Don't open the box

Michael Stephen Fuchs - who first hit our bookshelves with the technothriller The Manuscript (which I reviewed for Pulp.Net) is back. His new work is more-or-less in the same genre, and a specific one at that: Our heroes and/or heroines are undergoing an existential crisis and some form of Psychic MacGuffin (that might resolve said crisises) presents itself with a flash two thirds into the book; heroes and heroines then fall over themselves in an effort to claim the MacGuffin before Others do. The Others will be toting an embarrassment of weaponry and many fire-fights will come to pass before the MacGuffin is taken, by either our heroes/heroines or the Others...with existentially interesting results.

If this book was a car, it would be very difficult to handle, look swanky, and have little boot space...but you'll have a soft spot for it all the same.

The main protagonist is a woman fighting for meaning in her life following the death of her elder brother. Though British, she has fled to California where she works as a computer programmer tasked with constructing artificially intelligent 'bots' for first-person shooters. Prior to this, she was an academic specialising in AI. She lives - somewhat improbably, it has to be said - with a Bonobo chimpanzee and spends her days in conversation in with her office mate, Thad, a hunky-but-married computer engineer. Both of them have issues with whether or not their lives can have meaning.

For a thriller, the Pandora's Sisters is actually quite slow to start. Fuchs patches this a little with a 'flashforward' section that shows how much peril the protoganist will get into - in the Vatican, apparently, and it will involve halberds and Swiss Guards dressed like Bavarian school children. Until then, the book comprises a somewhat frustrating combination of character navel-gazing and occasionally interesting mini-essays on aspects of popular science, particularly evolutionary psychology.

I had a mixed reaction to the philosophy in this book. Fuchs is a philosophy graduate, and no doubt knows his stuff. But his characters - some of whom have PhDs in related fields - seem to produce, for the most part, rather weak philosophical ramblings of the kind one reads in bad undergraduate essays. Now, a work of fiction isn't an essay, and this might well be the result of Fuchs smoothing out some of more difficult bits...but I was disappointed.

For example, one of the dangers (to identity) of applying evolutionary psychology to human behaviour is that, to an extent, a component of our behaviour must be determined by the information in our genes. ...But that does not mean that the remainder is fodder for our free will. It is controlled by the information in our environment. And the combination of these two complex information systems - the human body and its environment - covers the extent of our behaviour. Though the characters in Pandora's Sisters search for meaning as something hidden, almost, in the genes, it seems that a meaninglessness is already apparent in their discussions about evolutionary psychology, completely independently of any 'Pandora code' in the DNA. And yet, as far as I can tell, they don't consider this.

The other difficulty I had concerned the notion of consciousness. There are lots of good arguments that counter the 'ghost in the machine' dualist of Descartes and others, and (speaking with my cognitive science hat on) most neuroscientists today see consciousness as a 'wave crest', if you will, of many components that, in themselves, do not show 'conscious behaviour'. The perspective is one of evolutionary continuity, too, with chimpanzees, for example, seen as having the precursors consciousness (because of their shared ancestry with modern humans). But the characters in this book see the emergence of consciousness as a mystery that somehow confounds evolution, just as nineteenth century critics of natural selection though the eye was too complex to evolve (in fact, it has evolved several times independently). I just didn't buy it.

Still, I recognise that this is a work of entertainment. Once the guns come out, the novel switches gear into a dream-like actioner where characters discuss their favourite automatic rifles, perform startling feats of derring-do, and generally bust caps in various asses. Fuchs's prose is sharper and wittier than before, and he's kept the focus on fewer characters. Definitely worth a look.

Harry Potter and the Order of Stock

Harry Potter mania has come to Exeter. Yes, during a brief trip to the town centre this afternoon, we spied witches, wizards and some extremely cynical shop staff - the latter not so surprising, given the efforts required of them over the past couple of days. But what really surprised me was the lack of stock. We have two branches of Waterstone's in Exeter. (A stranglehold that prevents the blossoming of any independent shops run by staff who don't need customers to spell Norman Mailer's surname when asking for his latest work, but I digress.) In the first branch, my enquiry about whether any Potter volumes remained was met by a polite and amused shake of the head. Only those customers who have reserved a copy, apparently, are able to purchase it today. It was the same story at the second branch of Waterstone's. Quite extraordinarily - given the amount of dough that publishers are wont to cough up for the privilege - there was a large, empty table in the entranceway.

I struggle to understand how this can happen. On the launch day of perhaps the most anticipated book of the last two years, Waterstone's Exeter sold their stock by mid-day. Each person who asked for a copy (and there were a couple in front of me) was turned away. Did Bloomsbury deliberately limit the amount that a given store could shift? Possibly, but this seems counter-intuitive. They can't superificially kick up the value by throttling back demand in the way that Nike or Sony might with a new product. And, in fact, those new products (like the PS3) are more greatly limited by the availability of material resources like silicon. What limits are there on paper?

Overall, the affair is puzzling. As Grumpy Old Bookman has opined, there can be no better demonstration of the oddness of the book trade than Harry Potter: the most sought-after volume in the past couple of years is going to make very little money for anyone other than Bloomsbury.

Two copies were finally purchased in W. H. Smith, which seemed to have anticipated demand rather more accurately than Waterstone's. Two copies? So my girlfriend and I can read them with squabbling.

BAFAB

Crikey, things really sloooow down when you're typing with one hand. But, inexorably, the moving finger writes.

OK! Using a bit of random jiggery-pokery, I've selected the lucky winners of the books in question. You'll recall that they were Life's a Cabaret by James Innes-Smith and Pandora's Sisters by Michael Stephen Fuchs.

And the winners are: Postmodern Housewife, who gets Life's a Cabaret; and Kymberlie R. McGuire, who gets Pandora's Sisters. Congratulations! As I mentioned in the original post, if you're outside the UK, you just need to pay the shipping costs - and it turns out that both winners are extracontinentals. For the Aussie Postmodern Housewife, this is 2.08 GBP, and for the San Franciscan Kymberlie, it's 2.34 GBP. If you could send me your snail mail addresses (my email is in the right-hand pane), then we'll get started.

Happy Buy A Friend A Book Week!

Not so handy

To the NHS walk-in centre this morning. Why? Well, it looks as though some of the scaffolding in my left wrist is tired and irritable. It's too painful to move my fingers and my wrist refuses any kind of rotational movement. The nurse shook her head sadly when I told her the amount of computer work I do on a given day - apparently, it's very common and is likely to be something called tenosynivitis. Impressive. Anywho, I'm not much good for computer work at the moment, so the blog may get a little quiet over the next few days. I'll try to finish off the BAFAB stuff soon, just as soon as I've worked out how to go to the toilet on my own.

Buy a Friend a Book Week - Free Book Give-away!

Buy a Friend a Book week is the brainchild of Debra Hamel, a writer and critic living here. Debra started BAFAB week to encourage book buying. The point is, though, that you should buy someone a book for no reason at all. Do it at random; at fancy; whimmishly.

To celebrate BAFAB week, I'll be giving away two books. The first book comes from a small publisher, the second from an up-and-coming author.

Life is a Cabaret, by James Innes-Smith, is published by The Friday Project (readers of this blog may be interested to know that this is where Scott Pack now resides).

James Innes-Smith's book Reach for the Big Time was an instant hit: it celebrated the heroes of 70s and 80s light entertainment and was beautifully illustrated with classic publicity shots of each unique star. It flew off the shelves and the PR began to roll in. And then it all went wrong…

Next up is Pandora's Sisters, by Michael Stephen Fuchs. Fuchs is the author of The Manuscript, which I reviewed for Pulp.Net as "[having] All the usual suspects: hitmen, shadowy 'intelligence' agents, and drug dealers . . . emerges as a high-energy, enthusiastic yarn".

'You want to know who gave you your immortal soul? You want a personal relationship with God? Well, we found God. We're all up in God. We've got God's private number. And so do you: imprinted a hundred trillion times – once in every living cell in your big dripping corpus.'

If you'd like one of these books, add your name as a comment to this post together with the book you'd like (only one) and I'll select winners at random towards the end of the week (though you might have to wait for me to finish reading Pandora's Sisters). If you live in the UK, I'll pay the postage; if you like outside the UK, I'd like you to pay me the postage via PayPal (the book will still be free, though).