Charlie Stross’ Halting State is a little more tame than Stross’ typical conceptually overpopulated prose. But not by much. It wasn’t quite as affecting as The Atrocity Archives, but a ripping yarn nonetheless.

The kernel of the story is built around a multi-million dollar heist within a virtual world. Set in near future Edinburgh, the heist reverberates throughout multiple spheres in the “real” world. One of the strengths of Halting State is the realistic construction of a world in which virtual reality and augmented reality have intertwined with daily life. The seeds of this transformation are already here today and Stross convincingly projects them forward to some reasonable conclusions.

As a combination of a police procedural and techno thriller, there are plenty of surprises along the way, although I found the resolution and denouement to be a bit unsatisfying. Also, the appearance of the Men-in-Black in the middle of the story seemed a bit over the top and bolted on.

There’s a sweet, for a nerd techno thriller, little love story threaded through Halting State. I didn’t quite bond with the characters enough to get much out of it though. There wasn’t enough backstory on Elaine to fully flesh her out. Then again, you don’t really pick up a Stross book for the romance.

Still, of the authors I’ve read this year, Stross has been the most consistently entertaining and challenging. Halting State is another worthy contribution.

I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed a book as miserable as Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. Not the writing which was excellent. Miserable in the sense of truly unpleasant, disquieting, and disturbing.

Anyhew, American Gods starts with our protagonist, Shadow, in jail counting the small number of days until he’s paroled and can join his wife. He gets out early only because she dies in a car accident. Things only go sideways from there.

American Gods’ main thesis, that America is not a good place for gods, but there’s plenty of them stuck here and doing quite badly as their worship fades, is captivating. These older, down on their luck gods are balanced with a set of newfangled deities of the sort you’d expect from our techno-driven, consumerist culture: Technology, Media, The Markets, etc. An odyssey for Shadow ensues, introducing us to various of these magical entities, major and minor. Drama is generated from an oncoming storm of war between the old and new gods. As is normal for this style of tale, not everything is as it appears.

The plot is complex, occasionally confused with dreamlike episodes that are a little hard to parse and put in context. But it moves well and leads to a satisfying, if somewhat anti-climatic resolution. All of the major characters are flawed, but fleshed out to a satisfying level. Thinking back, fresh from finishing, the tone is amazingly consistently, melancholy, low key, droll, even quite morbid and grisly at times. There’s bits of humor, but only of the gallows variety. Which is most appropriate. I found myself snorting occasionally, but never laughing out loud.

Gaiman is an interesting author relative to my tastes. It took me three tries to start and finish Neverwhere, but I really appreciated it after the effort. I’ll talk more about Anansi Boys in a later post, but that gets high marks too. I think of the three, I liked American Gods the least, it really is discomforting in a number of places, but I can still recommend it to others. Definitely worth the time.

My initial training in Computer Science used the Scheme programming language. I also did some undergrad research using Common Lisp on the Texas Instruments Lisp Machines. I’m not a whiny, bitter Lisp weenie, but I’m definitely sympathetic with the cause. Unfortunately, I haven’t had much of a chance to really use Lisp at all in recent years.

Just for grins on the new laptop I decided to kick the tires on a wide variety of Lisp implementations: CLISP, SBCL, Clozure CL, PLT Scheme, and scsh. While I haven’t pushed any of them too hard, I have to say I’m extremely impressed in how fast these guys run.

Lisp implementations out of the box performed pretty decently on mid-90’s stock hardware. Moore’s law dragged the Intel platform past the special purpose Lisp Machine architectures. Meanwhile, Common Lisp and Scheme have been pretty stable since then and despite their kitchen sink nature, regarding the former, and hyper advanced features, corresponding to the latter, technology’s march has blown past them. What used to be a large Lisp memory image is peanuts these days.

Next up, digging into how well these various Lisps interface to modern graphic toolkits and what kind of graphics performance do you actually get.

In my past life, I was interested in conducting research on RSS Aggregators, so I’m a bit of an afficianado. On the new Macbook, I use NetNewsWire, but I’m a really big fan of Google Reader.

I use Google Reader a lot, even to the point of hacking around with the unofficial API. I’m always thinking of ways to turn the application into a high powered information trapping tool.

Both GReader and GMail have the ability to star information. GMail one ups Reader though with the experimental Superstars feature. Superstars is basically a hyperfast way to tag items. Adding this to Reader, and then being able to see the results through the API, would be a great addition.

It’s amazing how efficient the classics can be.

Over 35 years old, Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama checks in at a slim 240 pages. The technology, both human and alien, is nothing to blow you away. No singularity, cyberspace, virtual reality, or quantum computing to be found here. I’m guessing that even by the standards of the mid-70’s, the sci-fi aspect of Rama was pretty tame.

At it’s heart, Rendezvous with Rama is a mystery novel. Where did this massive alien cylinder come from? Why is it in our solar system? What is it for and how does it work? Where is it going and what is it going to do? Through a series of increasingly tense challenges, Clark weaves a totally engrossing tale that reveals a lot about human nature, without really revealing anything about the intruding alien craft.

A distinctive feature of the book, relatively to the more “modern” stuff I’ve been reading, is it’s faith in good old science. Clark acknowledges the petty wars within and between disciplines, but the astronauts that explore Rama are fundamentally scientists, and engineers, carefully investigating a new occurrence in the world. And he manages to make them quite heroic. Some are even steadfastly religious, yet still maintain scientific discipline. Would that this attribute was more common in these anti-intellectual times.

Apparently there’s a movie adaptation of Rendezvous with Rama in development. Obviously Hollywood can screw up anything (Bonfire of the Vanities anyone?), but it looks like there’s a solid foundation with Morgan Freeman starring and David Fincher directing.

Speaking of Freeman, did you know he was a regular on The Electric Company? I only know this because one of my best buddies from college TF clued me in. Coincidentally I vividly remember TF reading Rendezvous with Rama our freshman year.

One of the unfortunate things about moving to a MacBook for personal computing is the iTunes hegemony. I mainly listen to DJ mix CDs which makes me a very playlist oriented type of guy. iTunes is radically track oriented and over time I’ve found a number of “playlist hostile” warts. For example, I’ve never figured out a way to select multiple playlists and move them to my iPod.

But my biggest gripe is that iTunes doesn’t support streaming of music in Ogg Vorbis format. This is obviously a complete geek Rube Goldberg setup, but I have an icecast server setup on a UNIX machine, which I can drive from any remote shell with a combination of mpd and ncmpc. What can I say it works for me, and anywhere I can ssh from I can get to my music. Not to mention I can geek out and write scripts to control my jukebox.

Just for grins, I decided to download Songbird and give it a go. Dang if it didn’t do the right thing straight off of the disk image! It’s glitchy in a few places, for example there’s a noticeable lag when navigating playlists, and sometimes the streams skip. But Songbird’s got the right price and it fills an unfortunate hole in iTunes.

Even though I should know better, I don’t outsource my e-mail services. I pay for a cheap virtual private server from RimuHosting, and run Postfix with Courier IMAP. This is a lose if you have any e-mail addresses which receive spam, which by definition means a flood of spam. And I’ve got a couple of such addresses. Meanwhile, I’ve also got a CS PhD but was stymied in my attempts to stem the tide using stock open source tools.

GMail to the rescue. In addition to receiving messages on my VPS I just forward all of them to an account on Google’s mail servers. Then I just use IMAP to access GMail. This wins because:

1. GMail’s spam filtering is really good
2. I can use the Web frontend or Thunderbird
3. If GMail goes down, I still have my old, spam overrun way of getting to my mail.

John Robb’s Brave New War was another member of the 4th of July reading binge. BNW is an exploration of how relatively small, decentralized, non-state actors can radically disrupt nation states.

BNW argues that globalization has put Western, and Westernizing, nation states in tightly coupled configurations, exposing key leverage points to attack. Moreover, the cost/benefit ratio of attacks is extremely favorable to the small actors. An example might be a small terrorist group attacking large stretches of mostly unmonitored oil pipelines. Such easy attacks, thanks to interlocking markets, can lead to billions of dollars of impact, and can destabilize a nation state’s economy. Globalization has amplified asymmetric warfare.

Robb makes an analogy with open source software in that a wide range of strategies and tactics may be employed by these groups, the elements of said approaches being openly visible to peers. This can lead to rapid, replication, adoption, and adaptation of winning strategies. Also, technology advances across a wide range of fields, similar to enabled by computing, is further empowering these groups well past their historic means.

Released in April of 2007, it feels like BNW has been around much longer, probably because I’ve been reading Robb’s Global Guerillas weblog, where many of BNW’s ideas were test driven, since long before the book came out. Even in the short 18 months since publication, bits of confirming evidence have been seen in the real world.

In general, I’m quite sympathetic to Robb’s take on the world, but didn’t swallow it whole hog. For example, a key element of his response to these conditions is the development of platforms, “a collection of services and capabilities that are common to a wide variety of activities aggregated in a way that makes them exceedingly easy to access.” But platforms are tricky to design, trickier to deploy, and trickiest to build a healthy ecosystem around. There’s also an insistence on these being open platforms, which I don’t think are mandatory for large, scale success, c.f. Microsoft and Apple.

All in all though, I can recommend Brave New War, it’s well worth the time spent.

While I’ve enjoyed Charlie Stross‘s books before (Singularity Sky, Accelerando), I hadn’t been blown away, despite his vaunted reputation.

The Atrocity Archives blew me away.

I think I crushed this book in less than 48 hours as part of a 4th of July holiday reading binge. While quite rich in detail, and droll geeky asides, The Atrocity Archives is not nearly as conceptually dense as Accelerando. This was a welcome change as I found Accelerando incomprehensible at points.

The peak moment for me was the trip to Amsterdam. The actual atrocity archives left a true knot of horror in the pit of my stomach. After that I simply enjoyed the roller coaster combination of Lovecraftian horror (none of which I’ve ever read), traditional pop spy thrills (few of which I’ve ever read), and geek insider (which I’ve lived) story physics.

You get a bonus short story, The Concrete Jungle, which starts out great, but then devolves into office politics. Even with Stross’ style the result is the same as every inside baseball tale of bad blood: somewhat silly looking in retrospect, with a “what was all the fuss?” air.

The front cover of The Atrocity Archives, touts the terror of, “…a surprising number of meetings…,” but I was disappointed that there was only one stupefyingly bad meeting. And a training class at that. Would that Stross ventured to skewer the dreaded “weekly status update” or the truly monstrous corporate “All Hands Meeting”.

Speaking of long texts, Dan Simmons’ The Rise of Endymion is 708 pages of messianic, space opera. This is technically the fourth in a series, but is really the second half of a second pair. You can reasonably read Endymion without reading Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion. The first pair of books are clearly better, principally owing to a rich literary connections to the Canterbury Tales and Keats, but the second pair is highly recommended.

The Rise of Endymion follows our protagonists, Aenea, Raul Endymion, A. Bettik, and friends as they complete their quest against an amazingly loathsome rendition of an intergalactic Catholic Church. I typically lose fascination with Messiah figures well before the crescendo of the story, but Simmons does quite a good job here. He has some of the best character development I’ve run across in my Sci-Fi/Fantasy readings. I was quite affected by the rather excruciating climax, because I was deeply invested in the characters. The final ending was really redemptive and just barely, but slickly, avoided a sickeningly cloying deus ex machina copout. All-in-all quite a good read.

If nothing else Endymion and The Rise of Endymion are worth reading for the provocative treatment of 1) how religion can be abused and 2) human life with unending resurrection.

One last thing. I’m still not sure if the question of “What is the Shrike?” was actually answered. And there were enough loose ends that I could easily see a third pair of books completing a trilogy of pairs someday.

Well, I managed to finish Stephenson’s WWII/cryptothriller tome. Again!!

Given that it’s been well over seven years since I originally read it in hardback, I didn’t really remember much of the storyline. A few things surfaced from dusty memories, such as Enoch Root, Golgotha, Amy Shaftoe and the river of gold at the end. However, I was still entranced by the interlocking historical, technical, and philosophical arcs, despite the numerous and lengthy sidebars.

But this time around I appreciated the Lawrence Waterhouse character, and his storyline, quite a bit more. Since my first read of Cryptonomicon, I had the opportunity to dig into the history of computing. Thus there was much more context available regarding Turing, the Enigma machine, Bletchley park, and the first computers. The resulting “backstory” really makes Waterhouse, and by extension Randy, much richer characters.

Just for the record, the actual completion date was 9/2/2008. Took me slightly over a month to read, end-to-end.

Talk about contrasts. The 19th book I read this year was Philip K. Dick’s “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” commonly known as “Blade Runner”. The cheap mass market paperback edition, prominently emblazoned with the movie title and poster, checked in at 246 pages. So Cryptonomicon is roughly 4.6 times as long as a noted classic of the genre.

I’m not sayin’ Stephenson could use a little editing, but I’m just sayin’. I think e-mail messages in Cryptonomicon might have taken up 246 pages by themselves.

Another interesting contrast is between Dick’s book and the movie that resulted from it. Other than some names, hovercars, and the concept of runaway androids from space, the book and movie don’t have a lot in common. C.f. dense urban LA setting (movie) vice sparse, lonely SF setting (book). Gives new meaning to the term “adapted from.”

One of the things I had forgotten about Cryptonomicon is how much of the book is really a World War II saga.

With a lot of unpleasant scenes.

Between guys accidentally cutting off their feet, cannibals, concentration camps and just generic war mayhem, the squick factor gets high pretty quick.

…warm MacBook, new, with 4 GB of RAM.

It might be the bottom of the line, but it beats a circa 2001 PowerPC desktop.

As a New Year’s resolution, I set out to read more books. Managing to keep up with that resolution, I’m up to my 20th for the year. Maybe Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon wasn’t such a good choice for number 20 though.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s good stuff which I’ve read before. But 1130 pages of historical fiction cum cryptotechno thriller, would slow anyone’s momentum. I went through July on a roll, plowing through about 6 books, thanks to some extended leisure time around the 4th of July. It may take me all of August to finish Cryptonomicon.

We forge on.