Category Archives: Books

Little Brother

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Recently I drove home from Northampton to Abingdon. The most logical course for the final stage of the journey would have been to come down the A34 to the south Abingdon exit, then drive towards the town centre and home. A reasonable variant on this would have been to take the north Abingdon exit off the A34 and come anticlockwise round the ringroad. A most unusual and unpredictable variant – and the one I actually used – was to come off at the north exit, drive clockwise around the ringroad to the town centre, head due north again back towards the north exit and this time come anticlockwise round the other half of the ringroad. Essentially, I did a big sideways figure 8 (or an infinity sign, of course). Why? Well, if you must know I was listening to Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” and I wanted to get to the end. It’s designed to be listened to in one piece. I’ve done similar in the past for the William Tell Overture and other pieces of music.

And, well, why not? I’m a free responsible adult. I can take any route I like.

Now, supposing there was a number plate tracking system in place programmed to detect unusual traffic variations, and alert the cops who would subsequently turn up and ask me to prove I hadn’t been doing anything suspicious?

Thoughts brought to mind by reading Cory Doctorow‘s Little Brother. A book not without its flaws but still one that everyone should read.

About five minutes into the future, a terrorist atrocity in San Francisco kills thousands and the Department of Homeland Security (henceforth the DHS, always making me think of sofas) swings into action with a programme it has obviously had long prepared, just waiting for the right opportunity. A security clampdown begins on absolutely everyone except the right people, i.e. the terrorists. Caught up in this, purely by dint of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, is 17 year old Marcus, a techno-savvy geek without (frankly) many redeeming features. Justifiably angered at the illegal treatment he has received at the DHS’s mini-Guantanamo in San Francisco Bay, he decides to fight back.

The point isn’t to bring down the government or to encourage terrorism. The point is that the DHS has completely missed the point, mistaking looking busy and ideological enforcement for actual results. There is no evidence that terrorists are even in San Francisco at all after the attack, yet the crackdown continues. Meanwhile, with a bit of technical wizardry that anyone can pick up off the web, a kid without a political thought in his head can pull the wool over the DHS’s eyes. How much more likely are the real terrorists to get clean away with it?

The situation is not really a thousand miles from what actually happened after 9/11 and continues to happen today. Posters like this one are serious. (Posters like this one, however, are not – mostly.) Have you tried taking any photographs in public lately?

First, things I didn’t like.

Marcus is not a sympathetic character, though others will find him so – even some of my friends. He is a cocky techy geek who is heavily into games. Not my kinda guy. He can be bratty and immature. I assume this is characterisation rather than Doctorow’s own personality showing through, as Marcus makes mistakes and gets it wrong. He is in love with his own cleverness and can never see in advance that every victory he scores over the DHS will simply make them up the game a little more, thus cracking down even harder. After all, the DHS is run by humans too and they don’t like getting it wrong either. Thankfully, Marcus grows up.

There were times that the great cause Marcus et al were fighting for becomes distinctly cloudy. Sometimes it just seems they want to fight for the right to party and be selfish little brats. If Marcus is immature, the self-important rebellion-for-rebellion’s sake yoof movement that grows up around him is downright pathetic. There is a fine line to draw between responsible use of freedom and anarchy just because you can. Freedom of speech is not the freedom to shout “fire” in a crowded theatre, and I really don’t care who argues otherwise.

In Denver back in August, I witnessed an exciting confrontation between an American gent who called the Democrats socialists and an American lady who called the Republicans fascists. As the native of a continent with plenty of experience of both, I was thinking “rank amateurs, the lot of them”, but Americans get like that when they talk politics (okay, okay, Doctorow is Canadian). Someone in the novel who I’m pretty sure we’re meant to take seriously refers to “Gulag America” and that really annoys me. America at its worst under the current administration doesn’t begin to scratch the surface of the Gulag. Name calling is just babyish.

“Don’t trust anyone under 25!” becomes a major rallying call. What, and I’m expected to put the major decisions into the hands of children with 24 years or less life experience? Feel free to let the door handle hit you on the way out and leave a nice bruise. For the record, according to Wikipedia Doctorow is 37.

But let’s talk about where Little Brother, and Doctorow, and Marcus get it right. The technology – well, I take his word for it on the technology. At least I recognise the words he uses (Xbox, Microsoft, Linux) so I presume it’s sound. The minimum lesson to take home from this is that the younger generation will always be ahead of the older in finding new and clever ways to utilise technology. What impresses us is already old hat to the teenagers.

Above all I can’t fault the logic of Marcus’s critique of the system. He does the maths for us. Suppose, he says, you have a means of detecting terrorists that is 99% accurate? And you apply this to, say, a city like New York with a population of 20 million, to find a terrorist cell that will have only a handful of members? At 99% accuracy you are still going to accuse 200,000 people wrongly. And the DHS does not have a system anything like 99% accurate. No one does.

Thankfully, what carries the book past posturing and preaching to the converted is that the ending, mostly happy, is brought about by the actions of Marcus but ultimately is attributable to forces he has no control over. The rule of law is brought back to San Francisco’s streets but this time it is open, attributable, accountable law by grown-ups (yes, even those over 25) who know what they’re doing. And not even Marcus is exempt. As it should be.

I quite enjoy not being blown up by Al Quaeda and I’m very glad there are people out there whose job it is to see that I’m not. I accept that they may from time to time find it convenient to read my email without letting me know, or track my car’s movements by CCTV that read my licence plate. Let ’em.

Little Brother says that the old security maxim “those with nothing to hide have nothing to fear” is a lie. Actually, it’s technically true. However, everyone has a lot to fear if all that power, all that surveillance data is put into the hands of morons and empire builders. Ian Huntley and the 21/7 bombers were found out by surveillance and studying old records. I’m not against the concept. But what is needed isn’t more surveillance of absolutely everything, it’s intelligent surveillance of what we have available.

Here are the basic ground rules for using our astonishing technological abilities to keep ourselves safe and safeguard our liberties. First and foremost, there has to be the simple recognition that dissent and disagreement <> terrorism or treason. Unfortunately, a lot of politicians are unable to make this connection and they’re the ones meant to be in charge. In another context, I believe statistics show that teenagers from families which openly discuss sex matters are much more likely to go on to have responsible sex lives. Same thing. Just talking about something should never be a crime and school is where it should start.

Politicians and law enforcement officials must realise that the best way to radicalise people against you is to piss them off. You counter insurgency by winning hearts and minds. There has never been a revolution in a happy country. I’m referring here to the hearts and minds of the people, not the headline writers of the Daily Mail or the US equivalent. They may safely be excluded from any decision making process.
I require anyone with this kind of power over me to know and understand considerably more than I do. If someone can’t understand why I would add twenty minutes to my journey just to catch the end of a Pink Floyd album then that person should not be put in charge of surveilling me.

From those to whom much is given, much is expected. The people entrusted with power that could ruin lives must get it absolutely right, or else. One of Marcus’s friends is detained for no reason other than being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and kept there simply because it reaches the point where his release would be embarrassing. Now look me in the eye and tell me that isn’t the reason a lot of people are still held at Guantanamo. Or, indeed, just cast an eye over reports on the Menezes inquest. The public interest is not the same as saving the blushes of a red-faced politico. If you get it wrong, you are out.

But, they might cry, how can we possibly recruit people into the security services with that hanging over their heads? Well, it’s not that different to recruiting people into the armed forces on the understanding that someone might shoot them dead. It happens. Maximise your efforts to make sure that it doesn’t happen; but once it has, live with it. They expect us to put up with all kinds of crap for the privilege of not being bombed by terrorists. They might even expect us to lay down our lives ourselves, or at least not raise a fuss if they happen to gun down the wrong person. Expecting them in return to put their career on the line doesn’t seem such a hard thing to ask. It’s not as if they’re left in the library with a revolver and a glass of brandy any more.

I’ll close as I started, with a driving-related anecdote. I once gave Cory Doctorow a lift from the centre of Oxford down Botley Road to the train station. En route, a traffic camera snapped me and I got my first ever speeding ticket …

(For reference, see Farah Mendlesohn’s review.)

Bobbles

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Recently I revisited a pair of books I last read about 20 years ago: Vernor Vinge‘s The Peace War and Marooned In Real Time.

One is a sort-of sequel to the other and they are both linked by Vinge’s short story “The Ungoverned” (full text available). The underlying premise is one of those brilliantly simple ideas that make other authors scream “why not me??” The stories were written in the early/mid 80s. In 1997 scientists at California’s Lawrence Livermore laboratory invent a way of generating spherical and totally impervious forcefields known as bobbles. Bobbles weigh and mass the same as their contents, apparently they last forever, and once something has been bobbled it may as well be in a different universe. As not even light can get through, a bobble appears to us on the outside as a perfectly reflecting silver sphere. Anyone enclosed by a bobble, it is assumed, simply dies of asphyxiation.

The bureaucrats behind the project seize control and use the bobble effectively to take over the world. Armies, cities, submarines, nuclear missiles – anything can be bobbled at a whim. They relaunch themselves as the Peace Authority and, as they see it, end the era of war. Of course, it’s not quite as simple as that. The chaos of the takeover unleashes plagues and further wars that kill billions … but at the end of it all, the Peace Authority is in overall charge. It’s a dictatorship that tries so hard to be benign but is inevitably corrupted – not just by its power but, as Aung San Suu Kyi has put it in a different context, by the fear of losing power.

Being bureaucrats more than researchers they never looked too closely at their new toy. The Peace War is set 50 years after the takeover and a few unexpected surprises become apparent. Like, bobbles don’t last forever. The early, crude bobbles generated by the Peace Authority will burst after … well, about 50 years, plus or minus. (By the end of the novel, a new generation of technology can generate bobbles on demand for any length of time, to order.) And they don’t just enclose their contents. Bobbles are stasis fields. Time stops inside them too. You come out exactly as you went in.

There are interesting implications to this …

Marooned in Real Time takes place about 50 or perhaps several million years after the first book, depending on your viewpoint. After the fall of the Peace Authority, bobble technology comes into its own. Farmers can sow crops at any time and then bobble them up until the right weather comes along. Deep space explorers only have to worry about getting into orbit; after that they bobble their ships and use nuclear explosions to propel them to their destination. Investors plant a small fortune, bobble up and come out when their deposit has earned enough interest. And one unfortunate policeman is panic-bobbled for 10,000 years by his leading suspect. When his bobble finally bursts he, like everyone else who was bobbled through the 23rd century (about 600 people, all told) has somehow missed out on the total extinction of humanity. Worthy souls are trying to bundle all the survivors together and reboot the human race, and our friendly cop suddenly finds his services in demand again. Because, during a 100 year leap forward for the community of survivors, someone is effectively murdered by being deliberately stranded outside the bobble. Thus, marooned in real time.

It’s interesting how time and memory plays games with you. I remember both books as being an enjoyable rollicking ride. I loaned The Peace War to Bonusbarn and was quite surprised when he gave up on it as boring. And now …

Okay, I can see his point. Maybe I just skipped through the boring bits first time around. Marooned in Real Time is really quite a gripping detective and adventure story, but The Peace War takes a long time to get going and is quite confusing at the start. This is all because of what I totally missed 20 years ago, or just failed to remember in the meantime. The whole brilliant bobbles idea is just a framework for Vinge to hang his main thoughts on: speculation about technological process getting to a point where individuals have more power than governments, thus making governments redundant; and ultimately leading to the Singularity, the point where progress increases so exponentially fast that the lines on the graph just shoot off into the far distance and what happens becomes unknowable.

Hmm. I won’t comment any further on this except to say that I honestly can’t think of any circumstances where I would trust a bunch of technologically advanced American libertarians to do the right thing over a representative government. No offence, just saying. That’s beside the point. Of late Vinge has been writing books and stories set in the relatively, attainably near future, all getting closer and closer to the Singularity. He has no doubt it’s in our future. These books will either prove bang-on prophetic, or be so embarrassingly out that no one will read them 10 years from now.

If it weren’t for the bobbles then The Peace War and Marooned In Real Time would already be in the latter category. They would have got a few polite handclaps, some appreciative critical notice and that would be it. But the bobbles are what make these books last. Such a simple idea. Such a good one.

Git.

Every few years, Vinge writes a book that is utterly, utterly brilliant. Then he goes away again, with an attitude of “right, SF community, here are your good ideas for the next decade or so. Do what you will with them, and then I’ll write another one a few years down the line.” You could hate him, except that he does it so well.

The Best of Ben

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At last available in print! And thanks to my lovely wife for suggesting the title.

Well, Christmas is on the horizon, I’m poised to make it big in the US (a posture I’ve been maintaining for about 10 years but I live in hope) and I enjoyed the exercise. The definitive Ben Jeapes short story collection is now available in one handy volumecosting a snip at $11.01.

Or, if you like, you can just go to my web site and read them for free.

Hmm. I start to see why marketing was always Big Engine’s Achilles heel.

This is a self-publishing venture through lulu.com. For the benefit of readers who get confused by various critical views I have expressed in the past on self/vanity publishing, here’s the introduction to the volume. Think of it as value added. You’re welcome.

“Approach a self-published book with caution. This is a self-published book, so you have been warned.

Normally, when you see a book in a bookshop, this is what has happened. The author sent that book to a publisher that liked it. (It might have been sent to several publishers first who didn’t like it. If that happened then the author might have worked on the story again to improve it, and become a better author as a result.) The publisher’s editor and the author will have worked together to make it even better. The publisher then paid the author and produced the book at its own expense, confident that it would get all that money back from sales. That’s a big vote of confidence.

However, a self-published book has not been sent to a publisher (or if it has, the publisher turned it down). The author has never had to improve the story. The only money that has been risked is the author’s own. The author thinks the book is pretty good – but what else would you expect? Why should you believe him?

This is a self-published book.

On the other hand, every story here – except one, and we’ll come to that – has been through the process described above. It has been accepted by a book or a magazine editor, who worked with me to make it as good as possible, and paid me and produced the magazine or book at their own expense. So, people other than me have believed in these stories and thought they were worth reading. I’m still the one who thinks they could work as a book collection and I take full responsibility (but offer no refunds) if you think my judgement was out.

I’ve sold 18 stories in my time, published between 1990 and 1998. Two of these were to Dr Who collections and so they don’t belong to me, they belong to the publishers of the collections. The remaining sixteen are collected here for the first time. There is also a seventeenth story here, which has been to not one but several editors, and worked on (and worked on, and worked on) but never actually published. It may be rubbish. It may not. This is only my opinion speaking, after all. But I won’t tell you which one it is yet – I wouldn’t want to prejudice you before you read it.

I wasn’t sure what order to put the stories in. I honestly can’t remember the order they were written in. It would be nice to think that if you read the stories in publication order then you could trace my development as a writer, but that would also be completely false. A writer’s style – if he’s doing it properly – changes every time he makes a sale, based on the experiences he has had, the feedback, and what else he has read and written in the meantime. There are also large gaps in the process; for instance, ‘Pages Out of Order’ dates back to at least 1990, but was sold in 1994 and published in 1997. I wrote and sold plenty of other stuff in those gaps.
Then I thought of putting them in alphabetical order, or grouping them by style, or doing it in order of length … In the end, I just put everything into a ‘this feels right’ sort of order. If it doesn’t work – well, that’s my fault again.

If the stories were in order of being written, it would be interesting to track my increasing confidence in the use of what maiden aunts might call Language. There are occasional mild uses of Language here and there; it’s heaviest in ‘Go with the Flow’. ‘A Holiday on Lake Moskva’ also contains scenes of implied pre-marital intercourse, so only show them to your aunt if you’re absolutely certain she isn’t a maiden. If she loves you, she won’t mind you asking.”