#mary robinette kowal

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Dinkclump Linkdump

I'm on tour with my new novel The Bezzle! Catch me TONIGHT in LA (Saturday night, with Adam Conover), Seattle (Monday, with Neal Stephenson), then Portland, Phoenix and more!

Some Saturday mornings, I look at the week's blogging and realize I have a lot more links saved up than I managed to write about this week, and then I do a linkdump. There've been 14 of these, and this is number 15:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

Attentive readers will note that this isn't Saturday. You're right. But I'm on a book tour and every day is shatterday, because damn, it's grueling and I'm not the spry manchild who took Little Brother on the road in 2008 – I'm a 52 year old with two artificial hips. Hence: an out-of-cycle linkdump. Come see me on tour and marvel at my verticality!

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/16/narrative-capitalism/#bezzle-tour

Best thing I read this week, hands down, was Ryan Broderick's Garbage Day piece, "AI search is a doomsday cult":

https://www.garbageday.email/p/ai-search-doomsday-cult

Broderick makes so many excellent points in this piece. First among them: AI search sucks, but that's OK, because no one is asking for AI search. This only got more true later in the week when everyone's favorite spicy autocomplete accidentally loaded the James Joyce module:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/02/chatgpt-alarms-users-by-spitting-out-shakespearean-nonsense-and-rambling/

(As Matt Webb noted, Chatbots have slid rapidly from Star Trek (computers give you useful information in a timely fashion) to Douglas Adams (computers spout hostile, impenetrable nonsense at you):

https://interconnected.org/home/2024/02/21/adams

But beyond the unsuitability of AI for search results and beyond the public's yawning indifference to AI-infused search, Broderick makes a more important point: AI search is about summarizing web results so you don't have to click links and read the pages yourself.

If that's the future of the web, who the fuck is going to write those pages that the summarizer summarizes? What is the incentive, the business-model, the rational explanation for predicting a world in which millions of us go on writing web-pages, when the gatekeepers to the web have promised to rig the game so that no one will ever visit those pages, or read what we've written there, or even know it was us who wrote the underlying material the summarizer just summarized?

If we stop writing the web, AIs will have to summarize each other, forming an inhuman centipede of botshit-ingestion. This is bad news, because there's pretty solid mathematical evidence that training a bot on botshit makes it absolutely useless. Or, as the authors of the paper – including the eminent cryptographer Ross Anderson – put it, "using model-generated content in training causes irreversible defects":

https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.17493

This is the mathematical evidence for Jathan Sadowski's "Hapsburg AI," or, as the mathematicians call it, "The Curse of Recursion" (new band-name just dropped).

But if you really have your heart set on living in a ruined dystopia dominated by hostile artificial life-forms, have no fear. As Hamilton Nolan writes in "Radical Capital," a rogues gallery of worker-maiming corporations have asked a court to rule that the NLRB can't punish them for violating labor law:

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/radical-capital

Trader Joe’s, Amazon, Starbucks and SpaceX have all made this argument to various courts. If they prevail, then there will be no one in charge of enforcing federal labor law. Yes, this will let these companies go on ruining their workers' lives, but more importantly, it will give carte blanche to every other employer in the land. At one end of this process is a boss who doesn't want to recognize a union – and at the other end are farmers dying of heat-stroke.

The right wing coalition that has put this demand before the court has all sorts of demands, from forced birth to (I kid you not), the end of recreational sex:

https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2024/02/getting-rid-of-birth-control-is-a-key-gop-agenda-item-for-the-second-trump-term

That coalition is backed by ultra-rich monopolists who want wreck the nation that their rank-and-file useful idiots want to wreck your body. These are the monopoly cheerleaders who gave us the abomination that is the Pharmacy Benefit Manager – a useless intermediary that gets to screw patients and pharmacists – and then let PBMs consolidate and merge with pharmacy monopolists.

One such inbred colossus is Change Healthcare, a giant PBM that is, in turn, a mere tendril of United Healthcare, which merged the company with Optum. The resulting system – held together with spit and wishful thinking – has access to the health records of a third of Americans and processes 15 billion prescriptions per day.

Or rather, it did process that amount – until the all-your-eggs-in-one-badly-maintained basket strategy failed on Wednesday, and Change's systems went down due to an unspecified "cybersecurity incident." In the short term, this meant that tens of millions of Americans who tried to refill their prescriptions were told to either pay cash or come back later (if you don't die first). That was the first shoe dropping. The second shoe is the medical records of a third of the country.

Don't worry, I'm sure those records are fine. After all, nothing says security like "merging several disparate legacy IT systems together while simultaneously laying off half your IT staff as surplus to requirements and an impediment to extracting a special dividend for the private equity owners who are, of course, widely recognized as the world's greatest information security practitioners."

Look, not everything is terrible. Some computers are actually getting better. Framework's user-serviceable, super-rugged, easy-to-repair, powerful laptops are the most exciting computers I've ever owned – or broken:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/13/graceful-failure/#frame

Now you can get one for $500!

https://frame.work/blog/first-framework-laptop-16-shipments-and-a-499-framework

And the next generation is turning our surprisingly well, despite all our worst efforts. My kid – now 16! – and I just launched our latest joint project, "The Sushi Chronicles," a small website recording our idiosyncratic scores for nearly every sushi restaurant in Burbank, Glendale, Studio City and North Hollywood:

https://sushichronicles.org/

This is the record of two years' worth of Daughter-Daddy sushi nights that started as a way to get my picky eater to try new things and has turned into the highlight of my week. If you're in the area and looking for a nice piece of fish, give it a spin (also, we belatedly realized that we've never reviewed our favorite place, Kuru Kuru in the CVS Plaza on North Hollywood Way – we'll be rectifying that soon).

And yes, we have a lavishly corrupt Supreme Court, but at least now everyone knows it. Glenn Haumann's even set up a Gofundme to raise money to bribe Clarence Thomas (now deleted, alas):

https://www.gofundme.com/f/pzhj4q-the-clarence-thomas-signing-bonus-fund-give-now

The funds are intended as a "signing bonus" in the event that Thomas takes up John Oliver on his offer of a $2.4m luxury RV and $1m/year for life if he'll resign from the court:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GE-VJrdHMug

This is truly one of Oliver's greatest bits, showcasing his mastery over the increasingly vital art of turning abstruse technical issues into entertainment that negates the performative complexity used by today's greatest villains to hide their misdeeds behind a Shield of Boringness (h/t Dana Clare).

The Bezzle is my contribution to turning abstruse scams into a high-impact technothriller that pierces that Shield of Boringness. The key to this is to master exposition, ignoring the (vastly overrated) rule that one must "show, not tell." Good exposition is hard to do, but when it works, it's amazing (as anyone who's read Neal Stephenson's 1,600-word explanation of how to eat Cap'n Crunch cereal in Cryptonomicon can attest). I wrote about this for Mary Robinette Kowal's "My Favorite Bit" this week:

https://maryrobinettekowal.com/journal/my-favorite-bit/my-favorite-bit-cory-doctorow-talks-about-the-bezzle/

Of course, an undisputed master of this form is Adam Conover, whose Adam Ruins Everything show helped invent it. Adam is joining me on stage in LA tomorrow night at Vroman's at 5:30PM, to host me in a book-tour event for my novel The Bezzle:

https://www.vromansbookstore.com/Cory-Doctorow-discusses-The-Bezzle

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/23/gazeteer/#out-of-cycle

Image: Peter Craven (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aggregate_output_%287637833962%29.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

#pluralistic #the bezzle #ryan broderick #mary robinette kowal #exposition #john oliver #margot robbie #adam conover #ai #ai search #change healthcare #centralization #pharma #pbms #pharmacy benefit managers #corruption #scotus #crowdfunding #clarence thomas

[the960writers]

Mary Robinette Kowal's guide to manuscript critiques

Beta reading and giving critique is a skill. Mary Robinette Kowal made a guide for beta readers how they can help the author the most:

Text on image (also in the alt-text):

Think of it like a clinical trial. The writer has a perfect story in their head and they need to test the manuscript, which is the delivery mechanism for hacking the reader's brain.

3 Categories of Critique: Symptom = My reaction. Diagnosis = Technical reasons. Prescription = How to fix it.

Stick to symptoms. A report of your symptoms, i.e. how the story struck you will always be useful. Unless the writer asks, avoid diagnosis or prescription because you don't know their intention so your advice will likely be wrong.

Symptoms include:

Awesome

Bored

Confused

Disbelief

(Stream of consciousness is also helpful, e.g. "DON'T GO DOWN THERE!").

Visit patreon.com/maryrobinette for more tips.

#critique #beta reading #giving feedback #Mary Robinette Kowal

[fantasybooktournament]

#robert jordan #brent weeks #mary robinette kowal #wheel of time #lightbringer #shades of milk and honey #round 1 #polls #fantasy book tournament

[whilereadingandwalking]

It was so lovely visiting Milwaukee last weekend. We have a special love for the beer Spotted Cow, which you can only buy in the state of Wisconsin! I spent a lovely afternoon drinking it with my Mary Robinette Kowal.

#the spare man #mary robinette kowal #books and beer #places to read #bookworm

[literary-illuminati]

Book Review 44 – The Spare Man by Mary Robinette Kowal

Alright, first full novel I’ve read entirely due to it getting a Hugo nomination. In retrospect that fact that there was absolutely no wait list for it at the library was perhaps a sign I should have paid attention to. I’m not sure it’s a bad book, exactly, but my god is it just chock full of little things that grated on me (which more or less tracks with my very vague memories of casually perusing The Calculating Stars when it first came out, so probably just a sign Kowal’s not for me, really.)

The story’s set in a fairly grounded space age future, on an ultra-lux cruise liner taking its passengers from Earth to Mars in speed and style. Tesla Crane, heiress, celebrity, and generally incredibly famous and unfathomably wealthy, has booked one of the nicest suites in the earth-gravity section of the ship under a false name to enjoy some anonymity on her much anticipated honeymoon cruise. Things of course take a drastic turn as a woman is murdered outside their sweet, and her spouse is framed for the crime. The shipboard security is obstructive and suspicious, bodies keep piling up, and it’s largely up to Tesla to solve the murder and clear his good name.

So first off – this is largely a style thing that grates on me far more than it should, and it probably effects my overall reading experience to an entirely unjustified degree, but – the standard etiquette in the story’s future is for everyone to use the gender neutral Mx. Using gendered terms like wife, husband, sir, m’am, or similar is also called out as being somewhere between archaic and offensively retrograde. Also, it is totally standard courtesy to list someone’s pronouns in any case where you’d their full name. In which case what is the point of taking so much care to be gender neutral of everything else. (In a sense this actually inspired worldbuilding, insofar as it’s exactly the sort of stupid language games high aristocracy or its equivalent tends to love, but the reading experience kind of grated).

The society’s generally very consciously progressive in a way that kind of calls attention to itself. It really wasn’t a surprise to see in the acknowledgement’s section that all the mentions of courtesy masks being a thing were edited in as covid happened. This is all mostly just background noise though, as far as narrative focus the only things that really occupy the story’s attention are its portrayal of disability and its bizarre class politics.

So, a key point of her backstory is that some years before the story, a lab disaster (during a demonstration of a personal assistance mech, which is actually some incredibly bitter dramatic irony I’m surprised the story doesn’t call any attention to?) killed six people and left Tesla with permanent spinal damage, chronic pain, and PTSD. Medical science doesn’t seem to have made many innovations on a cane or breathing exercises as far as mobility aids and PTSD treatment goes, but it does provide the absolutely incredible wish fulfillment device of a switch in your brain that lets you turn your pain sensitivity up or down at will. Tesla’s disability is a recurring thing throughout the book and generally the portrayal seemed fine to me? A couple conversations that bled into ‘giving the reader an important message’ territory, but only slightly and hardly the worst in the book.

The book’s attitude to class and wealth though, woof. Like, okay, the story is clearly a bit of a pastiche, a sanguine attitude to vast inequality and social hierarchy are necessary for the whole fantasy to work, but my god in that case please stop calling attention to it. The book so badly wants to simultaneously be progressive and have Tesla’s life be as maximally glamorous and exalted as possible that it gets twisted into this incredibly awkward spirals showing that she’s a good hyper-elite oligarch which really only call attention to the issue without doing anything to resolve it. Her internal monologue including some variation of the line ‘normally I hate just using money as a bludgeon to get what I want, but” happens a few too many times for it to not make un less likeable than an aristocrat who owns it.

Like, this is potentially uncharitable, but the book seems to take it as read that I find the idea of demanding to speak to a manager and having them grovel and apologize for how I’ve been disrespect far more alluring than I do? Not being that customer is a subject Tesla ruminates on at some length, and at the same time calling up her high priced lawyer and threatening to bury the whole cruise line in lawsuits while they rush to provide apology gifts is definitely portrayed as this thrilling power fantasy. It all left me actively rooting against her, at least a bit.

The actual mystery itself honestly wasn’t much to write home about – a bit confused, red herring introduced blatantly and too late, the obviously suspicious and personally unlikable character was the villain – but in a similar vein it did seem…telling, that the guy who’d been positioned as the unlikable asshole oligarch in opposition to Crane was secretly a murderous gold-digging imposter all along! Also, the fact that this was proven by a photo showing the oligarch to have been a dog guy, and the imposter being quite literally the only character in the entire book who didn’t adore Tesla’s emotional support dog. Like, c’mon.

Speaking of the dog – the book had a few recurring beats which I’m sure I’m supposed to have found funny or endearing but just overstayed their welcome with me several times over. The entire cast’s brains leaking out whenever they saw Tesla’s westie like it was some sort of platonic ideal of canine cuteness was one of them, along with like, Tesla and her spouse making out at a moment’s notice because a plot point meant that their encrypted tele-chat required skin-to-skin contact, and the book doubling as a cocktail guide. All things that if I’d liked the book I could have easily overlooked, but as is were just extra straws on the proverbial camel’s back.

Anyway, yeah, didn’t work for me.

#book review #sff #hugo nom #the spare man #mary robinette kowal

[haveyoureadthisscifibook]

vote yes if you have finished the entire book.

vote no if you have not finished the entire book.

(faq · submit a book)

#scifi #books #The Calculating Stars #Mary Robinette Kowal #Lady Astronaut #poll #result: no #l: English

[living400lbs]

Today I read Ghost Talkers, by Mary Robinette Kowal. It's a version of WWI where spiritualism is real and the British Army has volunteer mediums talking to recently dead soldiers to gain intelligence. The author notes include reading both nurse and ambulance driver accounts to understand women's experiences in WWI and with the dying.

A review of the book:

I'm reminded of the fictional WWI ambulance driver Phryne Fisher's line: "I haven't taken anything seriously since 1918." 1918, of course, was when the war ended.

Also reminded that Spiritualism was a major influence starting in the 1880s but had a huge surge in popularity after the Great War that killed so many. There are reasons that Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers used mediums and seances in their work, and that historical fiction uses Spiritualism to evoke the time.

Also remembering Lucy Worsley's accounts of Agatha Christie's nursing training in Worsley's biography of Christie.

#wwi #ghost talkers #mary robinette kowal #phryne fisher #agatha christie #women in wwi #lucy worsley

[the-final-sentence]

I was with my husband, on Mars.

Mary Robinette Kowal, from The Fated Sky

#lit #prose #submission #The Fated Sky #Mary Robinette Kowal

[torpublishinggroup]

We are in the midst of winter, and the holidays loom on the horizon, offering portents of fun times to come and the social obligation of procuring gifts for the loved ones in your life! Don’t worry. We’re here to give you book recommendations to help you take care of the second part, so you can get right to the holiday snacking and relaxing!

Take the quiz. Discover your perfect bookly gift.

#book recommendations #holiday reading #book quiz #the genesis of misery #neon yang #legends & lattes #travis baldree #the atlas six #olivie blake #the spare man #mary robinette kowal

[blueberrymess-art]

Had a bad day and it's way too hot to even sleep. So I made a few sketches of Shades of Milk and Honey. Here are Jane, Melody and Vincent. I can't remember how he was described so I used Rahul Kohli as a reference because he is so handsome <333

#digital art #my art #sketches #sketch #sketchbook #fanart #shades of milk and honey #mr david vincent #ms jane ellsworth #ms melody ellsworth #mary robinette kowal #regency #regency era #fantasy regency #period drama #artists on tumblr #artists of tumblr

[dragoninatrenchcoat]

I FIGURED IT OUT

I kept wondering how mary robinette kowal managed to telegraph that the main character spoke up without using ANY dialogue tags at one point in Calculating Stars. I took a picture of the page when I saw it, but then I forgot to find it again/look back on it when I had time, and I wondered about it on and off for YEARS.

Today I found the picture I took of the book and I can see the trick she used!

See: other characters were the focus of the scene and they were engaged in dialogue together. (I don't remember how long they'd been talking; I just remember it was a crowded room and a lot had been happening. My copy of Calculating Stars is somewhere.)

Then, interrupting their conversation, the main character thinks some indirect speech in a way that reminds you that she’s the narrator of the scene, and then her dialogue STAYS INSIDE that new paragraph!

Since it’s a general rule that dialogue never changes during a paragraph, and indirect speech is like dialogue, the reader knows from context that the main character is speaking--AND because the dialogue is grouped into the indirect speech, you get the effect that she just said it without meaning to, & evokes the exact feeling you see in the next paragraph.

I LOVE WRITING

#mary robinette kowal #the calculating stars #writing #writeblr

[9thbutterfly]

Tiny book reviews:

(trying to read more again, and to ease myself back into reviewing the books, too)

American Gods, by Neil Gaiman

finished Dec. 28, 2023

I know everyone loves Neil, but I honestly spent most of the time going, "yeah, but what's the *point*?" Like, okay, it's sad for the gods if they die, but does it have any impact on the rest of the world?

All about Green, by ?

finished Dec. 29, 2023

I had no idea why this was in my tbr pile or where it came from, but it was a quick read, so whatever. The last page revealed that it was distributed by one of my wholesalers.

It was ridiculous. Various bloggers - or probably, "influencers", these days - introducing themselves, and talking about how much they love plants. "Oooh, I love houseplants so much, I have so many" And you look at the photos of their house and you need a magnifying glass to find any plants. "Yeah, we grow so many vegetables, one year we even had 9 different tomatoes" Ma'am, I could introduce you to five people who grow more than a hundred without even thinking very hard. Ridiculous.

Shades of Milk and Honey, by Mary Robinette Kowal

finished Dec. 30, 2023

Also meh. Constantly waiting for some proper conflict. The blurb said something like, "when her family comes under threat", and I kept waiting for a threat and there just wasn't one.

I was going to put it in the donation box, but it looks like the sequels might have higher stakes, so I guess I'll keep it for a while and give those a chance.

#9thbutterfly thoughts #books #books are magic #Neil Gaiman #Mary Robinette Kowal #fantasy #nonfiction

[the960writers]

From Mary Robinette Kowal for the new year:

What do you want to level up? What stops you? What are you good at?

#into the new year #Instagram #Mary Robinette Kowal

[queer-ragnelle]

“One of the examples that I actually think of is King Arthur. Like, how exactly does that sword stay in the stone? How does it know? Is it a DNA test? What is the rule system for keeping the sword in the stone and identifying the one true king? We don’t know, we don’t care…A lot of times when we do start putting rules in, it makes something feel mundane and ordinary. Sometimes, what you want is something that is numinous, that there is a sense of wonder, a sense of awe to it. So one of the things that you can do is to take some of the explanation away, and just let this magical thing happen.

—Mary Robinette Kowal, Writing Excuses Podcast 14.11: Magic Without Rules

#arthurian legend #Arthuriana #king arthur #mary robinette kowal #writing excuses #quotes #writing #magic system #she’s right and she should say it <3 #my post

[whilereadingandwalking]

The Spare Man by Mary Robinette Kowal is an absolute joy. In this space mystery, Tesla Crane is a famous inventor who's traveling undercover in order to better enjoy her honeymoon with new husband and retired detective, Shal. But when a murder occurs on the ship, and Shal is the one arrested by ship police, Tesla will do anything she has to do to get her husband back—including solve the whole damn thing herself.

From Tesla's absolutely precious service dog Gimlet to the twists and turns of a "closed-door" (I should say, closed-ship) murder mystery, this novel was hard to put down: fun, playful, sexy sci fi. Kowal's writing is excellent, bringing in great details—for example, Tesla's lawyer could only respond to situations on delay, which at turns was hilarious or suspenseful. And the disability representation was really good—Tesla deals with both PTSD and severe chronic pain, and uses implants and occasionally a cane to manage. So a great murder mystery, a well-written novel all around, and great disability rep to boot.

And then to cap it all off, I get to the back of the book and Kowal admits that the trivia contest in one of the chapters is playable! Infuriating. I haunted down all of the answers but still haven't been able to figure out the overarching theme despite spending way too much time working on it!

Content warnings for violence, alcoholism, panic attacks/PTSD, suicide, ableism.

#the spare man #mary robinette kowal #bookworm #book review #mystery #sci fi #my book reviews

[literary-illuminati]

It's also just kind of disorienting to go from

The Mountain in the Sea: the mere fact of owning a megacorporation is proof positive that this once in a generation genius is evil, as whatever her personal standards the logic of capitalism is such that subordinates and subsidiaries will cross them in pursuit and endless profit for her benefit

Even Though I Knew Thr End: the fact that Marlowe can throw around endless amounts of money despite doing nothing visible to acquire it, and lives in secluded luxury waited upon hand and foot by layers of servants, is an incredibly unsubtle way to signpost "THIS WOMAN IS A LITERAL ACTUAL DEMON"

To

The Spare Man: our heroine is a second generation telecom oligarch on an ultra-ultra-ultra lux honeymoon cruise, and the story is just resolutely not interested in exploring this one little bit.

#sff #hugo nom #tht #the spare man #the mountain in the sea #even though i knew the end #mary robinette kowal #ray naylar #c. l. polk