Category: Publishing
Stop pollutin' m' recs
9 September, 2019 ~ RFM
There was a brief interlude, wasn't there, when the internet seemed to be making life better. And then it took over everything and we colluded with it in destroying the high street and Ruining Politics and everything else.
I just let my Apple Music free trial lapse and I'm so happy to be away from the Continuous Stream of Bad Recommendations. I'm also not on Netflix at the moment (waiting for a critical mass of 10 must-see shows to accrue), so I'm not seeing their particular algorithm's Continuous Stream of Bad Recommendations.
But I'm still stuck with the YouTubes and the Twitters and the Amazons. Amazon hits you with a triple whammy of bad recs. Its algorithm is no more sophsticated than those ads that follow you around, like when you buy wellington boots or something you get nothing but ads for wellington boots for weeks afterwards. Amazon is currently showing me tents: not because I want a tent or bought one. Just because I clicked on a tent out of curiosity, wondering if the technology had improved since the last time I went camping (spoiler: they're still tents).
Amazon is also offering me film for a camera I don't own; a microwave dish because I bought a… microwave dish; a big fuckoff box of blue plasters because I recently bought a big fuckoff box of blue plasters; and a bicycle light because I recently bought a bicycle light. You see the problem.
It's even worse over on Amazon Prime, where Amazon are guilty of spamming you with the spammiest spam they can spam about the US Open tennis because Bezos foolishly overpaid for it and they really really want you to pay a bit extra to watch tennis. In addition to this, because it's an account I share with the family, I'm always hacking through the weeds of the shit other people watch in order to find anything I might watch. And no matter how many times you don't watch Jeremy Clarkson, there's his hideous giant smoker's face.
It's a shame because Amazon does harbour some decent shows, but they seem happy to bury them under television and movie landfill rather than make it easier to discover them. I mean, I really ought to be able to click a button that says I WILL NEVER WATCH ANY SPORT EVER and they just stop showing it to me.
The pollution of your recs is real and it's here and it's killing us. I also get polluted recs on YouTube because it's on the AppleTV box, but people tend to watch their crap using my account, so I get bombarded with terrible recommendations. I made the mistake about three months ago of allowing one of my kids to put on a music video, and now I get slapped in the face with bad recs on a monotonous schedule.
But it's even worse than that, because even when you watch something you quite like, you still get only peripherally related crap fired at you like so many wet tennis balls. Watch, say, a Beatles video, and you suddenly see every fuckwit with a video camera's take on What Makes Ringo Special or one of those godawful Reaction videos or a conspiracy theory about Paul. YouTube has basically become that scene in Aliens where they decide to nuke the planet from orbit.
The saddest aspect to all this is the way it has become impossible to discover decent books. The tide of awfulness has simply overwhelmed what used to be the core, curated, controlled-by-gatekeepers publishing world. As iniquitous as it used to seem, now that any idiot, including myself, can self-publish an ebook, it's nearly impossible to find anything decent to read by a new writer. There, I said it. Editors are important.
It's hard to know where we'll end up with all this. In the meantime, stay away from my recs, lest you pollute them with your roving eyeballs. And stop looking at tents.
A couple of book reviews
18 February, 2018 18 February, 2018 ~ RFM
Cold Welcome by Elizabeth Moon
I picked this one up from the library, confident that, as it was the first in a series, I wouldn't be lost. I've not read any Elizabeth Moon before, and should have twigged that a series called "Vatta's Peace" comes after a series called "Vatta's War". Doh.
So there are characters and situations here, back story etc., that is only filled in sketchily. I scurried off to Wikipedia to fill in some blanks, but on the whole it wasn't a problem, except in the sense that a lot of the characters are merely sketched here, on the assumption that you know them from before.
Anyway, this is a military science fiction adventure set in a space trading/war universe that reminded me of nothing so much as the old Ambrosia software game Escape Velocity and sequels. Ky Vatta is an admiral in some space fleet on a visit to her home world. Her shuttle is sabotaged, possibly by a rival company, and she ditches in a hostile polar region with some other survivors, not sure who she can trust. My problem, however, is that I don't really care about these warring companies. There's an academic point to be made about capitalism and wastefulness, and what happens when corporations become quasi-governmental, sure. But I'm not going to root for one corporation over another, or really care about the people who work in their employ. Perhaps if I'd read the previous six books or whatever.
Overall, this just made me feel tired. Nobody can trust anybody, people are constantly being attacked, or abducted, and for what? Power and profit? Ugh. So you get this atmosphere of heightened paranoia, a constant game of Prisoner's Dilemma (always betray etc.) which I'm thinking might be a fairly accurate representation of how it feels to be among the super-rich. You want to keep all your stuff, other people are trying to get your stuff, you want their stuff etc. Exhausting.
There's no proper resolution to the story, which has some interesting elements (a strange and secret installation with a mystery as to who built it), and there's already one sequel, but I don't think I'll be bothering. And here's the central problem of these multi-volume series: give up at any point, and you've wasted your time.
Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
This novel is a winner of the Arthur C Clarke award, and like Tchaikovsky's Dogs of War, is an excellent exploration of creatures that have been "uplifted" by biotechnology to the level of intelligence, co-operation and technology. It's also a novel in the sub-genre(s) of space colonisation, generation ships, and Deep Time.
So humanity is at the peak of its technological development, busily terraforming planets and planting the seeds of life so that arriving colonists might find habitable worlds prepared for them — in one specific case by uplifted smart monkeys. But on the cusp of success, the whole thing falls apart. The monkeys don't make it and nanovirus designed for them uplifts something else instead.
Centuries later, the dregs of humanity, who have long forgotten the advanced tech of their forebears, arrive in a ship looking for somewhere, anywhere to land.
Such is the set up of this novel, which uses twin narrative threads (with subtle parallels) to tell the stories of what's happening on the ship, and what's developing on the planet. And there's more Prisoner's Dilemma, so that's a thing, only this time you care more.
Portia Labiata, jumping spider
As with his Dogs of War, it's a surprisingly easy read, with well-drawn characters and a fascinating portrayal of alien thought, which must result from extensive research. Tchaikovsky is a worthy winner of the Clarke award, and writes accessible science fiction based on the kind of grand concepts that most people just don't think about, but perhaps should. I mean, the media call this kind of thing a "breakthrough" but rarely pose the moral question: just because you can, does that mean you should?