FACT SF Reading Group

March 2007

March 5: Lady of Mazes by Karl Schroeder

On March 5, 2007 the FACT reading group discussed Lady of Mazes by Karl Schroeder. Everybody who was present at the discussion has read Karl Schroeder before. All but one person had read at least some part of this book. Only 4 people (out of 8) finished it. Most of others were planning to finish. The person who did not even attempt to read this book justified her decision with one word: Ventus. :-) Despite agreement that Lady of Mazes was better than Ventus (Karl Schroeder's first novel), the group's opinions on Lady of Mazes ranged from lukewarm approval to outright disappointment.

While some people thought Schroeder's world building seemed interesting at first while the story centered on Teven Coronal, later in the book both the world building and the plot faltered. A few people gave the author credit for developing something rarely seen in SF, countless overlapping virtual realities with no "baseline reality", but others thought his descriptive powers were not up to par to this undoubtedly difficult task. One reader found the portrayal of virtual reality unconvincing: "The fundamental idea of multiple overlapping realities was such a cool idea, and yet he didn't entirely convince me that in his version of it it makes sense. There were so many questions about, what if there are physical obstacles from one reality imposing on another reality? And he kind of danced it around it a little bit about having software impose a compatible obstacle, or even suppress your awareness of the motions you made to walk around something, to make you feel that you're walking in a straight line, but he didn't quite convince me that it would work." At the same time he acknowledged that Karl Schroeder's attempt at depicting virtual reality was more ambitious than what most writers had done before.

Another reader was even less impressed. "I see mundaneness everywhere, and I don't think that's what he intends to describe," he said. He thought Schroeder could have built a much more impressive world given the technology available in this world. He quotes examples of technological blunders in the book that one does not expect from a writer of hard science fiction. Case in point: "[In the scene where they are travelling in space], they spin up to get half the g, and they are looking out with the telescope. What's wrong with that scene?" he asks. "They are spinning like hell! You need to spin really fast to create an artificial gravity of half g." If they tried to look out the window while spinning this fast, they would see nothing but a blur. Another group member countered that the telescope output was edited by the virtual reality software (called inscape in the book) to eliminate the blur, making it look as if there was no spinning.

So there's an interesting dilemma. Too much reality-editing technology can, at best, make the world described in a science fiction book look mundane, and at worst, mistakenly imply that the author doesn't understand science. There's a fine line between giving your characters full control over the reality they experience, and shielding them from experiencing anything unusual, which would defeat the point of writing science fiction in the first place. The group for the large part seemed to think that Schroeder does not walk this line very well. This was the main source of dissatisfaction for some of the readers. When the virtual reality started to fall apart, it promised some interesting developments as the characters are forced to deal with the raw, unedited world. But it didn't happen. A reader said: "It starts out, we are in the virtual reality world and something weird starts happening. From the title Lady of Mazes I expected a series of puzzles to unravel. As the virtual reality world kind of fell apart, I thought, this was going to get interesting. And when they say, we're going to reinvent science, I thought, cool! And reinventing science is, you are in a house and put a sign on the house of your destination, and throw yourself of the cliff, that's reinvention of science?"

He was talking about a scene that exemplifies the low-tech feel of the book, unexpected for a hard science fiction novel. The three main characters launch themselves into space by getting into a house and throwing that house off of a cliff -- or, to be exact, off the edge of their world. The destination sign is the way to communicate their destination to the forces / mechanisms that run the set of artificial habitats floating in space, known as coronals. The forces read the sign and deliver the house to the right habitat. The same reader goes on to say: "They go around the ringworld, and they find nothing? OK, so let's go to Jupiter. And there's more virtual reality people! I wanted not the virtual reality people, I wanted the real world stuff! I was hoping I'll find people dealing with real science, real world stuff, but no."

The group was also unanimous in the opinion that the middle third of the book was poorly plotted; the narrative meandered and snarled. A reader said: "When [the characters] got to the Archipelago, it's like [the author] didn't know what to do. It kind of really slowed down, bogged down the whole thing".

Somebody was also disappointed that the psychological suspense in the book does not get satisfactorily resolved. A reader said: "there was this psychological suspense about why [Livia] reacted in certain ways, and what really happened back at the time of the accident. That scene should have been extremely intense, it should have been the point of the book, and it just didn't have the payoff it should have had."

I wasn't convinced by the characters' personal motivations, or even by the philosophical conclusions they arrive at in the course of the novel. First, there is this intriguing notion of "tech locks", which was one of the concepts that made me want to like this book, even though I was eventually unable to. The idea is that when we are choosing technologies we use, we are choosing our values. "Tech locks" are technological limitations, restrictions that prevent the society from using certain technologies. Those restrictions are self-imposed by the society. One of the main characters thinks society should not censor itself by dismissing entire classes of technologies; he thinks humans can't live authentic lives without complete technological freedom. Then the world they live in comes under attack from a superhuman power that wants to destroy the tech locks. The book does not make it clear why it wanted that -- maybe just for the sake of an experiment? Then it turns out there are not just one, but two superhuman / transcendent entities warring against one another, even though both of them want to destroy the tech locks. The main characters, who started out on a mission together to find help for their homeworld, split up and align themselves with one power or the other for no good reasons. Their choices don't seem to be dictated by their personalities. Once they started making arbitrary choices, I stopped caring about what was happening to them.

So what did people like about Lady of Mazes, if anything? They gave Karl Schroeder points for trying. Few writers try to create a virtual reality world as complex as this one, or an interesting mix of human and posthuman societies. It was also acknowledged that Schroeder's writing has improved since Ventus. This was followed by a meta-discussion of why did Lady of Mazes get all the rave reviews from a bunch of science fiction luminaries such as Charles Stross and Vernor Vinge. Those reviews were what made some hard SF fans in the group want to read this book in the first place, only to be disappointed. It was suggested that since these authors explore similar topics, such as singularity and post-humanism, and they all write works that are heavy on ideas but a bit weak on characterization, it is conceivable that they overlooked mediocre storytelling in favor of the ideas.

March 20: Recursion by Tony Ballantyne

Eleven people attended the discussion of Tony Ballantyne's Recursion. Nobody has read anything by Ballantyne before, because this is his first novel. Everybody in the group has started the book. About half the people finished it. Some of the rest were planning to finish, but a couple of people were so disappointed by the beginning that they put the book aside.

Recursion consists of three storylines, set at different times in the future. In the storyline set in the most distant future, a human and a robot fight Van Neumann Machines (VNMs), self-reproducing assemblers that threaten to overtake the whole universe by converting all matter to VNMs. This storyline is introduced first, and unfortunately most readers found it rather boring, which demotivated some of them to continue reading. The protagonist, Herb, is a self-centered young man from a privileged background, with more money than common sense. It would seem such a person would have enough foibles to make him a vivid character, but most readers found him dull. It may have to do with the fact that instead of actively seeking solutions, he kind of just goes along for a ride. Not that he wanted anything more to begin with: the only reason he went on a mission to save the universe was because he was blackmailed into doing that by the robot Robert. Robert is immensely smarter than Herb, and has all sorts of information Herb does not. As a result, Herb ends up being hardly more than a puppet for Robert, who drags him off, kicking and screaming, on a series of nauseatingly scary adventures. Robert keeps him clueless about his plans until the very end, where Herb is supposed to play a critical part. Since Herb was, albeit unwillingly, hardly more than a passive observer throughout his adventures, the readers did not find him interesting. To quote one reader, "Herb's only real emotion was wetting his pants."

A second character, Constantine, was found to be on the average more interesting. His most intriguing aspect was his four personalities, voices in his head, that bickered among themselves and gave him advice. However, the storyline and characters most people found most interesting was a woman named Eva and her friends, fellow inmates of a psychiatric hospital. Readers thought Eva was the most credible of the three protagonists, and admired the way the author got into Eva's head. Some thought Ballantyne's skill in creating Eva showed he could have done a better job with the other two protagonists. The portrayal of the society Eva lived in -- one reader described it as "nanny-socialist state run amock, making sure that all needs are met, whether you want them to be met or not", was found compelling as well.

The premise of the book -- the fight against self-replicating machines that are taking over the universe -- was judged by various readers to be

(1) a bit of a stretch;

(2) a cliche, made worse because Ballantyne

(2.1) didn't add much new to it,

(2.2) spent too much time explaining what Van Neumann machines are, given that a fairly high percentage of the readership was familiar with this concept from other science fiction works.

Regarding point (1), two readers could not take seriously the premise that there can be a society with no safeguards against someone accidentally launching a plague of self-assembling machines, or "grey goo". At the very least a runaway grey goo problem would have happened much sooner and on a much bigger scale, they thought.

That wasn't the only concept in Recursion people found hard to accept. The idea that an AI tests its behavior against the "crazy" people, and it bases its decisions regarding the future of humanity on reactions of the inmates of a mental asylum -- that idea was not found credible by some people. A reader said "The whole concept of testing against the extremes and basing your decision on the extreme... it's not why you do testing. [...] You use extremes to determine the middle to where you should stay, you don't use extremes to base your decision on."

But not everybody was disappointed in Recursion. One person said he liked it because "it was different. When I was reading it, I really couldn't tell what was going to happen 50 pages from now. This book constantly kept me guessing." The people who liked it, although they were in the minority, enjoyed the puzzle aspect of Recursion. By showing parts of the puzzle from different times and places, Ballantyne provided just enough clues for the reader to speculate what's going on, but not so many as to be predictable. Another aspect that appealed to some was the paranoia that pervaded the lives of the characters. Somebody said the paranoia reminded him of some of Philip K. Dick's work. "This was a stronger novel than Dick's A Scanner Darkly. This was on par with Dick's better novels like Ubik," he said. Paranoia in Recursion is fueled by the fact that the human protagonists are dealing with AIs of superior intellect, the motivations of which they can't possibly fathom. They can only acknowledge, as they do eventually, that they'll never know if they are on the "good" or "bad" side, or whether the "good" and "bad" sides even exist. I thought that was a realistic view of the situation on behalf of the author.

-- Elze Hamilton