Jlawrence’s Comments (group member since Mar 08, 2010)

Jlawrence’s comments from the The Sword and Laser group.

When the brain-munching apocalypse comes down, I think I'll be an annoying panicker who gets eaten pretty quickly. Travel across rooftops seems like a good tactic for exiting an urban area, but I need to get into better shape before I can do good doomsday parkour.

World War Z (and this thread) made me realize how unprepared I am for catastrophes in general. I live in San Francisco, for goodness sake, where the ground has a high likelihood of shaking us around in a big way sometime in the future. I've been meaning to buy an emergency survival kit for years, and now I'm finally ordering one!

Let's hope civilization stays together long enough for the kit to arrive, at least, and that the UPS deliverer doesn't have an unhealthy grey-ish green pallor...

I'm going! It'll be my first Comic-Con, too. I'll need to get a Sword and Laser t-shirt by then, so we can form a Sword & Laser army. Or at least a Sword & Laser platoon.

I've wanted to read Effinger for awhile. Infocom/Westwood released a graphic adventure game (with some RPG elements) based on Effinger's books in 1990. The game is set in Budayeen after the events of When Gravity Falls. I want to try the game out, too, after reading the book (yes, I have a high tolerance for grainy lo-res retro graphics).

(Note - in that game review I linked to, you have to scroll down quite a bit to get to the text.)

I echo a lot of the feelings above. I felt the finale was powerful and well put together, and I was strongly moved by it, but at the same time I felt frustrated by all that was left unexplained and unresolved plot-wise, and maybe even cheated by the 'it was always limbo' suggestion it offered.

Actually, pretty similar to how I felt about the BSG finale -- dramatically and emotionally powerful, but leaving a sense that the creators simply didn't know what to do with several of the big fascinating ideas and plot-threads they'd introduced.

Somehow the Lost finale feels more satisfying overall than BSG's, though -- paradoxically more like a end of a journey even though it leaves me scratching my head and obsessing over possible interpretations.

I do like to re-read sometimes. I return to The 13 Clocks by James Thurber on a semi-regular basis because it's such a pitch-perfect, delightful fairly tale. Some books I've re-read because I had placed them in a 'best books of all time' category at an earlier part of my life, and wanted to see if they still had the same impact on me (usually not - Love in the Time of Cholera is an example that fell from 'one of the best ever' to 'good' upon the re-read).

Some I've re-read because they were rich enough to get different things out of them a 2nd (or 3rd) time -- the first three Dune books and Watchmen are examples of that. I'm excited to re-read Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun series because I know there's a lot I missed the first time.

My ever growing to-read list does make it hard for re-reads, though!

Haha, I also believe Alden should be required to write a song based on Tyra B' opus. ;)

I'll echo with another congrats to Paolo!

Also congrats to Joe Haldeman, author of S&L pick The Forever War, who received the Grand Master Award this year.

Thanks, CP and Andrew. I've added both Consider Phlebas & Use of Weapons to my to-read list.

I've been interested in Banks, but haven't read him yet -- should the Culture books be read in a certain order, or are they independent stories set in the same universe?

Well, we've done a present-day (or just *slightly* ahead of present-day) tech-heavy book for this club before - Daniel Suarez's Daemon, so such a contemporary setting doesn't rule a book out so far. The fact that Little Brother received Hugo and Nebula nominations points to it having enough speculative content to fall in the Science Fiction fold (even if it's laser-less).

Excellent! This was already on my to-read list, since I was intrigued by Doctorow's description of it on the show.

The scenes of Emiko's brutalization were very shocking and difficult to read - but part of why they're so wrenching is because of the compassion we feel for her, which in turn stems from the author's compassion for her plight. I've read other dystopian works as well as pessimistic mainstream fiction that did not achieve this feeling of sympathy - of humanity - with their characters, and those works could much more easily be characterized as compassionless presentations of human nature's worst aspects, as opposed to what Bacigalupi is doing.

Now, I can agree that the scenes could have been shown in less explicit ways and still have retained their power, but I see that as a authorial mis-step in attempting to directly present the evils of abuse, not as signs of the author's moral failure or an attempt to produce pornography. And it's not as if it's a far-fetched scenario that the author concocted just to be cruel - a sex slave industry and the kind of abuses Emiko suffers exists today.

I understand if you are weary of dystopias and pessimistic views of the future, but the end of the book does offer some hope (if in a complicated form) and I also think it's unfair to label the book's themes as irrelevant. The dystopia is not just background atmosphere, because it is the social conditions of that dystopia that allow the worst aspects of human nature to fester and, as social pressures and political forces spiral out of control, erupt. The aspect of this in terms of political instability/coups/xenophobic violence I found very relevant and resonant with political problems today, and problems that could be faced in a future of ecological collapse.

In particular, I found the theme of the costs of a nation's survival in such a future fascinating: this future Thailand has stayed off collapse and maintained its independence at the cost of xenophobia and fascistic paramilitary forces. Examining that dynamic and its ramifications stems directly from Bacigalupi's particular dystopic vision. (Character-wise, this is represented by Jaidee, who I liked greatly and was the closest thing the book had to a hero, but who was also basically a xenophobic fascist.)

I think it's one of the strengths of science fiction that it can make us contemplate such dynamics and problems from unusual angles via dystopic visions.

As for a science fiction presentation of an optimistic future that has faced environmental woes - I haven't read it, but Ursula K. Le Guin's novel Always Coming Home apparently imagines a post-environmental collapse society that has been positively transformed by the societal reboot it has been forced through.

About two-thirds through Kushiel's Chosen by Jacqueline Carey (not quite as spellbound as I was with the first book in the series, Kushiel's Dart, but still enjoying it) and still reading The Discoverers by Daniel Boorstin in small doses (which means I could be reading it for quite awhile lol).

Ben, saw that news, too. I agree with the io9 folk that it's a good sign of HBO taking the world-building for the series seriously.

Visible wrote: "For those looking for prequels, Paolo Bacigalupi's Windup Stories is available as a download in various formats from Night Shade Books. These are two earlier short stories from the world of The Win..."

Whoa, that's great! He's already done what some of us were wishing for. I'll have to check those out. :)

It bothered me somewhat, but I did kind of absorb it after awhile. Farang I associated with gaijin like you did, Veronica, but the continual wais people gave one another kept tripping me up -- it was obviously an greeting/apologetic gesture, but it was a visual blank for me every time it happened until I looked online to find it was a kind of bow.

I think this technique can work to give a world a certain flavor, and to impress on you a sense of a truly different culture mingling with something you're more familiar with.

But an author can overestimate how much can be absorbed this way -- Gene Wolfe has said that all the abandoned (ie real, but fallen into disuse) English words he uses in his Book of New Sun series are words that should make sense to most readers because of the latin roots the words share with more common English words. But I found 'cheating' by using the New Sun lexicon a fan published was a much more enriching way to appreciate the books!

The mingling of familiar and alien words also comes into play with totally made-up words in fantasy and science fiction works. Take Anathem -- it really throws you into the deep-end of its own terminology from the get-go, but there's also the saving grace of the friendly glossary tucked away in the back. Some of the time I really enjoyed trying to puzzle out for myself what the words meant and how they fit the world -- other times I thanked the heavens (or Stephenson) for that glossary.

Tough one! May change when I follow up on some of the authors whose short stories I really liked in the The Best of the Best: 20 Years of the Year's Best Science Fiction anthology, but:

SF/Fantasy:
Gene Wolfe
Neil Gaiman
George R.R. Martin
Ursula K. Le Guin
Frank Herbert

My non-SF/Fantasy favorite author list is in flux - I've found my opinion can be quite different when I've re-read someone who used to be a favorite 'conventional fiction' author. I'm sure that can be true of SF/fantasy as well, but I still seem to like Earthsea wizards and sandworms, for instance. ;)

It's hard for me to choose between Emiko and Jaidee - but I think I'd have to say Jaidee. From that first moment we meet him on the anchor pads, as he grinningly smashes open the shipment crates and gradually lets the customs men figure out who he is - he totally won me over. Which also made his story even more moving.

Who's yours?

Food, Inc., from Netflix, is sitting next to my computer (right under Gentlemen Broncos). I'm still a bit afraid to watch it.

The Windup Girl's take on genetic engineering is interesting because on one hand, there's a clear depiction of the exploitive evils of the calorie companies' crop monopolies, the engineered plagues, etc.

On the other hand, there's Emiko. The book did an excellent job of making her a multi-dimensional, sympathetic character -- to the extent that the prevailing societal opinion that 'windups don't have souls' seems ridiculous. The book certainly makes the case that she should not be treated as a sub-human 'thing.' And is she just another victim of the evils of genetic engineering? Because there's...

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...the book's end, where Gibbons makes the offer to make New People 'children' from a sample of Emiko's hair, children that could be stripped of her arbitrary built-in defects (stutter motion, overheating) - which would be cloning with modification, I guess.

Gibbons, who is presented as pretty much evil personified when Kanya meets him, is with Emiko (despite her initial hatred for him) presented as a possible liberator for her and her kind. And if he did so, would New People supplant homo sapiens in the way Gibbons suggests? Gibbons' offer to Emiko could be meant as just another example of his evil, but the book left me sympathetic enough with Emiko that I wished for freedom for herself and her kind -- yet realizing such a thing could be deeply troubling for the future of humanity in Bacigalupi's world.

Despite being voiced by a despicable character, could Gibbon's opinion that humans tinkering with themselves is inevitable be shared by Bacigalupi? Would fanatical white shirt-like organizations be the only way to resist the results of such work, once such a genie was out of the genetic bottle? The Windup Girl raises those questions in provocative ways.

As I got further into the book, I found myself a little more bothered by some of those energy-resource questions Sean brought up than I was initially. I've finished it now, and found it excellent overall, but Bacigalupi definitely made the issue of energy use very prevalent in the book: characters are constantly thinking about their environment in terms of energy-use, calories expended, which technologies are wasteful-vs.-what's not, etc., much in the same water becomes the obsessive denominator of analysis in Frank Herbet's Dune. Our attention is also continually drawn to the various ways Thailand's inhabitants have shaped their environment and lives to deal with these constraints.

Bacigalupi even has Anderson, an powerful employee of a corporation that profits from the world's current state, go on a passionate mental rant against the wastefulness of the ancestors (ie, us) whose ways led to the state of the world in the book (pg. 64, looking at a photo of 'fat, contented fools' next to a overflowing fruit stand).

So societal reaction to environmental collapse seems to be a serious theme of the book, instead of just a background aspect of the world, and therefore it seems fair to poke around at the concrete ways the book presents that theme.

But again, any such technical holes didn't ruin my reading. The book had strong characters, I found it gripping and moving, and the environmental theme is one of many - there's also: loyalty, fate ('kamma' + all the times characters' plans were undone by external forces), the legal and spiritual status of genetically-engineered humanoids, the dynamics of a coup, etc. It just would have been an additional strength for the technical aspects of the environmental theme to be a bit more rigorous.