I started reading aloud to Jane many, many years ago; and when we had kids I started reading aloud to them; and for the last three years I’ve read to the whole family together every evening. It’s always interesting to come up with something that the whole family will enjoy; and one of the authors we’ve had good luck with is Patricia Wrede. We started with her Enchanted Forest books, a set of fractured fairy tales involving Princess Cimorene, who goes and gets herself captured by a dragon because life in the castle is just too boring; and everybody liked them. Then we read the very different A Matter of Magic, a pair of tales involving sorcery in Regency England that read like a cross between Georgette Heyer and P.G. Wodehouse; and everybody liked them. Then we read the very different Thirteenth Child and its sequel; and everybody liked them. So I went out and found Wrede’s first book, Shadow Magic, the first of the four Lyra novels. And tonight I finished reading it to the family.

And there was great merriment…but alas, a lot of it was at the tale’s expense. I have rarely read such an ineptly put-together fantasy novel. I’m shocked it got published, and I’m amazed at how much better Wrede has gotten.

Mind you, I’m glad to have read it—because as I went along I made mental notes of Things Not To Do That I’m Very Much Afraid That I Might Be Doing, starting with this: just because the characters are well-fleshed-out in my imagination, that doesn’t mean that they are well-fleshed out in the text.

I won’t go into further details, because I don’t like to kick an author when she’s down. But if you’ve ever tried this book and given up on Wrede because of it, give one of her other series a try. You’ll be glad you did.

A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs; Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert Heinlein. Two books I’ve read multiple times; two authors I have greatly respected. But although I gave the tales of John Carter to my sons a few years ago, I rather thought that I’d outgrown Burroughs. Now, thanks to the inimitable John C. Wright, I begin to think I’m outgrowing Heinlein. Checkout Wright’s comparison of the two books, very much to Heinlein’s detriment.

Amazon suggested that I might like Andrew Mayne’s The Monster in the Mist: A Chronological Man Adventure, and at $0.99 I decided to give it a try. And if I had to describe it in one phrase, that phrase would be “Steampunk Dr. Who”.

The book is set in Boston, in the 1890. It’s been very foggy recently, and people have been vanishing in the fog. Meanwhile, the pretty and competent April Malone has for the past two years been holding down a very strange job. Every day she goes to an unmarked building and lets herself in. Once inside she makes a pot of coffee that no one ever drinks and provides a bag of pastries that no one ever eats. She gets pneumatic tubes containing punched cards that she feeds to her desk, and reads newspapers and academic journals. Sometimes she gets a typewritten letter from one “Mr. S” directing her to take some particular class or hear some particular lecture or learn some particular skill. The why of all this has never been explained to her, but the money is good, and she tries to do her best.

There is a metal door with three lights over it in one wall of the office. She doesn’t know what’s behind it; her predecessor in the position told her that if she ever needs to know, she’ll receive instructions at that time.

One day the lights light up, and out comes Smith. He drinks the coffee, eats the pastries, and wants to know what year it is. Then he looks at some punched cards from the desk, and he and April Malone are off to investigate the recent string of disappearances.

I know nothing about the author or the series other than what I gleaned from reading the book, so what follows is conjectural. But gosh, it reads like Dr. Who fan fiction. Smith is clearly a normal human being, not a “time lord”, and he has no TARDIS; but I found myself willy-nilly picturing him as the 11th Doctor, as played by the inimitable Matt Smith.

What else to say about it? It was a fun story, very much in the vein of the current Dr. Who episodes, with all that that implies, being silly and horrific by turns. Given that, my only serious complaint is that April Malone and Smith both seem a little too present day in their attitudes to fit in 1890 in Boston. There’s one brief exchange about homosexuality, for example, that seems completely out of place given the setting and the participants but that would fit right in in a Dr. Who episode.

Be that as it may, it was entertaining, and certainly worth 99 cents.

Gosh, I’m writing a lot this morning. I think I’m just tired of sitting around.

Anyway, a guy over at Slashdot asks the question, “Is hypertext literature dead?“. I glanced at the comments, many of whom predictably said, “Dude! Wikipedia!” These people missed the point completely. Hypertext is alive and well, certainly; it’s how the Web works. And interactive fiction is alive and well. Not only is there a small but lively culture devoted to what we used to call “text adventures,” every computer game with a significant story-telling aspect to it is a kind of interactive fiction.

But hypertext literature, however, is dead…and good riddance to it, say I.

Back around the time the World Wide Web was becoming popular (and when was the last time you heard anyone say, “World Wide Web”?), it was common to hear people say that hypertext was the future of fiction. Authors would take advantage of hypertext to write books consisting of short, linked pages that could be read in any order, or that had multiple endings. You could choose to follow one character all the way through, and then follow another character, or read it back to front—assuming that there even was a front or back. It was to be a process of exploration, where the reader participated in the creation of the text they actually read. It was a Brave New World.

You might be thinking of the “Choose Your Own Adventure” books as a kind of hypertext literature, and they were, I suppose; but most of what I saw had something different in mind. It wasn’t meant to be a game; it was meant to be serious literature, serious exploration of characters. You were meant to read the whole thing, in time, but in your own order. I remember looking at a few experiments along these lines, back in the day. They were somewhat interesting. But, you know, they used to say that atonality was the future of serious music. The results were somewhat interesting, and yet melody and traditional harmony are still with us.

Just off of the top of my head, I can think of three reasons why hypertext fiction simply hasn’t caught on. The first is simply pragmatic: you get lost. As a reader, you want to read the whole story…but if you’re linking from page to page through a vast network of pages, it’s hard to have any idea how much you’ve read and how much is left. And since you didn’t usually have links to every page from every page, it’s hard to know how to find the pages you’ve not read. Ultimately, you end up with a linear list of pages somewhere in the work, and you keep having to go back to it to find starting points you’ve not yet read. It’s a lot of work.

The second is artistic, and has to do with the nature of story. A story, like a piece of music, is essentially linear. It has a structure: earlier parts lay the groundwork for the later parts, and the later parts build on the earlier parts. Imagine breaking a symphony up into ten second segments, and mixing them randomly: no doubt someone has written a symphony like that, but I doubt very many people have enjoyed it; and it wouldn’t work with, say, Beethoven’s 9th. A story has a logical order to it that builds to a climax. That order may not be purely chronological; we’ve all read books in which the chronological events are told out of sequence, and to good dramatic effect. They are told out of sequence because that’s how they best build to a climax.

This is true even in computer games like the various Legend of Zelda games: the player is free to wander about the world and solve problems in the order they choose…but only up to a point. The overall flow of the game is, in fact, tightly controlled so as to build up to the climax.

Hypertext literature rejected this notion in principle. The reader was to determine the order, not the writer. As a result, any order was as valid as any other. I suppose there might be stories that can be adequately told in this way; but in general, this notion runs contrary to the very nature of story.

The third is also artistic, and has to do with the skill of the author. Writing a work that can be effectively read in any order is hard. As an analogy, compare Pablo Picasso with Jackson Pollack. Picasso went through a period they call “high analytic cubism” where he painted “portraits” of people that looked like nothing so much as a flock of hundreds of little squares, hanging in space, all at slightly different angles. The notion, as I understand it, was that each square represented a point on the person’s face: the face was analyzed into hundreds of tangent planes, and each plane was exploded out in the form of a little square. If this is what Picasso really did, if it isn’t just hooey, then the resulting painting really is in some sense a portrait of the subject, even though it looks like nothing much, and involved quite a lot of real work. I couldn’t do it.

Jackson Pollack, on the other hand, laid canvases on the floor and dripped paint on them. Anybody can do that.

And that’s the problem. To do hypertext fiction really well wouldn’t involve a rejection of classic story structure. Instead, you’d need to have a deep, deep understanding of how stories work and of your story in particular, and your story would have to lend itself to being told in any order. You need the right author, and the right subject, and that’s a very small set. I’m not saying that it can’t be done…but the idea that it will ever be mainstream is, and always was, simply nuts.

White Cat is the first book in a new series by urban fantasist Holly Black. It concerns a young fellow named Cassell Sharpe who is Not At All Nice, though he would like to be. His world is almost identical to our own, except that a small fraction of the population are “curse workers”—by touching another person with their bare hands, they can give them luck, change their memories, or even kill them. Each curse worker has a single ability…at least, so far as we know so far. (I suspect some inflation might occur in the long run.) As a result, everyone wears gloves pretty much all the time; not wearing gloves is considered improper or even dirty.

Curse working was prohibited in the United States in 1929, and so naturally become the province of organized crime. There are a number of major crime families, and Cassell’s own family is associated with one of the more powerful, the Zakharovs.

These things happen in the best of families, so they say, but the Sharpe’s aren’t one of the best families. Cassell’s mom is a con artist who can make people love her with a touch (and is in prison as a result); one older brother is the lieutenant of the heir-apparent of the Zakharovs; another is in law school. All three are curse workers; Cassell is not. But he’s been well-trained in the con, and he’s the resident bookie at his expensive boarding school.

So Cassell is making his way, pretending to be normal…and then he starts dreaming of a white cat, and sleep-walking. Someone is making him do it…but who?

Julie reviewed this book some while back. I’m kind of hot and cold with Julie’s recommendations; some of the books she likes simply don’t do anything for me. Being home sick, though, I was looking for books to read, and I thought I’d give this one a try. Gladly, this is one of the ones I like. I’m not inclined to gush about it, but it was a good, solid read, and I expect I’ll read the sequel one of these days.