oxfordhacker

My Week Of Book Reviews (Possibly) makes it into a second day!

Reason for reading: Like yesterday's choice, this is another one from my wishlist. It's much clearer to me why I added this one though.

Synopsis: By 2044 we've predictably fucked the planet's ecosystem and economy, so everyone spends as much time as possible in OASIS: your standard-issue virtual reality environment in which you can guide your avatar through everything from school to work to games. Now, this may sound like a pretty optimistic dystopia, but it exists under a sword of Damocles because the founder of OASIS died and left control of the whole thing to anyone who can solve his riddles. He was a geek who grew up in 1980s, so an entire subculture has grown up around emulating his obsessions in the hope of winning his fortune, and of course an Evil Corporation is trying to do the same so it can destroy this one remaining bastion of freedom. Yes, it's a world in which teenagers (including our protagonist) learn The Breakfast Club off by heart and master Atari 2600 games because it's their only hope of escaping their awful lives.

Review: The problem with this book is that it doesn't seem to realise that adding the 80s to its futuristic dystopia makes it so much more horrifying. There could be a grim humour to a world where retro is the only hope for the future, but this isn't anything like as interesting as that. The quest is transparently and solely a clumsy mechanism for the author to write a world in which everyone still loves the same stuff as him, but with a better internet. This might be forgiveable if he was capable of conveying the joy he's clearly taking in the set-up, but the prose is leaden and the characterisation vestigial, reducing it to a tiresome checklist of games, music and films that feels as if someone tried to graft a plot onto I Love 1983. The most interesting thing about it is the cognitive dissonance generated by a book that reads like it's written for undemanding pre-teens but packed with references that only a 39-42 year old could love. (Out of curiosity, after writing that sentence I looked the author up on wikipedia. He was born in 1972. This was by no means an impressive guess.)

I find myself wondering if I'd've liked it more if it had been pandering to me rather than my hypothetical older brother. Perhaps I'm the absolute worst audience, old enough to be aware of everything it references without having been the right age to be shaped by it... Could you find-and-replace 'Joust' with 'Wolfenstein', 'Rush' with 'Queen' and 'Wargames' with 'Hackers', say, and create something that I would love? It might work, in that most of the references have no purpose except as cultural signifiers so the plot wouldn't be harmed in the slightest. However, even then I don't think the pleasure of nostalgic recognition would overcome the pain of the writing. It contains no subtlety whatsoever, being of the 'tell then show' school. For example:

It probably goes without saying that I had a massive cyber-crush on Art3mis.
She occasionally posted screenshots of her raven-haired avatar, and I sometimes (always) saved them to a folder on my hard drive.

Why do we need that first paragraph (and it is an entire paragraph)? The bit about him saving her photos might be quite neat shorthand if it wasn't preceded by such a blunt announcement of what it means, and the bloody book's like that all the way through. There's no surprise, no wit, and no real challenge beyond the explicitly-artificial 80s necrophilia of the riddles. The setting is flimsy, the characters charmless, the ending utterly inevitable (oops, spoiler), and the path it follows is predictable in all but the frankly somewhat tiresome details.

The blurb: This has garnered a lot of quotes about how geeky and awesome it is, which I can only assume are from people more successfully pandered to than I. They leave me feeling a little left out but not misled or resentful... except for Will Lavender's: 'Here, finally, is this generation's Neuromancer'. Fuck off. It's the Neuromancer generation's Da Vinci Code.

Illustrative excerpt from Amazon review:

5 stars
Arthur Dent, Rush's "twenty-one twelve", Star Wars, War Games, Ferris Bueller, Galaga, Everquest, World of Warcraft, LOTR, Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek, the Rubik's cube - the references just keep coming; the appearance of Graham Chapman's Arthur, trotting along to Patsy's coconut shells (an African or a European swallow?) was the final, epic cherry on my cake.

I left Oxfam with cleanskies, mr_snips and sea_bright looking for somewhere to have our traditional evening drink and chat, but our usual pub choice was full, presumably a mixture of Christmas shoppers and end-of-term students, and our usually reliable backup was full of empty tables, all inexplicably reserved. If that had happened in someone's fiction I'd've thought 'Foolish foreign author, British pubs don't do that', but apparently the Royal Oak does. The bastards. We ended up, sans sea_bright, in Wok and Roll, which is, of course, a Chinese restaurant. Since I've been in Oxford, it's changed ownership many times (while retaining the same interior and menu) but that is surely the worst name yet. Unfortunately, our pub quest had left time a little tight for cleanskies, who needed to be at the gig in time to do the band's make-up, so she bailed and left mr_snips and I to eat together, sitting diagonally opposite from each other, of course, so it was obvious that we weren't on a date.

I then cycled to the Cardiac and entered to find the venue full of dry ice smoke, but empty of actual people. I bought a beer from the obviously bored bar-staff, and picked a corner in which to lean. Fortunately people did start to accumulate, including concourse and Rachel Who May Or May Not Have A LiveJournal, with whom I chatted. It was all rather pleasant, though I must apologise for describing cleanskies, with her backstage cosmetics duties, as a 'facial roadie'. It wasn't long before Space Heroes of the People took to the still-smokey stage. They were as good as ever. The half-empty venue had something of a dampening effect on the crowd (which persisted throughout the evening, though I did more than my fair share of bouncing), but it was nice to hear them somewhere with a decent sound mix. The new tracks were fun, some of the old ones had been tweaked a bit, and all in all it was good times (all the better for the arrival of bluedevi, Dan ButNoLiveJournal and mr_snips.)

Next up were Tristan and the Troubadours, who despite their name are not part of the folk scene currently blighting Oxford, though they do have a violin. If forced to pigeonhole them, I think I'd say art rock. Or maybe just pretentious indie. At first I thought the lead singer was Germanic, but he had no accent when talking between songs, so we were forced to conclude that it was angst rather than upbringing that did that to his voice (and may also have been responsible for him dancing like an epileptic's marionette). With the rather busy arrangements (well, there are 7 of them) and overwrought lyrics, it all felt rather operatic. The singer introduced one piece with:

"This is a song called '3 studies for a figure at the base of the crucifixion.'"
[Giggles from audience]
"It's not funny, it's really sad."

This moment exemplified a divide in opinion between the people I was watching with. I was on the side that believed that no-one could have said that with a straight face, hence they're clearly leavened with irony and it's OK to enjoy them on those terms. On the other side mr_snips, who feared that they were deadly serious and should not therefore be encouraged, and seemed basically as horrified as if he'd seen children goose-stepping and saluting, oblivious to the implications of their actions. It lead to an interesting discussion, whether it's just that mr_snips is from pre-ironic generation or has been traumatised by early exposure to Marillion, or whether my generation has a surfeit of ironic detachment which may lead to us excusing things that really don't deserve it. Dan raised the terrifying prospect that the band, being younger, may be from a post-ironic generation, raised by the internet, unaware that there might even be a distinction between sincerity and sarcasm, operating entirely on superficialities. I liked them, anyway.

The Half Rabbits were much less divisive, in that we could all agree they sounded a bit like Placebo but with a less whiny lead singer. There were actually rather good, with one particular song that sounded as if they'd welded a verse by Led Zeppelin to a chorus by Filter; not entirely successfully, mind you, but it was still good fun. We did spot the lead singer of the previous band (Tristan?) in the audience and bluedevi suggested that I ask him how ironic they think they are, but I couldn't imagine that conversation going well. Perhaps it would be simpler to get some business cards printed saying:

I can think of many occasions in which those would be useful. I might have to get some made up.

After the bands we were of a mind to hang around for the club night afterwards, but (as always seems to be the case on these occasions) the venue didn't really seem to want us to. Unless they were anticipating needing the space we were occupying for new paying customers (unlikely, I'd've thought), I don't understand why they didn't make any effort to keep us in the building drinking their expensive drinks. They didn't though, and faced with lacklustre DJing upstairs and an indefinitely closed downstairs, we buggered off to The Star, where we drank (cheaper, nicer) beer, obstructed pool players, and chatted about the usual: work, comics, music and cartoons. It wasn't very rock, but it was very pleasant.