Month: July 2010

I should be going to bed, and I also should have posted earlier, but such is life. A quick review of the latest issue of Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, a small but well-regarded magazine published by Small Beer Press of Easthampton, Massachusetts (aka Kelly Link and Gavin Grant), the people who are putting out the new trade paper edition of Ted Chiang's brilliant Stories of Your Life and Others this October. Both Pandemonium and Porter Square Books sell it in hardcopy, or you can get it electronically for not-much money. I think it is consistently the best SF magazine I read, the magazine most likely to give me stories that I like, that I find well-written, that make me think, that discomfort me in a useful way. This latest issue is no exception.

• "A City of Museums", by Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud (translated by Edward Gauvin) — Châteaureynaud is a French writer, and this story was written in 1983 but only translated recently; Gauvin has a collection of Châteaureynaud's works in translation (coming?) out from Small Beer Press. It's an odd little story about a city which is made up entirely of museums, and about the "rats" who live in cracks writing, creating art, in the hopes that one day their hideout too will become a museum ("see 'the bed where the author of Sylvie’s Baubles had once lain in state'!") A bit about how artists hope to be remembered, what purpose the creation of art serves and what purpose the memorialization of art serves.
• "Dear Aunt Gwenda" — a cute little pseudo-advice column.
• "Fire-Marrow", by Jennifer Linnaea — a blind man lives by a subterranean river, his only contact with the outside world the toy boats his former lover, now dying, sends, magically filled with provisions for him. A gentle sort of meditation on death.
• "This Is Not Concrete", by Ben Francisco — a suddenly-precognitive girl and her father hunt for the Concrete Man (a figure of animate, well, concrete) which killed her mother and brother. The story works quite well, of course, read literally, and it wasn't until just now that I noticed the pun in the title. Now I need to reread it with that in mind. Even read literally I thought it was the best story in the issue — it reminded me a bit of "The Ghost-Hunter's Beautiful Daughter" from Asimov's some months back.
• "The Famous Detective and His Telepathy Goggles", by Sean Adams — exactly what it says on the tin. Short, amusing, absurd, steampunk.
• "Box", by Susannah Mandel (poem) — remarkably vivid and evocative given it's only four lines long. Exemplifies the technical skill (in this case particularly the use of meter) I find lacking in modern poetry.
• "Circumnavigation, With Dogs", by Richard Gess — could be considered an SF-twist story, not that it's not foreshadowed for the alert reader, and its format is interesting, and I actually liked it quite a bit regardless of the twist. Of course with my current job I suddenly take a lot more notice of travel-related things.
• "The Sleeper", by Eilis O'Neal — "My brother sleeps… I don't." Obviously hits close to home in a lot of ways, which makes it really, really creepy. Aaaaaugh.
• Three Poems by Jeannine Hall Gailey — Three poems about a fox-wife and her husband. They call to mind Neil Gaiman's "The White Road" and the Decemberists' The Crane Wife.
• "Heliotrope Hedgerow", by Christa Bergerson (poem) — An English sonnet! At least in rhyme structure, an English sonnet, though the meter until the ending couplet is altogether more complex and interesting. A nice bit of imagery in "take the key and cross through the clover door / transcend sublunary forevermore"
• "The Queen's Reason", by Richard Parks — a nice twist on the Emperor's New Clothes fable.
• "Music of the Spheres", by Daniel Braum — obviously references the jazz musician Sun Ra. I think a lot of the interesting oddity in the story is borrowed from Sun Ra himself rather than the author's own invention, but if the story gets you to give Sun Ra a listen, that's a good thing.
• "The Problem with Strudel", by Sarah Tourjee — really, really odd. Either the protagonist has some form of mental illness or that world is really, really odd. Or both.
• "Elephants of the Platte", by Thomas Israel Hopkins — A man and his amnesiac wife travel the Nebraska Canal from New York to the West Coast, in this oddly quiet little post-oil tall tale.
• "Exuviation", by Haihong Zhou — first appeared in Science Fiction World, the biggest Chinese science fiction magazine; translated by the author. The odd physiology of the cavers, humans who've evolved to live their entire lives in caves, similar to the blind salamanders and so on, and the choices they make in an alien environment to stay faithful to their nature or try to fight it.

Theresa's father is named Gregor, which means vigilant. He makes more noise in his sleep than he does when he's awake. His first language is silence. When he sits in a chair with his legs spread wide, his elbows resting on his thighs, his fingers interlaced, and his head bowed, it means he's thinking hard, or praying. When he stands with his legs as far apart as his shoulders, glaring at you with his arms crossed, it means he's angry. When he puts his right hand on his hip and breathes in light, quick breaths—like an inverse sigh—it means he is frustrated, or sad.

from "This is Not Concrete", by Ben Francisco

As promised yesterday…

Asimov’s, July 2010

A couple good stories, and a nice futuristic cityscape cover.

• “The Other Graces”, by Alice Sola Kim (short story). This story, about a young Korean-American woman applying to colleges with the telepathic help of future versions of herself, brought back both fond and not-so-fond memories of being in high school and trying to get into college, and of being in college. I identified with the main character a lot. It also got me to learn at least very basically how to enter Korean hangul into my computer so I could run Google Translate on it. (It turns out that 대황, used as a nonsense syllable throughout the story, translates to ‘rhubarb’.) Excellent.
• “Haggle Chips”, by Tom Purdom (novelette). It had a promising opening line (“It was a very civilized hijack.”), but I got as far as that part where the (needless to say, male) main character was being assigned three women for “emotional regulation” by his captors and punted. Maybe it gets better from there; perhaps I will come back to it later. I’m increasingly running out of interest in SF that exercises the fantasies and fears of white heterosexual men, lately, because I’ve read it all already.
• “Eddie’s Ants”, by D.T. Mitenko (short story). Another promising opening line (“Eddie laughs when he finds out what a gun does.”), and a bit of a cute premise (a man tries repeatedly and ever more creatively to kill an alien hive mind for stealing his girlfriend), but ultimately it’s another plot driven by white heterosexual male insecurity. I came back to it after I’d read the rest of the magazine, and it was okay — some mildly interesting discussion of human society as a cooperative organism, akin to ants or bees — but nothing particularly special.
• “The Jaguar House, In Shadow”, by Aliette de Bodard (novelette). Set in the universe of her forthcoming “Aztec fantasy” novel Servant of the Underworld (in September), a universe where the Chinese discovered America before Columbus. A fascinating (and fascinatingly alien) set of interlocking religious and political systems, conflicted and sympathetic characters, some meditation on leadership, especially leadership under a corrupt higher leader. From a technical standpoint, it has some continuity issues, which I lay at the feet of the editors mostly, but those are relatively minor. Easily the best thing by her I’ve read to date (and I feel like there was something besides February’s “The Wind-Blown Man”, but I can’t remember what).
• “Amelia Pillar’s Etiquette for the Space Traveller”, by Kristine Kathryn Rusch (short story). What is says on the tin. Short. Cute.
• A History of Terraforming, by Robert Reed (novella). I started it but the main character didn’t compel me, the main antagonist(?) was a cartoonishly-manipulative female environmentalist straight from Central Casting, and, having skimmed the end, it’s more than a bit heavy-handed in its didacticism. Not really worth it.

I’m still awake (Thursday), so I should at least get through the Asimov’s…

I'm behind in my reviewing, for whatever that's worth. It's not that I haven't been reading the magazines, though it has been mostly magazines I've been reading — I've been making ~no progress on my to-read stack of novels. Work has of course been consuming a lot of my energy. Also, more lately, the sleep meds I've been taking, some hours before bed, have been causing me to be a zombie pretty much up until bed. When I can't muster energy to get out of my chair, let alone read or watch TV or write, I can't really have a productive evening to speak of. I took the meds a bit later tonight — I've been playing around with dosages and timing some (melatonin in the 300-1000 microgram range, nothing heavy-duty, thank goodness), so I'll write as much as I have energy for while I wait for it to kick in. I'm not liking it much, this twilight life, but I go in for the follow-up to my sleep study tomorrow, so hopefully that will point me in more productive directions.

Asimov's, June 2010

A seriously underwhelming issue.

• "The Emperor of Mars", by Allen M. Steele (novelette). I feel like I've read this one before — pop psychology mixed with SFnal exceptionalism. Basically a young man, working on Mars, suffers the loss of his family and retreats into a universe constructed out of the SF books he's been reading, in which he's the titular emperor, in order to cope. Doesn't condemn his escapism, at least, but nothing hugely special.
• "Petopia", by Benjamin Crowell (short story). A cast-off electronic pet winds up in French-speaking Africa. Some commentary about digital haves and have-nots and so on, and the values different cultures place on things, and a bit of "the Street finds its own uses for technology", but it didn't really grab me.
• "Monkey Do", by Kit Reed (short story). Writer's animal learns to write, outshines writer, hilarity ensues. That's pretty much it.
• "The Peacock Cloak", by Chris Beckett (short story). A bit of an allegory on good and evil, set in a virtual world which recapitulated the Fall — a dialogue between God and the Devil in SFnal clothing, basically — and neither hugely novel in its outlook nor particularly deft in its approach, but well-told, and containing some nicely vivid imagery.
• "Voyage to the Moon", by Peter Friend (short story). An odd, arthropod From the Earth to the Moon. It's nicely alien, and it's fun to discover the odd nature of the world and try to understand it along with the characters.
• "Dreadnaught Neptune", by Anna Tambour (short story). I couldn't figure out where this was going, skipped to the end, skimmed the middle, and was still confused. The 1950's milieu that's pretty common in SF short stories doesn't do a lot for me, and this is no exception.
• Earth III by Stephen Baxter (novella). I couldn't get into the last story in this series, and I couldn't get into this one. Meh.

I'm not asleep yet. I'll get through as many reviews as I can tonight and post them, one a day for the next N days, until I run out.

Life continues to be a whirlwind.

It was announced a week ago Friday that the company I work for, ITA Software, is in the process of being bought by Google. (!!!!) Yes, I still have a job; certainly for the next N months while the US Department of Justice decides whether to let the deal go through or not, and quite likely thereafter. We love our existing and prospective customers!

I'm pretty sure "work for Google" was on my nebulous list of life goals somewhere, and it wasn't an especially long list. (Sample other life goals: attend MIT, have software to which I've contributed reviewed favorably in PC World, start a company…) It feels a little odd but good to find myself looking for new life goals because I've completed most of my existing ones.

I went in and did my sleep study (a polysomnogram and a multiple sleep latency test) last week, and I have the follow-up appointment to go over the results this week, so hopefully soon I will have some real data about my sleep issues. I'm tempted to ask for copies of the raw data files they collected, because I'm curious to see how they're formatted, and I think it might be fun to play around with the information a bit.

Working as I do for one of the largest commercial users of Lisp in the world, I find myself wanting Emacs's tools, specifically SLIME, for navigating Lisp code. Being a Vim user, I find myself with Emacs buffers unintentionally full of j's and k's a lot, and otherwise generally unable to function without the keybindings I've internalized. I know vim so well that it disappears in my hands; not so with Emacs. (In addition to being unfamiliar, Emacs's default keybindings are hell on my wrists.) Now of course Emacs is famous for being ~infinitely customizable, and in fact it comes with a pretty complete reimplementation of vi in Elisp, called viper-mode. Unfortunately this is a reimplementation of vi, not vim, and vim is vastly more full-featured. Figuring that I couldn't possibly be the only person with this problem — after all, the excellent viPlugin for Eclipse secretly implements vim keybindings — I spent a long time searching the net for a vim mode for Emacs.

Finally I found this vim-mode, which lives at bitbucket. Unfortunately it became rapidly clear that it was missing a bunch of features I rely on intuitively, and so, after swearing some, going back to Google, and failing to find a better vim mode, I forked it and started writing the missing features I wanted. It's mostly to a point now where the keybindings I reach for with muscle memory are in place. Patches are of course welcomed, and I'll eventually get around to pushing everything upstream. (I've been working with our Boombox web service middleware layer and not with Lisp so much at work lately, so I haven't really been using the vim-mode. It turns out that learning Elisp, Emacs internals, Mercurial, Common Lisp, QPX, Boombox, a new company's procedures, and the airline industry all at the same time is actually too much for me to do all at once, so I've had to prioritize. 🙂

…oh, and it looks like the maintainer has fixed most of the things I found lacking since I looked last. Cool. I'll have to try out the latest version.

Edit: Also, I think I'm mostly dug out from under the snowbank of e-mails, so if you sent something more than a few days ago expecting a response and haven't heard back from me yet, please resend it or contact me by some other method.