hotter than reality by far

Gaah. This post brought to you courtesy of (a) a mad day full of angsting students, so I couldn't post during the day, and (b) a sudden quick run to the supermarket owing to the fact that my keyboard just died in the middle of a sentence. I do love a cordless keyboard and mouse, their spaghetti-wrangling capacities are immense, but Sod's Law says the battery will always die at the exact moment when you've exhausted the stash of AAAs on non-computer (i.e. inessential) frivolities like the bedside clock. Usually in the middle of a particularly good sentence, too. Sigh.

So, yesterday I did no work for several hours on account of how Cory Doctorow just released his new book, free for download under a Creative Commons license, as is his wont. For The Win (available here) is kind of a cross between Little Brother (kids resist fascism!) and Stross's Halting State (shenanigans in online worlds! news at 11!1!!1!). It always faintly surprises me how much Doctorow's books drag me in, as I don't think he's a great stylist and middle-of-the-road writing style usually jolts me slightly but continuously out of the absorption. What he does, though, is to dissect, acutely, intelligently and with a shifting, manic energy, the current zeitgeist, a word the Evil Landlord has recently taught me how to pronounce. Devouring For The Win in three hours flat has caused me to unleash two major sizzling insights, viz:

1. Good lord, economics is the new geekery. SF writers of a certain stamp have always gleefully indulged in technobabble, and they're pretty fearsome if you unleash them on the increasingly technologically-defined systems and processes of modern-day economics. Quite apart from anything else, market operations are at least as arcane as anything a SF writer can come up with in the arena of quantum gadgets, string theory or the singularity. Doctorow does it here, packaged in a YA-friendly format with lots of analogies which means even I got most of it; Stross does it, with rather more first-world political wossname, in the Merchant Princes series. What they both achieve is that particular kind of obsessive, geeky insight which delights in expounding and exploiting a system for its own sake. I'd never really expected to have the economic version infect me, but it really does.
   
2. Economics is arcane, and these days it's deeply abstract and virtual to the point of being magical. If you have to talk about life-affecting realities whose abstracted systems are weirdly dislocated from the real world, the MMORPG environment is a bloody marvellous metaphor through which to do it. The recent stock market disasters have revealed, if nothing else, that the whole house of cards is a conceptual system with a hell of a lot less to it in the way of logic, coherence, rules and self-limitations than your average online fantasy realm. I couldn't help reading the book as a nastily acute and finger-pointing satire on recent economic trends, and as such it was deeply satisfying.

I thus recommend that ye go ye forth and read the damned thing. It's a slightly odd mix of surprisingly gritty and surprisingly utopian, and gives you rather more insight into Chinese and Indian poverty than is entirely consonant with first-world complacence, but it's very much worth a read.

I now return to the loving embrace of The Vampire Diaries. Damon is turning out to be a total shit, but very, very pretty.