Already Read

• Neverwhere by Niel Gaiman
• The Engineer Trilogy by K. J. Parker
  • Devices and Desires
  • Evil for Evil
  • The Escapement
• To Engineer is Human by Henry Petroski (2010 0708)
• Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay (2010 0715)
• Ghosts of Manhattan (2010 0720)
• Metatropolis edited by John Scalzi (2010 0722)
• Stardust by Neil Gaiman (2010 0724)
• The City’s End: Two Centuries of Fantasies, Fears, and Premonitions of New York’s Destruction by Max Page (2010 0726)
• Tron by Brian Daley (2010 0731)
• 1453 by Roger Crowley
• The Unincorporated Man by Dani Kollin & Eytan Kollin
• Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman
• The State of Jones: The Small Southern County that Seceded from the Confederacy by Sally Jenkins & John Stauffer
• The Affinity Bridge by George Mann

On the agenda

• The Global Achievement Gap by Tony Wagner
• The Book in the Renaissance by Andrew Pettegree

… well, you get the message below.

At this point, the economy is so anemic we should probably be considering nuclear-fueled desalinization plants (whatever their fiscal equivalent would be)…

Billed on several sites as home of “Chicago’s best cheeseburger” and made famous by a skit on early Saturday Night Live (“cheezborger! cheezborger! cheezborger!”).

As part of our very-intermittent plan of sampling “the best of…” in Chicago eateries, Annie and I decided to stop at the original Billy Goat’s Tavern on the way back from the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry.

What can I say?  Meh.  The burger wasn’t bad but it was far from the best I’d ever had.  Heck, it wasn’t even the best I’d ever had in Chicago.  (That goes to the Jona’s burger we had at Jacky’s on Prairie yesterday.)  The Billy Goat burger was, well, ordinary.  It was quick and it was priced right.  But I think that all the raves reflect more on nostalgia than quality.  If I happened to be out and about near the Tribune building, and I happened to be hungry, and someone happened to suggest Billy Goat’s Tavern, I would not be opposed.  But it’s not the sort of experience that makes me want to plan a return outing; it’s not the sort of burger that demands a second sampling.  The tavern has a real working-class ambiance and the place is decorated with more Chicago history than you can imagine…  but the burger?  Just OK.

Fox News is a propaganda outlet, a detail everyone seems to know, but which is apparently impolite to say out loud. The network’s proponents will likely argue a front-row seat is warranted because Fox News has a lot of viewers. Perhaps. But Milli Vanilli sold a lot of records, and success didn’t make them legitimate recording artists.

The quote comes from Steven Benen at Political Animal; the emphasis is mine.

In the end, we took a soapbox racer to a go-kart track and then realized we were competing against actual cars.

Great analogy — and better analysis — by Ezra Klein.

Metatropolis

Metatropolis is a science fiction anthology exploring, as it claims, the “future of cities”.  That’s not strictly accurate. It’s really a collection of stories that explore the question: If we as a species are going to survive the mistakes of our forebears (particularly ecological mistakes), what will human society have to look like?  It’s pretty clear that we won’t be able to ratchet up world living standards to the stereotypical 2.4 kids in the suburbs mid American ideal.  Resources are too finite and indeed running out.  If our profligate carbon society doesn’t right itself soon, if we face a Century of Judgment, then what will emerge from the drowned coasts and droughted interiors?

The five authors (Jack Scalzi, Jay Lake, Tobias Buckell, Elizabeth Bear, and Karl Schroeder) don’t really offer blueprints and white papers, of course.  They off five distinct tales, appropriately interdependent, that explore a possible future.  This is a shared world on the model of Aspirin’s Thieves’ World, though not quite so sprawling or tightly woven.  It is clear that the authors spent considerable time together thrashing out their shared world — though, in keeping with the theme, much of that might have been online and virtual.

So, does the book succeed?

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Addressing craft first, I’d have to say Yes.  The stories are uniformly well-written and engaging.  They each contain a nice mix of philosophizing and action, abstraction and characterization.  Each story has its own voice, as might be expected of an anthology; but even within a story the characters seems multidimensional and believable.  The slow-drip despair of the mid-to-late 21st century comes through nicely.  The world is running down and, for most of the main characters, that is their primary experience of it.  Each story includes a glimpse at what might replace the worn-out consumerist world; each story is a voyage of discovery.

As to the ideas behind the stories:  Most of the time, that works too.  While the thrust of each story is sustainability, there is no myopic utopian fantasies here.  The authors recognize that survival will come not from going back but going forward. In contrast to the environmental dystopias of, say, the 1970s, these authors understand that a call to abandon all technology will not be heeded by the mass of humanity; and, realistically, billions will not lay down and die to redress a balance they did not themselves upset.

Nonetheless, the citizens of these zero-footprint enclaves invariably come off as a tad, well, smug.  Perhaps they have the right to be, since they have unlocked a key to survival while most of the world burns and drowns.  But to present-day ears, it sounds a bit thin.  There is a steady undercurrent of derision and mockery for the “big society” thinking that got the world into the mess it’s in.  One story calls it big capital; another, corporatism; an third, consumerism.  Uniformly they denounce the past few centuries as a mistake run amok, a blight to be rejected and corrected.  This rankles me just a bit, because the actual proposed societies can only exist because of the larger, expansionist, consumerist, big-science world.  Without the technologies spawned by the governments and the markets, there would be no Cascadia with its reputation-based economy or New Detroit with its skyscrapes reclaimed for vertical agriculture.

The philosophy of the book is unsatisfying, because the new societies are every bit as parasitic as the one they strive to replace.  These new worlds feast on the carcass of the previous one (ours) and seem deliberately oblivious to it.  In the end, that didn’t ruin the book because, in my mind, that is very human — exactly how a new vibrant society would have to view its predecessor.  We all need myths of a heroic age.

The preachiness varies a lot from story to story.  It is worst in the introductory piece, by Jay Lake (“In the Forests of the Night”) and seems to dribble off from there. That might be a structural artifact; the need to explain the new world and hook the reader drives some of the choices Mr. Lake makes.  Even allowing for that, I found it to be the least successful of the stories

The second story (“Stochasti-City” by Tobias Buckell), on the other hand, is probably my favorite.  On one level it’s a more straightforward action tale with a unified narrator.  (Mr. Lake attempts a fractured, multifaceted narrative along the lines of Stand on Zanzibar; but he lacks John Brunner’s dexterity.) The big idea seems much more achievable and realistic, as well as something real people might actually attempt.  Of course it’s just my opinion, but Buckell does a better job than Lake in selling his reality.

“The Red in the Sky is Our Blood” by Elizabeth Bear works pretty well, too.  Like the previous piece, it’s about an outsider gaining access to the hidden new cities that underlie the collection.  In this case, the narrative is perhaps a little too linear, though the characters are well-drawn.

John Scalzi’s contribution (in addition to being editor) is “Utere Nihil Non Extra Quiritationem Suis”. It means “use everything but the squeal”, referring to a maxim about the high efficiency of pig.  And it is a pig story.  But don’t let that fool you, the way it does the narrator (at first).  It’s still a clever, if workmanlike, exploration of the role of labor in the new cities, which can’t base things on ever-increasing consumption.  I have a soft spot for the story, since it deals in no small measure with education and its impact.  But it must be admitted that it is probably the least adventurous or ambitious of the stories in the collection.

These middle three stories have the advantage of hanging together very well; they mesh to make the shared future world believable, whereas the bookend stories feel more shoe-horned in.  There’s an irony in the fact that Cascadia — the virtual, zero-footprint city that springs up in the Pacific Northwest — is more real and believable in the three stories that mention it obliquely, than in the one that describes it in detail.

The final tale is “To Hie from Far Cilenia” by Karl Schroeder.  Compared to the others, it’s right off the map.  (There’s a bit of a pun in that sentence but — I’ve decided to be spoiler-free.)  The earlier tales all split their focus between technology and sociology.  Not only do the authors explore what sort of devices we will need to survive the Century of Judgment; they also pick about what must change in our social interactions.  But Schroeder goes far deeper than that.  He ponders whether near real-time resource mapping will open up the unexpected vista of a whole new reality — or, at least, of a way of perceiving the world that is so radically different from what our monkey brains are used to, that it might just as well be a new reality.  I’m not sure he really succeeds at making this clear, but I’ll have to reread the story before I could say he failed.

Overall, the book is well worth the time spent in reading it and pondering its questions.  Although the prose is modern, its spirit harkens back to the early days of science fiction, where authors used grand visions to explore unseen possibilities.  Metatropolis is light years removed from the pulp fiction of the 1930s, but it aspires to some of the same larger purpose: to serve as a sort of handbook of the future, helping us navigate its unseen shoals by throwing a light on what might be.

In human history, it’s never been easier to get — and stay — well informed. Folks just have to take some responsibility. If they don’t, the result can be a dysfunctional democracy.

It’s impolitic to say this but not all pastimes and passions are equal. And the next time you bemoan the state of the economy or your due taxes or your summons to jury duty or the latest idiocy out of Washington — just pause for a moment and think about how much time you spend reading gossip columns, or devouring “reality” TV, or watching one overgrown overdosed tribe of jocks beat up on a different overgrown overdosed tribe of jocks. Is it really true that you don’t have the time to keep informed?  Or is it that you just don’t want to invest that time?

And if it’s the latter, do you really deserve the vote you’re accorded by virtue of your citizenship in an advanced democracy?

Inception is a weird, ambitious, action-packed sci fi thriller-cum-heist flick.  It is, in its own way, as ambitious as The Matrix and suffers from the comparison only in that it didn’t come first.  Leonardo DiCaprio plays Tom Dom Cobb, a thief of a singular kind: He can enter the dreams of others and “extract” information they’re trying to keep secret.  On the run for (at first) unspecified horrible crimes, he parlays his skill into a lucrative, if high-risk, lifestyle.  But in the end all he really wants to do is get to go home again and pick up the shards of his former life, including two small children.

More detail, and spoilers, to follow, but in short, this is a fantastic film that’s better than it has any right to be.  The pacing is superb, the acting is above-average, and the setting and technology are remarkably well fleshed out.  Although everyone draws comparisons to The Matrix, the real spiritual ancestor of this film is The Thirteenth Floor (which, ironically, came out at the same time as — and got lost in the glare of the hoopla of — The Matrix).

Spoilers ho!
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Any movie that involves dream technology is going to mess with the audience’s perceptions, and this is no exception.  By the end of the film, we’ve delved three levels “deep” : a dream within a dream, itself within a dream. And the film ends by (of course) going one further and asking, Is this the real world?  Or is Tom Cobb just locked within another nested level?  Has he returned to reality?  Was he ever there to begin with?  By transparent design, the question is left open.  Within the movie, we are told that every dream adventurer must fashion his or her own “totem”, an object he/she can use to assess whether the current setting is real or someone’s dream.  Arthur uses a loaded die, whose balance only he knows.  Adriadne makes a chess piece (a bishop). Cobb uses a peculiar top.  (It belonged to his deceased wife Mallorie, and would keep spinning forever in a dream world but flop over in a real one.)  You can’t share your totem because then someone else could simulate it in one of their dreams and you’d be lost.

The totems raise a couple of questions.  For example, while it might tell you you’re in someone else’s dream, could it tell you if you were lost in your own?  Cobb warns Adriadne that one must never use whole memories in building a dream world, because you might lose grasp of the distinction and never find your way out.  But you can, of course, perfectly dream your own totem — so it must be useless in distinguishing your dreams from reality.

Adriadne’s totem never comes into play, oddly enough, considering the screen time spent on explaining its purpose and on her fashioning it.  But the top is crucial.  At several places, after Cobb begins to get drawn more and more obsessively into the dreams they are making, he uses it to reassure himself that he’s still got a handle on reality.  There’s something almost heartbreaking about this process, because by the very rules of the game, he must check his sanity alone.  You can never share the thing that keeps you anchored.

But the most important — if most glaringly telegraphed — use of the top comes at the end of the film, after Cobb has rescued the sponsor of the last job and so gotten his life back. He sets the top to spinning, but is distracted by the arrivial of his children.  For the first time he (and we) can see their faces, and he moves off to their embrace.  Behind him the top keeps spinning.  Just before the camera cuts, it starts to wobble, but we never see it fall.  So… is Cobb in the real world?  Or has he fled into yet another dream, one he fashioned himself, so that he can have the life he’s been missing?  (This is even set up by a projection of Mallorie, that asks him whether his actual life — chased by shadowy agents of an unseen conspiracy — is true or just another psychological immune reaction.)

To me, the far more interesting point is:  The top was Mallorie‘s totem.  That fact is mentioned repeatedly, in important scenes.  But you can’t share totems … so why does Cobb think it’s valid for him at all?  Every one of his reality checks is suspect, not just the final one.  We might be far more than one level “down” at the end.  There are hints, I think, that the nesting is infinite.

It’s been a while since a movie had me thinking this hard after the credits rolled.  I heartily recommend it.