Brown Girl in the Ring

This novel, first one by Nalo Hopkinson, surprised me very much, and very pleasantly at that. It tells the story of Ti-Jeane, a woman in (presumably) her early twenties, who lives with her grandmother. Mami, the grandmother, is both a well-trained professional nurse and the local herbalist who treats diseases and aches in both modern and not-so-modern ways. She summons and talks to the spirits, and generally takes care of the populace of central Toronto after its economic and social downfall. In the novel, a lot of instability has led to riots and to the abandonment of central Toronto some years ago, which forms the setting and the premise for the plot. Governmental structures have moved out to the suburbs; no one guarantees the security and the welfare of the city-centre population any more.

In this world of insecurity, Ti-Jeane is looking after her young baby whose father is Ti-Jeane’s ex-boyfriend Tony, a member of the local gang who also uses buff, a rather powerful drug. Trouble walks in when Rudy, the boss of the gang, receives a contract to “find”, as soon as possible, a human heart for transplantation into no other body than that of Canada’s Prime Minister at the time. Rudy gives that task to Tony who has dipped a finger or two in the gang’s buff and has to repay his transgressions, this time in blood.

What follows is an indescribable adventure that involves murder, spirits, the return of people thought long lost, and a fight for life amidst the threat of eternal death and imprisonment and pain. Hopkinson manages to implicate all possible levels of society into her story. I was amazed at the way she renders the consequences of a decision both strictly local, then regional, then almost global, and also extant on several levels in between. From a very formal, academic point of view, this novel interweaves concepts and strategies from the three thickest branches of the tree of speculative fiction: fantasy, horror, and sci-fi. This results in a story one literally cannot put down. The stakes for all characters are very high at all times: they all fear things more sinister than death; they all experience both true horror before the unknown, and true stomach-churning disgust at the evil deeds of others; they all hope and fight for the best, and put every last piece of energy they have into that.

To cut to the chase, Hopkinson engages her readers with a story that is both very tough and very optimistic. She boldly goes beyond genre cliches and delivers a narrative about the power of the spirit and the enormity of change. After I read the final pages of Brown Girl in the Ring, I walked around stunned, with a smile on my face that didn’t disappear for hours. Such is the strength that this story gives its readers: I found that the transformative potential of the social decisions Hopkinson elaborates upon is not only immense, but also inescapable. It is in our hands and minds to take those decisions for the good of absolutely everyone, and not only of those hungry for more and more money and power. Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring clearly shows what the fruit of such careful, suffered-for decisions tastes like. Please believe me, for I tell you true: it is delicious.

Dell Sells Computers to Women

The latest ludicrous insanity by a big multinational? Dell selling gender-specifically. They opened up a website to spread the word about how women can best employ laptops. The answer to this hugely difficult, almost unsolvable riddle, Dell thinks, lies in the following: recipes, weight control, cooking. Oops, should have actually combined “recipes” and “cooking” into one since… wait… it’s all about one thing, actually. Ah, these people kill me! When will they stop attempting these differentiations that go way beyond the smallest grain? We all need computers.

To return to the problem: dear Dell, I suggest the following. You invent a time machine. A big one. You put your whole marketing department in there. Then you stuff the CEO and the other C’s on top. Then you send them to nineteenth-century Victorian England. I have a hunch that they will find some suitable partners for conversation there. Or possibly not, since marketing and the C’s probably know nothing about looking after small children, and knitting, and weaving, and playing the piano, and singing in church, and dressing properly for different occasions, and… Aaaarrrgh, I’m too tired for this. You get my drift; now git! Q. W3ary out. (via /.)

Slumdog Millionaire

I finally managed to see the much-hyped Slumdog Millionaire. To be honest, this was both a shocking and a pleasing experience, mainly because one cannot be prepared for some of the things that happen in this film. All other things set aside, I couldn’t explain to myself how this film got awarded a total of 8 Oscars (if memory serves me right); but then, on the one hand, some possibilities for storytelling are apparently unknown to Hollywood, and on the other, awards do not matter at all if a work of art cannot speak to the reader/listener/viewer in any way.

Slumdog Millionaire did speak to me a lot, however. The poverty depicted in the film is not unreal, as any and all people who have observed it will confirm. Neither is the ethnic/religious violence something devised for the film or invented for purposes of plot and character; unfortunately, such episodes of blood and death are well known in Indian history under the name of communalism, something Mahatma Gandhi spoke of very often. One could accuse the film’s team of showing only one side of communalist violence, but that is the farthest any historically well-informed critic could get. Of course, any production of such proportions will stir trouble and cause controversy, but I will not go into further details here: I find that the points I just mentioned are the farthest-reaching ones. These items should be on the agendas of local, state and international decision-making entities because action is needed, not words — as always.

The film tells its story in several threads which are woven into one toward the end. I was at times shocked and at times deeply moved by the events unfolding on my screen. The most profound of these was perhaps Jamal and Latika’s undying love which, to my mind, is one of the deepest, most affirmative statements about the human spirit I’ve seen recently. I think this is a central motif everyone can relate to. Naturally, this type of story is not new; the film sets it in a location rather vaguely known to Western Europe and North America, and I would venture that that is what spelt the movie’s success in huge capital letters all across NA and European cinemas. Slumdog Millionaire does not tell a brand new story, but does so with power, beauty, and belief in our strength to overcome barriers of money, hatred, violence, and — most importantly — time in the name of love. That makes it a highly recommendable experience.

The Calcutta Chromosome

Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome won him the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and rightfully so. It is a novel about knowledge, about people who want to find truth and understanding, about the secret of a chromosome that can travel from person to person. The plot unfolds in several time-lines, and in different places and narratives. The beautiful thing about the story is that all these threads coalesce into a peaceful but profoundly transforming climax in the end.

Along the way, Ghosh has some quite perceptive things to say about the world today. He introduces us to a young man who works in the virtual world of computers, networks, and information reconstruction for the veiled purposes of big corporations; he follows a young journalist in India as she tries hard to pursue her professional goals; he tells the story of an ageing man seeking knowledge, a man who himself becomes the narrator in the novel very often, lifting the shrouds from the past; he places us under the gaze of a woman whose origins and powers are unknown and seemingly unknowable. Ghosh also ironically returns to the colonial past to recreate the discovery of the malaria virus which plays a major role in the history of the Calcutta chromosome. The novel, divided into two parts and 40+ chapters, somewhat deliberately confuses the reader by interweaving all these stories and several more, only to resolve the confusion at the end. This strategy allows Ghosh to hold the reader on a very tight leash as well as increase and maintain the suspense until the grand finale.

Finally, while reading and thinking about the novel, I deeply appreciated two general features of Ghosh’s writing. First, he is not afraid of transformation and change; he cannot be intimidated and forced back into circularity and rigidness by concepts of intentional “high-brow” literariness. His stories lead somewhere, his characters change, and that can only be good because it is such a heavy, substantial, material process. Second, Ghosh proves, and indeed not only in this novel, that there is more to be found out there, that the world still holds riddles and enigmas and wonders — all those things we can marvel at, and invest our passion in. The universe we live in possesses enormous breadth and depth, and we are the privileged ones who were given the chance to explore it. Let us do so, says Amitav Ghosh, and fear not, for the journey to understanding will change us forever.

Balls and Chains to Keep Children at Desks

The latest ridiculous idea: make your children study by actually physically constraining them with balls and chains. Follow the link for the usual high-charge punchline commentary from Slashdot.

However, I think I actually have a better idea. Having only a ball chained to your foot can still be distracting, you could look at the birds in the trees or the clouds in the sky or the people in the street or the patterns on your wallpapers, or do something else rather than study/solve problems/write essays. I suggest we build mobile holding cells for unruly students (the iStudyCell!), lock them in, and let them toil there. That’ll teach them, the bastards!!! Just make the interior as un-distracting as possible — completely white, for example, so that, after a while, they get the feeling they are in some old-style medical institution. Scratch that; the interior has to be black, so that no one and nothing can write on it. Also, limit intake of food and drink by providing just a small slot for a water straw and (very thin) slices of bread. All the student needs is light from a light-bulb, books, and writing materials. Place the iStudyCell anywhere in your place of living and enjoy the increase in silence and the better grades. So here are the specifications. Anyone willing to design and produce?

Killer Robots Get Ethical

So now we’re no longer only producing killer robots, we also spread the delusion that they can be “ethical”. Ronald Arkin, a computer science professor, is developing decision-making machinery to be included in the controlling modules of flying drones, “smart” missiles, and other killer machines. We don’t have enough people on the planet willing to go for each other’s throats for the most stupid reasons you’ve heard in your life, no; we also need robots that act autonomously and decide whether to kill on their own. Great. I’m starting to think that the first Terminators will look either like the current Predator and its family of murderers, or like over-sized Wall-es with machine guns, small missiles, mines, and possibly a couple of flame-throwers on board. The future awaits.

UPDATE 22.09.2009: Obviously, data on deadly robots had already been available when I was writing the above. Slashdot posted another story about killer robots deployed in battlefields. Numbers: 250 dead in Pakistan, 9 in South Africa; software glitches are blamed at least in the second case.

Microsoft Patents Methods for OS Crippling

Microsoft has evidently been granted patents for what it long desired: to restrict the users of their operating systems as much as possible. Now they can do that all they want, and no one can steal the sweet invention from them. Congratulations, Redmond! Happy choking on your well-deserved mints, and happy exploding Creosote-style! I’m wondering how far will MS go in enforcing this type of OS behaviour. They stated that “virtually anyone can write an application that can be executed on the system” if that system has an open architecture. How ingenious. What an insight. And now, thanks to finally patenting mechanisms against this sort of blasphemous, disrespectful, beyond-the-pale behaviour on the part of users, MS can curb said behaviour. (via /.)

Strange how MS doesn’t get it at all: with each Windows version from 95 up to XP, they enabled users to do more and more and more on their own, take their own decisions what to install and run. I find XP to be the peak of that enabling thinking. It is a relatively stable system (especially with the latest service packs), has little difficulty except reboots in adding and removing programmes/components of all sorts, be those applications, drivers, residents like firewalls, etc., and lets the user define default programmes, default file associations, default start-up services and applications, and so on. Of course, it has its limitations, but they are a few, and far between. The good thing with XP lies in the combination of all these features which are constantly available to the user. And where did Vista go? One hundred million warnings and confirmations are needed to install a new piece of hardware, or a programme like an audio editor which hovers slightly above average complexity. And now they want to prolong these procedural agonies even further. Dear MS, don’t you get it? Really? Your customers want stability and freedom of choice. You can’t restrict those for reasons of security because security of computer systems can only be guaranteed by both writing bug-less code and educating users about security problems. When you do that, you win. When you don’t, you get lost in the wild vistas of public anger, which are right next to the vistas of oblivion. Since choice of how to accomplish a task borders on the political so often, users need to be allowed to exercise that freedom and learn. They’re not all children under the age of three. (Actually, almost none of them are children under the age of three.)

So what do you do? Do you give people that freedom, or do you decide you can solve everything for them, keep them from cyberharm, find answers to all their questions, give them all they need and want on your own? Your choice, MS.

Amazon Kindling

If someone doesn’t make random fun of high tech developments, the world will lose all its colours and become a dull, gray place. I read about the amazing Amazon Kindling on Boing Boing Gadgets. The thing I appreciate deeply about this hack is that it shows how wooden the real Kindle is – can’t install plug-ins, can’t tweak all settings, can’t convert and use most of your own data, and so on. I really hope that competition will bring out better devices soon because they are needed by mad readers such as me, myself, and I. Q. W3ary out.

Shuttle before the Sun

Just like millions of other people, I gazed with awe at the photos of Atlantis and Hubble flying across the background of the Sun’s titanic disc. That the Sun, our relatively small, inconspicuous and average star, is so enormously huge might easily dwarf and asphyxiate any thoughts of the grandeur of human civilisation. But still: for human-created objects to be visible at these distances, even for such tiny periods of time, is already an achievement. We are in space, be it the final frontier or not; let us stay there and go even further. Let us take proper care of the good planet we’ve got here and find some others like it one fine day. Because there’s no road to happiness, happiness is in the road; and what other thing can give us more roads than the unbelievably vast Cosmos? Q. W3ary out.

Intel Fined (Almost) to Hell by the EU

The press exploded with news that Intel has been fined 1.06 billion Euros by the EU. This new record, I think, is not undeserved. The practises of number one chip company were clearly anti-competitive. It’s strange how big multinationals think they are above all rules. And I certainly did wonder whether AMD or anyone else would do the same if they were in a similar position. But the gist of the story lies in the fact that a capitalist for-profit entity can feel pain and understand a lesson, just like a very mischievous dog would, only if you hit it where it truly hurts. The governments in the EU — or anywhere else on our lonely, beautiful planet, for that matter — may not be perfect, but most of them have set up rules called laws to regulate our social exchanges. Business is one of those exchanges, and, I dare say, not the single most essential one in life. Nevertheless, big money thinks it can go above and below and around the rules any time it wants to. That’s why you have to hit it while you can, and money is exactly where it hurts most. Whether it will learn? Who knows. But knowing that we’ll all die one day doesn’t make living less sweet: so fighting the big rude grabbers must be independent of the eventual result of that fight. (via /.)