Spring-Summer Highlights

I don't usually post much about myself on social media, but in honour of my 31st birthday today, I will.

May, June, July and August (already) have been exciting months. I've:

• seen Angel Witch live at Lee's Palace
• gone to the Preakness
• seen most of the National Mall in Washington DC
• hiked Mount Nemo
• made a root beer kit
• made my own hot sauce for the first time in a while
• had my dog's picture on the wall of my local pub
• attended the Doug Ford inauguration party
• gone to Ripley's Aquarium
• gone to Niagara on the Lake
• shown friends from across North America around my hometown Toronto
• just today, walked from Roncesvalles to Etobicoke Point.

Pictures to follow ASAP. You won't miss these!

This is what I do when I'm not reading, whether law or literature, apparently.
(July's book coming soon as well.)

Design Space in Fiction

Growing up, one of my favourite card games was Magic: the Gathering. Wizards of the Coast lead designer Mark Rosewater has a fantastically written column, Making Magic, that goes into the details of what it takes to create Magic cards. With their endless permutations and their medieval-ish fantasy themes, Magic cards have a lot in common with fiction books.

One of my favourite concepts Rosewater explores in Making Magic is something called "design space".

In short, design space is what hasn't been done within a specific medium but that is a logical offshoot from what is currently available. It's the innovation that fills in the gaps. For example, if the first two Magic cards ever printed had been a red creature with 1 power and a red creature with 3 power, "red creature with 2 power" becomes an obvious card design.

How does this relate to fiction?

• Substantial portions of fiction, especially genre fiction, are effectively fictional adaptations of non-fictional subjects. Historical fiction adapts history. Most science fiction adapts physics, chemistry or engineering. Didactic instructional tales frequently adapt religion or philosophy.
• Which other subjects can be adapted? I've been doing this with diplomatic history. political science, industrial relations and economics in my upcoming novel, Burning Clouds. By digging deeper into these less-mined fields, I'm using design space.

• Related concepts can be substituted for each other. For example, houses can be made of wood instead of bricks. Positive: houses can be built faster. Negative: wildfires are suddenly terrifying. In fiction, this usually occurs more as "what if dragons breathed ice instead of fire?" or "what if people had flying cars instead of... non-flying cars?"
• I explore this concept in depth when discussing the replacement of fantasy-style magic with mysticism. To ape my above example, Positive: characters have greater reliance on technology, precluding Harry Potter-style wizard luddite-ism. Negative: battle scenes become less Tigana and more "let's scope out our enemies from a mile away and then lob artillery shells at them". I'm thankful I write such good diplomatic conference scenes.

• Fiction often borrows from other media. The possibilities here are endless. Borrowing from modernist literary theory? Why not also borrow from modernist architecture?
• I've done this in coining the term "literary hyperrealism". By combining Henry James-style realism, which I've been reading for years, with influences from hyperrealist painting, I've been working on a style (or is it a genre?) in which the action follows the characters so closely the reader can feel every breath, twitch or drop of sweat. See this post and this Quora answer for more.

Once you start thinking of established genres as hollow rather than solid, or as frames rather than as buildings, you can start filling in the gaps. Rather than describe someone else's world, you can squeeze into that spot within a genre, or between genres, to create your own.

Overload Nostalgia

There's a phenomenon* in the arts, culture, fashion, and everything else that's capable of being current or trendy. It can happen to anyone, although it happens most often to people who seek depth rather than breadth in their interests. The phenomenon is: any effort aimed at being as thorough as possible will eventually end up dooming someone to living in the past.

I call it Overload Nostalgia.

Not an overload of nostalgia, but rather, overload that causes nostalgia.

Here's an example: I've listened to 46 albums that were released in 2018. I'm on pace to listen to approximately 79 albums released in 2018 by the end of the year. That's a lot of albums for someone who doesn't work in the music industry. However, it's a tiny fraction of the albums that have been released in 2018 so far, let alone the ones yet to come.

If I attempt to listen to every single album released in 2018, I'll be listening to 2018 releases well into the 2020s. If I add on every 2016 album and every 2017 album, I'll be well into the 2030s, despite the supply remaining fixed. By the time I reach some albums that are new to me, the artists will be nostalgia acts. There's simply no way to process this much information without everything getting horribly backlogged, and - here's the key - my hypothetical 2016-2018-obsessed self missing out on all the great albums of 2019, 2020 and onward.

This applies with other media, such as paintings, books or video games. It's especially bad with watching or reading the news. One day's current events, told from every outlet's perspective, and then including various places' local news items, could take a near eternity to read.

While this is all very fun, what's the practical application?

Overload nostalgia:

• Helps explain why we need canons, in everything from books to music to movies, even when we disagree with them or temporarily abandon them. Any oldies radio station sifting through every single '60s song, for example, would take years before returning to an old favourite.

• Cuts slack for the seemingly excessive trendiness of popular media. Surface-level analyses are important because depth can result in the entire outlet becoming bogged down in a single event or topic.

• Reminds us to consume a variety of sources. That can be everything from alternating classic novels with newer ones, to reading different news outlets, to trying out different stores.

I post this as I listen to a classic heavy metal album from 1990 that I had never heard all the way through before. Next, I'll put on something else.

*A trope, if you will.

June's Book: The Dictator's Handbook

The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior Is Almost Always Good Politics by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith
Politics (2012 - 124 pp.)

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith set out their theory of leadership in The Dictator's Handbook that, like many mixed qualitative/quantitative political science theories, is applicable across democracies, autocracies, municipalities, corporations and other organizations. It is that there are small coalitions and large coalitions in charge, that the leader has to please his or her coalition in order to stay in charge, and that the more people in the coalition, the more spread-out the benefits from the leader are. Populations are thus divided into interchangeables, influentials and essentials (the coalition). Essentials are rewarded first, then influential, then interchangeables.

This is best illustrated using examples:

Andy Autocrat leads a resource-rich, but education-poor, postcolonial dictatorship. Andy requires only the support of 20 top military officials, and 3 key foreign investors (including governments), to stay in power. However, Andy's country has 23 million taxpayers. Andy can then raise taxes, pay off the military leaders and foreign investors, pay what little Andy must to quell any rebellion, and then keep the rest.

Dale Democrat has been elected to the highest office of a small but wealthy democratic nation. Dale requires at least 51% of the vote in at least 51% of the electoral districts in order to be re-elected; a little over 25%. In Dale's country of 5 million registered voters, that equals 1.25 million votes. Dale needs to appease these voters, who can easily switch sides, by enacting good public policies. "Keep[ing] the rest", and Andy Autocrat can, would be frowned upon decisively.

The Dictator's Handbook is thus simultaneously a cynical explanation of every leader's objective - to stay in power - but also a tribute to democracy. By appealing to leaders' selfish instincts, we need to make that selfishness work for us, so they argue - and in democratic states, that means

Most of the rest of the book consists of applications of these concepts. Topics from foreign aid (in which it is easier to buy off dictators), to corporate governance (in which the authors advocate for greater coordination among minor shareholders), to many others all siphon through the small coalitions and large coalitions that make up the groups leaders need to please. Whereas autocrats desire many interchangeables (people eligible to become coalition members) but few essentials, democrats typically end up with large groups of both.

Tip for anyone reading this book: have an encyclopedia or similar source, even just Wikipedia, nearby either during or after reading The Dictator's Handbook. The source material is so broad there's no realistic way any reader, myself included, knows the details of all the settings and characters Bueno de Mesquita and Smith introduce. I tip my hat to them for braving such eclectic source material, although this also gives rise to the book's greatest flaw: there is no way any two professors, even combined, can be experts on so many subjects. Therefore, it is inevitable that some of their overviews will be eclipsed by the more comprehensive work of specialists in those fields. (Especially the WWI and WWII discussions, but those are topics for another day.)

Ease of Reading: 3
Educational Content: 8

RateYourMusic vs. Goodreads: A Comparative Analysis

One of my favourite social media sites is RateYourMusic. I've rated over 2,300 albums, and over 300 movies (2,323 albums and 310 movies as of May 14, 2018). A significant portion of the album ratings date back to my nearly lifelong love of all things metal, but my collection is eclectic.

On August 27, 2013, I created a Goodreads account. Then I did nothing with it. This morning, I received notifications asking me to sign up for the 2015, 2016 and 2017 reading challenges. (I assume I lost them.) Naturally, I addressed the 4-month old notification to sign up for the 2018 reading challenge, listing 20 books. (More than Book a Month, but not quite Book a Week.) I then attempted to do a rating blitz, essentially a huge number of ratings all in one go in order to establish that yes, I have read a lot of books.

One of the benefits of RateYourMusic is exactly what it says on the tin: rating music. Community aside, what you're there to do is enter numerical ratings into a gigantic database that covers, hypothetically, all recorded sound. Realistically, the community focuses on classic rock, hip hop, indie rock and metal. Many popular albums have thousands of ratings, all of which aggregate into an overall rating. That overall rating isn't always accurate, but usually, it gives you an idea of how critically acclaimed an album is.

Recorded sound is so recent, though, and popular music that we think of as popular is even more recent. My grandfather (1918-2011) owned 78s. The album as we know it is a creature of the '60s and beyond.

Books go back a long way.

As soon as I started rating books, I realized:

• How do I compare fiction with non-fiction? When do I say that a science fiction novel is better than a book about science? How can I ever know that? Rating fiction versus non-fiction is the equivalent of rating albums versus university lectures.
• How do I compare different eras? Which Shakespeare plays are, or are not, better than last week's New York Times #1 Bestseller?
• How do I rate books I read as a child, teenager or young adult? Are my memories of, say, hating The Indian in the Cupboard back in 1994 even relevant to how I might view it now? (No, I will not be reading that book for this blog.)
• So many books have such high ratings on Goodreads. I presume this is because anyone willing to invest the hours and hours necessary to finish a book will probably like it, whereas spending 45 minutes listening to an album while cleaning the kitchen isn't much of a sacrifice. When seemingly every fantasy novel has a 4+ rating, and the only negative ratings are on books people had to read for grade-school novel studies... what's the point?

I'd be curious about the idea of porting my music rating ideas to my favourite medium for years. Now I know.

Books just can't be rated like that.

Thankfully, my "Ease of Reading/Educational Content" system on here avoids having to figure out books' merits. Instead, it seeks to answer the age-old question: is the author doing what he or she intended to do? I'm also willing to bend the definitions of "ease" and "education", but only sometimes.

May's Book: Seventh Son

Seventh Son by Orson Scott Card
Fantasy (1987 - 272 pp.)

This is my second Orson Scott Card review on this blog. The first was Ender's Shadow, all the way back in June 2012. This is the first book for the Alvin Maker series I've reviewed, in large part because it's the first one in the series and the first one I've read.*

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Seventh Son takes place in an alternate history of the United States of America in the 1700s-1800s in which the US had only started, and in which the folk magic of the time is all real. "Heartfire" is the idea of there being fire in our hearts/souls, taken literally, allowing Peggy to track people using an early modern heat sensor. Out-of-ordinary, or out-of-body, events are debated: are they from the devil, or simply inaccurately reported? England has a Lord Protector (9), suggesting that perhaps the Restoration under Charles II never occurred, although there are Crown Colonies as well. The map at the start of the book shows just how different the US could have been.

Throughout Seventh Son, characters search for meaning. Among Card's wittier moments - and there are many of them - is when Taleswapper explains his journal entries to Alvin Miller Junior, the series's protagonist, and one of them is from Benjamin Franklin. Franklin's greatest achievement, in this world, is the creation of the word "American". (154-155) The idea that a word can unify people is one of Taleswapper's most powerful observations.

Much of that meaning comes through conflict between the drolly named preacher Philadelphia Thrower, of Anglo-Scottish origin, and the Millers. This symbolizes a conflict between paganism and Christianity generally, at least in Seventh Son's versions. "Paganism" generally, the agglomeration of beliefs and superstitions various characters hold, is placed in stark contrast to Christianity... until suddenly it isn't. Alvin Junior has an experience like breaking the ridgebeam: is this the work of the devil, or a simple coincidence? If a preacher like Thrower says it is the former, he vindicates the "pagans'" beliefs. If it is the latter, how did it happen? The sparkled snakelike beast that visits Thrower as "the Visitor" later in the book complicates matters further. Most mainstream Christian faiths would assume Thrower had been sleep-deprived when he saw the beast, yet another character, named Armor of God(!!!), sees the beast as well. Throughout Seventh Son, the combination of frontier, faith and fantasy constantly bends reality.

Fear of the unknown expands into the constant worry that "Reds" (meaning to be an intentionally archaic term for Native Americans,** although I had initially thought they were communists) would scalp anyone who ventured into the woods at night. Those scalps would then be traded to the French for metal. Why the French would place monetary value on scalps is something no character is able to explain - which immediately calls into question whether it's even happening. Indeed, not a single "Red" or Franco-American is ever seen in the entire book. Tales like these force the reader into the unknown-ness of the American frontier, where every tale can be believed or disbelieved. By the end of the book, Alvin Junior possessing magical power becomes more realistic than the French holding ill intentions toward Anglo-American or Swedish-American settlers.

Yesterday, when I was walking by High Park, I saw a sign that appears to immortalize the book's iconic opening scene: the Millers' horse-drawn carriage nearly sinking in the river. Alvin Miller is a seventh son, and his wife Faith is pregnant with what could be the Millers' seventh son. That makes Alvin Junior a seventh son of a seventh son: the powers this confers upon him are vast. Alvin Senior's eldest son, Vigor, aids greatly in helping the carriage out of the river. During my walk in High Park yesterday, I came across this sign:

Had the person who wrote "VIGOR" on the sign read Seventh Son? I certainly hope so.

Seventh Son is a page-turner, yet like while I read Card's classic Ender's Game so many years ago, I never stopped thinking.

Ease of Reading: 8
Educational Content: 4


*The edition I own, found here, also includes the 1988 sequel Red Prophet. I have not yet read Red Prophet due to the Book One Effect.

**In Canada, where I live, we would say "First Nations".

The Book One Effect

This is the first in a series of musings I'll be making over the next month or so on reading, writing, and the cozy little place I've carved out for myself in the literary world. It's fitting that the first post of this month is The Book One Effect.

What is it?

I am statistically extremely likely to read a disproportionately high number of Book Ones of any given series.*

How does it happen?

My unofficial but very firmly held requirement for this blog is that I don't review multiple books by the same author in the same calendar year. The reasoning behind this is simple and elegant: there have been thousands of great authors in English-language** history, and they all deserve a turn. It's all so grade school-ish. This rule is usually beneficial, although it's currently having the annoying side effect of making me delay any review of Neil Gaiman's American Gods until 2019 at the earliest, as I reviewed Coraline back in January.

Is it a good thing?

Overall, I think The Book One Effect is something to celebrate. It makes me intimately involved with various iconic characters' origin stories. It also forces me to consider parts of series as standalone novels. Asking "could this part of the franchise pull its own weight?", outside of simply being an X-Brand book, is a good start for a lot of pop cultural literary analysis.

Notable examples include:

• The Douglas Adams books (I read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in 2012, but didn't read Book Two until March of this year)
• The Terry Goodkind books (I read Wizard's First Rule in 2012, and still haven't read Book Two)

I don't have a notable counter-example. Maybe this is a sign that in a post-Archie McNally, post-Harry Potter, de facto post-A Song of Ice and Fire world, I'm not meant to read series. I kind of like that. It forces me to see something different in everything I read.

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*This may be the most adverbs per line of any sentence I've ever written.

**For whatever reason, I've never thought to read a book in French for this blog. I may dabble in some Polish at some point, though.