#but neither do the gibson novels really and it's okay

[cantsayidont]

July 2014. Dazzling Tula Lotay artwork for SUPREME BLUE ROSE, previewing the cover of #2 (above), and a page from that issue:

I don't even know how to summarize what's going on here because this series is a pastiche on a pastiche of a pastiche: a Warren Ellis revival of Alan Moore's SUPREME — an extended pastiche of/homage to the Silver Age Superman, and Silver Age DC more broadly, based on Rob Liefeld's '90s Superman pastiche/parody — framed as a pastiche of William Gibson's Blue Ant trilogy (PATTERN RECOGNITION, SPOOK COUNTRY, and ZERO HISTORY), and featuring some of the most jaw-dropping artwork I've seen in a modern comic book. It will probably not make any sense at all if you're not familiar with the things I've just named, but if you are, it is unaccountably, exceptionally good.

[v171]

Best in Books, 2021

Sorry for another book post that no one asked for. I just enjoy doing these as it lets me reflect back on books that I haven't read in a long time.

Got this survey online here and thought it was another fun way to reflect back on what I read.

1. Best Book You Read In 2021?

Provenance - Ann Leckie

2. Book You Were Excited About & Thought You Were Going To Love More But Didn’t?  

Hummingbird Salamander - Jeff Vandermeer WHAT a colossal disappointment...

3. Most surprising (in a good way or bad way) book you read?    

The Midnight Library - Matt Haig I absolutely hated this book and it made me realize that I don't think I'll ever like him as an author. I was stunned that this book got the acclaim that it did considering how objectively bad I felt that it was.

4. Book You “Pushed” The Most People To Read (And They Did)?

Words of Radiance - Brandon Sanderson I don't actually think I pushed too many people to read this, but I recommended it to a friend who in turn recommended it to by brother and now another friend. So it all started with me.

5. Best series you started in 2021? Best Sequel? Best Series Ender of 2021?

Best series I started - Rosewater - Tade Thompson Picked this up on a whim and really loved it. Looking forward to finishing the trilogy this year.

Best sequel - Artificial Condition - Martha Wells Honestly all of the murderbot books blend together, but I THINK this one was my favorite.

Best series ender - The Hero of Ages - Brandon Sanderson This was honestly just okay, but I didn't finish many series this year....

6. Favorite new author you discovered in 2021?

Jackie Polzin I read her debut novel, Brood on a whim as my last book of the year. I was so surprised by how wonderful it was and how excellent of a writer she is.

7. Best book from a genre you don’t typically read/was out of your comfort zone?

Poison for Breakfast - Lemony Snicket This was some mixture of memoir and philosophy I guess? I really enjoyed it and neither genres are something I read often.

8. Most action-packed/thrilling/unputdownable book of the year?

Sea of Rust - C. Robert Cargill This had been on my TBR forever before I finally picked it up, and I'm so happy I did. It was fantastic and oddly touching.

9. Book You Read In 2021 That You Would Be MOST Likely To Re-Read Next Year?

Blindsight - Peter Watts I initially rated this a lot lower than I should have, because I am still thinking about how impactful this was. There's a sequel and I think I might try to re-read this before jumping into Echopraxia.

10. Favorite cover of a book you read in 2021?

The Hole - Hiroko Oyamada I'm not super big into the genre of Japanese mystical realism, but I found this to be short, sweet, and moderately enjoyable. I LOVE the cover though.

11. Most memorable character of 2021? Molly, Neuromancer - William Gibson The original Trinity. I loved her.

12. Most beautifully written book read in 2021?

This is How You Lose the Time War - Amal El-Mothar, Max Gladstone

13. Most Thought-Provoking/ Life-Changing Book of 2021?

The Seep - Chana Porter I thought this was a very interesting exploration into what it means to be progressive and what we'd be giving up if we actually were liberated from earthly conflict.

14. Book you can’t believe you waited UNTIL 2021 to finally read? 

 Neuromancer - William Gibson

15. Favorite Passage/Quote From A Book You Read In 2021?

I never write down quotes that I like, but it would probably be something from The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula Le Guin because of course it is.

16.Shortest & Longest Book You Read In 2021?

Shortest - Peace, Pipe - Aliya Whiteley More like a short story. I think its like... 20 something pages.

Longest - Words of Radiance - Brandon Sanderson 1087 pages

17. Book That Shocked You The Most

The Invention of Sound - Chuck Palahniuk This was literally written to be shocking, so I guess it wasn't surprising that I found it shocking. It was not good though.

18. OTP OF THE YEAR (you will go down with this ship!)

I do not do this.

19. Favorite Non-Romantic Relationship Of The Year

Henry Thompson and OWEN, The Municipalists - Seth Fried Totally fell in love with this book and I loved their buddy cop dynamic. (They weren't actually cops, don't worry)

20. Favorite Book You Read in 2021 From An Author You’ve Read Previously

Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro The Buried Giant was one of my favorite books of last year and this was just as wonderful and devastating.

21. Best Book You Read In 2021 That You Read Based SOLELY On A Recommendation From Somebody Else/Peer Pressure/Bookstagram, Etc.:

Piranesi - Susanna Clarke Absolute garbage. Can't believe I was tricked into reading this by everyone on youtube and goodreads.

22. Newest fictional crush from a book you read in 2021?

Tobias, Silver in the Wood - Emily Tesh I was about to say that I don't get fictional crushes... but that's not true I guess. How am I supposed to resist a gruff mountain man forest spirit??

23. Best 2021 debut you read?

Brood - Jackie Polzin

24. Best Worldbuilding/Most Vivid Setting You Read This Year?

The Well of Ascension - Brandon Sanderson Not a surprise that Brandon is good at worldbuilding. Only reason that I didn't put Stormlight Archive is that I haven't caught up yet.

25. Book That Put A Smile On Your Face/Was The Most FUN To Read?

A Psalm For The Wild Built - Becky Chambers So lovely and beautiful. A joy to read.

26. Book That Made You Cry Or Nearly Cry in 2021?

Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro I mean come on... completely devastating...

27. Hidden Gem Of The Year?

The Raven Tower - Ann Leckie Criminally underrated book. I know Leckie is known for her Imperial Radch saga, but this was absolutely excellent.

28. Book That Crushed Your Soul?

Razorblade Tears - S.A. Cosby So heart wrenching. Cosby was able to convey grief so wonderfully.

29. Most Unique Book You Read In 2021?

Version Control - Dexter Palmer What I thought would be a standard time travel sci-fi story really surprised me with its novel approach to time travel. Completely unique and an actually scientifically backed theory.

30. Book That Made You The Most Mad (doesn’t necessarily mean you didn’t like it)?

The Midnight Library - Matt Haig What a stupid waste of a book. So dumb, not insightful, waste of time. He literally just wanted to write a worse, less nuanced version of The Bell Jar, and in that I suppose he succeeded. Baffling that people loved this book. Not only was is completely surface level, the overarching commentary on mental health was bad and harmful.

[2soliddudes]

Fifth Business by Robertson Davies

1970, 252 Pages

Ramsay is a man twice born, a man who has returned from the hell of the battle-grave at Passchendaele in World War I decorated with the Victoria Cross and destined to be caught in a no man's land where memory, history, and myth collide. As Ramsay tells his story, it begins to seem that from boyhood, he has exerted a perhaps mystical, perhaps pernicious, influence on those around him. His apparently innocent involvement in such innocuous events as the throwing of a snowball or the teaching of card tricks to a small boy in the end prove neither innocent nor innocuous. Fifth Business stands alone as a remarkable story told by a rational man who discovers that the marvelous is only another aspect of the real.

Róisín: When I first printed out this list and stuck it on my fridge I ticked off all the books on it I had already read. This was maybe one of the three? A perennial favourite in my family, I read it in my late teens, but not in high school like my sister did. I love the premise of a serious man surrounded by strange and silly people and situations.

I read this book years ago but definitely still remember some of Davies’s lines and turns of phrase. I still have a lot of feelings about Mrs. Dempster okay? I feel like there is a very Protestant obsession with Catholic mythos and mysticism in this book which is very interesting but as I said, I did not read this in high school so sorry you will not get a three point thesis from me on this one.

Kathleen: I didn’t read this in high school either! I eventually picked it up in my late teens because I assumed I had missed out on something. It was about a decade ago, so I don’t really remember much! And I’ve gotta say, I feel pretty medium about this one? It took me a while to get into it, and then I didn’t really start enjoying it until I was well over the halfway point. It’s a story told in 6 parts, and I think I genuinely enjoyed the last two. I really disliked the portrayal of most of the women in the book, who were all young/stupid/vain/slutty or old/domineering/humourless or “crazy”. I found this book funny in only a handful of places, and did genuinely enjoy some of his adventure, but was disinterested in a lot of it. People are obsessed with this one, and I simply do not get the dang hype! What did I miss!

Róisín: Apparently Robertson Davies haunts Massey College at U of T and this is something I learned in high school. We didn’t read him in high school though so I guess my question is was this part of ghost curriculum?

Also! Davies quotes a Norwegian playwright in the inscription to the novel but apparently he fully made up the quote he used? Love an old dude who is COMMITTED to dumb lil pranks, his ghost is probably laughing it up somewhere in the staff bathrooms at U of T.

Kathleen:  Girl I like him more knowing about his pranking!

VERDICT: Should it be on the 30 before 30?

Róisín: Yes! An absolute 20th century classic

Kathleen:  I actually truly do not understand why this was on the list, and why people are falling over themselves to talk about how great Davies is. Oh look, a man read some books and went to Europe. Cool! Just like all the other white dudes!

OUR NEXT READ: Neuromancer by William Gibson

[preserving-ferretbrain]

You Wonder What The Author Was Thinking

by Sonia Mitchell

Wednesday, 04 February 2009

Sonia learns an important moral lesson about impulse buying, with Charles Stross's Halting State.

Uh-oh! This is in the Axis of Awful...~

From the blurb, and the little card on the shelf telling me that a bookseller recommended it, I thought Charles Stross’s novel Halting State sounded good enough for an impulse buy on a 3 for 2 offer. Seduced by the fun little pixel people on the cover, and the intriguing description, I didn’t even take the elementary precaution of reading a few pages.

If I’d bothered, I might have noticed this book’s major failing. It’s written in the second person.

Second person is good for some things. Choose Your Own Adventure books, text adventure games... interactive fiction, basically. I can only presume that Stross is attempting a homage to such games, but in doing so he does seem to miss the point using the style. The principle advantage to the second person is that it lets you place yourself – or a character of your choosing - in the story. Combined with the ability to make choices, this give you a lot of freedom in the way you follow the plot. Zork never told me what I thought of the thief, only what he looked like. It was up to me whether I wanted to try killing or kissing him. The game made very few assumptions about me, other than that I was mobile, able to carry things and able to perform those actions that it recognised. The internet tells me that later in the series you’re satirically addressed as AFGNCAAP - Ageless, Faceless, Gender-Neutral, Culturally-Ambiguous Adventure Person - though as I’ve been stuck on Zork II for years I’ve never had the pleasure of that address. At any rate, the freedom to choose your own character helps the player immerse themselves in the game in ways that can never happen when you’re guiding Mario on his way to find the princess. (There are exceptions, of course. The

Hitchhiker’s infocom game

has you playing in the second person as characters from the series, but that’s the point of the game and you come into it knowing what you’re going to get).

Basically, while second person has its advantages, they centre around making the reader a participant. This novel doesn’t even bother to try doing that, instead trying to balance three characters’ viewpoints. You jump from being a female police sergeant, a female insurance investigator and a male computer programmer. The latter, incidentally, is harbouring Dark Secrets that work really fucking well in the second person, when you keep thinking about the Dark Secrets without ever being able to articulate them into actual thoughts.

It’s difficult to get past the second person problem and review any other aspects of the plot, but I will just in case you’re intrigued by the blurb and decide to risk it. I’m going to have to spoil it, but without apology because I believe I’m doing you a favour. Also because I stuck with the book right to the end and I need to make it worthwhile somehow.

The near-future novel claims to be about an apparently impossible raid which takes place in a World of Warcraft-style game. The virtual treasures stolen in this raid have real world value, and the book supposedly deals with the real world consequences of what happened in the game. To me, that sounded pretty awesome. A novel about games and computer crime should have been fun, and the aforementioned little pixel people on the cover also contributed to my impression that the book would be a light and enjoyable look at gaming. The actual focus, though, is more on insider trading and various bit of European politics that presumably fit together somehow. There’s a board of stereotypical fat-cats, and one of them did something bad while another one’s a goody. I couldn’t tell you which is which, despite the Big Revelation of the bad guy.

Oh, and incidentally Scotland now has its independence, which is really good, and England is doing quite badly as a result for reasons that never become clear. Something about the English reaping what they sowed. Don’t worry about remembering this though, as the text will be sure to remind you. Inexplicably, it even reminds you when you’re currently the English woman, who somehow connects the failing tube system with the closing of the borders. I think. To be frank, I was getting a bit annoyed with the book by then, so I may be misremembering.

As another incidentally, this is the future, so everyone wears FutureGlasses, as possibly seen in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine in the seventies. They allow the wearer to be connected to whatever network they’re engaging with, such as CopSpace (okay, FutureGlasses was facetious. CopSpace, unfortunately, is Stross’s actual term) or the game they’re playing. They’re also got various recording devices built in and overlay nicely with the real world most of the time. Bizarrely, despite the fact that people walk around with computers on their faces, ‘geek’ is still used as a pejorative.

Do you need another ‘incidentally’? How about the fact that the insurance investigator also specialises in sword fighting and conveniently impulse buys a broadsword which is not mentioned again until a bad guy needs sorting out in her hotel room? Yeah, I’m getting a hit cross writing all this. I spent money on this book. The excessive programming language doesn’t really help, either, especially as I suspect that since this is set in the future some of it’s made up. I could be wrong, though, as Stross’s own background is in programming. Either way, he overkills on the acronyms and abbreviations for my layperson’s taste.

Even without the massive problem of the second person, this wouldn’t be a great book. Which is a shame, because the initial idea was pretty promising, and I’m still open to the idea that a story about a MMORPG could be fun. Unfortunately the plot of this book turns out to be quite dull, and from time to time it just gets irritating. There are good moments and interesting points – an exciting scene in which two of the characters had to escape from a remotely-controlled taxi is a high point - and I did get quite absorbed in the book at times, but I can’t recommend it to anyone else. There’s just too much working against it.

Ultimately, Halting State is readable, but I’m still stuck on my initial question of why anyone would write a book in the second person. It’s such a bad technique that I’ve felt justified telling people about the book in social situations, and the only other books I tend to do that with are the latter volumes of King’s Dark Tower series (for reasons that will become very clear if the reading canary ever tackles them). Even when you get sucked into the book enough to overlook it, next time you pick it up you’ll get that jolt all over again. Surely someone along the publishing process raised an eyebrow when they saw what they were producing?

Morbid curiosity, however, is rarely a good reason to pick up a book, and I don’t suggest you do it. And kids - always glance at the first few pages before you buy.Themes:

Books

,

Sci-fi / Fantasy

,

Judging Books By Their Covers

~

bookmark this with - facebook - delicious - digg - stumbleupon - reddit

~Comments (

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)

Wardog

at 10:21 on 2009-02-04I'm glad (glad in the schadenfreude sense of the word) you read this ... the cover has been attracting me from Borders for a while now and it was just a matter of time until I picked it up. I have such a terrible habit of judging books by their covers - I might make a theme for it, actually :) I'm not sure I can actually think of (m)any books about gaming / virtual worlds that aren't entirely made of stupid, or offensive in some other way...

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Arthur B

at 10:23 on 2009-02-04

It’s such a bad technique that I’ve felt justified telling people about the book in social situations, and the only other books I tend to do that with are the latter volumes of King’s Dark Tower series (for reasons that will become very clear if the reading canary ever tackles them).

Maybe it will, but it'll have to be someone else doing it; I can smell the stench of King's solipsism from a mile off.

The England/Scotland thing seems especially bizarre. It's like someone needs to sit down with Stross and draw a diagram of where the taxes come from and where the taxes go...

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Wardog

at 10:24 on 2009-02-04But dude! You've forgotten what the English did to Mel Gibson!!

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Andy G

at 14:30 on 2009-02-04I do know two good things that address the reader directly, but neither of them are full-length books written completely in the second person. One is "If on a winter's night a traveller" which is all about readers of books so it makes a lot of sense, and the other is a German short story where the point of the direct address is not so much to involve the reader as a participant as to characterise the reassuring, mysterious voice talking to someone as their life flashes before their eyes (it's more like overhearing it talking to someone else). Definitely something you need to have a good reason to do though – and not something to do badly. Why do you think it was being attempted here?

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Rami

at 15:38 on 2009-02-04I have to admit everything I've read from Stross has been great, and in most cases his fascinating ideas have been good enough for me to forgive the slightly idealistic political allegory. But writing the book in the second person... well, I'm disappointed in him. Especially if it's all about MMORPGs, and full of slightly silly Scots nationalism (yes, Mr Stross, we know you're proud to be Scottish).

I am mildly curious about him working programmer-ish language into a book without ruining it for non-programmers, though. I shall have to leaf through the book in Borders at some point. Perhaps there will be geek in-jokes that redeem the book somewhat.

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Sonia Mitchell

at 21:20 on 2009-02-04"Why do you think it was being attempted here?"

I'm not entirely sure. The book has a theme of the erosion of boundaries between the real and the virtual, so I suspect that by casting the reader as participant Stross was trying to play with the real/made-up boundary. If that's what he was aiming for, though, it wasn't effective on me.

Or maybe he just hates his readers.

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Sonia Mitchell

at 21:21 on 2009-02-04Kyra - Love the new category :-)

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Dan H

at 21:55 on 2009-02-04

I can actually think of (m)any books about gaming / virtual worlds that aren't entirely made of stupid, or offensive in some other way...

Aren't they usually made of stupid *and* offensive, in exactly the same way every time, to wit:

"Okay, right, so the core idea of this book is that ... like *games* ... right take place in ... like ... worlds. But the *real* world is ... like ... also a world so ... like ... people who play games must get ... like ... confused about what's real and what isn't."

Why yes, I am still bitter about

The Sword of Maximum Damage

.

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Shim

at 23:17 on 2009-02-04Offhand, do you know of any stories that work the opposite way round? Ignoring Jumanji/Zathura, I mean... I'm picturing 'exported' characters wandering round casually smashing objects in the search for powerups, jumping on people's heads or demanding quests from people in the Lamb and Flag...

If they're going for that "core idea", of course, then the in-game characters should also be influenced by real-world stuff. "Sorry, I can't slay the Lord of the Ogres and free your children, I've got laundry to do."

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Arthur B

at 01:04 on 2009-02-05

Otherland

by Tad Williams is in theory about virtual entities manipulating the real world whilst real people simultaneously invade the virtual world.

In practice it is about Tad Williams giving an airing to some of his undeveloped story ideas (including honest to god

Wizard of Oz

fanfiction) before slapping us all about the face with a deus ex machina and declaring the story over.

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Wardog

at 11:20 on 2009-02-05And there's always Snowcrash of course...

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Arthur B

at 11:40 on 2009-02-05Ah, Snow Crash. Where sneaking through the enemy's base camp is the best possible time to have a long chat online about a sub-William Burroughs bicameral mind language virus...

Though to give it its due, the Metaverse of Snow Crash is probably the most accurate envisioning of Second Life-style virtual worlds the cyberpunk movement ever produced, mainly because Stephenson realised that some people would just make their avatars giant purple cocks. Which doesn't mean it lacks its share of stupid and offensive content (anti-rape devices which only work if you're already being raped!).

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Sonia Mitchell

at 16:54 on 2009-02-07I rather like the way the computer game in Ender's Game is handled, come to think of it. The unnerving wavering of the line between worlds and the perplexed way the adults try to get a handle on Ender's in-game behaviour are pretty interesting.

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Wardog

at 10:44 on 2009-02-09Re the new category, yay :) I'm actually always surprised to note how horribly suspectible I am to book covers. I've always secretly feared this made me an inherently shallow person but I'm reassured to know that you do it too :)

~Ah, Snow Crash. Where sneaking through the enemy's base camp is the best possible time to have a long chat online about a sub-William Burroughs bicameral mind language virus...

From what I have heard, and the little I have read of him, this seems to be Stephenson's problem in a nutshell. His books are so enslaved to the ideas at their core that they're, um, kind of the opposite of books.

I have to confess, I lose all my genre points because I haven't actually read Ender's Game...

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Arthur B

at 11:06 on 2009-02-09

this seems to be Stephenson's problem in a nutshell. His books are so enslaved to the ideas at their core that they're, um, kind of the opposite of books.

It wouldn't be so bad in

Snow Crash

, except that the idea he chooses to obsess over happens to be the least interesting one he presents in it... franchise nationality? The internet as a shallow pit of wish-fulfilment? (Man, did he call that one...) Stateless communities based on lashed-together ships in international waters? Pizza delivery tanks?

Snow Crash

is stuffed with cool shit; unfortunately, it all gets shoved bodily offstage every time the origins of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind waddles its fat, pasty, historically inaccurate, cribbed from Burroughs arse onstage to do its ludicrous little dance and spout its silly little monologues. How I hate that creature.

I've not read

Ender's Game

all the way through, and I was kind of uninspired by what I read of it; I wonder if it isn't the sort of books that has the best impact if you read it at just the right age, and preferably around the same time the book came out...

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Wardog

at 11:14 on 2009-02-09The internet as a shallow pit of wish-fulfilment

It seems like a pretty deep pit to me - I'm a big fan :)

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Rami

at 16:14 on 2009-02-09Heh, am I the only one on here who has read Ender's Game? Granted, it was a few years ago, and I actually read it after its sequel. I thought it fell a bit flat, but if you skip it and just read Ender's Shadow you might like it -- there's a lot more going on in the book, a rather more interesting main character, and all the plot points of the first...

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Andy G

at 20:21 on 2009-02-09I have read it! Do I get some sort of prize?

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Wardog

at 12:29 on 2009-02-10Yes, yes you do.

You get ... um ...

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Arthur B

at 14:09 on 2009-02-10...Mormonism! Delicious, delicious Mormonism...

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http://bitterlittleman.livejournal.com/

at 11:01 on 2009-02-20The second person was nearly enough to drive me away in the first chapter. I hate being told what I feel or think. Unbelievably irritating. And it only gets worse when you jump to another character in the next. I think there could be a case made for it if it had been better implemented, but i wasn't expecting it and it threw me.

The rest of the complaints didn't bother me much though. If you read it as a story about the future of the IT society it's quite interesting and fun. It seems that you are pulling the book apart based on what you wanted it to be, rather than what it is.

For example: CopSpace is a terrible name but it brings together the ideas of the internet of things, ubiquitous computing, augmented reality etc etc quite well. The story then allows discussion of how such technologies might get used, their benefits, their flaws and also the wider ranging implications for society...

It's a similar thought experiment about most of the issues with online activity, and how they will only become more important. For me, that's interesting.

On another note - the pixel people were enough to put me off the buying the book entirely, rather than an attraction. If my brother hadn't lent it to me, I would never have read it.

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Sonia Mitchell

at 00:11 on 2009-02-21Hi bitterlittleman, thanks for the comments. I'm glad you managed better than me in getting past the second person problem.

It seems that you are pulling the book apart based on what you wanted it to be, rather than what it is.

Good point, but I think the book did make promises it veered from. I expected a fun gaming read because of the incident it began with, because of the blurb (though I appreciate that was written by marketing people rather than the author) and because of the cover. I wasn't led to expect a board-room book, and I wouldn't have read it if I'd known.

So I'll concede I have prejudices against the genre it turned out to be, but I don't think the book should have disguised itself as another genre.

It's a similar thought experiment about most of the issues with online activity, and how they will only become more important. For me, that's interesting.

In general I agree, but in this specific case I think it was badly handled. The idea that the future of IT is in computerised glasses seems outdated and unlikely to me. The remote controlled taxis, on the other hand, rang true, and I think Stross does have some good ideas in the book. I would perhaps pick up something else of his (after checking the viewpoint this time).

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http://bitterlittleman.livejournal.com/

at 02:18 on 2009-02-21Glasses maybe, but the actual idea of copspace... Not outdated or unlikely. Take your smart camera phone, pair it with your location and relevant databases, and output.

http://apple20.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2008/09/23/androids-first-killer-feature-compass-mode/

(sorry, first example i found, its 2am.)

Once you want that kind of data on a heads up display to keep your hands free, glasses start to be more practical...

I'd say that we're way closer to CopSpace than autonomous vehicles like the taxi's described. For reference, I did information engineering, including modules on autonomous vehicles, intelligent systems (AI) and computer vision. My masters project was a combination.

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Wardog

at 14:40 on 2009-02-21Hmmm...possibly I'm looking at this in too shallow a light and I certainly don't pretend to be any kind of future-tech commenter but it occurs to me that any technology that would make you look lame (e.g. computer glasses) will never catch on ;)

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Arthur B

at 15:59 on 2009-02-21I think the key point is this:

Once you want that kind of data on a heads up display to keep your hands free, glasses start to be more practical...

Which is sort of the issue; how many applications are there where it's more practical to have a load of distracting crap appear in your glasses?

It's also worth noting that

HUDs

have existed for a while, and I think it's noteworthy that the information they present:

- Is presented in a very sparse style. You don't want this information to actually get in the way of something you might bump into.

- Is related exclusively to the task at hand. Distracting car drivers or aircraft pilots with ephemera while they fly is a no-no.

- Relate entirely to the operation of vehicles.

Basically, I think the uses of HUDs for pedestrians are going to be extremely limited.

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Shim

at 20:19 on 2009-02-21I could see the odd extra use for them, at least in a story. Traffic police could have HUDs that flashed up speed, vehicle tax status, and checked vehicles against police records. Security guards, scuffers and bouncers might have something that matched your face to records of troublemakers, or scanned and tagged you for possible weapons. Warehouse foremen or car park wardens could have HUDs to help identify each item and navigate around. Workers in sewers, mines or other confusing places could have HUD maps and compasses (like in a game). Or if you were doing pure information work (coding, examining photos or something) you might use them to avoid distractions.

It all rather depends on what other gear you're packing, though. I mean, if your HUD can detect RFID tags, or contain X-ray scanners, or spot and label problems with machinery, that's useful. If they just display the latest headlines, less so.

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Arthur B

at 01:02 on 2009-02-22But I think it's also worth considering whether it's more useful to have this sort of stuff on your glasses or some other surface. With the traffic police, it's surely more useful to just project the information onto the windscreen or something. With security guards and bouncers, I'm not sure putting this stuff on something that might get ripped off/smashed in a scuffle is necessrily a smart move.

Also, if you happen to be longsighted, there's obvious problems with trying to read something that's projected onto the inside of your glasses...

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http://bitterlittleman.livejournal.com/

at 17:01 on 2009-02-22And, voila, discussion about interesting ideas of how this technology might work and the effects it would have... Stuff people might like to read about... in a book?

And Kyra... Mobile phones? Wtf? Bricks with no battery life... who the hell would want one of those stuck to the side of their face... oh wait....

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Wardog

at 20:10 on 2009-02-22And Kyra... Mobile phones? Wtf? Bricks with no battery life... who the hell would want one of those stuck to the side of their face... oh wait....

Yeah, who would...

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Wardog

at 20:15 on 2009-02-22Also, actually, being serious for a split second here and putting my ludditism aside - mobile phones only really took off when their utility was met by their aesthetic. I have seen grown men actually caressing their I-phones.

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Wardog

at 20:17 on 2009-02-22And, voila, discussion about interesting ideas of how this technology might work and the effects it would have... Stuff people might like to read about... in a book

Books providing fodder for discussion is rarely connected to literary value. Look at JK Rowling.

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Rami

at 16:57 on 2009-02-23If you read it as a story about the future of the IT society it's quite interesting and fun

I've found that to be the case with everything Stross writes -- in this case, from what I'm seeing here, the vehicle for these ideas might be a bit lacking.

The idea that the future of IT is in computerised glasses seems outdated and unlikely to me

Well, the idea's not novel -- the first time I came across it was

in the 90s

, and even Stross has been

playing with it since 2005

.

Projecting things onto your glasses would be easier and cheaper than putting them in contact lenses or implanting them into your retina, which are AFAIK fairly well-known SF tropes (@Arthur: while it's non-trivial I think it would be perfectly doable to adjust the focus of the projection to be perfectly clear to your eyesight), and I for one think it's pretty cool and wish we had the commercially-available technology to do that today. Presumably, once the glasses are developed, you could stick a Bluetooth receiver into them and then have them interface with everything from your mobile phone to, as Shimmin suggests, an X-ray scanner...

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Orion

at 00:38 on 2015-02-18What does bi-cameral mean in this context?

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Arthur B

at 10:52 on 2015-02-18It's part of a

fringe psychological theory

.