Phase 14: Really, wind? In my face both directions? And on a Monday!
The Book: This was my first real detour into the lesser
known (to me) depths of the fantasy genre. Mostly I've stuck to the well-known
stuff, Tolkien and Martin. I've always had it in my head that everything in the genre is ultimately derivative of Tolkien anyway, so what would be the point of
reading inferior versions of the same basic tale? This opinion was at first
refuted by the fantastic Game of Thrones books, but then more recently
confirmed when I read (okay, listened to) the first half of The Eye of the World, which was ridiculously
(offensively! preposterously!) similar to The Fellowship of the Ring. But once
again, the limits of the library’s Overdrive catalog left me with no choice but to
try Lois McMaster Bujold’s The Curse of Chalion. Which was fine. My experience with
Gormenghast – which I don’t consider to be a fantasy series at all - has encouraged
me to branch out a bit from my initial “sci-fi or die” constraints for this
audiobook blog project. So, it turns out I love The Curse of Chalion, particularly the main character
Caz and his steadfast humility, his dependability, and his unflappable
goodness. I thought of this story as nice counterpoint to the Game of Thrones epic,
which now seems like a post-modern take on the fantasy genre, the way it plays
against every convention, with its lack of heroes, ambiguous morality, its
justicelessness, its absence of Chivalry, and total disregard for such things
as romance and happy endings. In light of this, The Curse of Chalion felt
delightfully old-school. It’s small, simple,
occasionally brutal, often sweet, and you read it with a genuine sense that things
will resolve themselves tidily. It focuses on wholesome things like gratitude
and service. And it’s also very clean and chaste, which is surprisingly
refreshing after experiencing Martin’s crude treatment of sex, or the way
sci-fi writers like Peter F. Hamilton so often cram in unnecessarily graphic
and painfully awkward depictions of futuristic humans getting it on. I liked
the fact that the dirtiest thing there is in The Curse of Chalion is a passing
reference to a concealed erection. This isn’t a book to change your life, or cause
you to petition HBO to turn it into a mini-series, but it’s well-written,
well-plotted, addictive and weird. And it raises the fundamental question we
all ponder in our lives: what if the soul of your defeated mortal enemy took
refuge in your gut, where it festered and raged like a depraved sentient
cancer?
The Ride: I pass through many different municipal districts and
jurisdictions on my bike commute. Each one is responsible for maintaining their
own section of the bike path or road. Since I started riding to work much of my
route has been rebuilt, repaved, repainted, or repaired. Frequent winds along
the path bring sand and debris, which sits there until someone decides to send
a crew out to move it. You can learn a lot about a town or a country by
studying the quality of the bike path, and how it’s maintained after a big
wind. I move from freshly applied black asphalt into a sea of dunes, then out
again onto swept concrete, into fields of palm trunk husks, then onto more
dunes, a gauntlet of broken glass and razor sharp mussel shells, over sections
made bumpy by subterranean tree roots, onto slick new city streets. You learn the
ups and downs, the grooves and bumps and little minefields. Most interesting of
these obstacles are the sand dunes. Because the sand on the path is dry, most
passing bikers fail to carve out a trench to the asphalt. Sand gets pushed back
and forth, without a clear thoroughfare ever developing. So I’m pedaling along and
there’s a mini-dune of indeterminate length on the path ahead, and I have to
decide; do I take it slow and steady and risk losing momentum and steering, and
end up dismounting or wiping out at an embarrassingly low speed, or do I pedal as
hard as I can and hit the obstruction with the goal of forcing my will upon the
sand, and risk losing steering and wiping out for real, with all the attendant
consequences? Making the correct decision requires the evocation of a paradox
that has confounded me since I was two years-old and put on my first pair of
skis: the faster you go, the more control you have. It’s certainly counterintuitive, not to mention dangerous. But it’s interesting to expand this
basic tenant of physics to the larger world, which is somehow more manageable,
and you yourself become more functional and effective, if you accelerate into
danger. If you slow down and try to micromanage a situation, you often
flounder. It’s the old “pitch it, don’t aim it” scenario. Certain physical
realities in our world seem to intentionally push us out of our comfort zones,
into danger, where moments take on greater significance. Kids who are bored in
school think inaction is the solution; they don’t want to be there so they do
nothing. In reality, the cure for boredom is action. The kid who truly hates
school should work at it, so time passes more quickly. The way out, is in. A
nice side effect is all the learning that takes place while that student is
just trying to beat the clock. It’s sort of all the same thing, isn't it? So I
hit the dunes full speed and barrel through upright and unharmed, for now…
Phase 15: End of Daylight Savings = sunrise and sunset, five commutes a week
Phase 15: End of Daylight Savings = sunrise and sunset, five commutes a week
Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold
The book: This is the sequel to The Curse of Chalion. But it
doesn’t continue the events from the first book; rather, it tells a new story
with a new protagonist. I was at first disappointed, because really loved Caz,
the hero of the first book. Now, instead of a continuation of his story, I
found myself forced to hear about Ista, some crazy lady who had a very minor
role in the first book. I didn't enjoy this book as much, even though I
eventually came to appreciate Ista every bit as much as I did Caz. What I didn't like was how much the story relied on its own universe’s somewhat abstract and
arbitrary natural (and unnatural) laws. As a reader, you don’t know what is
possible and what isn't. Therefore, when a problem arises, or a mystery
develops, you can’t make assumptions or predictions because you don’t know what
the rules of the game are. If a bunch of people get trapped in a castle and are
slowly dying of starvation, you don’t know if someone might just summon up some
food out of nowhere, or if a god will magically make everyone’s belly full, or
if the enemy will be smitten down by some character’s discovery of a secret
ability. Anything can happen, so there’s nothing clever about how problems are
solved. Every time you think you understand the protagonists gifts, she
suddenly has a conversation with a god and realizes she can do even more cool
stuff than she thought she could. That
said, I still liked the book for many of the same reasons I liked its
predecessor. The story telling is direct and economical. Everything that
happens relates to the ultimate conclusion. There are no wasted moments or
characters. Everything is neat and tidy. All the messes get cleaned up,
everyone finds their intended mate, the bad guys are either vanquished or
forgiven, and the gods can relax and go back to whatever it is they do when
they’re not preoccupied with human fallibility. I don’t read very many books
like this, with nary an ironic twist, a random act of depravity, or a character
who doesn't get exactly what he or she deserves in the end. There’s a third
book in the series, but I think I've had enough of this good clean fun. I need
more nerded-out space sex and less magic.
The Ride: Whether it’s the start of a tough day at work, or
the end of a long one, I often daydream about a less complicated and less
stressful existence. I’ll do things like watch seagull standing on the beach as
I ride my bike to work, and think, those guys don’t have to do anything today.
They have no responsibilities, no deadlines, no performance reviews. No inane
conversations. They just sit there or fly around. They eat from the bounty of
the ocean (and the beach trash cans). And that’s it. A beautiful simple life.
Of course any seagull would be happy to tell me it’s not all wine and roses. I
get that. I also do the same thing with people, or specifically, with their
occupations. During my ride to and from work I pass numerous people who are “on
the job”, spending their work-hours engaged in far more satisfying, less
stressful, activities than what I do. There are the physical trainers and yoga
instructors, the lifeguards, the surf coaches, the garbage men, the delivery
drivers, the road construction crews, etc. But there are two jobs in particular
I observe with a genuine, somewhat absurd longing. First is the power washer.
This is the guy with the wand that shoots pressurized water at the ground to
remove dirt and grime and gum. I've used a power washer before on a job years
ago, and I've used a similar device at a do-it-yourself car wash. I find the whole experience to be aesthetically
satisfying on some core level. In this case I really couldn't say if it’s just
me, or if everyone gets a kick out of feeling the jolt of pressure shoot out at
the ground, washing away the sins of the weekend, leaving glimmering virginal
concrete. I could do it eight hours a day. Ten hours. Twelve. It could be some
kind of Freudian hyper-ejaculatory fantasy. Or not. I don’t know. But it’s deep
in there. When I see these guys I try to really look at them, to see if there’s
evidence of a primal fulfillment. Usually there isn't. And not only do these
guys get to man the pressure hose all
day long, they also get to wear these crazy big rubber boots. The other job I
see during my ride, is the sand cleaner. This is the guy who drive a tractor
across the beach, pulling some device that rakes and cleans the sand, leaving a
smooth uniform surface that reminds me of fresh powder snow. The appeal of this
job is similar to that of the power washer, with a lawn-mowing component I relate to as
well, having worked as a landscaper for years. I love the way the tractor lays
down a smooth clean line, and then lays down another on his next pass, right next to the previous one. And
then another and another. I love the uniformity, the systematic approach. When
he’s done the beach is all neat and tidy (I must be going through my neat and tidy phase). It’s litter-free, seaweed-free, even
seagull poop –free. It’s all so damn satisfying. And the guy driving this
tractor gets to spend his whole day at the beach, every day. It probably pays
little more than minimum wage, but in
many ways it’s my dream job.
Phase 16: Cops punishing homeless guys by impounding their unlicensed dogs
Phase 16: Cops punishing homeless guys by impounding their unlicensed dogs
The Evolutionary Void by Peter F Hamilton
The Book: Back into space. Back home, actually, in many ways.
Peter F. Hamilton’s Commonwealth Saga is the heart and soul of this sci-fi bike
commute project. It’s where I began. And John Lee’s narration of this series
has warmth and familiarity that lets me settle down into my ride and just enjoy everything. This, unfortunately, is the last book available in
the series. I understand Hamilton is writing two more, but it will no-doubt be
a few years until they are available as audio books, and even then, there’s no guarantee
they’ll be available on Overdrive. I might be going back to Audible soon. In
any event, The Evolutionary Void wraps up the Void Trilogy, a richly imagined
space opera, full of clever ideas, fascinating technology, and just enough plausibility
to keep the whole thing grounded. It’s hard to separate this book from the
others. In fact, the whole Commonwealth Saga is really just one long book. I
would echo the complaints of many of Hamilton’s readers and say the ending isn't quite as satisfying as I would have liked it to be. I think this is a function
of the massive world building the author does, rather than a shortage of ideas.
There’s simply too much going on for it all to just come neatly together at the
end. Things get pretty abstract down the stretch and I’m not sure if you asked
me to explain what happened, if I even could. A couple times in the series
Hamilton has broken out of his normal narrative mode and experimented with
different ways of delivering his story. The brief history of
MorningLightMountain in Pandora’s Star, the Prime’s interrogation of Dudley
Bose, and the battle scene in The Evolutionary Void where Aaron reverts to his default
cybernetic survival mode, are all examples of non-traditional story telling that
give the reader a more immediate understanding of character and point-of-view. I
wish he did this sort of thing more. Something else I really liked about this
whole Commonwealth Saga is the fact that it really doesn't ever present itself
as a cautionary tale. I don’t know all that much about science-fiction writing,
but it seems that older, “golden age” writers had a point. Like you get in Star
Trek. This is what will happen if we do not evolve as a species. Hamilton’s
works, like many contemporary sci-fi books I've read, are more interested in speculating
about how technologies (immortality treatments and wormholes and that sort of thing) will drive the
human narrative. It’s kind of a Darwinist approach. This is what humans do. We
will always do it. We will evolve as a species only to the extent that it
serves out own individual interests.
The Ride: Speaking of
technology, there is one truly amazing gift from the future, that allows me to
fine tune the experience of riding to and from work, and allows me to alter
reality based on my mood, my interests, and my responsibilities. I’m talking
about Siri. I know Siri is useful in a number of different situations, but I
think she’s most helpful to a bicyclist. I use her to send text messages and
make calls, to change the music, to start and stop audio books, and take down
notes. The fact that I can do all of this hands-free, while pedaling along
is by far the most sci-fi thing I do all day. I mean, what’s more futuristic
than talking to a computer and having it do what you want it to? Smartphone and
microphone technology in general is pretty fantastic. I’m cruising along. “Call
my wife,” I say. Suddenly my audio book stops, my wife is talking through my
headphones. I talk without having to break stride or even adjust my head to
direct sound into a microphone. We talk. I pedal along. We hang up. The
audio book resumes. It’s crazy. I can ride my bike and speak into the air and
communicate in real time with someone on the other side of the planet if I
wanted to. My wife can put the phone up to my baby daughter’s mouth and I can
hear her weird noise-making just like I’m in the room with her. We take some of
these things for granted. The telephone itself is an incredible technology. But
something about using Siri and a headphone mic to communicate, all while riding a bike
on the beach is surreal. We live in incredible times.
Click here to read part VII: The Sci-fi Bike Commute goes to Mars!
Click here to read part VII: The Sci-fi Bike Commute goes to Mars!
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