"House of Suns" by Alastair Reynolds

My review from Amazon.com:

Incredibly ambitious, but it works
Publishing’s a funny old business. Reynolds’ magnum opus, “House of Suns” has only just come out in hardback in both the UK and the US, but I found a paperback copy at Singapore Airport last Saturday. I hesitated for a moment – this is a big book: did I really want to lug it around the world? – but only for a moment.
One of the age old problems in science fiction is that of the speed of light. How can one write a decent space opera, with exotic starships visiting improbable planets, without violating the speed limit? Reynolds decides to stick with relativistic limitations (well, mostly) by playing with the other side of the equation: time. The result is an extraordinary mystery story at galactic scale, in which (for a few travellers) time is measured in thousands, even millions of years.
“House of Suns” is an audacious work. I’ve enjoyed all of Reynolds’ earlier books: even though the stories were more conventional than, say, those of Iain M. Banks, Reynolds confident mastery of his material has been undeniable. In the new book, he takes quite a few risks, and gets away with them. The conclusion… well, my first reaction was confusion, but I found myself realizing how utterly apposite it was.
Comparison between writers is invidious, but inevitable. Right now, two of the best science fiction writers are British: Banks and Reynolds. Before “House of Suns”, I would have said that Banks was clearly the greater talent. Now, I’m not so sure. What fun!

Airports

This is an interesting trip for airports. At Beijing, I arrived and departed through the extraordinary new Terminal 3. I only saw Singapore from the inside, but it’s one of the most impressive international shopping centres I’ve ever seen. At Hyderabad, I had my first experience of the new Rajiv Gandhi airport, which is a tremendous improvement over the old one (which was stuck on the side of an air force base).
And now Bangalore. I arrived on Tuesday night at the old airport, which was as chaotic and depressing as ever. (The rain didn’t help.) And on Saturday night (technically Sunday morning) I’ll be flying out of… well, hopefully the new Bangalore Bengluru airport. It was supposed to open for business on Friday, but suddenly the authorities have announced a 24 hour delay, so Saturday will be the first day of operation. I have a nervous feeling about this… I’m hoping that I won’t have a Terminal 5 experience.

Darwin's uncomfortable truths

Derb has a fabulous piece over at Taki’s Magazine about Darwin, evolution, and the uncomfortable consequences of this simple but revolutionary idea.

It cannot be denied, though, that Darwinism’s metaphysical implications are hard to square with any view of human nature not flatly biological; and this applies as much to the “blank slate” egalitarianism of the irreligious Left as to the soul-based universalism of the religious Right. This is inevitable. As an empirical view of living matter, chasing down its truths one by one through thickets of patient observation, Darwinism is bound to offend systems derived from introspection, revelation, or social approval.

(Channeling Pinker, of course.)

Only one view of human nature can be correct. Either we are the ensouled favorites of an omniscient deity; or we are biology and nothing else; or we are biological vehicles for a perfectly plastic uniform essence whose every trait is a consequence of the world immediately around us. The first option, in current American society, is largely the property of the political Right; the third, of the political Left. The middle option has no true political home, any more than Pythagoras’ Theorem has. Like Pythagoras’ Theorem, it is much the most useful of the three, and very likely true. Unlike the theorem, though, it tells us things about ourselves we cannot bear to hear. For that reason, it will probably never have wide acceptance.

At the sign of The Lucky Shamrock

I’m sitting in a restaurant called The Lucky Shamrock, at the far end of the incredible new Terminal 3 building at Beijing Airport. ((Curiosiy: There are lots of stores carrying duty-free, luxury, and Olympic-themed items, but no bookshop or newstand.)) Breakfast is on its way: the choices were “English”, “American” and “French” style. The latter includes shrimps… We shall see. At least they have WiFi, although for some reason (!) I can’t establish a VPN connection to Amazon. Another exmple of the Great Firewall at work, I guess.
The ride from the hotel to the airport was a white-knuckle affair: the taxi driver was determined to break all the records. We did it in 20 minutes, door to door, which wasn’t really necessary.
(OK, “English” consists of scrambled egg, a rasher of bacon, several slices of fried salami, two wedges of water-melon, and four triangles of dry toast. Sadly, I don’t like water-melon. Never mind: the coffee is excellent.)
Speaking of food, last night I decided to try the restaurant across the street from the Ascott Hotel. It’s the Yuxiang Kichen; part of a chain of “authentically Sichuan” restaurants. It was superb – the best meal I’ve had all week. The highlights were a terrine of preserved eggs, and a hot and sweet soup with fresh slices of pear. I’ll be back…
It’s 7:38; I’m boarding at 8:15. Check, please!

The streets of Beijing

When I’m in a new city, my impulse is to walk. Not take tours, or work through the top tourist spots, but simply to walk the streets, wherever they take me. (Remember Prague?) And when I start walking, I have a tendency to keep going, at a fairly brisk pace, until I can’t walk any more. Often I won’t stop to check out an interesting sight, or even to eat.
So it was today. I thought about visiting the Great Wall, but that would be an all-day commitment, and I wanted to get back and get some work done before Seattle woke up and I had to pack for my flight tomorrow. So around 9am I set off. As yesterday, I started west down Jianguomennei Dajie towards the Forbidden City, but when I reached Chaoyangmen Nandajie I turned south, under the railway tracks. I was looking for the Park of the Ming City Wall, which turned out to be delightful. There were elderly women doing their morning exercises, children everywhere, and ancient men who looked at me as though I was an alien. (I guess I was, in my broad-brimmed kangaroo leather hat and my “There’s no place like 127.0.0.1” t-shirt.) The oddest thing I came across was a perfectly preserved late Victorian style railway signal box!
At the end of the park, I followed Qianmon Dongdajie towards the south end of Tiananmen Square. I plugged in my headphones and cranked the music up, to discourage the many young men who wanted to be my tour guide. (My choice of music: Banco de Gaia’s “Last Train To Lhasa”. Hmmmm.)
After Tiannmen Square, I decided that I’d seen enough big, ornate stuff: I wanted to see “real Beijing”. (OK, that’s a bit pretentious, but you know what I mean. So I explored the hutongs (narrow alley-like streets) southwest of the Arrow Tower, in Dashilan district. I went down Zhubaoshi Jie until I found the turning into Dashilan Dajie, and followed this into a maze of twisty passages, all different. Dashilan Dajie turned into Dashilan Xijie, then Tieshuxie Jie. And then suddenly I was stuck – and so was everyone else. There was a small excavator digging up the street, and the operator decided to take out the one remaining strip of pavement. A few brave souls scrambled over the debris, ducking to avoid the bucket of the excavator, but I decided to backtrack and work around. I turned south down Shanxi Xiang until I hit Zhushikou Xidajie, which I followed west until I reached Nanxinhua Jie. (One confusing thing about Beijing is that the streets tend to change their names every block or so.) I turned north; I had some vague idea of going all the way up to Bei Hai Park, but I soon abandoned that.
Just as I noticed when I was in Seoul, Beijing merchants tend to cluster. Nanxinhua Jie was full of shops selling musical instruments and trophies – awards, cups, plaques, medals, and so forth. (I probably saw more trophy shops than any other kind in Beijing, except for food and clothing.) I kept going north, until I reached Xichang’an Jie, which is the western continuation of the street I’d started out on. At this point I realized that I wasn’t going to go much further: I’d been walking non-stop for four hours, and my feet knew it. So I reluctantly headed west to the nearest subway station, paid my 2 yuan for a ticket (that’s 29 cents US), and rode the gleaming, streamlined (and packed) train back to Guo Mao station. To the Chinese passengers with whom I shared the train, I apologize for my slovenly appearance: the humidity had picked up mid-morning, and my shirt was terribly sweat-stained.
And now I must deal with my blistered feet, and transfer all the photos to my laptop. I’ll go online and upload this piece in a few minutes. (I have to buy internet access one hour at a time in this hotel.) I probably won’t log in tomorrow morning, because I need to be at the airport by 6am. This time tomorrow, I’ll be in Singapore. (Well, at the airport, anyway.) And tomorrow night I’ll be in Hyderabad.

In Beijing

Today I got to be a tourist in Beijing. I walked the two or three miles from the hotel to Tiananmen Square, toured the Forbidden City, and explored the backstreets and alleyways. I took a couple of hundred photos, but I don’t have the bandwidth to upload them all yet. This teaser will have to do.

Around 2 pm, I wound up at a Starbucks near Ritan Park, and found that they had free WiFi. I turned on my iPhone, and was amused to discover that although Google Maps refused to show me a street-level map of Beijing, the satellite image view worked perfectly, and pinpointed my location within 10 metres!
When I told friends about this, they teased me about going to Starbucks. This is unfair: I have been sampling plenty of local cuisine. Starbucks was a move of desperation: the first place I’d seen to sit down and have a cold drink in about 30 minutes of pounding the pavement.
Yesterday I went out to dinner with two Amazon colleagues, and we had Shark’s Fin Soup. Yes, I know it’s environmentally irresponsible – but on the other hand it was one of the few items on the English version of the menu (hand-written in a school exercise book!) that we could identify. That and the eel stir-fried with mushrooms. And various dishes including the word “testicles”… (It was a strange evening all around: we wound up as the only customers in a quaint bar called “The Buffalo”, drinking weak cocktails and listening to an atrocious singer mangling Carpenters’ songs.)
On Tuesday I went to a fast food place near the office for lunch; it was decorated with pictures of Jackie Chan,and looked innocuous. I picked what I thought looked safe, and emerged 20 minutes later certain only of the identity of two elements of the meal: rice, and mushrooms. All of the other 5 or 6 ingredients were completely unknown to me, by appearance or taste. The next day I went with a colleague to a huge underground food court, and I just said “I’ll have what you’re having.” There was fried rice, and a hard boiled egg, but after that I’m hazy…..
Hotel breakfast is either dim sum (individual items unidentified) or stuff that looks like ham and eggs but doesn’t taste like either.
I’m having a great time!
OK, here are a couple of buses, just for Susan:
A couple of buses on Jianguonmennei Street, near Tiananmen Square

A slow-motion thunderstorm, with buses

We’re in the middle of a strange, slow-motion thunderstorm here in Beijing. After a beautiful sunny morning, a bank of low, grey-yellow cloud has descended on the city. There are barely-discernible signs of motion in the cloud, as nearby skyscrapers seem to drift in and out of focus, and occasionally an aimless pattern of lightning will put in an appearance, followed by a muffled apology for thunder.
Meanwhile, it’s rush-hour. From my vantage point on the 11th floor, I’m looking down on an elaborate intersection: ChaoYang Road crossing the 4th Ring Road. It’s a bus enthusiast’s paradise: double-deckers, single-deckers, short bendy-buses, long bendy-buses, long-distance coaches, even a few trolley-buses, all in a dazzling variety of colour schemes. The only common factor is that they all look much more modern and stylish than any buses that I’ve seen in the USA.

The incredible expanding hotel room….

Yesterday evening I returned to my hotel from the Amazon office, and came up to my room on the 9th floor. As I mentioned yesterday, it’s a suite: living room, bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, and laundry. Or so I thought… When I entered, I noticed that a door at the end of a corridor was ajar. I had previously assumed that this connected to the next suite, so that adjacent units could be combined – but why was the door open? My first reaction was to wonder if someone had entered my room, but when I explored I realized my mistake. The door led into a master suite: a huge bedroom, walk-in closets, a sumptuous hi-and-hers bathrooms with side-by-side walk-in showers, a whirlpool tub, and so forth. This “hotel suite” is twice as big as my apartment in Seattle!
When I’d finished exploring, I took a few photos and closed the door again. I’m not sure why: I guess it’s because I’d already settled into the “room” as I’d originally found it, unpacking my clothes in the smaller bedroom and arranging my things in the bathroom. I didn’t really feel the need to “move”.
But it’s an awesome bathroom!

In Beijing

I arrived in Beijing yesterday afternoon. We landed shortly before the earthquake struck Sichuan province; I didn’t notice anything at the airport, but of coure it was felt in various parts of Beijing.
The flight was good – long, long, long, but improved by (a) a gratis upgrade to Business Class ((Both first Class and Economy were oversold.)) and (b) a thoroughly congenial neighbour: CFO of a pharma business, an old China hand, and a delightful conversationalist. And Channel 9 was on the whole way; it was fascinating listening to the Russian and Chinese controllers. For a long way (from Anchorage to Khabarovsk) we were part of a small Star Alliance convoy: one Air Canada, followed by three United, all heading towards Beijing. We had an uneventful ride, but the United flight just behind us kept getting all sort of grief from the controllers, who seemed to think that he was too close behind us (4 minutes). “This is Magadan control: United 853, can you cross Dukat one minute later?” “United 853, negative.” “Are you sure?”
(The oddest aspect of the flight was that, after I’d just flown from Seattle to San Francisco, the San Francisco-Beijing flight took us right back to Seattle and up the coast of British Columbia and Alaska. I could have stayed in bed a few hours longer!)
Once at the airport, I took a cab to the hotel. It felt like a strange mixture of Japan and India: the freeways and major roads were reminiscent of Tokyo, but the taxi driver’s “creativity” would have been right at home in Hyderabad! The hotel (the Ascott) is fantastic: it’s designed for medium-stay guests, so I have suite with a kitchen and even a small laundry. I arrived late afternoon, succeeded in staying awake until 9pm, and then slept until 6am.
More anon.

Just-in-time travel planning

Assuming no last-minute hitches, 31 hours from now I’ll be heading off around the world. It’s not quite the longest trip I’ve ever taken, but who’s counting? Seattle to Beijing (via San Francisco) on Sunday; then Beijing to Hyderabad (via Singapore) the following Friday; then a mere hop down to Bangalore on Tuesday 17th; then the really weird bit: Bangalore to London, via Frankfurt, leaving at 1:55am on Sunday 25th and arriving at 10:40am the same day; and finally London to Seattle via Chicago on May 27th.
The planning for this trip has been more than a little crazy. First, I was supposed to be going with a colleague; then he cancelled out. Next I had to obtain a replacement passport, and (obviously) I couldn’t get my visas for India and China until it arrived. Then there were some minor changes in visa processing. (Why do changes never reduce the processing time?) Then a Seattle meeting appeared on my calendar for May 28th, and I decided that I really, really needed to be there, so I shifted my return flight from Thursday to Tuesday. The final curve-ball was that yesterday I found that I needed to upgrade to Office 2008 to cope with a particular document I’m working on, and I finally got that taken care of later this afternoon.
Anyway, the upshot is that my passport (with visas) is supposed to arrive tomorrow, Saturday morning, less than 24 hours before I depart. I was chewing my fingernails (metaphorically, OK?); now I’m just checking the FedEx tracking page every few minutes.
Tomorrow I pack ((Actually, I’ll get my hair cut, pick up my dry cleaning, then pack, and if time permits I’ll go to the Sounders game. Maybe.)), and Sunday I fly. After the mad scramble to get ready, I’m actually quite confident that the trip will go smoothly. I’ve replaced the 1GB SD card in my camera with a 2GB, because I’m planning to take plenty of pictures, but I probably won’t upload them until get back. This might seem to be the perfect trip to exploit the weightlessness of my MacBook Air, but in fact I’m bringing “Black Beauty”, my Amazon-supplied MacBook (freshly upgraded with Leopard and Office 2008). I’ve had my shots, and I’m packing the necessary meds to cope with the unexpected.
Let’s see… my passport is currently in Oakland. Time to fly.
UPDATE: One bonus, one glitch (resolved). The bonus is that I was able to purchase an upgrade to Economy Plus for SFO-PEK, so rather than being stuck in a middle seat at the back of a 100% full Economy section, I’ll now have a decent window seat and some legroom. The glitch was that FedEx tried to deliver my passport too early this morning, and didn’t bother to call the number on the waybill. I checked in with customer service, twice; when I realized that they weren’t going to deliver the package until Monday, I went down to the FedEx office to collect it. Not what I wanted to be doing, but never mind.