Fuschia schtick

[hirez]

The fallout from an attack of shopping earlier in the week continues to settle.

A lot less like the radioactive ash my generation were led to expect; re-watching Wargames (as distinct from The Wargame) from the vantage point of a post-wall Europe was a cheerful dose of brown suits, 8" floppies, reasonably accurate hackerdom and cold-war nuke paranoia that unfolded into the space in my head where Plutonium Blondes and F-111s used to live. Protest and Survive. A lot more like breeze-blocks carelessly lobbed from twenty minutes into the future.

I'm mid-way through Accelerando. It's, um, excitable. The sugared-up Cory Doctorow, even. The problem with wheelbarrow-loads of Gibsonian near-future tech is that it dates significantly faster than the subjective march of real time. (I was going to mumble on about phrases like 'sun-bleached concrete apartment complex' being essentially Ballardian and on one hand hard to generate (At least for me), but on the other acting like the self-expanding viral payloads I've gibbered about before. I would guess that one fact is related to the other. Meanwhile, phrases like 'Lebanese boy-band' or 'one-shot Kosovan railgun' could be generated by a Perl script. As indeed could 'self expanding viral payload', which was about the moment I realised such mumbles are essentially pointless.) However, it's Stross at the controls, so there's a plot and a set of people with relationships that don't remind a chap that he's reading a work of fiction every five minutes.

Meanwhile, and bearing in mind that much of Accelerando revolves around future shock, it was particularly bloody odd to be in the shop of Lush (and therefore breathing carefully through my ears so as to avoid an attack of the vapours) and watching a no.1-cut and be-tracksuited pre-teen chap unselfconsciously purchase a handful of lip-balm and face-gunge. My reaction (surprise, a sense of recursive horror at that reaction) was the odd one. It marked me out as being as mired in the Hai-Karate generation as my parents are mired in the Old Spice one.

Ye Gods. Ain't that a kick in the head.

Comments

[red-mel.livejournal.com]

Happy new year, you are a proper grown up now xx

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Proper gown up? Run while you still can.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Good. It's a storming book.

[fross.livejournal.com]

haven't got into accelerando yet, gave it a couple of tries. i think i already commented on the atrocity archives in your lj before. for all the problems i had with it i'd be happy to read another one. maybe i'll give accelerando another crack.

and i'm glad i'm not the only one who remembers that the hacker portrayal in wargames is really spot on for what it was like in the early 80s (or the late 80s in slowpoke europe, at any rate!)

[spride.livejournal.com]

> Meanwhile, phrases like 'Lebanese boy-band' or 'one-shot Kosovan railgun' could be generated by a Perl script.


ROAR!

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Ta.

Mind, should 'imself pull a swift Kibo, I should note that I'm just under halfway into the book now and it's turning into a bit of a blinder.

I think I read one too many Gibsonian try-hards (WJ Williams, for instance) and That Sort Of Thing sets off my 'Oh for heaven's sake' detector.

[spride.livejournal.com]

I think I've been lucky not to have read too many Gibsalikes, having been diverted into Neal Stephenson at the 'Snow Crash' mountpoint and have deviated faithfully into the 17th Century with him now. I suspect coming the encomiast for The Baroque Cycle is otiose in your case, but just in case, I commend Quicksilver/The Confusion/The System of the World - a foot of shelf space between 'em, and huge numbers of history-of-sci-and-tech injokes and rib-jolting anachronisms.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

I think it may be early vs. late-model Stross. Iron Sunrise, Atrocity Archives (Keep wanting to call it 'The atrocity exhibition', but that's just my influences showing) and The Family Trade are all fine things that fell into my head in eerily familar way. In that in reading a lot of authors, there's an n-page period of impedence matching while you and the writing-johnny try to find some storytelling common ground. (In the case of Ballard, abandoning yourself to the internal logic of his stories is a great deal of the fun. Though remembering to reconnect to the 'real' world afterwards is usually a good idea.) With Mr. Stross at the controls, that doesn't need to happen. I don't wonder if that isn't strongly correlated with a hacker mindset. It's very odd. Like that mental rollercoaster thing when one's effortlessly creative for sustained periods of time. (Fuck. Now there's a psychoactive that would change the world...)

(Dear lord, if he ever reads this I'll be horrified...)

Hackery. Yes. The university geeks were spot on, as was the whole monomaniac breaking-into-the-machine section. Never mind food or sleep when there's an interesting problem to be solved.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

I waded through Quicksilver a while back. (I should give the tome back to jarkman) Fine stuff, but the above-mentioned impedance matching took a while.

[fross.livejournal.com]

the problem i had with stross (or at least with the atrocity archives, not sure about the rest of his material) was the cramming in of buzzwords, i found it distracted from the immersiveness. which is saying something as i can blip over most of them quite happily being familiar with them, of course, but sometimes it felt like reading a copy of Wired magazine or, at worst, an RFC. His characterisations and plots and locations are fine, but it felt almost like product placement with all the specific mentions of tech wizardry and so forth.

[fross.livejournal.com]

another one my bookmark has been firmly entrenched in at about page 80 for several months now.

Floppy disks

[jendama.livejournal.com]

Speaking of floppy disks, I recently saw several of them made into notebooks and journals (assorted sizes) with the use of a spiral binder machine. The creator inserted pictures into the center hole for a bit of color. If you have a ton of old floppy disks and a spiral binder at work, this could be a great craft project. This (http://www.scrapsofpaper.net/) is the closest I could find but the ones I saw were much better.

[reddragdiva]

I'm sure I've mentioned enough times how Perth is Vermilion Sands, so there's little point in bothering to reconnect as such.

[reddragdiva]

WJ Williams? Rilly? What did you think of Aristoi? I was considerably impressed — it didn't make me imagine the social context of the novel's writing even once, which is quite an achievement with any post-New Wave SF I read these days.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Pass. I steamed through Hardwired and it was just... Like someone had taken all the set-dressing from Neuromancer and Count Zero, mixed it in a bucket and made a story from the result: Big guns, armoured hovercraft (useless bloody things), a street ninjette, drug-hoovering hero, social conditions to give capitalists stiffys and rich people in orbit. It was the 'cyber' equivalent of some sub-Heinlein Hornblower-in-space.