hudebnik

Start with the political world of Dune, only even more decadent, decrepit, and dysfunctional. Add a sprinkle of Hunger Games: each of the eight Great Houses has sent two of its youth to compete for glory and immortality. But there's no rule that only one can survive and win -- in fact, there don't seem to be any rules, and they've been told only to figure it out somehow. What do they have to work with? A millennia-old, decaying castle with hundreds of rooms and hundreds of doors, of which a few are locked. Oh, and all the castle servants are animated skeletons, while one of each pair of contestants is a necromancer and the other a fencer.

Gideon and Harrowhark have grown up together all their late-teenaged lives, the only two children in their House, which is abnormally death-obsessed even by the standards of a civilization ruled by necromancers. Harrowhark is the heir, daughter to the Lord and Lady of the House, while Gideon is an orphaned foundling girl. They hate one another with the fire of a thousand suns: Harrowhark delights in torturing Gideon with magic, while Gideon takes every opportunity to either make trouble, insult people, or run away. As the House has only two available youth, there's not much choice which two to send to the competition. You can see where this is going.

My first impression of the book was "this author really loves describing scenes of decay." How many different words are there to describe things and people that haven't been cleaned or maintained for a thousand years, and were pretty hideous even when new? My first impression wasn't wrong: the loving descriptions of scenes of decay run pretty much throughout the book, even in the parts of the castle that were beautiful a thousand years ago. Sometimes the exposition is painfully obvious: the villain explaining the evil plan to somebody who's about to die, who in turn is keeping the conversation going to buy time, stuff like that. The predictable arc of "total hatred becomes mostly hatred becomes tolerance becomes cooperation becomes friendship" didn't always strike me as believable. But eventually most of the plot makes some kind of sense. A lot of secrets are revealed near the end that have been hinted at throughout, and I hadn't guessed most of them (I'm not much of a mystery reader). There is, apparently, a sequel.

Ten years ago, or so, somebody gave me a copy of Neal Stephenson's novel Anathem, as I'd previously read and enjoyed Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon. Snow Crash, as I recall (I don't see it on the shelf now), was a normal-sized paperback novel, while Cryptonomicon was a (let's see...) 910-page hardback (not counting technical appendix) involving half a dozen story lines in different time periods, all somewhat absurdist-surreal in a Catch-22 sort of way. Anathem promised to resemble the latter, at least in size (890 pages, not counting several appendices).

I dove into Anathem, read several chapters, and got bogged down. Came back to it a few months later, read a few more chapters, and got bogged down. Came back to it a year later, read a few more chapters, and got bogged down. Came back to it a year later, starting from the beginning to get a running start, and got bogged down. The issue seemed to be that Stephenson had spent an enormous amount of effort on world-building and forgotten about plot: nothing ever happened. And there was a remarkable amount of philosophical argument.

For whatever reason, last month I came back to it, started from the beginning to get a running start, and read a few pages whenever I was waiting for a long compile during my work day. And actually finished it this time. In fact, a great deal happens in the last, say, 200 pages, which feel sorta like an ordinary SF novel in their own right, but nothing that happens in those last 200 pages would make sense without the world-building and philosophical argument.

So let's see what I can summarize without excessive spoilerization. The book is set in a world quite similar to ours, and from the first page you can tell that people speak and think in a Romance-based language that's not quite any of the ones we know. It's an old culture: it has written history going back at least 5000 years, at a level of detail comparable to what we have for the past 500 years.

And it's a culture in which academics have consciously (and not entirely voluntarily) divorced themselves from popular culture, living sequestered in what are effectively monasteries. To maintain their perspective and avoid being polluted and confused by transient fads, many of the (co-ed) monastic/academics live under a rule that they can only leave the monastery, or even hear news from outside the monastery, once a year. To maintain even more perspective, other monastics live under a stricter ten-year rule: no information from the outside can get in except at ten-year intervals. An even more elite group live under a hundred-year rule, and the really hard-core ones live under a thousand-year rule; they've only opened their gates twice since the monastic rules were set up 3000 years ago. (The monastics aren't celibate, but they're sterile due to their diet; an unanswered mystery, which bothers the protagonist from time to time, is how the Hundreders and Thousanders stay populated.) There are even rumors of a sect living under a 10,000-year rule, which has another 7,000 years to go before they'll open their gates.

So some of the book explores the resulting sense of detachment. For example, the monastics and the outside world experience linguistic drift, so the longer they've been apart, the less they can understand one another. The monastics of different sects can mostly understand one another because they're all trained from the same books in Classical Orth, the analogue of Classical Latin. And when they do observe the outside world, it's all "the city had gone through cycles of growth and shrinkage over the millennia, and was currently in a shrinking phase, as shown by such-and-such characteristics typical of shrinking cities," or "the current governmental institution was dominated by a religious belief system with properties X and Y, but not Z," all properties identified in other religious belief systems over the millennia. The monastics have observed how the outside world thinks about them, and have categorized such beliefs into a dozen or more named Iconographies, each of which recurs every few hundred years (e.g. the monastics are a bunch of mostly-harmless mental patients, the monastics are secretly developing technology that will bring about a Golden Age when they finally share it with the rest of us, the monastics are a bunch of malevolent magicians scheming to take over the world, the monastics are a bunch of malevolent magicians who have already taken over the world but are keeping it secret, etc.) In short, the monastics view the current outside world as anthropologists might view an isolated tribe, comparing and contrasting it with other isolated tribes while trying to avoid getting thrown in a stew-pot.

Another thread of the book starts with a philosophical question which (in our world) is called Mathematical Realism. Mathematicians studying a topic like (say) prime numbers generally feel as though the concept of prime numbers was inevitable -- that any culture, or even any species, with sufficient cognitive powers would eventually come up with the same concept, and prove the same theorems about them. Indeed, a great deal of mathematics has this feel of inevitability to it: we're not inventing new things, but discovering things that in some sense were already out there waiting to be discovered; when we prove a theorem, we now know not only that it's true, but that it couldn't have been false in any conceivable world. A mathematics developed by small furry creature from the planet Zrax would have isomorphic conceptual structures to our own, differing only in names. But where is "out there"? Is it a world of Platonic ideals, made up of isosceles triangles and automorphism groups in the same way our world is made up of photons, electrons, protons, etc.? And how do we know this stuff is inevitable, as opposed to being artifacts of our own culture or historical accident?

This doesn't happen only in number theory or group theory. In theoretical computer science, people point out that the problem classes Rec [recursive], r.e. [recursively enumerable], and P [polynomial-time-computable] can each be defined in at least half a dozen simple, elegant, apparently unrelated ways that all turn out to be exactly equivalent, and conclude from this robustness that they're "natural" or "real" classes. Discoveries, not inventions. Which makes people more motivated to study them: it feels more rewarding to study something that "really exists" than to study a historical contingency that might have worked out any of a hundred slightly different ways instead.

An alternative view could be called Mathematical Formalism: this dispenses with the question of whether these mathematical concepts are "real", and says "we've agreed to manipulate symbols according to such-and-such rules; what results do we get by following those rules? What if we changed the rules slightly; what results would we get then?" This approach is summarized in the Bertrand Russell quote "Mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true." We "don't know what we are talking about" because there is no "about": we're just shuffling symbols according to arbitrary rules. And "we don't know whether it's true" because a statement's "truth" is a property not of the symbols but of a particular world (while in a different world, the same statement isn't true).

In our world, mostly starting in the 20th century, logicians have made serious progress reconciling these views. We can study a set of axioms and their implications under certain syntactical proof rules (we call this "proof theory"), and (following Tarski et al) we can also talk about concrete worlds that "model" those axioms and proof rules in the sense that, when you interpret each formal symbol as a particular object in or assertion about the world, the axioms all turn out to be true and the proof rules preserve truth ("model theory"). Logicians explored the difference between formal provability and semantic validity, showing that in certain simple systems they can be made to coincide perfectly ("Completeness"), while for complex systems of arithmetic they can't (to oversimplify Gödel's famous Incompleteness Theorems). For example, one of the tasks my thesis advisor set me (and at which I never entirely succeeded) was to take a particular result that a colleague had proven using model theory, and see if I could reach the same or a similar conclusion using proof theory instead. There's a branch of logic called "modal logic" which talks about not whether things are true but whether they could be or must be true; logicians for the past few centuries had dismissed this as meaningless mysticism, but it was given a precise proof system in the 1930's, and a precise semantics in the 1960's; see this overview article.

In the world of Anathem, the realist and formalist schools have been feuding for thousands of years, the formalists accusing the realists of quasi-religious mysticism and the realists accusing the formalists of pointless mental masturbation. The realists hypothesize that yes, there really is a world (or "causal domain") of Platonic ideals from which we get all our mathematical ideas, which means that information somehow flows from that abstract world to our concrete one. But once you've postulated two worlds with a unidirectional information flow, a natural question (to any mathematician) is "why only two?" Could there be several "concrete" worlds, independent of one another but all getting their ideas from the same abstract world? Could there be several abstract worlds, independent of one another but all contributing ideas to our world? Could there be an even-more-abstract world from which the Platonic world gets its "ideas"? Could there be an even-more-concrete world that gets its "ideas" from ours? Could there be an arbitrary DAG (directed acyclic graph) of worlds connected by information flow? And why does it have to be acyclic: could there be information flow in both directions? (Although if there's information flow in both directions between two worlds, they've effectively collapsed into one causal domain.) The formalists, of course, say this is all mystical nonsense. Until they meet visitors from one of these other worlds... but that's getting into spoiler territory.

A seemingly-unrelated philosophical thread in the book is about epistemology within a single concrete world. When you see a frying pan, or a friend, how do you know it's "the same" frying pan or friend as it was yesterday, or as it was when you looked at it from the other side? There's an argument from simplicity -- Occam's Razor (or "Gardan's Steelyard" in the world of Anathem) -- that it's simpler to hypothesize one persistent object than to hypothesize distinct objects that coincidentally have a lot of observable properties in common. But those observable properties aren't identical; they vary, but only in certain predictable ways. If I move clockwise around the frying pan, I expect to stop seeing what was on its right side, and see additional things adjacent to what was on its left side, and things fall down but not up, and people get older but not younger, and so on. All this requires building a complex model of how the physical world works, which implies a lot of conclusions about "what would happen if ...": if I looked at the frying pan from the other side, if the table the pan is on weren't present, if my friend were wearing different clothes, etc. In other words, you can't make sense of even a single concrete world without a lot of counterfactual reasoning -- or in other words, reasoning about worlds that are extremely similar to this one, but differ in one particular way. The realists of Anathem further hypothesize that this ability of the human mind is implemented using quantum computation: that rather than one classical brain exploring all these counterfactual worlds classically, it actually explores all of them at once in a superposition of quantum states, or in parallel universes, or something. And we're back to talking about multiple worlds -- except that now the information flow among them (via quantum interference), while limited, is symmetrical. Each version of your brain directly perceives the universe that it's in, as well as picking up some quantum interference from versions of itself in other nearby universes, and uses this to form counterfactual models and thus to reason about its own world.

So now that I've finally finished the book, I have some things to think about. And some logic to reread.

I'm late to the party, having never heard of this author until I saw her mentioned in one of hrj's posts in LHMP, but on that basis I ordered two of Donoghue's books, Kissing the Witch (1997) and The Woman who Gave Birth to Rabbits (2002) through our local indie bookstore. Both are collections of short stories about women's lives, In Rabbits (which I just finished), each story is based on tantalizing story-fragments surviving from the lives of actual women in history (the title character perpetrated, in the 18th century, the fraud that she had given birth to numerous rabbits, all of whom alas died at birth). Another protagonist is Elizabeth Bell, a black gentrywoman in England whose story also became the 2013 movie Belle. One story is set during the 1381 Peasants' Revolt in England, and another has a peripheral character named Richard Ledrede, Bishop of Ossory, with whom shalmestere and I are familiar because he wrote a collection of sacred "filks" of secular songs in the 14th century and, infuriatingly, didn't write down any of the music, saying only "this is sung to the tune of _____, which everybody knows."

Donoghue has a knack for engagingly capturing a feel of daily life, of the choices ordinary people (especially women) make to survive in the world. I'm not sure what to say beyond that: the stories and the sometimes-scanty historical facts on which they're based speak for themselves. Highly recommended.

In Witch, each story is a retelling of a classic fairy tale. I have nothing to say about this yet, as I haven't gotten it out of shalmestere's hands to read it for myself.

Or more properly "speculative fiction".

There are various aspects of our current predicament that have been explored by SF authors in the past. Some that I know of:

• Philip Roth's The Plot Against America. I haven't actually read this one, but I hear that it's relevant to the Trump presidency.


• Octavia Butler's The Parable of the Talents, in which a populist demagogue wins the Presidency on the slogan "Make America Great Again" and a lot of sucking-up to the religious right. But one gets the impression in the book that he's a competent adult, not a petulant toddler, and that he actually believes some of the religious-right stuff he spouts.


• "Being There", the movie starring Peter Sellers as a mentally handicapped gardener who makes decisions and pronouncements by watching TV, and by the end of the movie is the Republican nominee for President. But he's gentle and good-natured.


• Robert W. Sawyer's WWW: Wake, in which a highly-contagious disease jumps from animals to humans in a remote Chinese province. The Chinese government exterminates the human population of the infected area and temporarily shuts down China's Internet connections to the rest of the world to prevent the story from leaking.
  (Not really a spoiler: that all happens in the first few chapters of book 1 of a trilogy.)


• And of course lots of people have written about racial conflicts in the U.S.

But there must be an already-written SF story in which a modern industrialized society responds to a pandemic by shutting down face-to-face businesses and social contact, and the effects of this. Such as what happens if workers don't go back to the office?, and how children who grow up being told not to leave the house or be within 6 feet of anybody outside the family will adjust when it's over.

My print copy of hrj's Floodtide finally arrived at the local indie bookstore yesterday (only six weeks after official publication date; apparently there were some problems at the printers). And I may have piqued the interest of the lady behind the counter and a customer who overheard me talking about the series, so there may be a few more orders coming.

The series is set in early 19th-century Europe, with magic. But "magic" means something very different to different people. In the first book it means ceremonies invoking Christian saints for divine aid; in the second book it means alchemy; in the third it means music; and in the fourth (whose main characters are on a lower socioeconomic rung than those in the previous books) it means folk charms.

And of course, many of the central characters in all the books are lesbian, but there are no sex scenes (so far) so I gather the books don't really fit into "lesbian fic". Being lesbian is just one more complication in the protagonists' already complicated lives as they try to make a living, find love, and stay out of trouble.

A year or so ago I heard or read a news story about the late science fiction author Octavia Butler. I had heard of her but never read any of her work, so I decided to find some. Conveniently, an independent bookstore had just opened in my neighborhood, and this was a good excuse to give it some business in hope that it stays afloat.

I've read three (or five) of her books so far: Kindred (in which the protagonist time-travels into the body of one of her slave ancestors in antebellum Mississippi), The Parable of the Sower (in which the protagonist, living in a falling-apart near-future society, becomes the leader of a religious/social community devoted to treating people decently, rebuilding society, and eventually emigrating to other planets and stars; I gather it's the first of a series but I haven't looked up the rest), and most recently Lilith's Brood, which is actually a trilogy bound together. So let's talk about the last one.

In Lilith's Brood, humanity encounters an alien, star-traveling species (the Oankali) who are born genetic engineers (as one human character says, "They manipulate genes as easily as we manipulate pens and pencils"), so their every offspring is the result of conscious genetic choice. And the Oankali's driving motivation is to seek out new interesting species and exchange genetic material with them to produce a new species, just as individual humans seek out other humans and exchange genetic material with them to produce a new individual. Every million years or so, they discover a new species and their own species Divides: part goes on as it was, while another part interbreeds with the newly-contacted species to form a new species with selected genetic characteristics of each.

Since humanity has just killed off most of itself and much of the Earth in a nuclear war, the Oankali pick up all the survivors, heal their injuries and radiation damage, and offer each survivor the choice between staying on the starship with them or returning to an Earth whose less-radiation-ravaged portions the Oankali have restored to livability.

But the human race has a deadly combination of intelligence and hierarchical thinking that inevitably leads to oppression, war, and misery, so they won't be allowed to breed as humans did before: it would be just too irresponsible, like a skilled carpenter seeing a crooked table or a warped door frame without fixing it. Each survivor is also offered the choice to interbreed with Oankali or to be sterile, living out an extended, healthy life but not producing any more of those intelligent-hierarchical-murderous humans. The "Resisters" who choose not to interbreed remain purely human, but in a dead end, unable to propagate their pure humanity. Some respond to this dead end with suicide; others kidnap the most human-looking hybrid babies from hybrid communities and try to raise them as humans, hoping to back-breed them with true humans to produce a sustainable population that's as human as possible. And they view the people who choose to interbreed as traitors to their race.

Which leads to the question at the top of this post: "Are you human?", which forms a sort of ostinato theme to the book. The first non-Resister, Lilith, is given some minor genetic enhancements and assigned the task of training other humans to get along with Oankali; her students suspect her of being not entirely human, and certainly not "loyal" to the human race. And various other characters have their humanity and/or their loyalties questioned. You can justify almost any treatment of a person that you've decided is non-human.

If there's a moral to the book, it might be "Life is messy. It doesn't fit into neat categories with clean boundaries."

What does "human" mean when most of the living humans have some Oankali genes, and others have had Oankali change the activation state of some of their in-born genes? (Or, in our own world, when most living humans have some Neanderthal and/or Denisovan genes?)

What do "male" and "female" mean if, like the Oankali, you have three possible sexes, and you don't know which one you'll be until adolescence? (Or, in our own world, when nobody has all the characteristics we associate with "male" or "female", a small number of people have ambiguous genitalia, and rather more people have social identities that don't match what's between their legs?)

What does "individual" mean when a good deal of your body mass is mitochondria (which used to be independent organisms) or symbiotic bacteria (which still could be)?

Not to mention: what do "white", "black", and other race names mean when in fact almost every human has ancestors from a variety of ethnic groups, and every human descends from eastern Africa two million years ago?