Secrets (a book review post)

Secrets is a great example of how even a poorly written novel can be popular. And, when I say "poorly written," I mean it on just about every level that you can mean it. Still, though, it's better than Snow Crash but, then, Snow Crash is a level of stupidity all its own.

The first and most obvious issue the book has is that it needed an editor. This may be the most poorly edited book I've ever read. There were misspellings, homophones, tense issues, missing words, wrong words (above and beyond the homophones, which are, technically, wrong words), missing letters, wrong letters... um, did I cover everything? I'm not actually sure. And it's not that there were these things; it's that there were these things on every page. And not that there was, like, one per page, it was a handful per page. And I haven't even mentioned the punctuation... oh, wait, there, I did. Let me just say, and not just to whomever edited the book (I'm assuming the author (but I don't know that)), but to everyone (because this is becoming a real peeve of mine): a dash is not a "catchall" piece of punctuation. You can't just stick in a dash (either kind) because you feel like it. Dashes have a purpose, and they are much more limited than most people think. [Let me just put it like this: Quit using dashes! Seriously.] There were more punctuation issues than just the dashes, but it was like someone just sneezed dashes all in the book.

At any rate, if editing is an issue for you, don't attempt this book, because you will want to pull out a red pen and mark all over your Kindle screen (or whatever screen).

The next issue is that it's first person but not just first person: It's written from two different first person perspectives in alternating chapters. Which, in and of itself isn't an issue [I mean, I've done that, so who am I to complain, right?] except that both perspectives are written in exactly the same voice. There is nothing to differentiate them and, especially considering one is male and one is female, there ought to be some differentiation. The author doesn't even bother to give us alternate perspectives on the same event once we get past the first few chapters. For the most part, they just pick up where the other left off or show us what is happening where the other character isn't. Not to mention the fact that [spoiler alert] during the climax, when Olivia starts to doubt Holden, there is no suspense because we've been in Holden's head the whole book (and so has she, actually, for part of it) and we know how he feels about her.

[More spoiler alert.]

The story itself is pretty typical; in fact, I felt like I was watching a cheap knockoff of Buffy the Vampire Slayer through most of the book. So let's see:
1. Female protagonist born with a hidden destiny that she doesn't know about.
2. Bad boy romantic interest whom only she can save and turn to the light.
3. Good boy romantic interest to create some tension.
4. Traumatic death of a loved one.
5. Enigmatic mentor who never tells her anything useful other than that she's "special."
Yeah, it's got it all. Actually, it's worse than what I'm saying, too, because the female protagonist, who hasn't been in a relationship for over a year, finds herself instantly infatuated with two men at the exact same time. What are the odds? [Is the sarcasm coming through?] She immediately begins acting in ways that are just not her. Of course, we don't know that other than that she tells us that "she never does this kind of thing."

There are two things here:
We have to take Olivia's word about things way too often. The author never shows us how Olivia supposedly really is. For instance, when Quintus tells her that she's been born this guardian (the first one in 2000 years, so she's mega-special), he says to her something along the lines of "Haven't you always been a loner? Someone on the outside looking in?" But we never see that about Olivia. In the book, she has an awesome best friend who has been with her since middle school (that doesn't sound like a loner) and she's quite adept at being a socialite, so none of that stuff rings true in the book (it reminded me of Percy Jackson and how, at least in The Lightning Thief, he is constantly telling the audience he's one thing (a rebel and troublemaker) while acting completely the opposite).

It's quite difficult to take Quintus as a love interest seriously since Holden is the one offering the alternate perspective to Olivia's. To put it another way: Quintus is never a credible threat.

And speaking of vampires, Holden is "Vampire Lite." It's like the author really wanted to do a vampire story, but she also wanted her vampires to be able to go out in the daylight, so she just calls them "jinn," instead. Or "jinni." She seems to use the terms interchangeably, and they have nothing to do with the actual jinn mythology. It's just a word she uses, which, actually, bothers me. If you're not basing it on the actual thing, make up a word, or, you know, make your vampires all sparkly. Oh, and jinn have demons in them that operate much the way Whedon's vampires do without the actual changing into vampires.

Perhaps the thing that bothered me most, though, is the sudden, inexplicable, telepathic bond Olivia and Holden develop. It's all very much "we love each other so much, we know each other's thoughts! We're just made for each other! Two halves of the same soul!" [Yeah, I want to go wash my mouth out from just typing that.] So, yeah, their connection is so deep that they spontaneously develop the ability to read each other's minds. And, yet, at the end, even though Olivia has been inside Holden's mind, she doubts whether he really loves her and thinks that maybe he's just been using her the whole time.

Mostly, I just found the book tedious. There's nothing in it that hasn't been done elsewhere and done much better. If it had been well edited (or just edited), I might even would say: If this is the kind of thing you like (cliche love-at-first-sight stories), give it a read; as it is, I can't say that. Evidently, though, based on the other reviews and ratings, most people don't care about that kind of thing, so, I guess, if you like cliche love-at-first-sight paranormal(ish) love stories and don't mind bad grammar and poor punctuation, give it a read. I won't be going on to the next book, though...

Which reminds me! Considering the cliffhanger ending (which I won't spoil), it shows how much this book didn't hold my attention, because I don't care what happens enough to endure another of these books. The two stars I'm giving it is me being generous. I'd say it's probably a 1.5 star book.

Fahrenheit 451 -- A True Dystopian

This is not the first time I've read Fahrenheit 451, but it has been, oh, about 30 years, and you can forget a lot in 30 years. I had. In fact, I had forgotten what a wonderful book it is and, actually, how relevant it remains, now, 60 years later. It's also amazing to see all of the foresight Bradbury had into the world that would be, which is now the world that is. [It was not amazing to see how much of Fahrenheit made it into Snow Crash and not in a good way. Not in an homage way. In a "I really like this and am going to take it and use it in my book" way. Like the mechanical dog. I didn't think it was possible for my view of Snow Crash to fall any farther than it already was, but Stephenson surprised me yet again. Not in a good way.]

The thing that stood out to me most is the true nature of the dystopian world of the Firemen. I'm not a fan of dystopians, but that's because I'm not a fan of current dystopians, which are not dystopians at all. Almost across the board, they are post-apocalyptic. The Hunger Games is not a dystopian story; I don't care how it's marketed or what publishers say or whatever. [And the distinction and where it went wrong is a post unto itself, so I'm not going to go into that now.] But Fahrenheit is in no way post-apocalyptic (although you could say it's pre-apocalyptic, I suppose). It's not even a government imposed dystopian. No, the Firemen and the book burning is something that came from the people, and that's what makes the book so scary.

And, possibly, real.

There are so many things in our current society that Bradbury was only glimpsing when he wrote the book, but they are so much worse, now, than then. I'll focus on two things:

1. We don't like to make people feel bad. About anything. This has been a growing trend over the past few decades with our movement toward positive thinking and making everything "politically correct," but it doesn't stop there, because we've started to stop allowing kids to experience losing. Losing feels bad. Over the past few years, there has been a growing trend in kids' sport teams (like my daughter's old softball team) to not have any losers. No scores. Just two teams of kids who are all winners. And many schools have begun adopting grade-less systems, because bad grades make kids feel bad.

In Fahrenheit, one of the reasons that people don't read is that reading makes them feel bad. As a society, the people want to have fun, and they can't get that through reading.

2. Thinking is hard work. And it makes people feel bad. If they read, they will think. If they think, they will realize just how not very special they are and how much they don't have and that makes them sad. Thinking about anything for too long becomes a bad thing; it's thinking they're really trying to get rid of, not the books. And I'm not talking about the government; I'm talking about the society. Books get shorter and shorter because no one wants to think (and we all know about the current TL;DR crap). Eventually, books become anathema to the society, so they start burning them. They burn them until it becomes a law.

I was looking over a survey recently dealing with people and whether they like to have "intellectual conversations" and 80-90% of people responding say no. I think the numbers where slightly higher for women, but that could be cultural (men want to appear smarter and women want to appear less smart than men). The most common response to the question was, "I don't like to think that hard."

That Bradbury was tackling these topics back in '53 (actually earlier, because Fahrenheit was based off of a short story he wrote in the 40s called "The Fireman") says a lot. It says that we've been struggling over the loss of books in our society for much longer than we normally think. It also says that, although these issues have grown in the decades, books, even if not physical, are still a strong force in our society, and that's a good thing. Of course, the metaphor that Bradbury is making is that the loss of books, the loss of knowledge, the loss of thought will lead man to his doom (a fiery apocalyptic doom in Fahrenheit), and I don't think that he was wrong. His warning is still as applicable today as it was then, just before the greatest wave of censorship the United States has ever seen would was across the country (something the Tea Party would like duplicate, I'm sure).

All of that aside, the language of Bradbury is superb, his language exquisite. Things like, "...under an ancient windmill that whirred like the sound of the passing years overhead." I can hear that sound in my head when I read it, and it gives the passage a weight that just isn't found in a lot of modern books. And my favorite passage:

She had a very thin face like the dial of a small clock seen faintly in a dark room in the middle of a night when you waken to see the time and see the clock telling you the hour and the minute and the second, with a white silence and a glowing, all certainty and knowing what it had to tell of the night passing swiftly on toward further darkness, but moving also toward a new sun.

It's full of foreshadowing and beauty. Very evocative. And the book is full of that stuff.

There's a reason this book is considered a classic, but many books that are no longer relevant are classics. This one surpasses those in that it is a classic and still relevant. I'm quite sure this is a book that more people should still be reading.

12-year-old Drunken Fantasy

[This is a follow up to the A to Z Challenge in that I mentioned Snow Crash in this post and in this one. I talked about a lot of books during the challenge that I had never read, and this is the second work I've read from those I mentioned back in April, the first being "Pygmalion's Spectacles," which was also mentioned in the Virtual Reality post and I talked about it again here. Having finished Snow Crash, here is my review.]

My first impression of Snow Crash came from my  younger son who was looking at it as it laid on the table waiting for me to get to it. He said something like, "The main character's name is Hiro Protagonist?!" and burst out laughing. Being incredulous, I grabbed the book and looked and, sure enough, that is the main character's name. The thoughts in my head ran something like this:

• "That is so dumb!"
• "That sounds like something that would come from a bunch of guys sitting around drinking." You know, because they're drinking, they think it's funny.
• "Stephenson must not have realized the next day that it wasn't as funny as it seemed when he was drinking."
• "It sounds like the kind of thing my oldest would have suggested when he was 5 and wanted to name his not-yet-born younger brother Hot-Speeder." You know, if he had known the word "protagonist" at 5.
• "That is so dumb!"

The thing is, though, Stephenson evidently did realize it was stupid, because he acknowledges within the book that it's stupid by having another character tell Hiro he has a stupid name. It didn't dissuade him from using it, though. His secondary character has a similar name in  that she's called "Y.T." which seems to have been used just so there can be confusion and have people call her "Whitey."

The second impression followed closely on the heels of the first. Hiro delivers pizzas (for the Mafia, but that's another story). Hiro is also an elite hacker and the best samurai swordsman in the world. He delivers pizzas. As I digested this information, I flashed back to an idea my oldest told me about when he was about 12: a ninja on a motorcycle, swords crossed on his back, delivering pizzas. He, at 12, thought this was a wonderful idea. At 12, it probably is. At this point in the book, I began entertaining the idea that this was just some kind of delusion from the hero, Hiro; that might have made the book interesting. But it turned out not to be; everything is supposed to be as it's presented.

As you can see, my view of the book wasn't shaping into anything positive. But it gets worse... oh, it gets so much worse.

See, the back of the book says the book is "...a mind-altering romp through a future America..." A future America. And that's the hinge that broke the whole story for me, because it's not set in the future at all. Whoever wrote the back cover blurb must not have actually read the book, and that's without excuse. It is even more without excuse that that's been allowed to stand through 19 printings of the book. It makes me wonder if anyone in the publishing industry ever actually read the book.

Let me break this down for you.

Hiro's father fought in World War II. Not his grandfather, his father. To be at all plausible, the story can't really be taking place any later than the mid-90s. The book was published in 1992, so, really, the story was happening "now" as it was published (because 3 years into the future is not a "future America," at least not as it's presented in the book). So, basically, what we're dealing with is an alternate timeline world, which would be okay if
1. it was presented that way
2. there was some reason for the HUGE differences between the world of the book and our world

• what caused the divergence (which happened sometime after WWII and, probably, after Vietnam)
• how in the heck did the technology get so advanced (because it's decades (at least) more advanced than what we have now (two decades after the book was written)

Which is to say that I just couldn't buy the book from that perspective, because the world as it's presented in the book could never have gotten to the state that it was in in just a couple of decades from the divergence point. It's utterly ridiculous.

So... I'm reading, I'm not very far in, and I'm having huge issues with the book. And it gets worse.

The "partnership" between Y.T. and Hiro is only there because the author decided it would be. The characters have no motivation toward it. They meet and Y.T. says "hey, you wanna be partners?" and Hiro says "yeah, sure." The problem is that Y.T. is a 15-year-old girl and Hiro is a 30-something guy with no job. The relationship is never mutual, either. Y.T. just feeds information to Hiro while occasionally being bossed around. She gets nothing in return other than getting to say  he's her "partner." It was dumb.

But it gets worse.

Early in the book, after Hiro has lost his pizza delivery job because he crashed the pizza car (see, so now he's a completely unemployed samurai hacker (pun intended)), he's in the metaverse, the virtual reality world of the book, trying to get intel he can sell. Some stuff happens including Hiro getting into a fight that just happens so that we can see Hiro's virtual sword skills. But! In the middle of all of this stuff in the metaverse, we cut to Y.T. who has gotten herself thrown into "the Clink." She needs to be rescued, so she calls Hiro to get her out of her jam. This is pre-partnership and, I suppose, the impetus of the partnership. Anyway, Hiro shows up and rescues her, and they part ways. THEN, we go back to Hiro right where we left him in the metaverse about to have this fight. Basically, Hiro was in two places at once, because there is no explanation ever given about how these two events happened at the same time. Basically, Stephenson needed to break to the other character and never took into account the conflicting time frame.

This is not the only time we see Stephenson have issues with keeping things like this straight, and this next bit has spoilers, so skip ahead if you have the misguided notion of wanting to read this book. Otherwise, read on!
1. Near the end of the book, Hiro is explaining everything to some dudes (you know, your basic telling instead of showing, but it's worse than that (but I'll get to that in a moment)), and one of the guys asks Hiro why he needs to get the clay tablet. The problem? Hiro hadn't gotten to that part yet. Basically, Stephenson just has the guy ask a question that he, supposedly, knows nothing about so that he can dump the info to the readers. It made me want to gouge the pages. First, I don't need to have stuff explained to me (especially more than once!), but, if you're going to explain to me, don't do it in a stupid way like having a bunch of guys who don't have a clue about what's going on start asking questions based on info they don't have.
2. During the climax of the book, the main tough dude bad guy is on a helicopter. He's been on the helicopter for a while. Except when he's suddenly needed to kill a bunch of people, he's somewhere else killing them before the helicopter arrives at the location. No explanation. Nothing. He's just already there. After Raven has killed all the dudes he needs to kill, then the helicopter with the head bad dude shows up. The helicopter that Raven had been on for chapters and chapters. I wanted to rip the pages out of the book (but I'm going to trade it in at the used book store for something that's actually good, so I refrained).

So...
There are all of these specific issues of stupidity in the book, way more than I've mentioned here, but the worst thing about the book had nothing to do with those things. And those were bad enough. I mean, if I hadn't been trying to find out why the book is such an "important" sci-fi book, I wouldn't have read it. I would have stopped at the point where I realized it was set "now," because, really, that was a deal breaker for me, except I wasn't to anything, yet, that was giving me a reason why it made such an impact, so I had to keep going to find out.

The beginning of the book has a bunch of inane action that has nothing to do with anything before we actually get to the inciting incident. After that, someone shows up and gives Hiro a special computer thing, and, basically, the computer tells Hiro everything he needs to know for the rest of the book. He never does anything to discover anything. The computer just tells him the story. And, you know, it's this long philosophical discussion with the computer (that goes on for, like, 1/3 of the book) that, again, reminded me of a bunch of guys staying up late drinking and someone says "what if language was a virus?" and they just went on and on about it thinking themselves all deep and crap and everyone wakes up the next day and realizes what a stupid idea it was. Except, well, everyone but Neal Stephenson. He wakes up the next morning and decides to write a book about it with his other stupid, drunken idea, the name of the protagonist, oh, yeah! Protagonist! And then threw in the stuff he fantasized about when he was 12, namely being a ninja hacker pizza delivery guy with a hot 15-year-old girl.

Oh, yeah, did I mention that Y.T. is 15? Because she is. And she spends a goodly portion of the book being concerned with what a hot 15-y-o piece she is. (Yes, I know I mentioned it, but OH MY GOSH it's so constant in the book.)

Oh! Oh, wait! So, yeah, there's this huge discussion with the computer, right, where the computer tells him everything. Blah blah blah. The whole plot is just explained to us without any action to go with it. So that's bad enough (actually, it's horrible, because, like, that's the HUGEST no no of writing: Show, don't tell, but Stephenson apparently thinks we wouldn't be able to figure it out if he showed us, or, maybe, he just couldn't figure out how to show us his deep, philosophical conversation with himself), but, at the end, he has to re-tell it all from Hiro's perspective to make sure we understood what he already told us, so we get to spend another couple of chapters with Hiro explaining the plot to people that aren't really important. Except that they are, but we never knew that until just at that moment when Hiro needs to explain everything to them so that they can take care of  the bad guy. Basically, the book spends a lot of time telling us the story with action mixed in that's only loosely related to the plot.

The only interesting thing in the book is Stephenson's vision of virtual reality and virtual worlds. Way back in '92, I guess I can see people getting excited about what he did with that stuff, since the whole virtual world thing didn't really exist, yet. Of course, it still doesn't exist via virtual reality, but virtual worlds are virtually a dime a dozen these days (sorry for the pun but not sorry enough to take it out (see what I did there? acknowledging it but leaving it in)), and some of them are even modeled on the idea of Snow Crash. It doesn't make up for how poorly written the book is, though. It's not the worst written book I've ever read, but I think it may have been the stupidest. I mean that. It has so many plot issues and plot holes and, well... maybe I shouldn't expect more, but, yeah, I expect more from big time books from big time publishers (and, remember, this was before the breakthrough of independent and self publishing). Someone, at some point, should have said... something. Something like, "Go back and fix this." But no one ever did.

Which brings up a whole slew of other questions, because this book was a big deal. So, as far as being a money maker, I suppose they were correct to release it the way it is, but it's actually what I would call a piece of garbage, and I don't say that very often. I mean, I hated (hated) The Sword of Truth books (after the first one), and I wouldn't call those garbage, but this book has no redeeming qualities. It has no real plot structure. The protagonist (and I can barely even use the word in connection with the book, because the author had to tell us who the protagonist is so that we would know) doesn't do anything to facilitate the story except write one computer program that's mentioned, basically, as an aside and that he does because he's bored. It's a linear story, but the author couldn't keep track of when things were supposed to be happening so there are conflicts all over the place. The bad guy is taken out by the equivalent of a car crash. And there is no denouement at all. It just ends right there. So the questions it brings up all have to do with critical thinking and reading and, maybe, I need to do a post about that, but, right now, I can't figure out whether I envy or pity people who don't engage in critical thinking when they read.

I've heard that Stephenson has some good books out there, but, then, I also head that this was a good book, so it's really highly unlikely that I'll ever look at anything else he's written. Snow Crash is easily the worst book I've read this year. Not the worst written, but the worst in concept and execution for sure. In fact, I can't think of any book that I've read that I would say is worse. Even books I couldn't finish.

The A to Z of Fiction to Reality: Snow Crash, Second Life, and Submarines

Submarine

After all the talk about Jules Verne, how could I not mention submarines?
The thing is, though, despite frequently having the idea of the submarine attributed to him, Verne actually didn't dream these up. In fact, the Nautilus, Nemo's submarine in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, is named after one of the first submarines from almost a century before Verne wrote about it.

And that nautilus was named after this one:

And the interior:

Even though Verne wasn't the originator of the submarine (actually, it was another of those things that da Vinci had sketches for), he was the first to write about them in the way that he did, a tool for exploration and a tool for combat. It's fairly safe to say that he helped form the concept of what the submarine would be used for in the 20th century.

Snow Crash

Let me start out by saying that Neal Stephenson did not come up with the idea for virtual reality, nor did he come up with the idea of the multi-verse. Neither did Marvel Comics, but they've probably done more to promote the idea of the multi-verse than anyone else. However, Stephenson, through his novel Snow Crash, did introduce the concept of the Metaverse. And this is a novel I now feel like I need to read. It was like one of Jung's unconscious ideas coalesced in Stephenson's brain and came out as this concept of the Metaverse.

In Snow Crash, the Metaverse is a virtual reality world that has... well, not replaced the Internet, become the Internet. Since I do actually believe we're heading toward virtual reality (and I believe that it's in virtual reality that mankind will face its greatest challenge (not zombies, not cyborgs, not even genetically engineered viruses)), I think this idea of the Metaverse is fascinating (did I say I need to read this book? Oh, I did...).

Anyway...
My point is this, after the book came out in 1992, a text-based game was launched in '93 called The Metaverse. In '95, Active Worlds was launched, and it was based entirely on Snow Crash. There were some others, but the big one was Second Life in 2003. You have heard of Second Life, right? It's hard to be online and not to have heard of it, even if you haven't "played" it. Just for the record, I have not. But there have been laws passed in some countries to control the exchange of money, real money, on this "site."

Second Life was created by Philip Rosedale who, at one point, gave the credit for the idea to Stephenson's novel (I wish I could find that article again, but, basically, he said "I got the idea after reading Snow Crash); now, of course, he only says he was "aware" of the novel but the idea for Second Life was completely his own. I will point out, though, that they did introduce a Snow Crash sub-world into Second Life.

Snow Crash continues to influence the development of the world wide web. It was Snow Crash that popularized the term "avatar." Google Earth was modeled after Snow Crash, and Google Earth is just cool. I used it for research while I was writing The House on  the Corner. From that standpoint, it's also influencing Google's driverless car. And I'm not even going to list all the software that's been developed or is being developed in order to bring about this virtual idea of the Metaverse.

By the way, Time named it in their top 100 English-language novels written since 1923. Not top 100 sci-fi novels, just top 100 novels. Did I mention the need to read this? Will we look back as a society a few decades from now and point at Snow Crash as a turning point? Will we just see it as part of the natural evolution of things? Will it have faded out of importance entirely? It's hard to say, but here, now, 20 years after its release, we are still feeling its impact.



And, now, something completely unrelated:
As I have mentioned many times, Briane Pagel has this big Star Wars blogfest going on. We're just past the halfway mark, now, and I'm no longer in the lead. I got whammied. If you like me, though, you can go over and comment and let him know that I sent you, and we'll both get some points for it. But that's just an aside. Here's the real bit:
There's this indie movie called Yellow Hill that's trying to get funded. It's starring Bai Ling, and she's also producing it. They're asking for donations of just $5 to help them reach their funding goal of $6,000. For a movie $6,000 is pretty near to nothing, but it's still $6,000.
Anyway, Briane is trying to help these people out, and I support him in that. And, well, he's giving 1000 points to anyone who posts about the Yellow Hill thing, and, well, I need the points. But, still, I do support him in his support of this movie project! So click on the link and check it out.