Killed in a Smiling Accident.

Found via Charlie Stross’ blog, Tor have launched a shiny new website, and to celebrate are giving away stuff! Books, pictures and… well, just books and pictures. But that’s enough, surely, especially when it’s a whole pile o’ books in a variety of handy formats (mostly HTML, PDF and Mobipocket). I haven’t tried any of those authors yet, so what better opportunity? The N810 is now loaded up with some extra holiday reading, which is always handy for keeping the weight of a suitcase down. The freebie bonanza is only on until July 27th, so make haste! Even if you miss that free loot it’s looking like a fine site with new stories and all sorts of other interesting posts.

The general shorthand for Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell seems to be “Harry Potter for adults”, but as the only common element is magic you might as well call it “the Paul Daniels Show in book format”. The immediate comparison that springs to mind for me is Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle (Quicksilver, The Confusion, The System of the World), though that still doesn’t stretch much past that they’re both dense, weighty historically-set tomes. The Baroque Cycle is set in the 17th and early 18th century, has strong picaresque elements, and focuses on science and technology, whereas Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell is a Regency novel from a 19th century where magic exists.

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell is extensively footnoted with references to magical texts and happenings, which was initially slightly irritating and disruptive, but it builds such a cohesive, believable world that the magical becomes matter-of-fact, a natural part of things. Though the pace is measured, and at times there isn’t an awful lot happening, it doesn’t happen with such style that it carried me through. Not quite “I couldn’t put it down” (apart from anything else your arms need a rest now and again), but most enjoyable. Recommended, especially if you like Regency novels featuring magic.

Let’s see, other than spending copious amounts of time covered in poop and vomit (have I mentioned the baby at all?), what have I been up to that might be marginally more interesting to those of you who come to read this blog on occasion.

Well time really has been at a premium so MMOs were the first to suffer the +1 Pendulous Axe of Time Management. It’s hard to find an MMO that one can dip into and play with very little commitment; it’s not just the relatively small slices of time that I am afforded to play at the moment, where travelling time in some MMOs would consume ninety percent of my play experience, but also the fact that it’s very hard to just abandon an MMO at the drop of a demanding baby’s +2 Hat of Vocalised Attention Seeking. In a single player game it’s very easy to hit a pause button, press escape to pull-up the options menu (which I suppose is the modern game equivalent of the pause key), or to just abandon the game very quickly wherever your character currently stands, knowing that when you return they will be standing where you left them, perhaps picking their nose or tapping their foot impatiently, but otherwise unscathed. Not so in an MMO: if you leave your character for even a fraction of a second, turn your head to look at something on the television, say, or look briefly out of the window at all the young healthy people soaking up their daily dose of vitamin D, perhaps bend down to rub some life into the numb slabs of jelly that pass for one’s legs, or so much as blink for longer than the requisite human system requirement of four hundred milliseconds, and a thousand angry mobs will have rained down upon your character and have reduced them to zero health points before you can say “By Chronos’ hairy arse! I glanced away for no more than the duration of the blanking period of my monitor! It’s not even visible to the human eye for crying out loud!”.

Having said all that, I have been dipping into City of Villains on occasion, for a quick half hour blast here and there, generally teaming-up with Zoso and or Elf; I’ve created a new character on which I can experiment with the power-set proliferation that occurred in the I12 ‘Midnight Hour’ update, and being that my love for the Earth Control power-set is unhealthy, and in fact illegal in twelve American states, I decided to create an Earth/Thorns dominator, and thus the Iron Cactus was born. Part man. Part machine. Part succulent spiny plant.

I may have also rolled an Electric/Willpower Brute, a Dual Blade/Regen Scrapper and a Willpower/Super Strength tank, although I haven’t played any of those characters at all yet.

But I’m not an altoholic!^[1]

I’ve also dipped into Guild Wars on occasion, essentially because, like a saucepan of dark chocolate and cream melted over a stove, it’s very, uh, dip-inable. I have a dervish, Wur Lin (WUR LIN! Whirling! As in whirling derv… ok, I was slightly inebriated and it sounded clever at the time) a monk, Mun Ki, (MUN KI. Monkey! As in monk eee… er, eh?) and an assassin, Tri Badism (TRI BADISM. Tribadism! As in… Ah. Well. Look it up some time, ey? Possibly not from work. And not if you’re under 18). Anyhoo, I think that’s plenty enough evidence of my, to be expected, curious naming conventions for my many characters.

But I’m not an altoholic!^[2]

Guild Wars is terribly easy to just hop into and play a mission or two, with the option of being able to drop it in an instant should a delightful ickle pink bundle of rabid screaming poo projection require one’s immediate attention. Admittedly most of my characters are in the early teens of the level progression cap of twenty, and this essentially means that they’re hardly anywhere at all in terms of game progress, but as with my never having reached the level cap in City of Heroes/Villains, for me it’s a game about the play, rather than the progress.

What makes City of Villains and Guild Wars so readily accessible to what I dub the Radical Casual player, the “It takes fanatical dedication to be this non-committal to a game” gamer? I think it’s a combination of things:

• The short time it takes to travel anywhere. Both games have travel systems that mean you can get where you need to go, and be slaughtering your way through bags of XP in no time at all.
• The short time it takes to make some progress. In both games, quests are readily available, relatively quick to complete, and generally not terribly complex. Yes, both games have deeper, longer, more complex missions at the higher levels, but they maintain this quick-access, easy goal, mission structure throughout a large portion of the levelling curve.
• The time-minimal death penalty. Both games make it very quick and very easy to get yourself back into the fight, especially when you don’t have a rezzing character in the party. Both have penalties that could perhaps be considered more harsh than that in, say, WoW, because in WoW if you make the run to your corpse you suffer nothing but a little damage to your equipment which is easily repaired, but it is the length of that corpse run that hurts the Radical Casual player because it’s time wasted, and time is the defining limiting factor in their enjoyment of a game.

So that’s it for MMO, or MMO-like, games at the moment. As Zoso mentioned, many bloggers, of which we are no exception, seem to be experiencing the Anticipatocene era of the MMO timeline, sub-heading: “What We Do Whilst Waiting For WAR”.

My other gaming action in recent times has been Penny Arcade’s On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness, a Final Fantasy-alike, with the various elements of a JPRG but with the rude, crude and not-for-the-prude humour that any fan of the online web comic would come to expect. With the speed of encounters, and the fact that they are not sprung on the player, but initiated by them at their choosing by walking into an area containing enemies, it’s again an ideal play style for those of us who have to regularly acknowledge a priority interrupt, we who experience random encounters of the tot kind. The game was entertaining enough to keep me playing until the end – the humour quite successfully treads that fine line of juvenile puerility without being obnoxious – but I found the combat mechanics a little frustrating, perhaps dull is the better description. I seemed to spend most combat encounters waiting for the most powerful combos to charge, and just blocking or healing damage the rest of the time, which essentially consists of pressing the spacebar a lot, or clicking a few menu options. I’m not sure if this is just indicative of the JRPG style of combat – it’s been a while since I last played Final Fantasy VII or Chrono Trigger – but seeing as the combat constitutes the bulk of the game-play, I think there could have been a greater emphasis on tactical decisions, perhaps the Tactics style of play might have been more engaging. Nevertheless, the story was fun, the writing and art direction excellent, and the game-play was certainly not tortuous, indeed the idea of having mini-games to play through to get the maximum damage from your high-power combos was a nice touch. I’ll certainly be purchasing the next instalment when it arrives. On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness is available on Steam and also through PA’s Greenhouse.

In non-gaming related activities I’ve been trying to read when I can, which seems to be predominantly in those periods where one hand is occupied in holding a bottle to Mini-melmoth’s chasm-like, gorging mouth hole. I fair blasted my way through The Lies of Locke Lamora, an easy to read fantasy heist with likeable characters told through fluid, playful prose. Charles Stross’ Halting State got me through many a late night feeding session. It is, however – like Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother – one of these near-future novels that rubs one’s nose in the techno-jargon of today, tweaked slightly in attempt to appear 1984-like in its predictive nature. Which, frankly, just annoys the hell-fired pants out of me, because it’s just a jarring interruption to show how clever and techno-savvy the author is, rather than a commentary on anything in particular. Constantly having your protagonists use ‘weird’ and ‘wonderful’ futuristic Google applications, by having them (in some sort of Star Trek parody) hax0r in an improbable fashion an application to produce an inverted BitTorrent flow through Google’s forward deflector shield, in order to undermine the authorities in that hip, cool and subversive manner that only asocial computer nerds can manage, is just tedious, frankly. If you want to see a near-enough-to-be-scary prediction of the future that was written in recent times (1984 is still the unassailable granddaddy, and the story that every author of this type of book should strive to achieve), then you read Gibson’s Neuromancer. No Google, no 5000 jiggerbyte iPods or Xbox 2020 editions, but it still predicts a future that we can overlay on our current reality, like a virtual map, and plot the route, as clear as the neon-bathed streets of a Chiba district at night, that humanity is taking.

Having said all that, Halting State isn’t a bad book, other than for that minor personal nitpick, which probably nobody else shares. Oh, and it mentions Scotland far too often to be subtle, often enough to be blatantly jarring after a while. Yes, we get it, you’re Scottish, and a big fan of Scotland and you believe in it as a nation, and you probably hate the English, and all that, so it’s not the UK, because that would include the English and they don’t deserve any advertising unless it’s in a bad light, such as a Hollywood villain. So it’s a story about how the Scottish police were called into investigate a Scottish crime in the heart of Scotland’s Scottish hi-tech infrastructure, or Scotlandstructure, as they call it in the Scottish suburbs of Scotland’s Scotlandscape. There’s a subtle subliminal message in there, but I’m just not quite getting it.

In other news, Mrs Melmoth and I are taking Mini-melmoth to Scotland on vacation this year. No idea why, it just seemed like a good idea.

[1]May be a lie. Regulations and guarantees apply. This statement does not affect your statutory rights.

[2]Yeah, ok, it’s a lie.

I finished Last Argument of Kings a few weeks back, and I’m still not quite sure what I think of it.

To sort of sneak up on it unawares, I’ll talk around it for a while, with a few Western references, so apologies if you’re not into cowboy films. Minor (sort of, not terrible I hope) spoilers may follow…

So you have “classic” westerns, say the Lone Ranger: a sound, morally upright, heroic, white hat wearing hero, doing battle against injustice, never shooting to kill. Then you have films like Leone’s spaghetti westerns, of which my favourite is probably For A Few Dollars More. The morality is more complex, everything is much grittier, much more violent, but, broadly, you’re still rooting for your heroes against villains (though it’s harder to tell them apart).

The first two books of Abercrombie’s First Law trilogy, The Blade Itself and Before They Are Hanged, are like For A Few Dollars More compared to the Lone Ranger of more traditional fantasy. They’re gritty, violent and morally complex; they use a lot of common elements, but twist them into something new, so although you’ve got wizards, and kingdoms at war, and a quest, the key characters are a fop, a crippled torturer and a couple of psychos instead of a lantern-jawed farmhand, a jovial beer-swilling warrior and a sneaky thief with heart of gold (only stole from the rich and all that, bonus points if it’s a feisty teenage orphan/runaway). There’s a barbarian, but rather than a Schwarzenegger-as-Conan type, Logen is reminiscent of Clint Eastwood’s character in Unforgiven, older and weary, and Gregory Peck in The Gunfighter, living with the notoriety his actions have brought.

Last Argument of Kings carries on where the first two left off (weird, that, for the third book in a trilogy), with lashings more war, torture, stabbing and humour (mostly black). It serves up further twists on fantasy clichés, particularly a lovely take on the mysterious orphan finding his True Heritage, but if the first two books had kicked down the door of The Shed Of Fantasy Tropes, leaving it battered but standing, Last Argument of Kings lobs a grenade through the window. One thread you can normally cling to in stories is that main characters are heroes, The Good Guys, and they fight, and beat, The Bad Guys, whether it’s in a simple, Lone Ranger, white hat-wearing way, or a more complex blood-soaked scenario where one side are only good on a relative scale as they’re killing the really, really bad guys, and a lot of people get caught up in the middle. The first two books of The First Law, that’s pretty much the case. None of the main characters are saints by any freakish definition, but when the other side are cannibalistic devil-worshippers, you know who you’re rooting for (hint: it’s not the ones that snack on the odd leg here and there).

By the end of Last Argument of Kings, though, there is no winning, no vanquishing of great evil. There is no Greater Good. There isn’t even “Well At Least They’re Not As Bad As…” There are surprisingly few deaths in the key characters; if the Good Guys don’t win outright, another sure fire way of wrapping everything up is to kill everyone off in a massive shoot-out (c.f. The Wild Bunch), but Abercrombie doesn’t do that either (not least because it’s harder to do a shoot-out with bows, and stab-outs don’t seem to have caught on so much). It’s quite an unsatisfying finish in some ways; although some strands are tied up, many are (quite deliberately) left dangling. It’s challenging, thought provoking, not something you put down and wander away from whistling, and that’s why I’m still not sure what I think about it. Which is a good thing. I think. Probably.

Well, the intention was to write a little reviewlet of Miéville’s Iron Council, but to be honest, in browsing around to see if anyone else thought, like myself, that the book was the expression of an incredibly imagined world of wonder wrapped in a story that dragged like the hind foot of a zombie on fright night, I stumbled into the Debating Iron Council blogstravgansa over at Crooked Timber.

Warning, spoilers abound! I’m putting the warning here, after the link, to punish all those of you who have shot off to read somebody else’s post before finishing with mine. The Internet really doesn’t teach the best of social graces when it comes to the art of conversation, it teaches us more about how to… Ooo, look, goldfish everyone! Goldfish!.

What really interested me was the link about two thirds of the way down the post which pointed to China’s responses to the points raised by several of the bloggers. It’s an interesting read, and gave me an insight into the man behind the book which coloured my opinion differently after having read his point of view, and more importantly showed that he felt that there were some valid criticisms, some of which he had received in the past, which he had tried to correct in Iron Council, obviously with varying success depending on each critics point of view.

But that’s not the really great part, the fun comes further down. In the mire that is the comments. Anyone who has blogged, read a blog, or once knew a man whose auntie’s dog was featured on a blog, will understand what happens in the comments. Generally, you get the nice people, writing to share their thoughts and perhaps heap a little praise on you for being able to do no more, if we’re honest, than string a few sentences together in a vaguely entertaining fashion. Then you get the Commentards; these are the people that have to pick a hole in something that you’ve said – not really justification in itself: debate is, after all, the art of war refined into a slightly less ‘head cleft in twain by sword’ fashion – but crucially, should you dare to respond and attempt a defence of your position they will essentially resort to calling you a Nazi and correct everything you’ve said as though you know nothing about the subject under discussion and that you’re simply trying to oppress them, even if the subject at hand happens to be the best selling book that you wrote.

Fun side-entertainment, head on over to China’s response post, and see if you can spot the point where the poor author’s soul is sundered into a thousand tiny little pieces. Hint: it’s his last post to the comment thread.

Those of you who stayed to finish this post before heading on over there, well done, award yourselves a biscuit and a small caffeinated beverage of your choice. Those of you just coming back from the other thread where you shot off like a puppy after a stick, those of us here who stuck around are now ignoring you like the bad puppy that just peed on grandma’s favourite Victorian winter shawl. While grandma was wearing it. That’s some mighty fine projectile peeing you’ve got going on there.

The wonder of it all though is this: more and more authors are making their presence felt online, and I’m not talking about the stand-offish token page, where you get the impression that the author is wearing industrial marigolds and a face mask, and holding the page out to you at arms length pinched between their finger and thumb so as to make sure that the amount of time that they will be in contact with you, via the page, is as little as possible. No, these authors, the Gaimans and Abercrombies (and I’m sure many others, these are just two of the prominent ones that I happen to read) of the online world, respond to readers either directly in comments or as the focus of their own posts. This rather brave behaviour gives an ‘indirect direct’ access to them that provides insight into the mind behind the stories and the person behind the characters, such that all of their works are enhanced tremendously from knowing them that little bit, as much as you can know anyone online. As much as you know me. For all you know I could be a fifty year old transvestite boxing champion with a walrus moustache, called Marjorie.

I did feel a tinge of sadness though. It was the idea of having such access to luminaries of the past, contact which in the past would have been reserved for only a close circle of friends, that triggered the melancholy; specifically I was thinking of the inimitable Bard himself, seeing as I find myself endlessly marvelling at his wordsmithing. I wondered what he would say to us if he had a blog and could respond to our questions and comments, briefly I marvelled at the possibility of contact with that mind and what insight we could have garnered, until I pulled-up short and realised the inevitable, the one and only comment that he would post: he would tell us all to fuck off, because he was fed-up with having to answer to the griping pedantic diatribes of a bunch of ingrates.

But it would be the most beautiful blog comment ever composed by man.

You can’t judge by looking at its cover, Bo Diddly assures us in a bid to convince that, despite looking like a farmer, he is, in fact, a lover. The cover of Achtung Schweinehund! features a British and German armoured car straight from the pages of a Commando comic, the back has that distinctive dagger, and blurb about a childhood spent re-enacting the Second World War. For the first part, that’s just what it is, reminiscences close enough to my own to provoke frequent laughter and a warm wave of nostalgia, but his childhood was around ten years earlier so also interesting in a sort of “compare and contrast” way. Arsenals of toy weaponry ranging from cowboy six-shooters to sparking laser blasters, Battle Picture Weekly and Commando comics, Action Men, legions of plastic 1:32 scale Airfix soldiers…

The second part, though, suggests that Diddly chap might’ve been on to something. As the author leaves childhood, the focus moves to more serious wargaming. Where he stuck with historical warfare, my divisions of plastic soldiers were joined by Star Wars figures and Orcs, I started on fighting fantasy books and roleplaying, then computers got involved. This presents something of irreconcilable difference, I sense. Pearson says:

The whole fantasy thing turns my stomach. To my mind, three men are responsible more than any others for the creation of this abhorrent perversion of the hobby: J. R. R. Tolkien, creator of Middle Earth, Robert E. Howard, creator of Hyboria (which was a kind of Middle Earth with breasts), and E. Gary Gygax, the mild-mannered Canadian inventor of Dungeons and Dragons. ‘All three of them should be put up against a wall and shot,’ I said to TK one day when I was feeling particularly aggrieved at World of Warcraft’s continued encroachment into our territory. He raised an eyebrow. ‘I think you’re getting a bit carried away there, mate’ he said. ‘Are you sure?’ I said. ‘Oh yes.’ TK said. ‘I mean, two of them are already dead. It would be a waste of bullets.’

Ironically, Gygax died while I was reading Achtung! Schweinehund, though I don’t think Pearson was in the area with a rifle. I’ve long said that some of the most heated flamewars on message boards are between people who fundamentally agree with each other, but get into vicious point-by-point rebuttals over exactly how they agree, so after bristling with incandescent rage over such heresy and writing a stiff letter to The Times Points of View White Dwarf magazine involving the line “why oh why oh why oh why oh why etc. (ps: I totally expected the pig, don’t you go trying to put one over on me, no piggy-wiggy)”, I figured hey, that’s the rich and diverse world of specialist interests (or, if you prefer, geekdom) for you. Fantasy vs Historical is another blood-feud over barely-perceptible-to-outsider differences to file alongside Metal vs Plastic, Collectors vs Wargamers, Marvel vs DC, PvE vs PvP, Hard Science vs Space Opera, Normal People vs LARPers (I kid, I kid, don’t hit me with foam-covered axes).

I don’t think it was just being put off by that quote, but I wasn’t so keen on the second part of the book. It meanders around somewhat, and where Pearson doesn’t care for fantasy, I don’t have a great interest in pre-mechanised 20mm miniatures. The bits and pieces about the history of wargaming, Napoleonic dioramas and such are fairly dry, and I’d mostly picked up elsewhere. The descriptions of fellow enthusiasts and characters, the embarrassment of such a terminally uncool hobby and hiding it from “normal” people, ring true enough, but though there’s a few funny moments on the whole I found it tended more towards the depressing than the heart-warmingly eccentric, particularly the gamer, alone in a squalid house stuffed to the point of structural failure with metal figures. It drifts off rather after the promising start; overall, not bad, but not brilliant.

No spoilers here as, amongst other people, Zoso hasn’t had a chance to read it yet.

I’ve just finished reading the third book of Joe Abercrombie’s First Law trilogy. The entire series has been an astonishingly enjoyable read from start to finish. There’s plenty to talk about and I hope to craft a more substantial discussion later on, once more people have had a chance to read it. However, if you’re looking for a new fantasy author to try, I couldn’t recommend Joe Abercrombie highly enough.

This is, however, a reviewlet, so how to describe the book without giving things away? Well, Abercrombie helps with that too (the man thinks of everything), by having one of his characters provide a small description of what the book is not:

‘I’ve been trying to get through this damn book again.’ Ardee slapped at the heavy volume lying open, face down, on a chair.
‘The Fall of the Master Maker,’ muttered Glokta. ‘That rubbish? All magic and valour, no? I couldn’t get through the first one.’
‘I can sympathise. I’m onto the third and it doesn’t get any easier. Too many damn wizards. I get them mixed up one with another. It’s all battles and endless bloody journeys, here to there and back again. If I so much as glimpse another map, I swear I’ll kill myself.’

In the First Law trilogy there are wizards, but not too many; there is but one traditional heroic journey, and although it is bloody, it is not endless; there is little magic, but also little valour; and there are no maps.

Joe Abercrombie has taken many of the best parts of Tokien’s work and turned it on its head, creating an audacious adult fantasy work that would be better suited to the direction of Quentin Tarantino than Peter Jackson if it was ever adapted for film (one can only hope).

As I mentioned earlier, I hope for further discussion in future posts, but for now take this as one highly recommended trilogy.

I first heard about Charlie Stross a few years back when, within the space of a couple of days: I’d been browsing around e-books and found he’d made Accelerando available under a Creative Commons license, I was Googling around Githyanki for some reason (I think they’d turned up in Neverwinter Nights 2) and found he’d created the AD&D version of them, and then an old schoolfriend blogged about enjoying the paper version of Accelerando. That all led me to his rather splendid blog, and with further meanderings to evidence of extraordinary geek cred.

Ironically, though Accelerando has been sitting on my PDA for a couple of years now, I still haven’t got round to actually reading it; I started with A Colder War online, then The Atrocity Archives, wonderful spy thrillers with added Cthulhu Mythos. Towards the end of last year, he released extracts from Halting State, a near-future novel that starts with a robbery in an MMOG. Say no more, obviously I picked it up straight away. Well, OK, not quite straight away, I got distracted by something (probably the next thing that turned up in the RSS reader) and forgot for a bit, then got as far as sticking it on my Amazon wishlist (or “vast pile of stuff I’ve found references to somewhere or other that look brilliant, but I can’t just go ahead and get the whole lot what with, y’know, money and time and storage space all being finite and that, and so it all piles up and then you go to actually buy some of it but get paralysed by choice and it’s a toss up as to whether you abandon the whole idea and play Peggle or frenziedly click for a while then pass out coming round only when a postman knocks on the door with a parcel of several books, a 2Gb memory card that you don’t strictly need but heck for less than a fiver it’d be rude not to, a coffee maker, a sonic screwdriver LED torch, that Medieval Total War expansion pack you never quite got round to at the time, and an electric toothbrush”-list, as I like to call it. Though I’ll concede “wishlist” is slightly snappier.) Fortunately I then saw it in a bookshop in town, where paralysis of choice was reduced to a slight limp of minor indecision, and I made it out with just Halting State. And a small selection from the 3-for-the-price-of-2 offer. And a large cappuccino and a muffin from the coffee shop. And a novelty bookmark.

Anyway! On to the actual book. Halting State chucks you straight in to 12-years-from-now very skillfully; I can’t remember anything sticking out and shouting “it’s the FUTURE with LASERS and JETPACKS and stuff”, the changes are mostly subtle, and utterly believable. Stross’ Tech Lab article for the BBC is a good primer for some of the ideas. The initial set up, in the extracts available from his site, is slightly hard going as you’re introduced to a lot of people in second person narrative switching between three characters. After that, things settle down a bit and you start to get a handle on what’s going on, but then stuff really kicks off and we’re off down the rabbit hole, keep your hands and feet inside the carriage. I’m going to need to give it a second read, as the twists and revelations come pretty thick and fast.

It’s quite jargon heavy, and if you’re not up with MMOs and techspeak you might struggle, but I loved it. If you’re a MMOGer, and you like near future thrillers, what’re you waiting for? Add it to your wishlist now! (And don’t forget that four gig USB stick while you’re there…)