Review: Out of Office, by Charlie Warzel & Anne Helen Petersen

Publisher:	Alfred A. Knopf
Copyright:	2021
ISBN:	0-593-32010-7
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	260

Out of Office opens with the provocative assertion that you were not working from home during the pandemic, even if you were among the 42% of Americans who were able to work remotely.

You were, quite literally, doing your job from home. But you weren't working from home. You were laboring in confinement and under duress. Others have described it as living at work. You were frantically tapping out an email while trying to make lunch and supervise distance learning. You were stuck alone in a cramped apartment for weeks, unable to see friends or family, exhausted, and managing a level of stress you didn't know was possible. Work became life, and life became work. You weren't thriving. You were surviving.

The stated goal of this book is to reclaim the concept of working from home, not only from the pandemic, but also from the boundary-destroying metastasis of work into non-work life. It does work towards that goal, but the description of what would be required for working from home to live up to its promise becomes a sweeping critique of the organization and conception of work, leaving it nearly as applicable to those who continue working from an office. Turns out that the main problem with working from home is the work part, not the "from home" part. This was a fascinating book to read in conjunction with A World Without Email. Warzel and Petersen do the the structural and political analysis that I sometimes wish Newport would do more of, but as a result offer less concrete advice. Both, however, have similar diagnoses of the core problems of the sort of modern office work that could be done from home: it's poorly organized, poorly managed, and desperately inefficient. Rather than attempting to fix those problems, which is difficult, structural, and requires thought and institutional cooperation, we're compensating by working more. This both doesn't work and isn't sustainable. Newport has a background in productivity books and a love of systems and protocols, so his focus in A World Without Email is on building better systems of communication and organization of work. Warzel and Petersen come from a background of reporting and cultural critique, so they put more focus on power imbalances and power-serving myths about the American dream. Where Newport sees an easy-to-deploy ad hoc work style that isn't fit for purpose, Warzel and Petersen are more willing to point out intentional exploitation of workers in the guise of flexibility. But they arrive at some similar conclusions. The way office work is organized is not leading to more productivity. Tools like Slack encourage the public performance of apparent productivity at the cost of the attention and focus required to do meaningful work. And the process is making us miserable. Out of Office is, in part, a discussion of what would be required to do better work with less stress, but it also shares a goal with Newport and some (but not most) corners of productivity writing: spend less time and energy on work. The goal of Out of Office is not to get more work done. It's to work more efficiently and sustainably and thus work less. To reclaim the promise of flexibility so that it benefits the employee and not the employer. To recognize, in the authors' words, that the office can be a bully, locking people in to commute schedules and unnatural work patterns, although it also provides valuable moments of spontaneous human connection. Out of Office tries to envision a style of work that includes the office sometimes, home sometimes, time during the day to attend to personal chores or simply to take a mental break from an unnatural eight hours (or more) of continuous focus, universal design, real worker-centric flexibility, and an end to the constant productivity ratchet where faster work simply means more work for the same pay. That's a lot of topics for a short book, and structurally this is a grab bag. Some sections will land and some won't. Loom's video messages sound like a nightmare to me, and I rolled my eyes heavily at the VR boosterism, reluctant as it may be. The section on DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) was a valiant effort that at least gestures towards the dismal track record of most such efforts, but still left me unconvinced that anyone knows how to improve diversity in an existing organization without far more brute-force approaches than anyone with power is usually willing to consider. But there's enough here, and the authors move through topics quickly enough, that a section that isn't working for you will soon be over. And some of the sections that do work are great. For example, the whole discussion of management.

Many of these companies view middle management as bloat, waste, what David Graeber would call a "bullshit job." But that's because bad management is a waste; you're paying someone more money to essentially annoy everyone around them. And the more people experience that sort of bad management, and think of it as "just the way it is," the less they're going to value management in general.

I admit to a lot of confirmation bias here, since I've been ranting about this for years, but management must be the most wide-spread professional job for which we ignore both training and capability and assume that anyone who can do any type of useful work can also manage people doing that work. It's simply not true, it creates workplaces full of horrible management, and that in turn creates a deep and unhelpful cynicism about all management. There is still a tendency on the left to frame this problem in terms of class struggle, on the reasonable grounds that for decades under "scientific management" of manufacturing that's what it was. Managers were there to overwork workers and extract more profits for the owners, and labor unions were there to fight back against managers. But while some of this does happen in the sort of office work this book is focused on, I think Warzel and Petersen correctly point to a different cause.

"The reason she was underpaid on the team was not because her boss was cackling in the corner. It was because nobody told the boss it was their responsibility to look at the fucking spreadsheet."

We don't train managers, we have no clear expectations for what managers should do, we don't meaningfully measure their performance, we accept a high-overhead and high-chaos workstyle based on ad hoc one-to-one communication that de-emphasizes management, and many managers have never seen good management and therefore have no idea what they're supposed to be doing. The management problem for many office workers is less malicious management than incompetent management, or simply no effective management at all apart from an occasional reorg and a complicated and mind-numbing annual review form. The last section of this book (apart from concluding letters to bosses and workers) is on community, and more specifically on extracting time and energy from work (via the roadmap in previous chapters) and instead investing it in the people around you. Much ink has been spilled about the collapse of American civic life, about how we went from a nation of joiners to a nation of isolated individual workers with weak and failing community institutions. Warzel and Petersen correctly lay some blame for this at the foot of work, and see the reorganization of work and an increase in work from home (and thus a decrease in commutes) as an opportunity to reverse that trend. David Brooks recently filled in for Ezra Klein on his podcast and talked with University of Chicago professor Leon Kass, which I listened to shortly after reading this book. In one segment, they talked about marriage and complained about the decline in marriage rates. They were looking for causes in people's moral upbringing, in their life priorities, in the lack of aspiration for permanence in kids these days, and in any other personal or moral failing that would allow them to be smugly judgmental. It was a truly remarkable thing to witness. Neither man at any point in the conversation mentioned either money or time. Back in the world most Americans live in, real wages have been stagnant for decades, student loan debt is skyrocketing as people desperately try to keep up with the ever-shifting requirements for a halfway-decent job, and work has expanded to fill all hours of the day, even for people who don't have to work multiple jobs to make ends meet. Employers have fully embraced a "flexible" workforce via layoffs, micro-optimizing work scheduling, eliminating benefits, relying on contract and gig labor, and embracing exceptional levels of employee turnover. The American worker has far less of money, time, and stability, three important foundations for marriage and family as well as participation in most other civic institutions. People like Brooks and Kass stubbornly cling to their feelings of moral superiority instead of seeing a resource crisis. Work has stolen the resources that people previously put into those other areas of their life. And it's not even using those resources effectively. That's, in a way, a restatement of the topic of this book. Our current way of organizing work is not sustainable, healthy, or wise. Working from home may be part of a strategy for changing it. The pandemic has already heavily disrupted work, and some of those changes, including increased working from home, seem likely to stick. That provides a narrow opportunity to renegotiate our arrangement with work and try to make those changes stick. I largely agree with the analysis, but I'm pessimistic. I think the authors are as well. We're very bad at social change, and there will be immense pressure for everything to go "back to normal." Those in the best bargaining position to renegotiate work for themselves are not in the habit of sharing that renegotiation with anyone else. But I'm somewhat heartened by how much public discussion there currently is about a more fundamental renegotiation of the rules of office work. I'm also reminded of a deceptively profound aphorism from economist Herbert Stein: "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop." This book is a bit uneven and is more of a collection of related thoughts than a cohesive argument, but if you are hungry for more worker-centric analyses of the dynamics of office work (inside or outside the office), I think it's worth reading. Rating: 7 out of 10

Review: Soul Music, by Terry Pratchett

Series:	Discworld #16
Publisher:	Harper
Copyright:	January 1995
Printing:	November 2013
ISBN:	0-06-223741-1
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	420

Soul Music is the sixteenth Discworld novel and something of a plot sequel to Reaper Man (although more of a sequel to the earlier Mort). I would not start reading the Discworld books here. Susan is a student in the Quirm College for Young Ladies with an uncanny habit of turning invisible. Well, not invisible exactly; rather, people tend to forget that she's there, even when they're in the middle of talking to her. It's disconcerting for the teachers, but convenient when one is uninterested in Literature and would rather read a book.

She listened with half an ear to what the rest of the class was doing. It was a poem about daffodils. Apparently the poet had liked them very much. Susan was quite stoic about this. It was a free country. People could like daffodils if they wanted to. They just should not, in Susan's very definite opinion, be allowed to take up more than a page to say so. She got on with her education. In her opinion, school kept on trying to interfere with it. Around her, the poet's vision was being taken apart with inexpert tools.

Susan's determinedly practical education is interrupted by the Death of Rats, with the help of a talking raven and Binky the horse, and without a lot of help from Susan, who is decidedly uninterested in being the sort of girl who goes on adventures. Adventures have a different opinion, since Susan's grandfather is Death. And Death has wandered off again. Meanwhile, the bard Imp y Celyn, after an enormous row with his father, has gone to Ankh-Morpork. This is not going well; among other things, the Guild of Musicians and their monopoly and membership dues came as a surprise. But he does meet a dwarf and a troll in the waiting room of the Guild, and then buys an unusual music instrument in the sort of mysterious shop that everyone knows has been in that location forever, but which no one has seen before. I'm not sure there is such a thing as a bad Discworld novel, but there is such a thing as an average Discworld novel. At least for me, Soul Music is one of those. There are some humorous bits, a few good jokes, one great character, and some nice bits of philosophy, but I found the plot forgettable and occasionally annoying. Susan is great. Imp is... not, which is made worse by the fact the reader is eventually expected to believe Susan cares enough about Imp to drive the plot. Discworld has always been a mix of parody and Pratchett's own original creation, and I have always liked the original creation substantially more than the parody. Soul Music is a parody of rock music, complete with Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler as an unethical music promoter. The troll Imp meets makes music by beating rocks together, so they decide to call their genre "music with rocks in it." The magical instrument Imp buys has twelve strings and a solid body. Imp y Celyn means "bud of the holly." You know, like Buddy Holly. Get it? Pratchett's reference density is often on the edge of overwhelming the book, but for some reason the parody references in this one felt unusually forced and obvious to me. I did laugh occasionally, but by the end of the story the rock music plot had worn out its welcome. This is not helped by the ending being a mostly incoherent muddle of another parody (admittedly featuring an excellent motorcycle scene). Unlike Moving Pictures, which is a similar parody of Hollywood, Pratchett didn't seem to have much insightful to say about music. Maybe this will be more your thing if you like constant Blues Brothers references. Susan, on the other hand, is wonderful, and for me is the reason to read this book. She is a delightfully atypical protagonist, and her interactions with the teachers and other students at the girl's school are thoroughly enjoyable. I would have happily read a whole book about her, and more broadly about Death and his family and new-found curiosity about the world. The Death of Rats was also fun, although more so in combination with the raven to translate. I wish this part of her story had a more coherent ending, but I'm looking forward to seeing her in future books. Despite my complaints, the parody part of this book wasn't bad. It just wasn't as good as the rest of the book. I wanted a better platform for Susan's introduction than a lot of music and band references. If you really like Pratchett's parodies, your mileage may vary. For me, this book was fun but forgettable. Followed, in publication order, by Interesting Times. The next Death book is Hogfather. Rating: 7 out of 10

Following on from 2020 in Fiction: In 2020 I read a couple of collections of short fiction from some of my favourite authors. I started the year with Christopher Priest's Episodes. The stories within are collected from throughout his long career, and vary in style and tone. Priest wrote new little prologues and epilogues for each of the stories, explaining the context in which they were written. I really enjoyed this additional view into their construction. By contrast, Adam Robert's Adam Robots presents the stories on their own terms. Each of the stories is written in a different mode: one as golden-age SF, another as a kind of Cyberpunk, for example, although they all blend or confound sub-genres to some degree. I'm not clever enough to have decoded all their secrets on a first read, and I would have appreciated some "Cliff's Notes on any deeper meaning or intent. Ted Chiang's Exhalation was up to the fantastic standard of his earlier collection and had some extremely thoughtful explorations of philosophical ideas. All the stories are strong but one stuck in my mind the longest: Omphalos) With my daughter I finished three of Terry Pratchett's short story collections aimed at children: Dragon at Crumbling Castle; The Witch's Vacuum Cleaner and The Time-Travelling Caveman. If you are a Pratchett fan and you've overlooked these because they're aimed at children, take another look. The quality varies, but there are some true gems in these. Several stories take place in common settings, either the town of Blackbury, in Gritshire (and the adjacent Even Moor), or the Welsh border-town of Llandanffwnfafegettupagogo. The sad thing was knowing that once I'd finished them (and the fourth, Father Christmas's Fake Beard) that was it: there will be no more. 8/31 of the "books" I read in 2020 were issues of Interzone. Counting them as "books" for my annual reading goal has encouraged me to read full issues, whereas before I would likely have only read a couple of stories from each issue. Reading full issues has rekindled the enjoyment I got out of it when I first discovered the magazine at the turn of the Century. I am starting to recognise stories by authors that have written stories in other issues, as well as common themes from the current era weaving their way into the work (Trump, Brexit, etc.) No doubt the Pandemic will leave its mark on 2021's stories.

No doubt it was someone's idea of a joke to release Silence of the Lambs on Valentine's Day, thirty years ago today. Although it references Valentines at one point and hints at a deeper relationship between Starling and Lecter, it was clearly too tempting to jeopardise so many date nights. After all, how many couples were going to enjoy their ribeyes medium-rare after watching this? Given the muted success of Manhunter (1986), Silence of the Lambs was our first real introduction to Dr. Lecter. Indeed, many of the best scenes in this film are introductions: Starling's first encounter with Lecter is probably the best introduction in the whole of cinema, but our preceding introduction to the asylum's factotum carries a lot of cultural weight too, if only because the camera's measured pan around the environment before alighting on Barney has been emulated by so many first-person video games since.

We first see Buffalo Bill at the thirty-two minute mark. (Or, more tellingly, he sees us.) Delaying the viewer's introduction to the film's villain is the mark of a secure and confident screenplay, even if it was popularised by the budget-restricted Jaws (1975) which hides the eponymous shark for one hour and 21 minutes.

It is no mistake that the first thing we see of Starling do is, quite literally, pull herself up out of the unknown. With all of the focus on the Starling Lecter repartee, the viewer's first introduction to Starling is as underappreciated as she herself is to the FBI. Indeed, even before Starling tells Lecter her innermost dreams, we learn almost everything we need to about Starling in the first few minutes: we see her training on an obstacle course in the forest, the unused rope telling us that she is here entirely voluntarily. And we can surely guess why; the passing grade for a woman in the FBI is to top of the class, and Starling's not going to let an early February in Virginia get in the way of that. We need to wait a full three minutes before we get our first line of dialogue, and in just eight words ("Crawford wants to see you in his office...") we get our confirmation about the FBI too. With no other information other than he can send a messenger out into the cold, we can intuit that Crawford tends to get what Crawford wants. It's just plain "Crawford" too; everyone knows his actual title, his power, "his" office. The opening minutes also introduce us to the film's use of visual hierarchy. Our Hermes towers above Starling throughout the brief exchange (she must push herself even to stay within the camera's frame). Later, Starling always descends to meet her demons: to the asylum's basement to visit Lecter and down the stairs to meet Buffalo Bill. Conversely, she feels safe enough to reveal her innermost self to Lecter on the fifth floor of the courthouse. (Bong Joon-ho's Parasite (2019) uses elevation in an analogous way, although a little more subtly.)

The messenger turns to watch Starling run off to Crawford. Are his eyes involuntarily following the movement or he is impressed by Starling's gumption? Or, almost two decades after John Berger's male gaze, is he simply checking her out? The film, thankfully, leaves it to us.

Crawford is our next real introduction, and our glimpse into the film's sympathetic treatment of law enforcement. Note that the first thing that the head of the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit does is to lie to Starling about the reason to interview Lecter, despite it being coded as justified within the film's logic. We learn in the book that even Barney deceives Starling, recording her conversations with Lecter and selling her out to the press. (Buffalo Bill always lies to Starling, of course, but I think we can forgive him for that.) Crawford's quasi-compliment of "You grilled me pretty hard on the Bureau's civil rights record in the Hoover years..." then encourages the viewer to conclude that the FBI's has been a paragon of virtue since 1972... All this (as well as her stellar academic record, Crawford's wielding of Starling's fragile femininity at the funeral home and the cool reception she receives from a power-suited Senator Ruth Martin), Starling must be constantly asking herself what it must take for anyone to take her seriously. Indeed, it would be unsurprising if she takes unnecessary risks to make that happen.

The cold open of Hannibal (2001) makes for a worthy comparison. The audience remembers they loved the dialogue between Starling and Lecter, so it is clumsily mentioned. We remember Barney too, so he is shoehorned in as well. Lacking the confidence to introduce new signifiers to its universe, Red Dragon (2002) aside, the hollow, 'clip show' feel of Hannibal is a taste of the zero-calorie sequels to come in the next two decades.

The film is not perfect, and likely never was. Much has been written on the fairly transparent transphobia in Buffalo Bill's desire to wear a suit made out of women's skin, but the film then doubles down on its unflattering portrayal by trying to have it both ways. Starling tells the camera that "there's no correlation between transsexualism and violence," and Lecter (the film's psychoanalytic authority, remember) assures us that Buffalo Bill is "not a real transsexual" anyway. Yet despite those caveats, we are continually shown a TERFy cartoon of a man in a wig tucking his "precious" between his legs and an absurdly phallic gun. And, just we didn't quite get the message, a decent collection of Nazi memorabilia. The film's director repeated the novel's contention that Buffalo Bill is not actually transgender, but someone so damaged that they are seeking some kind of transformation. This, for a brief moment, almost sounds true, and the film's deranged depiction of what it might be like to be transgender combined with its ambivalence feels distinctly disingenuous to me, especially given that on an audience and Oscar-adjusted basis Silence of the Lambs may very well be the most transphobic film to come out of Hollywood. Still, I remain torn on the death of the author, especially when I discover that Jonathan Demme went on to direct Philadelphia (1993), likely the most positive film about homophobia and HIV.

Nevertheless, as an adaption of Thomas Harris' original novel, the movie is almost flawless. The screenplay excises red herrings and tuns down the volume on some secondary characters. Crucially for the format, it amplifies Lecter's genius by not revealing that he knew everything all along and cuts Buffalo Bill's origin story for good measure too good horror, after all, does not achieve its effect on the screen, but in the mind of the viewer. The added benefit of removing material from the original means that the film has time to slowly ratchet up the tension, and can remain patient and respectful of the viewer's intelligence throughout: it is, you could almost say, "Ready when you are, Sgt. Pembury". Otherwise, the film does not deviate too far from the original, taking the most liberty when it interleaves two narratives for the famous 'two doorbells' feint.

Dr. Lecter's upright stance when we meet him reminds me of the third act of Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious (1946), another picture freighted with meaningful stairs. Stanley Kubrick's The Killing (1956) began the now-shopworn trope of concealing a weapon in a flower box.

Two other points of deviation from the novel might be worthy of mention. In the book, a great deal is made of Dr. Lecter's penchant for Bach's Goldberg Variations, inducing a cultural resonance with other cinematic villains who have a taste for high art. It is also stressed in the book that it is the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould's recording too, although this is likely an attempt by Harris to demonstrate his own refined sensibilities Lecter would surely have prefered a more historically-informed performance on the harpsichord. Yet it is glaringly obvious that it isn't Gould playing in the film at all; Gould's hypercanonical 1955 recording is faster and focused, whilst his 1981 release is much slower and contemplative. No doubt tedious issues around rights prevented the use of either recording, but I like to imagine that Gould himself nixed the idea. The second change revolves around the film's most iconic quote. Deep underground, Dr. Lecter tries to spook Starling:

A census taker once tried to test me. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.

The novel has this as "some fava beans and a big Amarone". No doubt the movie-going audience could not be trusted to know what an Amarone was, just as they were not to capable of recognising a philosopher. Nevertheless, substituting Chianti works better here as it cleverly foreshadows Tuscany (we discover that Lecter is living in Florence in the sequel), and it avoids the un-Lecterian tautology of 'big' Amarone's, I am reliably informed, are big-bodied wines. Like Buffalo Bill's victims. Yet that's not all. "The audience", according to TV Tropes:

... believe Lecter is merely confessing to one of his crimes. What most people would not know is that a common treatment for Lecter's "brand of crazy" is to use drugs of a class known as MAOIs (monoamine oxidase inhibitors). There are several things one must not eat when taking MAOIs, as they can case fatally low blood pressure, and as a physician and psychiatrist himself, Dr. Lecter would be well aware of this. These things include liver, fava beans, and red wine. In short, Lecter was telling Clarice that he was off his medication.

I could write more, but as they say, I'm having an old friend for dinner. The starling may be a common bird, but The Silence of the Lambs is that extremely rara avis indeed the film that's better than the book. Ta ta...

Review: Men at Arms, by Terry Pratchett

Series:	Discworld #15
Publisher:	Harper
Copyright:	1993
Printing:	November 2013
ISBN:	0-06-223740-3
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	420

Men at Arms is the fifteenth Discworld novel and a direct plot sequel to Guards! Guards!. You could start here without missing too much, but starting with Guards! Guards! would make more sense. And of course there are cameos (and one major appearance) by other characters who are established in previous books. Carrot, the adopted dwarf who joined the watch in Guards! Guards!, has been promoted to corporal. He is now in charge of training new recruits, a role that is more important because of the Night Watch's new Patrician-ordered diversity initiative. The Watch must reflect the ethnic makeup of the city. That means admitting a troll, a dwarf... and a woman? Trolls and dwarfs hate each other because dwarfs mine precious things out of rock and trolls are composed of precious things embedded in rocks, so relations between the new recruits are tense. Captain Vimes is leaving the Watch, and no one is sure who would or could replace him. (The reason for this is a minor spoiler for Guards! Guards!) A magical weapon is stolen from the Assassin's Guild. And a string of murders begins, murders that Vimes is forbidden by Lord Vetinari from investigating and therefore clearly is going to investigate. This is an odd moment at which to read this book. The Night Watch are not precisely a police force, although they are moving in that direction. Their role in Ankh-Morpork is made much stranger by the guild system, in which the Thieves' Guild is responsible for theft and for dealing with people who steal outside of the quota of the guild. But Men at Arms is in part a story about ethics, about what it means to be a police officer, and about what it looks like when someone is very good at that job. Since I live in the United States, that makes it hard to avoid reading Men at Arms in the context of the current upheavals about police racism, use of force, and lack of accountability. Men at Arms can indeed be read that way; community relations, diversity in the police force, the merits of making two groups who hate each other work together, and the allure of violence are all themes Pratchett is working with in this novel. But they're from the perspective of a UK author writing in 1993 about a tiny city guard without any of the machinery of modern police, so I kept seeing a point of clear similarity and then being slightly wrong-footed by the details. It also felt odd to read a book where the cops are the heroes, much in the style of a detective show. This is in no way a problem with the book, and in a way it was helpful perspective, but it was a strange reading experience.

Cuddy had only been a guard for a few days but already he had absorbed one important and basic fact: it is almost impossible for anyone to be in a street without breaking the law.

Vimes and Carrot are both excellent police officers, but in entirely different ways. Vimes treats being a cop as a working-class job and is inclined towards glumness and depression, but is doggedly persistent and unable to leave a problem alone. His ethics are covered by a thick layer of world-weary cynicism. Carrot is his polar opposite in personality: bright, endlessly cheerful, effortlessly charismatic, and determined to get along with everyone. On first appearance, this contrast makes Vimes seem wise and Carrot seem a bit dim. That is exactly what Pratchett is playing with and undermining in Men at Arms. Beneath Vimes's cynicism, he's nearly as idealistic as Carrot, even though he arrives at his ideals through grim contrariness. Carrot, meanwhile, is nowhere near as dim as he appears to be. He's certain about how he wants to interact with others and is willing to stick with that approach no matter how bad of an idea it may appear to be, but he's more self-aware than he appears. He and Vimes are identical in the strength of their internal self-definition. Vimes shows it through the persistent, grumpy stubbornness of a man devoted to doing an often-unpleasant job, whereas Carrot verbally steamrolls people by refusing to believe they won't do the right thing.

Colon thought Carrot was simple. Carrot often struck people as simple. And he was. Where people went wrong was thinking that simple meant the same thing as stupid.

There's a lot going on in this book apart from the profiles of two very different models of cop. Alongside the mystery (which doubles as pointed commentary on the corrupting influence of violence and personal weaponry), there's a lot about dwarf/troll relations, a deeper look at the Ankh-Morpork guilds (including a horribly creepy clown guild), another look at how good Lord Vetinari is at running the city by anticipating how other people will react, a sarcastic dog named Gaspode (originally seen in Moving Pictures), and Pratchett's usual collection of memorable lines. It is also the origin of the now-rightfully-famous Vimes boots theory:

The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.

Men at Arms regularly makes lists of the best Discworld novels, and I can see why. At this point in the series, Pratchett has hit his stride. The plots have gotten deeper and more complex without losing the funny moments, movie and book references, and glorious turns of phrase. There is also a lot of life philosophy and deep characterization when one pays close attention to the characters.

He was one of those people who would recoil from an assault on strength, but attack weakness without mercy.

My one complaint is that I found it a bit overstuffed with both characters and subplots, and as a result had a hard time following the details of the plot. I found myself wanting a timeline of the murders or a better recap from one of the characters. As always with Pratchett, the digressions are wonderful, but they do occasionally come at the cost of plot clarity. I'm not sure I recommend the present moment in the United States as the best time to read this book, although perhaps there is no better time for Carrot and Vimes to remind us what good cops look like. But regardless of when one reads it, it's an excellent book, one of the best in the Discworld series to this point. Followed, in publication order, by Soul Music. The next Watch book is Feet of Clay. Rating: 8 out of 10

Review: Small Gods, by Terry Pratchett

Series:	Discworld #13
Publisher:	Harper
Copyright:	February 1994
Printing:	March 2008
ISBN:	0-06-109217-7
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	357

Small Gods is the thirteenth Discworld novel, but it features new characters and is unrelated to any of the previous books. Some reading order guides show it as following Pyramids in an "ancient civilizations" track, but its only relationship with that book is some minor thematic similarities. You could start here with Discworld if you wanted to. Brutha is a novice in the hierarchy of the church of the Great God Om, and his elders are convinced he'll probably die a novice. He's just not particularly bright, you see. But he is very obedient, and he doesn't mind doing hard work, and there's nothing exactly wrong with him, except that he looks at people with startling intensity when they're talking to him. Almost as if he's listening. All that seems about to change, however, when the Great God Om himself approaches Brutha and starts talking to him. Not that Brutha is at all convinced at first that this is happening, particularly given that Om appears in the form of a small, battered, one-eyed tortoise who was dropped into the church garden by an eagle attempting to break his shell. Small Gods is, as you might have guessed, a parody of religion, at least large, organized religion with fixed hierarchies, organizations called the Quisition that like to torture people, and terrifyingly devout deacons who are certain of themselves in ways that no human ever should be. It's also an interesting bit of Discworld metaphysics: gods gain power from worship (a very old idea in fantasy), and when they don't get enough worship, they end up much diminished and even adrift in the desert. Or trapped in the form of a small tortoise. One might wonder how Om ended up in his present condition given the vast and extremely authoritarian church devoted to his worship, but that's the heart of Pratchett's rather pointed parody: large religious organizations end up being about themselves, rather than about the god they supposedly worship, to such an extent that they don't provide any worship at all. Brutha is not thinking of things like this. Once he's finally convinced that Om is who he claims to be, he provides worship and belief of a very practical but wholehearted and unshakable sort, just as he does everything else in life. That makes him the eighth prophet of Om as prophecy foretold, but it's far from clear how that will be of any practical use. Or how Om will come back into power. And meanwhile, Brutha has come to the attention of Vorbis, the head of the Exquisitors, who does not know about the tortoise (and wouldn't believe if he did), but who has a use for Brutha's other talent: his eidetic memory. In typical Pratchett fashion, the story expands to include a variety of other memorable characters from the neighboring city of Ephebe, a country full of gods and philosophers. Vorbis's aims here are unclear at the start of the book, but Vorbis being who he is, they can't be good. Brutha is drawn along in his wake. Meanwhile, Om is constantly watching for an opportunity to regain his lost power and worshipful following, and also to avoid being eaten. Despite the humorous components, Small Gods is rather serious about religion and about its villain. It's also a touch repetitive; Om's lack of power and constant fretting about it, Brutha's earnest but naive loyalty, and Vorbis's malevolent determination are repeatedly stressed and get a little old. Some bits in Ephebe are quite fun, but the action is a bit disjointed, partly because the protagonist is rarely the motive force in the plot. There are also some extended scenes of trudging through the desert that I thought dragged a bit. But Pratchett hits some powerful notes in his critique of religion, and there are a few bits with Death at the end of the book that I thought were among the better pieces of Discworld philosophy. And when Brutha gets a chance to use his one talent of memory, I greatly enjoyed the resulting scenes. He hits just the right combination of modesty, capability, and earnestness. I know a lot of Pratchett readers really like Small Gods. I'm not one of those; I thought it was about average for the Discworld series (at least among the books I've read so far). But average for Discworld is still pretty good, and its new setting makes it a plausible place to start (or to take a break from the other Discworld plot threads). Followed, in publication order, by Lords and Ladies. I don't believe it has a direct plot sequel. Rating: 7 out of 10

Conversations is a really nice, actively developed, up to date XMPP client for Android that has the nice feature of telling you what XEPs are supported by the server one is using: Some days ago, me and Valhalla played the game of trying to see what happens when one turns them all on: I would send her screenshots from my Conversations, and she would poke at her Prosody to try and turn things on: Valhalla eventually managed to get all features activated, purely using packages from Jessie+Backports: The result was a chat system in which I could see the same conversation history on my phone and on my laptop (with gajim)(https://gajim.org/), and have it synced even after a device has been offline, We could send each other rich media like photos, and could do OMEMO encryption (same as Signal) in group chats. I now have an XMPP setup which has all the features of the recent fancy chat systems, and on top of that it runs, client and server, on Free Software, which can be audited, it is federated and I can self-host my own server in my own VPS if I want to, with packages supported in Debian. Valhalla has documented the whole procedure. If you make a client for a protocol with lots of extension, do like Conversations and implement a status page with the features you'd like to have on the server, and little green indicators showing which are available: it is quite a good motivator for getting them all supported.

Now that I've gone down the signal road, when can I get off of it? The two contenders I've found for more politically conscious mobile-friendly instant messaging are Tox and XMPP. And the problems to solve are:

• Implement end-to-end encryption
• Receive messages the moment they are sent without draining the battery

The Tox Project has a great design (peer-to-peer) and handles end-to-end encryption as part of its core design. However, the Antox mobile client has not only failed to solve the battery drain problem but seems to also have a serious bandwidth issue as well. Also, what is up with this drama? How about XMPP? For years, XMPP clients have been using OTR - and many instant messaging applications support it, including ChatSecure. And now, there seems to be quite a bit of excitement around implementing a better protocol called OMEMO. Incidentally, the OMEMO protocol uses the same Double Ratchet (previously referred to as the Axolotl Ratchet) protocol that Signal uses. While there are some irritating hiccups around using the available GPL library for Double Ratchet on iPhone apps, it seems like these issues are being sorted out and soon we'll have some kind of standard way for XMPP clients to exchange end-to-end encrypted messages. Let's move on to notifications and battery drain. If you believe the author of the Android Conversations App there doesn't seem to be a problem. However, client state indication seems to be the only issue related to battery drainage he addresses and I couldn't figure out how to easily install that extension on our Debian Jessie prosody instance since it isn't included in the prosody-modules package in Debian and it requires additional modules for it to work. Chris Ballinger, the author of ChatSecure (iOS and Android XMPP app), is less optimistic about this problem in general. In short, he thinks we need a proper "push" mechanism and has even started to implement one. At the same time, a new (and different) XMPP standard called Push Notifications - XEP-0357 has been released and it is even implemented in Prosody (although not yet available in Debian). So the future seems bright, right? Well, not exactly. All of this "push" activity seems to solve this problem: A federated/decentralized application cannot properly use Apple's APNs or Google's GCM. In the words of Chris Ballinger:

The biggest problem is that there is no easy way to send push messages between my app and your app. For me to send a push to one of your app s users on iOS, I must first obtain an APNs SSL certificate/key pair from you, and one of your user s push token that uniquely identifies their device to Apple. These push tokens are potentially sensitive information because they allow Apple to locate your device (in order to send it a push).

So, even if we manage to get one of these two standards for push notifications up and running, we have only succeeded in solving Signal's centralization problem, not the dependence on Google Play Services and Apple Push Network (in fact it's quite mysterious to me how you could even use the Prosody implementation of Push Notifications with GCM or APN). So... what we really would need would be to figure out how to implement one of these two push standards and then get it to work with an alternative to GCM and APN (perhaps MQTT)? Which, I think would require changes to the XMPP client. Geez. I may be on Signal longer than I planned.

Give a man a fire and he's warm for the day. But set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life.

Terry Pratchett dies, aged 66. It looks like his last novel will be The Long Utopia, the fourth book in the Long Earth series, co-written with Stephen Baxter.

DON T THINK OF IT AS DYING, said Death. JUST THINK OF IT AS LEAVING EARLY TO AVOID THE RUSH.

Terry Pratchett, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch Thank you for everything you wrote. Each and every line was a gem, with another gem hidden inside.

2013 is nearly all finished up and so I thought I'd spend a little time writing up what was noteable in the last twelve months. When I did so I found an unfinished draft from the year before. It would be a shame for it to go to waste, so here it is. 2012 was an interesting year in many respects with personal highs and lows. Every year I see a lots of "round-up"-style blog posts on the web, titled things like "2012 in music", which attempt to summarize the highlights of the year in that particular context. Here's JWZ's effort, for example. Often they are prefixed with statements like "2012 was a strong year for music" or whatever. For me, 2012 was not a particularly great year. I discovered quite a lot of stuff that I love that was new to me, but not new in any other sense. In Music, there were a bunch of come-back albums that made the headlines. I picked up both of Orbital's Wonky and Brian Eno's Lux (debatably a comeback: his first ambient record since 1983, his first solo effort since 2005, but his fourth collaborative effort on Warp in the naughties). I've enjoyed them both, but I've already forgotten Wonky and I still haven't fully embraced Lux (and On Land has not been knocked from the top spot when I want to listen to ambience.) There was also Throbbing Gristle's (or X-TG) final effort, a semi/post-TG, partly posthumous double-album swan song effort which, even more than Lux, I still haven't fully digested. In all honesty I think it was eclipsed by the surprise one-off release of a live recording of a TG side project featuring Nik Void of Factory Floor: Carter Tutti Void's Transverse, which is excellent. Ostensibly a four-track release, there's a studio excerpt V4 studio (Slap 1) which is available from (at least) Amazon. There's also a much more obscure fifth "unreleased" track cruX which I managed to "buy" from one of the web shops for zero cost. The other big musical surprise for me last year was Beth Jeans Houghton and the Hooves of Destiny: Yours Truly, Cellophane Nose. I knew nothing of BJH, although it turns out I've heard some of her singles repeatedly on Radio 6, but her band's guitarist Ed Blazey and his partner lived in the flat below me briefly. In that time I managed to get to the pub with him just once, but he kindly gave me a copy of their album on 12" afterwards. It reminds me a bit of Goldfrapp circa "Seventh Tree": I really like it and I'm looking forward to whatever they do next. Reznor's How To Destroy Angels squeezed out An Omen EP which failed to set my world on fire as a coherent collection, despite a few strong songs individually. In movies, sadly once again I'd say most of the things I recall seeing would be "also rans". Prometheus was a disappointment, although I will probably rewatch it in 2D at least once. The final Batman was fun although not groundbreaking to me and it didn't surpass Ledger's efforts in The Dark Knight. Inception remains my favourite Nolan by a long shot. Looper is perhaps the stand-out, not least because it came from nowhere and I managed to avoid any hype. In games, I moaned about having moaning about too many games, most of which are much older than 2012. I started Borderlands 2 after enjoying Borderlands (disqualified on age grounds) but to this day haven't persued it much further. I mostly played the two similar meta-games: The Playstation Plus download free games in a fixed time period and the more sporadic but bountiful humble bundle whack-a-mole. More on these another time. In reading, as is typical I mostly read stuff that was not written in 2012. Of that which was, Charles Stross's The Apocalypse Codex was an improvement over The Fuller Memorandum which I did not enjoy much, but in general I'm finding I much prefer Stross's older work to his newer; David Byrne's How Music Works was my first (and currently last) Google Books ebook purchase, and I read it entirely on a Nexus 7. I thoroughly enjoyed the book but the experience has not made a convert of me away from paper. He leans heavily on his own experiences which is inevitable but fortunately they are wide and numerous. Iain Banks' Stonemouth was an enjoyable romp around a fictional Scottish town (one which, I am reliably informed, is incredibly realistical rendered). One of his "mainstream" novels, It avoided a particular plot pattern that I've grown to dread with Banks, much to my suprise (and pleasure). Finally, the stand-out pleasant surprise novel of the year was Pratchett and Baxter's The Long Earth. With a plot device not unlike Banks' Transition or Stross's Family Trade series, the pair managed to write a journey-book capturing the sense-of-wonder that these multiverse plots are good for. (Or perhaps I have a weakness for them). It's hard to find the lines between Baxter and Pratchett's writing, but the debatably-reincarnated Tibetan Monk-cum-Artificial Intelligence 'Lobsang' must surely be Pratchett's. Pratchett managed to squeeze out another non-Discworld novel (Dodger) as well as a long-overdue short story collection, although I haven't read either of them yet. On to 2013's write-up...

Somalia's chief exports appear to be morally-ambiguous Salon articles about piracy and sophomoric evidence against libertarianism. However, it is the former topic that Captain Phillips concerns itself with, inspired by the hijacking of the Maersk Alabama container ship in 2009. What is truth? In the end, Captain Phillips does not rise above Pontius Pilate in providing an answer, but it certainly tries using more refined instruments than irony or leaden sarcasm. This motif pervades the film. Obviously, it is based on a "true story" and brings aboard that baggage, but it also permeates the plot in a much deeper sense. For example, Phillips and the US Navy lie almost compulsively to the pirates, whilst the pirates only really lie once (where they put Phillips in greater danger). Notice further that Phillips only starts to tell the truth when he thinks all hope is lost. These telling observations become even more fascinating when you realise that they must be based on the testimony of the, well, liars. Clearly, deception is a weapon to be monopolised and there are few limits on what good guys can or should lie about if they believe they can save lives. Futhermore, there is an utterly disarming epilogue where Phillips is being treated for shock by clinical efficient medical staff. Not only will this scuttle any "blanket around the shoulders" clich but is probably a highly accurate portrayal of what actually happens post-trauma. This echoes the kind of truth Werner Herzog aims for in his filmmaking as well his guilt-inducing duality between uncomfortable lingering and compulsive viewing. Lastly, a starter for a meta-discussion: can a film based on real-world events even be "spoilered"? Hearing headlines on the radio before you read your newspaper hardly robs you of a literary journey... Captain Phillips does have some quotidian problems. Firstly, the only tool for ratcheting up tension is for the Somalians to launch verbal broadsides at the Americans, with each compromise somehow escalating the situation. This technique is effective but well before the climatic rescue scene where it is really needed it has been subject to the most extreme diminishing returns. (I cannot be the first to notice the "Africans festooned with guns shouting incomphensively" trope I hope it is based on a Babel-esque mechanism of disorientation from miscommunication rather than anything more unsavoury.) Secondly, the US Navy acts like a teacher with an Ofsted inspector observing quietly from the corner of the classroom; far too well-behaved it suspends belief, with no post-kill gloating or even the tiniest of post-arrest congratulations. Whilst nobody wants to see the Navy overreact badly to other military branches getting all the glory, nobody wants to see a suspiciously bland recruitment vehicle either. Paradoxically, this hermetic treatment made me unduly fascinated by them as if they were part of some military "uncanny valley". Two quick observations:

• All US Somali interactions are recorded by a naval officer. No doubt a value-for-money defense against a USS Abu Ghraib, but knowing the plot is based on factual events, it was perhaps a little too Baudrillardian to ponder how the presence of the Navy's cameras in a scene actually lent weight to the film's version of events, crucially without me even knowing whether the parallel "real-life" footage is verifiable or not.
• The navigational computers not only seem to require lines to drawn repeatedly between points of interest, but the Maersk Alabama's arbitrary relabelling as MOTHERSHIP seems to imply that an officer could humourously rename a radar contact to something unbecoming of a 12A classification.

Finally, despite the title, the film is actually about two captains; the skillful liar Phillips and ... well, that's the real problem. Whilst Captain Muse is certainly no caricatured Hook, we are offered little depth beyond a "You're not just a fisherman" faux-revelation that leads nowhere. I was left inventing reasons for his akrasia so that he made any sense whatsoever. One could charitably argue that the film attempts to stay objective on Muse, but the inability for the film to take any obvious ethical stance actually seems to confuse and then compromise the narrative. What deeper truth is actually being revealed? Is this film or documentary? Worse still, the moral vacuum is invariably filled by the viewer's existing political outlook: are Somali pirates victims of circumstance who are forced into (alas, regrettable) swashbuckling adventures to pacify plank-threatening warlords? Or are they violent and dangerous criminals who habour an irrational resentment against the West, flimsily represented by material goods in shipping containers? Your improvised answer to this Rorschach test will always sit more haphazardly in the film than any pre-constructed treatment ever could. 6/10

Somalia's chief exports appear to be morally-ambiguous Salon articles about piracy and sophomoric evidence against libertarianism. However, it is the former topic that Captain Phillips concerns itself with, inspired by the hijacking of the Maersk Alabama container ship in 2009. What is truth? In the end, Captain Phillips does not rise above Pontius Pilate in providing an answer, but it certainly tries using more refined instruments than irony or leaden sarcasm. This motif pervades the film. Obviously, it is based on a "true story" and brings aboard all that well-travelled baggage, but it also permeates the plot in a much deeper sense. For example, Phillips and the US Navy lie almost compulsively to the pirates, whilst the pirates only really lie once where they put Phillips in greater danger. Notice further that Phillips only starts to tell the truth when he thinks all hope is lost. These telling observations become even more fascinating when you realise that they must be based on the testimony of the, well, liars. Clearly, deception is a weapon to be monopolised and there are few limits on what good guys can or should lie about if they believe they can save lives. Lastly, there is an utterly disarming epilogue where Phillips is being treated for shock by clinical efficient medical staff. Not only will it scuttle any "blanket around the shoulders" clich but is probably a highly accurate portrayal of what actually happens post-trauma. This echoes the kind of truth Werner Herzog often aims for in his filmmaking as well his guilt-inducing duality between uncomfortable lingering and compulsive viewing. Another angle worthy of discussion: can a film based on real-world events even be "spoilered"? Hearing headlines on the before you read the newspaper hardly robs you of a literary journey... Captain Phillips does have some quotidian problems. Firstly, the only tool for ratcheting up tension is for the Somalians to launch verbal broadsides at the Americans, with each compromise somehow escalating the situation further. This technique is genuinely effective but well before the climatic rescue scene where it is really needed it has been subject to the most extreme diminishing returns. (I cannot be the first to notice the "Africans festooned with guns shouting incomphensively" trope I hope it is based on a Babel-esque mechanism of disorientation and miscommunication rather than anything, frankly, unsavoury.) Secondly, the US Navy acts like a teacher with an Ofsted inspector observing quietly from the corner of the classroom; far too well-behaved it suspends belief, with no post-kill gloating or even the tiniest of post-arrest congratulations. Whilst nobody wants to see the Navy overreact badly to other military branches getting all the glory, nobody wants to see a suspiciously bland recruitment vehicle either. Paradoxically, this hermetic treatment made me unduly fascinated by them, as if they were part of some military "uncanny valley". Two quick observations:

• All US Somali interactions are recorded by a naval officer. No doubt a value-for-money defense against a USS Abu Ghraib, but knowing the plot is based on a factual events, it was perhaps a little too Baudrillardian to ponder how the presence of the Navy's cameras in a scene actually lent weight to the film's version of events, crucially without me even knowing whether the parallel "real life" footage is verifiable or not.
• The navigational computers not only seem to require lines to drawn repeatedly between points of interest, but the Maersk Alabama's arbitrary relabelling as MOTHERSHIP seems to imply that an officer could humourously rename a contact to something unbecoming of a 12A classification.

Finally, despite the title, the film is actually about two captains; the skillful liar Phillips and ... well, that's the real problem. Whilst Captain Muse is certainly no caricatured Hook, we are offered little depth beyond a "You're not just a fisherman" faux-revelation that leads nowhere. I was left inventing reasons for his akrasia so that he made any sense whatsoever. One could charitably argue that the film attempts to stay objective on Muse, but the inability for the film to take any obvious ethical stance actually seems to confuse and then compromise the narrative. What deeper truth is actually being revealed? Is this film or documentary? Worse still, the moral vacuum is invariably filled by the viewer's existing political outlook: are Somali pirates victims of circumstance who are forced into (alas, regrettable) swashbuckling adventures to pacify plank-threatening warlords? Or are they violent and dangerous criminals who habour an irrational resentment against the West, flimsily represented by material goods in shipping containers? Your improvised answer to this Rorschach test will always sit more haphazardly in the film than any pre-constructed treatment ever could. 6/10

I read a lot this year - I'll write more about that and reflections on goodreads in another post - but most of the things I read weren't published in 2013. (I should also write a bit about my thoughts on e-readers). However, it seems I have enough to write about 2013's novels to make a round-up post worthwhile, so here we go. This year, crime author Robert Galbraith published his first novel The Cuckoo's Calling. I'd never have heard of it if Galbraith was not outed as an alias for Joanne "JK" Rowling. Clues that Rowling was working on a detective story exist as early as a Guardian preview article in 2012 for her last novel, The Casual Vacancy. Further hints, for me, that this was no first-time author were the taglines from Ian Rankin and Val McDermid on the cover, writers of a calibre I'd be surprised a new author could attract. However I don't know whether they were on the pre-unveiling cover or not. Rowling was upset be outed, having enjoyed the freedom to write without the baggage of expectation that she is subject to. I hope she's pleased: prior to her unmasking the novel was warmly received by the (admittedly relatively small) number of people who read it. And a very good novel it is too. It starts with a genre clich of a grizzled, meloncholy detective, Mr. Cormoran Strike, in an upstairs office with a neon light flickering through the window, but fleshes the story out both forwards - a client, a mysterious death - and backwards - how did Mr. Strike end up in that upstairs office - living out of it, no less? As is traditional for the genre there's a very clever twist. What I really enjoyed about Cormoran Strike was Galbraith/Rowling moving quickly from Chandler-esque everyman to a well fleshed-out, complex protagonist, intertwining the development of the character with the unfolding of the wider plot. I'm looking forward to the sequel, expected in 2014. A second surprise favourite this year was Lauren Beukes' time-tripping crime story The Shining Girls. A monsterous murder of women somehow finds a room in Chicago that lets him travel through time (or perhaps the room finds him). He uses this facility to stalk and murder a set of Shining Girls: women who, for one reason or another, literally 'shine' in his perception of them. One such woman survives his first attack and decides to try and find out who attacked her, and why. The crimes are described in a brutal fashion which - from a distance - resemble the sometimes glorified violence for which crime fiction is sometimes criticised, but the focus of the story is very much on the victims: they are fully fleshed out characters and each death is felt by the reader as a genuine tragedy. I discovered Beukes when her earlier novel Zoo City was included in a Humble eBook bundle. On reading The Shining Girls I felt that the novel deserved to be more widely known than I would expect it to be trapped in the ghetto of genre fiction, so I was pleased to discover that the very mainstream Richard and Judy Book Club discovered it. In established author news, Terry Pratchett, having adopted speech recognition for writing (to combat his debilitating Alzheimer's) has seemingly managed to accelerate his rate of production and squeezed out at least two this year: The Long War with Stephen Baxter is the sequel to 2012's The Long Earth which I very much enjoyed, but it really felt like "difficult second novel" to me. Hopefully there'll be a third. Raising Steam, the 40th Discworld novel, was an enjoyable romp around the concept of steam trains, featuring the relatively new Moist von Lipwig who has managed to become one of my favourite Discworld characters. I can't think of much more to say about the novel, really. It's a Discworld novel, probably not the best introduction to the series for a new reader, but will give a reader familiar with the franchise everything they expect, and possibly no more. Iain Banks sadly died this year, shortly after the publication of his last novel, The Quarry. It's sat on my hardback shelf for the time being. I couldn't bring myself to read it in 2013. I did read his last SF offering from the year prior, The Hydrogen Sonata. Sadly, yet coincidentally, both of these books examine the nature of living and dying, The Quarry in particular from the point of view of a terminal cancer sufferer. I have a small backlog of unread Banks fiction which I want to take my time over with. Finally, whilst not really a book, I thoroughly enjoyed the BBC's 2013 adaptation of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere. Natalie Dormer wrote a piece on the making of the drama which should serve as a good introduction. At the time of writing, most of the programmes have disappeared from iPlayer, but I would be surprised if this wasn't released commercially at some point.

Since becoming interested in triathlon in October of last year, my goal in 2013 was not to just finish a "70.3" (or "Half-Ironman"), but to complete one in under 5 hours. At the time, each discipline was woefully inadequate; I had not swum in over a decade, my cycling was average and I had only begun running again after years away from exercise. The somewhat arbitrary target time would dictate my training. For example, the high proportion of time spent on the bike combined with the injury-sensitive nature of running meant that cycling would have a highest return on investment of the three disciplines. Despite that, I would need to take the run seriously but carefully - I decided to enter a series of monthly 10K races where I could steadily reduce my times over the year. Races themselves formed a crucial part of my preparation and a carefully balanced race calendar was surprisingly important, balancing upcoming milestones that would provide an achievable goal as well as uncovering weaknesses in enough time so they could be worked on. Whilst I did post about my first triathlon, I felt no compulsion with the interleaving five or six races as I was evaluating them in the context of the 70.3 rather than as races in their own right.

Review: Judge Sn Goes Golfing, by John Scalzi

Artist:	Gahan Wilson
Publisher:	Subterranean
Copyright:	2009
Printing:	2012
ISBN:	1-59606-479-X
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	32

As you may have guessed, this is yet another short story by Scalzi that was rolled into the Subterranean Scalzi Super Bundle. This one is a bit longer than the ones I've previously reviewed, and is also illustrationed. Unlike some of the others, it's not available on-line for free... as a written work at least. There's an abridged audio version available for free from Subterranean Press's web site, though. Like the other stories I've reviewed so far, it's humor, but I think it's a bit more successful and substantial than the previous short stories. Judge Bufan Nigun Sn is an extremely foul-tempered alien judge who loves to golf, despite being terrible at it. He's a sort of circuit court judge for a larger galactic civilization, of which Earth is now part. (There's a smattering of background world-building, but it's not the core of the story.) Golf is his passion, in several senses of the word: his habit of getting into nasty fights with his fellow players and otherwise making public and occasionally injurious scenes has gotten him banned from every course in the Washington DC area, both public and private. Except, that is, for Dulles Woods, a dire, badly-maintained course designed via nepotism and theft whose business model is primarily based on letting the people banned from every other course golf there. And charging them extra to let caddies accompany them. The plot of this story is about a particular game of golf, dramatically foreshadowed by the opening sentence. But the story is really about Judge Sn's relationship to golfing and to the notorious Dulles Woods. It's one of the better jobs I've seen of writing a thoroughly unlikable person into a gloriously foul-tempered charm. It's also a story about a golf course and golfer who thoroughly deserve each other, and about how it feels to suddenly have something go right after grinding out hours and hours of work on a hobby that is supposed to be fun but manages to fall into some horribly compelling middle ground between enjoyment and rage-inducing frustration. Speaking as someone who is known to grind out video game completions while swearing at the television, I can sympathize. I got thoroughly hooked by Scalzi's descriptions of Judge Sn's mental state and enjoyed this story far more than I expected to. Sadly, when the plot does finally arrive, I thought it was a letdown. Scalzi throws in a highly improbable coincidence to create action, and while that's a legitimate plot technique (particularly in humor), it works best when the author goes back afterwards and fills in the back story of the coincidence. Pratchett does this extremely well. Scalzi, alas, doesn't really bother, and while suspension of disbelief isn't as relevant for this sort of story, I thought it was a missed opportunity. The ending seemed to be missing some sort of punch or background twist. That said, I really liked the character study and I think the story is well worth the 99 cents it's still selling for on the Kindle (and quite possibly other platforms; I haven't checked). If buying short stories on the Kindle is something you want to do, I recommend this one to your attention. Rating: 7 out of 10

Review: Witches Abroad, by Terry Pratchett

Series:	Discworld #12
Publisher:	Harper
Copyright:	1991
Printing:	February 2008
ISBN:	0-06-102061-3
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	350

Witches Abroad is the twelfth book in the Discworld series, but there's no strong reason why you couldn't start here. It's the second book about the three witches (Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg, and Magrat Garlick), following Wyrd Sisters, and the third book about Granny Weatherwax, but it doesn't assume any knowledge of the previous books or of Discworld in general. Desiderata Hollow is dying. This is not a surprise; she's known for a long time exactly when she was going to die, and that time has come. She's not particularly bothered by it, but it does pose one difficult problem. She's a fairy godmother, as well as a witch, and she's balancing another fairy godmother because they come in pairs. With her dead, Lilith seems likely to win their long struggle, and that would be a bad thing. She needs to pass her wand on to a successor, but she wasn't the planning sort. At least she claims; this comment of hers turns out to hide an elegant bit of manipulation that leaves her wand in the hands of Magrat and sends the three witches on their way to the city of Genua to confront Lilith. There are two halves to Witches Abroad. The first half is the setup described above and their trip across Discworld. The second half is a sort of retelling of Cinderella, as foreshadowed early on by Desiderata. But the whole book is about stories and story shapes and their head-on collisions with the practical confidence of Nanny Ogg and the endless stubbornness of Granny Weatherwax. I think the three witches are one of Pratchett's best inventions, and Granny Weatherwax the best of the three. She has many of the characteristics that would normally relegate her to a supporting mentor figure: older, very knowledgeable, remarkably good at getting her way and at manipulating situations, and not particularly interested in going on adventures. But Pratchett turns this on end at every opportunity. Granny Weatherwax doesn't act like a mentor at all: she doesn't explain things to Magrat, or anyone else; she's almost constantly bickering with the other witches; and she's a fount of irritated and exasperated opinions about the world. She's one of the best irascibly competent characters in fiction, and she steals every scene she's in, refusing to become a supporting character and staying at the center of the story, despite not being a viewpoint character. (Pratchett wisely keeps her out of the viewpoint role for most of the story, since much of her knowledge and "headology" would be less effective if the reader knew what she was thinking.) The dynamics between the three witches are the best part of this book, and I love all three of them. But I'm also a sucker for fractured fairy tales in general, and Witches Abroad is full of them. Their opponent loves stories and has gathered most of her power from reinforcing and manipulating stories, which means that the density of random stories keeps increasing as they approach Genua. That provides numerous opportunities for the witches to stumble through, analyze, take apart, twist, or untwist numerous familiar stories, ranging from Red Riding Hood to Sleeping Beauty. Pratchett keeps things moving right along, not belaboring connections and not explaining too much, which makes it very easy to keep turning pages. The story does get a bit slower in Genua. There's quite a bit of scene-setting and figuring things out, and while Pratchett maintains the steady stream of humor, it isn't quite as compelling without the ever-changing context. He introduces a bit of voodoo magic, which I found to be the least interesting of the multiple styles of magic that show up here. But there are some absolutely brilliant bits with Nanny Ogg's cat, a wonderfully annoyed Cinderella, and an inversion of the traditional story that kept surprising me. I thought the ending was a bit of an anticlimax, but it does fit the nature of the characters. Despite a few plot short-comings, this is my favorite Discworld book up to this point in the series. Definitely recommended, and not a horrible starting point. Followed by Small Gods in the chronological sense and (later) by Lords and Ladies in the plot sense. Rating: 8 out of 10

In May this year, in a desperate bid to bail water out of a sinking ship, HMV group sold off the Waterstones chain of bookstores. I'm fond of reading so naturally I visit Waterstones from time to time. (but not exclusively.) For many years, their promotions were unanimously structured as "3 for 2" offers: find three books in the promotion, in-store, and get the cheapest of the three for free. I hated these promotions. I always found it very challenging to find three books in the promotion that I wanted. If I was visiting to buy a specific book and found it in the promotion, on more than one occasion I left the shop empty handed: I wasn't prepared to pay full price for a book in a promotion and not get the benefit of the promotion. Since being sold, Waterstones seem to have made a lot of changes. Many new hardbacks from popular authors have debuted at a discount for a short period (Rowling, Pratchett). I've found many more discounted books not tied to others in 3-for-2-style offers, sometimes window-display stock at half price, a month or so after release. They started a loyalty-card scheme, with a 10 gift card the prize you reach once you've spent 100. (I wonder if such schemes are examples of a token economy?) Finally, they've tentatively started to explore putting cafes in their branches. The one in Newcastle is best described as 'fledgling', but it's nice to have one more place to escape for a cup of tea at lunchtimes. The cafe, as well as a very well stocked collection of magazines, were the two killer features of the sadly- defunct Borders bookseller chain. For years before we got our own Borders in the North East, I used to enjoy the York branch if I was passing. I actually managed to fill a loyalty card this year, so clearly their change in attitude has worked on me! I'm generally not a fan of gift cards, especially in today's climate, so I quickly spent it. I hold an American Express credit card, which earns me cashbask on purchases which I make with it. I think the rate is about 1%. However, I can opt to receive the cashback in the form of gift vouchers. If I do so, I get them to the value of 110% my cashback balance. One of the retailers in on the scheme are Waterstones. I'm tempted

Review: Cerebus, by Dave Sim

Series:	Cerebus #1
Publisher:	Aardvark-Vanaheim
Copyright:	August 1987
Printing:	July 2003
ISBN:	0-919359-08-6
Format:	Graphic novel
Pages:	546

Cerebus is something of a legend in comics. Begun in December of 1977 by Dave Sim, it was one of the first entirely independent, self-published comics in a field dominated by the large work-for-hire companies like Marvel and DC. It ran for 300 issues and nearly 27 years and became one of the most influential independent comic books of all time, in part due to Sim's outspoken views in favor of creator rights and his regular use of the editorial pages in Cerebus issues to air those views. This collection (the first "phonebook") collects issues 1 through 25, with one of the amazing wrap-around covers that makes all of the phonebooks so beautiful (possibly partly by later Cerebus collaborator Gerhard, although if so it's uncredited so far as I can tell). Cerebus reliably has some of the best black-and-white art you will ever see in comics. There is some debate over where to start with Cerebus, and a faction that, for good reasons, argues for starting with the second phonebook (High Society). While these first twenty-five issues do introduce the reader to a bunch of important characters (Elrod, Lord Julius, Jaka, Artemis Roach, and Suenteus Po, for example), all those characters are later reintroduced and nothing that happens here is hugely vital for the overall story. It's also quite rough, starting as Conan parody with almost no depth. The first half or so of this collection features lots of short stories with little or no broader significance, and the early ones are about little other than Cerebus's skills and fighting abilities. That said, when reading the series, I like to start at the beginning. It is nice to follow the characters from their moment of first introduction, and it's delightful to watch Sim's ability grow (surprisingly quickly) through the first few issues. Cerebus #1 is bad: crude, simplistic artwork, almost nothing in the way of a story, and lots of purple narration. But flipping forward even to Cerebus #6 (the first appearance of Jaka), one sees a remarkable difference. By Cerebus #7, Cerebus looks like himself, the plot is getting more complex, and Sim is clearly hitting his stride. And, by the end of this collection, the art has moved from crude past competent and into truly beautiful in places. It's one of the few black-and-white comics where I never miss color. The detailed line work is more enjoyable than I think any coloring could be. The strength of Cerebus as an ongoing character slowly emerges from behind the parody. What I like the most about Cerebus is that he's neither a predestined victor (apart from the early issues that follow the Conan model most closely) nor a pure loner who stands apart from the world. He gets embroiled in political affairs, but almost always for his own reasons (primarily wealth). He has his own moral code, but it's fluid and situational; it's the realistic muddle of impulse and vague principle that most of us fall back on in our everyday life, which is remarkably unlike the typical moral code in comics (or even fiction in general). And while he is in one sense better and more powerful than anyone else in the story, that doesn't mean Cerebus gets what he wants. Most stories here end up going rather poorly for him, forcing daring escapes or frustrating cutting of losses. Sim quickly finds a voice for Cerebus that's irascible, wise, practical, and a bit world-weary, as well as remarkably unflappable. He's one of the best protagonists in comics, and that's already clear by the end of this collection. Parody is the focus of these first issues, which is a mixed bag. The early issues are fairly weak sword-and-sorcery parody (particularly Red Sonja, primarily a vehicle for some tired sexist jokes) and worth reading only for the development in Sim's art style and the growth of Cerebus as a unique voice. Sim gets away from straight parody for the middle of the collection, but then makes an unfortunate return for the final few issues, featuring parodies of Man-Thing and X-Men that I thought were more forced than funny. You have to have some tolerance for this, and (similar to early Pratchett) a lot of it isn't as funny as the author seems to think it is. That said, three of Sim's most brilliant ongoing characters are parodies, just ones that are mixed and inserted into the "wrong" genres in ways that bring them alive. Elrod of Melvinbone, a parody of Moorcock's Elric of Melnibone who speaks exactly like Foghorn Leghorn, should not work and yet does. He's the source of the funniest moments in this collection. His persistant treatment of Cerebus as a kid in a bunny suit shouldn't be as funny as it is, but it reliably makes me laugh each time I re-read this collection. Lord Julius is a straight insertion of Groucho Marx who really comes into his own in the next collection, High Society, but some of the hilarious High Society moments are foreshadowed here. And Artemis Roach, who starts as a parody of Batman and will later parody a huge variety of comic book characters, provides several delightful moments with Cerebus as straight man. I'm not much of a fan of parody, but I still think Cerebus is genuinely funny. High Society is definitely better, but I think one would miss some great bits by skipping over the first collection. Much of what makes it work is the character of Cerebus, who is in turn a wonderful straight man for Sim's wilder characters and an endless source of sharp one-liners. It's easy to really care about and root for Cerebus, even when he's being manipulative and amoral, because he's so straightforward and forthright about it. The world Sim puts him into is full of chaos, ridiculousness, and unfairness, and Cerebus is the sort of character to put his head down, make a few sarcastic comments, and then get on with it. It's fun to watch. One final note: I've always thought the "phonebook" collections were one of Sim's best ideas. Unlike nearly all comic book collections, a Cerebus phonebook provides enough material to be satisfying and has always felt like a good value for the money. I wish more comic book publishers would learn from Sim's example and produce larger collections that aren't hardcover deluxe editions (although Sim has an admitted advantage from not having to reproduce color). Followed by High Society. Rating: 7 out of 10