Review:
Grimspace, by Ann Aguirre
| Series: |
Sirantha Jax #1 |
| Publisher: |
Ace |
| Copyright: |
March 2008 |
| ISBN: |
0-441-01599-9 |
| Format: |
Mass market |
| Pages: |
312 |
Sirantha Jax is a jumper: a person with the rare genetic ability to jump
spaceships through the shortcut dimension of grimspace. It's a science
fiction idea with a long pedigree. It creates a separate in-group for the
characters to belong to, a society with its own rules, and sets up tension
with the rest of the institutions of the world. In Aguirre's version,
jumpers can provide the transition but direction in grimspace has to be
done by a pilot, and the jumper and the pilot develop a deep psychic bond.
Jax had been jumping with her husband piloting, but on their last trip
their ship crashed, killing everyone on board except her.
As
Grimspace opens, Jax is in a treatment facility that's much more
like a prison. In theory, they're trying to figure out whether she's
still able to (and safe to allow to) jump. In practice, something quite a
bit more sinister is going on, a fact that the reader senses early but
only learns more about after Jax is helped to escape. Scarred, deeply
depressed, and nearly suicidal, she's pulled into the subversive plans of
a small ship of renegades who are trying to break open the Corp monopoly
on grimspace travel and their tight hold over every jumper. But she's not
sure whether she trusts them, or whether she cares enough about their
crusade to truly join in.
Grimspace follows well-trod SF paths of special cadres of pilots
and navigators, lawless corners of space with local warlords, and
rebellion against smothering centralization, but its first-person
protagonist and point of view have more in common with urban fantasy.
It's written in first-person and, at times, nearly stream of consciousness
from Jax's perspective, and Jax displays plenty of profanity, acidic
commentary, and emotional angst. If her special ability were
shapeshifting or magic instead of jumping spaceships, one could easily see
her as the typical burned-out urban fantasy detective. I liked that.
It's a fun point of view when it's written well, and it felt fresh when
applied to a science fiction background instead of the more typical
fantasy.
That said,
Grimspace has a rather rough start. Jax isn't sure
what's going on at first and also isn't sure she cares, and I thought that
carried over to the reader's experience. The first section of the book is
rough and jagged, with staccato bursts of character introduction,
world-building that doesn't quite cohere, and an extended stop on a very
odd outback planet that felt to me like a repurposed stage from a western.
Part of the early problem is that Jax and the reader are being
intentionally kept in the dark about the real goal of this group, but part
of the problem is also that none of the characters start off as very
likable. That includes Jax, who is a complete mess and who is both scared
and despairing to the point of being almost nihilistic. The
world-building unfortunately does not carry the reader through that part
of the story, and at about eighty pages in I wasn't sure I was going to
like this book.
It does, however, get much better. For one, Jax calms down and starts
making emotional connections with the rest of the crew, and that lets her
demonstrate skills as a fearless problem solver. For another, while the
goal of the group of people she's fallen in with isn't exactly deep, it
does make sense and it does slowly become a cause the reader (and Jax) can
believe in. The frenetic pace of introduction and discovery also slows
down, the cast stabilizes, and the surroundings get a bit less weird (and
a bit more conventional for a science fiction novel). I didn't care for
the alien baby subplot I rarely do but the rest of the story slowly
pulled me in.
One thing Aguirre did extremely well was surprise me. There are several
points later in the book where Jax gets put in a fairly typical
high-stress position and does something very atypical in reaction to it,
twisting the story into a shape quite a bit unlike what I had been
expecting. That made Jax feel like a true free agent, establishing her
independence and her desire to control her own life, and that appealed to
me. Aguirre also palms one card exceptionally well, setting up an ending
that I thought was the best set of scenes in the whole book, and that had
me thoroughly engrossed. One can see the bones of the urban fantasy
heroine inside Jax's character, but they're fresh and interesting in an SF
world, and they work better than I would have expected.
There is a romance, in fitting with the urban fantasy inspiration, and it
didn't quite work for me, but Aguirre also builds in a reason why it might
not make sense and makes it spiky and fragile without being too cliched.
By the end of the book, I was, if not entirely persuaded, at least willing
to go along for the ride.
And that's the best summary of
Grimspace, I think. Parts of it
don't make a great deal of sense, and parts of it are quite choppy. But I
liked Jax once she starts getting a handle on her trauma, the other
characters grew on me, and the plot surprised me in some interesting ways.
It's not the smoothest or most polished SF novel I've read, but it has a
lot of energy and an unusual genre mix. I think I'll stick along for the
ride.
Followed by
Wanderlust.
Rating: 7 out of 10
As I mentioned earlier, the information in the documents released by Edward Snowden show a clear pattern of corporate and government abuse of the information networks that are now deeply intertwined with the lives of many people all over the world. Surveillance is a power dynamic where the party doing the spying has power over the party being surveilled. The surveillance state that results when one party has "Global Cryptologic Dominance" is a seriously bad outcome. The old saw goes "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely". In this case, the stated goal of my government appears to be absolute power in this domain, with no constraint on the inevitable corruption. If you are a supporter of any sort of a just social contract (e.g. International Principles on the Application of Human Rights to Communications Surveillance), the situation should be deeply disturbing. One of the major sub-threads in this discussion is how the NSA and their allies have actively tampered with and weakened the cryptographic infrastructure that everyone relies on for authenticated and confidential communications on the 'net. This kind of malicious work puts everyone's communication at risk, not only those people who the NSA counts among their "targets" (and the NSA's "target" selection methods are themselves fraught with serious problems). The US government is supposed to take pride in the checks and balances that keep absolute power out of any one particular branch. One of the latest attempts to simulate "checks and balances" was the President's creation of a "Review Group" to oversee the current malefactors. The review group then asked for public comment. A group of technologists (including myself) submitted a comment demanding that the review group provide concrete technical details to independent technologists. Without knowing the specifics of how the various surveillance mechanisms operate, the public in general can't make informed assessments about what they should consider to be personally safe. And lack of detailed technical knowledge also makes it much harder to mount an effective political or legal opposition to the global surveillance state (e.g. consider the terrible Clapper v. Amnesty International decision, where plaintiffs were denied standing to sue the Director of National Intelligence because they could not demonstrate that they were being surveilled). It's also worth noting that the advocates for global surveillance do not themselves want to be surveilled, and that (for example) the NSA has tried to obscure as much of their operations as possible, by over-classifying documents, and making spurious claims of "national security". This is where the surveillance power dynamic is most baldly in play, and many parts of the US government intelligence and military apparatus has a long history of acting in bad faith to obscure its activities. The people who have been operating these surveillance systems should be ashamed of their work, and those who have been overseeing the operation of these systems should be ashamed of themselves. We need to better understand the scope of the damage done to our global infrastructure so we can repair it if we have any hope of avoiding a complete surveillance state in the future. Getting the technical details of these compromises in the hands of the public is one step on the path toward a healthier society. PostscriptLest I be accused of optimism, let me make clear that fixing the technical harms is necessary, but not sufficient; even if our technical infrastructure had not been deliberately damaged, or if we manage to repair it and stop people from damaging it again, far too many people still regularly accept ubiquitous private (corporate) surveillance. Private surveillance organizations (like Facebook and Google) are too often in a position where their business interests are at odds with their users' interests, and powerful adversaries can use a surveillance organization as a lever against weaker parties. But helping people to improve their own data sovereignty and to avoid subjecting their friends and allies to private surveillance is a discussion for a separate post, i think.Tags: cryptography, nsa
Announcement
After a very long work, over the course of 4 months, I have finished packaging the first RC1 of OpenStack. This comes on time, just 9 days before the official Havana release. Please do try this RC1 before the official 2013.2, code name Havana, is released, and hopefully uploaded to Debian. All of the packages are available from Debian Experimental, keeping Grizzly in Sid. However, there is also some private repositories that I maintain, holding Wheezy backports:
deb http://havana.pkgs.enovance.com/debian havana main
deb http://archive.gplhost.com/debian havana-backports main
The first repository holds the packages maintained within the Alioth group. These are built directly from my Jenkins machine, on each git push. The 2nd repository is holding backports from Sid to Wheezy for the packages that I don t actively maintain (though a lot of them are in the Python module team, in which I do a lot of packaging and updates as well).
A few numbers
A few numbers about this now. I had to work on 145 source packages: at least backport them to Wheezy, and push them in the GPLHost archive repository above. This generates 360 binary packages. Out of these, I maintain 77 source packages within the Alioth OpenStack group, generating 209 .deb files. That s a lot of stuff to deal with (and I feel sometimes a bit dizzy about it). While OpenStack is a big jigsaw puzzle to solve for the users, it is even more for someone who has to deal with all the (sometimes buried in the the code) Python dependencies. I hope others will come and join me in this packaging effort, since over the time, there s more and more work to be done, as the project grows. Note that most of the work is unfortunately done on packaging (and updating) the Python dependencies, working on the packages themselves is done last, at the end of the cycle.
Other things not packaged (yet)
Before the release (and the forthcoming Hongkong summit on the 5th of November), I hope to be able to finish packaging TripleO. TripleO is in fact OpenStack on OpenStack, which works with nova-baremetal. I have no idea how to test or install this, though it sounds like a lot of fun. There are 6 source packages that need to be done. Also, pending on the FTP masters NEW queue, is Trove: Database as a Service. I hope this one can get through soon. There is, also, Marconi, which is an incubated project for a new message queuing service, which probably will replace RabbitMQ (I m not sure yet what it does, and I will be happy to hear about it at the summit). Lastly, there s Ironic, which will at some point, replace nova-baremetal. That is, it does cloud computing over bare metal, without virtualization.
All of these new projects are still in an incubation stage, and are not part of the official release yet. Though, I have learned over the course of this past year, that with OpenStack, it s never early enough to start the packaging work.
Thanks to my sponsor!
Please note that all of this wouldn t be possible without 
Just as last year, 
since 
First day of 
I attended 
I m using 
In April this year, Iain Banks announced that he had inoperable cancer. At
the time I was reading what became his last Culture novel, "The Hydrogen
Sonata". Banks died shortly afterwards in June.
I came across this passage in "The Hydrogen Sonata" which struck me
as poignant: