Mare Somniorum

When you pick up “The Player of Games”, your enjoyment will depend a fair bit upon what you expect from the book.  As an approachable introduction to  the Culture universe created by Banks, “The Player of Games” works really well.  But, if you’re looking for a stand-alone work, it’s not half bad either.  The Culture influence isn’t absolute, as most of the book takes place on a planet outside of the Culture.

The idea is simple, a society that shapes itself around a game as complex as life itself.  How you do in the game defines you and your role in society, from the bottom to the very top.  Our protagonist is the best generic game player that the Culture has, and is shipped out onto this new realm to participate in the game.

As simple as the idea is, it’s a really neat concept.  Banks inspects the interaction between the game and the player, how they shape each other — and the society as a whole, as well as the diplomatic aspects of this human playing the game.  There are undoubtedly passages where the sheer number of aspects of the plot are fighting for prominence, that might leave the reader wishing for their core interest to be pampered to, but it’s not the way “The Player of Games” is written.  It’s not a diamond hard single point Eganesque type of a story, nor does it share the very wide view of someone like Clarke.  Banks drifts in the space between, with a mostly steady hand.

“Galactic North” is a collection of short stories set in the universe we encountered in “Chasm City” and the revelation space trilogy.  Some of the stories are pure backdrops into the universe we’re seeing, and it’s hard to see a story as self-contained, “The Great Wall of Mars” shows this off very early.  The collection is often labeled as a “companion volume” to the saga proper, for good and bad.

“The Great Wall of Mars” is a story around the betrayal of blood, and the lengths one goes through for survival.  However, more than anything the story revolves around the initial meeting of Nevil Clavain and Galiana, with Felka along for the ride.  We also get a short introduction to Sandra Voi.  I never really managed to get gripped by the story though, which is a bit of a loss as the people are important in the saga to come, but it shows the need for such a collection to leave the stories on their own.

“Glacial” deals with information theory and sentience, and produces a quite appealing plot.  Nevil Clavain is the main protagonist, and we get some insights into his personality and ties into the conjoiner faction.  It’s not a bad story, but I’d love to see what Egan would have done with this idea.

“A Spy in Europa” is the first real “stand alone” story in the collection.  There are no really big names and we’re faced with a plot over person view that is quite refreshing.  “A Spy…” is also a pretty decent thriller, even if the pacing falls a bit flat during the middle part of the story.

“Weather” is the first story in the collection that really shines.  We’re talking about doubt, fear, prejudice and love bundled up into a brief spot, all of it wrapped inside a ticking time bomb scenario.  It’s not the most amazing plot or idea in the world, but it’s extremely well crafted and delivered.  Weather herself is a real work of art.

“Dilation Sleep” is a bit hit and miss.  A decent plot idea and the writing is pretty decent, but the execution and pacing is decent.  It just doesn’t leap out and scream joy at you.

“Grafenwalder’s Beastiary” fiddles with identity (see, “Chasm City” for more of that), and is quite enjoyable, of sorts.  The story is a bit winded and lacks some pacing, but its got some nice bits to it.  It’s also showing off some darker bits of Reynolds which are well worth catching.

“Nightingale” is another horror tale, with a decent pace and a lot of lingering fear.  It’s well done, well thought out and quite appealing in a disturbed sense.  It’s not a pleasant read, but the take on AIs cold and detached view of war binds the story well.   Oh, and if you thought the previous story was dark, Reynolds has another tier to show you.

“Galactic North” works on a scale which makes it quite… Different.  It’s a grand tale of loss and failure, and the effect choices have over time.  Rings of a pebble in a pond might not be much then and there, but as they wash over space for a few millenniums, things change.  It’s a “grand scale Reynolds” type tale that you either ignore or love, but you can’t deny some of its beautiful and wondrous imagery.

All in all, the collection “Galactic North” has some merit, but it’s hard to see it as a work on its own.  Many of the stories rely on the Revelation Space trilogy in some form or another.  It’s a decent collection, with some interesting backdrops for the big picture and a few really good stories on their own — “Weather” makes the collection worth owning on its own.

A collection of early short stories by Egan.  Dangerous territory, as one never quite knows where the story will go, or how rough the journey will be.  Some of the early work does, at times, feel less refined.  Ideas are less direct, the stories softer, people are less well defined.  At times, reading early Egan feels like reading recent Egan through a lens covered in a slight mist.  As such, “Axiomatic” was left alone for a bit, waiting for a slot where there was less to do and even less to read.  At the end of the day, I knew I’d just come to expect a lot from Egan.  I should also have learned that I expect a lot because Egan delivers a heck of a lot.  “Axiomatic” is no different.

“The Infinite Assassin” starts the ball rolling in a thunderous cascade of discreet fun.  Egan hops into a reality of many worlds, drift between the worlds and how we deal with the consequences of such a reality.  It’s a very Eganesque start to a collection.

“The Hundred-Light-Year Diary” takes on limited knowledge of the future, with absolute certainty.  What would we tell our earlier selves about the choices we’re about to do?  Moral choice slotted into absolute knowledge of what will, or has, happened as well as a touch on what being human is all about.  The story is interesting, the idea is good, the delivery might not be the best Egan has done though.

“Eugene”.  Egan takes on genetic engineering.  We move into morality, ideology and wanting what is best for your loved ones.  I’m not keen on the way the ending is delivered, but the story and ideas we’re looking at are well worth the read.

“The Caress”…  Imagine Egan reading Lovecraft and thinking, “hey, I could do with some of that”.  What you’d get is something akin to “The Caress”.  It’s a fantastic tale of eccentricity, desire, science and the meaning (or meaninglessness) of life.  For some reason it reminds me quite a bit of “The Case of Charles Dexter” and is just as outstanding.  I loved it the first time I read it and I loved it just as much on the second read through, it’s a fantastic piece of work.

“Blood Sisters” deals with the scientific method, the ideal double blind test, it’s moral consequences and a personal price payed.  It feels a bit long, and wanders between a story about loss and about the idea.  It’s a good read, but it’s not as hard and pointed as it maybe could have been.

“Axiomatic” nods to much of Egans core works.  What would you do if you could change yourself, and what would that make you?  What consequences would actions done while “changed” have onto yourself once you fell back to “normality”?  At the end of the day, who are you, what are we, and what do we do about ourselves?  “Axiomatic” is vintage Egan in every way and takes no prisoners.  Egan at his very best, simple and unrelenting.

“The Safe-Deposit Box”.  Ouch.  Egan does wonders with a simple premise of a sentience waking up in a new body every morning.  Trying to carve out a “self” as best possible.  The story is both sad and hopeful, but in true Egan style, there are no easy answers and there is much pain along the way.  It’s a very human story and Egan pulls it off very well.

“Seeing” takes on identity as rooted in perception.  How would seeing yourself from outside your own body, whilst knowing that body is you, affect your identity?  Egan suggests the answer is “not very well” and he makes a good tale of it.  It might feel a bit winded, but it’s a “day in the life of” type of story, and it does what it sets out to do very well.

“The Kidnapping” takes us back to virtual identities and our attachment to identities, real or not.  It’s an interesting read and gives an interesting take on leaving scanned reflections of people on disk.  What happens if someone steals that data?  Do we then lose someone, even if that someone is still alive in the flesh?  “The Kidnapping” doesn’t give any simple answers, but walks the path of such an event.  Well written, well executed and quite sad again, just the way Egan does such a story.

“Learning to be me” is another highlight of the collection.  A redundant brain would be interesting, but who’d you be when their actions no longer mirror each other?  It’s not exactly a work that’ll keep you warm, but it’s quite good stuff.

“The moat” is us and them, a take on social cohesiveness and the troubles of being human.   It’s a decent read, but never quite grips the way Egan can when he’s really got you transfixed.

“The Walk” goes into the realm of identity again, and does so with great success.  It’s a thrillerish wind-up toy that springs into action at the very end, asking a question you can’t answer.  It’s more vintage Egan and the story is very good.  The writing might not be his very best, but it’s almost sad that a “not the best” from Egan is still top notch.

“The Cutie”.  At times it feels like Egan dropped the ball.  It feels like the story can’t pull off the emotional levels of the protagonist, leaving a very rational take on the emotions in questions, which again leaves the story in the void between idea and execution.  There’s loss, but you might not care as much as you should.

“Into Darkness” is Egan to the bone.  It is a personal story.  The setting is very Egan, the story not what you’d expect.  It’s a tale about making choices, probabilities, statistics and (hopefully) living with the results.  It’s also surprisingly strong in every facet it touches.  Another highlight.

“Appropriate Love” is to some extent a story about technology and its impact on individuals, but even more it’s a story about how the human sentience is affected by events.  It’s the old dichotomy of knowing and feeling, and for some facets of life, the latter might hold more weight than the former.  It’s not the greatest piece of writing Egan has done, but it’s a very good idea put on paper.

“The Moral Virologist” has Egan look at religious liturgy.  It’s fairly apt, considering it was written before the current faith-based “initiatives” that roam our pale blue dot, and it’s quite scary to boot.  It’s painfully aware of rationalization of actions and events, melding them into a system of faith.  A surprisingly well-done story considering the subject matter.

“Closer”.  Nobody wants to spend eternity alone.  A great read, a fantastic idea from a fantastic author.  Subtle and elegant, “Closer” is an outstanding short story on the needs of intimacy.

“Unstable orbits in the space of lies” finishes off the collection on the highest of notes.  It is a fantastic fable of group ideology and the freedom of choice.  One of the best works from Egan, showcasing the fact that Egan is about ideas over settings.

All in all, Axiomatic was a very positive collection.  It’s early Egan, but it’s Egan.  Lots of highlights, very few low points.  Highly recommended.

“Breaking the spell, Religion as a natural phenomenon” is a philosophers “God Delusion”.  Dennett isn’t interested in arguing a simple yes or no, but more looks at the evolution of religion, it’s effect on people as well as what effect religion has on societies past and present.  It’s a great read, but your sensation of revelations might vary depending on prior thoughts on the subject matter.

As a mass-marked book, “Breaking the spell” starts off easy and goes through familiar hoops.  The priming towards faith in humans, the effect rites have on social structures, morality disentangled from religion down to the very origins on religion.  After the initial soft welcome, Dennett delves deep into the matter and writes with wit and clarity.

At the end of the day, the book is a journey of the human condition.  Troubled, frail and fraught with moral choices, always trying to explain the world around us and the consequences of our actions, we stumble through existence.  Dennett seeks to ask questions, finding cores we can adhere to and build upon, and he does this very well.  On the subject matter of understanding religion, I can’t recall reading a better work, and any works released after “Breaking the spell” will have very steep mountains to climb.

I’ll admit it, I bought “Altered Carbon” blind.  It was recommended at the book store I tend to stroll through, and I thought I might as well.   After reading the book, I’m not quite sure what to think about that decision.

“Altered Carbon” is a great thriller.  It’s well paced, well written, well narrated and well constructed.  It is, however, just a thriller.  There are some facets of humanity that makes you think, but at the end of the day, it’s a roller coaster ride that ends when the book is over.  As roller coasters go to… Morgan really delivers.  It’s fast, it’s furious and its blend of noir and sci-fi kicks back to some of the genres greats.

But, really, at the end of the day it’s not “Chasm City“, nor is it “Neuropath“.  “Issues” are left in the mundane, but that’s also where the book works.  I suppose it’s appropriate to say that I did really enjoy the book, but it’s not a book I’ll read many times over.

Early on in “Stumbling on Happiness” the author makes it clear that the book isn’t a self-help book.  At best, the book can be described as self-confusion or self-understanding (to some extent).  Gilbert cites research, both his own and that of others, throughout the work to share how we do, indeed, stumble on happiness.

What makes us happy?  How do we become happy?  What happens in our heads to give us that sensation we long for so much?  Over the course of human history the question of happiness has been raised, by philosophers, religious leaders, politicians and the layman, every single day.  It’s a driving force for much of humanity, one way or another.  But just how well do we understand it?

Gilbert takes us on a tour of our mental processes and how we fail, miserably, to understand what choices will make us happy.  A prime example of this is the art class experiment, which gives students the choice of two classes, identical in every way, except that one class will let you choose between two items of your work to keep for yourself — with an option to change your mind for a brief period of time, the other class has the teacher assign you an item.  People, almost without a fault, would prefer to have the choice of items.  However, when people are asked afterwards (no matter the time frame from the class itself), those who had the choice made for them are much happier with the item they possess then those who chose for themselves.

What’s even worse though is that even after being shown this study, when new students were offered the same classes, a vast majority chose the one where they had the option to choose the item for themselves.   Even after being made aware of our faulty expectations, we still demand to make them, and we are, yet again, disappointed relative to our counterparts.

There are many such revelations in Gilberts work.  Another tidbit is how our brains rationalize our choices and expectations,  and our memory then fudges things to make them “as we wanted them to be” over how they really were — even over how we experienced the events at the time.   Our brains simply lie to us, and the lack of introspection onto the self makes it almost impossible to notice what’s going on.

Gilbert is also a fantastic writer, and the audio book is read by Gilbert himself, making it a treat to listen to if that’s your preference.  Apart from hard science and acclaimed research, there is massive fun to be had in seeing how he tricks your mind just as you’re reading or listening to the book itself.   If you’ve ever wondered what goes on in your noggin’, “Stumbling on Happiness” is a must.

As a light introduction, Daniel Gilbert has hosted two TED talks, if you haven’t watched them yet, now is a good time.

“Disress” deals with information — and information decaying into entropy at that.   It is vintage Egan in almost every way, even if it is more oriented towards the people involved than you’d expect.  Some of this focus could stem from Egan working more with how the threads in the work effect the characters and their relationships.   It’s a change for sure, but again, Egan and people, not always the best combination.

That being said, “Distress” is neat.  It’s not as direct and pointed as some of Egans other work, but it’s still well worth a read.

“Incandescence” is quite the little trick of a book.  How do you teach relativity to a society that doesn’t seem to pass much beyond our middle ages, if even?  In Egans world, you place them next to a gravity well that’ll make relativity directly effect you.  This is tricky stuff to follow, but the greater trick in “Incandescence” is that it’s so easy to read — on the surface.

You’ll often catch yourself reading a paragraph, and not really notice the subtle physics you’re being confronted with.  Add to this that Egan doesn’t hold many punches (the names of the dimensions, time measurements and other such things) and it’s easy to lose content.  I know I did more than once, requiring rereads of passages.

The main focus of this book has been this half (and it is half the book) that deals with relativity.  But, honestly, the other culture we meet is just as interesting.  Its an Eganesque society only limited by the laws of physics, most notably the speed of light.  The characters we meet and the choices they both do and debate are well done.

It also needs to be said that the way Egan treats the aliens is stellar, they “talk” and only later do you find out what “talking” means from the outside.  Internally they don’t explain how they talk, and why would they?  We don’t see that when Laxness’ characters talk?

“Incandescence” might not blow you away like some of Egans other works, but I think it hits its target quite well.   Its form works well and the writing is quite good for Egan.  Although, it’s hard to evaluate writing.  Could you write a book like this with the vividness of Gaiman or Harrison?  And if you could, would a mortal be capable of reading it?  In the end, we have Egan writing Egans work, and for that we should probably be grateful.

Picking up this book, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect.  I’d read Eugenes review and decided that it was something I should, if nothing else, read.  The book is often described as “emotionally draining” and “painful”, yet, it is a beautiful book.  There are a few reasons it has taken me a while to read it, most of these reasons aren’t tied to the book itself, but even outside of that, the book practically begs for patience.  Its painful grip on the human soul begs for the reading to be portioned out in small doses.

It is a testament to the skill of Laxness that one would read this book to begin with.  The content is bleak, harrowing, painful and worse.  On every page you’ll find human life on the brink, or passing the brink itself.  Yet the language, oh the language.  Laxness is a poet of the olden days.  A man who writes lyrically without using language as most people think of it, Laxness molds language to do his bidding.  “Independent People” is astounding.  Everything is rich and vivid, be it death stalking the land or the first rays of light on a summer field in the morning.

One can talk about the story, Bjarturs longing, his fight for independence, his lost love for his bastard daughter.  It’s painful.  It tears you to bits.  There is a sadness in the independence that juxtaposes the heroic efforts taken by Bjartur.  As the book moves you onwards, there is no reprieve, there are no sudden revelations.  The epilogue is daunting and there is a sense of pain and fear for each page, each paragraph, each sentence, and even joy is bittersweet.

“Independent People” is the kind of work one should have read.  It peers into the soul of man and paints a mosaic from what it finds.  And we’re all richer for it, even if we’re left crying.

I think I’ve called Egan “interesting to read” or something like that on more than one occasion.  “Schild’s Ladder” is interesting, no doubt, but if one ever found either Diaspora or Permutation City to be daunting reads, this isn’t even literature.   “Schild’s Ladder” is full of conceptual ideas and models down to a point where the story, even it’s intent, is caught up in it.  When you name a piece of literature after what Wikipedia describes as “a method for parallel-transporting a vector along a curve using only geodesics“, you know why people learned to duck and cover once upon a time.  I suppose a lot of people will be happy that it’s all over in under 300 pages,  and to be honest, I’m probably one of them.

The opening paragraph sets the standard:

In the beginning was a graph, more like diamond than graphite. Every node in this graph was tetravalent: connected by four edges to four other nodes. By a count of edges, the shortest path from any node back to itself was a loop six edges long. Every node belonged to twenty-four such loops, as well as forty-eight loops eight edges long, and four hundred eighty that were ten edges long. The edges had no length or shape, the nodes no position; the graph consisted only of the fact that some nodes were connected to others. This pattern of connections, repeated endlessly, was all there was.

I’m not going to say it’s easy to follow the ideas without wrestling with the science involved.  It honestly isn’t.  The reader is forced to comprehend context to be able to follow the message from Egan, and that context is unequivocally tied to the science.  You don’t have to be able to hold (or even follow) a lecture in quantum graph theory, but I’d put money on that knowledge making the content easier to follow.  At some point you realize that you can only battle so many things at once while reading fiction.

That being said, we’re again moving into the realm of identity.  We always are with Egan, but this time we’re dealing with it more on the level on consciousness and the journey of the self, rather than defining the entity we see as the I itself.  To this end we run into constructs that bend time, space and probably the idea of free will into concepts that bear little resemblance to even most philosophical debates you’d run into.

“Schild’s Ladder” is as hard as Egan gets.  It may cause his ideas to be harder to follow, but it also gives them a lot more of a foundation to work on.  Other books probably serve as a better introduction to Egan, but once you pop, you just can’t stop.  Read it.  With patience and without worry about time it takes.  Besides, time is just another facet of the flipping the pages.