skud

Mirrored from Infotropism. You can comment there or here.

[Contains spoilers for Anathem, if anyone cares.]

I’m going through two intensely frustrating things at present:

1. The end of my first semester of sound engineering school, and
2. Reading Neal Stephenson’s Anathem

School: it’s TAFE, which means no exams worth mentioning, and they really don’t want to fail anyone if they can help it. That means the assessment tasks aren’t too difficult, and in many cases we finish them long before the end of semester so that there’s time for marking, resubmission, late submission, or whatever. The side-effect of this is that the last weeks of semester seem to be spent mostly sitting around not doing much. Last week I had a couple of days where we essentially did nothing — or nothing that I either hadn’t done before, or which I couldn’t do myself via Google or Wikipedia in a fraction of the time — which as you might imagine I found rather irritating. Wait, that’s perhaps too much understatement. I was literally bored to tears, and yes, I do know the meaning of the word “literally” thank you very much.

By Wednesday afternoon I’d started to think the whole TAFE thing was a waste of time. Perhaps I could do better working (paid or unpaid, or most likely a mix of both) in the industry and learning on the job. I’d almost certainly find it more fulfilling than sitting in class, and over the same time period I’d probably learn more and certainly get more hands-on experience and industry contacts. When I approached one of our teaching staff about this, asking for his opinion, he said that I “might as well finish what I started”. In other words: I’ve done a semester of a course that takes two semesters to receive a piece of paper (and four semesters to receive a more advanced piece of paper, but two semesters is the first relevant exit point). Now that I’ve sunk the costs into the first half-year, I might as well go through to the end of it, even if what we’re doing in class is of only limited use to me, and not all that good for my mental health.

On another note, Anathem: a few weeks ago, probably because I was missing Wiscon, I found myself in an SF-reading mood. I wanted to catch up on a lot of the books my friends had been talking about over the last couple of years, while I’d been reading other things. I ordered an ebook reader, which would take a couple of weeks to arrive from the US, and in the meantime I hit the public library and borrowed a couple of books I’d been meaning to read or re-read, to tide me over. One of them was Anathem.

Before I start panning the book, I should mention that I’m actually a moderate Stephenson fan. This website is named after a term I found in one of his books, after all. I first encountered his work when found Snow Crash on the shelf of a general bookstore in Ballarat, sometime in the early 90s. I picked it up because the cover looked cool and bought it because the first paragraph grabbed me and wouldn’t let go. Cryptonomicon came out the same year the geeky consultancy company I was running was working on a gambling project on an offshore data haven; all our servers were named things like “kinakuta” and “raft”, and my laptop was “yt”. Hell, I even got hold of a copy of The Big U and read it. So, I’m not generally averse to the guy, and I have a fairly high tolerance for his diversions, random infodumps, and half-assed endings.

It was only when I got to the Baroque Cycle that I couldn’t handle it. At the time I was reading a lot of historical fiction and had pretty firm ideas on what constituted good writing in that genre. Quicksilver rubbed the wrong way against those genre conventions once too often, and since Stephenson was a relative newcomer to a period I already knew a bit about, his geeky fascination with things I considered commonplace (muskets and slow-match, for example) started to grate. Quicksilver was the first of his books that I didn’t finish, and I didn’t pick up another one until now.

Anathem is about a monk-like order who have survived thousands of years, who remain cloistered for up to a thousand years at a time, and who have a daily service of winding their giant clock, which has not just minute and hour hands, but year/decade/century/millenium hands too. It came out when I was working at Metaweb, on Freebase. The company had been named after Baroque-cycle-affiliated wiki of all knowledge, “The Metaweb” (now defunct, but you can see it on the Wayback Machine), and was founded by people closely associated with the Long Now Foundation, who are actually building a 10,000 year clock. Long Now talk was common at the office when I worked there, and there was lots of enthusiasm for Anathem when it came out — I remember there being an offer of tickets to a launch event or author talk or something for Metaweb staff — but I wasn’t in an SF-reading phase, so I skipped it. When Metaweb was acquired by Google, one of our founders gave a speech at our acquisition party talking about how Freebase was meant to be a repository of information that would last 10,000 years, and getting it into Google was the best possible way of furthering that goal. (True? Not sure.)

Enough background. A couple of weeks ago when I was standing in the Darebin Public Library’s Adult SFF section wondering what to read, I saw Anathem and grabbed it. I figured it would fill the time before my ebook reader arrived, I’d get to see what connections it had to Metaweb-the-company-where-I-worked, and it couldn’t hurt to have some of pop-cultural awareness of what it’s all about, the same as how I went to see Avengers, even though I don’t have much interest in the franchise, just so I’d know what people were talking about. All these were reasons to have a shot at it even though I knew there was a risk that I might find it as tedious and annoying as Quicksilver.

Surprise! It’s tedious and annoying! Stephenson finally found a way to add even more tangential infodumps into the story, by having almost the entire cast of characters be philosophers/theoretical scientists who spend most of their time lecturing or in Socratic-style dialogue about things like geometrical puzzles or the sensory perceptions of worms. Most of it ties in to the overall plot development, which at least is an improvement on some of his previous works.

The other thing that annoyed me was his worldbuilding: it’s set in another world where the people in it have “jeejahs” that are almost identical to our mobile phones and tablet devices; where the plebs wear baggy pants and sports jerseys with numbers on the back; where the dominant religion has a schism directly equivalent to the Reformation; and where details ranging from canvas-covered military transport vehicles to bucket-sized “sugar-water” drinks are all surprisingly familiar. The overall effect was of the kind of lazy worldbuilding where everything gets an “alien” name full of Zs and Qs and apostrophes, but is otherwise exactly the same as our world.

And then, over the course of hundreds and hundreds of pages, you eventually realise — SPOILER — that it’s all because parallel universes blah blah. Wait, you’ve been irritating me with your sloppy worldbuilding and “jeejahs” for all this time just so you could go SURPRISE! ALTERNATE EARTH!? And I’m meant to go “oh, wow, you’re not sloppy, you’re actually BRILLIANT!” Sorry, not feeling it.

So, I’m seven-hundred-something pages in to the book, and about ready to throw it across the room. And yet I find myself thinking, “Well, I’ve come this far, I may as well finish. Maybe it’ll get better.” At the same time, I have books ready and loaded on my ebook reader that I could be reading now, and probably enjoying more.

So the questions I’ve been asking myself, and which I ask you, if you care to take a shot at them: Firstly, with about two hundred pages to go, should I finish Anathem? Secondly, should I stay in school? If your answers differ, then why?

Mirrored from Infotropism. You can comment there or here.

Over in the comments of the Dreamwidth mirror of my previous post, Elf asked whether I could redraw the graph of the ebooks discussions after removing her linkspam from the mix. Good idea!

In the end I removed several things:

• Elf’s linkspam (elf1)
• Kanata’s linkspam (kanata)
• The entire tech-blog cluster (oreilly1, booksprung1, and those linked to them)
• Any posts that linked to mitchell but weren’t otherwise connected to the graph
• Any posts which, after all that was done, were orphaned, not linking to anything else

The results were interesting:

ebooks discussion (no linkspam version) - full size SVG, PNG

So, to reiterate, this is the “interesting bits” version of the LiveJournal/Dreamwidth discussion that took up most of the previous graph. I’ve also added something new to the visualisation: posts shown as ellipses happened on LJ/DW, and those in rectangles happened on non-LJ/DW blogs. This makes it easy to see which parts of the conversation were happening where. As I did last time, any post that was crossposted to at least one of LJ or DW counted as an LJ/DW post.

Points of interest:

• In the lower left, there’s a cluster of mostly authors or others involved in the publishing industry, many of them posting on non-LJ/DW blogs.
• The centre of the graph, especially those posts linking to troisroyaumes and colorblue1, are what I would characterise as members of the social justice/fandom community.
• At the upper right, also linking to some posts shown in the lower right, you can see that there were a handful of men mostly linking to other men (jimhines et al.)

We already knew that the tech blogs were having their own discussion unconnected to the LJ/DW discussion, but now we can see that the authors/publishers were, for the most part, having a conversation disconnected from the fans. The crossover between the author and fan conversations mostly happened via Karen Healey, a young author whose first YA novel was published last year, and who moves in both circles.

I thought it would be interesting to take a look at the different conversations going on, and see how the actual content of them differed. Here are Wordle diagrams of the three main clusters:

Authors wordle (based on: renesears1, mitchell, healey1, jimhines1, sjaejones, pauley1, seawasp)

Social justice/fandom wordle (based on: qian1, deepad, colorblue, starlady, marina1, marina2, wistfuljane)

Tech blog wordle (based on: oreilly1, booksprung2, oleary, librarything, booki.sh, shatzkin2, wired)

It’s no real surprise to find that each of these groups was writing about different stuff, but I still find it interesting to see the words that pop out in each picture: “publishers” and “illegal” in the author wordle; “people”, “Western”, and “indigenous” in the social justice one; “piracy” and “DRM” among the tech bloggers.

Again, for reference, links to all the blog posts referenced can be found in this spreadsheet.