Reading

Thoughts about something I’ve recently read.

Scott Westerfeld’s “Pretties”

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Nov 032005
 

I like juvie novels. “Juvie” is a term from the ghetto world of science fiction and fantasy, where it refers to books intended for a young adult audience–stuff in the tradition of Andre Norton, Heinlein’s Have Spacesuit, Will Travel, and so on. The nice thing about juvies in genre fiction is that they don’t do a lot of talking down on the stuff that really matters.

Cory Doctorow turned me on to Scott Westerfeld‘s stuff when he stayed at my place during ETECH this year. So I went and got one of his books. Then three more. Now I’ve got all of them, I think.

Westerfeld’s stuff is highly readable; I confess that I grabbed two books to carry around with me, this one and Ted Castronova’s new tome Synthetic Worlds, and sorry Ted, but this is the one I ended up reading at 1am last night.

More importantly, though, Westerfeld tackles interesting issues. In So Yesterday he delved into the world of cool-hunting and more importantly, the ecology of cool, wondering whether as cool becomes commodified, what sort of people it takes to keep generating fresh ideas. In Peeps he creates a thoroughly plausible explanation for vampirism-as-biological-trait, carried by a variety of creatures in a manner similar to flu. His Midnighters series is about a group of teens who literally can live in the witching hour, during which everything else in the world is frozen–except the ancient magical beings that humanity forced out of the world back in prehistoric days, and which have shaped most of our superstitions and religions ever since.

In Uglies and its sequel Pretties Westerfeld imagines a post-apocalyptic world (the old oil-eating bacteria being the McGuffin this time) in which society has been re-engineered to turn “uglies”–meaning “normals”–into perfectly beautiful people when they turn sixteen. They also turn into basically the right sort of citizen for the society that is being engineered–docile and responsible (after a teenage-to-twenties period in which they are allowed to be as thrill-seeking and frivolous as they want). Naturally, every young teen can’t wait to be Pretty–but some people just aren’t that sort of person.

The books have a lot to say about the ways in which body image affects our perception of people, the ways in which attractiveness can sometimes enable a person to succeed when they otherwise wouldn’t, and also about the ways in which rebellion is important but may also be damaging to society as a whole. Our heroine, Tally Youngblood, keeps trying to rebel and do the “cool” thing, which eventually becomes the “right” thing, but also keeps interfering in matters beyond her control. Despite all the portrayal of the true “adults” of the world (the Specials) as lupine, insectlike, sharp-toothed, and so on, you can’t help but have a sneaking suspicion that they are also living ina world which Tally doesn’t really understand.

Part of why these books catch my attention is that the transition from Uglies to Pretties is also very much the transition from real life to virtual. In a lot of ways, the story Tally goes through is the story that players go through in online spaces. Maybe that makes the admins the specials. That must explain the sharp teeth.

The Wisdom of Crowds

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Nov 012005
 

I just finished The Wisdom of Crowds. Thanks to Jamie Fristrom for turning me on to it.

Those of us who have been watching groups of MMO players already knew, of course, that the aggregated intelligence of large groups can be awesome and frightening. Those who have watched the burgeoning genre of Alternate Reality Games know that the players in those games can solve deeply complex problems cooperatively.

But that’s not the sort of problem-solving that this book is discussing.

In those other cases, it’s the presence of a wide array of specialists that generally makes the difference. In Surowiecki’s world, it’s the presence of a wide array of people, period, that allows startlingly accurate assessments to come forth.

Ask one person to guess how many jelly beans in a jar, and they’ll prove fairly unskilled–even if they are a jelly bean expert (the most notable quality of the jelly bean expert will be that they will overestimate their accuracy).

Take a crowd of random people, ask them all to guess, then average the results, and somehow you’ll get an answer that is remarkably accurate. Like, within a couple percentage points.

In other words, SirBruce should quit trying to get developers to leak numbers to him; he’d probably get more accurate results by just asking everyone who comes to the site to provide an answer, then averaging the results.

The problems with this sort of approach, of course, are that people influence each other. When monolithic blocks appear within the group, you’ll start to get inaccuracies. When apparently authoritative sources of information start broadcasting their impressions of reality, it’ll distort the result. The results in markets are bubbles and crashes. The result, perhaps, in democracies, is ideological partisanship.

Based on my reading of the book, the sorts of problems that this collective wisdom solves are complex but limited. A huge amount of the examples in the book involve examples exactly like the jelly beans–quantitative assessment. The bulk of them can be divided into

  • coordination problems, which are essentially forms of self-organizing behavior, many of which seem to echo the power-law observations in books such as The Tipping Point or my personal favorite explanation of small worlds phenomena, Albert-Laszlo Barabasi’s Linked. (Got email from him today, I need to reply… hmm.< ---gratuitous name-drop.)
  • cooperation problems which largely echo discussions about tit-for-tat strategies, trust networks, etc.

One thing where I was left hanging was whether or not this wisdom of crowds phenomenon can assist with creative problems. After all, the repeated creative story is very different from what is described in this book; it usually involves intersecting disciplines or schools of thought, and then someone who essentially integrates things. Breakthrough products are often created by teams that are very much infected by groupthink–what in this book is decried is described as an effective way to create a skunkworks team in Peopleware.

All in all, this is a valuable read that may well illuminate many aspects of decisions you see taken around you, the nature of leadership, and so on, but I’d definitely want to put it in context with other worldviews before letting it take on too much significance in your daily life. These days are exciting, because it seems like every few months or years, we get another good, solid description of a chunk of the elephant; but as usual, the way the world works is proving to be quite like the pachyderm of the fable: hard to describe except in isolate pieces.

Melancholy Baby

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Oct 292005
 

If the Spenser books are largely about the way in which the lead characters’ interior lives are hidden away, the Sunny Randall books (and Jesse Stone books, for that matter) are about revealing interior lives. Half of Melancholy Baby consists of Sunny’s sessions with special guest star Susan Silverman from the Spenser books–during therapy. I finished it on the airplane back from the AGC, when I wasn’t comatose.

The Sunny Randall books have never really clicked with me as much as the Spenser books; just as the Jesse Stone books can seem too bleak, the Sunny books seemed too facile, somehow. Sunny came across to me as Spenser in a skirt. That’s no longer the case. Parker is a very good writer, not just on the level of snappy dialogue (he’s one of the best dialogue writers I’ve seen) but in his most recent books, at characterization. While perhaps not up to the level of Gunman’s Rhapsody, this one, as with his last Spenser book, is digging deep and hitting hard in places. The overall effect is of a writer who has moved beyond series detective novels, and now uses genre as a skeleton on which to hang novels of character.

A snicket, a snacket

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Oct 252005
 

Gotta love a children’s book that quotes from Richard Wright’s Native Son.

Who knows when some slight shock, disturbing the delicate balance between social order and thirsty aspiration, shall send the skyscrapers in our cities toppling?

Appropriate to read on the day that Rosa Parks passes away.

That said, The Penultimate Peril is perhaps not as important a book as Native Son, but it does delve into some weighty topics for a kid’s book. The Lemony Snicket series is worth reading for the sheer love of language and literature, the wicked humor, the tricksy clues dropped on practically every page–and now, it’s worth reading for its inquiries into the nature of heroism, nobility, and responsibility, believe it or not.

I know a few parents who won’t have their kids read these books because they are too dark. This makes no sense to me. Some of the questions that it poses can only be asked in the darkness (TINY spoiler that likely won’t make much sense):

Violet, Klaus, and Sunny wondered about all the things, large and small, that they had done… they wondered if they were still the noble volunteers they wanted to be, or if… it was their destiny to become something else. The Baudelaire twins stood in the same boat as Count Olaf, the notorious villain, and looked out at the sea, where they hoped they could find their noble friends, and wondered what else they could do, and who they might become.

Only one more book to go in a series that I’d rank up there with L’Engle, Lloyd Alexander, Dahl, and other such as a real classic. And hooray for HarperCollins for giving them the presentation they deserve, too–books to keep as keepsakes.

Hunting witches

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Oct 242005
 

I discovered Ian Rankin whilst in Edinburgh on a business trip. We had a lot of spare time, which is unusual on one of those trips, and Russ & I wandered all over downtown, checking out music shops, bookstores, and all the various historical sites (though we managed to miss out on a few, I found out later).

While in a bookstore, I was taken aback to find a whole shelf devoted to Ian Rankin, of whom I had never heard. Upon discovering that he was a writer of what might be called “hardboiled police procedurals” sort of in the vein of Michael Connelly, I picked up the first three books in the Inspector Rebus series to read on the flight home. Soon as I landed, I went on Amazon and ordered all of them.

Witch Hunt is out in paperback… I bought it in hardcover as soon as it came out, though, and finished it today while sitting in the doctor’s office. Yes, I’m a bit behind.

So how is it? Well, it’s not up to the level of Resurrection Men, not quite, despite a great ending. Of course, Rankin’s had many books over which to develop Rebus’ character (remember when he was into jazz? Somewhere along the line, it morphed into 60s rock ‘n’ roll). Here, the characterization feels rushed; splitting the main plot across so many protagonists (I count four seperate detectives, only two of whom have anything approaching an emotional arc) has weakened the power of his writing, despite a truly wonderful last paragraph that does reach for a satisfying conclusion and barely makes it.

Still, quite good. The setting is London this time, not Edinburgh, so I didn’t end up with my usual keen desire to go back. I really liked that city.

When I got home, I found the new Lemony Snicket waiting in the mailbox. Of course, there will be thirteen books in this series. How could it have been otherwise?

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