I bow to your superior knowledge of Marx-on-surplus (although I do believe that he considered the beginning of communism to be the collapse of capitalism under the weight of its own -- self-enforced -- scarcities?)
Not to get too geeky about it -- Special Circumstances and Contact are all "ad hoc" and spontaneous; their resources come not from a top-down appropriation or restriction, but just from the fact that some of the cleverest, weirdest and oldest of the people in the society happen to want to join in.
As for Cultural Imperialism "with a good reason" -- that's a rather American attitude (one I share, I should note.) Banks is much more, I think, nervous about the idea, and it comes out here and there in the novels.
I think is the reason for the high prices! A copy of Paradise Lost is pretty cheap...
from a blogger hack to a comment troll
on
Matter
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I provide what I think is a relatively interesting historiography of sci-fi subgenres and try to suggest that space opera, after years of taking a sideline to other projects, might be ready to capture the attention of the average geek. I try to put things in a larger context because my guess is that most/. readers haven't read Banks, and generally consider space opera to be a bit beneath their paygrade.
In response, you demand a totally different product, a review of the book for someone who already has read Banks' culture novels. That's fine, but that's not the review I wanted to write. Then you as much as accuse me of deception -- that I never actually read the book -- and when I bite back, you get huffy and claim that you were simply providing kind guidance and that if I don't listen to you I will be doomed to write crappy reviews.
I, blogger hack, salute you, friend and comrade comment troll!
This is probably the advantage of the space-opera. It's also a failing, because sci-fi's appeal does rest on the notion of constraint -- either by physical law, or by alterno-universe physical law -- and a lazy space opera writer can just go off the deep end, continually modifying physics whenever the plot gets too tangled (viz., all of Star Trek.) If I had to stick to only one sub-genre, it might be the Neal Stephenson niche, where physics takes a backseat to sociology, but the constraints are still strongly in place and one still has that "parlor game" feel at the right moments.
possibly an oxbridge thing
on
Matter
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I've seen his releases get front-alcove treatment in the Waterstones in Oxford, and Heffers' in Cambridge, but perhaps that's because they know their nerds. I do agree, in lesser doses, that the problems you describe are the failure modes of Banks' sci-fi -- but I disagree that it happens as often as you suggest.
Hello all -- thanks for writing in with comments on the review; I'll try to respond to those I think I should.
One error I made in this review was to say that Benford's Timescape was published in the 1990s. This is incorrect: it was actually published in 1980 (I believe my mistake stemmed from my having read it in the 1990s in a new edition at the time.) Trying to fit sci-fi (or anything else) into neat decades is pretty tricky even if it does provide a satisfactory narrative device. One interesting note is that steampunk, which I think most of us think of as a Gibson/Sterling 1990s thing, actually had its birth wayyy back in the 1960s, with Pavane: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavane_(novel) -- a really fantastic read that doesn't "date" at all despite its release during the Summer of Love.
Re:really, i didn't make it up
on
Matter
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· Score: 1
Another place to find Banks in the British editions (which are also quite a bit prettier in binding and cover, if you are shallow like me) is Borderlands Books in the Mission district of San Francisco (which itself sometimes feels like an outpost of the Culture where the A.I.s take the form of fixed-gear bicycles): http://www.sfstation.com/borderlands-books-a1423
how banks sees the culture
on
Matter
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Post-scarcity, I don't see how you'd have anything that resembled "Communism" in the standard sense, but the Guardian described the Culture as "anarcho-communism", which seems reasonable. I can't find the interview, but the one think Banks did say was that he was very irritated by those who saw the Culture as a metaphor for a kind of "future America." Banks is indeed very critical of what he sees as the kind of anarcho-capitalism tooth-and-claw of the States and my guess is that back in the real world he's a socialist.
I do agree that Banks is pretty sophisticated about his relationship to the Culture, and is tuned-in to the sort of "cultural imperialism" that the Culture's unrestrained hedonism and vaguely-Enlightenment extrapolations practice. But would you really join the Iridians?
Well, I did try to give a sense of Banks' larger project. Since I considered Matter not his best, I tilted more towards that than plot summary (which is a pretty lazy way to write a book review after grade school.) If you are looking for hints that I've actually read the book, you can try paras eight and nine, or just take my word for it.
really, i didn't make it up
on
Matter
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· Score: 4, Informative
Not really, he's not -- not compared to the killer-Bs, for example, or Neal, or the "older" generations. "Extremely prominent" is a difficult thing to quantify (just as "less known than he deserves to be"), but here's one metric: Myopic Books, a used book store in Chicago with an excellent sci-fi section, currently has no Banks on the shelves -- but plenty of the more usual suspects from America.
As for relative availability in the US versus the UK: I've already covered the extent to which his sci-fi is far more celebrated in blighty, but to elaborate: it is tough (but getting easier now) to get a hold of Banks' books. Booksellers tend to class them with the usual muck and laser-slash-grunge and don't really consider him (as they should) an essential writer to stock. And, yes, there is digging required: Inversions and Look to Windward are, for example, not available on amazon (Look to Windward is "temporarily out of stock", and Inversions appears to be out of print and only available used.) This is changing now that Orbit is re-releasing the books, as you can see from a cursory glance at release dates.
In conclusion: you are wrong, and also a bit mean.
But you are right that $700/year was the average annual income back in the 20s. On the other hand, the average annual income today is $26k, so things do work out roughly (i.e., the car is still a larger-than-unity fraction of a year's income.) I think the distinction here needed is not average income, but average income per household (today that is more like $48k.) Of course, there's the mean/median/mode distinction as well, but this isn't a statistics class so I'll spare us all.
Actually, if you were going to pick some creature to go with whales, it would be the hippopotamus. In the evolutionary chain that you can establish with DNA, whales got back into the water rather late. But as someone noted below, this article is about papers that come out of "scientific" whaling -- which is really just a cover for the Japanese to hunt the endangered species for cash. So I guess they went with cows, because they are pretty cheap and it's probably easier to do whatever phony-science you want (e.g., because of agriculture, getting your cow DNA sequenced is probably somthing you can just mail in.)
Beware! My knowledge of evolution and cetaceans comes only from Richard Dawkins books which I last read like three years ago (I highly recommend The Ancestor's Tale, if you've already read the classics like Selfish Gene and Extended Phenotype.)
Yup, all true (I hear Auckland has some danger areas, though.) Christchurch is wonderful. Except that everyone I met was either 21, and getting ready to go on an O.E. they hoped never to return from, or 28 and back from their O.E. after exhausting their visas without getting a spouse or a job that could keep them somewhere where the papers are scary, the homeless nasty, and there's something going on. Not to knock it -- there were a few Christchurchers happy to be there at 30 (one told me the city was so nice because there were no Maori making crime -- I felt a little schadenfreude that there are racists in paradise), and the internet makes things easier, but if you have ambitions that don't involve the interaction of geography and gravity, it's hard to realize.
I've just gotten finished burning all the books of mine published in 2007. Can't have any of those clogging up the house! Tomorrow I go for a memory erasure to make sure I don't think about them very much (or, hopefully, recall them at all.)
"Sunlight is the best disinfectant." But it doesn't have to be 100% pure fusion-powered. So perhaps the site is biased, full of cranks, even full of lies -- so are most local governments. If they can't compete against RateMyCop, there is something broken in them: they've lost the public trust, most likely. One nice thing about the post-9/11 security scare is that educated white people are feeling about 1% of the pain from law enforcement that minorities and the poor have been feeling for decades.
In the States, anonymous political speech is held -- at least to date -- to be strongly protected under the 1st Amendment; furthermore, slander and libel, especially in the case of discussion of a public official's official conduct, are insanely hard to prove (much easier in Commonwealth countries, and thus, they have their access to information cut off in cases -- most recently, the Tom Cruise biography -- where there is a powerful corporation or government against them.)
As for the 1984 allegories? I suspect that you all-too easily attribute to malice what can be more easily attributed to incompetence, greed, and disparate desires that happen to run in parallel.
I suspect that you all-too easily assume that the erosion of our freedoms is driven mainly by malicious intent.
The only airport I've been able to get free wifi in has been Tucson; everywhere else (and I travel quite a bit) charges around $10. Certainly the major airports (Newark, La Guardia, O'Hare, SFO, e.g., and also the European ones like CDG). Meanwhile, unsecured personal hotspots are drying up -- three years ago they were everywhere, now it's rare to turn on your laptop and get an unsecured signal even with a list of ten to choose from. The only place that's not true in my experience are places like the Lower East Side of New York, where folks are sufficiently both technically savvy and generous to disable what must be now-automatic passwording. I think it's mostly that service providers are pushing secured routers; awareness of liability for an unsecured network is pretty low.
In San Francisco, free wifi in the Mission is still standard. I think that's partly due to the massive abundance of cafés and it's true they need to draw you in. But a lot of coffeeshops in the rest of the country I've found have either never jumped on the wifi wagon, or have gone to a pay-for-access model. This latter decision makes quite a bit of sense depending on your business model: if you're primarily serving coffee, you want to move people in and out quickly, and giving internet access tends to lead to people "camping out". Unless you market higher-end things like sandwiches and so forth, you have a situation in which a guy is paying $2/4 hours to rent 10 sq feet in a seriously expensive part of town at the peak of business -- doesn't make economic sense. Especially since, these days, a café needs to be nearly full for most of the day just to survive; that guy drawn in by free wireless will sit for four hours, holding a seat and meaning you won't get four one-hour customers.
This is very often true in cafés in college towns, where students don't actually have to be "in the office". Another way to "throttle back" tables is to hide the power outlets, so at least there's a one or two hour limit; even in San Francisco, it's rare to find a place that offers both free wireless and free power. Yes, a place like Panera will give you free wireless, but they're not particularly nice places to sit and work (I found them echoy and noise-filled.)
I'm not sure where wireless is going. I think you will find increasingly that liability issues, coupled with the business-sense above, will mean that hotspots will increasingly become pay-for-access. It's possible you can finesse things, having free wireless at "unpopular" times, or having free-but-time-limited access (this latter one is harder, because it requires some software and café owners don't really know how to maintain it -- but you can't pay support with $0!)
I actually kinda agree. The problem is sort of cat-and-bell -- right now, only a few do it, and are penalized, whereas if it were required we'd all get used to seeing crappy code.
Interesting. Releasing code unrelated to the core field seems fine (I may have done that myself, including little "bug fixes".) It's when you come to release code that does something related to your core competency that things become problematic -- people could use it to (unfairly) judge your work.
I'm not sure what field you're in, but mine is small (at most 10,000 people, but actually much less.) Giving away code -- it carries with it responsibility, in the sense that if you do give away code people think you are saying "I am so cool that what I have done is better than whatever you haven't released." Sort of like, I don't know, the difference between keeping a diary and publishing a diary on livejournal. It generates problems.
It might be something to do with the bizarre psychological fact that people are suspicious when you do them unasked-for favors.
Well, it's partly a joke, I mean, I don't actually send hatemail. But it's true that the authors spend a lot of time fielding "customer support". They are dedicated to their code, and put a lot of work into it, and it's not something that I personally have the time (or the code skills) for. You should see most of the code scientists write, it is horrific, cobbled-together stuff, meant for an audience of one. Perhaps I should take a CS class again (the last time was in high school) -- I duplicate efforts every few years.
As a scientist, I write a lot of code to do things that other people have already done. I sometimes think about "releasing" it -- informally, without a license, just on a webpage or something. But it really is embaressment that holds me back -- it's poorly documented, full of hacks, and basically inelegant.
I remember as an undergraduate suggesting to my advisor that I release my (actually rather pretty) code that I wrote to do general relativistic raytracing around neutron stars. His response? "People will not understand your code, they will misuse it, and then they will blame you when it gets them in trouble." You might expect someone who's doing raytracing around compact objects to not be so silly as to do something like that, but I think you'd be mistaken: I know I treat the few publicly available codes in my field (e.g., camb) with great disrespect, bitch all the time, and generally am part of the large community that makes it far more trouble than it's worth for the poor people who worked so hard on it.
Slashdot Mirror
I bow to your superior knowledge of Marx-on-surplus (although I do believe that he considered the beginning of communism to be the collapse of capitalism under the weight of its own -- self-enforced -- scarcities?)
Not to get too geeky about it -- Special Circumstances and Contact are all "ad hoc" and spontaneous; their resources come not from a top-down appropriation or restriction, but just from the fact that some of the cleverest, weirdest and oldest of the people in the society happen to want to join in.
As for Cultural Imperialism "with a good reason" -- that's a rather American attitude (one I share, I should note.) Banks is much more, I think, nervous about the idea, and it comes out here and there in the novels.
I think is the reason for the high prices! A copy of Paradise Lost is pretty cheap...
I provide what I think is a relatively interesting historiography of sci-fi subgenres and try to suggest that space opera, after years of taking a sideline to other projects, might be ready to capture the attention of the average geek. I try to put things in a larger context because my guess is that most /. readers haven't read Banks, and generally consider space opera to be a bit beneath their paygrade.
In response, you demand a totally different product, a review of the book for someone who already has read Banks' culture novels. That's fine, but that's not the review I wanted to write. Then you as much as accuse me of deception -- that I never actually read the book -- and when I bite back, you get huffy and claim that you were simply providing kind guidance and that if I don't listen to you I will be doomed to write crappy reviews.
I, blogger hack, salute you, friend and comrade comment troll!
This is probably the advantage of the space-opera. It's also a failing, because sci-fi's appeal does rest on the notion of constraint -- either by physical law, or by alterno-universe physical law -- and a lazy space opera writer can just go off the deep end, continually modifying physics whenever the plot gets too tangled (viz., all of Star Trek.) If I had to stick to only one sub-genre, it might be the Neal Stephenson niche, where physics takes a backseat to sociology, but the constraints are still strongly in place and one still has that "parlor game" feel at the right moments.
I've seen his releases get front-alcove treatment in the Waterstones in Oxford, and Heffers' in Cambridge, but perhaps that's because they know their nerds. I do agree, in lesser doses, that the problems you describe are the failure modes of Banks' sci-fi -- but I disagree that it happens as often as you suggest.
Hello all -- thanks for writing in with comments on the review; I'll try to respond to those I think I should.
One error I made in this review was to say that Benford's Timescape was published in the 1990s. This is incorrect: it was actually published in 1980 (I believe my mistake stemmed from my having read it in the 1990s in a new edition at the time.) Trying to fit sci-fi (or anything else) into neat decades is pretty tricky even if it does provide a satisfactory narrative device. One interesting note is that steampunk, which I think most of us think of as a Gibson/Sterling 1990s thing, actually had its birth wayyy back in the 1960s, with Pavane: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavane_(novel) -- a really fantastic read that doesn't "date" at all despite its release during the Summer of Love.
Another place to find Banks in the British editions (which are also quite a bit prettier in binding and cover, if you are shallow like me) is Borderlands Books in the Mission district of San Francisco (which itself sometimes feels like an outpost of the Culture where the A.I.s take the form of fixed-gear bicycles): http://www.sfstation.com/borderlands-books-a1423
Post-scarcity, I don't see how you'd have anything that resembled "Communism" in the standard sense, but the Guardian described the Culture as "anarcho-communism", which seems reasonable. I can't find the interview, but the one think Banks did say was that he was very irritated by those who saw the Culture as a metaphor for a kind of "future America." Banks is indeed very critical of what he sees as the kind of anarcho-capitalism tooth-and-claw of the States and my guess is that back in the real world he's a socialist.
I do agree that Banks is pretty sophisticated about his relationship to the Culture, and is tuned-in to the sort of "cultural imperialism" that the Culture's unrestrained hedonism and vaguely-Enlightenment extrapolations practice. But would you really join the Iridians?
Well, I did try to give a sense of Banks' larger project. Since I considered Matter not his best, I tilted more towards that than plot summary (which is a pretty lazy way to write a book review after grade school.) If you are looking for hints that I've actually read the book, you can try paras eight and nine, or just take my word for it.
Not really, he's not -- not compared to the killer-Bs, for example, or Neal, or the "older" generations. "Extremely prominent" is a difficult thing to quantify (just as "less known than he deserves to be"), but here's one metric: Myopic Books, a used book store in Chicago with an excellent sci-fi section, currently has no Banks on the shelves -- but plenty of the more usual suspects from America.
As for relative availability in the US versus the UK: I've already covered the extent to which his sci-fi is far more celebrated in blighty, but to elaborate: it is tough (but getting easier now) to get a hold of Banks' books. Booksellers tend to class them with the usual muck and laser-slash-grunge and don't really consider him (as they should) an essential writer to stock. And, yes, there is digging required: Inversions and Look to Windward are, for example, not available on amazon (Look to Windward is "temporarily out of stock", and Inversions appears to be out of print and only available used.) This is changing now that Orbit is re-releasing the books, as you can see from a cursory glance at release dates.
In conclusion: you are wrong, and also a bit mean.
The consumer price index says that $1,775 is about $30k today, a reasonable cost for a low-mid end car new -- try it here: http://woodrow.mpls.frb.fed.us/research/data/us/calc/
But you are right that $700/year was the average annual income back in the 20s. On the other hand, the average annual income today is $26k, so things do work out roughly (i.e., the car is still a larger-than-unity fraction of a year's income.) I think the distinction here needed is not average income, but average income per household (today that is more like $48k.) Of course, there's the mean/median/mode distinction as well, but this isn't a statistics class so I'll spare us all.
You just made my day.
Actually, if you were going to pick some creature to go with whales, it would be the hippopotamus. In the evolutionary chain that you can establish with DNA, whales got back into the water rather late. But as someone noted below, this article is about papers that come out of "scientific" whaling -- which is really just a cover for the Japanese to hunt the endangered species for cash. So I guess they went with cows, because they are pretty cheap and it's probably easier to do whatever phony-science you want (e.g., because of agriculture, getting your cow DNA sequenced is probably somthing you can just mail in.)
Beware! My knowledge of evolution and cetaceans comes only from Richard Dawkins books which I last read like three years ago (I highly recommend The Ancestor's Tale, if you've already read the classics like Selfish Gene and Extended Phenotype.)
Yup, all true (I hear Auckland has some danger areas, though.) Christchurch is wonderful. Except that everyone I met was either 21, and getting ready to go on an O.E. they hoped never to return from, or 28 and back from their O.E. after exhausting their visas without getting a spouse or a job that could keep them somewhere where the papers are scary, the homeless nasty, and there's something going on. Not to knock it -- there were a few Christchurchers happy to be there at 30 (one told me the city was so nice because there were no Maori making crime -- I felt a little schadenfreude that there are racists in paradise), and the internet makes things easier, but if you have ambitions that don't involve the interaction of geography and gravity, it's hard to realize.
I've just gotten finished burning all the books of mine published in 2007. Can't have any of those clogging up the house! Tomorrow I go for a memory erasure to make sure I don't think about them very much (or, hopefully, recall them at all.)
"Sunlight is the best disinfectant." But it doesn't have to be 100% pure fusion-powered. So perhaps the site is biased, full of cranks, even full of lies -- so are most local governments. If they can't compete against RateMyCop, there is something broken in them: they've lost the public trust, most likely. One nice thing about the post-9/11 security scare is that educated white people are feeling about 1% of the pain from law enforcement that minorities and the poor have been feeling for decades.
In the States, anonymous political speech is held -- at least to date -- to be strongly protected under the 1st Amendment; furthermore, slander and libel, especially in the case of discussion of a public official's official conduct, are insanely hard to prove (much easier in Commonwealth countries, and thus, they have their access to information cut off in cases -- most recently, the Tom Cruise biography -- where there is a powerful corporation or government against them.)
As for the 1984 allegories? I suspect that you all-too easily attribute to malice what can be more easily attributed to incompetence, greed, and disparate desires that happen to run in parallel.
I suspect that you all-too easily assume that the erosion of our freedoms is driven mainly by malicious intent.
The only airport I've been able to get free wifi in has been Tucson; everywhere else (and I travel quite a bit) charges around $10. Certainly the major airports (Newark, La Guardia, O'Hare, SFO, e.g., and also the European ones like CDG). Meanwhile, unsecured personal hotspots are drying up -- three years ago they were everywhere, now it's rare to turn on your laptop and get an unsecured signal even with a list of ten to choose from. The only place that's not true in my experience are places like the Lower East Side of New York, where folks are sufficiently both technically savvy and generous to disable what must be now-automatic passwording. I think it's mostly that service providers are pushing secured routers; awareness of liability for an unsecured network is pretty low.
In San Francisco, free wifi in the Mission is still standard. I think that's partly due to the massive abundance of cafés and it's true they need to draw you in. But a lot of coffeeshops in the rest of the country I've found have either never jumped on the wifi wagon, or have gone to a pay-for-access model. This latter decision makes quite a bit of sense depending on your business model: if you're primarily serving coffee, you want to move people in and out quickly, and giving internet access tends to lead to people "camping out". Unless you market higher-end things like sandwiches and so forth, you have a situation in which a guy is paying $2/4 hours to rent 10 sq feet in a seriously expensive part of town at the peak of business -- doesn't make economic sense. Especially since, these days, a café needs to be nearly full for most of the day just to survive; that guy drawn in by free wireless will sit for four hours, holding a seat and meaning you won't get four one-hour customers.
This is very often true in cafés in college towns, where students don't actually have to be "in the office". Another way to "throttle back" tables is to hide the power outlets, so at least there's a one or two hour limit; even in San Francisco, it's rare to find a place that offers both free wireless and free power. Yes, a place like Panera will give you free wireless, but they're not particularly nice places to sit and work (I found them echoy and noise-filled.)
I'm not sure where wireless is going. I think you will find increasingly that liability issues, coupled with the business-sense above, will mean that hotspots will increasingly become pay-for-access. It's possible you can finesse things, having free wireless at "unpopular" times, or having free-but-time-limited access (this latter one is harder, because it requires some software and café owners don't really know how to maintain it -- but you can't pay support with $0!)
I actually kinda agree. The problem is sort of cat-and-bell -- right now, only a few do it, and are penalized, whereas if it were required we'd all get used to seeing crappy code.
Interesting. Releasing code unrelated to the core field seems fine (I may have done that myself, including little "bug fixes".) It's when you come to release code that does something related to your core competency that things become problematic -- people could use it to (unfairly) judge your work.
I'm not sure what field you're in, but mine is small (at most 10,000 people, but actually much less.) Giving away code -- it carries with it responsibility, in the sense that if you do give away code people think you are saying "I am so cool that what I have done is better than whatever you haven't released." Sort of like, I don't know, the difference between keeping a diary and publishing a diary on livejournal. It generates problems.
It might be something to do with the bizarre psychological fact that people are suspicious when you do them unasked-for favors.
Well, it's partly a joke, I mean, I don't actually send hatemail. But it's true that the authors spend a lot of time fielding "customer support". They are dedicated to their code, and put a lot of work into it, and it's not something that I personally have the time (or the code skills) for. You should see most of the code scientists write, it is horrific, cobbled-together stuff, meant for an audience of one. Perhaps I should take a CS class again (the last time was in high school) -- I duplicate efforts every few years.
As a scientist, I write a lot of code to do things that other people have already done. I sometimes think about "releasing" it -- informally, without a license, just on a webpage or something. But it really is embaressment that holds me back -- it's poorly documented, full of hacks, and basically inelegant.
I remember as an undergraduate suggesting to my advisor that I release my (actually rather pretty) code that I wrote to do general relativistic raytracing around neutron stars. His response? "People will not understand your code, they will misuse it, and then they will blame you when it gets them in trouble." You might expect someone who's doing raytracing around compact objects to not be so silly as to do something like that, but I think you'd be mistaken: I know I treat the few publicly available codes in my field (e.g., camb) with great disrespect, bitch all the time, and generally am part of the large community that makes it far more trouble than it's worth for the poor people who worked so hard on it.
the American firm Fortinet, which runs the Myanmar Wide Web.