I finally got around to reading Wool, via the omnibus edition, and since singing its praises just adds another voice to a justified clamour, I thought I'd suggest, dear reader, that you take my approval and enjoyment for granted, and I'd write about the things that worried me in this book.
Warning, some of the statements in this post might qualify as spoilers. I won't give anything important away, though.
Wool is Old School SF for the aficionado, or possibly the connoisseur, possibly some other foreign word. It evokes the sociologically centered work of golden age names like Sturgeon, Kornbluth, Aldiss, Harrison, Bova, Silverburg, EF Russell, Bradbury; work that was largely buried by the cyberpunk avalanche and its concomitant wave of high-tech high action cinema that seemed to culminate in The Matrix; at once the apotheosis and antithesis of its own genre, echoing in huge halls the cramped and solipsistic worlds of the sociofuturologists of the 1960s.
I should probably frame that last para. It's intended to exorcise the pretentious twat that lurks inside every critic, no less me.
What worried me about Wool was not its stark vision of the future, nor its almost nihilistic commentary on the nature of man. None of the sociological stuff that ought to breed disquiet in the reader really bothered me. Wool is well aware of its own heritage, and its heritage is books and stories that I grew up with; it tips a nod to William Golding as well as Isaac Asimov (though thankfully Howey's computers benefit from transistors and silicon chips, so they don't take up quite so much room). For me, this was home turf. And that didn't detract from the suspense, the jeopardy, the excitement. I finished it at 3 am last night.
The following worries probably say more about me than they do about Hugh Howey's excellent book. I certainly hope so. I wouldn't want to put you off reading it.
1. The health and safety benefits of modular design and high replacement rates.
What worried me most at first was the staircase. I was initially concerned that its design was non-modular. There doesn't seem to have been a provision for swapping out worn or damaged stairs - not even the handrail. Not only is this an accident waiting to happen, but repairs will be extremely time-consuming and could have a severe impact on the economy. It would be a simple matter to make individual stairs from sheet steel using a specialized pressing and folding machine. They would wear out quickly but replacement would be a matter of a few minutes. As it is each stair is thick enough that it is possible for it to wear smooth, and therefore lose its nice safe planar profile. Which implies another problem: if the stairs go unreplaced for so long, the joints will be at extremely high risk of microfractures caused by repeated impacts - vibration fatigue which leads to catastrophic failure. This translates to a cascade of stairs suddenly breaking loose and bringing several floors worth of the structure down.
2. The quality of life of sheep.
Sheep need the outdoors. We know there are pigs in the silo - more on them below - but the presence of sheep is strongly implied, by the presence of wool. Indeed it is always to be hoped that a book with wool in the title will have at least one sheep between the covers.
Sheep are not known for standing around in barns, and most sheep species spend all year outside, different breeds tolerating different degrees of hardship. Maybe it comes from having lived in Wales, having Welsh blood, that I worry about the wellbeing of sheep that have to live underground. And I have grave doubts about the quality of the wool that would be produced without the constant stimulation of inclement weather.
3. Genetic diversity in Domestic Stock
Along with the humans, there are (among others), dogs and tomatoes. The domestic dog has a ridiculous amount of genetic diversity. Even a fairly small population (in the low hundreds) might well survive a few hundred years without developing severe congenital disorders. The domestic tomato has suffered from a reduction in diversity but efforts have been made in recent years to reintroduce greater diversity through targeted rebreeding with wild stock, which has an extremely high diversity. As long as the hydroponic farms maintain a healthy strain of wild stock, yields of domestic varieties should remain stable for a good long time, but I'm not sufficiently knowledgeable to guess at how long. Domestic pigs are in trouble. Perhaps not as much as bananas and vanilla, but trouble nonetheless. As with many meat species, genetic sustainability (sufficient diversity in the population to resist new threats (e.g. new viruses)) has been sacrificed for higher yields. The silo builders would have been smart enough to begin with as diverse a stock as possible, ideally representing as many domestic breeds as possible, along with representatives of both wild and feral breeds. This would likely make the pigs small, and bad tempered, but with a strong flavour and higher fat content. Pigs do tolerate confined living, especially if they are in contact with people. They are also a much more efficient recycler of dead people than burial.
4. Hydrocarbon economy in confined spaces
Building a silo on top of an oil well seems a pretty smart idea. Refining and burning it as fuel though, seems less smart. Hydroponics are carbon neutral, so you would already have to be producing oxygen for the people and scrubbing the air clean of CO2. This requires some pretty inventive solutions, all of which are net consumers of energy. So a significant amount of the energy generated by burning hydrocarbons would be used up generating oxygen to make it possible to burn hydrocarbons. This is quite apart from all the other products of burning. In order to avoid poisoning everyone with exhaust gases you would have to burn the fuel inside a closed system, and to prevent clogging you would have to use only the lightest fractions obtained in refining, leaving you with an enormous amount of waste oil to dispose of.
Oh, and one last remark:
How hard would automated lens cleaning have really been to implement?
2012-10-11
2012-10-09
On the role of memory: Part II
I've been agonizing over this since the previous post, as well as researching it in neurological texts and in the cognitive sciences, commentaries on them, and in philosophy. I haven't found any especially satisfying references, so* I'm not going to try to back up my synthetic hypothesis with weighty authority.
What I want to talk about is the past, the present and the future and how, or more specifically, when we experience them.
Below is my scribbled diagram of the "arrow of time" model of how we experience the universe.
This 'hourglass' model presents the Present as a single instant (of 0 duration) where we experience events (or phenomena or epiphenomena); the unknown future transforms into the certain and unchangeable past. (We can leave aside the curious fact that the mathematics of time makes no differentiation between past and future; possibly mathematics is as confused by the hourglass model as I am.)
As a model of history, the hourglass is fine. When dealing with large timescales it presents no real problems. but at very small scales, it does. We experience events as a continuous flow, one thing happening after another; when I see a bird fly past my window, I know it has flown from west to east because even in the fraction of a second that it took, I remember that it appeared at the west side of the frame and disappeared at the east, and crossed my field of view on a continuous vector from west to east. I have a sensation of seeing a bird fly west to east because in each Present instant I remember the preceding Past instant when it was slightly to the west. At least, that's the hourglass theory.
Consider laying the dining table. As you place a plate in each place, you hear the plate touching the table at the same time as you feel it touching at the same time as you see it touching.
Sound travels at about 340 m/s. Light travels at about 300,000,000 m/s. Nerve impulses travel at widely varying speeds, though 100 m/s seems fairly typical. Even over the very small distances between the plate and your brain, the difference between the visual sense and the other two is very very large. Large enough that if we really experienced events in a single instant as they happen, people sitting in the back row at the cinema would experience a substantial lag between seeing the actor's lips move on the screen and hearing them speak**. Why doesn't this happen?
This model leaves out the future altogether. When it comes to understanding our present the future is an unnecessary distraction. Indeed, you'll notice that I don't treat the present as a point here, because although in mathematics it may be, in epiphenomenology (the study of the nature of conscious and unconscious experience), the present is not a point. It's a sort of blur; your sense all get information at different speeds. Were pretty comfortable with the idea that the sense of smell is generally out of sync with the rest of the sense. My dog will chase a cat by following the cat's scent trail around the garden when the cat is in plain view in the middle of the lawn; the dog's present includes smell in a way that ours includes sight and sound; your brain is compensating for the different times at which the same information arrives by creating a lag; a lag that can sometimes be detected. What we call déjà vu is exactly this. And why? Because the only way that the brain can compensate for the variation in the speed of the senses is memory.
We are continuously remembering the present.
This is the only reason why reading works at all. As you read a sentence, the words go into a buffer, to be interpreted, converted into a memory of meaning, once enough of them are present for an experience sufficient to be remembered is formed. This is also the reason why jokes work; to save time (your brain is always trying to find ways to cut down on time and resources), you begin to predict what the memory will be before the joke is completed, but the punchline short-circuits your expectation, giving a feeling of giddiness as the memory has to change. One thinks of Jimmy Carr's infamous mosquito joke.
All this is the reason why you can write events out of order; why the editing of Pulp Fiction works; why it is even possible to start a chapter:
Sir Hargen was uncomfortable in the saddle; he had set of half an hour earlier after a hurried breakfast of indifferent eggs, having roused unexpectedly from a deep sleep, dreaming of riding in a carriage. And here he was back on his bony old nag.
It isn't always a good idea to do this, but it works. Once you've read the sentence you remember the events of Sir Hargen's morning in order.
Going back to my earlier post, I believe that this is why Bob's technique works, and the reason why Adam's technique, when it does fail, does so so spectacularly, is because the memory does not have enough time or information to fully form in the reader. The reader literally can't remember the details.
__
* oh all right: a nod to Daniel Dennett's "Consciousness <scare quotes>Explained</scare quotes>". The excellent Tom Stoppard play "Jumpers" includes a satirical treatment of the way that philosophers choose the titles for their books which seems to apply especially well to Dennett. But it is an entertaining book that certainly helps the student to think in the right way, (much like Wittgenstein), even if it doesn't really explain consciousness.
** in a big cinema, the sound would take something like a tenth of a second; easily detectable to us humans. The light would take a ten-millionth of a second; definitely undetectable.
What I want to talk about is the past, the present and the future and how, or more specifically, when we experience them.
Below is my scribbled diagram of the "arrow of time" model of how we experience the universe.
This 'hourglass' model presents the Present as a single instant (of 0 duration) where we experience events (or phenomena or epiphenomena); the unknown future transforms into the certain and unchangeable past. (We can leave aside the curious fact that the mathematics of time makes no differentiation between past and future; possibly mathematics is as confused by the hourglass model as I am.)
As a model of history, the hourglass is fine. When dealing with large timescales it presents no real problems. but at very small scales, it does. We experience events as a continuous flow, one thing happening after another; when I see a bird fly past my window, I know it has flown from west to east because even in the fraction of a second that it took, I remember that it appeared at the west side of the frame and disappeared at the east, and crossed my field of view on a continuous vector from west to east. I have a sensation of seeing a bird fly west to east because in each Present instant I remember the preceding Past instant when it was slightly to the west. At least, that's the hourglass theory.
Consider laying the dining table. As you place a plate in each place, you hear the plate touching the table at the same time as you feel it touching at the same time as you see it touching.
Sound travels at about 340 m/s. Light travels at about 300,000,000 m/s. Nerve impulses travel at widely varying speeds, though 100 m/s seems fairly typical. Even over the very small distances between the plate and your brain, the difference between the visual sense and the other two is very very large. Large enough that if we really experienced events in a single instant as they happen, people sitting in the back row at the cinema would experience a substantial lag between seeing the actor's lips move on the screen and hearing them speak**. Why doesn't this happen?
This model leaves out the future altogether. When it comes to understanding our present the future is an unnecessary distraction. Indeed, you'll notice that I don't treat the present as a point here, because although in mathematics it may be, in epiphenomenology (the study of the nature of conscious and unconscious experience), the present is not a point. It's a sort of blur; your sense all get information at different speeds. Were pretty comfortable with the idea that the sense of smell is generally out of sync with the rest of the sense. My dog will chase a cat by following the cat's scent trail around the garden when the cat is in plain view in the middle of the lawn; the dog's present includes smell in a way that ours includes sight and sound; your brain is compensating for the different times at which the same information arrives by creating a lag; a lag that can sometimes be detected. What we call déjà vu is exactly this. And why? Because the only way that the brain can compensate for the variation in the speed of the senses is memory.
We are continuously remembering the present.
This is the only reason why reading works at all. As you read a sentence, the words go into a buffer, to be interpreted, converted into a memory of meaning, once enough of them are present for an experience sufficient to be remembered is formed. This is also the reason why jokes work; to save time (your brain is always trying to find ways to cut down on time and resources), you begin to predict what the memory will be before the joke is completed, but the punchline short-circuits your expectation, giving a feeling of giddiness as the memory has to change. One thinks of Jimmy Carr's infamous mosquito joke.
All this is the reason why you can write events out of order; why the editing of Pulp Fiction works; why it is even possible to start a chapter:
Sir Hargen was uncomfortable in the saddle; he had set of half an hour earlier after a hurried breakfast of indifferent eggs, having roused unexpectedly from a deep sleep, dreaming of riding in a carriage. And here he was back on his bony old nag.
It isn't always a good idea to do this, but it works. Once you've read the sentence you remember the events of Sir Hargen's morning in order.
Going back to my earlier post, I believe that this is why Bob's technique works, and the reason why Adam's technique, when it does fail, does so so spectacularly, is because the memory does not have enough time or information to fully form in the reader. The reader literally can't remember the details.
__
* oh all right: a nod to Daniel Dennett's "Consciousness <scare quotes>Explained</scare quotes>". The excellent Tom Stoppard play "Jumpers" includes a satirical treatment of the way that philosophers choose the titles for their books which seems to apply especially well to Dennett. But it is an entertaining book that certainly helps the student to think in the right way, (much like Wittgenstein), even if it doesn't really explain consciousness.
** in a big cinema, the sound would take something like a tenth of a second; easily detectable to us humans. The light would take a ten-millionth of a second; definitely undetectable.
2012-10-06
Take your time.
I am not on the side of the author, nor on the side of the reader. I believe that the author has to fight his own corner, and in the brave new world of electronic publishing where noone needs to listen to professional critics any more (whose side were they on, anyway?), the reader has at last acquired a voice, with the result that some independent authors rewrite and republish—even entirely retelling a story—after listening to reader reaction.
I am on the side of the story.
Stories can take many forms, so knowing what a story ought to be is not a straightforward matter of applying a few patterns. My authors will know that I'm as likely to cite examples from Buffy and Xena as I am to cite Kipling or du Maurier, Homer or Chaucer, Shakespeare or Wertenbaker.
From time to time this editor comes across shining examples of what not to do when telling a story, and this post is about one of them.
Last night I stayed up a little later than I should have, watching a movie that in some ways I'm glad I watched. Which is to say that if I weren't a story editor, I probably would have said the n hours of my life I won't get back thing. (I'd never say that in a review, but informally or for comic effect I might say it.)
The movie was Babylon A.D. , a Franco-American Sci-Fi actioner from 2008. Cutting straight to the chase, the film got a metacritic score of 26% and rotten tomatoes gave it 7%. Those are not good scores. And well justified.
Some critics complained about shabby action sequences, and from the point of view of American audiences who are used to brassfests* like Heat or Total Recall, I can understand this; the two running battles are shot through crowds, scaffolding and parked cars, and choppy cutting means that the viewer sees very little detail of these scenes. This is typical of French action films, where (apart from car chases, that the French are if anything even more fetishistic about than Americans) big, complex or lengthy scenes of violence are often distanced from view by this sort of technique, in order to give more punch to key moments like the hero getting shot, which tend to be extremely graphic.
But that is cinematography, not storytelling. You could do that stuff differently and it wouldn't help or hinder the story.
The acting (as an aside) is mentionable at best. Michelle Yeoh acts her little cotton socks off, as always, and comes across as if about 80% of all her scenes ended up on the cutting room floor. Mélanie Thierry (the one whose eyes are on different continents) does a passable imitation of Elijah Wood, and Vin Diesel is indescribable. He has a quality in almost all his movies of "surely this guy is too smart to be playing that part?".
Actually what does for this movie is its treatment of its story, which suffers in equal measure from Xeno's Dichotomy Paradox and its usual corollary, back-cutting.
The dichotomy paradox maintains that before you can get somewhere, you must first get halfway there, and once halfway, you must then cover half the remaining distance before you can cover all of it, and once there (three quarters of the original journey), you must cover half the remaining distance again, and so on ad infinitum, HENCE you can't ever get there. Wikipedia probably explains it better than I do.
The manifestation of this effect in a story is (sort of) inverted. Sometimes it is caused by the writer realizing he has reached the halfway point and therefore seeing the end in sight. Sometimes it is caused by the writer realizing that the book is getting overlong. Whatever the reasons might be, in the third quarter of the book the writer takes half as long to narrate the same amount of action as in the first half, and then in the seventh eighth half as much again, and then in the fifteenth sixteenth half as much again, and so on. The pace of action accelerates exponentially as you approach the end, and as the pace of action accelerates, so the detail starts to go amiss.
There are big jumps in distance and time (which in the movies are glossed-over usually by giving the main characters a makeover and a change of costume). Plot details that would have made sense of the story are delivered with every increasing economy until they're no longer sufficiently detailed to be understood or recognized. Character development is inverted, as there is more an more action and less and less interaction, characters are gradually reduced to mere cyphers.
When the author realizes just how differently the first and second halves of the book come across, he goes back and begins thinning the plot and characterization in the first half in order to better match the second, and in order to avoid leaving Chekhov's guns and other dangling plot opportunities, until, like in this movie, there isn't enough detail in the first half for you to understand why anyone is doing anything, and it becomes a loosely strung together collection of rule-of-cool badassery punctuated by token tragedy, onto whose tail end Hollywood tacked an incomprehensible Shawshank ending**.
In the movies it is very very common to cut the details that make sense of the story, because producers are loath to cut scenes that cost a lot of money to shoot. Even if the actors take a week to shoot five minutes of dialog, those five minutes cost less than shooting 5 seconds of car chase.
In a book, you don't have the financial issue. Indeed if your writing is good and the story is strong, the longer it is the more value for money the reader will get. In theory. I believe that length is a much less critical issue than completeness. You can write a complete, strong, story in ten, twenty, forty thousand words. But if the story demands two hundred, then that is what it should get.
It can take a lot of discipline to keep yourself from rushing the second half, but the more books you write, the more you will realize that it is worth it. That the second half should take at least twice as long to write as the first half, because it needs to be twice as good. The Marriage at Cana (John 2: 1-11) has an important message for the writer: at the feast, you must serve the best wine last, because the most articulate critics are generally the ones that drink least.
___
* oh all right: a 'brassfest' is a film where everyone is armed with fully automatic weapons and there are lengthy action sequences that involve epic quantities of rounds being fired, scattering ejected empty bullet casings (brass) in all directions. Hot Shots Part Deux (a surprisingly enjoyable and gloriously silly sequel) has a scene where Topper fires his M60E3 for so long that he is buried under a pile of 7.62 casings.
** named after what is for me the worst final scene of any film, ever, a Shawshank ending is when there is a final optimistic or feelgood scene that bears little or no relation to the themes, atmosphere or general message of the rest of the film.
I am on the side of the story.
Stories can take many forms, so knowing what a story ought to be is not a straightforward matter of applying a few patterns. My authors will know that I'm as likely to cite examples from Buffy and Xena as I am to cite Kipling or du Maurier, Homer or Chaucer, Shakespeare or Wertenbaker.
From time to time this editor comes across shining examples of what not to do when telling a story, and this post is about one of them.
Last night I stayed up a little later than I should have, watching a movie that in some ways I'm glad I watched. Which is to say that if I weren't a story editor, I probably would have said the n hours of my life I won't get back thing. (I'd never say that in a review, but informally or for comic effect I might say it.)
The movie was Babylon A.D. , a Franco-American Sci-Fi actioner from 2008. Cutting straight to the chase, the film got a metacritic score of 26% and rotten tomatoes gave it 7%. Those are not good scores. And well justified.
Some critics complained about shabby action sequences, and from the point of view of American audiences who are used to brassfests* like Heat or Total Recall, I can understand this; the two running battles are shot through crowds, scaffolding and parked cars, and choppy cutting means that the viewer sees very little detail of these scenes. This is typical of French action films, where (apart from car chases, that the French are if anything even more fetishistic about than Americans) big, complex or lengthy scenes of violence are often distanced from view by this sort of technique, in order to give more punch to key moments like the hero getting shot, which tend to be extremely graphic.
But that is cinematography, not storytelling. You could do that stuff differently and it wouldn't help or hinder the story.
The acting (as an aside) is mentionable at best. Michelle Yeoh acts her little cotton socks off, as always, and comes across as if about 80% of all her scenes ended up on the cutting room floor. Mélanie Thierry (the one whose eyes are on different continents) does a passable imitation of Elijah Wood, and Vin Diesel is indescribable. He has a quality in almost all his movies of "surely this guy is too smart to be playing that part?".
Actually what does for this movie is its treatment of its story, which suffers in equal measure from Xeno's Dichotomy Paradox and its usual corollary, back-cutting.
The dichotomy paradox maintains that before you can get somewhere, you must first get halfway there, and once halfway, you must then cover half the remaining distance before you can cover all of it, and once there (three quarters of the original journey), you must cover half the remaining distance again, and so on ad infinitum, HENCE you can't ever get there. Wikipedia probably explains it better than I do.
The manifestation of this effect in a story is (sort of) inverted. Sometimes it is caused by the writer realizing he has reached the halfway point and therefore seeing the end in sight. Sometimes it is caused by the writer realizing that the book is getting overlong. Whatever the reasons might be, in the third quarter of the book the writer takes half as long to narrate the same amount of action as in the first half, and then in the seventh eighth half as much again, and then in the fifteenth sixteenth half as much again, and so on. The pace of action accelerates exponentially as you approach the end, and as the pace of action accelerates, so the detail starts to go amiss.
There are big jumps in distance and time (which in the movies are glossed-over usually by giving the main characters a makeover and a change of costume). Plot details that would have made sense of the story are delivered with every increasing economy until they're no longer sufficiently detailed to be understood or recognized. Character development is inverted, as there is more an more action and less and less interaction, characters are gradually reduced to mere cyphers.
When the author realizes just how differently the first and second halves of the book come across, he goes back and begins thinning the plot and characterization in the first half in order to better match the second, and in order to avoid leaving Chekhov's guns and other dangling plot opportunities, until, like in this movie, there isn't enough detail in the first half for you to understand why anyone is doing anything, and it becomes a loosely strung together collection of rule-of-cool badassery punctuated by token tragedy, onto whose tail end Hollywood tacked an incomprehensible Shawshank ending**.
In the movies it is very very common to cut the details that make sense of the story, because producers are loath to cut scenes that cost a lot of money to shoot. Even if the actors take a week to shoot five minutes of dialog, those five minutes cost less than shooting 5 seconds of car chase.
In a book, you don't have the financial issue. Indeed if your writing is good and the story is strong, the longer it is the more value for money the reader will get. In theory. I believe that length is a much less critical issue than completeness. You can write a complete, strong, story in ten, twenty, forty thousand words. But if the story demands two hundred, then that is what it should get.
It can take a lot of discipline to keep yourself from rushing the second half, but the more books you write, the more you will realize that it is worth it. That the second half should take at least twice as long to write as the first half, because it needs to be twice as good. The Marriage at Cana (John 2: 1-11) has an important message for the writer: at the feast, you must serve the best wine last, because the most articulate critics are generally the ones that drink least.
___
* oh all right: a 'brassfest' is a film where everyone is armed with fully automatic weapons and there are lengthy action sequences that involve epic quantities of rounds being fired, scattering ejected empty bullet casings (brass) in all directions. Hot Shots Part Deux (a surprisingly enjoyable and gloriously silly sequel) has a scene where Topper fires his M60E3 for so long that he is buried under a pile of 7.62 casings.
** named after what is for me the worst final scene of any film, ever, a Shawshank ending is when there is a final optimistic or feelgood scene that bears little or no relation to the themes, atmosphere or general message of the rest of the film.
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