Matter
by Iain M Banks (Orbit)

The Culture is an anarcho-communist, galaxy-spanning civilisation of post-humans and machines that has been the playground of some of Iain Banks’s best novels, published with or without his middle initial. The Culture is vastly curious and tolerant: just about the only thing it won’t accept is being attacked. Thus its war with the Idirans, the backdrop of Banks’s first Culture novel, Consider Phlebas (1987), was a battle forced upon it by a fundamentalist enemy that refused to negotiate.

If that sounds vaguely similar to some contemporary geopolitical narratives, Banks is now out to extend the analogies further in Matter, his first Culture novel for eight years. In it, representatives of various advanced civilisations debate the ethics of intervention in other people’s affairs, even if it’s for their own good. Luckily for a writer who is so skilled at scenes of violent action, the Culture has a secretive arm called Special Circumstances that specialises exactly in deniable intervention. Its armed officers constitute a kind of interstellar equivalent of CIA Black Ops. Continued →

Why beauty is truth

When the downloadable version of Radiohead’s In Rainbows came out, some people were complaining vocally about the mp3 encoding. Tinny and distorted, they said, what a dreadful conversion to mp3, it’s not even worth the zero dollars I paid for it. Actually, it sounds okay to me. Not CD quality, but perfectly fine for the bitrate.¹ What evident distortion I can hear seems evidently to be the result of production/mastering decisions, not a technical fault. This story might be a good illustration of the fact that, the less you pay for something, the less value you are likely to assign to it. Or maybe those people were unconsciously ill at ease owing to Radiohead’s crazy time signatures.² Or maybe they were just using really bad headphones.

That’s what occurred to me as I was walking through Paris the other day, listening to my downloaded copy of In Rainbows on my iPod through my new pair of AKG K324P earphones. Continued →

1. I stop being able to hear the difference between 44.1Khz 16-bit AIFF and compressed codecs when the encoding hits around 320kbps (for AAC; somewhat higher for mp3). ↩
2. “Fifteen Step” is in 5/4, naturally. ↩

The BBC documentary on games that I presented in 2004, Trigger Happy: The Invincible Rise of the Video Game, is now online. The image shows your reporter in the universe of ICO. Click to go to Google Video:

White King and Red Queen: How the Cold War Was Fought on the Chessboard
by Daniel Johnson (Atlantic)

Garry Kasparov, the former world chess champion, was imprisoned for five days last month after participating in an opposition rally in Moscow. On his release, he wrote an impassioned editorial for the Wall Street Journal denouncing “Mr Putin and his gang” and observing that “KGB officers in plain clothes were clearly in charge even at the police station”. Although Kasparov is no longer a professional chess player but a politician himself, the event makes a chilling postscript to Daniel Johnson’s colourful history of chess as an ideological weapon in the USSR.

Most famously, chess became a proxy version of the cold war during the 1972 match in which Bobby Fischer defeated Boris Spassky in Reykjavik, after Henry Kissinger had intervened to persuade the holed-up Fischer to play. Johnson efficiently relates the by-now-familiar story of Fischer’s rise, punctuated by drama-queen vanishings, with a wry running simile that compares him to Achilles, “sulking in his tent”. In view of Fischer’s later deterioration into ranting anti-Semitism, Johnson sensibly resists the cliché that chess makes men mad, and instead offers the valuable observation: “It was not chess that made Fischer what he eventually became — it was the abandonment of chess.” Continued →

The Painter of Battles
by Arturo Pérez-Reverte, translated by Margaret Sayers Peden (Weidenfeld)

A man lives alone, in a crumbling tower by the sea. On its interior wall, he is painting a vast circular mural of war, melding histories and landscapes into a singular nightmare. One day a stranger arrives, and announces that he intends to kill the painter. Instead of punching the man, fleeing or informing the police, the painter takes the news phlegmatically, continuing to work on his mural while receiving the visitor each day for a series of long, philosophical conversations on the nature of art and war.

Such is the curious setup of this novel. There is no point complaining of implausibility, since if the painter had reacted otherwise, this particular story wouldn’t exist, and it is this story we have in front of us. Other fictions are based on similar theatrical conceits: perhaps Sandor Marai’s Embers, in which two men converse in a castle to reveal one’s betrayal, long ago, by the other; or the sly entertainment of another two-hander, Gilbert Adair’s A Closed Book. But here Pérez-Reverte — the author of some delicious novels constructed around enigmas in chess or painting, and the series of elegant swashbucklers starring Captain Alatriste — is composing in a more minor and less ludic key. Continued →

On videogames ‘versus’ reading

As George W. Bush nearly asked: “Is our children reading?” The answer appears to be no, according to the 2006 report of the International Literacy Study. As the Guardian summarises its findings:

England has plummeted from third to 19th in an international league table of children’s literacy levels as pupils replace books with computer games.

Imagine the headline 100 years ago: “Children Spending Too Much Time Playing Outdoors with Hoops and Sticks, Says Minister; Should be Forcibly Enclosed to Read Improving Literature.” There’s always some apparently pointless youth activity to scapegoat.

As has always been the case, though, the adult paranoia expressed here about the supposedly harmful influence of videogames depends on a sublime ignorance of the form. In fact, you’re not going to get far in most modern videogames if you can’t read. And some of them make you read an awful lot. Continued →

If you are a critic, an author or (ideally) a celebrity,¹ you might find yourself, as the calendar year slouches towards extinguishment, asked to nominate your “Books of the Year” in one of the literary newspaper sections or magazines. Such lists are celebrated for their logrolling, in which contributors nominate books by their friends, or authors with whom they share a publisher or an agent. By sheer chance, this does not apply to my contribution to this year’s list in the New Statesman:

Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke (Picador) was an epic of drenched sensuality and absurdly chewable dialogue, as though Don DeLillo and Joseph Heller had collaborated on a Vietnam war novel. DeLillo’s own Falling Man (Picador), the first 9/11 novel that will endure, crafted a dialogue between shattering thunder and shattered silence.

J M Coetzee’s mesmerising Diary of a Bad Year (Harvill Secker) was considered by some not to be a novel at all, as though there existed some bureaucratic checklist of novelistic virtues that Coetzee failed to satisfy; its drama consisted in the author’s characteristic ice being implacably heated to melting point.

This was also the happy year in which I discovered Lee Child, the British author of US-set thrillers with shiny covers that can be found at airports. His technical command of sentence rhythm and paragraph structure puts an alarming number of his literary compatriots to shame.

1. The Meatloaf theorem applies here to me, obviously. ↩

Free book!

Update: see the new discussion of this experiment here.

As a follow-up to my post on Amazon’s crippled and hideous Kindle, and the discussion at Mark Pilgrim’s place, I thought I’d try an experiment, and give away for free an “ebook” version of my first book, Trigger Happy, with no “digital rights management” whatsoever. It’ll work on anything that can read a PDF.

Trigger Happy is a book about the aesthetics of videogames — what they share with cinema, the history of painting, or literature; and what makes them different, in terms of form, psychology and semiotics. It was first published in 2000; this is the revised edition with the Afterword written in 2004 2001. (Update: as requested in comments, the 2004 Afterword can now be read here.) The book is offered under a CC Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 license (see terms), for a limited time only. I’m not sure how limited that time will be, so grab it while it’s hot. Continued →