Just Stop Dancing, Already!

So I spent some time yesterday afternoon on the SFX Forum whining about how impatient and increasingly hopeless I feel about Dance of Dragons ever getting released, and it occurred to me that my ranting was so extensive that it might serve as a post, thus allowing me another day in which I don't have to particularly engage my brain (still coughing, BTW, I think I may have loosened my filling). For anyone still not up to date with events in Westeros, fear not, this is an entirely spoiler-free rant.

The thing about George R R Martin is that I really do want to take his side on this. I may only be the most amateurish of amateur writers, but it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that the massive chasm that exists between our respective talents doesn't change certain fundamental principles about the nature of our desire to write. Namely, that we'd like to work on a bunch of stuff, rather than just the same novel day in or day out (right now I have two novels on the go, a third to be edited until the prose bleeds, and a short story and short film script halfway done), and that finishing a piece isn't quite as important as making damn sure it's a good as it can possibly be made. There's a reason for the old chestnut that art is never completed, only abandoned; eventually you can't think of a way to make it better, so you just put a conclusion in and hope you're next story is better.

None of that, of course, changes how frustrating it is to just be sat here twiddling my thumbs waiting for resolution. I didn't start reading the series until after A Storm Of Swords had been released, so I can't be entirely sure of this, but I'm reasonably confident that back then I wouldn't have minded how much other stuff Martin was working on, how many Wild Cards anthologies he was editing or Dunk stories he was writing, or what have you.

But A Feast For Crows took five fucking years (and wasn't entirely worth the wait, though that's a different kettle of monkeys) and, after being told A Dance With Dragons would only take another year or so to complete, we're looking at at a total writing time of at least four years. That's twice the time it took to write either A Clash Of Kings or Storm..., and moreover most of the book was supposedly already done. Which means Martin's effective writing speed[1] is somewhere between a half and a quarter of what it was. We were assured that the gap between Storm... and Feast... was due to an unavoidable course change, a necessary adjustment to a story that wasn't behaving itself (again, I can sympathise). All well and good, I guess. What about Dance..., though? Is there another complete overhaul going on? Because that doesn't sound particularly encouraging. How many times can the series survive needing to be radically re-jigged?

Regardless of the reasons for this particular delay, the fear is that if it takes four years to finish Dance... when it was estimated to take one, does that mean we'll be waiting eight more years for the next book? Another eight for the last? Martin will be seventy-six by then. I realise that writers, more so than many artists, can get to a fair old age before their work gets hit by "the brain-eater", but even if the quality remains constant (and there are reasons to doubt that), the quantity might well diminish, and we've got problems enough there as it is.

I think Martin, quite simply, fucked up. He came up with a brilliant idea for a series of books, started them, watched as people lapped them up, and then suddenly realised halfway through that he was going to have to seriously re-think the whole thing. Shit happens. But the resulting situation is that hundreds of thousands (millions?) of people have bought into this series under the very reasonable expectation that it will conclude at some point, and twelve years (and God knows how many sales) after the series began, there's still no end in sight, and only Martin's increasingly inaccurate word to go on that we're even past the halfway point. And that's before we start thinking about all the new converts the HBO series is liable to add to the mix, who (assuming it a) gets made and b) isn't shit) will also be keen/desperate to see the end of a series that doesn't have one yet.

At this point, I think there's a stark choice to be made. Martin can either cast aside as many other projects as he can to make sure ASOIAF gets finished, or he can keep juggling like he has been, and hope for the best. He has every right to choose the latter, it's his life, and certainly that choice is entirely understandable. But as one of potentially millions of people who have handed him money on the understanding of reading a story that actually has something prosaic as an ending, I reserve my right to be pretty pissed off about that decision.

Martin likes to point out that no-one talks about how long it took Tolkien to write Lord Of The Rings. The key difference, obviously, is we know that Lord Of The Rings got finished. He may not realise he's in a race, against the ravages of old age and diminishing talent and, frankly, the big brick wall that is death, but I suspect he's too smart for that to be true. Moreover, his argument that if a new idea makes a story better than it must be included only works as long as the price of that inclusion is delayed completion, rather than the risk of non-completion. I think we passed from the former to the latter a year or two ago, at least.

Lastly, it's also possible Martin would argue that he can't actually write Dance... any faster, that his various side projects are just filling up what would otherwise be dead space, that he can only concentrate on the same project for X hours a day, regardless. Which may be true. It might be that putting in X+1 hours a day would cause the narrative to suffer. I guess my position at this point is that I'm finding it really hard to care. I don't care if a new idea would make the book 10% better, and I don't care if an increased work-speed will make the book 10% worse. Sooner or later reality reminds you who's in charge. Just make it happen, would you?

Update: Over on the forum Werthead makes the point that neither Game... nor Clash... were written as quickly as I had thought, though that doesn't really address the "you'll only have to wait a year or so for A Dance With Dragons" issue.

[1] OK, I acknowledge that the term "effective writing speed" is almost entirely meaningless. All I mean is that his rate of publication is plummeting. Maybe that's because he's now working on such an ascended level of literary genius that things are taking longer. Of course, since Feast... is the weakest of the first four books, I'd be careful about drawing that particular conclusion.

Give Me Back My Double Helix

Hurrah! The European Court of Human Rights agrees with me! Not for us the keeping of DNA on file for no good reason!

This is doubly cheering, partially because it's the right decision, and partially because of the number of irritating people who will doubtlessly be wound up by this. I look forward to the inevitable Daily Mail whining about how statistically this means the DNA of up to umpteen paedophiles will no longer be on file and that means your child will die!!!

Snark Of The Day

Ezra Klein responds to news that "Citigroup’s top executives, and Robert Rubin, a director and senior adviser, are ready to forgo their bonuses this year":

Am I missing the point of bonuses? I always understood them to be tied to performance, either that of the individuals or that of the company. But the company almost went bankrupt this year and the executives demonstrated themselves almost cosmically hapless. If they were going to get bonuses, then what could the term possibly mean? Bonus for what? A working cardiovascular system?

I agree entirely. If anything bonuses should go to executives without a working cardiovascular system. Zombie bankers might not have saved us from the credit crunch, but they have managed to avoid destroying mankind in an orgy of human flesh consumption, and that's probably worth some kind of reward.

The ineviatable h/t to Kevin Drum.

Zap Zap Kapow

Still low on energy due to the Horrible Gribbly Disease, which I assume one of my various thralls brought back from the South, or possibly Scotland. If you're looking for something to eat up a few hours of your Friday afternoon, or indeed endless days of your pathetic life, you might want to give Desktop Defense a go. Let me know if you manage to beat it on Hard.

Voices Of Authority #1: Dark Energy

When, a few weeks ago, I was ruminating on Big Bang Theory and considering (in my own cackhanded, amateurish way) to what degree it was a more satisfying answer to why we exist than "God did it", it occurred to me that others would be far better at tackling that sort of question than I. Specifically Pause, who is constantly willing to correct my feeble understanding of astrophysics when prompted (and I appreciate that he waits for said prompting, otherwise I'd probably be in tears every other day).

In fact, not long after that post appeared on the intertubes, S. Spielbergo e-mailed me, wanting to know if the all-powerful Pause could enlighten him as to why the universe is apparently not only expanding, but accelerating in its expansion.

Because I care about my readers (at last count, and being generous, you might just be in double figures by now), I asked Pause this very question, and he was good enough to explain it to me: dark energy.

That makes sense, I thought, dark energy. Trouble is, I was thinking of dark matter, and I'm not entirely sure what that is either, but apparently it's very different to dark energy, and I was a crazy, wide-eyed fool for believing differently.

Anyway, this rather rambling introduction is a preamble to introducing a new (and almost certainly tremendously irregular) feature: Voices Of Authority. Within these posts you will find the smartest minds that can be found (read: that can be found in my address book) explaining various complex topics in a way that even I can understand.

We begin with Pause, ably assisted by fellow space-obsessive Cocklick, trying to hammer the basic properties of dark energy into my puny cranium. Jamie was there too, but since we weren't talking about whether Nero ever actually played a fiddle, his turn will have to wait.

SS: Welcome ladies and gentlemen, to the first episode of Voices of Authority. Thanks to Pause and Cocklick for joining us, and to our studio audience for being so well-behaved.
Jamie: You mean me?
SS: Quiet, Jamie. Anyway, since I apparently can't tell the difference between dark matter and dark energy, purely because they both start with the same word, maybe you guys could tell me what the difference is between them?
Pause: Dark matter is still a form of matter, which we can't see, but has gravitational attraction like all other matter.
SS: So how come we can't see it?
P: We don't know: we just can't. Well, we can't detect it. It appears to interact only via gravity, which is the weakest of the four fundamental forces.
SS: The other three being?
P: Weak nuclear, strong nuclear, and electromagnetism.
SS: All right. So we don't know it exists; we haven't detected it.
Cocklick: That's not quite true. We can't observe it in EM radiation, but we can test it by galactic collision. Basically, two galaxies collided, and there was a big explosion in the middle, but the dark matter went straight through.
SS: But you couldn't detect that, surely? Isn't there a problem with inferring its existence in that way having already assumed its existence? Isn't that a bit circular?
C: Not really. The idea was "If we assume dark matter exists, what natural phenomenon would demonstrate its existence?" What would split normal matter and dark matter? And the collision of galaxies is one thing that would do that, so they went out looking for it. And they found... something, by using gravitational lensing.
SS: So there's more to dark matter than just "we need this thing to balance everything out".
C: Well that's how it started, but now we're at the next step.
SS: Proving that it actually exists?
C: Yes.
SS: Right, that'll have to do, since I've already wandered way off what it was I actually wanted to ask. So, dark matter is matter that interacts by gravity but is unobservable. What's dark energy?
P: Dark energy is something completely different. It's a repulsive force which is responsible for the universe expanding. In the loosest possible sense, it's "anti-gravity".
SS: And the universe isn't just expanding, but expanding faster as time goes on, right?
P: Yeah, the expansion is accelerating.
SS: Which confused everyone, since we'd always assumed that the universe would either contract, reach an equilibrium, or just drift apart.
P: And none of those seem to be the case.
SS: I've got to ask the same question I did about dark matter. Is there any reason to believe that dark energy exists, beyond us needing something to explain accelerating expansion? In which case, couldn't I just say "it was God?"
C: Well, not really. Science is about generating models. We have a standard model that explains most things. Now we've found something that it doesn't explain. So we ask ourselves what we can add to model to explain it.
SS: But my point is what makes "dark energy did it" any more compelling than "God did it?"
P: Well, dark energy is just a name for at least two or three different theories. It's more of a label.
SS: So it has nothing to do with actual energy?
C: Maybe not.
SS: So I could call it "space fairies" and be no less accurate?
P: You might find it harder to get your papers published.
SS: Isn't that a little homophobic?
J: You're the one trying to blame universal expansion on gays.
SS: Quiet, Jamie; this is a serious article. Anyway, I could argue that dark energy is actually a racist term.
C: Back to the question at hand, you could call it Unexplained Phenomenon A, if you really wanted. I guess the "dark energy" label came about from attempting to balance Einstein's equation. They didn't want to call it "negative energy."
SS: Because that describes the Mexicans?
P: No comment.
C: The University of St Andrews does not endorse bigotry of any kind.
SS: Yeah, MotCC would like to make clear that the Mexicans are an industrious race, and a wonderful people.
P: We salute our Mesoamerican brothers.
SS: OK, next question. Obviously as the universe expands, the galaxies get further apart and thus exert less gravitational force upon each other. So why isn't this dark energy getting weaker in the same way?
P: Because dark energy, unlike matter, isn't concentrated in galaxies. In fact, maybe it's better to move away from the "anti-gravity" idea. Dark energy actually expands space-time itself. So rather than the "big crunch" idea, where everything collapses back into itself, you get the possibility of a "big rip", in which space-time becomes stretched so far that it just basically snaps. Electrons end up too far from nuclei, and everything stops working. It's one more potential "end of the universe" scenario.
SS: So the expansion of space-time doesn't mean subatomic particles get bigger, they just get further apart?
P: Right. And if this dark energy effect isn't homogeneous, then it's pretty close to it.
SS: OK, well I think that's probably enough for our first session. My thanks to Pause and Cocklick for their co-operation and enlightening answers, and to Jamie for not slowing us down with retarded art-student questions like "What colour is an atom?" See you next time.

.

(Edited for clarity).

Bleurgh

Far too ill to post anything particularly deep or long this evening, so you can have this instead.

Choices And Orderings

This article reminded me of a question I've had floating around in my head for a while. It's related to another, more commonly-asked question, which simply put goes: "Which bits of the Bible are actually right?"

For a Christian, and I would imagine for many other religions too, there are two basic choices. You either work under the assumption that the entirety of your religious tome is literally true (or at the very least everything in there is unambiguously correct in its message), or you have to consciously or subconsciously cherry-pick what you do and don't believe (or do and don't follow). There are a lot of interesting questions to be asked about the specific methodology people use to do that, but that's away from my main point.

What I'm wondering about is: once you've put together your own personalised list of Right and Wrong, according to the particular verses from the Bible that you agree with, how do you then take that list and organise them in order of preference?

Because that's the obvious question raised be what this Reverend is saying. Having first concluded abortion is wrong (which, yes, is official Catholic policy, but that in itself doesn't make it an article of faith for all Catholics, and potentially even for all Catholic ministers), Rev. Illo has apparently made a further leap and decided that abortion is so wrong that voting for someone who doesn't want to ban it is a mortal sin. Apparently voting for McCain is fine, even though the man's policies and rhetoric made it very clear that there could well be more wars under his watch; most plausibly with Iran but even potentially (God forbid) armed skirmishes with Russia. Either of those outcomes would lead to a healthy body count of American soldiers and foreign civilians, but apparently someone not trying to stop that particular tragedy is perfectly OK.

Attaturk over at Rising Hegemon, from where I found the article above, describes this approach to abortion as "a one track mind". I see where he's coming from, but I would phrase it differently. To me, this kind of behaviour is proof that certain people have a very odd and enormously top-heavy priority list. Murdering foreign civilians? Meh, it happens. "Murdering" the unborn? Anyone allowing it, or voting for those that allow it, are sinning. Since objections to both must surely come under the 5th Commandment, I don't see where the differential is, other than a potential difference in numbers, which would be the first time I've seen religious molarity bend to statistics.

I understand that religious leaders are charged with, well, leading. It still baffles me though how anyone can be sure that their own personal hierarchy of what is more and less important can be projected onto anyone else. Between the choice of what to take from the Bible, and the choice of what order to place everything is, it just feels like there's too much uncertainty around everything to be so heavy-handed in condemning a political choice, or pretty much any choice, for that matter.