Dispatches from the Eccentric Frontier - Books that will make good hypertext

Recent Entries • Archive • Friends • User Info • Tags • LJ Messages • LJ Status • Home Page

April 24th, 2006

22:52 ※ Books that will make good hypertext

Then I picked up Ian McDonald’s River of Gods, and I found out. The book is set in India in 2047, following ten characters through a set of interlinked storylines that lead up to Big Things Happening, and any time that McDonald has to choose between an Indian word for something and an English translation that would lose the nuance of India, he picks the Indian word— he won’t use “captain” when he means “subadar”. Like Stross, McDonald is careful to explain anything that you need to understand to enjoy the story, but puts in plenty of things that you can infer from context (and there’s a helpful glossary in the back of the book, too); again, this gives depth to the book’s world. I consider myself fairly cosmopolitan, but my reaction to River of Gods was: “This is good stuff! And wow am I ignorant about India!”

Now, I’ve got a very strong curiosity streak. I am no more capable of going through a book like River of Gods without looking up the places and ideas on the Web than I can go through Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun without hitting a dictionary. These are all good writers— they know how to make things obvious from context— but I can’t resist looking things up when I discover something I don’t know. The ultimate version of these books that I want to own (and I hope the publishers will be willing to create them before the copyrights run out) is the hypertext where I can trivially look up the Kardashev scale or illustrated descriptions of ghats any time I want to know more.

Current Location: 37.38211, -122.02781	Current Mood: satisfied	Current Music: Mystery of the Yeti	(4 rants | My 2¢)
Tags: books ⁎

Comments

From: calimac Date: April 25th, 2006 13:31 (UTC) (Link) I like books that make you want to look things up without making you have to look things up. These sound like those kinds of books. (Reply) (Thread) From: rhylar Date: April 25th, 2006 17:17 (UTC) (Link) Personally, I found Accelerando to be good gizmo-geeking, but lousy story. The cat was the most human, and he was very much a cat. The rest? self-indulgent brats with zero thought for anyone else. I've relayed Mims' theory about what happened to all the people with any empathy? It explains why they dont seem to exist in the story at all after the earliest time period portrayed. (Reply) (Thread) From: slothman Date: April 25th, 2006 17:31 (UTC) (Link) No, I don’t think I’d heard that one. The main characters in the book are a rather dysfunctional family— partly due to the amount of meddling in their lives from the entity revealed to be the meddler at the end of the book— and usually depicted at crisis points in their lives, but I wouldn’t describe them as devoid of empathy. (Reply) (Parent) (Thread) From: rhylar Date: April 25th, 2006 19:38 (UTC) (Link) ok, the theory runs along these lines: Take the archetype of programmer whose tag-line would be "Isnt this cool? let me share this really cool thing I've made with you, because I think you'd appreciate it." Imagine they build an upload-verse, and seed it with intelligent, creative, altruistic people. Include a mechanism to vote people who dont get along off the island as it were. So, minds who fit those qualities are welcomed into the upload-verse, and minds that dont are kept out. From the outside, you get a world much like accelerando. The characters are messed up. They are not going to be invited into the upload-verse, and the more normal & empathic members of society are constantly being removed into the upload verse. So, more & more, they are going to be surrounded by people like themselves. Look at the side characters towards the end of the book. Are any of them the sorts of people you'd want to invite into your upload-verse? They are as dysfunctional as the family members. Meanwhile, can you imagine a better way to convince people that they dont want to be part of your upload-verse than they way that the 2 upload-verses are protrayed from the outside? Finally, consider the actions of the self-proclaimed meddler. To me, it seemed just as plausible that the "meddler" in fact was nothing more than he appeared to be, and did nothing not obvious, but declared that the misfortunes of the family were due to his (nonexistant) meddling in order to give them a face-saving way of reforming themselves in order to get into the upload-verse. (Reply) (Parent) (Thread)