Dreams are built on dull facts

It has been many an age more since the crowds called for a liar. Mine is a lost art, and I shall be grateful to share it with thee." He turns aside, and lets me pass. We stand back out in the busy street.

"You're a liar?"

"The last liar," he says, slowly, sadly, observing the tower. In the light of day Thyme looks like an artefact recovered from some lost tomb. "Once, dreams were built of my tales. Quests formed by the skill of my words. But now there are only the whispers and rumours, and little room for a liar. Dreams are built on dull facts. Mine," he repeats, "is a lost art. Follow me, Manderlay, and we shall locate thy Sleepwalker." Reluctantly I do as I am told, wondering whether I have made a grave mistake.

Metronome, by Oliver Langmead, is a strange but beautiful dream of a book.

The story opens by introducing the reader to Manderlay. He's aged and living in a retirement home, but with his buddy Valentine, they still get up to some antics. Manderlay was once a violinist, and receives the occasional cheque for 40 pence in royalties whenever someone buys his album. Manderlay is lately troubled by his dreams, and the reader soon leaves the gently nostalgic blanket of the home to inhabit his dreamworld entirely.

The dreaminess is both a strength and a weakness. It allows for some very creative images, actions, and relationships, but it also falls back on dream logic to justify its course.

Manderlay's musical skills are called upon to help navigate the skyship Metronome, with a small group of righteous warriors engaged in an ultimate battle between good and evil.

I don't fully understand how all our dreamworlds intersect with each other. Each dream opens onto a collective unconscious, an evidently vast but common world, night after night.

I just couldn't buy into the workings of the dream logic. There are detailed battle scenes — something I'm simply not a fan of. I would've been happy to follow Manderlay's demise from the comfort of the retirement home, but that it not the book Langmead chose to write. The story also takes a religious turn; while not exactly didactic, I'm not entirely comfortable with the implications. I'm not one to turn away from stories just because they espouse a worldview different from mine, but in this case it posed an obstacle to my buying into the premise of the book.

Still, the scenery is steampunkishly breathtaking.

There are shapes hanging from the tower ahead of us: a tapestry of wooden walkways and scaffolding which make for a kind of peculiar set of docks. I can see the distant silhouettes of dock workers, high in the air, as if we are standing beneath crystal-clear depths of water and looking up at them. And moored at those docks is a singular ship, or mechanism, that defies easy understanding.

It looks as if someone has attempted to build a clock but did not know when to stop. It is a cataclysm of clockwork parts in synchronised motion arranged in the shape of a frigate. The ship has no sails, barely any hull beyond a few lengths of wood along its flanks, and between brass and copper lengths of girders, I can see endless cogs and cables, whirring and winding and ticking in gentle motion. The whole thing just hangs there, impossibly, in the sky.

I realise that I have forgotten to breathe.

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The systematic encouragement of subversiveness

Other people have already reviewed Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age better than I could.

While I love big ideas and big words — and Stephenson uses both, in spades — that sort of book demands a certain attention, a time and a place, to be appreciated. I had a rocky start with the novel, but it won me over finally. Some plottings, sadly, get glossed over, or are plain forgotten, and the ending's a bit crap, but I loved it all the same.

Here are some bits that I took note of, for their humour or insight.

On children:

Most of their children had reached the age when they were no longer naturally endearing to anyone save their own parents; the size when their energy was more a menace than a wonder; and the level of intelligence when what would be called innocence in a smaller child was infuriating rudeness.

On cultural differences:

Finkle-McGraw began to develop an opinion that was to shape his political views in later years, namely, that while people were not genetically different, they were culturally as different as they could possible be, and that some cultures were simply better than others. This was not a subjective value judgment, merely an observation that some cultured thrived and expanded while other failed It was a view implicitly shared by nearly everyone but, in those days, never voiced.

On transcendence:

Hackworth had made efforts to learn a few Chinese characters and to acquaint himself with some basics of their intellectual system, but in general, he liked his transcendence out in plain sight were he could keep an eye on it — say, in a nice stained-glass window — not woven through the fabric of life like gold threads through a brocade.

On the collapse of nation-states:

The media net was designed from the ground up to provide privacy and security, so that people could use it to transfer money That's one reason the nation-states collapsed — as soon as the media grid was up and running, financial transactions could no longer be monitored by governments, and the tax collections systems got fubared. So if the old IRS, for example, wasn't able to trace these messages, then there's no way that you'll be able to track down Princess Nell."

On subversiveness:

"It wouldn't work," Finkle-McGraw said. "I've been thinking about this for years. I had the same idea: Set up a sort of young artistic bohemian theme park, sprinkled around in all the major cities, where young New Atlantans who were so inclined could congregate and be subversive when they were in the mood. The whole idea was self-contradictory. Mr. Hollywood, I have devoted much effort, during the last decade or so, to the systematic encouragement of subversiveness."

On stories:

"We change the script a little," Madame Ping said, "to allow for cultural differences. But the story never changes. There are many people and many tribes, but only so many stories."

On diplomacy, or something:

"Yo! Aren't you going to invite the King of the Reptiles?"

They looked at me like I was crazy.

"Reptiles are obsolete," said the King of the Shrews.

"Reptiles are just retarded birds," said the King of the Birds, "and so I am your King, thank you very much."

"There's only zero of you," said the Queen of the Ants. In ant arithmetic, there are only two numbers: Zero, which means anything less than a million, and Some. "You can't cooperate, so even if you were King, the title would be meaningless."

The difference between stupid and intelligent people...

"Nell," the Constable continued, indicating through his tone of voice that the lesson was concluding, "the difference between ignorant and educated people is that the latter know more facts. But that has nothing to do with whether they are stupid or intelligent. The difference between stupid and intelligent people — and this is true whether or not they are well-educated — is that intelligent people can handle subtlety. They are not baffled by ambiguous or even contradictory situations — in fact, they expect them and are apt to become suspicious when things seem overly straightforward."

— from The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, by Neal Stephenson.

While the above snippet may not be exactly subtle, and Stephenson himself lacks somewhat in subtlety, at least insofar as world-building goes (the concepts may be nuanced but their literary execution is not. Compare, for example, Miéville, who immerses you in a world with no explanation, it is a given; Stephenson explains everything for you — at least there is no danger of misreading his world.), I am beginning to wish the primer were real so that I might bestow one on my daughter. The primer is fast becoming my favourite imaginary book.

Banished to unfrequented parts of their minds

Hackworth had enjoyed San Francisco and was hardly immune to its charm, but Atlantis/Shanghai had imbued him with the sense that all the old cities of the world were doomed, except possibly as theme parks, and that the future was in the new cities, built from the bedrock up one atom at a time, their Feed lines as integral as capillaries were to flesh. The old neighborhoods of Shanghai, Feedless or with overhead Feeds kludged in on bamboo stilts, seemed frighteningly inert, like an opium addict squatting in the middle of a frenetic downtown street, blowing a reed of sweet smoke out between his teeth, staring into some ancient dream that all the bustling pedestrians had banished to unfrequented parts of their minds. Hackworth was heading for one of those neighbourhoods right now, as fast as he could walk.

— from The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, by Neal Stephenson.

I'm not enjoying this novel as much as I expected to, but it's early still, and I suspect a great deal of my difficulty with it has to do with the fact that I'm away, sadly not in Stephenson's Shanghai, and my focus is elsewhere. I'm having a hard time following the plot, but the world is sufficiently interesting, although it is revealed in a fairly expository manner.

Maybe it's the wrong book for the wrong time and place. However, there are several bits I'm finding compellingly strange and witty, and I anticipate a pay-off.

I'm also looking forward to starting Stephenson's Anathem, which I recently acquired, particularly since its appearance on a list of 10 recent science fiction books that are about big ideas. After all... Science monks! Big ideas!

Truth, beauty, genius

Erasmus Valentine had a fondness for women of a certain age, and that age was at least sixty. He loved their soft, stretched flesh, hanging off their arms like wings, and the look of surprise in their eyes when he made love to them. He loved their stiff gray hairs, which stuck straight out from their scalp and were often dyed a strange false shade of lavender or orange, and he loved their long beaklike noses. If he was particularly lucky, their cries of passion would even sound like squawks.

He was often successful in his amorous quests. Though sometime surprised, or confused, Valentine had loved many, many women of London, none younger than fifty-seven — and that one looked quited ancient for her age. But one bird had escaped his net, and it was the bird he wanted to catch more than any other: Ada Byron, the Countess of Lovelace herself. She was a different sort of bird. Ada had been famous for being wild and brilliant in her youth, and age hadn't tempered her with caution — as it often did — but with confidence. She still smoked cigars, gambled, and wrote tracts on the future of analytical engines with just as much fervor as — if not more than — she had when she was in her twenties. When her husband died thirty years ago in an accident involving the steam presses he made to shape wooden ceilings into cathedral-like patterns, she hadn't sought a new husband. Not out of grieving, but because she didn't see the need for one. She was independent. She laughed at bawdy jokes, and drank with the men after supper. And she had rejected all of Valentine's advances. But she was coming to Illyria today, and Valentine was determined to persevere.

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, a day to celebrate women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Daughter of Lord Byron, Ada Lovelace contributed to Charles Babbage's analytical engine. She is widely held to have been the first computer programmer.

Ada Lovelace also appears in All Men of Genius, first novel by Lev AC Rosen. But as should be clear from the excerpt above, it is not quite the same Ada Lovelace. This one is sixty-seven, a widow who smokes cigars and wins at poker.

But she is but a bit player in All Men of Genius.

This is steampunk. (And it's steampunk week at Tor.com.) Victorian London, horseless carriages that run on different principles than our own, mechanical prostheses, gears, a lot of clockwork, a kind of science that may resemble magic more than what has been borne out in our history.

Violet, age 17, wants to study science at Illyria College, but the school is (as the schools are in her day and age) male only. She applies under the name of her twin brother and gains entry. Now she has to go about in disguise.

All Men of Genius is said to be inspired by Shakespeare's Twelfth Night (or, What You Will) and Oscar Wilde's Importance of Being Earnest. I read Twelfth Night for grade 13 English — I remember I made some clever comment about "Illyria" sounding like "delirium" — so I can attest to there being commonalities. Clearly, character names and plot devices have been liberally borrowed. I have not read Earnest — but, oh look, there it is on my shelf, can it be that I really haven't read it? — but an Internet review of the synopsis makes the similarities to this play clear as well.

This is a charming novel, about science, about girls doing science, and about beauty.

"What's so funny?"

"That all you should see in flowers is scientific principles," he said, "even when a man tried to show you their beauty."

"But that is their beauty," Violet said, pursing her lips. "Really, I don't know what it is with your gender, that they must divide science and beauty into separate fields. As if the stars and planets themselves are lovely, but to map the way they turn takes that away from them. In my opinion, the way a planet spins only adds to its beauty."

And it's about love, too. Love is bound to gum up the works.

Cross-dressing, mistaken identities, killer automata, invisible cats. The pacing is perfect. All Men of Genius is sweet and funny and full of joy.

Excerpt.