Special Circumstances

Battle Royale by Koushun Takami

42 students remaining.

42 students from Shiroiwa Junior High School awake on an island. They are told that they are involuntary participants in a game, a game in which they each get a randomly assigned weapon there can be only one survivor.

At first glance, it seems to be a thinly disguised version of the "Lord of the Flies". But the underlying motivation for the setting seems to be quite different. While "Lord of the Flies" was about human nature, this work is about politics. The story is set in the year 1997, not in contemporary Japan, but a Japan that is part of a brutal dictatorship, called the Republic of Greater East Asia, a thinly disguised reference to the Greater Asia Prosperity Sphere that the Japanese Empire wanted to create in the years leading upto the Second World War. In this novel, America is an enemy state, which implies that the novel is set in an alternate history where Japan did not lose in the Second World War.

Unlike Germany after 1945, many observers of Japanese culture have commented that Japan has been hesitant in acknowledging the atrocities committed during the war. This denial is especially true in school textbooks, which leads to the premise of this book. It seems as if it is only in the fringes of Japanese pop culture, in novels like these and Yakuza "exploitation" movies, has this issue been addressed at all. The mainstream culture, directly or indirectly via post-apocalyptic plotlines, is usually transfixed by the horrors of the atomic bombs.

In keeping with the tradition of exploitation movies, the style of the writing, intentionally or not, is extremely melodramatic, from the dialogue to the dated and much too sincere references to rock and roll music as a clarion call for freedom (in this case, from the state, not your parents). What is clearly intentional is the violence, not unfamiliar to those exposed to Yakuza movies, but in this setting intended to create a controversy. This it did, in Japan, but only when the movie based on this book was released. The over-sincere writing and the neat plot twists in the ending jars with the rest of the novel, and is contrary to the cynicism that is usually part of the genre.

%A Koushun Takami
%T Battle Royale
%I Viz, LLC
%P 616
%D 1999
%D :english translation 2003, by Yuji Oniki
%G ISBN: 156931778X (pb)
%K science-fiction

Review written: circa 2003

The Razor Wire Looking Glass by Greg Egan

Australian science-fiction author, Greg Egan, has taken time off from his fiction writing to investigate the procedure of immigration detention in his country.

His essay on the topic is called The Razor Wire Looking Glass.

One sentence in this essay was particularly intruiging:

There are institutionalised flaws in the system, such as the language tests routinely used for validating people's nationality that have been discredited by professional linguists.

I wonder what kind of language test can prove that one is from a particular country. Kafka (if he used speech reco) might imagine the following scenario. Perhaps they ask people to talk into ViaVoice and measure the word error rate: "Edit distance of 24? You must be from Bhutan.''

Boardinghouse Nevermore by Robert Musil

In the short story Boardinghouse Nevermore, Robert Musil writes:

How revolting are the words harmony, symmetry, perfection, noble bearing! We have stuffed them so full of meaning, they stand before us like fat women on tiny feet and cannot even move.

If Musil had a blog, perhaps he would use a title that he has used before: Ill-Tempered Observations. Good name for a blog, isn't it.

Search engine for linguists

Phil Resnik has created a Search engine for linguists. It allows the user to search for particular sentence structures or parse trees. The parses are generated by running Eugene Charniak's statistical parser.

The idea, if I understand it correctly, is to search for structural matches rather than matches on the words. So, for example, if the user was interested in the class of sentences typified by the sentence:

"John ate the meat raw"

Then using the Query page of the Linguist search engine the user could search for the following parse tree (plug your Penn Treebank notation memory module into your brain first):

 (VP (VBD ate)(S NP (ADJP JJ))) 

According to Philip, in the forum post explaining this query, the first 20 hits include:

      Just because they eat it raw doesn't mean that they don't want it fresh.

      Partial decomposition would be a good alternative for seasoning and
      tenderising if you have to eat it raw.

      Eat them broiled, grilled or blackened.

      All the hypocrisy around me oh God don t let me fall,they might just eat me alive.

      Eat them smoked, pickled, or cooked.

      Then the baby Kangaroo's can eat them alive! 

Syntactic Processing in a Nonhuman Primate

Two posts by Mark Liberman on the languagelog about the Jan 16 Science magazine article: by Tecumseh Fitch and Marc Hauser entitled Computatational Constraints on Syntactic Processing in a Nonhuman Primate, and a "Perspective" piece by David Premack entitled Is Language the Key to Human Intelligence?

The comments by Mark Liberman:

• Jan 16: Language in humans and monkeys
• Jan 17: Hi Lo Hi Lo, it's off to formal language theory we go

gloof, spooce, gloof twain, spooce, gairk

Very cool piece of work brought to my attention by Mark Liberman on the languagelog:

ShortTalk is a speech interface for composing text. Think of it as a "little" programming language that is speech-based and which you can freely intersperse in between normal English speech with some guarantee that the speech recognition algorithms will not freak out on you.

Here's a brief clipping from the webpage that shows how to use ShortTalk to add some space around a "+"-sign

Before

    z = x+y| 

After

    z = x + y| 

ShortTalk solution

    gloof, spooce, gloof twain, spooce, gairk  

Trouble and her friends by Melissa Scott

On the surface, it seems like any other cyberpunk novel. There is a lot of 'jacking in' to the net, and characters use sight, smell, sound and emotions to navigate the network. However, there is something more here: the main focus of the book is the cracker/hacker subculture which is explored with obvious appreciation. The tensions between crackers and the authorities forms the main backdrop. This atmosphere is a somewhat obvious metaphor for gender and sexuality issues, but this aspect is not overbearing or falsely sincere.

Most visual descriptions of the net in cyberpunk (especially William Gibson) betray lack of understanding of basic network protocols. Not so in this book. The descriptions of navigating the net are impressively original, extrapolating and borrowing from non-fiction books about the contemporary net (some of the inspiration seems to come from "The Cuckoo's Egg" by Clifford Stoll, the real-life story of a sysadmin tracking down some crackers from Germany).

On the downside, there isn't much of a plot, the Wild West analogies get a bit tiring after a while and it could easily have been about seventy pages shorter, but these are minor points.

%T Trouble and her friends
%A Melissa Scott
%I Tor Books
%D 1994
%G ISBN: 0312857330 (hc)
%G ISBN: 0812522133 (pb)
%P 379
%K science-fiction

Review written: circa 2000

Schismatrix Plus by Bruce Sterling

Life moves in clades. A clade is a daughter species, a related descendant. It's happened to other successful animals, and now it's humanity's turn. The factions still struggle, but the categories are breaking up. No faction can claim the one true destiny for mankind. Mankind no longer exists.

A collection of short stories and a novella called "Schismatrix" written by Bruce Sterling in the early 80s. All the stories are set in a common future universe where the human species has cleaved into the Shapers and the Mechanists. The Shapers have "reshaped" themselves through genetic engineering, adopting such enhancements as superior intelligence, longevity and odor-free perspiration. In the other corner lurk the Mechanists, who prefer to gradually replace their mortal flesh with prosthetic limbs and artificial organs. Both factions have colonized the solar system and most of the actions takes place off-earth on the various orbital conglomerates.

It was not entirely clear why the schism had developed, but as established it provides a Cold War setting (this was written in the 80s) but also a setting for the kind of political science-fiction that Sterling has in mind where there is no pause from technological and social change. Everybody has to change constantly, or become obsolete.

I am thankful for the inclusion of the short stories which are set in the same logical universe. Sterling is stronger when writing short fiction and there are some gems in this collection.

An especially good short story in this collection is "Swarm" where the hoary cliche of a hive-like alien species is handled with renewed vigor and with a bold moral about intelligent life.

I also liked "Spider Rose" and "Cicada Queen" for their wonderful post-human characters.

Here are the list of short stories in this collection (along with original publication dates):

• Swarm First published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, 1982.
• Spider Rose First published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, 1982.
• Cicada Queen First published in Universe 13, 1983.
• Sunken Gardens First published in Omni, 1984.
• Twenty Evocations First published in Interzone, 1984.

Thematically similar cousins of these short stories are the `Near-Space' stories by Allen Steele (e.g. "Sex and Violence in Zero-G") and "Vacuum Flowers" by Michael Swanwick.

%T Schismatrix Plus
%T :Includes Schismatrix and Selected Stories from Crystal Express
%A Bruce Sterling
%I Ace Books
%D 1996
%G ISBN: 0441003702
%P 304
%K science-fiction

Review written: 2000/05/02

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

The plot itself is one part cyberpunk (an `homage' to William Gibson), and three parts techno-fiction (sf with detailed descriptions of technological artifacts and gadgets). The prose is fast and flashy and almost distracts you from the central premise which is ludicrous and betrays lack of knowledge in both neuroscience and linguistics. The continual comparisions of the human brain to a von Neumann computational architecture and the oversimplification of descriptions of software get to be a bit annoying.

On the other hand, it is extremely enjoyable to read especially if you like techno-fiction and are in the mood for some tongue-in-cheek cyberpunk. This is some pretty good head-candy.

This book is always hailed as being seminal and I had some trouble figuring out why. The only answer that comes to mind is that the good hard-sf before Stephenson were usually writing about speculative physics. The ranks of hard-sf were filled with people from hard science backgrounds. Stephenson was one of the first group of people with computer science background to delve into the field of science-fiction (yes, Vernor Vinge and Rudy Rucker were there first, but somehow were not read widely at the time and only associated with the cyberpunk revolution much later; the other two: William Gibson and Bruce Sterling do not have a CS background). What makes Stephenson especially compelling is that he is one of the first sf authors who really extrapolates the information age. `Intel' is everything where access to information is equal to intelligence.

Whatever its merits, this book is a lot of fun to read. The basic plot point of a neuro-linguistic virus was already explored by Samuel Delany in his 1966 novel "Babel-17". However, Stephenson's book is a much more enjoyable read.

At least after reading this book you will know which sf book inspired the idiotic skate-boarding scene in the movie "Hackers".

%T Snow Crash
%A Neal Stephenson
%I Bantam Books
%D 1992
%G ISBN: 055308853X (hc)
%G ISBN: 0553562614 (pb)
%P 440
%K science-fiction

Review written: 1999/08/24