You know that nice feeling you get when you clean up a room, or your whole home? It just looks so... tidy. More spacious. More comfortable. You can find everything again. You can relax and enjoy yourself. You lose that nagging feeling that told you to clean it up in the first place.
Personally, I've had a nagging voice telling me to clean up my MP3 collection for, oh, maybe about six years now. Like most people, I've gradually accumulated these files over a long period of time. They were ripped on multiple computers, using different software, different bitrates, different storage. In the early days, my rippers didn't attach ID3 tags; this wasn't a problem while I navigated music by folders, but was a huge pain once I started using iTunes. Even the naming convention was messed up. For years, I stubbornly insisted on using my preferred format of "Artist Name-- Album Name-- Song Name.mp3". Eventually, I gave in and switched to the predominant format of "Artist Name - Song Name.mp3". But, once I started ripping things with iTunes, I had to accept its default format of "Track# Song Name.mp3", with the artist and album given in the folder hierarchy.
It was a mess. Over the years I developed a couple of Perl scripts to help manage some basic things (standardize capitalization, remove parentheses, etc.), but the best I could do was apply a bit of furniture polish when the floor was littered in old newspapers.
This Saturday, I finally cleaned it all up. It took a grand total of about 2 hours, of which about 15 minutes was spent in front of the keyboard. 15 gigabytes of music are finally in a format I can live with. Isn't technology grand?
I was lucky enough to get a head start thanks to my corporate overlords. My company is owned by Gracenote, and they've developed a cool tool in-house called the Gracenote Media Manager. It uses their MusicID technology to look up a song based on the music. What's cool about this tool is, you can set it to scan all the music in a particular directory and have it fill out all the ID3 tags with what it finds.
In my case, most of my music is kept on a media PC that I keep attached to my home entertainment system - this is the same box that I use for DVR and video watching. It runs Ubuntu, but has a Samba share drive that points to the folder with [almost] all my music. The exception: discs that I have ripped within the past year or two (there aren't very many - I've grown depressingly less adventurous in my musical exploration lately) are on my main PC's hard drive, organized into iTunes folders; of course, iTunes purchases are here as well (as are some Amazon freebies and Bleep buys).
Now, all the modern stuff already was tagged properly, so I ignored that to start. I ran GMM on the media box's drive. This took a while, but for the most part it was really smooth. It keeps several queues that allow you to track what it's doing: some songs that it has already identified, others that still need to be checked, some that need resolution (multiple possible matches), and a rejects bin for things that it didn't recognize. The last two items for me were, fortunately, rather small. I'm a wee bit obsessed about R.E.M. and Radiohead, and they couldn't identify some of the more obscure tracks. (My favorite example: an R.E.M. fan club Christmas L.P. I had played this on a borrowed record player, done line in to a Creative Audigy audio card, did a raw capture of the WAVE, then transcoded to MP3. That was one of my finest moments. Apparently, Gracenote doesn't have that album. Yes!)
After it was done, I went through the most time-consuming part of manually identifying the tracks that they couldn't detect. There were... maybe 80 or so, altogether? In most cases they try to make guesses based on the words in the file name if all else fails, so you can scroll through a list of, say, 20 or so possible matches, and manually choose the one you want or reject the suggestions. One regret - I really wish they had a manual option for cases where you wanted to override it. I was shocked at some of the stuff in here, things that I hadn't listened to in over a decade... old RPG game music that I had downloaded from fan sites on the Internet; weird live covers of unpopular sings; one or two pieces of filk. Honestly, I ended up deleting half of what they couldn't detect. (Second feature wish: a "Locate This File" button on the resolver screen.)
Once that whole process was done, I saved out all the results. Now, I still had messed-up filenames and folders, but at least I had the right ID3 tags.
For my next step, I modified iTunes configuration. I turned on the option to have it organize my music, and also selected the option to copy imported music into the music folder. Then, I pointed it at my Samba share and hit "Import Folder". I had both machines plugged in to Ethernet at the time, fortunately. It didn't take terribly long for everything to get copied across the wire.
I next verified that iTunes had imported it correctly. I spot-checked a few random songs, and found that everything looked good: nothing was missing, all the file names had been corrected, and they were placed into their proper artist and album folders, based on the ID3 tags from GMM. I then deleted the 15 gigs of old, badly organized data on the media box.
Finally, I switched the media folder within iTunes so that, instead of pointing at a location on my local drive, it pointed at the Samba share. This copied all the data back across the wire, keeping its proper internal structure. So far, so good. In retrospect, I might have been able to do this all in one step instead of copying forward and back, but this did give me a nice way of consolidating the media files that had previously been stored on two separate computers.
Now, almost everything is perfect. I only have a few very minor remaining niggles.
First of all, somewhere along the way a few of my albums got duplicated, or in some cases, triplicated: each song in the album will have 2 or 3 copies in their folder (with a "1" or a "2" tacked on to the filename). I strongly suspect that this is because, in the old days, I used to manually write M3U files to manage my playlists; I think that when iTunes grinds over these, it imports the files separately. It's a little annoying that iTunes doesn't detect and automatically remove duplicates; I can see why, say, you might want to have a song that appears in both an artist album and on a soundtrack, but not why you'd ever have multiple copies of a song within a given album. Anyways, this is a very minor annoyance (it only happened to a few albums), and easily corrected (I just delete the superfluous albums when I see them).
A second thing is that I would like to separate my storage. iTunes now keeps a "media folder" that holds everything iTunes: podcasts, music, movies, television, etc. In my case, I want to keep music on my media box, but my podcasts and everything else on my PC. It isn't a huge problem to go over the network, but it's really dumb to do this for podcasts, since they're downloaded onto my PC and copied from there to my iPhone. To be fair, though, I have dedicated 0 seconds to figuring out how to resolve this. There may be a clean way to break this out within iTunes, or maybe I can set up a slick nested network share or something for the podcasts folder.
Anyways, that's that! The whole process ended up being WAY faster and easier than I had expected, and I only regret that I didn't do it a year ago. Finally I can access all my music, and do it just as easily whether it's within iTunes or through my stereo speakers. Hooray for good tooling, standard technologies, and virtual filesystems!
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Marveling
Um, I guess that I'm on a Neil Gaiman comics kick now? Again?
Marvel 1602 was written in the early 2000's, and is an oddity in the best sense of the word. It isn't typical Gaiman, and it isn't typical Marvel, and it's definitely not what you would expect from a union of the two. It's a rip-snorting adventure, with a great sense of humor and a great sense of mystery, but largely eschewing both the Gaiman Mythos and the Marvel Mythology. I really dug it.
MINI SPOILERS
So, here's the basic idea: it's England in 1602 AD. Many characters from the Marvel Universe are represented as Elizabethan doppelgangers. There's a single, coherent, relatively tight plot that carries through eight issues of beautifully illustrated comics. It's pretty Marvel-ish in that a lot of the plot focuses on friendships, encounters, and teams coming together and/or fighting each other.
A few cool bits include:
* Carlos Javier, the Xavier equivalent. There are no mechanized wheelchairs in the 17th century, so people carry him in their arms. He plays a similar role to his present self, taking in "witchbreed" outsiders who have unhuman talents.
* Matthew, a blind Irish minstrel. Turns out that he has really, really good hearing, and amazing acrobatic skills. Daredevil, anyone?
* Count Otto von Doom. I'm sorry, but that's an even better name than Doctor Doom. He's the principate of a Bavarian province, and cunningly weaves a web of influence over all Europe. And, y'know, he has flying vulture creature assassins.
* Peter Parquagh. An Elizabethan nerd. He is almost bitten by a spider a half-dozen times throughout the book, finally succumbing towards the very end.
* etc., etc.
For the most part, I loved this. It's a huge cast of characters, easily several dozen; the X-Men by themselves contribute a good number, and they're just a piece of it. I did find myself occasionally bemoaning my own lack of culture. Since I don't read superhero comics, then if there isn't a movie about it, I don't know it. Nicholas Fury is one of the most major characters; he seems cool, but I have no idea who he is. Ditto Stephen Strange. And The Watcher. I don't think this is necessarily bad - I still thoroughly enjoyed myself - but I'm sure that I missed out on some fun inside jokes.
The writing is generally really strong, especially after the first two issues. There are a few sections that made me groan, like Gaiman was just trying way too hard. One of the worst is in Matthew's introduction, where he says something like, "Well, if the devil is one who dares, then you may call me a devil indeed!" Yes. You're DareDevil. We get it. He eventually settles down, and then it's just good. Character tend to speak in their own voices, for better or worse. Cyclops is as much of a whiny bastard here as he is in every other medium where I've encountered him. Magneto (The Grand Inquisitor) is solemn, clever, menacing. DareDevil and... the leader of the Fantastic Four (I told you, I'm uneducated!) generally get the best lines. There's pathos, and humor, and melodrama, and a bit of anger. It's appropriately Marvel-y in that you feel attached even to many of the villains, and hold out hope that some bad guys might become good guys.
Gaiman's rich sense of history is well on display here - he doesn't spend a ton of time on it, but all the stuff about Elizabeth's fading reign, James' ascension, religious tensions, the Inquisition, the Papal States, the Germanic States, the Great Game, and the microscopic spec that is English settlement in America, all feel real. That is, he doesn't dwell on background, but what background shows seems authentic.
What's largely missing is Gaiman's most distinctive characteristic, his sense of mythology. There are a couple of things that he taps here, most notably a plot thread regarding the Templar treasure from Solomon's Temple, but even that ends up having a direct correlation to the Marvel universe. I'm not complaining about the missing mythos... he's great at it, but it doesn't need to be applied to all stories, and this one is probably better without it.
END SPOILERS
Just so we're clear, 1602 isn't seminal in the way that Sandman is seminal. That said. it's a lot more pure fun to read than any given Sandman issue. There's nothing wrong with well-crafted entertainment, and Gaiman proves that he can be a great entertainer.
Marvel 1602 was written in the early 2000's, and is an oddity in the best sense of the word. It isn't typical Gaiman, and it isn't typical Marvel, and it's definitely not what you would expect from a union of the two. It's a rip-snorting adventure, with a great sense of humor and a great sense of mystery, but largely eschewing both the Gaiman Mythos and the Marvel Mythology. I really dug it.
MINI SPOILERS
So, here's the basic idea: it's England in 1602 AD. Many characters from the Marvel Universe are represented as Elizabethan doppelgangers. There's a single, coherent, relatively tight plot that carries through eight issues of beautifully illustrated comics. It's pretty Marvel-ish in that a lot of the plot focuses on friendships, encounters, and teams coming together and/or fighting each other.
A few cool bits include:
* Carlos Javier, the Xavier equivalent. There are no mechanized wheelchairs in the 17th century, so people carry him in their arms. He plays a similar role to his present self, taking in "witchbreed" outsiders who have unhuman talents.
* Matthew, a blind Irish minstrel. Turns out that he has really, really good hearing, and amazing acrobatic skills. Daredevil, anyone?
* Count Otto von Doom. I'm sorry, but that's an even better name than Doctor Doom. He's the principate of a Bavarian province, and cunningly weaves a web of influence over all Europe. And, y'know, he has flying vulture creature assassins.
* Peter Parquagh. An Elizabethan nerd. He is almost bitten by a spider a half-dozen times throughout the book, finally succumbing towards the very end.
* etc., etc.
For the most part, I loved this. It's a huge cast of characters, easily several dozen; the X-Men by themselves contribute a good number, and they're just a piece of it. I did find myself occasionally bemoaning my own lack of culture. Since I don't read superhero comics, then if there isn't a movie about it, I don't know it. Nicholas Fury is one of the most major characters; he seems cool, but I have no idea who he is. Ditto Stephen Strange. And The Watcher. I don't think this is necessarily bad - I still thoroughly enjoyed myself - but I'm sure that I missed out on some fun inside jokes.
The writing is generally really strong, especially after the first two issues. There are a few sections that made me groan, like Gaiman was just trying way too hard. One of the worst is in Matthew's introduction, where he says something like, "Well, if the devil is one who dares, then you may call me a devil indeed!" Yes. You're DareDevil. We get it. He eventually settles down, and then it's just good. Character tend to speak in their own voices, for better or worse. Cyclops is as much of a whiny bastard here as he is in every other medium where I've encountered him. Magneto (The Grand Inquisitor) is solemn, clever, menacing. DareDevil and... the leader of the Fantastic Four (I told you, I'm uneducated!) generally get the best lines. There's pathos, and humor, and melodrama, and a bit of anger. It's appropriately Marvel-y in that you feel attached even to many of the villains, and hold out hope that some bad guys might become good guys.
Gaiman's rich sense of history is well on display here - he doesn't spend a ton of time on it, but all the stuff about Elizabeth's fading reign, James' ascension, religious tensions, the Inquisition, the Papal States, the Germanic States, the Great Game, and the microscopic spec that is English settlement in America, all feel real. That is, he doesn't dwell on background, but what background shows seems authentic.
What's largely missing is Gaiman's most distinctive characteristic, his sense of mythology. There are a couple of things that he taps here, most notably a plot thread regarding the Templar treasure from Solomon's Temple, but even that ends up having a direct correlation to the Marvel universe. I'm not complaining about the missing mythos... he's great at it, but it doesn't need to be applied to all stories, and this one is probably better without it.
END SPOILERS
Just so we're clear, 1602 isn't seminal in the way that Sandman is seminal. That said. it's a lot more pure fun to read than any given Sandman issue. There's nothing wrong with well-crafted entertainment, and Gaiman proves that he can be a great entertainer.
Saturday, March 13, 2010
Cases
I don't think I've mentioned it here recently, but I really like my work. Not only because of what I do, and the people I work with, but the environment itself is very stimulating. Among the many things I love about my office is the preponderance of comic book: we keep an enormous supply in our bathrooms (too much information!), and I've been able to, for example, work my way through the entire run of Transmetropolitan in little 4-page chunks.
I just recently discovered a secondary trove: on the same bookshelf where we keep some of our reference books (PHP, Java Servlets, Java ME, etc.) are a bunch of comics that I hadn't noticed before. And I was delighted to see that, along with some titles I didn't recognize, were two that I have wanted to read for a while but haven't been able to track down. One is Ghost World. The other is Violent Cases.
Violent Cases was Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean's first collaboration. It's a wonderful little tale, just over 40 pages long. It takes the form of a reminiscing monologue, told by a man in the present (judging from his dress, probably the contemporary 1980's), recounting memories of events from his childhood (England in the 1960's), which focus on tales he hears about gangsters (from Chicago in the 1920's).
The story itself is really nice - it doesn't have the mythos or the sweep of Gaiman's later work, but it's quite compelling, with a shot of ambiguity that keeps things intriguing. However, I have to say that McKean's artwork steals the show here. It's just as weird and compelling as the seminal covers he did for Sandman, and displays some of the same instincts - a lot of collage, a lot of shadowy shapes. However, where his covers are mainly impressionistic, here he carries the story.
Basically, what he does is draw the scenes as they would appear in the mind's eye, and not as they occurred. It's a little hard to describe without pictures, but I'll do my best. To start with, there's great variation in detail; the things that a four-year-old boy would be most likely to notice are sketched in great detail, while other objects are only hinted at with rougher lines and shading. So, for example, we get a really detailed rendering of an outstretched hand, but the face behind the hand is shown all in shadow.
Even better, he plays with memory in the art. A major character in the story is an osteopath. The narrator confesses that he doesn't remember what the osteopath looked like; he has his own vague idea of what he looked like, while his father has a more detailed memory that does not line up with the narrator's own. So the osteopath's form shifts around as the narrator tries to decide what he looks like.
Other touches are just gorgeous or brilliant. The osteopath is described as having a nose like an eagle, and the next panel displays an incredibly well rendered diagram of an eagle's beak, superimposed over a dictionary opened to the definition of "England". In another, the osteopath mentions a scene where a man is carrying a baseball bat. When he realizes that the boy doesn't recognize the word, he describes it as "Like a cricket bat, but smaller and heavier." And, for the remainder of the scene, the men are carrying things that look like cricket bats... only smaller. It's a subtle touch, not played too obviously for the joke, but certainly made me smile.
The biggest problem with Violent Cases is that it's over too soon. On the other hand, I can't imagine how you could make it longer. Its power comes from its limited scope: a fragment of memories, artfully presented and pondered, attempting to reclaim something from the past.
I just recently discovered a secondary trove: on the same bookshelf where we keep some of our reference books (PHP, Java Servlets, Java ME, etc.) are a bunch of comics that I hadn't noticed before. And I was delighted to see that, along with some titles I didn't recognize, were two that I have wanted to read for a while but haven't been able to track down. One is Ghost World. The other is Violent Cases.
Violent Cases was Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean's first collaboration. It's a wonderful little tale, just over 40 pages long. It takes the form of a reminiscing monologue, told by a man in the present (judging from his dress, probably the contemporary 1980's), recounting memories of events from his childhood (England in the 1960's), which focus on tales he hears about gangsters (from Chicago in the 1920's).
The story itself is really nice - it doesn't have the mythos or the sweep of Gaiman's later work, but it's quite compelling, with a shot of ambiguity that keeps things intriguing. However, I have to say that McKean's artwork steals the show here. It's just as weird and compelling as the seminal covers he did for Sandman, and displays some of the same instincts - a lot of collage, a lot of shadowy shapes. However, where his covers are mainly impressionistic, here he carries the story.
Basically, what he does is draw the scenes as they would appear in the mind's eye, and not as they occurred. It's a little hard to describe without pictures, but I'll do my best. To start with, there's great variation in detail; the things that a four-year-old boy would be most likely to notice are sketched in great detail, while other objects are only hinted at with rougher lines and shading. So, for example, we get a really detailed rendering of an outstretched hand, but the face behind the hand is shown all in shadow.
Even better, he plays with memory in the art. A major character in the story is an osteopath. The narrator confesses that he doesn't remember what the osteopath looked like; he has his own vague idea of what he looked like, while his father has a more detailed memory that does not line up with the narrator's own. So the osteopath's form shifts around as the narrator tries to decide what he looks like.
Other touches are just gorgeous or brilliant. The osteopath is described as having a nose like an eagle, and the next panel displays an incredibly well rendered diagram of an eagle's beak, superimposed over a dictionary opened to the definition of "England". In another, the osteopath mentions a scene where a man is carrying a baseball bat. When he realizes that the boy doesn't recognize the word, he describes it as "Like a cricket bat, but smaller and heavier." And, for the remainder of the scene, the men are carrying things that look like cricket bats... only smaller. It's a subtle touch, not played too obviously for the joke, but certainly made me smile.
The biggest problem with Violent Cases is that it's over too soon. On the other hand, I can't imagine how you could make it longer. Its power comes from its limited scope: a fragment of memories, artfully presented and pondered, attempting to reclaim something from the past.
What A Philip
I didn't like "In Milton Lumky Territory." I suppose it's partly my own fault. These days, I virtually never read the back cover or inside jacket for books that I'm about to read; they inevitably give away things that I'd rather keep as surprises, and for many of my favorite authors, they actually get important things wrong. So, when I saw this book at the library, I focused on the fact that it was written by Philip K. Dick and figured that was enough for me.
I think this might be the first Dick story that I've actually read. Like everyone else in America, I'm familiar with his stories because of their ubiquitous translation into movies. (My favorite is probably still Blade Runner, with A Scanner Darkly close behind.) From what I understand, most of the adaptations have come from short stories of his. This is the perfect source for a really talented director like Ridley Scott or Richard Linklater, since it gives them a cool plot to play around with, and also enough freedom to make appropriate additions to grow out the story to make it fit the scope of a major movie. That's a much better approach than the typical novel adaptation in Hollywood, which is all about simplifying and cutting down the more complex source material.
What I'm saying (in a very round-about way) is that In Milton Lumky Territory isn't sci-fi - it's a realist novel. That isn't necessarily bad, even though it wasn't what I expected. However, on the whole it was a thoroughly disappointing book.
I should have taken as a warning the Author's Note at the very beginning. It's quite brief, and says something like, "This is actually a very funny novel, and a good one, too." That "actually" ought to have tipped me off... if the author is responding defensively before you've read the first sentence, he knows something's up. Even with that note in my mind, I didn't think the story was at all funny. It didn't seem to be trying to be funny, either... maybe it was just being too subtle, but I rarely have trouble detecting subtle humor. And I didn't think it was all that good. Oh, from a technical perspective it's just fine - no writing errors, the dialog was fine, and there aren't major unexplained holes in the plot. But it's pretty boring, and often pointless, and features characters who aren't very remarkable, and on the whole it was a waste of time to read.
MINI SPOILERS
Some of this might have been deliberate, perhaps? Is it ever valid to write a bad book if you want to make a realistic portrayal of a dull subject? The story is set in the 1950's, and features a commercial buyer who falls in love and decides to work in a typewriter shop. The book is utterly focused on the feel and pace of 1950's America: small towns that are being encroached upon by national marketers; the federal highway system opening up new freedom of movement for everyone; the relatively insular lives of rural folk, and so on. So if the point was to communicate how boring the 1950's were by writing a boring book... well, mission accomplished.
I found myself often thinking of The Man Who Wasn't There, and then wishing I was watching that movie instead of reading this book. There are a lot of similarities between the two. Billy Bob Thornton is a barber who dreams of opening a drycleaning business; Bruce is a wholesaler who dreams of managing a typewriter shop. Both are set in the 1950's. Both look at the attitudes of people in small towns. However, TMWWT is an interesting movie, where things actually happen, with a character who you genuinely like (or at least are interested in)... it sets the stage with dullness, but the dullness isn't an end within itself, but rather a springboard for some really thoughtful and shocking developments.
The only time that there's any real energy in this book is when Milton Lumky is on the stage. He shows up for the first time around page 90, and has a total of maybe 25 pages throughout the whole book. Unlike the other characters, he's at least interesting - he's got a world-weariness about him that he displays acerbically, a weird blend of camaraderie and depression. He's always a minor supporting character, not someone who you can root for, but at least he livens things up a little.
I get the awful suspicion that Dick started writing this book based on the name alone. I can just imagine him going, "Milton Lumky. That's a great name. I wonder what a character named Milton Lumky would be like? Hmmm... I bet I could write a story about him!" His Milton Lumky is as Milton Lumky as you can get; I can't think of a better representation of that character name than what Dick comes up with. That's nowhere near enough to carry this story.
END SPOILERS
I'm definitely not going to give up on Dick, but I'll be much more careful before the next time I pick up one of his books, and will definitely go for his science fiction next time. After I wrapped up the book (it's just over 200 pages, but feels much longer), I finally read the supporting promotional material. It would have saved me some grief - the best praise they come up with is something like, "Arguably Dick's best realist novel, apart from [some other title]." Just how many realist novels did he write? It would be pretty funny if it was just two.
I think this might be the first Dick story that I've actually read. Like everyone else in America, I'm familiar with his stories because of their ubiquitous translation into movies. (My favorite is probably still Blade Runner, with A Scanner Darkly close behind.) From what I understand, most of the adaptations have come from short stories of his. This is the perfect source for a really talented director like Ridley Scott or Richard Linklater, since it gives them a cool plot to play around with, and also enough freedom to make appropriate additions to grow out the story to make it fit the scope of a major movie. That's a much better approach than the typical novel adaptation in Hollywood, which is all about simplifying and cutting down the more complex source material.
What I'm saying (in a very round-about way) is that In Milton Lumky Territory isn't sci-fi - it's a realist novel. That isn't necessarily bad, even though it wasn't what I expected. However, on the whole it was a thoroughly disappointing book.
I should have taken as a warning the Author's Note at the very beginning. It's quite brief, and says something like, "This is actually a very funny novel, and a good one, too." That "actually" ought to have tipped me off... if the author is responding defensively before you've read the first sentence, he knows something's up. Even with that note in my mind, I didn't think the story was at all funny. It didn't seem to be trying to be funny, either... maybe it was just being too subtle, but I rarely have trouble detecting subtle humor. And I didn't think it was all that good. Oh, from a technical perspective it's just fine - no writing errors, the dialog was fine, and there aren't major unexplained holes in the plot. But it's pretty boring, and often pointless, and features characters who aren't very remarkable, and on the whole it was a waste of time to read.
MINI SPOILERS
Some of this might have been deliberate, perhaps? Is it ever valid to write a bad book if you want to make a realistic portrayal of a dull subject? The story is set in the 1950's, and features a commercial buyer who falls in love and decides to work in a typewriter shop. The book is utterly focused on the feel and pace of 1950's America: small towns that are being encroached upon by national marketers; the federal highway system opening up new freedom of movement for everyone; the relatively insular lives of rural folk, and so on. So if the point was to communicate how boring the 1950's were by writing a boring book... well, mission accomplished.
I found myself often thinking of The Man Who Wasn't There, and then wishing I was watching that movie instead of reading this book. There are a lot of similarities between the two. Billy Bob Thornton is a barber who dreams of opening a drycleaning business; Bruce is a wholesaler who dreams of managing a typewriter shop. Both are set in the 1950's. Both look at the attitudes of people in small towns. However, TMWWT is an interesting movie, where things actually happen, with a character who you genuinely like (or at least are interested in)... it sets the stage with dullness, but the dullness isn't an end within itself, but rather a springboard for some really thoughtful and shocking developments.
The only time that there's any real energy in this book is when Milton Lumky is on the stage. He shows up for the first time around page 90, and has a total of maybe 25 pages throughout the whole book. Unlike the other characters, he's at least interesting - he's got a world-weariness about him that he displays acerbically, a weird blend of camaraderie and depression. He's always a minor supporting character, not someone who you can root for, but at least he livens things up a little.
I get the awful suspicion that Dick started writing this book based on the name alone. I can just imagine him going, "Milton Lumky. That's a great name. I wonder what a character named Milton Lumky would be like? Hmmm... I bet I could write a story about him!" His Milton Lumky is as Milton Lumky as you can get; I can't think of a better representation of that character name than what Dick comes up with. That's nowhere near enough to carry this story.
END SPOILERS
I'm definitely not going to give up on Dick, but I'll be much more careful before the next time I pick up one of his books, and will definitely go for his science fiction next time. After I wrapped up the book (it's just over 200 pages, but feels much longer), I finally read the supporting promotional material. It would have saved me some grief - the best praise they come up with is something like, "Arguably Dick's best realist novel, apart from [some other title]." Just how many realist novels did he write? It would be pretty funny if it was just two.
Friday, March 12, 2010
Vernal
Vernor Vinge seems to be a very highly regarded sci-fi author, but for some bizarre reason, the San Jose library doesn't carry any of his novels, and so I haven't been able to follow up on my excellent experience with his novel "Rainbow's End." That book was the first hard sci-fi that I'd read in ages, and it was a really thrilling experience that reminded me what I used to love about sci-fi: the way it can turn on parts of your brain, activating modes of thought and prompting you to consider how the world could change, how you could change, what really lies beneath our everyday reality.
While the library doesn't have his novels (I'm particularly curious about "A Fire Upon the Deep"), it does carry a collection of his short stories, which I finally got around to checking out. It's great stuff, and shows an impressive range. Everything in here counts as science fiction of some sort, but no two stories are really alike; they range from adventure tales, to fairly sentimental character studies, to cleverly plotted puzzle stories, to thrillers.
I hadn't realized just how long Vernor has been active for. He wrote his first stories while he was still a teenager in the 1960's. He's currently a professor, so he isn't a full-time author, which I'm sure limits his output somewhat. That arrangement is probably a really good thing, though... it keeps him active in the real world (well, as real as an academic in San Diego can experience), away from the solipsistic temptations of professional writers.
MINI SPOILERS
Things got off to a great start with "Bookworm, Run!" After all, it's about an ape! How could I possibly withhold my approval from Monkey-related shenanigans? The concepts are interesting, but were probably more revolutionary in the 1960's: networks of computers, vast stores of electronic government data that could be instantly and remotely accessed, augmenting a biological brain with digital data. All that plus comical Russian spies... neat!
A couple of the stories feel a bit more like fantasy, but sooner or later betray their sci-fi leanings. One features a high-tech "peddler" who arrives on a low-tech world. There's the obligatory Asimovian rumination about sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic. However, the peddler takes a young (and violent) man in under his wing, and gradually the youngster begins to understand the nature of technology. Another pseudo-fantasy was one of my favorite stories here, "The Barbarian Princess." This story was about a sci-fi/fantasy magazine (!) on an alien world (!!) which sails a ship among a large number of archipelagos, collecting new stories and selling issues with tales from other writers (!!!). This is also a relatively low-tech world; the telescope has only recently been invented, and there's no form of communication faster than the ship. There's a really good reason for the tech, though: metal is extraordinarily rare. A tribe offers to pay "a few coppers" for issues of the latest magazine; this would be a pittance in a fantasy world, but it's extremely lucrative here. The lack of metal (and petroleum) has hampered progress, and some of my favorite parts are when the characters daydream about what it must be like to live on a planet with abundant supplies of metal.
Some of the most science-fiction-y stories prominently feature aliens, and Vinge gets some good mileage out of playing around with stereotypes about these creatures. In one case, he inverts our common Foundation-esque view of aliens (wise, advanced, experienced) and comes up with a race of incredibly impatient, short, and violent creatures. (This story also features a Noir style, which is pulled off masterfully well.)
Vinge switches up his writing style as much as he varies his subjects. The aforementioned alien story is told in the first person; most of his stories are told in third person, with varying levels of omniscience; and a particularly entertaining one is an advertisement in Scientific American, aimed at recruiting one particular reader to join a shady biotech firm. He doesn't do anything earthshatteringly literary with perspective, but he uses it well to tell his stories... he isn't a Kilgore Trout sort of sci-fi author who has great ideas but no skill.
END SPOILERS
As far as I can tell, this collection includes every short story Vinge has published, which is cool. It's a shorter collection than I would have expected for someone who has been writing as long as he has; but, again, he's been doing other things with his life, including writing novels that my library inexplicably omits. What he has here is great; even his earliest stuff is fun to read, and he stays strong throughout. The very last story here, "Fast Times at Fairmont High," was the kernel for "Rainbow's End," which lends a nicely circular feel to my experiences with this author. Anyways. This is a great collection for any sci-fi fan, or anyone who wants to be a fan, or was one once and wants to remember why they enjoyed it so much.
While the library doesn't have his novels (I'm particularly curious about "A Fire Upon the Deep"), it does carry a collection of his short stories, which I finally got around to checking out. It's great stuff, and shows an impressive range. Everything in here counts as science fiction of some sort, but no two stories are really alike; they range from adventure tales, to fairly sentimental character studies, to cleverly plotted puzzle stories, to thrillers.
I hadn't realized just how long Vernor has been active for. He wrote his first stories while he was still a teenager in the 1960's. He's currently a professor, so he isn't a full-time author, which I'm sure limits his output somewhat. That arrangement is probably a really good thing, though... it keeps him active in the real world (well, as real as an academic in San Diego can experience), away from the solipsistic temptations of professional writers.
MINI SPOILERS
Things got off to a great start with "Bookworm, Run!" After all, it's about an ape! How could I possibly withhold my approval from Monkey-related shenanigans? The concepts are interesting, but were probably more revolutionary in the 1960's: networks of computers, vast stores of electronic government data that could be instantly and remotely accessed, augmenting a biological brain with digital data. All that plus comical Russian spies... neat!
A couple of the stories feel a bit more like fantasy, but sooner or later betray their sci-fi leanings. One features a high-tech "peddler" who arrives on a low-tech world. There's the obligatory Asimovian rumination about sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic. However, the peddler takes a young (and violent) man in under his wing, and gradually the youngster begins to understand the nature of technology. Another pseudo-fantasy was one of my favorite stories here, "The Barbarian Princess." This story was about a sci-fi/fantasy magazine (!) on an alien world (!!) which sails a ship among a large number of archipelagos, collecting new stories and selling issues with tales from other writers (!!!). This is also a relatively low-tech world; the telescope has only recently been invented, and there's no form of communication faster than the ship. There's a really good reason for the tech, though: metal is extraordinarily rare. A tribe offers to pay "a few coppers" for issues of the latest magazine; this would be a pittance in a fantasy world, but it's extremely lucrative here. The lack of metal (and petroleum) has hampered progress, and some of my favorite parts are when the characters daydream about what it must be like to live on a planet with abundant supplies of metal.
Some of the most science-fiction-y stories prominently feature aliens, and Vinge gets some good mileage out of playing around with stereotypes about these creatures. In one case, he inverts our common Foundation-esque view of aliens (wise, advanced, experienced) and comes up with a race of incredibly impatient, short, and violent creatures. (This story also features a Noir style, which is pulled off masterfully well.)
Vinge switches up his writing style as much as he varies his subjects. The aforementioned alien story is told in the first person; most of his stories are told in third person, with varying levels of omniscience; and a particularly entertaining one is an advertisement in Scientific American, aimed at recruiting one particular reader to join a shady biotech firm. He doesn't do anything earthshatteringly literary with perspective, but he uses it well to tell his stories... he isn't a Kilgore Trout sort of sci-fi author who has great ideas but no skill.
END SPOILERS
As far as I can tell, this collection includes every short story Vinge has published, which is cool. It's a shorter collection than I would have expected for someone who has been writing as long as he has; but, again, he's been doing other things with his life, including writing novels that my library inexplicably omits. What he has here is great; even his earliest stuff is fun to read, and he stays strong throughout. The very last story here, "Fast Times at Fairmont High," was the kernel for "Rainbow's End," which lends a nicely circular feel to my experiences with this author. Anyways. This is a great collection for any sci-fi fan, or anyone who wants to be a fan, or was one once and wants to remember why they enjoyed it so much.
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