Odd Jux

Right now, I am sitting back with a warm feeling of contented amusement percolating in me. Such moments do not last, but the memory can remain.

This feeling is upon me because I am contemplating two lovely hardback volumes sitting on the shelf together. The one on the left is a Subterranean Press collected edition of Barry Hughart's The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox; the one on the right is John Whitbourn's The Complete Binscombe Tales.

The first is a compendium of alarming novels about a China that never was; the second is a compendium of alarming short stories about an England that could very well be. Both overturn their respective myths with a good shot of common sense and a better shot of humour. Yet both are wildly fantastic.

How else to explain the continued survival of the evil Duke of Chin and assorted awful throwbacks to a distant and possibly imaginary suppressed Chinese past? How else to explain the horrified realisation that the return of Arthur would spell the doom of modern England — the Anglo-Saxons of the day being of course his worst enemies? And so it goes.

But what these two books really have in common is that they cater to the yearning in all of us for pasts that never were but could have been. Humans can't help but wonder about such things.

Emerging Disquisitions

The stuff the young people say is the usual stuff. It is fueled by frantic hormones and raging culture-savviness; genes and memes. It is the frenetic commentary of the young when faced by the tipping-point of the pendulum. You see, the older ones have seen the pendulum swing from A to B and back again; some older than that have seen this happen more than once. But the young have seen only the pendulum swing towards its nadir and twitch up again, and marvel at the change in direction.

Let me tell you a story.

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Once upon a time, there was a charming prince. His name was Sundark Anthony. He wasn't very handsome, but he was fabulously wealthy, and he was incredibly smart. And the thought came to him one year, as thoughts sometimes do, telling him, "Hey, why not make places where the rich, smart people (like yourself) can learn to be princes?"

But this was Atlantis, and Atlanteans need reasons. And statistics. And study committees, if possible. So the prince got his people together, and they had all these things, and they went to faraway places to collect those things they didn't have, and if I were to tell you all the things they really did and the meals they ate and the words they threw out of their reports, I would never get to the end of this story.

In their final report, they said that if you had something that was good, you could tell everyone that it was good, and make a fence of goodiness (yes, goodiness) around it, and call it goody goody good. Then it would be more good than any good. You could make people pay more for such goods.

A year later, there were seven dwarfs. Actually, there were eight, and they weren't really dwarfs. But whatever they were, they shared one thing in common. There was a lady named Mo, and whatever she told them to do, they did. Each in their own way, of course, but they did it.

Two of them spoke Neo-Classical Latin, and they were the Gambler's son and daughter. One spoke only Church Latin, and his name was Joe. Two wore blue and gold, but one wore jade and gold. One wore brown, and carried a flaming book. And the last was always clad in white. Four of them were male, and four were female, for the balance had to be maintained.

And they were to be fenced around with goodiness, and they would be more good than good, and everyone would come to them to learn how to be good. For if they were good to begin with, how much more goody would they be when they had been goodified?

The years passed, and those who were good were treated as good, and their children were told they were good, and everyone saw the signs of goodiness, and said, "Good! Good!" But honestly, a good look would have told you all you needed to know about looking good.

Sundark Anthony prospered, but he was getting older, and the white streak in his dark hair was getting whiter, and his belly was broadening. He was a very nice man, and a very clever man, but he wondered a lot about why his goody goody goodies were not really as goodified as he thought they would be. And he wondered those wonderful thoughts until he finally retired to his home on the crest of the hill.

But before he left all that behind, he had some provocative words with the managers of the goody estates. Or at least, some of them. And so, goodification gave way to greatification. Into greated programmes, to be exact, with nearly instantaneous greatification too.

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It is traditional to tell of wonders and youngest sons, dragons and magic swords, marvelous artifacts and flying ships, blue oceans and two-headed gryphons. However, you would never believe the whole story anyway, if I put all those things in. It is also traditional to wind the story down and say, "And they lived happily ever after." Yet I cannot bring myself to say it, because I don't think it has happened yet.

In fact, like a typical B&M case study, the eight goodies messed around a bit too much, got into bad ways, played with mergers and inquisitions, hired and fired, highered and lowered, went multinational (some say international), and in general created a story that sounded like a China that never was.

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I'm done for now. But I am going to tell the story of at least some of those goodies over the next few days.

Mandoon

Kröd Mändoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire has got to be one of the funniest things around right now. It needs to be made into a DVD quick so that you can get all the juicy goodness in ONE package. For at the moment, it is YouTube which is hosting most of it. Probably illegally.

This show is all about a hero. And his kinky girlfriend. And his malfunctioning warlock other friend. And the big oafish Journey to the West kind of servant friend who hits the wrong people with his weapon. And so on. It is otherwise hard to describe, unless you like snorting food.

In other news, not so funny at all, there's been an outbreak of swine flu, this season's version of SARS. I remember writing this huge document on contagious disease protocols in a boarding school setting back in 2003. Somewhere out there, someone probably ought to be dusting it off and looking at it soon.

A Blue Ocean Strategy

In the last few weeks, by some sort of synchronicity, I've met with many senior and junior members (associate, naturalised, affiliated, and many other kinds) of the College of Wyverns. The news coming out from there is about what seems to be called a 'blue ocean strategy'.

I haven't heard this ancient term for years. In Homer's Odyssey, he sings of the 'wine-dark sea', that complex melange of trading and naval relationships and rivalries that was the Aegean Sea of his time. (There's a great summary article about it here.)

The point about a blue ocean, as opposed to a wine-dark (or 'incarnadine', as Shakespeare puts it) one, is that a blue ocean has no rivalries or contentions and often no complex history. The perspective is that of a navigator and explorer who for the first time chances upon what seems to be a virgin sea.

In a blue ocean strategy, one actively seeks out areas in which one has uncontested supremacy (a famous school song has the line 'to reign supreme in every sphere', and that's a similar idea, but not quite). It is not really like de Bono's idea of surpetition, surpassing and bypassing the opposition by qualitative difference. It's more like a fantasy that doesn't work in a globalised world.

The problem of course is that of the Aegean; if you have many geographical neighbours (or conceptual neighbours), then the ocean is unlikely to be uncontested. You will waste endless resources until you get to something like the Pacific Ocean — only to discover that as you get further away from your civilised roots, you encounter other rivalries, problems and difficulties. You might even be killed and eaten by cannibals on friendly-looking islands.

Meanwhile, your lines of supply run short, and as you head westward (or eastward) for the fabled treasures of the Orient, you find yourself back at your starting place after much hardship. Then people who have learnt from your difficulties come along and do the same thing without the mistakes, thus ensuring larger profits for themselves.

Blue ocean strategising is a fairy-tale. Ask the Portuguese about the Treaty of Tordesillas, and who got a better deal. That treaty has had great relevance to the history of Asia, Africa and South America. But consider the long-term fate of Portuguese and Spanish sea-power. Heh.

Milton's 400th

This day marks the 400th anniversary of the birth of John Milton in 1608. Milton was a famous poet whose Paradise Lost is one of the seminal works of the English religious literature canon. In a literary sense, he was a precursor to Shakespeare; whereas Shakespeare was the first writer to consistently give his characters psychological dimensionality (intention, motivation, character and complexity), Milton did give it a shot, especially in his diabolical exegesis of the character of Satan.

But Milton isn't literature that every student of English comes across in this day and age, although I am sure many traditionalists would prefer it. It is sadly far more likely that the advice given to the unknown Terence should hold true:

Oh many a peer of England brews
Livelier liquor than the Muse,
And malt does more than Milton can
To justify God’s ways to man.
Ale, man, ale’s the stuff to drink
For fellows whom it hurts to think:
Look into the pewter pot
To see the world as the world’s not.
And faith, ’tis pleasant till ’tis past:
The mischief is that ’twill not last.

One wonders, however, if seeing "the world as the world's not" would do us any lasting mischief – or whether a little bit of fantasy might indeed be a useful coping strategy, profitably deployed as we build castles in the air as templates for an ideal future.

Reading Lists

The summer break is almost upon us (or in some cases, has already begun). Here are a couple of lists borrowed (rescued?) from a coffee shop menu. People who haven't visited that (now slightly disused and dilapidated) coffeeshop can still find interesting things there.

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~autolycus says:

1) Which 20 F&SF books would I replace first if my entire library disintegrated one night?
Note: This excludes graphic novels and excludes some works (but not all) by authors included in the second list.
Here's a list, in order of physical distance from my desk. There might be some shocks...

1. Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny
2. The True Game, Sheri Tepper
3. One for the Morning Glory, John Barnes
4-6. The Earthsea trilogy (A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, The Farthest Shore), Ursula le Guin
7. Bridge of Birds, Barry Hughart
8-10. The Planetary trilogy (Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, That Hideous Strength), C S Lewis
11-13. The Dorsai trilogy (The Tactics of Mistake; Soldier, Ask Not; Dorsai!), Gordon Dickson
14. The Drawing of the Dark, Tim Powers
15. The Anubis Gates, Tim Powers
16. The Stress of Her Regard, Tim Powers
17. The Princess Bride, William Goldman
18-20. The 1st Uplift trilogy (Sundiver, Startide Rising, The Uplift War), David Brin
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~autolycus says:

2) Which author's books would I buy and read just on the strength of the author's name alone? (i.e. I would buy any book written by that author.)

Note: This includes authors who have written stuff which isn't F&SF, and whose books I have tried to obtain complete sets of. It excludes authors who have written books I have deliberately decided not to buy for one reason or another.
Here's the second list, in no particular order, except that it's convenient to follow the first list. More shocks? You decide...

1. Roger Zelazny
2. Sheri S Tepper
3. John Barnes
4. Barry Hughart
5. Tim Powers
6. Steven Brust
7. Terry Pratchett
8. Neil Gaiman
9. Tom Holt/K J Parker
10. Anthony Price
11. Isaac Asimov
12. Iain Banks
13. Larry Niven
14. Diana Wynne Jones
15. Mary Gentle
16. Arturo Perez-Reverte
17. Lawrence Block
18. Joe Haldeman
19. Greg Rucka
20. Kage Baker
21. Andrea Camilleri
22. Sean McMullen
23. Charles Stross
24. Michael Crichton
25. Jack Vance (I've actually bought a complete set of ALL his books.)
26. Alfred Duggan

Bookies

Nice things have been happening to me, in between the interminable marking of internal assessments (and internally-moderated or internally-predicted assessments - this sounds like haruspimancy to me, auspicium melioris aevi and all that). These nice things include finally getting down to Burning Tower by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, the immediate sequel to The Burning City and the thematic sequel to Niven's The Magic Goes Away.

This venerable science-fantasy series (started in 1969!) is about a world in which mana is the finite essence of magical power. It can be used up; powerful army-destroying and city-building spells will make whole areas mana-depleted. Yes, it was a metaphor for the 1970s oil crisis; yes, it will probably continue to be relevant.

But that wasn't all that was happy-making. Last night, my three-volume omnibus edition of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin series arrived! Yes, here are all 21 books of this seafaring historical-fiction adventure, in three lovely hardcovers. As a consequence, I shall either donate my softcovers to a friend or the school library. Friends come first...

I still have a list of books to buy and read though. Topping it at the moment is Kim Stanley Robinson's global warming trilogy - Science in the Capital. It's divided into three books: Forty Signs of Rain, Fifty Degrees Below, and Sixty Days and Counting. Sea levels rise, the next Ice Age is precipitated, and people are left stuck in awkward positions around the world while everyone pretends they don't know what caused it all.

I am also still looking for a Del Rey edition of Barry Hughart's The Story of the Stone. This is the macabre sequel to Bridge of Birds and is quite a worthwhile read. However, someone borrowed mine and I can't remember where it is now. How sad. It's very hard to find.

Sigh. Back to the marking. Red ink and stacks of paper, the tension of having to squeeze out a painful result - it all sounds like a bad case of the piles.

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Update: Ah, here is a relatively interesting link about the practice of reading.