Historical fiction isn’t all that different from fantasy: It’s all about the world building, except you use one of the real worlds instead of building a new one.  Historical novels can perhaps skip the 20 pages explaining what, where and why France is, but they have to describe their world in detail all the same: The context is half the story, half the appeal.

The context in Niccoló Rising by Dorothy Dunnett is Flanders and Italy in the 15th century, a context that deserves a protagonist who could walk out of a renaissance painting.  One of those whose ambitious eyes shine out across the centuries, as if they’re asserting a right to run our world as well.

Niccoló will eventually end up in a painting like that, no doubt, but in this first of many novels in the House of Niccoló series he’s just a clever apprentice, who manouvers his way into becoming some sort of merchant/mercenary/courier/spy.

I enjoyed the novel a lot, partly because of how vividly it paints mid-15th century Europe.  But the more I think about it, the less I want to read the followups.  Niccoló is too perfect.  Despite being maybe 20, he’s absolutely brilliant, knows everything that happens in any court or banking house in Europe, can trick anyone, pull any string to make anything happen, and is a fantastic lover.

The novel says he’s flawed, but I see no sign of it.  I see a wish-fulfillment fantasy. Which can be fun, but not fun enough to last eight long novels.

I picked up Tim Powers’ On Stranger Tides because someone said it was one of the few novels that had gotten the whole pirrrrate thing right.  It even inspired the Monkey Island games and the Pirates of the Caribbean movies.

Pirates are inherently ridiculous, especially when they’re dressed like they’ve been “ransacking a theater’s costume closet”, and are led by a voodoo pirate captain who, in the first chapters, abducts a fair maiden and a swashbuckling hero.  But I’m all for pretending to be twelve years old if it will help me enjoy a story.  So I gave it a try.

It didn’t work.  But that actually had nothing to do with the pirate theme.  I liked the pirate theme.  It’s the author I don’t like.  His characters have as much soul as a voodoo pirate captain.

I tried to read another Tim Powers novel once, The Anubis Gates, and it had the same problem.  Plenty of fun concepts, including, if I remember correctly, some sort of evil clown running the underworld of 19th century London.  Fun fun fun.  But no magic.  I mean: No story magic.  The magic that makes you want to know what the characters will do next, because they have their hooks in your psyche and refuse to let go.

So, no more Tim Powers for me.  Ever.  But thar be plenty of voodoo pirate captains ahead for me anyway: Monkey Island 2 has just been rereleased with new graphics.  It’s out on PC and iPhone etc.  Go play it.

I’ve read many books like Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational, about how people are consistently irrational in specific ways.  It’s my favorite topic in psychology.  I wonder what long-term effect this reading has.  Does being aware of your own irrational tendencies help you to counteract those tendencies, or are they like optical illusions: We see them even when we know that we shouldn’t?

I suspect the first.  This knowledge influences me all the time.  It’s why I try to read books and watch movies without any foreknowledge, (to prevent expectations from tainting the experience), why I don’t pretend I can tell an expensive wine from a cheap wine, and why I try to decouple my political principles from factual claims.  (Gender discrimination is not wrong because it, say, reduces economic growth.  Maybe it’s good for the economy. It would still be wrong.)

This is one reason why I think behavioral economics has its limits.  Another is methodology: Almost all these experiments use students as subjects.  What happens when they grow old and gain experience?  Do they learn that FREE isn’t magical?  Do they learn tricks to stop overvaluing short-term benefits?  Probably, even if they never read this book.

What researchers like Ariely has done is not to introduce brand new ideas.  What they’ve done is replace the first step towards wisdom with science.  That’s great, it makes the step easier to make, but it doesn’t help you with the next step.  At some point science must give way to intuition.

The British and Indian characters in E. M. Forster’s 1924 novel A Passage to India are unable to understand each other.  Not because east and west can never meet, but because it requires patience, trust and luck, and the circumstances here all conspire against it.  The imbalance of power between ruling class and subjects makes every social gesture a potential grab for power or status, or a potential source of embarrassment.

The desire of two visiting Englishwomen to “see the real India” is based on an illusion. The imperial elite can never be friends with their subjects.  They cause only problems by trying.  One friendship comes out of it all, but at a high cost.  It’s probably not worth it – but Forster wishes it was.

A century later, the empires are gone, but alien cultures keep grinding into each other, through immigration, globalization, tourism – and war, and A Passage to India is a template that fits all of these collisions, even today.  It warns us not to assume that we know how people of other cultures are similar to or different from ourselves.

Forster’s Anglo-Indians can, if they want to, and most of them do, retreat behind the safe, thick walls of prejudice and hierarchy, – or if necessary back to England.  There are no walls to hide behind today.  The option of retreat from the foreign is gone.  We’re all in this mess together.  Any genuine, intimate cultural encounter is going to be at best confusing and painful, but what other option do we have?

So now that the internet culture is a few years old, and the first waves of euphoria and panic have passed, the calmer, more interesting ideas begin to emerge.  The shape of this new world, hastily thrown together by IT geeks with little more forethought than “I wonder what happens if we connect this to this”, is becoming clearer.  We can see some sort of outline.

I’ve been awaiting Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows.  Not because I think he’s necessarily right to believe that the perpetual distraction machine that is the internet harms the brain’s ability to do deep reading and deep thinking, but because he’s asking the most important question of 2010: Is the internet literally rewiring our brains?  And is that a good thing?  His answer, (“yes”, and “not entirely”), will one day seem either quaint or prescient, but I think everyone will agree that, yes, this was the right question to ask at this point in time.

To react with derisive laughter is to be stuck in the mid-00’s social media hype.  It’s fair to laugh at the luddites, but more and more we’re all of the internet now, and there’s no “them” for “us” to protect our shiny new world from. We’re all us.

Agreeing fully with Carr, on the other hand, is premature. What can we reliably know about the long-term effects of something so new?

The correct answer to his question is: “I honestly don’t know. Let me observe myself for a while, and see.” So – let’s!

Steampunk is based on the belief that if you take any story, and add futuristic Victorian machinery and yellow-brownish colors to it, it becomes twice as awesome. This belief is correct. Michael Moorcock, one of my favorite authors, is miffed at steampunk because he contributed to its invention, and he didn’t intend it to be awesome. He intended it to be used to satirize British imperialism. And now everybody’s embracing steampunk chic, just because it looks good.   Philistines.

I guess he has a point. But it’s a boring point, which I choose to ignore.  Otherwise, you couldn’t, say, retell World War I as a war between the bioengineering Allies, whose Darwinist teachings enable them to design living war beasts, and the Central powers, who rely on walking fortresses and other mechanical contraptions.

Which is what Scott Westerfeld does in Leviathan, and the result is absolutely delightful. Leviathan is a light adventure where the son of the murdered Archduke of Austria-Hungary escapes the clutches of the warmongering Kaiser in an AT-AT, and an enterprising Scottish girl pretends to be a boy so she can join the crew of a flying whale.

A flying whale!  With its own ecosystem!  And a tentacle monster called the Huxley!

This is about as good as that sort of thing gets.  Also, further proof of how much good writing is being done for the YA market.

Oh, and read Westerfeld’s post on how Walt Disney was a steampunk pioneer.  I swear, steampunk Mickey is my new desktop wallpaper, replacing this.

The freedom to choose makes us happy, except when it doesn’t.  Sheena Iyengar’s The Art of Choosing traces the border between the choices we like, and the choices we don’t like.  What determines how happy a choice makes us feel?

Culture is a factor. Culture doesn’t just affect, for instance, how much power a parent expects to have over their children’s marriage, it affects how the children feel about it too.  Choice you’re not culturally primed for can make you uncomfortable.  The idea that everyone should be the ultimate authority over their own lives is morally better, but it’s not inborn: it’s learned.

Even in cultures that value choice highly, there are some choices we might not want to make, such as life and death decisions. And sometimes the amount of choice becomes overwhelming.  Choosing between hundreds of different variants of a product, such as a computer, is only fun when you feel qualified to tell the difference.

But this too is learned behavior: Anyone can learn to deal with difficult choices.  We can choose smart ways to choose.  But any amount of choice doesn’t automatically make anyone happier.

My favorite text on choice is the discourses of Epictetus, from around 100 AD.  He argued that choice made people unhappy when they attached too much importance to the uncontrollable consequences of their choices.  Basically, if something is not up to you, don’t worry about it.  Iyengar deals with many of the same questions, but takes a descriptive rather than a prescriptive approach.

I love audiobooks.  I’ve found that, especially with big, fat history books, I’m more likely to finish it if someone reads it than if I have to read it myself.

The drawback is that audiobooks are usually .. read .. very .. very .. slow .. ly.  So I’ve been experimenting with how to speed them up, more than the +25% my iPod can do.  I’ve found a solution.  It’s not easy, but it works.

Step 1 – Remove the DRM. I buy audiobooks from Audible, and you can’t just open those in an audio editor.  You have to convert them to an unprotected format such as mp3.  I use Daniusoft Digital Music Converter to do that.  There’s no magic: It just plays the audio silently, for itself, and records it.  This means that converting a 20 hour book takes 20 hours.  It’s kind of crappy, but it more or less works.

Step 2 – Change the tempo.  I use Audacity, an open source audio editor, which allows you to change the tempo – how fast it plays – without changing the pitch.  How much you can increase the tempo depends on the narrator.  I’ve managed +60% to +90%, ie. almost twice normal speed.  Some sounds disappear at higher speeds, but you may still be able to understand the words.  There’s no right answer: Just experiment.

Step 3 – If you’re using iTunes, select “Remember playback position” on the options tab for the file, or it won’t remember where you are.

And that’s it.

If you want to hear what this sounds like, here’s a sample from Revolution 1989, at normal speed, +50%, +75% and +100%: