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Seven Pillars of Wisdom

Seven Pillars of Wisdom is T.W Lawrence’s (Lawrence of Arabia) notes and autobiographical memoir of his time served as a liason officer during the Arab Revolt.  Way way back in the day I reviewed a book called Eastern Approaches, the story of Fitzroy MacLean, one of the first SAS officers and an english member of diplomatic core that explored Soviet Central Asia.  I mention both of these books because they’re similar: heroic individuals who explored the harshest parts of the world during war time and then wrote about their story with singular humility and deference.

Seven Pillars of Wisdom is not a general history of world war 2 or even specifically the Arab Revolt that ended Turkish dominance in the middle east.  There are enough blanks in the narrative to greatly encourage further study.  Presumably Lawrence was writing for his contemporaries who already knew the political details of the causes and aftermath, but after almost a hundred years there’s a lot lacking.

What it lacks from the air, it makes up for on the ground.  Lawrence nearly maps the entire desert for the benefit of his readers, remarking on the snakes, the various wells visited, the character of the various people and towns.  He follows the revolt from the Arab position and in that capacity is near flawless.

As a story, the best part is Lawrence’s own transition.  He begins as a rather reluctant staff officer who nevertheless is eager to help the Arab cause.  As the revolt progresses he becomes increasingly disillusioned by his own place in what is likely a fraud.  England’s support for the Arab revolt is hardly an act of generosity with Turkey a German ally.  As the tolls of war grow Lawrence finds himself the near leader of a revolt he’s lost his own position in.

It’s a rather terrible story, but it’s phenomenal reading.  The writing is rather archaic and Lawrence does spend a great deal on details, the texture of the land for example, that most readers would probably rather do without, but as a complete work it’s a rousing adventure story of the finest calibre.

A note worth mentioning, there are a handful of different versions of the tale.  Lawrence himself repeatedly revised his work, mostly to edit down it’s original length.  I read a version stored for free here.  (The book is out of copyright.)

Final note:  I’m still editing.  It’s going tolerably well, if only very slowly.  I’m hopeful that I get it all together this year.

I finished Michael Stackpole’s Age of Discovery series about a month ago.  Predictably enough it got lost in the shuffle.  I’ve started to edit my novel (le sigh!) so I haven’t had much time to skim my notes.

I’ve been fairly liberal in my mentions and praise of Mr. Stackpole of the last few months.  His series on writing. “The Secrets” has been interesting, helpful, and inspiring.  I felt a near obligation to read a few of his books since I was tossing his name around so cavalierly without having read anything of his since the Rogue Squadron Star Wars series a decade ago.

I do not have much of a review prepared and I’m working off of memories that are already starting to fade.  Age of Discovery is trilogy.  (A Secret Atlas, Cartomancy, A New World)  The series was entertaining by most reasonable measures, but for whatever reason I did not find them as compelling as others I have read in the last few months.  As the last books on the list, I may have suffered from book fatigue, or perhaps I’ve grown out of his writing, or maybe I’ve simply moved away from fantasy in my interests.  I still read George RR Martin and await his next book eagerly, so I haven’t left it completely behind, but in this series the spark of magic held less of an interest for me than in the past.

I found many of the characters a bit too ‘in the know’.  Their indecisiveness and hesitation when faced with titanic revelations came across as overly quick and flippant.  They managed to adjust themselves to the consequences of the world within a chapter or two.  I admit there were long stretches of the book that were pretty fascinating, but the catharsis of seeing the character’s resolve their struggles was just too quick for tastes.

I’d be remiss if I gave a bad review.  They do not deserve that, per se, certainly not for me.  Age of Discovery is nothing if not a creative adventure.  Had the books been shorter I’d call it an amusing jaunt, but at 600 pages each in my edition they started to become a slog.  Again, 1800 pages does tend to bring on a bit of fatigue.

Unfortunately I don’t have any books new books on the horizon for a bit.  Editing is my highest priority.  I do, however, have an upcoming review of T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom on the list.  I’ll probably manage to get that down later in the week.

These have probably been around for ages, but I just found them.

Medieval Demographics

Medieval Demographics Calculator

Sometimes, you just want to know how many furriers the average medieval big city had. (Answer: 160 for a population of 40,000.)

Does anyone know of any similar ‘culture’ demographic calculators? These things are pretty invaluable for setting up worlds that make sense.

Enjoy!

Io9 published (about a month ago, what can I say, I’m working on a backlog), an article on the novels that originated their own science fiction sub genres.  A few are obvious ones (Neuromancer and Cyberpunk, Frankenstein and Gothic Science Fiction.)   Others are a bit more obscure, at least as far as my experience.

As expected the comments are filled with suggestions on alternate books to fill the various categories.  Interesting stuff!

Worth reading is the link to the ‘cranky essay’ looking further in cyberpunk.  (Relinked here.)

I feel like I don’t come across hardcover 200 page children’s books very often.  Harry Potter, of course, and probably a whole bunch of others, but they never seem to pass my desk.

The Graveyard Book starts off with probably the most horrific intro I could think of for a children’s story.  Bod’s parents are killed whole he’s a baby.  He manages to escape his crib and crawl to the nearby graveyard.  Jack, the murderer, tracks the baby down, but Bod is saved by the local ghosts and taken in.  He’s granted a pair of ghost parents, the Owenses, and a guardian, the enigmatic Silas, a sort of half-living, half-dead gravekeeper.

Bod goes along being raised and learning more about his past.  I’ll save any reader the particular details, but it all goes along with quite a bit of humor and artistry.  The various personages of the graveyard, all hundreds of years dead and not exactly up on the world, give advice and amusement.  Bod learns the powers of the dead, fading and hiding, and explores the ghoul gate.  He mets the Sneer, the witch, and a little girl.

I won’t give away the ending.  I wish the story had explored Jack a bit more.  There was plenty of material to explore and it wraps together all too nicely all too quickly, I thought, but it was a very cool concept and a neat story.  The book has pages of art work, black and white drawings that sort of remind me of spartan outlines of the title cards used for the Jeeves and Wooster series.

Currently I’m reading the book Terraforming by Martin Beech.  It’s nonfiction research for my own story.  After that I’ll be reading The Yiddish Policeman’s Union by Michael Chabon.

I’ll be writing a lot of book reviews for Servusamanu over the next few weeks.   After months of pushing reading back in order to get a few extra words written (Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire being a nopted divergence), I’ve got a whole stack of books to get through.  With the my story finally all nice and drafted, I’m taking something of a break to finally get through.

The first on the stack is an old wilted book with yellowed pages and a creased spine.  1.75 is printed in the top corner in black letters.  It looks like a small travel guide, twenty years old and dumped in an attic.

Happens to be one of the most exciting science fiction books I’ve ever read.  Book, is maybe not the best classification.  It’s four short stories each separate from each other all set in a distant future where society, technology, business, and exploration have long since challenged the present norms.  The first story is a navy training expedition into space, a grueling year journey that is almost always lethal to a few crewmen.  The second story is a 1984esque world of social classification and bureaucracy.  The third is a world so crowded space and privacy are the ultimate signs of wealth.  The last is about a rig, somewhat akin to an oil rig, that harvests resources from a peaceful ocean planet.  It doesn’t stay peaceful for long, but the enemy is, well, not what one would expect.

Jack Vance is a well-known author and I probably should have delved into one of his books quite a bit sooner.  He writes with the sparse and fast-paced style more common to the era of small books and detective paperbacks and it works very well for short stories.  I must have gone through a hundred pages a minute, only stopping to digest each story before it whizzed completely by.  I definitely expect to read more of his stuff.  (Also George RR Martin recently helped with an anthology of his stuff.

Next book up is The Secret by Jack McDevitt.

I wrote an article about the Kindle way back when. There’s a new one coming out and it’s not really that much better.

Gizmodo has an article here.

Too slow, too small, too expensive.

$489? Make it $150 and I’ll start to look at it. It should at least be competitive with an ipod, which can hold significantly more (and play musics, music etc etc. Why can’t the kindle combine all of these features?)

No panning, no zooming, no scrolling. Bah? The bigger screen is really nice and the textbook deals could make it great for students (maybe…a big maybe), but these half-hearted readers are just not enough to make way for a digital revolution in books.

As soon as they can halve the price, get it to at least 20 GBs of space, and add at least one non-reader functionality (music, video, file storage, wireless, email, web browser, etc etc), it’s just not enough.

IMHO as always.

Here’s a video.

As I slave away on a novel that’ll likely not even get published ever, Cracked.com has deemed to supply a list of famous authors were made masterpieces, without really even trying. Honestly, the list seems to go a flat by the second page, but Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas…I still don’t know how he managed to get that published.

Little Red Riding Hood could have maximized her efficiency by taking a Ultra Low Emissions Vehicle, conserved heat by wearing black, and optimized her wolf-recognition-to-hunter response time by carrying a cell phone. Other than that, she kept well within her expected operating paramaters.

May 1st. March might welcome in spring but the flowers wait till May. It’s a good time to get outside and hike, play some tennis, do absolutely anything except for sit inside writing…

Which is why I’m happy I’m just over half done. I’ll hopefully have finished a rough draft by September. I’ll be looking to edit it until the end of the year and then make 2010 the year of publishing. These schedules of mine never seem to survive contact with whim.

I’m still enthusiastic about the story overall, probably because I’ve changed the plot around a dozen times already. It’s become a lot faster than my outline and so I’ve had to expand a number of sections. A few characters have popped out of nowhere and now they need some developing too. This has lead to a lot of rough chapters not much better than a lengthy outline and continuity errors abound at this point, but I’ve been taking notes. The editing process is already piling up tasks.

The second half promises to be even harder. The tension is really starting to build on a few characters, but it won’t be a graceful road to the end. And then, of course, I have to end it. That’s the monkey that rides my back for the first 90,000 words. The outline was meant to tie everyone’s story down nicely, but then the outlined changed, so the ending has to too. I’m not sure I’m prepared for that just yet.

So, that’s the update. It’s coming along. The most interesting part has been the different direction my research has gone. Most people do their research and then write a story around it. I prefer to write the story, leave things loose enough that I can change things as necessary, add in the research that I think will add verisimilitude, and then tighten the plot around that. So far I’m looking at a small library of physics books that I’ll need to get through before the real editing can begin.

Another update soon!