Mare Somniorum

So, lots of praise has been given to “Redemption Protocol”.  It’s a fast packed action-oriented science fiction thriller that makes you flip pages until the birds come home.  There are big booms, enough action to rival most movies and enough deaths to rival a plague.  It does however rock your boat when you’re reading it and the characters are surprisingly rich considering the amount of time they get — something that really does help retain your interest throughout it all.

What it isn’t though is very deep or complex.  There are certainly neat ideas and breathtaking descriptions, but it’s not an Egan-esque hard story or a universe like what Reynolds would paint.   It is what it sets out to be, and in that category it is very good.

“Too Big to Fail” is surprisingly often the book people suggest one should read with regards to the economic meltdown of 2007/2008.  This might stem from the fact that there’s much less technical jargon and a lot more a view of the people involved.  This makes a few things happen, firstly there are a lot of names being tossed around.  There doesn’t seem to be an end to them at all, it just keeps on coming.  This avalanche of names doesn’t really help explain why or how, but makes sure you know that there were a heck of a lot of who involved.

Secondly, since we get personalized views, it’s hard to pin down exactly what happened and why.  In “All the devils are here“, the authors are trying to work on the what and the why, in “Too Big to Fail”, there are just a ton of pieces that we’re trying hard to pick up.  It’s useful, but with the constant avalanche of names and the jumping around it takes to follow them all, it’s hard to get any real insight.  Well, apart from “this stuff is hard to fix” and “people often try and often fail”.

The movie is in many ways almost as informative, as the linearity makes it that much easier to at least fix down what it’s trying to tell you.  It’s a useful read, but for a view of the economic calamities, both “The Big Short” and especially “All the devils are here” are much more worthwhile.

So, the final work in the Rifters saga.  The work has grown and the results from “Maelstrom” take a few more turns before we reach the crux of the tale.  Here we’ve moved on a bit from the concept of information and its ties to life, and onwards to the defining characteristics of the characters involved.  Now, these characters certainly aren’t angles, but what are they?  And why?  And, well, how did they get to be like this?

Behemoth uses the story as a backdrop to explore these beings and pushes their buttons around a fair bit.  It doesn’t instantly feel as successful as Watts’ others works though, even if the concept is very interesting.  It feels less focused, and surprisingly, long.  There are a good number of side stories that are relevant to the story, but less relevant to the what can be seen as the point of the story.  That’s rarely a great sensation.

It is however a fascinating set of works.  Starfish, Maelstrom and Behemoth all tackle quite distinct aspects of life.  How, what and why.  If the last works would have been a bit more focused, this would have been an tour de force of storytelling.  It’s still good, make no mistake of that, but it’s not quite as good as one could hope for after reading Starfish.

The entire Rifter saga is available for free from Watts’ website, http://www.rifters.com/ in a host of formats for your reading pleasure.

So, the difficult middle book of any trilogy.  We’ve now moved on from the events of “Starfish” and the world of the protagonist, the one that used to be all about pain and suffering, has about to become the world that everyone knows.  Yeah, there are moments when it feels like “Matrix Reloaded”, but at the same time, there’s more of an edge to what’s going on.  Actually, there’s very little but edge.

Watts doesn’t change strides though.  His writing is still the same.  It’s terse, acute and direct.  Our “protagonist”, Lenie Clarke, isn’t too happy about what happened to the Beebee station in Starfish, so she’s decided to make that fact known.  She is however dragging along quite the potential for collateral damage, so quite a few people wish to stop her.

“Maelstrom”, in essence, plays on one key concept.  The interplay between information and life.  Yeah, there’s a ton of other things to look at, but the core of it is the concept that all life depends on a set of instructions to multiply, to breed and ultimately, to live.  The realm of the flesh is just one angle for information to live.

The book works its way through this concept, carried by Lenie and Watts’ unrelenting desire to tell us his story.  It’s not as honed as “Starfish”, and reads more as a cross between Egan and Reynolds — a hard core, with a large story attached to it.

I was challenged to explain why I like Watts’ work the other day, and the question made it dawn on me exactly why I do indeed like his work.  Watts does to humans what Egan does to identity.

It’s about deconstruction.  Peel apart layers until you’re left with some semblance of a core, or a core question.  Definitions become leaky, bleeding into Watts’ work until it’s unclear who we are.  It’s a riveting tale symbolized by the deconstruction and reconstruction of a starfish.

However, this insight doesn’t come without a heavy cost. Watts’ works are dystopian and do not seek absolution for their storylines. What happens, happens and it’s all there to shine the light onto humanity. The main characters of “Starfish” are “bad” people. Criminals and flawed humans, obeying behavior that’s brutal and painful to watch play out, but the odd thing is that they do grow on you. Not as much in spite of their flaws, but due to their life and in certain situations, struggle, with those flaws.

Watts’ work is also available for free at his website, so checking out http://www.rifters.com/real/shorts.htm is well worth it.

For the first one, “The Big Short” is more emotional than “All the Devils are here”.  It’s more about how bad something feels rather than asking if it’s technically illegal.  The second question is quite interesting and causes some of our subjects quite a lot of concern.

It’s a great book, a very quick read, and a great “human counterpoint” to “All the Devils are here”.

“The Quantum Thief” has been hailed as a masterpiece of modern science fiction storytelling. Comparisons to Reynolds, Chiang and even Egans take on science fiction have become common praise for Rajaniemis debut and it’s not *that* surprising.

However, it’s also misses the point.  ”The Quantum Thief” can very well be compared to Reynolds in the sense of storytelling and character work, but the comparison to Egan seems odd.  Yeah, there’s technology, but there’s no “concept” that’s being illuminated.  No “idea” that defines the story in the same way.  The thing is, that doesn’t matter if the question is “is this a book worth reading?”, because if you like science fiction, it probably is.

First off, bits of the story are so superbly written that it’s obvious the author loved to write them. Combat scenes are painted with brush strokes Van Gogh would have been proud of.  There’s a sensation of texture to the scenes as they rise from the paper and grip you. Not everything is this well-done in the work as a whole, but in a sense, that’s a good thing — even the reader needs reprieve after some of these lovingly crafted pieces. None the less, the book really is a page turner.

The characters are amazingly fun to follow as they’re all truly alive, complex and full of identity. They’re also very human and represent some of the best work done in the genre. As a comparison, Reynolds “Chasm City” is close. These clearly distinct characters work well to retain different paces and move the readers focus around as the story unfolds and the slightly unconventional chapter setup, with their charming “Interludes”, also does wonders for the story. It really is a masterly piece of writing.

One can argue that Rajaniemi does, eventually, bite off more than he can comfortably chew. There are ideas that might have been better suited to another work, not because they’re badly written or feel very out of place, but because there’s already enough to keep us occupied. There were enough gears, and after the second overdrive kicks in, well, the reader is already fairly saturated.

Either way, “The Quantum Thief” is a stellar work. It’s pleasingly brief, it’s not a full opera, it’s not aiming to redefine good and bad, it’s not the story about the end of the universe.  It’s a great story about a whole lot of human nature and it’s combat scenes will rock your boat.

“All the Devils are here, the hidden history of the financial crisis” is written by Bethany McLean (of “Enron, the smartest guys in the room”-fame) and Joe Nocera.  No, let me rephrase that, it’s “superbly written by”. Considering all the terminology, the history and the number of players, the book is amazingly readable. McLean first caught my attention with her work on Enron, which also became a very good documentary and her tone is very well suited to the material, yet again.

But, really, what happened?  Well, a lot happened.  ”All the Devils are here” looks at the US in particular, which outside of Iceland, isn’t such an odd thing.  The way the US has dealt with regulation and mixed big business and politics is if not unique, in a league of its own. However, it’s also clear that Wall Street does what Wall Street does, which is to maximize profits, pretty much at any cost to others, and that even the smartest people on Wall Street are very fallible humans and smart solutions weren’t.

When securitization came along, it severed the critical link between a borrower and a lender. Once a lender sold a mortage to Wall Street, repayment became someone else’s problem.  This was made even worse by a slightly worrying trend as firms gave bonuses for closing loans, without asking if they could be, or would be, repayed. It just wasn’t their problem. Interestingly enough, everyone thought it was someone else’s problem. Which, in a true sense of irony, made it everyone’s problem.

The people who bought the loan created CDOs (“collateral debt obligations”) of the loan, tranching the CDO to get parts of it rated triple-A pretty much no matter what loans were used to form the CDO. Considering the rating agencies had started taking payments to provide ratings for products to the companies making the products, rather than relying on member subscriptions and rate products for their members, this wasn’t surprising — even if it was quite unfortunate. The fox was suddenly guarding the hen house, and when the fox didn’t like the hens, it shopped around.

As loans started to dry up on 2005/2006 a vast majority of the loans being taken out were refinancing for cash, with home owners using their houses as piggy banks. “Fresh” loans were dwindling and internal inspectors started seeing defaults in the 25%-range on the first payment, it became obvious that the financial institutions wouldn’t be getting more loans to create CDOs with, which was a huge cash cow for Wall Street.  Seeing this well dry up was obviously bad.  The solution however, well, it was worse.

What do you do when you’ve got low-rated tranches of unsellable CDOs on your books, and no more loans to create new CDOs from?  If you’re Wall Street, you have an epiphany and create new CDOs from low-rated trances of your CDOs — synthetic CDOs. And then, magically, the CDOs consisting of triple-B or junk loans that no one wanted, get parts of its tranches rated triple-A. Copperfield couldn’t have done it better. The problem is just that doubling down against the house only works for so long.

Add credit default swaps to defend against CDOs going bust, with multiple parties (even those not owning the CDOs) being able to insure (read, “bet”) on the success or failure of the product, and the house of cards is getting very tall, very fast. Add players like Goldman Sachs who created weak CDOs on behalf of clients, then sold these bad products as a “good buy” to other clients, while themselves betting that the CDO will fail (which it would, spectacularly), and you can’t help wonder if smoke and mirrors is a much too nice description of what went on.

“All the devils are here” is “Inside job” with tons and tons of documentation and details.  If you have seen “Inside job” and became infuriated, “All the devils are here” will make you understand how it could happen.  No single drop is ever responsible for the flood.  There were a host of players, inventors of fiscal products, government agencies failing or ignoring their purpose (Fanni and Freddi, we’re looking at you) and a long-held faith in the self-regulation of the smart people at Wall Street.

Well, here’s a hint.  When someone at Wall Street suggests that a product making 5-6% annually has “zero risk” (and yeah, they didn’t mean “close to nil”, they actually said “zero” explicitly), you’re so deep into the rabbit hole that self-regulation or even a functional risk analysis is impossible.  As much as the book is about economy, it’s about group think and human cognitive fallacies.

And no matter what memes people wish to sell, there are no easy solutions. We can just hope that after spending thirty years to create a perfect storm we can get it right this time around. Considering how the stakes keep getting raised, we might not have another shot at failing.

“All the Devils are here” is a fantastic work. Buy it, read it, learn from it.

Quantum Mechanics and Experience tries to ask how we can reconcile the rules that governs quantum mechanics with what we experience in this world on a day to day level.  It’s a tall order and there are a fair few number of oddities that needs to be addressed. There is also a fair bit of math involved, but it’s presented mostly at the level of set theory and formal logic that isn’t too hard to follow.

Drawing on his physics background, Albert takes us through the quantum world while asking about concepts like causality and determinism. It’s a very interesting ride founded in a way that  a layperson can follow, even if ones definition of a layperson might vary.

It’s also worth noting that Albert doesn’t seek to give definitive answers.  He’s mostly explaining the issues and presenting possible solutions, some of which do differ from what other scientists expect from quantum today. None the less, it does illustrate the weird world that is quantum very well. It also seeks to at least attempt to answer questions, as opposed to just showing the oddities that go on at the quantum level.

Okay, so Albert doesn’t possess the greatest writing gift of all time.  At times, this does make such a dense book hard to read. The sentence structure might cause some headaches at times as well as the heavy use of parenthesis and footnotes that come and go. Also, when giving lists of concepts named by letters, those concepts are referred to simply by letter for quite some time.  Considering the informational density of the book, this will make you want to keep several bookmarks in your head to expand on the current thread in Alberts mind.

It’s could have been an easier read, and it could have been better. But for what it is it sits in a niche of its own and as such, picking it up is worth it.

So, meh, I’ve been lazy about updates.  Sorry about that.

Anyway, over the last year-odd the theme has been textbooks and poetry. Mostly.  And following the idea of reading things one doesn’t normally read, “Non-places, an introduction to supermodernity” by Marc Augé was picked up at a local bookstore not that long ago.  Social anthropology isn’t something with which I’m overly familiar, so the book was bought on a recommendation from the staff. As the title suggests, I was given the English translation.

The concept that Augé puts forward is how places aren’t really places anymore. Our modern world has created places that are physical locations we travel through, but never to. Malls, motorways, airports and similar constructs are all “non-places”, but so are computers, TVs and similar tools that warp space and time through themselves to do our bidding.  Your phone can now show you last nights news from the other side of the globe, while you’re waiting for the train at a local train station and Augé ponders on what this does to both the public and private experience.

In a world of excessive information and excessive space, we pick and choose what and where with impunity.  We effectively base our experiences in what Augé calles “non-spaces” in partial and incoherent bits with no attachment to the physical place at all. As an essay on what this does to us, “Non-places” is a fascinating work.  The language is originally french, and it does show — strongly at times. The translation feels fairly literal and doesn’t shy away from a very latin-inspired vocabulary. It’s also a very academic text in certain ways, expecting a familiarity with terminology and names that might require a reader to do some research on the side.

Either way, it warrants being read.  It’ll make you look at the world around you differently and think thoughts you probably haven’t thought before.