Reading, Brief Updates

I read _Alterned Carbon_ by Richard Morgan. It has been out for a few years and I have looked at it in bookstores, but it finally appeared in a small-format paperback, so I took it home.

The writing is pretty good, and I enjoyed bits of the world Morgan has built. However, I don't think this is actually great work. I like his morally ambiguous and intuition-driven main character, for the most part. In Morgan's world, most forms of death are recoverable: wealthy people's personalities and identities are backed up. People without backups can be killed, permanently by destroying the small electronic module in their skull. This is "RD," real death, and it is a very serious crime compared to just killing someone's body, or "sleeve," which is just classed as "organic damage."

At a couple of points in the book the main character, Takeshi Kovacs, goes on killing sprees. He doesn't just kill one or two people: he kills a dozen. He doesn't just kill the bodies of his victims, he inflicts RD, melting down their "cortical stacks," the devices that hold his victims' conscious minds.

There's no real justification for this in the storyline. We feel some sympathy with this character, and perhaps start to like and understand him, but then we're supposed to accept that he is someone who can go on a killing spree like this without remorse. If we do that, how can we continue to see him as a sympathetic character? Also, within the story there seems to be no serious consequences for these actions, although as he investigates the matter that frames the whole storyline, supposedly all of this takes place as elaborate vengeance for another "real death."

It's weirdly inconsistent. Either death has great significance, or it doesn't. What we get instead is that it apparently has no significance when Kovacs does it, but when other people do it, the act is enough to drive Kovacs' actions for hundreds of pages.

The story also lacks some focus: props and sets appear and disappear without further reference. There are some big issues at play involving human consciousness and what death means if you can be stored and resurrected later, or even if there are duplicate copies of you running around, but for the most part Morgan doesn't go very deep into these issues.

The consciousness-in-a-machine themes have been handled much better by Greg Egan in his books such as _Permutation City_, and in some of his fantastic short stories, where the little device in your head that holds the real "you" is known as a "jewel" instead of a "stack."

For surreal and grotesque science fiction crossed with the classic detective novel, I'd recommend instead _Noir_ by K. W. Jeter. It's darkly comic, full of wordplay, although I should caution you that it is quite grotesque, very uneven, and will be too weird for many readers.

If you're interested in some of the philosophical ideas brought about by copying human consciousness into a machine, see the classic _Rogue Moon_ by Algis Budrys. For another darkly comic cyberpunk-y vision, one that is a fun ride, if not all that well-written, see _Signal to Noise_ by Eric S. Nylund and the sequel, _A Signal Shattered_.

When compared to these books Morgan's novel doesn't seem very original. He seems to be inspired by secondary sources: more by _Blade Runner_ than by Philip K. Dick's spooky _Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep_, and more by _The Matrix_ than Baudrillard. I'd be willing to give Morgan another try, but I don't really recommend this book.

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I'm also finally getting back to Susanna Clarke's _Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell_. This is a long novel about an alternate past where magic was real. The style is engaging and funny, and it is peppered with interesting footnotes. It is slow reading, though. I'm currently at about the halfway point.

Setting it down for a number of months hasn't seemed to harm my enjoyment of the book, in part because it is somewhat episodic. There are a couple of plot lines happening in the background and returned to now and then, but much of it is really in the form of short adventures within the framework, as if it had been written on and off over the course of several years and then fit together (which, in fact, I think it was).

The author's vision of magic is really beautiful, and has a magnificent kind of internal logic to it. Jonanthan Strange, one of the two magician characters, seems to operate entirely by intuition, rather than planning, and I get the feeling that the author does too. Highly recommended if you like long novels and discursive storytelling.

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So, roofers have been out and there is some kind of temporary patch on our roof. The ceiling has not leaked in the last couple of storms. That's good! We also found out that we are, in fact, going to get a substantial rent reduction. So it looks like when the carpeting is replaced and the paint dries, Isaac will be able to return to his room! My hope is to be able to get some new shelving and storage space in there before he does so, so that it never becomes quite as messy as it was.

That is predicated on money, though, which we still don't seem to have a good grip on, as far as making our expenses predictable.

We have to pay a chunk of money for state tax this month. We're also getting a series of baffling notices from Blue Cross and from Isaac's counselor. Blue Cross says they aren't paying. Grace has her insurance license but she can't interpret these statements; they don't make ansy sense. The counselor says, though, that Blue Cross has actually reimbursed them for the remaining cost of the sessions.

Neither Blue Cross or the counselor's business office, though, seems at all capable of giving us any kind of coherent account of (a) the charges, (b) what we've paid, (c) what Blue Cross has paid, and (d) what we have left to pay (or to be reimbursed for, if we've overpaid).

Of course, we know what _we've_ paid, but although they've cashed the checks, the counselor's business office can't seem to show us an account that agrees at all with reality, which should be quite simple. So despite our best efforts to stay on top of this, we don't actually know if we're going to have an unpleasant billing surprise or if in fact we have already paid all we need to pay and then some.

I fear we're in for a similar situation with Credit Counselors of America and our consolidated debt payment. We are supposed to be done in the fall, but the statements from our creditors don't seem to reflect this, and we don't have copies of the agreements that CCOA made with the creditors. They are supposed to be taking care of that part; we're just supposed to make our fixed monthly payments. But something tells me it is not going to end well, and my plan to be completely debt-free by my fortieth birthday is going to be profoundly screwed up.