Have you heard of it?

Sunday, December 09, 2007

Time for a secret. Oh, not much of one. I don't intend to give out all my best stuff on the public Internet. But here it is: I was always really good at standardized testing. Loved it. It helped that I was pretty good at essays too, but I adored those scantron sheets.

Multiple choice and true/false tests are a sort of game for which Nintendo trains you remarkably well. "Guess What the Developer is Thinking" is what I call it. On the NES there were no tutorials, no help pop-ups, no X/Y camera inversion. No adjustable camera of any kind, in most cases. Compared to the assistance that games provide today - which, to be clear, I totally approve of - we were gaming blindfolded. This makes perfect training for multiple choice exams. You fill in the answers you know, then go back to the mysteries and try and guess what the developer of this exam was thinking. Three Bs in a row? There won't be another streak like that for a while. The last answer was a D? If you're deciding between C and A, go with A. Imagine making a test to defy Christmas-treers and use that template to fill in the gaps. This strategy served me very well.

What I hated were compare/contrast exercises. Not because of the intent, but that what I ended up writing never felt like it answered the question even when it was marked correct. For example: compare the treatment of women in these two novels. So you find duplicated elements and list them next to each other like a product comparison chart. This one has a good job, this one a bad job. Husband loves her, husband doesn't. It doesn't feel like literary analysis so much as sorting similar Legos on a table and remarking on their colors. I want to build something. I want to analyze odd sentences and see if there's some deeper meaning based on variable word definitions. Of course that's tough to do anyway and downright impossible in a controlled testing environment, so here we are with our Legos.

All this is just prep to say that I read two books recently that left extremely contradictory impressions. One is arguably a sci-fi novel: "Light" by M. John Harrison. The other is "oPtion$: the secret life of steve jobs" by no less than Fake Steve Jobs. Comparing and contrasting these two literary works is impossible unless you want to know about page count or font size or kerning or something. So instead I get to embark on another free-form discussion about art that hopefully my mother will not zone out through. Let's talk about "Light" first so I can end on a high note.

Light makes a good first impression. It's a respectable length, has a mostly white cover adorned with two cryptic dice, a white cat and a testimonial from a bestselling author. The first four physical pages of the book are covered with more testimonials, and the book even won something called the James Tiptree Jr. award. If I was paid by the word I would give you the names of everyone who lent their praise to this book just so you could swear off their recommendations forever. Light is a terrible, confusing, frustrating and literally depressing book, made worse by the fact that it seems to think it's part of this "modern literature" thing.

Here's another secret: I read Neuromancer, supposedly the source material for The Matrix movies, and I hated it. Hated the bizarre new terminology, the loser protagonist and the crappy world everyone lived in. But most of all I hated the language of the damn thing. Every sentence felt like it was written by Yoda thumbing through the Oxford English Dictionary while smoking pot. I had to struggle through pages of musings about unintelligible futuristic drug deals to learn something simple like "Henry Case ran down the street." This was my starting point for the monster that calls itself modern sci-fi literature, and now that I have a second point I can draw a line.

For those unabused by these sorts of stories, I'll tell you how to write your own piece of award-winning modern literature. First, write down a sentence like you were making a normal book. Then get a bunch of blank six-sided dice and write each word on the top of an individual die. Crack open a thesaurus and write synonyms on the other five sides of the dice. Next, go to dictionary.com and look up three random words of the day. Got all that? Line up the dice in your hands in the proper order and throw them on the table. Then take your newly shuffled dice and try and make a straight line with them as they landed. If you need words to fill in an awkward sentence just drop the words of the day in there whether they are appropriate or not. Add punctuation to flavor, and violá, your own modern lit novel. Sure you have to repeat this about a thousand times to fill a paperback, but you'll get lots of rubes to say your writing is "top notch and involving."

In the sixteen years between Neuromancer and Light, all we have to show for it is sillier words than "cyberspace," namely "Kefahuchi." Wow my spell-checker loves that word. Anyway, Light is about three people: a serial murderer in 1999 London who seems to be a physicist in his spare time, a woman called Seria Mau in 2400 who is mentally fused with her exotic spaceship, and a loser called Ed Chianese also in the year 2400 who is an ex-pilot and current VR junkie. Connecting their stories is, I want to be clear about this, nothing. Not the "shadowy presence of the Shrander," not the physics-bending Kefahuchi Tract, nadda. Two unlikable characters and one barely tolerable loser do not a compelling tale make. Technically everyone runs into the Shrander in the end, but he (it?) only serves as a deus ex machina slash end-of-Harry-Potter-book speech by Dumbledore.

First up is Michael Kearney in 1999, although the book interweaves all three stories as it goes along. Kearney is a serial murderer by night and appears to be working on a quantum computer by day. To be honest I never saw him put in a full eight hours. He shows up like once every two weeks, gets the understandable third degree from his partner Brian Tate, then makes something approaching an excuse and runs off. He only kills one woman in the book; most of his time is spent with Anna, a girlfriend/ex-wife/wannabe psychopath who is anorexic and has some strange co-dependency with Kearney, or maybe Kearney has with her. Michael spends a lot of time on the run from this thing called the Shrander, which sounds scary but honestly all we have to go on is Kearney's paranoia. It's a man-shaped creature, obviously supernatural, with the head of a horse's skull resting on top of what otherwise is a normal human body in a long coat. It doesn't say much or chase Kearney in the traditional sense. He just runs, runs everywhere because he stole a pair of dice from it twenty years ago. Don't ask how. I can't even remember.

That is the entirety of the Michael Kearney story. What's missing from the above paragraph is the sick relationship he has with Anna, and I don't just mean the sex. Anna knows he kills women and asks him when he's gonna kill her in the same bored way you might ask "when is dinner?" They were once married for ten years, now divorced but still living together. At several points he leaves her, but she always finds him and he relents to her companionship for a while. I would love to know what his salary is. They fly back and forth between London and New York, drive up the coast of New England, buy a house near the ocean and rent cars everywhere they go. In the end he has a normal conversation with the Shrander like they were bar buddies and returns the dice. And then dies on an asteroid in space under the madness that is the Kefahuchi Tract.

The Tract is what brings us to Seria Mau, easily the most unlikable spaceship captain ever. I say "captain" when there's no crew; really it's just her in a vat of fluid mentally controlling the ship. She joined some government program and got radical surgery to fly this super advanced ship, but she's only fifteen or so and is crazier than Michael and Anna Kearney put together. Short-tempered? Check. Jealous? Check. Hysterical in the not-funny way? Oh that's a big check. She somehow stole this ship, the White Cat, from the government and is cruising around the galaxy for no particular reason. I should mention that this is a K-ship, which is some kind of cross between the Heart of Gold and the Millennium Falcon. It can move in ten physical dimensions and four temporal ones, and is actually piloted by something called "the mathematics" which can put Seria Mau to sleep if she's being cranky (which happens a lot). Sounds like a wild ride, right?

Bzzt, wrong. None of the physics, mechanics, politics or xenobiology of this universe is explored in the slightest. I had more realistic space adventures playing with plastic Hong Kong toys when I was six. About the only thing I can reasonably describe is the Kefahuchi Tract, and only that because they mention it so damned often. The tract is a huge rip in space and time that glows like the energy ribbon from Star Trek Generations. Exotic alien technology can be found all along the tract, and the weird part is that all of it works. All theories of physics, even the ones that contradict each other, are valid in the vicinity of the tract. The author blathers on about how cool this is and how it's beyond our wildest imagination, but since nothing is explained it may as well be Narnia. Seria Mau has a box from the tract that she tries to get analyzed, but mostly she just wanders around picking up passengers, tossing them out the airlock and screaming like a total bitch. In the end she meets the Shrander and is turned into some kind of bird thing and flies away happy. I would have preferred her dead, but no such luck.

Our last poor soul is the pseudo-normal guy Ed Chianese. He's addicted to VR simulations like in The Matrix, owes money to the mob, used to fly spaceships and now tries to make good choices in between having sex with his roommate's wife. Ed's story is the most compelling, probably because it generates pity instead of nausea or irritation. He runs from hellhole to hellhole, dodging people who genuinely want to kill him for reasons I can comprehend (money). He winds up at a circus as a fortune teller, predicts war every time and sleeps with this Amazon of a rickshaw girl. The story ends as the Shrander tells Ed he is their final project to understand the Kefahuchi Tract and sends Ed in there in Seria Mau's ship. The last words of this novel are "The Beginning." It makes exactly as much sense as I have described above, and probably even less should you be foolhardy enough to read it yourself. As for me, I'll be boycotting the James Tiptree Jr. awards until my dying breath.

If you want a fun, subversive and simply riotous book, you have to get "the secret life of steve jobs." Many, many times during this book I threw my head back, barked a huge laugh and let the book slightly flop away from me. The good kind of hysterical. But who is Fake Steve Jobs and why should you care?

Well, you know who Steve Jobs is. Head of Apple, does the MacWorld and WWDC keynotes, wears jeans and a black turtleneck sweater and can hypnotize an entire crowd of people. That is all you and I know about the man as he exists today. Fake Steve Jobs, on the other hand, is the rest of his personality as extrapolated from Apple's insistence on perfection, their "holier than Windows" attitude, and the kind of sociopath you'd expect to lead the Cult of Mac. He's egotistical and selfish, but occasionally kind-hearted, a vegetarian, smokes pot, meditates frequently and drives everyone around him bonkers. His longest assistant tenured for four months. He sees himself as a holy man who only wants to create beautiful products for the world to enjoy and projects a Colbert-esque aura of madness.

The story in the book is probably its weakest link: it's an inside take on the options backdating scandal in 2006. Since this book was actually written by someone at Forbes I'm sure he finds it compelling, but I don't even know what short selling is so the narrative was a strange river to me. It's told in first person as though you're shadowing Steve through Apple's corridors. What really matters - and what you'll really enjoy - is the wisdom and sharp commentary from Fake Steve. His advice? Create a culture of fear.

"Set impossibly high standards for your employees, but don't tell them what they are. Then fire them if they come up short. Drives people crazy. As a manager you should be inconsistent and unpredictable. One day say something is great and the guy who made it is a genius. The next day say it's crap, and he's a moron. Watch how hard that guy will work now, trying to impress you."

The whole book is full of these barbs, and some are inadvertently thrown at the real Steve himself. I don't know how much you have to follow the Mac community to enjoy this book, but it's a fantastic read.

So as I hinted at earlier I finally scored a copy of Rock Band. This is truly the next-gen Guitar Hero, and I'm awed at the emotional power it delivers. Last Saturday Sunshine, Blair and I restarted our band and kicked some ass in the world tour mode. We went to a few cities, got some money and new threads, and had a great time. By the end we realized that the one thing Rock Band is missing is a music video mode so you can watch your character's performance after the show is over. I still haven't seen Timmy and the Lords of the Underworld yet... something to look forward to.

Our name? We are "Fairyworld Domination."

Goodnight Tallahassee!