Ringworld

 
 
Ringworld

by Larry Niven

Del Rey

1970, reprinted 1985

 

 

Ringworld is reasonably famous work of science fiction. It's probably Larry Niven's best-known work. It's the culmination of all the other books and stories in his Known Space setting. Barlowe included one of its aliens in his Guide to Extraterrestrials. It won both the Hugo and Nebula awards, and you can probably find a copy in just about any used bookstore you check. It's long been on my 'probably ought to read this sooner or later' list, and before reading it, I kind of assumed it would eventually get adapted into a prestige miniseries, although now I rather doubt it.
 
The idea of the Ringworld itself is definitely the best-known part of the book, certainly more so than the plot or any of the characters. The Ringworld is an artificial habitat meant to provide almost unlimited living room. It's a circular hoop around it's own star, occupying approximately the entire orbit of Earth. The ring is about a million miles wide, bounded by walls a thousand miles high. For reference, the Earth is about 8000 miles in diameter, so you could stack about 100 Earths from wall to wall. The high walls keep the atmosphere from escaping, giant solar panels in a narrower orbit provide shade to create a day-night cycle, and the whole thing spins very fast to create a centrifugal force approximating Earth gravity. It's a thought experiment, not a thing that could actually exist, and one thing that makes it interesting is that it's very difficult to imagine it without shrinking it to more comprehensible dimensions.
 
The basic plot is that two humans and two aliens go to investigate the Ringworld, they crash land, and then have to use flying motorcycles to try to find help getting their spaceship off the ring. They see the sights, learn more about the history of the place, meet people who can't help them, eventually meet someone who can, and then finally leave. In structure, it's actually quite similar to Jack Vance's Big Planet, Hal Clement's Mission of Gravity, or Jack Chalker's Midnight at the Well of Souls. The success or failure of a plot like that is going to depend on how much you like the characters, and how interesting what they find on the surface is. No matter how cool the big-picture premise is, it can't save poor execution - and notably the big picture here doesn't imply much about the details. The ring could have almost anything on its surface, the same as any alien planet.
 
I'll touch on both of those in a minute, but I first want to note that I found the pacing of the book kind of weird. It's a 300 page book, and we don't arrive at the Ringworld until a hundred pages in, a third of the way through. And we don't meet anyone living on the ring for another 50 pages, at the book's halfway point. Because their flying motorcycles can go at supersonic speeds, the crew of characters we're following travel many times farther than it's possible to travel on Earth, but only interact with a few things, flying over and ignoring the rest. They encounter a village, some dangerous plants, an abandoned city, some dangerous weather, and then an inhabited city where they find help. For all that the ring is huge, Niven doesn't exactly stuff their trip across it with events.
 
I have a fondness for what I call Sapir-Whorf scifi, stories like Samuel Delaney's Babel 17 or China Mieville's Embassytown, that take real properties of language and amplify them until they're basically supernatural. Niven does something like that here (and really, in everything of his I've ever read) with Malthus's ideas about population growth and Darwinian evolution. The pressure created by population growth is more-or-less THE reason why any sentient species does anything. Growth plus evolution means, in Niven's view, that neoliberal economics, selfishness, rational-choice and game-theory decision-making are objectively true, and any attempts at kindness or altruism will give way to necessary cruelty within a few generations. And more generally, cultural change within any sentient species isn't actually driven by culture, but by the success or failure of how they manage their biological evolution. Nivens characters all believe this stuff, and the only times they're ever wrong are when they don't believe it enough.
 
This can potentially make for interesting fiction, although it can also just be offensive and pedantic, and not coincidentally, Niven pairs it with some pretty extreme sexism. What women are 'for' in Ringworld is providing men with children, with pleasure during sex, and otherwise staying out of the way. Both the aliens on the crew come from species where their females are literally non-sentient animals used solely for breeding. The human woman on the expedition is only there because the man likes having sex with her. At one point, to cheer her up when she's sad, he tells her if she weren't there to keep him happy, he'd be forced to rape the aliens. (Yes, this is really something Niven wrote as a reassuring sentiment!) When they later meet the person who can help them, her previous role on her crew was as ship's prostitute, whose job it was to keep the otherwise entirely male crew happy. She uses her sexual skill to try to enslave the main protagonist, something he claims any human woman could do to any man.
 
I sort of presume Niven's eugenic beliefs must've been racist too, although here we see that only by what's excluded. With the exception of the leading man, who is Asian, all the other humans in the book are White, including everyone on the Ringworld. Certainly Niven seems to think that each planet should be a monoculture, and each colony world should remain subservient to the home planet. Even the incomprehensible vastness of the ring seems to home to only one culture with one language, and a consistent way of signaling social class via hairstyle. I'm honestly annoyed that this book gets held up as an exemplar of good scifi!
 

 
Beyond all that, there are two other things you have to contend with. One is just the 1970s-ness of the setting, especially the way Niven chooses to mix humor into his writing. A lot of it just seems silly now. The sole curse word is 'tanj,' an acronym for 'there ain't no justice.' Two human space colonies are called 'We Made It' and 'Mount Lookithat.' Of the two aliens, one looks like a humanoid tiger, and the other, the Puppeteer, looks like a hunched-over person using their arms to make two ostrich-faced hand puppets. The woman on the crew, thanks to the success of human eugenics, is supernaturally lucky, like Domino from the X-Men, and the other three spend an awful lot of time trying to deduce from events just exactly how lucky she must be.
 
The other thing is that this is one of the last of Niven's Known Space works, and it sort of feels like he expects you to've read all the previous ones to fully appreciate it. The tiger-like Kzin have like, a 7 book series detailing their many wars with humanity. The Puppeteers build all the spaceships, and are in a bunch of earlier stories that I've read but mostly forgotten, at least one of which, I assume, explains why the hulls and inner walls of their ships are transparent like glass, which otherwise just seems bizarre. This omission especially surprises me, considering how many words get used telling us how cool the ring is and all the safety features built into the flying motorcycles. Niven does retell several of the earlier plots, which is part of why it takes Ringworld a hundred pages to actually get to the Ringworld, but a lot of ideas are also tossed out like you'll know what they are and why they're significant without him having to describe it. And some things we learn about the history of Known Space are clearly meant to be shocking revelations that recontextualize everything - but you had to believe something different first to fully appreciate that.
 
Anyway, if you can put up with all that, and a plot that's like half introduction, your reward is 150 pages of our heroes figuring out why civilization has collapsed across the Ringworld, and puzzling out how to get their ship off the ring. The collapse was primarily because all electricity, and thus all long-distance travel and communication, relied on a single system that failed and couldn't be fixed. Also no new electricity-generating devices could be built because the builders used atomic transmutation to supply materials, and so there's no metal not already in use on the ring. That all seems egregiously short-sighted on the builders' part, though Niven presents these as totally rational decisions despite their catastrophic (and foreseeable!) consequences. I was even more interested how impoverished Niven's view of nature is. The whole ring is like a giant city park rather than a real ecosystem, because after all, as Niven's characters remind themselves, why would you both including any desert landscape, or bringing along any pests or predatory animals? And at no point is this portrayed as a problem or mistake.
 
This will be my last book of 2024. I need to make sure the next scifi I read is something better than this!

I Saw a Peacock with a Fiery Tail

 
 
I Saw a Peacock with a Fiery Tail

art by Ramsingh Urveti

Tara Books

2012

 

 

Ramsingh Urveti only credits himself as the illustrator of I Saw a Peacock with a Fiery Tail, perhaps because the text of the book consists of only the title poem, a folk poem from England in the 1600s, and according to the preface, often included in collections of poetry for children. Urveti's version takes the form of a children's picture book, and the poem is simple enough to be enjoyed by children; but I think adults can enjoy this as well.
 
The poem's first few lines go like this:
"I saw a peacock with a fiery tail
I saw a comet drop down hail
I saw a cloud with ivy circled around..."
 
Read this way, it's a series of strange images. But the poem's 'trick' is that it can be read another way, no longer rhyming, but making perfect sense.
"I saw a peacock

With a fiery tale, I saw a comet
Drop down hail, I saw a cloud..."
 
Urveti's art allows both readings at once. Each two-page has one of his black-and-white ink drawings, and a half-stanza of text. Each also has a hole in the paper that reveals the next half-stanza. So it reads more like this:
"I saw a peacock with a fiery tail
With a fiery tail, I saw a comet
I saw a comet drop down hail
Drop down hail, I saw a cloud
I saw a cloud with ivy circled around..."
 
At the beginning, the cut-outs only show text, but as the book continues, they reveal glimpses of art too, and the cut-outs themselves become an increasingly important part of each new drawing.
 
I don't know why, exactly, but this book feels very appropriate for the Solstice and New Year. Perhaps the images of darkness, of lights in the sky, perhaps the way the dual readings suggest transformation.

Shady Hollow

 
 

Shady Hollow

by Juneau Black

Vintage

2022 

 

 

Shady Hollow feels both brilliant and inevitable, because what author Juneau Black has done is to take the plot conventions of a classic cozy mystery and place it in the setting of a contemporary cozy video game, like the Animal Crossing series. It makes perfect sense, because both already take place in the same sort of environment - an isolated small town where everyone knows everyone, and where there usually isn't any real hardship or trouble. What separates Shady Hollow from other cozy mysteries is that all the characters are lightly-anthropomorphized animals.
 
I want to note briefly that Juneau Black is the singular pen name of a pair of authors working together, like James SA Corey or Lewis Padgett. This isn't a secret; they explain it in the preface and pose together for the author photo at the back of the book.
 
So, Shady Hollow is a little town tucked away in the northern woods. (I love the double meanings of the word 'shady' here.) The town borders a river, and its chief industry is the wood mill owned the the industrialist von Beaverpelt family. The town has a newspaper, a thriving coffee shop run by a moose (or perhaps a caribou?), a bookshop run by a raven, and a new vegetarian restaurant run by a recently immigrated panda. The police are bears, the usual suspect is a raccoon, the college professor's an owl, and most of the townsfolk seem to be mice, rabbits, etc, wild animals, the kind that usually live in forests. So "A Murder in Richard Scarry's Busytown" remains an available concept to any copyright-courageous writer wanting to turn Black's insight into a subgenre.
 
We start with an introduction to the cast of main characters, written to cast suspicion on absolutely everyone, a map of the town, and then we're off to the races, when the hummingbird gossip columnist spots a dead body floating in the mill pond - the grumpy old toad who lived by the pond and liked to argue with everyone. Aspiring star reporter Vera Vixen picks up the story, determined to both report the news and solve the mystery! She talks to the other townsfolk to try to understand the victim and his relationships. Meanwhile the murderer isn't idle. Someone else is attacked, and then Vera becomes a target herself...
 
The concept of using animal characters gives Black permission to make them all a bit simplified in a way that works well for the story. The dynamic between Vera and her boss, for example, reminds me of Lois Lane and Perry White, or Mary Tyler Moore and Ed Asner. Not flat, but archetypal, iconic. Each character has only a few traits, so you feel like you get to know them quickly, including some of their secrets. This is not a dense or difficult book, it's a page-turner, and at just 200 pages, a quick, enjoyable read.
 
I honestly appreciated that the solution to the mystery was relatively straightforward. There was no locked-room puzzle to untangle, and unlike a couple mystery miniseries I watched recently, no too-clever implausible twist at the end. The answer is grounded in the relationships between the relevant characters that Vera and the audience discover together.
 
Black is also quite careful and playful with language. The townsfolk are 'creatures,' never 'people,' never even 'women' or 'men.' There are 'pawkerchiefs' and folks considering things 'on the one paw,' but never any 'hands' or 'feet.' There are a few little puns and other language jokes, especially in the bookstore, but not so many that they dominate. The snake medical examiner talksss like thisss, but only gets a handful of lines. It's funny without bring overwhelming, a neat balance.
 
As I was reading, I found that the way I imagined the characters shifted between various visual inspirations. At times, I imagined them like the stop-motion puppets from Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr Fox movie. Other times I pictured them looking like Hannah Barbara cartoons, like Yogi Bear, Huckleberry Hound, and so on. The racoon I kept imagining as the vagabond from the boardgame Root; the sheep I pictured as Lambchop. And once, when the bear police detective picks up an injured Vera to help her to safety and her heart flutters with romantic excitement, I saw them as Little John and Maid Marian from Disney's foxy Robin Hood. It made me wonder how the authors imagined their own characters, and how other readers picture them.
 
Using the same rhyming logic employed here, of combining genres because they share a word in common, it's easy enough to imagine a cozy catastrophe with a cast of talking animals. For all I know, that'll be Juneau Black's next project. But I'm curious if anyone's ever mashed up the cozy mystery and cozy catastrophe, and had an amateur sleuth poking around a murder in the one town that's miraculously unaffected while the rest of the world succumbs to an off-camera apocalypse?

The One-Bottle Cocktail

 
 
The One-Bottle Cocktail

More than 80 Recipes with Fresh Ingredients and a Single Spirit

by Maggie Hoffman

photos by Kelly Puleio

Ten Speed Press

2018

 

 

I got a copy of The One-Bottle Cocktail a few years ago when it first came out. It was getting talked up on NPR and maybe some other news services I was following at the time. And a lot of the drinks in it do sound good, but this is not a book for me. The recipes collected here, most of them anyway, are intended for foodies with well-stocked kitchens. For me, the need to pull a second bottle of liqueur or amaro or bitters out of my cabinet is much less of an obstacle than a recipe that calls for me to prepare my own fresh fruit juice or infuse an unusual vegetable syrup.
 
There's an irony here. In her introduction, author Maggie Hoffman mentions the frustration of finding a cocktail recipe that calls for buying a a bottle of some ingredient that won't have any other uses. But almost all the homemade ingredients in the book are used in only a single recipe, possibly something you wouldn't buy to cook with otherwise. The way Hoffman collected her recipes means that across the book, there are two different simple sugar syrups, and three different concentrations of honey mixed with water. Is that better? It might be a little cheaper, and they'll go bad if you don't use them, instead of hanging out in the back of your cabinet, either to haunt you or to be used again later. Maybe it's a matter of preference.
 
Hoffman found recipes from professional bartenders all over the country, and each recipe credits the original creator and their bar, along with Hoffman's own notes and instructions, and sometimes a photo, either of the preparation or the finished drink. The recipes are organized into sections based on the one bottle they use - vodka, gin, tequila, rum, brandy, and whiskey. At the end of each section is a list of cocktails from the other parts of the book that Hoffman thinks would taste good with that spirit.
 
The recipes vary in complexity, but are mostly on the higher end. There are only a few that only need jam or a single homemade syrup, and maybe lemon or lime juice. Hoffman is very big on the idea of making your own fruit juices by chopping something into cubes, dropping them in the food processor, and first pouring, then pressing the juice through a fine mesh strainer. One recipe notably calls for juicing an entire watermelon this way, something I doubt I have either the stamina or patience for. Other times, she suggests just muddling the fruit before dropping it into the cocktail shaker along with the other ingredients, and double straining during the pour.
 
The size of the recipes also varies, with most making single drinks, a handful making pairs, and a sizable minority making batches of 8 or 12. The punches might be where the idea of this book shines best. They're often for a special occasion, where you don't mind doing a bit more work, and where all the prep can be handled well before everything is combined. The lower alcohol of these recipes is probably also good for most kinds of parties, and by making many drinks at once, you'll use up all the juice or syrup you made, with no leftovers.

The Real Dada Mother Goose

 
The Real Dada Mother Goose

A Treasury of Complete Nonsense

by Jon Scieszka
art by Julia Rothman

adapted from the book illustrated by Blanche Fisher Write

Candlewick Press

1916, adapted 2022

 

 

Like many of the children's books I read, The Real Dada Mother Goose was recommended by my sister, and I'm really glad I listened to her!
 
I had a copy of the book this one is based on, growing up, a black-and-white checkerboard hardback of The Real Mother Goose, illustrated by Blanche Fisher Wright, originally published in 1916. It's been a long time since I've read Jon Scieszka, who you might remember from The Stinky Cheese Man or The True Story of the Three Little Pigs, but what he's produced here is wonderful. It's both a playful expression of human creativity, and hopefully an inspiration to kids to remixing something they like to create something new.
 
The book has six main chapters, plus a section of notes at the end. Each chapter has a reprint of the first verse of a nursery rhyme, and then six variations on it. Each variation is like a little game, applying a specific procedure to the text to change it in a specific way. There are chapters for 'Humpty Dumpty,' 'Jack be Nimble,' 'Old Mother Hubbard,' 'Hey Diddle Diddle,' 'Hickory Dickory Dock,' and 'Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.'
 
I'm pretty sure the variations include actual Dada tricks and games, as well as others that Scieszka added. In many of the games, words are put in some kind of code, Morse, pig latin, a rebus, the Military Alphabet, simplified Egyptian hieroglyphics. Sometimes there are substitutions, using the same rhyme scheme with new words. In others, the whole form is changed, creating a haiku, a pop quiz, a comic strip.
 
The notes section explains some of the more complex games so that child-readers will have the instructions they need to try making their own variations. They also give some history of Mother Goose, and dada, and they explicitly confirm that - like cartoonist Matt Madden - Scieszka was inspired by Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style. I think this could be a great resource for someone who wants to cultivate their own creativity, but could use a little help getting started.
 
Whenever the original text of the rhymes is repeated, it appears in black, while new words are printed in blue. Artist Julia Rothman has a bit of drawing depicting dada geese hard at work remaking the rhymes, but a lot of what she's done here is to collage and modify the original images, breaking them up, rearranging their parts, adding something new - exactly the same way Scieszka does with the text. Again, it could easily inspire kids to add to existing drawing as a way to get started on their own art.
 
I probably want a copy of The Real Dada Mother Goose for myself, and if you have a creative child, you probably want it for them too.

The Unaccountability Machine

 
 
The Unaccountability Machine

Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions - And How the World Lost its Mind

by Dan Davies

Profile Books

2024

 

 

The Unaccountability Machine starts with with author Dan Davies introducing the relatively accessible idea of 'accountability sinks.' The paradigmatic example of an accountability sink is a gate agent at the airport. Your flight is delayed or canceled, your plans are upended, you might incur significant costs, and the only person you have access to, to complain about all this, is the gate agent, who has no control over the situation, no ability to change your fate, and possibly no way to escalate your complaint to a higher level, beyond a direct supervisor who can only remind you that all this is company policy, and can you please stop being rude to the human shield?
 
Davies, an economist by training, who used to work for the Bank of England, and who is clearly trying to translate complex academic and legal ideas into accessible prose that can be understood by a broad public audience, makes two moves from there. First, he diagnoses this kind of breakdown in accountability, when a problem is caused by 'a decision no one made' with no one to blame or even complain to, as a problem of organizational structure, where there is a break in what should be a feedback loop, and the acted-upon have no way to communicate with the actors and the people who decide how they should act. Second, he broadens outward to a claim that broken feedback loops and the absence of accountability are why we live in a society where nothing seems to work, and for example, the biggest banks in the country can crash the global economy by selling bad mortgages that make people lose their homes, allegedly without any crimes being committed.
 
The rest of the book is Davies' intellectual history of how we got here. I found this account interesting, and I'm going to give a basic outline in a moment, but I kind of disagree with his equation of certain things. I think there are meaningful differences between companies using their lowest level employees as accountability sinks, the unintended consequences of 'decisions no one made,' and the inability (or I think more accurately, the refusal) of our law-enforcement to punish executives for the harms caused by the companies they lead.
 
Davies thinks that unaccountability is an unavoidable but accidental consequence of certain organizational structures. I would argue that assigning (or withholding) accountability and blame is always a choice. Executives may deliberately set up their 'customer service' points to avoid actually hearing from their customers, and may generally structure their companies to allow profitable law-breaking while avoiding the creation of incriminating evidence because they want to avoid both public scrutiny and prosecution, but it's not actually impossible, or even unfair, to hold them accountable - to blame and punish them. That's a choice, and it could be made differently.
 
There's also a difference between true 'decisions no one made' and when decision-makers try to hide their role to escape accountability. Things like central banks worldwide setting 2% as their inflation target happen because of what sociologists DiMaggio and Powell called 'institutional isomorphism' - the leaders of one organization copying another until the copied choice becomes an unofficial standard by default. Situations like that can arise by accident, but we're not necessarily just stuck with them. People can meet to discuss, negotiate, and change the standard. They can do this more than once, even routinely! But that's different from Boeing executives showing callous disregard for safety by rushing crash-prone MAX jets to market, and I think Davies errs when he conflates the two.
 
When companies decide to seek profit in ways they know will cause harm or even death, to their workers, customers, or just unfortunate bystanders, that too is a choice. When a leader, whether political or organizational, decides that they have a right to act, and that the acted-upon do not have or deserve a right to have a say in the decisions that affect them, that is also a choice, and an ideology, not an accident. And, as recent events have reminded me, while a government or an organization can made it impossible to give meaningful feedback through official channels, people still retain the ability to go around those channels, as whistleblowers, or protesters, or through direct action.
 
Anyway, those critiques aside, I was interested in the intellectual history Davies presented to explain how we got here. In brief, after WWII, two different schools of thought developed theories if how organizations work and how they ought to behave - the interdisciplinary field of cybernetics, and the newly invigorated discipline of economics. Cybernetics accidentally undid itself by developing the information theory behind modern computing (which then proved to be an attractive alternative career), while economics embedded itself in government and industry, eventually providing both the instructions and intellectual justification for neoliberalism and rising inequality. In Davies' telling, the decisive victory of economics (and if he's lucky enough that his book gets a Big Short style Hollywood adaptation, the moment that will definitely be the climax of the movie) occurs when the democratic Chilean government of Salvador Allende, advised by cybernetician Stafford Beer, is overthrown by dictator Augusto Pinochet, backed by the CIA and advised by economist Milton Friedman, on September 11th, 1973. Afterward, we get Reagan and Thatcher, private equity conducting leveraged buy-outs, and the general rise in corporate leaders focusing on quarterly profits at the expense of long-term sustainability, which culminates in the Great Recession in 2008, and the post housing bubble world of today, where nothing works but no one is to blame.
 
Today when we think of the term 'cybernetics,' we think of human-machine hybrids, but as an intellectual field, it refers to the study of complex systems, including the ways that they regulate themselves in response to a changing environment. The paradigmatic cybernetic process is the feedback loop - the system acts based on input from its environment, its actions change the environment, and that change becomes an input that affects the next action. A stable system helps to maintain its own environment, unstable systems eventually destroy themselves by changing the environment in ways that are not survivable. Think of an ecosystem.
 
Many disciplines contributed to cybernetic thought, including medicine, computing, and sociology. One of my favorite theory books, Anthony Giddens' Modernity and Self-Identity is all about the 'reflexivity' of modern organizations, the way they collect data and change their behavior in response to it - that is, the way they incorporate feedback loops. In the 1940s through 60s it seems to have been a respectable field, but ironically, the great success of some of the projects led to the coalition separating back into its component parts.
 
I think Davies is at his best when he's explaining this part, which is unfamiliar to him too. His discussion of economics benefits from his insider-knowledge, but it felt like he assumed a bit too much familiarity with terms and concepts, despite his efforts to make the book accessible to non-expert readers.

The Phantom Scientist

 
 
The Phantom Scientist

by Robert Cousin

translated by Edward Gauvin

MIT Press

2023

 

 

The Phantom Scientist is a French graphic novel set at a mysterious, isolated institute, where scientists from a variety of fields are invited to advance their research. The institute itself is a kind of experimental project. The idea is that incidental interactions with peers from other fields will produce novel, serendipitous discoveries ... but it also produces a rising tide of chaos that will eventually force the institute's current director (a sociologist!) to call in the army to evacuate everyone for their own safety. This is the fourth iteration of the institute, and when it inevitably collapses, it'll be restarted with new researchers and a new director.
 
Our viewpoint character is professor Stephane Douasy, a physicist who studies fractals and spirals, who is interested in applying those ideas to understand plant growth. Based on the acknowledgments, it seems he's closely based on a real person, Stephane Douady, so I suspect that the discovery he eventually makes about leaf shapes is a real finding from the actual Dr Douady's research. The fictional Stephane is the last of the 24 scientists to arrive at the institute. A new one comes at regular intervals to dampen the chaos. Now that Stephane has arrived, the institute should function at maximum capacity for the final 6 months of its 7-year cycle before collapsing. But there's a problem - there's already way too much chaos, and it doesn't seem to calm, so the institute may not survive its full span...
 
Stephane is an outgoing fellow, and he quickly befriends two other scientists in his building - Louise, a linguist who was working on teaching computers speech but has given up since the appearance of chat-bots, and Villhelm, who's written a computer program that accurately predicts his own future actions, but that works so slowly that they always arrive late. (Ominously, each set of predictions includes his percent chance of death.) Their building also has the office of the never-seen Dr Paniany, the 'phantom scientist' of the title.
 
Stephane is basically doing what the institute is supposed to - he gets his introverted colleagues to leave their labs and talk to each other for the first time in forever, he insists on checking inside Paniany's office (the other two had been assuming he'd either never or arrived or left before they got there), and gaining new insights from seeing his research. Vilhelm figures out how to make his program run faster, and Louise gets reinvigorated out of her torpor, and decides to find where inside the institute Paniany is camped out.
 
Dr Paniany was researching the P vs NP problem. In math and computing, some problems just don't have a single right answer. Among those that do, there are problems that are 'easy to solve' called P, and problems that are hard to solve but 'easy to check' called NP. Easy to solve here means you have a set of instructions, an algorithm, you can follow that lets you find a solution without needing to guess or use trial-and-error. Easy to check means you can tell that a right answer is right. The NP example author Robin Cousin gives is a jigsaw puzzle - hard to solve, but very easy to tell if it's put together correctly or not. (Complex as they look, Rubik's cubes are P. If you know the steps, you can solve one, from any starting arrangement, in seconds.) There's a longstanding debate about whether or not P = NP, if every problem we can easily check has some algorithm that would let us solve it easily too, even if we haven't found it yet, or if there are some problems that can only be solved by trial-and-error.
 
In reality, we don't have an answer either way. In the comic, Paniany has proved that P = NP, and written an algorithm using his proof that helps every other researcher who encounters it do their own research much better and faster. He, and his proof, are the source of the rising chaos that overtakes the institute during the second half of the comic.
 
Cousin's art style reminds me a bit of Jason Shiga. His figures are cartoony, with relatively little detail, fairly thick outlines, and bright colors.
 
It's pretty rare to see a sociologist show up in contemporary scifi! The other example I can think of is Connie Willis's Bellwether, which was also about how the 'chaos' of interactions between people who might not otherwise meet can produce unexpected creativity or start trends and fads. This is, in fact, a real sociological finding, although both Cousin and Willis play it up for effect, in the same way scifi authors have been doing with ideas from physics forever. But one of the earliest findings in the sociology of networks is about how you can get more new information from acquaintances rather than close friends and family, a phenomenon called 'the strength of weak ties.' That name comes from Mark Granovetter, although if you've heard the idea before, it's probably because of Malcolm Gladwell, who's done the most to popularize it. It's too bad the seismograph-style Organizational Chaos Index the institute director keeps consulting isn't a real measure; it'd be awfully useful!

Glass Town

 
 
Glass Town

The Imaginative World of the Brontes
by Isabel Greenberg

Harry Abrams

2020

 

 

Glass Town is a graphic novel that presents a lightly fictionalized telling of the life of Charlotte Bronte that centers on the game of make-believe she used to play with her siblings Branwell, Emily, and Anne.
 
The book opens near its ending, with Charlotte visiting the grave site of her recently dead siblings, and being visited by a vision of Charles Wellesley, one of her imaginary characters, the one most like herself in Greenberg's telling. In conversation with Charles, Charlotte remembers her siblings and their make-believe game, and the rest of the book appears as an extended flashback from this 'present day' moment that we return to again at the end.
 
The earliest time we return to is also a funeral. The two eldest Bronte sisters have just died of illness they caught at boarding school. Charlotte is now the oldest, and with Branwell, Emily, and Anne, she starts a game they can play together, imagining the city of Glass Town, on a British-colonized African island called Angria. Greenberg portrays Charlotte as a natural leader, but one who defers to Branwell because she believes that, as the only brother, he ought to be in charge of the girls.
 
Throughout the book, the invented character Charlotte is most interested in is the womanizing poet Zamorna. She clearly loves him, gets jealous of the fictional women she pairs him with, and even changes the narrative to punish them for getting the attention she wants for herself but can't have. Greenberg depicts Charlotte as kind of romantically obsessed with cruel, patriarchal men; she wants someone who can boss her around, but she's so strong-willed that she keeps creating tyrants in an attempt to find someone to rule her. Charlotte seems to try to mold Branwell into this same kind of man, but he crumbles beneath the pressure she puts on him.
 
The siblings build up Glass Town in the stories they write for each other, especially Branwell who wants war and adventure stories, and Charlotte who wants romance and domestic drama. They spend all day every day playing. Eventually Emily and Anne get tired of always getting overrun and invent their own island, Gondal, to tell their own stories their own way, without their older siblings taking over.
 
Eventually, their father sends Charlotte to boarding school again. She and Branwell write each other letters to keep the game going initially, but when he stops writing, Charlotte carries on by herself. Things come to a head when the various ongoing plots in Glass Town come to a climax - overlapping love triangles intersecting with a revolution for African independence - and Charlotte worries that she's becoming unhealthily obsessed. She turns away from her fantasy world, she and her sisters publish their novels, and then all the siblings but Charlotte fall sick and die within a year. This brings us to the 'present' when she has the chance to choose again, to return to her fantasy and get lost in it, or to stay grounded in reality.
 
Greenberg's art is noteworthy. The proportions of the people and the perspective of the buildings resemble's children's art, an impression that's reinforced by the rough linework, which looks more like charcoal than ink. The color scheme of the entire book is autumnal, with reds and pinks, oranges and browns, splashes of yellow and purple, but no blue or green at all. Scenes and characters from Glass Town are in full color, while the living Brontes are monotone. Grey in the present day when Charlotte is in mourning, brown before the game starts, red at the height of the excitement, pink and orange when Charlotte is at school. You really feel that the fantasy world is more lively than reality, both brighter and more saturated with emotion.
 
Greenberg published in 2020, Catherynne Valente write a YA novel about the Brontes a couple years earlier called Glass Town Game. I'm not quite sure why a 200 year-old kids' game made it into the zeitgeist just then, though I'd guess that it helps that Oxford published a collection of the Brontes' Glass Town writings in 2010.
 
Lots of kids play let's pretend, but the Bronte siblings wrote their imaginary world down instead of only describing it verbally to each other. And because they became famous, various people had reasons to collect, preserve, and transcribe these childhood writings, which is why we're able to know or care about them. Whereas if you or I did something similar when we were kids, we would each likely be our own stories' only reader, if we kept them at all, instead of boxing them up in the attic or tossing them in the trash, the usual fate of kids' art, even the stuff that once got displayed on the fridge.
 
I've actually seen essays claiming that the Brontes invented roleplaying games 150 years before Gary Gygax wrote Dungeons & Dragons, or that one or the other of the sisters were the world's first Dungeon Master, but I don't really think that's true, any more so than I think HG Wells invented wargaming when he wrote Little Wars. At most, I think these might be the earliest examples of someone documenting in writing (that survived, and could become part of the historical record) the sort of games that many people played in their heads as kids and young adults, without usually leaving any record behind. And actually, I doubt they're even the earliest, probably just the best known, because these game-players became world famous, and their records got reprinted, rather than being anonymous writings that remain confined to an archive.
 
Which is not to say there's nothing of value here! Glass Town has kind of caught my imagination, and I'll probably read Valente's book about it at some point too. Lots of kids probably had their own make-believe world, but it's not so surprising to think that the future authors of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights might've had fantasy worlds that were more interesting than most, just as Wells and his opponent Robert Lewis Stevenson probably described their battles between toy soldiers more entertainingly than your average wargamer.