2012-01-25: Do symbols files make sense for C++?
I also posted this to debian-devel, which is where the discussion will be,
but I wanted to post it on my journal as well so that others who may be
interested will see it on Planet Debian. For those not familiar with
Debian, this concerns the implications of a new feature for how Debian
tracks shared library dependencies.
I'm currently working on the Policy modification to document (and
recommend) use of symbols instead of shlibs, but I'd only personally used
symbols with C libraries. Today I decided that I should try adding a
symbols file to a C++ library, particularly if I'm going to recommend
everyone do it. I tried this exercise with xml-security-c, which is, I
think, a reasonably typical C++ library. Not the sort of core C++ library
that would sit at the center of the distribution, but a random software
package that's in Debian because other things use it.
The experience was rather interesting, and I ended up uploading the new
version without a symbols file and continuing to just use shlibs. That's
for the following reasons:
The generated symbols file was HUGE. Hundreds of lines. This is a
marked difference from the typical C symbols file, which is of quite
manageable size. Some of that is that the library provides a lot of
different classes, but some of it is that C++ just generates a lot of
exported symbols. There's no way that I could do what I would do with
a C library and understand those symbols, why they're there, and
whether they are likely to have changed between revisions.
Generating a reasonable symbols file was a pain. Generating an
unreasonable symbols file that just contains all of the mangled symbols
is largely mechanical and uninteresting, but that symbols file doesn't
seem to me to convey useful information. So I did some scripting to
translate the symbols back with c++filt, and add (c++) tags, and then
try to understand what I was looking at and figure out whether I should
sort the symbols list because the default sort is by mangled name,
which is meaningless. This is a rather unappealing process. It's not
particularly difficult, but it's very awkward and feels like it's
missing vital tools.
The resulting symbols file is incomprehensible to someone without
strong knowledge of C++. It's full of opaque entries that don't make
sense to the non-C++ programmer, which I suspect is a substantial
number of people who package C++ libraries for Debian. I know enough
C++ from school that I can evaluate security fixes, make simple
patches, and review upstream changes, and I think that's all that
should be needed to package things for Debian. But I'm deeply
uncomfortable producing a symbols file on my own that contains entries
for things that I know nothing about and cannot evaluate when they've
last changed, like "non-virtual thunk to FooClass::~FooClass@Base".
Once I had a symbols file that resulted in a successful build and that
I could have uploaded, I started thinking about how I was going to
maintain it. With a C program, I would change the symbols file
versions when the underlying function implementation changes in a way
that may not offer eqiuvalence, similar to bumping shlibs. I realized
that I was going to have no idea when that happened, and the only way
that I would maintain the symbols file would be to either trust
upstream to maintain ABI equivalence and therefore only change the
symbols file when upstream changes the SONAME, or not trust upstream to
maintain ABI equivalence and therefore change all the versions with
each new upstream release. That gives me exactly the same semantics as
a shlibs file, so what's the point in having a symbols file?
The exported symbols of the library contained many symbols that
obviously weren't really from that library, but instead were artifacts
of the C++ compilation process, things like instantiations of
std::vector. Do those go into the symbols file? Do they change from
architecture to architecture? If they disappear again, is that
actually an ABI break? How do I know? It's all very mysterious, and
while shlibs provides the same semantics as just ignoring this, at
least I'm not then including in the package data, generated by me,
things that I'm just blindly ignoring.
I came away from this experience thinking that I should revise the Policy
amendment to say that symbols files are really for C libraries and for C++
libraries with either a tightly maintained symbol export list or
maintained by a C++ expert, and that most C++ library maintainers should
just not bother with this and use shlibs, bumping the shlibs version or
not based on their impression of how good upstream is at maintaining ABI
equivalence.
But that feels like a result contrary to what I had previously thought was
the intended direction, so I wanted to ask the Debian development
community as a whole: am I missing something? Are these symbols files
actually useful? Am I missing some trick to make them useful?
2012-01-23: Review: Baba Yaga Laid an Egg
Review: Baba Yaga Laid an Egg, by Dubravka Ugrešić
| Translator |
Ellen Elias-Bursać |
| Translator |
Celia Hawkesworth |
| Translator |
Mark Thompson |
| Publisher |
Canongate |
| Copyright |
2007, 2009 |
| Printing |
2009 |
| ISBN |
0-8021-4520-5 |
| Format |
Trade paperback |
| Pages |
327 |
Baba Yaga Laid an Egg is a very strange book, at least compared to
what I normally read and review. It has three separate and very distinct
parts written in very different styles (so much so that they're translated
by three different people, and that choice feels natural). The first two
are fiction; the last is non-fiction. The first part is straight mimetic
fiction. The second is borderline fantasy, a sort of magic realism. And
the third part is a scholarly discussion of Baba Yaga in myth and legend
in Slavic countries, mixed with a critical analysis of the first two parts
from the perspective of how they incorporate symbols and themes of the
Baba Yaga myth. This is a book that contains its own critical response.
The first part, "Go There — I Know Not Where —
and Bring Me Back a Thing I Lack," is a close look at the relationship
between a daughter and her mother, told from the daughter's perspective in
a series of vignettes and moments of observation. It doesn't exactly have
a plot, although there is a longer bit of narrative around a woman her
mother met and a trip to Bulgaria.
This part is beautifully, breathtakingly well-written, full of small
observations and emotional discoveries that paint a vivid picture of both
the narrator and her mother. The balance of frustration, discomfort, and
helpless amusement in the way her mother often gets the wrong word for
something was particularly lovely. I was less fond of the section where
the narrator goes to Bulgaria with Aba, but mostly just because I was
sympathizing with the narrator's negative reactions. It's one of those
bits of writing where the author manages to talk about parts of life that
don't follow a plot arc: problems that don't really resolve, history that
simply is what it is, and the day-to-day process of staying close with
relatives and coping with their well-established quirks.
The second part, "Ask Me No Questions and I'll Tell You No Lies," is, as
mentioned, a significant shift in tone. It's set in a health spa in the
Czech Republic. The primary characters are three old women (one extremely
old and in a wheelchair and prone to wonderfully blunt outbursts), the
doctor who runs the spa and is obsessed with life extension, an American
vitamin and supplement magnate, and a masseur at the spa with a serious
(and completely unrealistic) priapism problem.
This is the section where the fantastic starts to enter the story, but
always somewhat sneakily and without narrative fireworks. Two of the
women (possibly all three) have unusual powers, which are almost
indistinguishable from strange and usually amusing personal quirks and are
mentioned without narrative fanfare. There is more of a plot than the
first part, but it's not the sort of story that collects a bunch of plot
threads and ties them up into a resolution, which is sometimes
frustrating. Family troubles, death, romance, friendship, and personal
baggage all mix, swirl, and mingle. Parts of it are delightful; parts of
it are rather confusing. The story seems determined to not be taken too
seriously, reinforcing that constantly with rhyming couplets about the
relentless forward motion of the story at the end of each section. I
loved moments of this part of the book, but I came away wishing it had
taken itself a bit more seriously and provided a bit more internal
analysis and explanation to the reader.
The third part is the hardest for me to talk about, since I don't read
much literary criticism and symbolic analysis. It's a detailed look at
the Baba Yaga myth, organized largely by symbols within the myth, and it's
full of the sort of symbolic analysis that I'm not personally interested
in: lots of connections to sex, fertility, and sexual duality. (I'm not
saying this analysis is wrong, just that I don't find it that interesting
to read about.) Most of this part is a general and generic overview of
Baba Yaga, with lots of mentions of regional and cultural variations. The
most interesting material (to me, at least) is the application of that
overview to the two fictional parts, but unfortunately that's a minority
of the material. This is dense going if you don't read a lot of
mythological analysis or literary criticism, and it didn't add as much to
the previous parts as I was hoping.
I can appreciate what Ugrešić is doing in echoing the form of independent
analysis and putting speculation about the possible interpretations of her
own work into the pen of a fictional scholar. The resulting sense of
uncertainty and multiple valid interpretations is more accurate, in a deep
sense, than an analysis that pointed to specific interpretations. But the
result is that no particular interpretation goes deep enough to make a
coherent whole. I think this effect was probably intentional, but I found
it unsatisfying. (Which may, itself, be part of the point.)
One thing that does come across from the final part is a picture of Baba
Yaga as a figure who lives on the margins and doesn't fall into a simple
picture of good and bad in large part because she refuses to participate
in the expected cycle and structure of the world and specifically in the
"proper" female roles in that structure. That makes her a figure of
threat and chaos in tales, but it can also make her a figure of female
empowerment, and specifically one for old women. I can see why this book
won the Tiptree: it's not obvious in the way in which it raises gender
issues, but it raises them very effectively, and does so while looking at
old women on their own terms. This is not a frequent subject of books.
I'm not sure I could quite recommend this work as a whole; it's just so
strange that I'm still not sure what I think of it. But there are
sections that are beautiful, particularly in the first part which (due to
the nature of the book) reads well independently. I like somewhat more
resolution and plot structure in my books, but it's hard not to admire the
skill and the embedded moments of brilliant observation. Certainly look
for it if you like mythological analysis and symbolism and would enjoy
picking apart the ambiguous symbols embedded in the fiction with the help
of the concluding analysis.
Rating: 6 out of 10
2012-01-17: Review: Bright of the Sky
Review: Bright of the Sky, by Kay Kenyon
| Series |
Entire and Rose #1 |
| Publisher |
Pyr |
| Copyright |
2007 |
| ISBN |
1-59102-541-9 |
| Format |
Kindle |
| Pages |
450 |
Bright of the Sky starts promisingly enough. Humans have developed
an interstellar travel technology called Kardashev tunnels, which appear
to be some sort of wormholes. These tunnels are maintained by AIs (called
machine sapients here), and the book opens with one of those AIs going
runaway. I was a bit dubious that, with the paranoia about runaway AIs in
this universe due to a previous incident, a junior staff member could
cause this with a homework assignment on extragalactic particles, but the
rest of the background was still good enough to hold my attention.
Unfortunately, this bit of background has very little to do with the main
story. The extragalactic particles are the hook for discovery of a
parallel dimension, or, more accurately, confirmation: an interstellar
pilot named Titus Quinn disappeared with his family in the middle of
Kardashev tunnel travel some years ago, and then turned up on a remote
planet without much of his memory and with a wild story about having been
in another universe. The runaway sapient provides confirmation that his
story may not have been that wild, and Bright of the Sky is about
his return to this alternate dimension. His employer, the Minerva
corporation, wants him to scout a path through it as a safer form of
travel, since the Kardashev tunnels are increasingly unstable. Titus
wants to find his wife and daughter.
Unfortunately, as you might guess from that description and knowledge of
how these stories usually go in SF, this alternate dimension is fuzzily
faux-medieval. That means a story that starts out with some interesting
SF grounding turns into a typical fantasy traveling quest, sending Titus
wandering around a world trying to make allies and find clues of the fate
of his wife and daughter. There are a few SFnal aspects to this world
that are mentioned in reviews: a land mass that's supposedly interstellar
in size (although the story never shows that well), a burning sky, rivers
of exotic matter that serve as a transportation system, and giant walls
that form the boundary of this constructed space. There are also some
mildly interesting aliens populating this world alongside human analogues,
including capricious and powerful aliens who apparently built it and rule
it with an iron fist. The problem with all of these elements is that, to
bring them alive and elevate this book above a tedious travelogue, they
need awe-inspiring descriptions. And the descriptions and scene-setting
in Bright of the Sky are not up to the task.
I hate to say this, because I liked some of the background ideas, but I
have rarely read an SF novel that was this bad at providing any sense of
place and surroundings. This novel gave me little or no mental image of
anything: scenery, setting, even the supposedly awe-inspiring artifacts
that the characters run into. There just isn't adequate description.
It's not vivid, it's not specific, it doesn't provide the reader with
enough material to orient themselves, and even major features of the world
Titus finds himself in never cohere. About the only element of the Entire
that I felt like I could picture was the strange sky. How can you have a
transportation system built on rivers of exotic material and never
memorably describe them? It's a baffling flaw for an SF novel that wants
to invoke sense of wonder.
The lack of description isn't due to the author erring on the side of
terseness, either. Bright of the Sky meanders, sprawls, and idles.
There is nowhere close to 450 pages of actual action in this book and
little memorable writing. Instead, there are 450 pages of Titus acting
like an ass, constantly rehashing his inner emotional turmoil, or having
long and elliptical conversations with people about nothing in particular.
It is, in short, boring. There are whole side quests in Titus's story
that do little or nothing to advance the story, and, due to the lack of
description, don't flesh out the world either.
The one part of Bright of the Sky that works is the thread focusing
on Titus's daughter Sydney, who is living in a semi-autonomous part of the
world as a rider for horse-like creatures. It's ironic that the best
descriptions in the book are from a blind protagonist. Kenyon does a
wonderful job giving the reader a sense of open plains, the feel of
Sydney's mount, and the fear and chaos of fights without sight, although
even here I never got a good sense of the indoor spaces. Sydney is also
the best character in the book: by turns brave, despairing, and defiant,
with little touches like her diary adding a great deal of depth. If the
whole book were like this, it would be a much better book, but
unfortunately it's just one side plot, and the contrast is startling. One
is always delighted to see more of Sydney, and disappointed to have to go
back to Titus and his muddled world of overanalyzed actions against
indistinct backdrops.
This book isn't a complete loss, mostly because of Sydney, but it's close.
The writing is mechanically bad: padded, meandering, insufficiently
descriptive, insufficiently vivid, and riddled with cliches and stock
phrases. There are some good ideas, particularly in the world-building,
that would have been fun in a better-written book, but without description
and sense of wonder they fall flat. Kenyon does do a good job with
characters, keeping them memorable and distinguishable and giving them
their own motives and personalities, and it's unfortunate that the primary
protagonist is one of the least interesting characters in the book. I
enjoyed several of the minor characters, and there's some heavy lifting of
characterization towards the end that was disturbing but effective. But
the generic search plot doesn't help, and none of this, not even Sydney,
is worth slogging through the writing.
Bright of the Sky is free on the Kindle, so the price is right if
you want to give it a try. Other reviewers liked it quite a bit more than
I do, and the series as a whole apparently goes interesting places. My
advice would be to read the first couple of chapters, if you think you may
be interested, and see what you think of the writing. If it feels
adequately descriptive and doesn't feel padded, you may enjoy the whole
book. If you're dubious, be warned that the writing gets worse, not
better.
Followed by A World Too Near.
Rating: 4 out of 10
2012-01-16: Review: Fantasy & Science Fiction, July/August 2010
Review: Fantasy & Science Fiction, July/August 2010
| Editor |
Gordon van Gelder |
| Issue |
Volume 119, No. 1 & 2 |
| ISSN |
1095-8258 |
| Pages |
258 |
James Sallis has the other book review column this month, which is devoted
to a long discussion of C.M. Kornbluth. I was already familiar with a lot
of that information, but I do like long profiles of an author's work and
would be happy to see more of those in the review columns. The other
non-fiction is just average, although it does feature a rare film that
Lucius Shepard actually likes. (It is, of course, a non-US, quirky,
small-budget film that debuted at a film festival.)
"Recrossing the Styx" by Ian R. MacLeod: Elderly cruise-goers
as zombies! Well, sort of. In the world of this story, it's possible to
preserve life essentially indefinitely using cloned parts, artificial
replacements, and an upload of the mind into a computer. This has blurred
the line between life and death entirely, creating a huge market of undead
rich people who are catered to by cruises. The protagonist is a cruise
tour guide who starts the story feeling sorry for (and becoming completely
infatuated with) a "minder" of one of the elderly passengers. At the
start of the story, a minder appears to just be a nurse, but it gets
creepier as the story develops.
The story has a good plot that caught me by surprise with the ending
reversal (although in retrospect I should have caught on). But the
foundation on which the plot rests is the attitude that youth is beautiful
and valued above all else and old age is horrible and disgusting and vile,
and that left me a bit cold. I realize this is not exactly a
controversial stance, and the story is full of characters who would
realistically have that attitude, but I didn't enjoy seeing it left
unchallenged. (5)
"Advances in Modern Chemotherapy" by Michael Alexander: What
starts as a rather detailed apparent slice-of-life look at an elderly man
undergoing chemotherapy turns into, of all things, a look at a secret
association of telepaths. The highlight of the story is the
characterization, particularly of the protagonist, who is quietly
matter-of-fact about the end of his life and provides an enjoyable
contrast to the attitudes about old age of the previous story. The plot
is somewhat less effective. There are some good initial bits of growing
discovery, and I liked the look at new-found friendships among the dying.
But it never goes anywhere, just meanders to a moderately confusing
conclusion. A good look at the value of companionship that I think could
have used a bit more narrative oomph. (6)
"Brothers of the River" by Rick Norwood: One of the problems
with invented myths is that legends and myths are embedded within a social
context and normally have some social purpose or point within that social
context. The trick for manufactured ones is to go beyond telling a
myth-style story and provide the reader with a sense of that context and
how the myth fits into it. That's what Norwood, sadly, doesn't do here.
We get a story about two brothers who make a suitably mythic wager that
prompts an adventure, to which they both react following their own
personalities, and the style is well-done. But it doesn't seem to have
any point, and that, I think, is the sign of that missing deeper context.
Also, just as a nit-pick, humans are perhaps the best long-distance
runners on the planet, particularly in heat. During a day-long race
through a hot climate, the last thing that creatures with their choice of
forms would do would be to switch away from human form to an
antelope. That would be a sure way to lose the race; the antelope would
outsprint the human at short distance, but the human would then run the
antelope to the ground. (6)
"The Revel" by John Langan: Langan writes some of the strangest
stories with some of the most unusual structures. This is another horror
story of sorts, but it's written as an analysis and breakdown of a
werewolf story (particularly a cinematic presentation, as it's big on
visuals). The narrator forms a connection with the reader by implying
that they both are very familiar with the structure of stories and are
going to discuss it together, at an abstract level where one doesn't have
to engage emotionally, but then the narrative seems to be drawing the
reader in. The first part, the abstract discussion, really worked for me,
and in that sense it was one of the more enjoyable werewolf stories I've
read. I like structural analysis, and this was nicely readable and rather
interesting. What I thought worked less well was the attempt to pull the
reader into the story. I found that too allusive and and confusing, maybe
because I'm not as familiar with horror as the narrator expects. (6)
"The Tale of Nameless Chameleon" by Brenda Carre: This I quite
liked. It's about a young orphan, a street kid in a vaguely Asian (well,
Orientalist is probably more accurate) world who saves a prince from an
assassin. Encounters with the rich and powerful when you're a penniless
street kid rarely go well, however, even when you save their life, and the
prince ends up killing her mentor and closest friend. That leads into a
fun little adventure of curses and magic with a very satisfying ending.
Good fun. (7)
"Mr. Sweetpants and the Living Dead" by Albert E. Cowdrey: You
can rest assured that any Cowdrey story will be well-written, and this is
no exception. The protagonist runs a bodyguard service, and at the start
of the story is hired by a famous gay author to protect him against a
former lover. The twist is that his personal bodyguard already shot the
lover through the head. The reader will immediately guess that this is a
zombie story, but the protagonist wants very much not to believe that and
attempts multiple rationalizations, which is much of the fun. The setup
makes it sound like the treatment of homosexuality is going to be
cringe-inducing, but it's actually quite good and features a couple of
twists that left me grinning, particularly the way the ending played out.
This is Cowdrey in humorous action mode, rather than one of his more
serious stories, which is my favorite type of Cowdrey. (7)
"Pining to Be Human" by Richard Bowes: I'm not at all sure what
to make of this one. It's another story about being gay, and a much more
serious one that tries to capture the sense of being an outsider. That
part I thought was very successful. But like Bowes's
previous stories
referenced in the introduction, the plot drifted in ways that were rather
confusing and didn't provide quite enough for the reader to hold on to and
make sense of. This, as always, may be because I read SF&F magazines in a
distraction-rich environment and don't give them as much attention as
books. The introduction to this story says that this and the other two
referenced are autobiographical, but doesn't explain further. I don't
know if that means they're fictionalized versions of Bowes's own life,
which may explain the lack of a typical narrative structure or coherent
plot, or if that's just a reference to the writing style, which feels like
a rambing memoir. (6)
"Epidapheles and the Inadequately Enraged Demon" by Ramsey
Shehadeh: The introduction to this story says that Shehadeh's
previous story was somewhat controversial,
garnering reader reaction that said it was too silly and tried too hard.
I'm not sure what to make of that; if true, I suppose it's another sign
that humor is hopelessly individual. I loved it, and I loved this story
even more. It's the closest to Pratchett I've seen by someone who isn't
Pratchett.
Epidapheles is hired, at the start of the story, by a lord who wants him
to recreate the doorway to his wife's quarters. Hiring Epidapheles is, as
any reader of the previous story can attest, a very bad idea, as he's one
of the least competent (and most powerful) wizards you will ever see. As
before, we get most of this through the viewpoint of his familiar Door,
who's an invisible chair. (You should have a good feel for the tone just
from that.) As the story progresses, we find that the lord's wife is
actually off in a hell, slowly manipulating a demon into becoming a less
horrible person, a process that Epidapheles almost but not quite disrupts
completely.
This is by far the best story of the issue, and is even better than
Shehadeh's previous work, if only for some brilliant bits of description
near the start.
There was a flash, and a small, localized grammarstorm bloomed out of
the air and crawled along the ceiling, shedding torrents of adjectives
that splashed down into the room, modifying everything they touched.
Door suddenly found himself both crenelated and deciduous, and just
slightly canonical. Lord Fuddlesworth had become spangled and
punctilious. The walls dripped with jocund. Rivulets of trapezoidal
ran between the tiles.
I wholeheartedly approve of any story that can use the line "the walls
dripped with jocund." (9)
"The Lost Elephants of Kenyisha" by Ken Altabef: This appears
to be one of those issues of F&SF that doesn't really believe in
the "SF" part. This is another fantasy, this time a ghost story, with the
twist that (as advertised in the title) the ghosts are elephants. The
protagonist works with Kenya on preserving the wild elephant herds, and is
appealing desperately for help because what are claimed to be elephants
have been wreaking destruction in neighboring Tanzania. This has sparked
Tanzania to go back on their laws to outlaw elephant hunting, and given
that elephants don't honor national borders, that could become a horrible
tragedy for the small remaining wild herd.
The setup is effective, if depressing. The story is somewhat less so. It
goes through the expected (and predictable) stages of investigation,
disbelief, discovery, and then turning to native wisdom to deal with the
problem. The comment that native Africans lag in technology but are much
more advanced in mystic arts provoked some serious eye-rolling. And the
ending is just depressingly nihilistic. The mix of modern Africa and a
British ghost hunter out of a Victorian story was mildly entertaining, but
the rest of the story didn't do anything for me. (4)
"Introduction to Joyous Cooking: 200th Anniversary
Edition" by Heather Lindsley: As you might expect from the title, this is
a short, humorous piece, whose hook is a retrospective look at changes in
culinary habits over the upcoming 100 years. The idea is fine, but it's
not particularly funny, at least to me. (6)
"The Precedent" by Sean McMullen: Okay, I suppose I have to
concede the label of science fiction to this monumentally depressing
crapsack
future. Human over-consumption and abuse of the environment has caused a
variety of horrible but mostly unstated things to happen, and the
subsequent generations born after the collapse have decided to deal with
that by trying and convicting everyone who lived back when there was a
chance to stop the collapse. The story is of an extended trial, where
people are convicted of things like driving an SUV or using a jet ski and
then sentenced to death by horrible tortures or lifetime labor hauling
bodies into pits.
At the start, it looks like the protagonist may be fighting back against
this somewhat, as he's trying to prove that some people who lived during
that time did everything they could, and he avoids conviction for longer
than anyone in history. But lest you think a light of optimism can enter
this story, McMullen finds a way to use that to make the story even more
depressing. I understand where the anger and bleakness here are coming
from, but I don't think there's much point in a story like this; those who
already agree with the general emotional undertone will just be miserable,
and those who don't will just get angry at it to no effect. It's not
badly written, but bleh. (4)
Rating: 6 out of 10
2012-01-12: git-pbuilder 1.27
Two changes in this release. First, Guido Günther submitted a patch
(which I then mangled) to notice if the DIST ends in -backports and
git-pbuilder is calling the builder with an action like create and, in
that case, passing --othermirror with the Debian backports mirror. This
lets one create new build chroots for squeeze-backports with just:
env DIST=squeeze-backports git-pbuilder create
without any additional configuration required.
Second, Rafał Długołęcki pointed out the cause of the weird error message
that I'd been noticing for years: "W: /root/.pbuilderrc does not exist".
git-pbuilder runs the builder with sudo when performing an action like
login or create, but sudo resets the environment including HOME, so it
tries to load .pbuilderrc from root's home directory. This isn't very
useful, so now git-pbuilder checks if a .pbuilderrc exists in the user's
home directory and loads it with an explicit --configfile option if it
does.
You can get the latest version from my scripts distribution page, and I expect it will turn up in the
git-buildpackage package before long.
2012-01-11: krb5-sync 2.2
The big news is that, as of this release and thanks to work by Sam
Hartman, using this password and status synchronization toolkit no longer
requires patching the Kerberos implementation if you're using MIT Kerberos
1.9 or later. The name of the module has also now changed to krb5_sync.so
and is installed in a directory inspired by the MIT Kerberos plugin
directory. A patch is still needed if you use Heimdal as your KDC
implementation.
Support for -randkey password changes (by just ignoring them) has been
added in this release, thanks to Dominic Hargreaves.
For the tools, krb5-sync-backend's password command now accepts the
password on standard input, which will work better when used as a remctl
backend and won't expose the password to other local system users.
krb5-sync now reports a proper error message instead of segfaulting if the
local configuration is not complete.
There are also other, more minor build system and portability fixes.
You can get the latest version from the krb5-sync distribution page.
2012-01-07: Debian and popularity
In the course of a discussion on debian-project, statistics about how many
computers run Debian came up. This is a metric that always bothers me a
little, and this time I tried to say something about why. It feels like a
comment that should have an independent existence outside of that thread,
so I'll post it here as well.
One of the delightful things about Debian is that the project consists of
a group of people who are working together to create something that,
primarily, we all want to use. Making it usable for everyone else as well
is, of course, a wonderful goal and something that many of us care a lot
about. But I think it's important not to lose sight of the fact that
world-wide adoption on the order of Windows is not a requirement for the
Debian project to be a success.
Debian is successful every time I boot a system and it's running Debian,
every time Debian solves my problems, every time I can fix something I ran
into because it's Debian and I can help make it better. It's fun
if I can get more people to use Debian, and it's important to have an
influx of new blood and new ideas to keep Debian fresh and responsive, but
that's about keeping Debian successful, not about making
Debian successful.
If we have enough developers to maintain and improve Debian even at the
rate that we're maintaining and improving Debian today, to me that's a
success, and I don't really care whether the percentage of Debian users in
the broader computing context ever moves off of 0.02%. One of the great
things about free software is that we're not a business: we don't live or
die by market share, we aren't going to get bought out by someone else if
we don't become a big enough fish, and we don't have to grow 10% a year or
implode. It would certainly be nice to attract more people and
more users and improve even faster, and I certainly wouldn't want to stand
in the way of that, but it's not part of my metric of success.
2012-01-07: kstart 4.1
There were a couple of major bugs with k5start -H in 4.0, one reported by
pod and one that I ran into myself, so I wanted to get a new release out
soon. One fix is for k5start -H and krenew -H when the ticket cache is
not renewable; both would incorrectly attempt to reauthenticate even if
the remaining lifetime was fine. The other is for k5start -H for a
principal different than the ticket cache. k5start wasn't checking the
principal, only the ticket lifetime.
But I didn't want to release a new version without implementing a few more
things on the TODO list, so this release also has some other features and
bug fixes. k5start and krenew when run as daemons now remove their PID
files when killed with SIGHUP or SIGTERM. There's a new -s option to
krenew telling it to kill a command it's running with SIGHUP when krenew
exits (such as when the cache runs out of renewable ticket lifetime). And
when k5start or krenew, running as daemons, encounter errors in refreshing
the cache, they now retry every minute until the error is resolved.
You can get the latest version from the kstart distribution page.
2012-01-04: Miscellaneous mini-haul
Collecting a few random books I've bought over the last couple of months
that didn't warrant a full post in their own right.
Max Brooks — World War Z (sff)
Lawrence Lessig — The Future of Ideas
(non-fiction)
James Lipton — An Exaltation of Larks
(non-fiction)
Vandana Singh — The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet
and Other Stories (sff)
Jack Vance — Tales of the Dying Earth (sff)
I subject everyone else to these because, in the absence of a book
database, this is how I keep track of what I already own. It's already
been valuable several times. (I really do want to write a book database
at some point, though. I keep being tempted to use it as an experiment in
learning Java.)
2012-01-03: Review: Cyteen
Review: Cyteen, by C.J. Cherryh
| Series |
Cyteen #1 |
| Publisher |
Warner Aspect |
| Copyright |
1988 |
| Printing |
September 1995 |
| ISBN |
0-446-67127-4 |
| Format |
Trade paperback |
| Pages |
680 |
I've reviewed several other C.J. Cherryh books, somewhat negatively, which
combine to give the impression I'm not a fan. That, however, is an
artifact of when I started reviewing. I first discovered Cherryh with
Cyteen some 20 years ago, and it remains one of my favorite SF
novels of all time. After finishing my reading for 2011, I was casting
about for what to start next, saw Cyteen on my parents' shelves,
and decided it was past time for my third reading, particularly given the
recent release of a sequel, Regenesis.
Cyteen is set in Cherryh's Alliance-Union universe following the
Company Wars. It references several other books in that universe, most
notably Forty Thousand in Gehenna but also
Downbelow Station and some others. It
also has some links with the Compact Space series (The Pride of
Chanur and sequels), and more generally almost all of Cherryh's writing
is loosely tied together by an overarching future history. But one does
not need to read any of those other books before reading Cyteen;
the book will fill you in on all of the politics and history you need to
know. I read Cyteen first and have never felt the lack.
Be warned that Cyteen was at one time split into three books for
publishing reasons: The Betrayal, The Rebirth, and The
Vindication. This is an awful way to think of the book. There are no
internal pauses or reasonable volume breaks; Cyteen is a single
coherent novel, and Cherryh has requested that it never be broken up that
way again. If you happen to find all three portions as your reading copy,
they contain all the same words and are serviceable if you remember it's a
single novel under three covers, but under no circumstances should you
read one of those portions in isolation.
Human colonization has expanded out into the galaxy, but originally only
by slower-than-light travel sponsored by the private Sol Corporation. The
inhabitants of the far-flung stations and the crews of the merchant ships
that supplied them have formed their own separate cultures, but remain
attached to Earth until the discovery of FTL travel and a botched attempt
by Earth to reassert its authority. By the time of Cyteen, there
are three human powers: distant Earth (which plays little role in this
book), the merchanter Alliance, and Union.
The planet Cyteen is one of only a few Earth-like worlds discovered by
human expansion, and is the seat of government and the most powerful force
in Union. This is primarily because of Reseune: the Cyteen lab that
produces the azi.
If Cyteen is about any one thing, it's about azi: genetically
engineered human clones who are programmed via intensive psychological
conditioning starting before birth. The conditioning uses a combination
of drugs to make them receptive and "tape," specific patterns of
instruction and sensory stimulation. They are designed for specific jobs
or roles, they're conditioned to be obedient to regular humans, and
they're not citizens. They are, in short, slaves.
In a lot of books, that's as deep as the analysis would go. Azi are
slaves, and slavery is certainly bad, so there would probably be a plot
around azi overthrowing their conditioning, or around the protagonists
trying to free them from servitude. But Cyteen is not any SF
novel, and azi are considerably more complex and difficult than that
analysis. We learn over the course of the book that the immensely
powerful head of Reseune Labs, Ariane Emory, has a specific broader
purpose in mind for the azi, and one of the reasons why Reseune fought for
and earned the role as legal protector of all azi in Union, regardless of
where they were birthed, is so that they could act to break any permanent
dependence on azi as labor. And yet, they are slaves; one of the
protagonists of Cyteen is an experimental azi, which makes him the
permanent property of Reseune and puts him in constant jeopardy of being
used as a political prisoner and lever of manipulation against those who
care about him.
Cyteen is a book about manipulation, about programming people,
about what it means to have power over someone else's thoughts, and what
one can do with that power. But it's also a book about connection and
identity, about what makes up a personality, about what constitutes
identity and how people construct the moral codes and values that they
hold at their core. It's also a book about certainty: azi are absolutely
certain, and are capable of absolute trust, because that's part of their
conditioning. Naturally-raised humans are not. This means humans can do
things that azi can't, but the reverse is also true. The azi are not
mindless slaves, nor are they mindlessly programmed, and several of the
characters, both human and azi, find a lot of appeal in the core of
certainty and deep self-knowledge of their own psychological rules that
azis can have. Cyteen is a book about emotions, and logic, and
where they come from and how to balance them. About whether emotional
pain and uncertainty is beneficial or damaging, and about how one's
experiences make up and alter one's identity.
This is also a book about politics, both institutional and personal. It
opens with Ariane Emory, Councilor for Science for five decades and the
head of the ruling Union Expansionist party. She's powerful, brilliant,
dangerously good at reading people, and dangerously willing to manipulate
and control people for her own ends. What she wants, at the start of the
book, is a project to attempt again to completely clone a Special (the
legal status given to the most brilliant minds of Union). It was
attempted before and failed, but Ariane believes it's now possible, with a
combination of tape, genetic engineering, and a controlled environment, to
reproduce the brilliance of the original mind. To give Union another
lifespan of work by their most brilliant thinkers.
Jordan Warrick, another scientist at Reseune, wants this too, but for his
own reasons. He has had a long-standing professional and personal feud
with Ariane Emory and wants to be transferred out from under her to the
new research station that would be part of the project, and he wants to
bring his son Justin and his companion azi Grant with them. Justin is a
PR, a parental replicate, meaning he shares Jordan's genetic makeup but
was not an attempt to reproduce the conditions of Jordan's rearing. Grant
was raised as his brother. And both have, for reasons that are initially
unclear, attracted the attention of Ariane, who may be using them as
pawns.
This is just the initial setup, and along with this should come a warning:
the first 150 pages set up a very complex and dangerous political
situation and build the tension that will carry the rest of the book, and
they do this by, largely, torturing Justin and Grant. The viewpoint jumps
around a fair amount, but Justin and Grant are the primary protagonists
for this first section of the book. And while one feels sympathy for both
of them, I have never, in my multiple readings of the book, particularly
liked them. They're hard to like, as opposed to pity, during this setup,
since they're in way, way over their heads, are constantly making
mistakes, and are essentially having their lives destroyed.
Don't let this turn you off on the rest of the book; about 150 pages in,
Cyteen takes a dramatic shift of focus. A new set of protagonists
will be introduced who are some of the most interesting, complex, and
delightful protagonists in any SF novel ever written, and who are very
much worth waiting for. While Justin definitely has his moments later on
(his life is so hard that his courage can be profoundly moving), it's not
necessary to like him to love this book. That's one of the reasons why I
so strongly dislike breaking it into three sections; that first section,
which is mostly Justin and Grant, is not at all representative of the
book.
I can't talk too much more about the plot without risking spoiling it, but
it's a beautiful, taut, and complex story that is full of my favorite
things in both settings and protagonists. Cyteen is a book about
brilliant people who think on their feet, and Cherryh succeeds at showing
this through what they do, which is rarely done as well as it is here.
It's a book about remembering one's friends and remembering one's enemies,
and waiting for the most effective moment to act, but it also achieves
some remarkable transformations. About 150 pages in, you are likely to
loathe almost everyone in Reseune; by the end of the book, you find
yourself liking, or at least understanding, nearly everyone. This is
extremely hard, and Cherryh pulls it off in most cases without even giving
the people she's redeeming their own viewpoint sections. Other than
perhaps George R.R. Martin I've not seen another author do this as well.
But, more than anything else, Cyteen is a book with the most
wonderful feeling of catharsis. I think this is one of the reasons why I
adore this book and have difficulties with some of Cherryh's other works.
She's always good at ramping up the tension and putting her characters in
awful, untenable positions. Less frequently does she provide the
emotional payoff of turning the tables, where you get to watch a
protagonist do everything you've been wanting to do for hundreds of pages,
except even better and more delightfully than you would have come up with.
Cyteen is one of the most emotionally satisfying books I've ever
read.
I could go on and on; there is just so much here that I love. Deep
questions of ethics and self-control, presented in a way that one can see
the consequences of both bad decisions and good ones and contrast them.
Possibly the best political negotiations in all of fiction. A wonderful
look at friendship and loyalty from several directions. Two of the best
semi-human protagonists I've seen, who one can see simultaneously as both
wonderful friends and utterly non-human, who put nearly all of the
androids in fiction to shame by being something trickier and more complex.
A wonderful unfolding sense of power. A computer that can somewhat
anticipate problems and somewhat can't, that encapsulates much of what I
love about semi-intelligent bases in science fiction. Cyteen has
that rarest of properties of SF novels: both the characters and the
technology meld in a wonderful combination where neither could exist
without the other, where the character issues are illuminated by the
technology and the technology supports the characters.
I have, for this book, two warnings. The first, as previously mentioned,
is that the first 150 pages of setup is necessary and important, but
painful to read through, and I never fully warmed to Justin and Grant
throughout. I think it's quite likely one would start this book and be
trying to figure out, 50 or 100 pages in, why I like it so much. Stick
with it; it gets better. Justin and Grant continue to be a little
annoying, but there's so much other good stuff going on that it doesn't
matter.
The other warning is that part of the setup of the story involves the rape
of an underage character. This is mostly off-camera, but the emotional
consequences are significant (as they should be) and are frequently
discussed throughout the book. There is also rather frank discussion of
adolescent sexuality later in the book. I think both of these are
integral to the story and handled well, but they could be triggers for
some readers, so it's worth knowing in advance what's coming.
Those warnings notwithstanding, this is simply one of the best SF novels
ever written. It uses technology to pose deep questions about human
emotions, identity, and interactions, and it uses complex and interesting
characters to take a close look at the impact of technology on lives. And
it does this with a wonderfully taut, complicated plot that sustains its
tension through all 680 pages, and with characters whom I absolutely love.
I have no doubt that I'll be reading it for a fourth and fifth time some
years down the road.
Followed by Regenesis, although Cyteen stands well entirely
on its own and there's no pressing need to read the sequel.
Rating: 10 out of 10
2012-01-01: 2011 Book Reading in Review
For the year of 2011, I finished and reviewed 60 books. This is a huge
milestone for me; it's the first time since the second year I started
doing this that the number of books I read actually increased. This gives
me more confidence that I've stabilized the year-by-year decline in my
reading. I did that while substantially increasing the amount of time I
spent enjoying video games, which was another major goal of the year.
Only two books received a 10 out of 10 this year, one fiction and one
non-fiction. The novel was Jo Walton's
Among Others: the
best book I read this year. It's a delightful look at the process of
finding a place for oneself in the world and features one of the best
protagonists that I've seen.
The non-fiction book was Rory Stewart's
The Prince of the
Marshes, which means that both of Stewart's books that I've read have
received 10 ratings. The Prince of the Marshes is his look at his
time spent in the provisional government of Iraq after the overthrow of
Saddam Hussein. I think it should be required reading for anyone
expressing an opinion on what the US and other western powers should or
should not have done in Iraq. It lays bare the difficulties, confusion,
and frequent stupidity of going into someone else's country and trying to
fix it, and I think seriously calls into question whether this sort of
international intervention can ever work.
Other fiction highlights of the year were Kelley Eskridge's
Solitaire, a
startling and deep look at identity and social connection, and Mira
Grant's Feed, a
zombie apocalypse story that completely overcame my deep dislike of zombie
apocalypse stories. Feed should have won the Hugo in 2011, despite
some unbelievable politics and a bit too much cheering for bloggers. This
was the year for excellent protagonists, with all three of my top-rated
fiction books featuring unique and memorable characters who left a deep
and lasting emotional impact.
The two other non-fiction standouts were both a bit dry, but if you have
the patience and attention, they reward persistance. Richard Hofstadter's
Anti-Intellectualism
in American Life is a deserved classic that gave me an eye-opening
perspective on the long history of interactions between intellectualism
and populism in US politics and culture. David Levering Lewis's
God's Crucible is a
wonderful history of Islam as it related to Europe and filled in some
large gaps in my knowledge of world and religious history.
60 books a year, or five books a month, feels like a comfortable and
sustainable level, although I'm going to keep my formal goal at a book a
week (52 in the year) to give myself some leeway to either get distracted
by video games or by other projects. My reading did concentrate more than
usual in science fiction and fantasy this year, and I'd like to add more
mainstream fiction and more non-fiction.
The full analysis includes some
additional personal reading statistics, probably only of interest to me.
2011-12-31: Review: Norse Code
Review: Norse Code, by Greg van Eekhout
| Publisher |
Ballantine |
| Copyright |
2009 |
| ISBN |
0-553-59213-0 |
| Format |
Mass market |
| Pages |
292 |
Mist is a Valkyrie, tasked by Odin (by way of her boss Radgrid) to recruit
soldiers for Valhalla in the upcoming battle of Ragnarok. Baldr has been
killed, slain by his brother Höd through the machinations of Loki, setting
into motion the inevitable destruction of the world, and of late that
destruction seems to be entering its final phases. The world is locked in
an endless winter, society is breaking down, and it feels like the last
battle is fast approaching. So Mist's task is urgent.
The standard method of Valkyrie recruitment is to watch the fields of
battle and to harvest the deserving slain. But Radgrid doesn't think
that's fast enough. The best warriors for Odin are often those who are
Odin's descendents, so she's built a genetic analysis firm to track them
down. The warriors must die in battle, so she sends out Grimnir, a
previously recruited (and veteran) warrior, with Mist to fight whoever
they've tracked down and kill them, at which point Mist can bring them to
Valhalla. The only problem with this plan is that Mist isn't exactly
happy to watch Grimnir kill an accountant who has no idea how to fight.
As a long-time fan of Norse mythology, I'm happy to see the recent flood
of fantasy that uses it as a backdrop. I'm particularly happy to see it
as a setting for urban fantasy, where there are rather too many vampires
and werewolves and not enough variety. Admittedly, calling this urban
fantasy is a bit of a stretch, since rather a lot of Norse Code
takes place in mythological settings, but there's enough interaction
between the world of Norse mythology and everyday life that it still has
that feel to me. Mist is, in most respects, a typical urban fantasy
heroine: tough, independent, capable of holding her own in a fight, and
getting into trouble by going against the order of things until she gets
sucked into vast problems that are almost beyond her capability.
What's missing from this book, though, is the close emotional bond between
the reader and the protagonist. I think there are two main reasons for
this: a bit too much emotional distance, and the first novel problem of a
few too many ideas shoved into too small of a book.
Norse Code is, unusually for urban fantasy, not told in the first
person, and I think that's partly why Mist remains a bit of a cipher. She
has a brief sketch of a past, culminating in her and her sister being
murdered. She was chosen as a Valkyrie while she watched her sister walk
the long road to Hel, which provides some of the motivation of the book.
(Retrieving her sister makes rather more sense emotionally than her other
stated motivation for going to Hel.) But there just isn't much behind it,
and without her first-person perspective on events, I never developed much
of a feel for her. Her sister, who gets just a few viewpoint sections,
seems like a much more interesting character, but even there we only get
glimmers of what she cares about.
Van Eekhout has this problem throughout the book. The plot is relentless,
tense, and enjoyably complex, but there's a lot of distance between the
reader and the characters. We only get occasional glimpses of what they
care about and what's motivating them, and those glimpses, without the
underlying backdrop of history and personality, often feel random.
There's a bit of a romance, for example, which seems to come out of
nowhere. It sometimes feels like one is reading a history rather than a
novel.
The best characterization probably goes to Hermod, a minor Norse god whose
story van Eekhout alters and then elaborates. I did get a sense of his
love of wandering and his feel for moving through the cracks of the world,
and I think I would have enjoyed reading more about him outside of the
vast sweep of upcoming Ragnarok. But I didn't get a chance, and the
characterization stayed mostly on the surface.
The other serious problem with this book is a standard first-novel
problem: there are a lot of ideas, all packed together tightly and
sometimes not developed enough. It makes for a fast-paced book, but at
the cost of dropping some of those ideas before they're fully explored and
leaving the reader wondering what the point was.
For example, the secret genetics company run by Valkyries and devoted to
finding descendents of Odin and forcibly recruiting them to the armies of
Valhalla is a great hook. That could have easily been expanded into a
book itself: inevitable internal politics, the possible drawbacks of
Radgrid's unconventional recruitment methods, and emotional bonds and
conflicts between the various employees (knowing and unknowing) could all
have been fleshed out. Instead, NorseCODE disappears from the book almost
completely after the first few chapters. The plot sweeps the characters
into other big ideas and that setup left behind. There's one mention,
late in the book, that Radgrid's methods may not work as she intended, but
then nothing comes of it.
The center of this book is a retelling of the events of Ragnarok and the
desperate attempts of the characters to stop them. Van Eekhout fiddles
with the story a bit, alters the heroes and villains in some subtle ways,
and takes a look at the supposed inevitability of Ragnarok from a much
different angle than I've seen before. This part was great; it's
definitely the strength of the book. If you don't know Norse mythology,
van Eekhout explains it as he goes, but since he's only explaining his
version, I think you'd lose much of the enjoyment of seeing how he recasts
it. If you do know Norse mythology (particularly the Marvel Comics
version, for which this book provides a wonderful contrast), it's great
fun: much less of Thor, Odin, Loki, and other the typical center-stage
gods and heroes of the story, and much more of the characters around the
edges and what their goals and motivations are. It also contains the best
Frigga I've ever seen in a retelling of Norse mythology, a good Fenrir,
and some rather awesome set pieces. I had a lot of fun with van Eekhout's
imagination.
But, as much fun as the events are, there's a note missing. It's too much
of an intellectual pleasure, without enough emotional backing. The
characters aren't present enough, the reader doesn't have enough
opportunity to build a connection and really care about their fates, and
the flood of Norse mythology isn't grounded in an emotional sense of what
it would be like to be there, with those things happening to you. The
reader maintains too much distance, which also robs the set pieces of some
of their majesty.
If you like Norse mythology, this is still worth reading, since it
explores corners and pokes at ideas that I've not seen done elsewhere.
But compared to, say, Elizabeth Bear's treatment of Ragnarok (a high standard, admittedly), there isn't enough
emotional punch. If you're new to Norse mythology, I'm not sure I'd
recommend this; while van Eekhout will give you a comprehensive
introduction to Ragnarok, I think the book would be less enjoyable for not
knowing the tradition that he's playing with.
Rating: 7 out of 10
2011-12-29: kstart 4.0
Between one thing and another, it had been almost two years since the last
kstart release, which surprised me when I finally started working on it
again. I'd been intending to put out a new release for some time, but
apparently never got around to it. As a result, there were a ton of
accumulated features and bug fixes, not to mention a huge update to the
testing and portability framework.
The main backward-incompatible change in this release is that I finally
dropped k4start from the distribution. I haven't been able to test it for
years, no one (or almost no one) is shipping Kerberos v4 libraries any
more, and I wanted to do a significant code restructuring. People who
really need it can use older releases.
k5start and krenew now both allow arbitrary ticket cache designators to be
passed with -k, rather than forcing the argument to -k to be a file cache,
and both canonicalize the ticket cache name (by asking the Kerberos
library for the real name) before passing it to subprocesses via the
environment. These features combined should allow them to work much
better with various non-file ticket caches.
k5start and krenew now both, when running as a daemon or when running a
command, default to staying running even if authentication fails. This
allows them to be more robust against temporary problems with contacting a
Kerberos KDC, and is similar to what krenew -i previously did. krenew
still exits by default if the ticket cache disappears or if the tickets
are no longer renewable; to make it stay running in those situations, use
krenew -i as before. Both k5start and krenew have a new -x option that
restores the previous behavior of exiting on any error.
k5start, when run with the -o, -g, or -m options, now writes out a
temporary ticket cache in the same directory, sets the ownership and
permissions, and then does an atomic rename, closing a possible race where
a process using that cache could temporarily not have access to it.
k5start and krenew both now propagate SIGINT to the child process when
running a command rather than just exiting. Signal handlers are now set
with sigaction, rather than signal, which will hopefully fix problems with
propagating multiple signals.
The embedded kafs library has been updated to the current rra-c-util
release, which adds support for Mac OS X and Solaris 11.
There are also a bunch of minor bug fixes and portability improvements,
particularly to the build system.
You can get the latest release from the kstart distribution page.
2011-12-29: rra-c-util 4.1
This release removes the Kerberos v4 portability code, which I've been
carrying around but unable to test for some time. No one is shipping
Kerberos v4 libraries any more, and hopefully few people are still using
it. I'm releasing my last (non-obsolete) package that still supported
Kerberos v4, and it seemed like a good time to drop it.
Also in this release is a replacement for a missing krb5_cc_get_full_name
function (in Heimdal for some time and MIT only recently), and a bug fix
in pam-util. The new pam-util option parsing code for handling Kerberos
times didn't work properly on platforms where a krb5_deltat was not a
long.
You can get the latest release from the rra-c-util distribution page.
2011-12-28: Review: The Confusion
Review: The Confusion, by Neal Stephenson
| Series |
Baroque Cycle #2 |
| Publisher |
William Morrow |
| Copyright |
2004 |
| ISBN |
0-06-052386-7 |
| Format |
Hardcover |
| Pages |
815 |
This is the second book of the three-volume Baroque Cycle, following
Quicksilver. You don't necessarily need
to have read the first book to read this one, but there are a lot of
references to events in the first book that you'd otherwise have to piece
together. It's particularly useful to know Jack Shaftoe's history, or at
least vaguely remember it. I read The Confusion about two and a
half years after reading Quicksilver, and that was good enough,
although I was frustrated by not remembering some details.
Minor spoilers for Quicksilver follow, mostly around survival of
characters. I don't think any of the conclusions drawn are particularly
significant for enjoying Quicksilver.
Quicksilver focused primarily on Daniel Waterhouse with one part
showing Eliza and Jack. The Confusion focuses almost entirely on
Eliza and Jack. It consists of two "parts," Bonanza (Jack's story)
and The Juncto (Eliza's story). Rather than traditional book
parts, these are interwoven throughout the book, making it more like a
typical dual-viewpoint novel with a more dramatic separation between the
halves.
The novel starts with Jack Shaftoe making a startling and unexplained
complete recovery from syphilis, shortly after which he falls in with a
band of fellow galley-slaves and a grand plot to free themselves from
slavery and become exceptionally rich at the same time. This part of the
book is a pirate adventure that covers the globe from France to Mexico,
with a substantial stop in India. It's action-packed insofar as anything
in this series manages to be action-packed, which means that it's still
full of intricate description and it sometimes feels like it will take
forever for something significant to happen, but it's an at-times
fascinating tour of the world as seen by a slave and sailor in the late
1600s.
The second part of the book, Eliza's book, was for me by far the best.
Eliza is brilliant, the intellectual star of the novel, and is the person
with the most agency in the entire book. Using every resource at her
disposal, primarily a keen aptitude for economics but also a hard-nosed
use of the levers and resources a woman has available in the French court,
she maneuvers herself near the height of French nobility and the center of
the flow of money in Europe. And in the process she pulls off one of the
most audacious, intricate, and systematic bits of warfare by business that
I've ever read about.
One of my chief complaints about Quicksilver was the lack of varied
and deep characterization. It felt like the research ate the characters,
turning them into often-passive observers. Stephenson has definitely
remedied that here. The Confusion is packed with characters, and
if Stephenson lacks the dynamic range of a lot of authors, he makes up for
it with a rogue's gallery of personality quirks and bizarre motives that
at times had me laughing out-loud. Eliza goes from being a character it
seemed like Stephenson didn't know how to write to one of the strongest
characters in the book, in large part because Stephenson does a beautiful
job of not overplaying her, keeping her reactions and emotions
understated, and showing her character through the culmination of
deep-laid plans rather than outright description. Stephenson endows her
with a startlingly strong sense of self, which is very appealing to read
about. But the rest of the characters are nearly as good: Leibniz is a
delightful contrast to some of the natural philosophers of
Quicksilver, the villains cover a surprising range from devilish to
petty and nearly pathetic, and I was particularly taken by Stephenson's
handling of Louis XIV. That's a fictional king I could believe in.
Even better, this is a book full of strong female characters that
nonetheless is realistic about the limitations of the roles of women at
the time. I'm not sure if Stephenson just has more room to characterize
Eliza here, if he got better at writing her, or if I missed subtleties in
Quicksilver, but I was really impressed. And she's not the only
prominent female character in the book; several others, including a young
girl who became one of my favorite supporting characters, play significant
roles with clearly distinct personalities.
This all sounds wonderful. But unfortunately, while one major problem of
Quicksilver is remedied, others remain.
I frequently like Stephenson's discursive writing style, particularly when
it's delving into some topic that I enjoy (like cryptography in
Cryptonomicon). He does some of the
most engaging infodumps in fiction. But they are infodumps, and there are
rather a lot of them. It says quite a bit for the quality of Stephenson's
research that I like best the infodumps on topics I know something about,
and some of the details of the hard-currency monetary policy of
Enlightenment Europe were great. But there's just so much here about
which I cared nothing at all, particularly all of the endless names and
relationships of 17th century French nobility and the gory details of
sailing life prior to understanding of the importance of vitamins. I
think Stephenson's best infodumps are about technology and social systems.
There's quite a lot of that in The Confusion, but it's dwarfed by
the minutiae of history and place and petty alliance.
And, even beyond infodumping, this book is relentlessly detailed. The
conversations are long and involve a great deal of exchange of
pleasantries. The letters (much of Eliza's section is epistolary) are
some of the better parts of the book, but they still are full of elaborate
phrasing and don't use one word where five will do. Stephenson wants to
describe everything and everyone until one feels like one is drowning in
detail, and until it becomes hard to pick out the details that are truly
significant to the plot.
In short, this book, like Quicksilver, is a relentless onslaught of
words.
It took me a month and a half to finish (and I normally read quickly).
Much of that time was spent being intimidated by it after about 50 pages
and doing something other than reading, but even when I settled down to
make progress in earnest, it required a vacation and a week of multi-hour
daily stretches. It's impossible to read fast; you simply have to immerse
yourself in it, or you'll miss the details that really are important. But
the pace of the plot is slow and not enough of the digressions are
immediately captivating to give the reader much momentum. And it's 800
pages long, in hardcover, and that's not a large font.
Stephenson does use that pacing and the edifice of words to build some
great moments. There are some fantastic scenes in this book, ones that
I'll remember for longer than Quicksilver. In many respects, it's
one of Stephenson's best plots: strong and deep motives, complex and
entangled relationships, great characters, and some serious growth and
soul-searching for Eliza over the course of the book. It also has one of
the better endings that Stephenson has written, with a lovely mix of
triumph and tragedy and a great hook for the next book of the series. But
you really have to invest the time to get to the payoffs.
One other thing I have to compliment Stephenson on: he shows the harshness
of life before modern medicine, where even the rich can do little about
sickness other than hope. Here's another place where having Eliza as a
viewpoint character helps considerably. Rather than focusing on typical
male heroes, for whom adversity, including sickness, falls into a
pre-constructed frame for the reader, or focusing on the natural
philosophers for which it's primarily a diversion from their work, Eliza
provides some insight into a domestic reaction. This is a world in which
one has a lot of children because a lot of children just die, one where
faces scarred by smallpox are routine, and one where the amount of routine
death and suffering that's just part of daily life forces a practical,
matter-of-fact approach without really taking away the pain. This is a
subtlety of perspective that normally isn't Stephenson's strength, and I
have to applaud it.
So, there are definite merits here. But I think one still has to ask the
question of whether it's worth investing time that could be used to read
five other books to appreciate this one. And, to that, my answer is a
reluctant no. This is a much better book than Quicksilver, but
it's still one that demands a huge investment of effort and that didn't
excite me proportionally. This may well be different if you are as
interested in Nine Years' War European politics as I am in cryptography,
since Stephenson's research is generally superb. But this is a massive,
sprawling, rambling novel, and Stephenson is not a writer who keeps one
reading for 800 pages for the joy and music of his prose.
I'm glad I read it, but partly that's from a sense of accomplishment of
doing something hard I've wanted to do for a couple of years, and partly
because I'm slightly obsessive about writing reviews of award-winning novels. I'll go on (eventually) to read
The System of the World for the same reason. And Stephenson
improves on Quicksilver significantly and provides some excellent
characterization. It's a book worth considering if what you want to do is
crawl into a world for several months and not have to come out. But if
you've not invested in the series and are eyeing the wall of the Baroque
Cycle in a bookstore dubiously, I think you can get more enjoyment for
less investment of time and attention elsewhere.
Followed by The System of the World.
Rating: 6 out of 10
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