Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

Written in September 2013

Minor Spoilers Near the End

Somehow I am nine reviews behind, and although I wanted a day or two more to think about what to write about Snow Crash, if I don't force myself to do it, it won't get done! And then I'll be even more behind! (I started the summer twelve books behind on my progress towards my reading goal this year. Now I'm twelve books ahead. How did that happen?)

Thankfully, I can report that I quite enjoyed this one, and had none of the bumpy ride that Cryptonomicon gave me. The casual misogyny was nowhere in sight, thank goodness. Also, at only 400 pages, this was a much tighter story, and better because of that. Stephenson's still packing in a million ideas a minute, but that's okay, I can deal with that. In fact, I quite enjoy that.

Snow Crash sits happily within the cyberpunk tradition, on both the "cyber" and the "punk" sides. Sometimes I hear cyberpunk splashed around as a term too liberally, applied to anything with human alteration, transhumanism, or just a lot of technology. Let's not forget the punk side of the equation - not the music, of course, but the general feel that that term implies, the ways the world is and has and continues to go to shit. And here, complete with corporate takeovers of just about everything. You can be a citizen of a corporation, but that only applies on the small patchwork of turf they own.

Hiro Protagonist (guess what he is!) is a hacker, pizza delivery guy, and swordmaster, all in one. Both in the real world, and in the Metaverse, of which he was one of the first to stake his turf, and remains the best man with a sword (and can back it up with statistics.) But all is not well in the Metaverse. A digital drug is frying the brains of hackers, and in the real world, more and more people are falling prey to an outbreak of glossolalia. Are these two things connected?

(Pedantic historian of religion sidenote: Stephenson gets the terms right when he refers to both glossolalia and xenoglossy, but then attributes both to Pentecostalism. In fact, while early Pentecostals thought that the gift of tongues was actual other languages, like Chinese, and that that would help them greatly in their mission work, as they could go out as missionaries without ever bothering to learn the language, confident that God would provide the words, they were mightily disappointed when they tried it.)

Stephenson does an interesting job of weaving myth into his world here, with both overt discussion of Sumerian mythology, an open reference to one character's actions as Ishtar descending into the underworld, and more subtle aspects, such as Hiro's last name (okay, not that subtle), or Raven and his entire persona.

While I enjoyed the neurolinguistic digressions, I have to note that I know nothing of neurolinguistics, so they might send people who actually know into fits. The ideas were provocative, even if extrapolations Hiro made on them seemed, well, farfetched, to say the least. Wait, how would he know that the metavirus controlled the rest of the galaxy? Based on what?

At any rate, this was a lot of fun, even if I'm skeptical of some of it. I don't need to believe it, though. I just need to enjoy it. And I am very, very thankful that my second encounter with Stephenson was better than the first.

Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan

Major Spoilers at the End!

Sitting down to write this review makes me feel distinctly curmudgeonly. I didn't love this one, despite its eagerness to be patted, its copious pop culture references, the deep love of books. Given who I am, why didn't that last one, at least, get to me? Maybe because that part felt superficial. Books are like oxygen to me, sometimes, and despite the setting, this book mentioned books a lot, but not with the crazy enthusiasm that gets me about my favourite fellow reviewers. They were mostly set dressing for a more literate Da Vinci Code.

On the other hand, Mr. Penumbra's etc. was a fun read. The characters were lightly drawn, but entertaining. The solving of puzzles was mostly interesting, even though I still shake my head at the last one in the book, and the drawing-room solution.

There's just something missing. The book treads too lightly, I didn't get deeply attached to any of the characters, the action never felt truly perilous, and while that can make for an okay read, I wanted to like this one so much more.

I would say it was telling that I can't even remember the main character's name, but then, names are not always what I remember best. But I can remember Kat and Neel and Mat and Ashley and Corvina and Deckle and.... So maybe the problem isn't that, it's that the main character a) wasn't mentioned by name very often, and b) he wasn't very well developed. He's a struggling young graphic designer who works at a bookstore and loves a certain series of books and used to play D&D. Those are things he does, not things he is. As for his personality? He apparently gets along well enough with a bunch of people not to piss them off, he thinks geek girls are cute (we're getting into things he does again) and he's very loyal to Mr. Penumbra.

I was going to say curious, but he's not really the curious one. It's another friend who goads him into exploring the mysteries of the 24-hour bookstore at which he works. After he gets started, then he's curious.

But I'm being harsh again, which mostly comes from my disappointment that this wasn't better! He's a perfectly fine coatrack on which to hang a plot. And for the plot was fairly entertaining, if slight.

One more digression on characters? The most interesting thing about any of the characters was how personally offended Kat was by the very idea of death. We know this, because she says it constantly, and it's interesting, and I'm not looking for a deep psychoanalytical look at this, but some exploration would be nice. Death is frustrating, sure, but what drives it to be a constant burr under her saddle?

As for the plot? When the main character starts work at the 24-hour bookstore, he quickly notices that there are two sets of books. A small set for browsers, and a huge set of ones filled with what looks like nonsense. They're a test, you see. Once you decode one, it leads to another, and another, until you've solved the first puzzle in a mysterious brotherhood that believes that in the puzzle of the book written by the founder of the order centuries ago is the secret of eternal life.

But nobody can crack the damn thing. Well, what about Google? Enlisting the help of the woman he dates sometimes, his former dungeonmaster turned millionaire boob-renderer, and Mr. Penumbra himself, he breaks into the secret lair to get a copy of the book, and then turn it over to the codebreakers of the world.

This is all fun. As I said, a more literate and pop culture Da Vinci Code.

Spoiler! Spoiler! Spoiler!

But the ending, when it came, dissatisfied me, and this cast a pall over the rest of the book. There were two problems with it. Interestingly, one of them came from the fact that I was reading this on a Kindle, and it's hard to flip back to double-check something you might or might not have missed on a Kindle. So when it came out that the solution, which Google couldn't solve, was a simple substitution cipher, just on the sides of the letters instead of the letters themselves, that bothered me. Because even if that were the case, there would still be regularities in which letters were used after which letters, since the letters were cast in typeset, so would have to be used in certain patterns to get the code across.

Am I missing something? I may be, but I've worked on an augmented reality game and let me tell you, there is no substitution code the internet cannot break in seconds, given enough people. You've got to go harder. Why not use a Vignere cipher, at very least? That can be broken too, given enough time, but it's really hard without knowing the encoding phrase.

So maybe there's another layer here I missed as I was reading that explains why this substitution cipher couldn't be broken like any other substitution cipher, but again, hard to flip back and find it. So I remain a little dissatisfied with that solution. At very least, the book would not have come across as noise. Even if you couldn't figure out the actual message it would be very apparent that there were some regularities in how letters were being used.

And then the message underneath it all, in addition to the decoded book? It was nice that it wasn't the secret of life, but did the final message really have to be a wordier version of "friendship is great"? That seems a little saccharine a reward for all that journey.

That is my problem with the book. For most of it, it was slight but enjoyable. But the ending did not live up to the great message they were seeking. It doesn't have to be immortality, but it needs to be a more genuine insight.

So, do I recommend this? I don't know. As I said at the beginning, not being thrilled with this book makes me feel like the curmudgeon. I don't mind heartwarming, I just want books to have earned it. But it's light, and fun, for the most part. The pop culture references veer between fun and trying too hard to be hip.

Also, why isn't this book about Kat? She's far more interesting a character than old What's-His-Name.

A Palm for Mrs. Pollifax by Dorothy Gilman

I returned to this book this past week, as one of the best comfort reads I know. When the world is overwhelming, this series has been one of my best refuges, one of my favourite fictional universes to escape into when I have no energy to go anywhere new. (Other comfort reads include L.M. Montgomery, Robertson Davies and Spider Robinson books.)

Whether it was a few years ago when I was struggling with insomnia and anxiety before my comps, or this past week, when I was all knotted up after one of our cats had two successive seizures, the Mrs. Pollifax books comfort me.

And they're just so much darn fun. Rereading this for the umpteenth time, I enjoyed it as thoroughly as if it had been the first time. She's an elderly spy for the CIA, you see, and these books are wonderful tales of her adventures. They always send her on missions that should be simple and safe, yet never are. And she is always wholly herself as she has to deal with what goes wrong.

In this one, Mrs. Pollifax is sent to a rest spa in France, where alarming chatter gives this charming locale as a potential receiving spot for two recent thefts of plutonium. Once there, she annoys Interpol by seeming more interested in the wellbeing of a young boy than the mysterious Robin Burke-Jones, whose background checks out not a whit. Of course, her instincts are perfectly sound, and she suddenly finds herself in the middle of a cat and mouse game with the fate of nuclear materials at stake.

While I never like the circumstances that often drive me back to these books, I love that I know I can pick them up any time and spend some time with an old friend, just when I need the most soothing.

The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge

Oliver Sacks, he ain't. Despite the back cover blurb from Oliver Sacks, this is definitely a lesser book. There are some interesting things in here, and may be worth a read, even though there was one chapter that I thought was just terrible. But don't go looking here for Sacks' deep humanism and warmth. This is much more the distant case history, although the science he's talking about is fascinating.

(I also have a huge soft spot for Oliver Sacks, as he gave the commencement address at my undergrad graduation, and it was a wonderful speech about not being too attached to your plans, about making room for synchronicity and the unexpected.)

The Brain That Changes Itself is an examination of neuroplasticity, the ability of the brain to change, and I found a lot of the ideas well worth engaging with. The scientists he profiled, and the work they were doing, were all very interesting.

The chapter on sexuality, though, is atrocious. Here, Doidge displays his hardcore Freudianism (this comes out in another chapter as well), and changes from reporting on actual studies to heavily anecdotal evidence, including the characterization of all kinds of sex except the most vanilla as "perversions." He makes strange claims about people who engage in s/m play with very little to back it up, and generalizes far too much. He tries to psychoanalyze a masochist about whom a documentary was made, based solely on the footage that made it into the final cut of the movie.

Doidge's attitude towards porn bears striking similarities to the temperance advocates I study, with the fatal first peek replacing the fatal first drop. He goes to great length to show that porn addiction is a real addiction, a compulsion, out of the control of the sufferers, but ends off the section by saying that once the sufferers in his practice were made aware of their addiction, they were all able to just stop watching porn.

And most problematic at all, in the entire chapter on sex, he treats sexuality as a male attribute. The people he relates anecdotes about are all male, although some of those people refer to women in their lives. If you just read this section at face value, it would seem like women don't have sexual desire, or sexual issues.

It really felt like a publisher said "you know what we need? A chapter on sex!" and made him whip one off. If it isn't that, it's simply sloppy writing that has far too little evidence for its actual claims (the citations for this chapter are mostly on incidental things.)

The book also ends abruptly, without a conclusion. I finished the last chapter and went looking for the conclusion, and nope, that was it. There's some good stuff in here, but avoid that chapter on sex like the plague.

The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje

Even though it was years and years ago that I saw it, I wish I'd read the book before seeing the movie made of The English Patient. It would likely have meant that I'd have despised the movie, but having seen it kept me putting my attention in certain places, and never seeing other aspects creeping up until it was too late.

The movie, of course, is a romance. The book, although it has romances in it, is not. It is about war, and its effects on people. How some are destroyed, and some think they have found themselves.

The irony of the title is not just that eponymous character may not be English, but that no one in the book is. Hana and Caravaggio come from Canada, (Caravaggio probably from somewhere else before that), Kip from India. Yet they are all in France at that certain time, having participated in the war effort for the English, as a nurse, a thief, a mine clearer. Englishness itself lingers over the scene of the book, but no one hails from the country for which they are in the war - they are all from the colonies.

Englishness is not well-defined - the sections on Kip are the most direct, but even in that case, it is a particular Englishman and his entourage, rather than Englishness as a whole. Still, Kip's mentor in disarming bombs comes to stand for what Englishness can be, to him. Kip sets himself up as a living reproach to a still-much-loved older brother, who went to jail rather than fight one day for the English.

Caravaggio has been destroyed in the service of the Empire, stealing secrets (quite literally), suffering horrible consequences, with no apparent concern from the people he was stealing them for. Hana loses her father and almost herself in the war, and has very specific reasons why she will not leave her badly burned patient to die alone.

The English Patient is the story of these four, and how they knit a small community out of the ashes of the destruction. Not in grand ways, in small ones, working through suspicion, formality, and pain. They create a world which no one who had not been through the conflagration would understand, and come to some sort of equilibrium, having seen the worst that they could see. Where simple patriotism has given way to weary resignation.

And then even that is shattered. The worst was yet to come. And I never saw it coming, most of the political aspects being excised when they made the movie. But once it had happened, nothing could ever be the same. I had never even seen Ondaatje laying the groundwork for that moment, but once it came, everything came together at once.

Does that make the book a metaphor for the double fuze [sic] bomb Kip has to figure out how to disarm? While I was paying attention to one fuze, everything else was surreptitiously burning towards this other source of an explosion.

The English Patient is well worth reading. But the part that is the lion's share of the movie is perhaps the smallest part of the book. I enjoyed the patient's stories, but was far more engrossed in what was going on in their little corner of France.

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter by Seth Grahame-Smith

Alt-history by the creator of that trend of adding monsters to fiction, starting with Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which quite frankly, I rifled through once, saw the bits that had been added, winced at how they'd been added, and put it gently back down and backed away.

See, that sounds like a great idea for a late night discussion at a pub when you're all tipsy and want to argue about what would happen if zombies invaded Jane Austen. To me, that remains the proper locale. Such discussions do not generally need to be published. I couldn't see anything they were adding to the story, and for the most part, the author was using a book that's now in the public domain and changing small bits of it, then making money.

For years, one of my friends has collected Family Circus books, and circulated them at parties, inviting people to write their own (frequently outrageous and jawdropping) punchlines underneath the saccharine ones. I love these books. They make me laugh, they make me outraged, they make me doubt the sanity of my friends. I do not think they need to be published, even if Family Circus were in the public domain.

So how do I feel about this one, which appears to be more of the author actually writing, rather than tweaking existing material, doing an alt-history? It's certainly more up my alley - my husband and I bat around ideas for an alt-Canadian history book we could write, with Sir John A. using a wooden mecha to fight Bigfoot, or with Laura Secord as a superspy. Or how ninjas helped win the Quiet Revolution. None of these ideas have ever made it to paper, but we have fun talking about it.

Seth Grahame-Smith actually wrote it. Well, a book-length version of one story, and I'm not entirely sure there's enough here. Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter kept my attention (unsurprising - I needed some fluff after a book about the Sudan and another about the plight of the working-class in Victorian England). But I didn't laugh, I didn't even crack a wry smile. The book is already disappearing from my memory and I finished it yesterday.

My American political history is spotty, so I can't speak how in-depth his research was. So for pure entertainment value, it's okay. It didn't bore me, it didn't enrage me, it didn't capture or enrapture me.

I had expected it to be funnier, and I'm not sure the seriousness served this work well, although I do admit that I can imagine plenty of versions where humour grated.

It's just fluff. And sometimes, that's okay. But on the other hand, I can't think of any particular reason to recommend it, either.

The Ghost Road by Pat Barker

What becomes of us when all we know is death and killing, and that is taken away?

If that is the question being asked, the answer is not forthcoming. The book ends just before the war does, so we never get to see how any surviving characters would reintegrate into civilian life. From their worries, their neuroses, and what the experiences of warfare have done to them, the answer appears to be "not well." If the experiences of Rivers among the headhunters are instructive, particularly not well.

In the midst of the First World War, Billy Prior desperately wants to go back to the front. A victim of what is then termed shell shock, he has been hospitalized in England. Rivers, the psychiatrist that has taken care of him and many other men, sees the effects of war every day, but does not understand why anyone would want to return to the front. Billy does make it back, along with the poet Wilfred Owen.

From afar, Rivers tries to heal the men in his care, knowing they'll be sent back to be killed. While suffering from a battle with Spanish influenza, he gets stuck in his memories of doing anthropological research with a headhunting tribe, and his witness of their disintegration when headhunting is forbidden.

The Ghost Road feels distant from its characters sometimes, but from that remove weaves beautifully the attractions and horrors of war, the material world surrounding these soldiers, the hospitals that take care of the dead and dying, and who know their success stories will be sacrificed anew. We see men who are irrevocably changed by war. Their culture is now death, and death is about to be taken away.

Sex is another battlefield in this book - getting it, having it, exerting power through sexuality. Billy has to plan out an extensive campaign in order to be able to be alone with his fiancee, and, as in most combat, the plan doesn't survive first contact with the enemy. Billy also attracts and is attracted to men and women he encounters, and maneuvers sexual interactions skillfully, and mostly from a position of power, power that he has not always held.

This book deals with what parts of their lives the soldiers can control, which are controlled for them, and how they deal with it. And the looming threat of peace, which the soldiers both desire and fear.

The writing in The Ghost Road is evocative, and the details of the seamier sides of a soldiers life mesmerizing. The focus is squarely on the human elements of war, and Barker does a striking job of examining the moment before the end.