- Zoracle Zed
- Jul 10, 2001
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I posted this in the main SFF thread last week when Neil Stephenson's The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. came up. Nobody felt like defending it there so I might as well repost it here. Even for Stephenson it's bad.
somebody in the SFF thread posted:
I liked The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O.. 
I thought that book was unreadable and just skimmed over the first couple chapters to remember why.
quote:
“What’s your pleasure?” asked the barista, a young Asian-American woman with interesting piercings, tattoos in place of eyebrows, and a demeanor that blended I’m sooo interesting and this job sucks with I have a really cool secret life and this job is an awesome front. Her nametag read “Julie Lee: Professional 聪明的驴子•双簧管” (which I understood, roughly, as “Smart-rear end Oboist”).
We ordered drinks—Tristan, black coffee; myself, something I would never normally have, a complicated something-latte-something with lots of buzzwords I picked out at random from the menu over the bar, and which prompted a brief smirk from our barista. The agents of shadowy government entities, I reasoned, were likely to be trained in psychological evaluation of potential recruits, and I did not want him getting an accurate read on me until I decided whether or not I wished to pursue his offer. (Also he was rather handsome, which made me jittery a bit, so I decided to hide behind an affected eccentricity.) The result being that he sat down with a lovely-smelling cup of dark roast and I sat down with something almost undrinkable.
The narrator's voice is constantly jumping back and forth like this from a horny teenager to a bitter boomer complaining about kids nowadays.
quote:
"We have a bunch of very old documents—cuneiform, in one case—and we need them translated, at least roughly, by the same person. You’ll be paid very well. But I can’t tell you where we got the documents, or how we got them, or why we’re interested in them. And you cannot ever tell anyone about this. You can’t even say to your friends, ‘Oh, yeah, I did some classified translating for the government.’ Even if we publish your translation of it, you can’t take ownership of it. If you learn something extraordinary from translating the material, you can’t share it with the world. You’re a cog in a piece of machinery. An anonymous cog. You’d have to agree to that before I say another word.”
“That’s why Blevins threw you out,” I said.
“Yes, he’s strongly committed to academic freedom.”
Dear reader, give me credit for not going LOL on mocking him.
“No he isn’t.”
Yes, that strikeout "going LOL on" is in the original. The narrator makes a lot of asides to the reader like that. This is supposed to be a young post-graduate lecturer in the classics department. The book tries so hard like this all the time. Later on, a old lady turns out to be a time travelling witch and proves it by transforming into a hot young woman. The narrator is jealous, or something:
quote:Tristan, eyes glued to Erszebet’s face (and curves, I am sure), released me so I could unzip myself from the snowsuit. But even wearing civvies, I felt doltish while this elegant creature held us all entranced. Entranced is not the right word, though—that conjures a sense of a doe-eyed fairy-tale princess, and Erszebet was not that. She was fierce. Not deliberately, not like the Alpha Girl in a high school clique . . . it was effortless on her part, elemental. And she seemed amused by how her transformation distracted the rest of us.
“The experience was very pleasant,” she continued to Tristan, in a so-there tone. “Do not presume to tell me what is good for me or not. Ever again.”
“Got it,” he said almost meekly. His eyes kept sinking toward her boobs breasts bosom, as if lead weights were attached to them; then, with visible effort, he would wrench them back to her face.
Just a miserable slog for me.
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Mar 16, 2019 00:27
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May 22, 2024 04:32
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- Zoracle Zed
- Jul 10, 2001
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I doubt it, but I can't say for certain that there aren't. For context, the quoted section of D.O.D.O. is written from the perspective of a character trapped in a stressful situation, and also in 1850s England, writing in haste with a fountain pen, which is the diegetic reason for the struck-out text. D.O.D.O. is an epistolary novel written from multiple different perspectives which increasingly crowd out this first one, which range in style from diary entry to letter to bureaucratic report to chat log.
The reports and chat logs are definitely examples of intentional bad writing, like this, for example:
quote:
DODO WHITE PAPER
UDET: OR, DIACHRONIC MISSION DURATION
BY REBECCA EAST-ODA
Submitted to ODIN archive, Day 622
The recent influx of funding and new personnel has led DODO staff to look more deeply into certain aspects of how diachronic operations are conducted that hitherto we had just taken for granted. In particular, the need to schedule complex missions, such as the upcoming kalonji-related DEDEs, has forced us to think in greater detail about the duration of missions and how many can be scheduled in a given span of time.
Most of DODO’s experience has centered on the colonial Boston and Elizabethan London DEDEs conducted last year by Dr. Stokes and LTC Lyons respectively. Both of these were of relatively brief duration. Dr. Stokes was able to accomplish her tasks in the course of a single day. With the exception of the first repetition, LTC Lyons’s DEDE was a “sleepover” in which he had to spend one night at the DTAP. In all of these cases, the responsible witches (KCWs Karpathy, Fitch, and Gráinne) acted in a way that preserved “Unity of DOer-Experienced Time,” hereinafter UDET. The idea of UDET is simple and can be quickly explained: if Dr. Stokes experienced eight hours of elapsed time during her mission in colonial Boston, then the same span of time separated her being Sent by Karpathy from the ODEC to the DTAP and her reappearance in the ODEC upon being returned home by KCW Fitch. Likewise, when LTC Lyons spent approximately twenty-four hours in the 1601 London DTAP, the same amount of elapsed time occurred between his being Sent there and his being “Homed” by KCW Gráinne. UDET means that from the point of view of the DOer as well as observers in the facility, it is as if the DOer walked through a door into another room, spent eight or twenty-four hours there, and then walked back through the same door.
This does not pose a serious inconvenience for short missions. By contrast, however, the nature of the kalonji DEDE is such that it cannot be accomplished in less than approximately two months. For those unfamiliar with the premise of this DEDE, a short explanation follows: we are attempting to recruit Winnifred Dutton, a potential KCW in Antwerp circa 1560. The only way we have found to motivate her is by supplying her with samples of an herb called kalonji, which is rare and nearly unobtainable in her time and place. We have found a source for kalonji seeds in Constantinople circa 1200, which is a DTAP of interest to us anyway. The current plan of record is to send one DOer to 1200 Constantinople to obtain the seeds. She will then hand them off to a wilderness survival expert (Strider class) who will carry them overland to Belgium and sow them in a known location where we think that they will thrive. It should then be possible to visit that location circa 1560 and harvest the herb in the wild. The plan’s primary drawback is that the overland journey from Constantinople to Belgium is projected to take two months, and it will have to be repeated on at least three Strands in order for it to “take.” Our Strider will therefore have to experience a total of at least six months of (our) elapsed time in that DTAP.
If the mission is performed in a way that preserves UDET, then the Strider will indeed be absent for a total of six months.
If, on the other hand, we can arrange for the Strider to be “Homed” from 1200 Belgium only a few minutes after he is Sent to 1200 Constantinople, then the entire series of missions could be conducted in less than a day, as time is perceived by those of us here in modern-day Boston. The Strider would still be six months older at the end of it, and would have six months’ worth of memories from his journeys, but the clock, as far as DODO is concerned, would only have advanced a few hours.
The latter procedure is obviously a more efficient use of time as far as DODO is concerned. Moreover, to the extent DODO is engaged in a competition versus the diachronic operations agencies of foreign powers, we must assume that our adversaries are making use of such optimization wherever possible and are getting their jobs done that much more quickly.
This single white paper goes on for another couple pages! A lot of this material is at least partially intended to be a satire of military bureaucracy, which is such a limp and dated target for parody that I imagine it was constructed primarily as a diegetic excuse for bad writing and exposition dumps.
My personal favorite POV comes from letters written by a native of 1603 London, which is distinct in style from everything else given the time period (though it may not be historically accurate).
Can you quote it?
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Mar 17, 2019 18:37
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- Zoracle Zed
- Jul 10, 2001
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whoops, double post
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Mar 17, 2019 18:38
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- Zoracle Zed
- Jul 10, 2001
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at least Tor Books has never funded South American death squads
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Mar 19, 2019 01:29
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- Zoracle Zed
- Jul 10, 2001
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yes please!
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Apr 7, 2019 22:57
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Mar 16, 2019 00:27
