I received a copy of Glasshouse by Charles Stross for my birthday (thanks David & Jennifer!) and started reading it over the weekend. I finished it yesterday due to a CalTrain ride and I thought I'd talk about it a little. It's fairly common to see claims on the internet that Glasshouse is a sequel to Accelerando but I don't really see it. It's possible they are set in the same timeline but I don't see any particular reason to assume that and I can't easily find any quotes from Mr. Stross that state it's a sequel. The back jacket copy is "Praise for Accelerando", but that doesn't make the two books linked. I was sort of waiting throughout the book for a shoe of Accelerando-relation to drop and it never does.

I've read two Stross books on airplanes - Singularity Sky and The Merchant Trade and both times I wish I had brought something else. Not that they aren't good books but they are too dense to read for hours on end. I read the Accelerando ebook on my Palm in small doses and I think I would have totally lost it if I to spend several hours straight reading Accelerando. So I would not have normally considered taking Glasshouse with me on the train except I was already into it enough to realize it wasn't "normal" for Stross.

Accelerando is a hell of a good read, but it doesn't have that much story. Accelerando is a setting, it's a mood. The whole book is about what it would be like to live through a Vingean Singularity - with humans becoming something that can only be described as "post-human". It's taking VR to the logical conclusion. But the story is just a vehicle for touring the universe. Glasshouse inverts that. It has a lot of the same underlying assumptions as Accelerando but it's a gripping story first, and a tour of a future world second.

I'm not going to delve into spoiler territory, there's plenty of spoiler info available on the web (see the Amazon reviews) if you want that sort of thing. I will say that Glasshouse isn't for the faint of heart or the SF newbie. The strongest link I see to Accelerando is that it almost takes the end of Accelerando as assumed backstory. This is a strong statement but I mean it. If you're not prepared to assume that practical interstellar teleportation means "backing up" people, and from there it's a small jump to editing people - both in terms of memories and then in terms in their physical body, then Glasshouse is probably not for you. In the opening portions of the book there is a character who flips between a four-armed and two-armed form pretty much at a whim. There's a solid theoretical underpinning for this, but I'm not sure it would make sense to somebody who didn't immediately jump from teleportation "gates" to backups and multiple copies of the same person. If you're current on your science fiction reading this should be straightforward - but if your thinking about teleportation stops at the Star Trek transporter then you might get left behind by the whirlwind introduction.

John Scalzi talks about how Accelerando just isn't that accessible for the non-initiate - here's the best link I can find right now (although I think there's a better essay about it I'm too lazy to go grab my copy of Coffee Shop and I'm failing to pull it up on the Whatever's search page). I think Glasshouse is probably even worse about assuming the background knowledge.

So that's my capsule review: better story than Accelerando, but even more of a "Here we go, try to see if you can keep up" exercise in concepts. I liked it a lot - but I've read Accelerando twice so I was able to take the technology in stride.

technorati tags:Glasshouse, CharlieStross, ScienceFiction

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Couple of video bits to call out. First on the humor front: Writers of Lost

I still think Lost isn't doomed, but this is funny anyway. (I saw it from Violent Acres.)

Second, I was excited to see Merlin Mann (from 43 Folders, or the Phone Guy videos) launch his video podcast: The Merlin Show. But then I was a little surprised to see the first real episode show up as fifteen minutes. Yikes! I was expecting Ze Frank, not Adult Swim lengths. So I let it pile up last week - I was continually rebooting TinyGod into XP so even if I wanted a break I couldn't easily get at the videos on the Mac side of the fence. But I finally got around to watching that episode (an interview with Jonathan Coulton - download it here), and really enjoyed it. It's a good 15 minutes, but I need to figure out a good "automatic download from iTunes and stream to the 360 solution". TVersity I'm sure but I want an automatic feed that just makes it happen.

Anyway, lots of good stuff in that episode about the creativity vs. deadline dichotomy and how Thing a Week affected that.

(And while I'm talking about Jonathan Coulton - if you haven't seen Spiffworld's music videos (using World of Warcraft) check 'em out. Either Code Monkey or Skullcrusher Mountain would be my suggestions.

technorati tags:JonathanCoulton, MerlinMann, Lost, videos

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So I figured it was time for me to weigh in on the whole discussion of whether the writers creating Lost in fact have any idea what they are doing. I'm a little late to Lost - you can thread back some of my previous posts starting here. There seems to be a movement to reject Lost as being a big shaggy-dog story and they they'll never be able to make it all hang together. I don't understand it though, in that I don't see what it is in season three that is making people claim that. It's plausible and I can admit the possiblity - but I don't think anything that has happened recently strengthens the argument. I also don't know why you'd sit down and sat "I'm going to watch this show", agree to take the ride as it were, and then start assuming partway through there's a huge bait and switch afoot. There are a lot of unanswered questions, some of which stretch back to the beginning of the show, but I've seen web commentary about how they keep introducing new elements to distract the viewers. I don't agree with that - they introduce new elements to move certain plots forward and in some cases to introduce new elements that may be needed later.I'm not 100% convinced they know what they are doing, but I'm still comfortable just enjoying the ride and seeing what happens. It's not as good a show as it was, but it's still pretty good - better than most of what's available.I also have to extend a lot of credit to Lost because I very much think that we wouldn't have Heroes without Lost. Lost proved that mainstream America will watch a sci-fi show (if it's properly concealed), watch a show with a strong story arc, and watch a show where not every little detail is spoon-fed to the viewer. There are a lot of shows this year that trace a direct lineage to those realizations. Back during the first season of Battlestar Galactica I said it was the best show on TV at the time, and I stand by that (for the first season mind you - boy what a letdown that show has become this year), but it was a basic cable show that caught a basic cable audience that was already pigeonholed into a sci-fi ghetto. Lost broke out of that and got a mainstream audience and I think you can see a direct lineage from that to Heroes or even Jericho this fall. And Heroes holds the crown of "Best show on TV" right now, so I'm glad that Lost broke the way to that. It hasn't been that long since all of network TV was a wasteland of stupid "reality" shows, I'm glad to see real scripted TV make a comeback.Even if turns out they have no idea what they are doing at the end of it all :-)

technorati tags:Lost, television

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Last night Karin and I went to San Francisco to see One Man Star Wars Trilogy. I was pretty sure I would enjoy it of course, and I thought Karin would but that's a dicier proposition. I'm happy to report that it is very funny and she enjoyed it throughly. It's surprisingly faithful to the movies (he didn't actually do Greedo so I can't say who shot first), but has enough sly digs at all the cheesiness to carry it. And when he gets up to Kenobi's "What I told you was true, from a certain point of view." he elaborates on it with information from Revenge of the Sith - "I cut off his arm. And his legs. And then he fell into a river of lava. So what I told you was true, from a certain point of view."

Charles Ross is a very talented actor and mime - he can really carry Chewbacca's vocalizations and Yoda's motions well. His AT-AT and AT-ST were impressive - those are images that are graven on my brain and his evocation was as note-perfect as I can imagine a human body can get (including the ridiculous Ewok fights from Jedi.) Jabba pretty much brought the house down - he had to pause for a moment because of laughter - although I personally thought his Nien Nunb was funnier but you have to be a geek to even know who that is (he's the goofy guy with the huge jowls and ears who copiloted the Falcon during the battle at the end of Jedi).

The show is in San Francisco for another couple of weeks, and if you can get there I recommend it. It's right off of Union Square - you can park there in the underground garage, get some dinner, and see the show for a very nice evening out.

technorati tags:StarWars, CharlesRoss, OneManStarWars, entertainment

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This week I played a bit of both Dungeon Runners for PC and Destroy All Humans 2 for the original Xbox. That statement in itself is a capsule mini-review - and the focus of the statement was on "a bit".

Dungeon Runners is just plain bad. I don't know what they are thinking but I played it for about an hour and frankly I wish I had played Diablo II. Or Guild Wars which is a very similar concept, but a vastly improved execution. The graphics were serviceable, but the UI was clunky and very slow to respond. I seriously think they are communicating move requests to the server - there's a very noticeable lag before your character starts walking forward. There's a weird tongue-in-cheek aspect to it with NPC's in line to get in a dungeon and weapons that are made of cardboard (and have stats like "Speed: Granny"), but none of it hangs together very well. It reeks of artificial spray-on Attitude(tm).

Destroy All Humans 2 was OK, but not very appealing. My review of the first one was sort of tepid and the second one just didn't click. I haven't seen the mini-games that I didn't like in the first one, but somehow it didn't have the charm of the original. I played a few hours of it, and sent it back to Gamefly. If I had bought it I wouldn't have given up then, but it didn't inspire me. The humor has changed a bit in the sequel, it seems almost mean-spirited at time and clearly they decided that dick jokes can substitute for clever writing. "By Arkvoodle's crotch" isn't a very funny exclamation the first time, and it just gets older from there on out. There was also something I really disliked about the presentation this outing: the mission briefings are presented as dialog trees and you have these options to say smartass things instead of asking a pertinent question. But the briefings are sort of long and drawn-out anyway, so I tended to just plow through and not explore the dialog. Which means it had even less humor value.

I can't blame the developer for this but I was also annoyed that it wasn't on the 360 backwards compatability list yet. There weren't that many major Xbox titles released last holiday season that didn't have a 360 SKU - seems like that would have been a worthwhile goal to focus energies on.

So I recommended the first one as a rental only. This one doesn't even really rate that, unless your desperate. It's not unplayably bad, but it's not better than the original.

On the other hand next week is both Crackdown and Supreme Commander for PC. I've already ordered Crackdown and I have high hopes for Supreme Commander - I was a huge Total Annihilation fan back in the day. Of course TA: Four Kingdoms wasn't that great and I don't have any friends who are likely to want to try Supreme Commander online but we'll see. And I do have some luscious new PC hardware to spin games on . . . .

technorati tags:gaming