later chapters are solid but more mundane; it’s possible I’m less enthused simply because they deal with biz dev stuff that’s almost entirely unuseful to me. And then the final chapter is the seemingly obligatory “Oh yeah. Don’t be evil.” section that every business book seems to have these days.

Originally published on LiveJournal
Posted on

Book Review: Metropolis: Values in Conflict

I’ve just finished a book I picked up at the Menlo Park library sale a few months ago (any venue that sells books by the grocery bag is lethal to me). Metropolis is an urban studies reader from 1964. The first lesson I have gleaned from this is that I really need to break the habit of buying generations-old textbooks for a quarter; they’re interesting, but it’s not really a time-efficient way to learn things.

The second thing I notice is that urban theorists, from the earliest days of technocratic America up to the modern day, seem to dwell in a curiously non-geographic world. (I’m not just drawing from Metropolis on this; it just crystallized something that has niggled at me about various contemporary pieces I’ve read about reimagining cities.) I’ve seen any number of discussions of how to lay out cities, optimizing density and accessibility while preserving an appropriate amount of open and agricultural space, which completely elide the question of what happens if there’s a mountain or a river in the way of, say, your concentric rings scheme.

Perhaps I’m simply oversensitized to the question from living in a part of the world deeply at the mercy of its geography when it comes to urban development. I suppose that would explain why a lot of urban visionaries are Dutch; the Netherlands are pretty much flat, and heavily modified by human intervention already.

Originally published on LiveJournal
Posted on

Book Review: Altered Carbon

Amazon’s been telling me I need to read this book by Richard Morgan since it came out, and a few weeks ago I managed to hack down the stack to it.

There are two things I think are structurally interesting about this book. First, it’s a wonderful example of setting economy. There’s a single central piece of technology around which the setting revolves — the capacity to upload and download consciousness in and out of different bodies — and most of the book’s world proceeds from the ramifications of that technology.

The other intriguing bit is that I think Altered Carbon is an excellent instance of the decline of prognosticatory science fiction. There was a time when most science fiction could at least be construed as an attempt to predict a possible future. More and more, however, science fiction is allegorical rather than realistic. Altered Carbon, despite being set centuries into the future, has the feel of a noir detective story plus the aforementioned braintaping tech and more sophisticated weaponry. It’s a great story, and a fascinating meditation on a whole slew of social and ethical issues, but it’s not a plausible vision of the future.

Originally published on LiveJournal
Posted on

Book Review: The Etched City

I’d been wanting to start doing some book reviews as I work my way through the massive backlog of bibliage that bows my shelves, but I realize, after a couple tries, that I don’t really enjoy that. I hate doing synopses, and a number of the books I’ve read lately feel a bit beyond the level that my critical skills can fully encompass.

So instead I’m going to try talking about individual concepts that interest me in or around the books I’m reading.

First up is K.J. Bishop’s The Etched City, and asymmetry.

I’ll start by saying that this book is really frickin’ good. Anyone who can pull together flavors of Marquez, Mieville, and Squaresoft into a single book and make it work is doing something right. There’s depth and juice in the worldbuilding, there’s interesting philosophical freight and multifurcate narrative, and there’s a dude who forges his dead wife into a battleaxe. What more could you want?

When I took an initial stab at writing up a review, I had a paragraph about how I felt one of the book’s weaker points was its asymmetry. The book’s first fifty pages are set in a war-ravaged country (this bit read like a novelization of a console RPG in a very weird way), and then the protagonists go to the city of Ashamoil and pretty much stay there for the next three hundred-odd pages. The story is ostensibly a braided narrative about two estranged ex-revolutionaries and their tribulations in Ashamoil, but the vast majority of screen time goes to Gwynn, the brooding badass with the gun and the sword and the other gun.

The more I thought about it, though, the more I think that the asymmetry may be an effective narrative device. It’s unbalancing. You expect the narrative to shift from Gwynn back to Raule any minute now, or from Ashamoil back to the Copper Country or on to some other peregrination, and it consistently doesn’t. The net effect is that you lose your expectations, leaving everything possible. This may be essential to what Bishop is endeavoring.

The Etched City is basically magical realism set in a constructed world, which I’ve never seen before. Constructed-world fantasy tends to be naturalistic; the given circumstances may be different, but the world’s details proceed logically and predictably from those given circumstances. This is typically because it’s hard to make a story work when the audience lacks a touchstone to orient themselves by. In most magical realism, the familiarity of the real world is the axis mundi which makes the dream logic of the narrative comprehensible. Constructed-world magical realism lacks this anchor. I’m not sure how Bishop pulls it off, but my hypothesis is that she starts off with a fairly gritty, naturalistic base (the section in the Copper Country) and then uses distancing techniques like asymmetry to slowly ease the reader into the more dreamlike world of the later Ashamoil sections.

I have trouble describing this book in ways that don’t make it sound disastrous, but somehow it works. I recommend it highly.

Originally published on LiveJournal
Posted on

Equal Time

The “balance” thing in discussions about publishing and media is starting to drive me up a wall. At work, we pretty regularly get people complaining about how we stock more liberal books than conservative books, and therefore we must be biased. In the grand tradition of retail workers, because I can’t say to them what I want to, I will say it to you.

Look. There are just more liberal books than conservative books right now. I can’t say whether there’s a publisher-side conspiracy; personally, I think it’s because it’s easier to write an interesting book which is contrary to the establishment. Let’s face it, a book entitled Everything Is Fine doesn’t inspire you to pick it up, and the “Liberals! Liberals comin’ to get you!” screeds which made Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity famous just look stupid when the right controls two and a half branches of government.

Second, look around you. You’re in frickin’ Northern California. People are going to buy that big stack of Against All Enemies, or Bushworld, or What Went Wrong. I do not anticipate that Ann Coulter’s new book, How to Talk to A Liberal (If You Must), will be a brisk seller. (I can’t imagine what she would have to say beyond, “For some reason, calling liberals slanderous traitors seems to get the conversation off on the wrong foot. Those wacky chick pie wagons.”) Nevertheless, we’ll be carrying it. We just won’t have dozens and dozens of copies, because *they won’t sell, and we would lose money*. It’s that free enterprise thing; I thought you liked that.

On a related note, customers have started editorializing the display tables. We have one guy who likes to turn over the top copy of all the liberal books, and another who just covers them up with Unfit for Command. On the left, we apparently have a customer who enjoys moving the stack of Unfit for Command over to the Fiction table.

It’s for the best, I think, that crowbars are not typically considered part of excellent customer service.

Originally published on LiveJournal
Posted on

Unfit for Command

It’s a little late, but I have some tidbits about the whole Unfit for Command foofarah that might be interesting. (A disclaimer: I am not a journalist, and my ability to back some of this up is limited. Anything prefaced with “I am told” is something that I have in fact been told, and have no reason to doubt, but cannot verify.)

I work in a bookstore, you see, and thus selling Unfit for Command, the book written by the head of Swift Boat Vets for Truth, is part of my job. Or it would be, if we could get some in. I wish we could, because then the conservatives might stop yelling at me.

Unfit for Command is published by Regnery Press, a publisher of conservative books of various stripes. (Its owner is also currently involved in setting up an online dating service for heterosexual white Christians, it seems, for fear that they will be outbred by all the dirt people. Perhaps that was needlessly inflammatory. But I digress.) Regnery, it appears, was totally unprepared for the major media blitz that ensued; I am told that they printed 30,000 copies, which is about what you would do for a first novel. Demand was way, way higher.

Ordinarily, one deals with such a situation by sending some portion of each customer’s order. This is not what Regnery did. Instead, I am told they filled some orders fully, but not others. No one in the Bay Area had it, except for Borders, and they ran out within a few days. Some have speculated that Regnery may have tried to focus their efforts on supplying swing states with the book, but I have no evidence on that.

At this point, the angry phone calls began. It appears that right-wing talk show hosts have been telling their listeners that “liberal bookstores” are suppressing the book; at least, that’s what the legions of customers calling with venom in their voice to demand the book said. We will leave aside the question of what sane bookstore would buy dozens of books and then not sell them.

By now, the surge is subsiding; most of the charges the book needed to make are out in the public sphere, I think, so the point is probably sort of moot. Somewhere in there, we got a handful of copies which we used to fill special orders; this helps a bit, in that it’s easier to mollify an enraged conservative by telling them “we’re sold out” than with “we don’t have it yet”.

Ironically, very few of the livid legion actually want to order the book; they just want to test the liberal conspiracy. We may wind up sitting on a pile of books when Regnery finally fills our order.

Originally published on LiveJournal
Posted on

Book Review: Three Books of Occult Philosophy

Last night I finally slogged my way to the end of Agrippa’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy, one of the major tomes of Renaissance magical thought. It is a mighty slab of words, and the translation preserves that (possibly intentional) opacity that is typical of magical writers; it was a pretty long trek. I’ve been reading it for months.

At the end, my feelings are mixed. I wish I’d picked up more of the classics at some point in my education; I kept wanting more background in Aristotle and Pliny. Certainly I have a better sense of what magic was about at the dawn of rationalism now. I know the humors better, and I finally know the difference between a cherub and a domination. The astrology was a little past me at points, and a lot of the angelology would have been way more comprehensible if I knew some Hebrew. On the other hand, Three Books also has the most accessible introduction to Kabbalah I’ve read yet.

Basically, I learned a lot, but I’m not sure it was worth the massive investment of time. And I certainly wish I’d finished it before I started working on GURPS Magic.

Originally published on LiveJournal