Nothing Erases the Past: "Exhalation: Stories" by Ted Chiang

“Nothing erases the past. There is repentance, there is atonement, and there is forgiveness. That is all, but that is enough.”

In “The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate” by Ted Chiang

I could write a review for each one of the stories in this collection, but my favourite is the “The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate”.

If I had a Time Machine, I would save my time machine journey time (just in case it breaks down after too much use) until I had paid someone to type out the whole Harry Potter series for me and would travel back to just before J.K. Rowling started writing them and start negotiations with publishers....with my Harry Potter royalties I would then travel to the US and make some large investments into Facebook in its earlier stages and find the Whassapp guys and offer them a lot of money for a large share in their start-up! Or I'd kill Heinseberg to stop all the nonsense with the Quantum World. It'd probably not change anything as there would just be another nutter round the corner with the same idea, and then where do you stop, do you save every person killed by power crazed psychos, you would die of old age before you had the chance to keep travelling around. I will just take my Harry Potter, Facebook and Whatsapp money and do a load of good things with it instead; or maybe the publishers would reject it, since I'm not the sort of author they were looking for; or with the extra early on cash, I decide I'm rich enough and can't be shagged with my Facebook lark anymore and it never gets off the ground. Or If I had killed Julius Caesar instead, long before Brutus got him, we could all be speaking Welsh, which could have become the dominant language of the world! Or, as a keen photographer, I'd like to go back with my digital camera and photograph great events in history. I would have the knowledge of when and where they would happen, and I would do it unobtrusively so that it would not affect the course of history. But only If my camera would work before it had been invented! It'd inevitably be stolen/lost and fall into the hands of the Nazis, allowing a team led by Werner Heisenberg to reverse-engineer the microprocessor and use it to develop a dramatically improved guidance system for the V2 rocket, and a secure cipher machine that Bletchley Park could not break, drastically altering the course of the war? On balance, it seems safer to take a 1930s Leica - they still work very well, and you can buy film locally. Not sure if time travel fogs it, though...Of course, going back in time might not affect the past, but those pictures could well affect the future. Imagine if I had a clear, indisputable video of Moses parting the red sea or the resurrection of Christ. Such things would fundamentally alter society. Who knows? Read Chiang instead. Even when it's at it's most fantastical it's very definitively SF as SF.

SF = Speculative Fiction.

Transhumanist's Wet-Dream: "Incandescence" by Greg Egan

Alright, I'm gonna go ahead and critique this book’s critics.

It's perfectly understandable that folks are finding it a difficult read. I'm sure there are undergraduate text books that are more accessible. However, I challenge the idea that this is a failing. I'm quite sure that Egan didn't write this expecting its appeal to be especially broad. He's aware he's writing for a niche audience. That in mind, he's untethered. He can unleash his arsenal with the assurance that anyone who's already reading is likely a hardened veteran who knew the score going in. If was writing for the Harry Potter crowd, I'd agree that he spends too much time on minutia. This, along with some of his other works, is something to read, but not necessarily to tell all your friends to read. My bias is that I loved the book, cover to cover. Its protagonists are post-biological life-forms. How cool is that? He did an admirable job distinguishing them from modern humanity in a more or less plausible way. Kinda breaks the Kardashev scale, too. It's no just a space opera, it's a transhumanist's wet-dream. Somewhere out there in the vastness of space life exists, it will have evolved as we have on Earth. I don't think it's much of a reach to assume that. Everywhere we look in our solar system we're finding water for instance, it's not the Earth exclusive asset some presume. Life IS out there. Much if it could be far more advanced than we are, thus when something doesn't fit any naturally known causes I don't see the harm in beginning to consider that something artificial may be in play that can explain it. Sure it most likely will be natural and just a new phenomenon that we've not seen before. But alien civilisations are not in the crazy spectrum of possibility. It’s only that Greg Egan fictionalises this like no other by using “plain” and “boring” Physics. 

I love it.

The Holy Book of Blake: "The Poetic Image" by Cecil Day-Lewis

Word of Warning: What you're about to read might not make much sense if you don't have read the book. Read at your own peril...

Perhaps what Blake also represents to me is the “thou” in performance, on a threshold over which lay different spacial awareness, new, thee in triplicate state, digital long haul through double-number's realm - restoring boring patter to the even lie that led to this.

PS

Goodbye

I cannot go on for very much longer, because Carol's shelf-life, at the bottom of a reject-pile, thee's words, alert the authorities to one's 'undercover' performance as thine own Songs of Experience and Failure, 'shit', you know how it is. Blake here, he did you feel injustice because it is all there?

Anonymity, rejection, failure. It's all you knew and experienced, as a prophet: not only unrecognised by the community in your own land of 'Albion', as their Prophet; but also viewed with bafflement, indifference, disconnection, de-friend quality in personal dealings with your fellow bards, more or less, wholly inconsequential; you have, like, 'zero' effect you, in Albion thine of a too, too soppy mug, sceptic tank, this beach, this hut, this sea, this dump, this fecking Portugal’s greater glory, God and Lady AD's words, offering tokens of animal sacrifice and conditions on a toilet by the lake where

Homeric chimes will bring back to you, Spoils from Annwyn's cauldron of song.

Platonic Romantic poets. No need to hype you, for being aware of the crooked source, you're all the same.

"...cracked country lips,

I still wish to kiss,

As to be under the strength of your skin."

Bob

Your magnetic movements

Still capture the minutes I'm in,

But it grieves my heart, love,

To see you tryin' to be a part of

A world that just don't exist.

It's all just a dream, babe"

To Ramona..

"I experienced 'The Sick Rose', with the voice of Blake reading it, as something that applied to the whole universe, and at the same time, the inevitable beauty of doom ... '

It was all very beautiful

All very awesome

"As if Blake had penetrated the very “secrety” core of the entire universe and had come forth in some little magic formula statement in rhyme and rhythm that, if properly heard in the inner inner ear, would deliver you beyond the universe,' I said.

Blake

Boring person: stuck up and preying on the names of real talent and radical Art, but it's OK, I forgave her, 'Carol' who wrought every success, just that little bit better, that

'..vacuum, a scheme, babe,

That sucks you into feelin' like this..'

'I who wrote a song for you

About a strange young man called Dylan

With a voice like sand and glue

His words of truthful vengeance

They could pin us to the floor

Brought a few more people on

And put the fear in a whole lot more'

David, Blake and Bowie Jones

'...call yerself poets? arseholes more like it, little drippy idols of a forgotten mass of dead and dying core 'in the Rainbow at the final Ziggy Stardust gig' mugs, getting served up for the last time, when Dave killed him off, live as teenagers dreaming of suicide, broken, racked with responsibility into a dangerously offence state, the kids and fan-base of idiots who talk utter tripe, then and now David Bowie, since last we met in the realm of Albion, you little wonder, little wonder, little wonderful londoner, OAP, Anonymous you read only half of your self and show respect, I and the rest of you who can go fuck yerself.

Life, it is a dress rehearsal for ourselves as petty minded criminally academic interests, in numbers adding, subtracting and the time we feel the 'entire universe as poetry' with, just like it says in and on the tin

Ana

..thinking is more than thee's pals, at least, well, have a go, go and live in a small, confined space, a bedsit, and try being the least intelligent of all of you feckers. You haven't got it sorted from fact, not sussed out how you got it straight in the new dispensation - myth ... ha ha ha ...i can satirise to make you appear divs who wanna be like me ... get gassing about Carol's words, Beckett, Bowie, Bob, Blake and Milton, dickheads in shite and tatty tossers, Joyce, Shaw, Wilde and yeah ... Yeats?

. you are not even funny anymore than MacMillan bending for His Position, as god is marm, stuck up Unity, you are yer

'Oh hear this Robert Zimmerman, I wrote a song for you'

Tits, it's called, and it's all about a bloke called Dave who is consumed by you, and who stole some of your make-up to create one of his most infamous incarnations, passing himself off as you.

Tosser

Enter the world of Harry Potter. Be alert, be extraordinaire and ask yerself a big phat Q: What is it about you, I don't like and why?

Wankerz Massive - Deptford.

Blake

Ah! Feck off! We don't do flowers

so will you ever just go and stick the whole of yourself, up your own arse

Bowie

Carol Anwynn's words

Get over me, you I.

Lady D.

Postscript: I find it interesting about this business of interpretation. As has often been said on this blog, the best interpretation now may not be the best interpretation of a work. In say, Shakespeare's play, “King Lear”, his choices of words may have meant something interesting to audiences in the 16th century, giving lines a significance that we cannot grasp. Their best interpretation may be quite different from our best interpretation. But that leads us to conclude that the work meaning today differs from the work meaning when the play (or poem) was written. It seems too easy to have works of art, for which almost no one will be in a position to give the best interpretation, not even the specialists, always defeating the point of identifying work meaning with the best hypothesis.

There!

Coming of Age: "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban" by J. K. Rowling

(original review, 2002)

Children's literature comes in 3 styles these days. "The Coming of Age Stories", in which a child suffers a horrible tragedy and grows because of it. Pets, best friends, and elderly relations don't live long in Coming of Age tales. I hated the things when I was a kid. I'd seen enough tragedy first hand. I didn't need to read about it. Then there are the "realistic" children's books, that describe the social dynamics of middle school, without commenting on how the everyday cruelty affects children. Judy Bloom was the mistress of this. Here young protagonists were very real, but you didn't like them. Finally there are the series. Not well written, contrived plots, a little contrived humor. But kids like them.

Rowling understood what childhood is like. But she wasn't afraid to comment on it. She could be genuinely funny. And she understood that tragedy doesn't necessarily make you a better person. Future writers of children's' books might learn from her.

I was on the Tube one night reading. There was only one other person in the car, and he came up to me and asked what I was reading. Then he asked me if I'd ever read Harry Potter. He looked to be in his early 40s -- not much older than I was -- and he said that he hadn't read a book since leaving high school until his son brought "Chamber of Secrets" along on his weekend with his dad. After that, he read the first two books and when each new book came out he arranged for the release weekend to be one he spent with his son. They bought two copies and both read them, talking about them afterward. I think it was just after "Order of the Phoenix" had been released, but I was struck by him saying that he now read all the time. He loved Frederick Forsyth books. He asked if I thought he'd like the one I was reading, and when I said I didn't think it would be a favourite for him I recommended John Le Carré. Harry Potter had given him a better relationship with his son and brought him back to reading. Loved this story. The book deserves 2 stars just for this...

Painful Memories: "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets" by J. K. Rowling

(original review, 2000)

So millions of readers think these books are brilliant. It takes an odd sort of character to say, in this context, "frankly the books are rubbish".

Very odd.

It seems so much more natural, and logical, to say something like "I think these books are badly written ("he was sat there" etc.} and don't think they're any good". Just that tiny yet essential shift in emphasis from "They are crap" to "I think they're crap" prevents this massive denial of their appeal, which demonstrates they can't be crap. Incidentally, I agree they're not very well written. An editor should have had a closer look. There is the style, and there are repetitions which hamper the plot, and leaves one thinking "Hang on, did I turn back a few pages? Oh. No. I'm being told the same thing again." here and there. I could write a lengthy explanation, but the essence of which is "avoid saying that something very successful is bad" because this makes no sense: What is good, by definition, is something that has appeal, as this certainly has.

This book brings up painful memories...Oh dear....yes indeed. Painful memories again of that fateful day when I walked into a London bookshop all that time ago and spotted a pile of books. "Oh that's that kid's story I read about. Some wizard. Huh...it's signed. Ah well, no time for that nonsense..." And with that I threw back onto the pile a hardback early edition. And a signed one at that...Perhaps not worth as much as one of the fabled first editions as mentioned above but still, I try not to linger too long in that anguished land of Hindsight and think about what could have been...

Quaint Britishness: "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" by J. K. Rowling

(original review, 1999)

One of the main things that Harry Potter has taught me is that people who dismiss the series out of hand and people who laud it as the best thing since sliced bread are equally annoying. People who dismiss it tend to be those who are overly eager to demonstrate how terribly mature they are, and end up proving the very opposite. And I can't help thinking that people who laud it as literally the best thing ever do so because they've never read anything else or any of the other hundreds of franchises that essentially tell the same (rather tired) story, often in a more inventive way. That or they're anglophile Americans who are swept along with the quaint Britishness of the series. Essentially, they're not that good children's books. The fact that they stretch a pretty thin, derivative story over seven installments is made up for by the novel setting and some really fun characters and concepts. I'm glad they exist, but have always been slightly mystified by the obsessives (though to each their own, I suppose). But all literature is derivative; the Greeks did it all long ago and probably filched it from aural tradition. The key is how well do you it and can you capture the imagination of the reader.

One of my gripes with the books is their length. The author could have slashed the page length by half and the story wouldn't have changed at all. Maybe as she became famous after the second book the editors stopped trying to improve the content. I felt like the HP books were too much, because there was so much fluff around the main story, and also not enough because the main story felt a bit squeezed by the fluff. My impression is that the HP books should have been split into two series, one that deals with the dark lord, and a second one that deals specifically with the overarching lore, subplots, world-building, etc.

For the record, my opinion is not exactly mainstream, I read the HP books when I was much older than a teenager and didn't have to wait for them to be released. So I do understand if you suddenly have to urge to start throwing things at me. :)

Boarding Schools: "Tom Brown's Schooldays" by Thomas Hughes

(Original Review, 1981-01-22)

The issue of class and elitism (subjects dear to my heart) are, paradoxically, less important in these boarding school books than the fact that the children/teenagers are on a metaphorical island. They are without what in fictional terms is either the safety belt of having parents to look after them if they get into scrapes or of the social realism of having to deal with boring, dull, irritating parents in the form and shape the reader is likely to meet.

So the characters can be vulnerable, brave, cheeky etc but they have to do it with these surrogate parents, (teachers etc) who don't have the same sanctions and same psychological links and hooks that parents have. The school format also gives the writer the possibility of writing about a range of surrogate parent types and so can deal with children's 'split' view of their parents (love'em/hate'em etc).

In a way, a lot of the books, then, aren't really psychologically about private boarding schools about the reader's anxieties about how to make out in a world without your parents.

I'm not sure Harry Potter books are any more elitist than the myths of Moses or Jesus. They are messiah myths which means you can focus on the idea that the messiah will save us all or - flip it - and it's about the kinds of trials and quests that the messiah figure will need to do in order to win his crown...even though it's pre-ordained that he will. Ultimately, yes, this is elitist, but not in a social realist sense. More, in a mythic sense that socially we 'need' some kind of prince to 'save' us from an imperfect world. (As an ideology, I think that's crap. As a storytelling device, it's compelling because it induces us to care about someone who the world doesn't yet know or appreciate is 'the special one'. Doesn't that appeal to the part of us that thinks that about ourselves...'I'm special, but the world doesn't know that yet...' Whilst giving us hope that the world could be improved if only it woke up to the fact that it has a messiah in its midst.

The point about boarding school stories, at least for the purposes of the author, is that they give your protagonists an environment where authority and pastoral care are thinly spread, maybe intermittent, but extant, thus falling between the extremes of a closely observed and nurturing family life, where you'll get caught pretty smartly if you try anything wild (note that Will Stanton in the much-praised 'The Dark is Rising' is the youngest of a family of nine, and so over-anxious care is pretty thin on the ground for him too), and the full-on anarchy of 'Lord of the Flies'.

I understood the worlds of Bunter and Jennings very well, and have never derived anything much from their stories other than mild amusement and the occasional conspiratorial smile because their world was real to me and therefore not very interesting. I've always revered Kipling, but detested Chalky. What a smart-arse. He wouldn't have lasted long at my school before experiencing the dark, lonely horrors of being sent to Coventry, I can tell you. Hogwarts? There's fantasy for you. Great stories, crappy literature! But Molesworth is best as any fule no.

I recently read, and loved, a modern story (probably written for older kids), not about a boarding school but about a school trip which takes place in a closed environment. It was “Pandemonium” by Christopher Brookmyre. Great fun.