Tim Danner

This morning I finished listening to Paul reading “Tk’tk’tk“, a sci-fi short story by David Levine about an enterprise software salesman on an alien world far from home. It’s currently nominated for a Hugo. I enjoyed the story (you can also read it online), and Paul’s presentation of it was clear and well done.

The story involves an alien language that lacks vowels, so it’s full of unpronouncable words like “Fthshpk” (a holiday) and “thshsh” (a beverage). To record these words for the story, Paul added sufficient long vowels to make them pronouncable, then the producer used an audio editor to delete the vowel sounds, leaving only the sibilant consonants. The effect works very well - it gives the idea of a non-human language while still being sort of recognizable, at least in the sense that when you hear the same word twice you can tell that it’s the same word again. It helps that there aren’t too many alien words included in the story text.

If this is an indicator of the quality of the rest of the Escape Pod recordings (Paul tells me that it is actually “weaker than their normal fare”), then I expect to be a regular listener.

The “Ministry of Reshelving” has declared a campaign to move 1984 from the Fiction or Literature section to the Current Events or Politics sections. Very silly. They even have printable bookmarks that you can stick in the books that you move and notecards to put in the spot you took them from.

Yesterday I finished reading Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle. It was great fun and a worthy successor to Cryptonomicon, though I can’t, at this point, say whether it advanced my understanding of history or gummed it up with fiction. I feel like I should get a prize or something for getting through all 3,000 pages of it.

I finished Kiln People last night. I liked it, but then I like pretty much everything David Brin writes, except perhaps when he’s trashing Star Wars. That said, I rate it my least favorite of his books. The problem seems to be the switching among the various incarnations of Morris. Not that it’s confusing, just that it makes the story drag. And the whole “world conciousness” thing at the end was more annoying than it was in Earth. But you do have to give him some credit for building a novel around a premise that’s well off the beaten path of mainstream sci-fi.

Last night I also finished reading Neverwhere. This is only the second book I’ve read by Neil Gaiman, and the first was Good Omens. Since that was cowritten with Terry Pratchett, it has a very different feel. Neverwhere is not a funny book, though it does have a few laughs here and there. It’s a character book, and I recommend it.

What impressed me most about the book was how Gaiman leads the reader to track Richard’s own feelings about his surroundings. Starting with the shock and disgust about being pulled into and trapped in London Below, through a growing connection with and respect for its people, to finally a feeling of alienation on return to London Above, the reader (well, I did anyway) feels the same way about the world in the narrative as Richard does. That’s cool.

If this were made into a Hollywood movie (it’s already a BBC miniseries), Croup and Vandemar would be played by John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson. Or not.

Neverwhere comes of course from a long line of novels in which a fantasy world exists beside the “real world,” accessible through some strange portal - The Wizard of Oz, Through the Looking Glass, The Chronicles of Narnia, etc. This is in contrast to the other two major ways of setting up a fantasy world: embed it in the real world, but make it secret, as in Harry Potter and Buffy the Vampire Slayer; or just dispense with the real world entirely and set your novel in fantasy without reference to the contemporary mundane, as in The Lord of the Rings and essentially all science fiction, which generally relegates the mundane to the near or far past to make way for the [dys|u]topian future.

Also, it made me want to visit London.