Terminally Incoherent

As you may or may not know, I’m a big fan of Frank Herbert’s work. I own all six books in the Dune saga, and I more or less consider them an epic Science Fiction masterpiece. Dune is my yard stick by which I use to measure greatness of other SF novels.

You may say what you want about Herbert, but his books pack more thought provoking ideas about philosophy, religion and life per page than any other work in the SF genre. They are incredibly smart, eloquent and while the plot usually moves at a glacial pace, each paragraph is loaded with mind blowing revelations, or interesting ideas. Dune had so many incredibly potent ideas condensed into it created a similar effect that Tolkien’s Trilogy did for Fantasy - almost all science fiction written after Dune echoes or copies it’s themes and ideas.

Even Herbert himself didn’t seem to be able to escape from being overshadowed by his own success. I recently picked up one of his non Dune related novels titled Hellstrom’s Hive and it does seem like a faint echo of Dune. When I first started reading the book I actually thought that this was one of his earlier novels, and that the familiar themes (ecology, eugenics, social conditioning) were simply indicative of authors primary interests which were later expanded and fully fleshed out in Dune. This is however not the case. Prior to writing this review I checked the publishing dates, and it turns out that Hellstroms Hive (I will abbreviate it as HH if you don’t mind) was first released in 1973 which is 3 years after Dune Messiah hit the book shelves and 3 years before the Children of Dune.

Messiah is widely considered to be the weakest book of the Dune saga, so it puts HH right at the lowest point of this great authors form and it shows. Still, Herbert at is worst is still a hell lot better than most writers at the pinnacle of their creative performance. The book is still smart, eloquent and very well written. The concept behind it, and the general setting however are simply not as gripping or fascinating as those of Dune.

The action takes place in the present - or rather Frank Herbert’s present, which is the the earl 70’s. A ultra secretive governmental agency intercepts schematics for some incredibly potent weapons system, and links them to a known insect specialist and film maker Nils Hellstrom. Agents are immediately sent to covertly investigate his remote and secluded farm compound where most of his nature films are being produced. What they find there goes beyond their wildest dreams - they uncover a bizarre social experiment: a human hive. Inhabitants of the compound built a vast network of tunnels and caverns beneath the ground, and their society is modeled after that of social insects like ants of bees.

In a way the Hive is simillar to Huxley’s Brave New World Society with humans being breed and chemically altered for their jobs. There are mute drone workers chemically stripped out of free will, grotesque and sterile science specialists with withered bodies but superhuman intellect, inbred dim witted and docile hulks used for heavy lifting and etc. The Hive is essentially an alien world with it’s own philosophy, goals, and agenda.

Herbert skillfully switches between the two factions and tells the story both from the perspective of the members of the agency and the hive inhabitants. So we get a unique look on what really drives Hellstrom and his people, and how they view the outside world. But while the description of inner workings of the hive, and the psychological portrait of it’s people are compelling there are no where near as complex and layered as for example the Fremen culture Herbert portrayed in Dune.

While the Dune books usually are overflowing with really catchy, memorable ideas and themes that we keep imitating to this day (the spice, the space guild, the Bene Gesserit, Kwisatz Haderach, the Golden Path, Sand worms, personal shields, the Sardukar etc..), HH is essentially a one trick pony. The hive is the central idea - it is the science fiction element and that’s it. The same painstaking level of detail, and slow methodical progress of the plot that actually worked well in Dune is actually painful at times. While it was fascinating to read about court intrigue, or observe Bene Gesserit political maneuvers, the lengthy passages dealing with the Agency going through the motions, and dealing with bureaucratic hurdles are actually a bit dull. They lack that deep insight, religious reflection, philosophical contemplation, and the Zen of Dune.

I think that the core plot and ideas could easily be compressed into 20-30 pages and would make for an excellent short story. As it is, it is merely a mediocre novel which plays around with 3 of the themes known from dune: ecology, eugenics (selective breeding for special purposes) and social conditioning. All of them were already pretty well covered in the two Dune books that preceded HH and the author really had given them a much better treatment in the 4 Dune books which followed it. In my mind this book seems to be a light warm up or perhaps a much needed combo breaker that helped Herbert to get into the mood for Children of Dune.

If you are a big Frank Herbert fan like me, pick it up. It is well written, and uses that distinct 3rd person, objective, omnipotent narration style that you know and love from the Dune books. Just don’t expect any conceptual fireworks. Just sit back, and enjoy the ride. If you fell asleep reading Dune, and then fell asleep again watching one of it’s movie adaptations stay clear of this title. You have to appreciate Herbert’s specific, slow, deliberate and detailed style to fully enjoy this book.

I have this strange fascination with post apocalyptic stories. I love zombie movies, and MadMax like pictures despite their obvious cheesiness. I loved Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, and I’m glad that I picked up I am Legend after watching that unfortunate Will Smith movie which btw had nothing in common with the book, with exception of the title and the name of the lead character. So when I have seen the blurb for Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and looked through it’s glowing reviews I was sold immediately.

The book paints a vivid and yet disturbing picture of a world in which civilization has collapsed. Some unnamed, and unreferenced cataclysm has scorched the earth and changed the world forever. The novel starts many years after the catastrophe but the planet still haven’t recovered. The conditions are essentially those of a nuclear winter - the sky is shrouded, sun is never clearly visible, and the temperatures rarely climb above the freezing point. When it’s not snowing, it’s raining. When it’s not raining, the wind is blowing around fine grained gray ash, that makes breathing difficult. All the life is gone - there are no birds in the sky, no fish in the rivers and all the vegetation either withered away due to the perpetual twilight, or got scorched away by raging firestorms years ago.

Cities are populated by hollow, plundered, rusting, roting or burned buildings. Every store, and house has been looted years ago and everything is in the state of decay. A man and his son are traveling through this empty, sad and desolate world trying to reach the sea. They are always on the verge of starvation, as finding food is becoming more difficult every day. What is worse, they are not the only survivors. There are other people out on the roads, and they are also starving and are ready to do anything to survive. Anyone they meet is a potential threat - as the last human remaining communities seem to sustain themselves either by warfare and banditry or through cannibalism.

Unlike most of stories that deal with post apocalyptic scenarios, The Road is not some moralizing cautionary tale. We never find out what destroyed the world. It could have been a nuclear war, but it could have also been a force of nature - for example an asteroid impact akin to the one that wiped the dinosaurs in the past. No one knows, no one cares. This is not what the story is about - the story is about the human condition. It is a moving tale about survival, love, fatherhood and growing up in a world that has gone mad. It it is about desperately preserving the very essence of humanity against all the odds.

It touches upon many interesting topics - for example strange form of generation gap that exists only in this new reality. The father still remembers the world as it was before the catastrophe, but his young son has never experienced it. He only knows it from his fathers stories, and he suspects that he made up or embellished half of it. Contrasted with the bleak and harsh reality he knows, the fairytale sunny, overpopulated world full of teeming wildlife, and technology seems as alien to him, as the reality described in the book is alien to us. As the two travel together they see starkly different worlds.

Furthermore, how do you instill morality, goodness and kindness in a child in a world in which these values are only faint memories of a temperamental old man. Especially if this man can be as savage and brutal as the bandits and cannibals, when he is forced to defend his child.

There are no names in this novel - nameless characters move through nameless places. McCarthy stripped all the unnecessary geographical details from his narrative. The world is dead, the cities stand vacant, the rivers are empty - who cares what they are called. It wouldn’t make a difference - not to the characters at least. He concentrates on things which are important to them - like the weather conditions, the food they eat, or are able to find, the overpowering sense of danger, the omnipresent decay or the evidence of unbelievable depravities committed by the other survivors.

It’s thought provoking, moving and disturbing - and in a sense beautiful. The only thing that I didn’t like about it was the ending - the very last page or two [spoiler]where the boy is taken in by the strange man he meets on the road and his familly[/spoiler]. It just seemed anticlimactic. After all the stuff they went through [spoiler]he just finds a “normal” family, and lives happily ever after[/spoiler]? I don’t know, to me it just didn’t gel with the rest of the book. Perhaps I was really expecting either a very morbid, or very ambiguous ending - for example [spoiler]the boy taking the road alone this time, walking off into the gray ashen wasteland - this marking his passage into adulthood[/spoiler]. But alas, this is what we get. And since this conceptual glitch doesn’t show up until the very last 2 pages of the novel, I really think it’s not that bad.

If you haven’t read it, and you like this sort of post apocalyptic stories, definitely pick it up. But here is a word of warning - despite the premise, there is actually not that much action or suspense in this book. Or rather the suspense builds very gradually over many pages, and it is subtle. If you are looking for an action packed page turner, you will probably be disappointed.

Banking on the success of the adaptation of McCarthy’s other novel “No Country for Old Men” Hollywood already decided to create a movie based on “The Road” supposedly with Arragorn Viggo Mortensen in the lead role. I’m not really sure if Stareagorn could really pull this off.

I can’t wait to see how they fuck this one up. I wouldn’t be surprised if they decided to animate some of the cannibals and make them all monstrous and mutated, or made the father an ex navy seal and have him carry an M4 instead of the pistol. Most likely the movie will totally suck - but then again, we’ll see.

Continuing with my reader participation streak. There will be time for more single sided rants later on. This time I’m flipping it around and hopefully letting everyone, both tech oriented and non-technical readers to have a chance to contribute. Let’s talk about literature! I hereby designate this as the book recommendation thread.

What are you reading right now? Alternatively what was the last book that you have read that has either profoundly affected you? I’m mostly looking for fiction recommendations, but if you have some good non-fiction titles that are a must-read in your mind, I would love to hear about them as well.

You can usually see what I’m reading at the moment in the little status thing in the sidebar - but I forget to upgrade it half of the time. For example, right now I’m reading The Road by Cormac McArthy but that thing still says Night Watch because I was to lazy to change it. I’m 3/4 through the book, and I can tell you, it is good. Profound, disturbing and thought provoking. And I can’t put it down. Great read. You should see a review of it appearing here very shortly - I just need to finish it and gather my thoughts on it.

I have a few titles on the back burner. I’m around half way through Helstrom’s Hive by Frank Herbert (creator of Dune) but I’m not really feeling it. It’s one of his early novels and it shows. I will trudge through it after I’m done with Cormac out of respect for the author and likely post a review as well.

I have Stranger in Strange Land sitting on my shelf, lined up to be next on the reading list because I’m apparently not allowed to use the word grok until I finish it. After that, I’m open to suggestions. Here is what I got so far from various sources:

1. Hyperion by Dan Simmons
2. Life of Pi by Yann Martel
3. House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski

I haven’t read any of these yet, but they all seem interesting, each for different reasons. After that, I’m out of reading material. This is where you come in. What should I pick up next? This is the time to pimp your favorite book, or plug your favorite author.

The other day my dad saw me dog ear my book to save my place, and he made a comment about it. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I also sometimes make notes on the margins, and mark interesting quotes and passages in the books that I own. It seems that a lot of people get hung up about these things. No dog earing, no putting an open book face down on the table, no scribbling in the books and etc… And these are not just pet peeves of few bibliophiles - these are quite widely held beliefs.

But why is that? It is just a hard copy! A $5 paperback edition and there is a million of copies just like this one. A book is just a storage medium - it is designed to store information in a human accessible way. The data which it contains is the important and valuable commodity. The paper based container however - is for a lack or a better word disposable. And it comes with a built in bookmark functionality. Why not use it?

In fact I would argue that by adding my notes, scribbles and permanent dog-ear bookmarks I’m actually adding value to my copy. Now it has annotations that will help me find interesting passages, or remind me about the parts that I found worth remembering when I pick up the book second time around. It’s almost like having a time capsule - as you re-read the book that had a profound impact on you, you see what used to be important to you in the past. So the paper medium is not only containing data but also my markup and notes.

So I guess this is just a difference of the point of view. Which one are you? Do you dog ear and scribble in your books, or do you keep them in pristine condition? Are you one of the people who think dog earing is a criminal offense? Let me know. I’d love to hear arguments from both sides - to see how people treat their reading material and why.

Back at the begining of February I reviewed the movie Night Watch. It was deeply flawed but great looking action flick - in other words, very Hollywood like in execution. The plot seemed fragmented, and some things didn’t make any sense. I felt that there had to be more to this, so I picked up the book on which the movie was based.

Unsurprisingly it turned out the be much better than the adaptation. It is still somewhat action oriented, fast paced and easy reading but it has a very different tone. It’s actually much lighter, and not devoid of humor. Lukyanenko seems to have a good grasp of irony which is completely missing from the movie. And it’s this sense of irony that actually is the centerpiece of the whole story. The setup is as follows: there is a treaty between the forces of good and evil, forcing them to coexist peacefully. There are checks and balances, tribunals an special enforcement agencies on both sides.

The dark side naturally wants to cause suffering, chaos and mayhem because they feed off human misfortune. It is the actual source of their power - this is how they charge up for performing powerful feats of magic. Unfortunately for them, they can’t really just walk around making people miserable. For every harm they cause, the light side gets to do equal (or equivalent) amount of good. Sadly it works both ways.

Imagine yourself being in the shoes of the main character - Anton. He has the proper training, and enough power to do incredible amount of good. He could heal the terminally ill, save people from a horrible train wreck, or turn recidivist criminals into upstanding citizens. But he can’t - and if he tried, his pals from the light side would have to put him down to maintain the balance between the good and evil. So instead Anton has to walk past pain, suffering and ignore human crimes and idly watch as vampires feed on unsuspecting humans as per licensing agreements they were able to obtain from the light side.

The treaty is uneasy for both sides, and both scheme, plot and try to find some wiggle room to further their goals, and gain small advantage over the other. This means that the Night Watch (a light side organization which oversees and polices the activity of the dark ones) is not always about doing good. It’s almost always about self sacrifice. Being on the side of light means being a pawn in a convoluted game of intrigue, brokered deals with the dark side, diversions, feints and subversive tactics.

When the story begins, Anton is already pretty jaded about the shady tactics of the Night Watch. As his power grows, and he finds out more and more about the history and inner secrets of the organization, and becomes an unwilling pawn in one of it’s biggest operations to date he becomes completely disillusioned.

Lukyanenko starts with a black and white world, where the forces of evil are well defined, and then grabs his color palette, and starts adding shades of gray all over the place. In the end there is nothing left, and the light side ends up being as detrimental to the well being of the human kind, as the dark side. So the interesting bit is watching this deconstruction of this universe.

The backdrop for the story is modern Moscow which is a city of great contrasts very similar to the stark contrast between the forces of the Day and Night Watch. Here wealth and luxury spectacularly clashes with dirt and poverty - both competing for the same living space inside of the city. Lavish sports cars zoom past groups of underprivileged lower class citizens who can barely make the ends meet in post communist capitalistic Russia. You probably couldn’t pick a better setting.

The story is unveiled in 3 self contained chapters. Each is constructed the same way - it starts with a short exposition of a crisis situation. Next we witness Anton being thrown into the middle of the crisis, with the tension building up to an explosive resolution, accompanied by a clever twist. Naturally after the first chapter, you are pretty much expecting the very same type of twist in the second one, and when it happens again in the third you are no longer surprised. Each part could probably fend on it’s own as a short story, but they are related and and up telling a much broader and more interesting tale when read as a whole. To me however a less structured approach could have been better - but it helps to keep the book fast paced and easy to follow (which, again, is not always a good thing).

To tell you the truth, the part of the story which interested me the most was the concept of the Twilight, which was barely hinted at in the movie. Lukyanenko describes it as a sort of parallel shadowy dimension which can be accessed by rising your shadow and walking through it. It sort of reminiscent of Umbra from WoD.

Anton claims that there are 3 (or perhaps more) levels of Twilight. The first level essentially looks like a bleak and shadowy version of this universe that is run in slow motion. Deeper levels become much more alien, and disconnected from the physical universe. Second level for example is a dark realm filled with mist and rain in which features from the real world start to disappear. For example, Anton dispatches an enemy by pulling him into the second level of Twilight on an observation platform high above the ground. Since the platform does not exist thus plunging him down to the ground. We never see the third level, because our hero is not powerful to survive in it.

Twilight seems to drain your strength, and while an experienced Other can stay on the first level for hours, sooner or later it becomes dangerous. Second level is even more difficult to navigate, and more power hungry. Third is almost impossible to enter without strong protective magic, or transforming into some demonic form.

Similarly to Umbra, Twilight is inhabited by strange, and often misunderstood spirits. Most of them seem to be some sort of wraiths or ghosts of Others who either withdrew into this shadowy realm and were changed by it, or decided to inhabit it after death. There is no mentioning of daemons, gods or any kind of other supernatural beings living in there, other than some storage blue moss which seems to feed of human emotion.

In the novel, all magical duels and face-offs happen within Twilight, to keep collateral damage down to minimum. It is rather convenient solution, but it does make sense internally. It is an interesting concept and the movie really under-utilized it.

I guess my main complain about this book would have to deal with translation. Andrew Broomfield does a very good job for the most part, but there were several things that bothered me. For example, he insists on translating militsiya (мили́ция) as militia. While technically correct, considering the etymology of the word it seems a bit clumsy. In most English speaking countries when we talk about militia we usually mean a temporary, unpaid, paramilitary force composed out of citizen volunteers created to deal with specific threats or emergencies. This is naturally a wrong connotation. In soviet block countries militia (or rather militsiya) was essentially a state funded police force. The tactics, and organization differ from western police models, but I personally think that militia was a wrong choice here.

I say that, because it took me few seconds to realize what the characters were talking about - and I actually lived in a country that used to have a militsiya (there called milicja and later renamed to policja) for many years. So if I was confused, someone unfamiliar with this terminology would be completely lost. Using the word Police, or leaving it as a militsiya (which is I think transliteration from cyrylic) would make much more sense.

There were several other small hiccups like this one. I didn’t write any of them down, and I can’t recall them all but I remember that there was more than one. As a whole, the book just seems too sterile. None of the characters ever use any slang, or common contractions. They are all very articulate, and fond of big words. And while this clean and articulate voice it is perfectly acceptable for Anton - who is an educated programmer, it seems out of place when used for some of the other characters.

Some sort of change of pace, or creative speech-pattern modeling would do wonders for this novel. I have seen this done many times - only the other way around. For example, back in the day I read Polish translations of some of Terry Pratchet’s early books and found them humorous and colorful - with the signature English humor either surviving intact, or being converted to something more familiar and sensible as needed.

Translating a novel isn’t always about simply getting the meaning across. Sometimes injecting a bit of a personal touch and creativity into the text goes a long way. But that’s just my opinion.

All in all, Night Watch is not a bad book. It is mostly a fast paced, action romp but the ambiguous approach to the whole light and darkness dichotomy gives it a more layered, and almost philosophical touch. Don’t expect it to change your life, but if you want some easy but not brain-dead reading I recommend picking it up.