Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer (Books 2018, 1)

The worst thing about this book is that it tells you, two or three chapters from the end, that it’s only the first half of the story. Now, I knew there are two other books in the series, but I expected the first book to be at least capable of standing alone. Turns out it isn’t: the ending leaves us hanging right after the big reveal.

The other worst thing about this book is that I’m not really that compelled to read on. I mean, I probably will, but it’s not like when I read Hyperion, say, and had to scurry around the city trying to find a copy of the second volume.1

After all the fuss about it not being published in the UK, and me not being able to get it, I had high expectations. Probably too high, as it turns out.

Don’t get me wrong: it’s by no means a bad book, and it’s astonishingly accomplished for a first novel. I did enjoy reading it. Its true weakest point— ignore all that complaining above — is that it can be a little bit hard to understand the world she creates. Not impossible, though, and Palmer does go to some efforts to explain it with minimal infodumping. Or at least with infodumping disguised as a conversation with the reader, which works quite well.

It’s about four hundred years in the future, and since the Church War some two hundred or so earlier, the world no longer exists as countries in the way that we know them. Instead people are members of one of seven “hives,” which they can choose to align themselves with at majority. Or not: some people are hiveless by choice.

Countries mean less at least in part because of super-fast international transport by “cars,” which I think are probably suborbital rockets or similar. Though they may have a more advanced propulsion system. The most confusing thing is probably that the leaders of the seven hives are characters and each of them has several names. For any given one of them, each of the others might know them by a different nickname, and the narrator uses these interchangeably. It gets hard to keep track of who’s who.

Global warming appears to have been conquered, or ameliorated to the point where it’s not a major concern. In fact it seems to be very close to a post-scarcity society. People only work at things they want to, and seem to be able to live OK without having to work.

Apart from “Servicers,” that is. Our narrator, Mycroft Canner, is one of these. People convicted of sufficiently serious crimes can end up as one of these. They are essentially public slaves. They are required to work for seemingly anyone who asks them, and are paid in food and board — and occasionally other treats such as cinema tickets. But they have no other way to get these things.

I found it quite a disturbing an idea; though it would almost certainly be better than being in prison; and at least they don’t have the death penalty.

That’s not the most disturbing thing in the book. But I’ll say no more about that.

As I write about it, my estimation of it is going up. Isn’t that strange? If I write enough about it I’ll probably stop to download Seven Surrenders, the next volume.

Oh, yes, as I said, it says it’s “the first half” of Canner’s story; but there are two more volumes. Are they both short, or is the third one more standalone? There’s only one way to find out.

But I have a stack of other things to read first. Also I realise I have no idea what the title has to do with the story. 📖

  1. If memory serves: it was a long time ago, and it may not have happened exactly like that. ↩

Clarke Kickstarted

The Kickstarter for the Arthur C Clarke Award is already fully funded, but now they’re pushing for a stretch goal.

What you get already is pretty good: an anthology of original SF stories of exactly 2001 words each, by a host of great names including past Clarke winners.

But the stretch goal adds a specially-commissioned soundtrack, which is a great idea.

Why are you still reading this? Go and sign up.

Lana, What?

Turns out Lana Del Rey was… mistaken? about Radiohead having brought a lawsuit against her. After me leaping to her defence. I’m very disappointed.

Amanda Petrusich, writing in The New Yorker, tells us:

Eventually, Warner/Chappell*, Radiohead’s publisher at the time of the song’s release, refuted her claim: “It’s clear that the verses of ‘Get Free’ use musical elements found in the verses of ‘Creep’ and we’ve requested that this be acknowledged in favor of all writers of ‘Creep,’ ” the company said in a statement. “To set the record straight, no lawsuit has been issued and Radiohead have not said they ‘will only accept 100%’ of the publishing of ‘Get Free.’ ”

Which seems fairly clear. Read the whole article, though. It’s interesting.

I Never Thought I'd See the Day...

When Gmail launched several years ago offering a free gigantic storage plan of, I think, 1 gigabyte, it seemed impossible that anyone could ever fill that much space with email. Since then, of course, the free allowance has quietly grown and grown. So too has the volume of email, and the average size of individual emails.

Until today, when I see this:

Gmail showing 99% used of 15GB

99% of 15 GB. Whoops! Of course, seven years of using it as a repository for daily backups from WordPress will do that. (It’s not the most elegant of backup solutions, but it’s easy and it works.) I deleted everything before 2017 and now it’s down to 60%.

Crazy Copyright Claim

Gotta say I hope Radiohead (or their lawyers) lose this case:

Pop star Lana Del Rey says she’s being sued by Radiohead for copying their breakthrough single, ‘Creep.’

I’m not a fan of Lana Del Rey, but I just listened to her song, ‘Get Free,’ and the only similarity is the chord progression in the first verse. You can’t claim copyright in a chord progression. Or if you can, you shouldn’t be able to.

If the chords and the melody were the same, they’d have a point, but even then apparently they want 100% of the publishing royalties; don’t the words count? Del Rey has offered them 40%, and I think that’s way too much.

I’m amused that the album containing the song gets its title from a doubtless much better one by the same name: Lust for Life. There’s no copyright in titles, of course.

2017 in Bitface Blogging

Well hello. It’s been a while. That daily posting thing didn’t work too well in the latter part of the year, and was particularly weak in the last couple of weeks. Weak weeks.

In fact I posted 261 times in 2017. It’s surprisingly hard to find that kind of thing out from Wordpress itself. I had to dig into the database and run some simple SQL:

select count(*) from devilgate_posts
  where  post_status = 'publish'
  and post_type = 'post'
  and post_date_gmt like '2017%';

261 is 72% of the days of the year, which is not too bad. Certainly the most posts in any year out of the past fifteen(!)

Here’s the monthly breakdown:

Month Posts
Jan 32
Feb 33
Mar 33
Apr 18
May 27
Jun 15
Jul 21
Aug 17
Sep 18
Oct 18
Nov 23
Dec 6

A strong start, tapering off in the middle, with a rally in November and then a complete collapse in December. I suspect the last is from a combination of post-nano slump and the festive season.

If you’re interested, here’s the SQL that got me that table:

select
  date_format(post_date_gmt, '%b') as Month,
  count(*) as Posts
  from devilgate_posts
  where post_status = 'publish'
  and post_type = 'post'
  and post_date_gmt like '2017%'
  group by date_format(post_date_gmt, '%m');

As to this year, we’ll see how it goes. I hope at least to keep the frequency reasonably high. And improve both code and table formatting.

Mouse Takes Fox

The news that Murdoch plans to sell 21st Century Fox and Sky TV to Disney is interesting for how it will reshape the media landscape. But it’s good from my point of view for a number of reasons, some relatively trivial and to do with content consumption; and one big.

  1. The X-Men and the Fantastic Four will come under the control of Marvel Studios. Just in time for Infinity War. Well, of course, far too late — even, I would imagine, for Infinity War Part 2. I expect that’s at least planned by now.
  2. Even more trivial, Lucasfilm can put the Fox fanfare back at the start of future Star Wars movies (and add them in to future reissues of the recent ones).
  3. It will become ethical to watch Sky TV. More of which below.

Above all: better Disney than Murdoch.1

Will Disney own too much? Hell yes. But see above.

On the ethics of watching — and paying for — Sky TV: see this blog passim for my thoughts on that. Like here and here. If Sky had not been owned by Murdoch we might conceivably have got it in the past. But I feel we’re highly unlikely to get it now. Buying a dish in 2017 would just be weird, and our side of the road is not cabled, by some odd historical aberration. But there’s the online version, which I think is called Direct TV. If we had had that I would have been able to watch the new Twin Peaks when it was actually broadcast, instead of now, on DVD, as is actually happening.

Loving it, by the way. And managed to hear no spoilers whatsoever, surprisingly.

  1. I mean, better almost anyone than Murdoch. ↩︎

Burn it With Fire (Stick)

I bought an Amazon Fire TV Stick in the Black/Cyber/Whatever sales, because I thought it would be a good way to watch BBC iPlayer, Netflix, and so on, on the telly, without having to plug a laptop in, as we do at present. Tonight I tried to set it up.

Amazon have decided to use replaceable batteries like it’s the 90s, instead of using a rechargeable like it’s today. I found it literally impossible to open the back of the remote.

The very fact that there are multiple YouTube videos explaining how to open the thing should be a giveaway. Unfortunately they all say, “It’s easy enough now because I’ve opened it before; it was really hard at first.”

The Apple TV may be several times the price, and the remote has its critics. But you just know you’re not going to have bollocks like this when you try to start using it.

Right now I’m planning to send the Fire TV Stick back. I’ll have another go when more of the family are around, and maybe we’ll get it. But I can’t help but wonder, what about someone who’s a bit older and maybe has arthritic hands? This is incredibly bad product design.

A Five and Four Zeroes

Actually it’s 50,069 words in total, as of a few minutes ago. And the last 5000 or so were not in the novel that I finished the other day.

Instead I wrote a new opening to the previous novel, which I hope will have moved it towards a submittable state; and a whole load of notes towards the next one, which I intend to start more or less right away.

As soon, at least, as I’ve got the skeleton of a plot, and a vague idea of the ending, so that I don’t go wandering around for years again.

Anyway: I declare myself a NaNoWriMo Winner.

Finished

I have finished my novel. Hooray!

Stats: 121,304 words. 44,107 of them since the 1st of November.

There is, of course, a great deal still to do before it will be ready for anyone else to see, but I’m going to put it away for a couple of months before starting rewrites.

There is one little downside: that 44,000 word figure, while by far the most I’ve ever written in a November (or any other month) does not quite reach the 50,000 required to “win” NaNoWriMo. Which doesn’t really matter, as the whole purpose of the thing is to encourage us to get the words down, get a first draft out onto the solid-state drive.

But I’ve come this far. It would be nice to hit the 50,000 mark. Luckily there is a solution.

The publisher Angry Robot has an open submissions period running until the end of December. That means they accept and will read manuscripts from writers, instead of requiring all submissions to be via agents as normal.

Now obviously I’m not thinking about the just-completed first draft for this. But the one I finished before is ready. Except for two things.

  1. I submitted it the last time Angry Robot had one of these.
  2. I’ve never been happy with the beginning.

Point 1 would bar me from resubmitting, except it wasn’t rejected the last time. I just never heard back from them. So I asked on their comments page, and they said I could assume it got lost, which allows me to resubmit.

Point 2 gives me the ideal thing to work on for the rest of the month: rewrite the beginning of the previous novel.

So it’s time to jump back into the world of The Accidental Upgrade (though I may try to think of a new title).