cahn | Omnitopia Dawn (Duane)

"Rewarding the good," Delia said, "and punishing the wicked."

Dev gave her a dry look. "Would that everything was so binary," he said.

This is a Duane-tries-to-channel-Vinge book about a big Google-esque MMORPG company. I always enjoy reading Duane -- I got to her from her Star Trek novels and have been happily reading all the Wizard books since high school.

Part of what I enjoy about Duane is that, contrary to the quotation above, Duane is awfully binary -- there are the good guys, the defenders of Truth, Right, and the Way of Good -- and the bad guys, the Bringers of Evil and Entropy and So On. And you never get them confused. Oh, the evil guys are human (well, except the non-human ones) and even somewhat sympathetic, and at the end there's always the chance of redemption (though sometimes they don't take it). But these are not morally ambiguous books. And sometimes that's just what I want.

One unfortunate thing that I've noticed in a lot of her other work, but that annoyed me more in this book (probably because it's near-future SF), is a certain... sloppiness. The biggest example: one of the main plots of the book has to do with one of the villains planning to wait for a large drop in the share price of Our Heroes' company and then proceeding to buy up all the stock on the sly until he has a voting majority. This didn't seem quite right to me, and indeed a quick google search shows that you can't do this -- you have to file with the SEC if you want to buy out a company like this, giving other people the chance to bid on it. In real life, if The Villain tried to do this, either the SEC would come down on him (and all the proxies he was using) hard if he didn't file, and if he did, other people would get wind of it and bid up the share price. So either way it's not really a workable plan.

Here's another minor example.

Across its great lintel was graven in very perfect Trajan Roman letters the first part of the ancient warning: FACILE DESCENSUS AVERNO... Above the door was the space in which some wit three years ago had written (in beautifully drafted archaic Latin) that other famous Dantean quote, Abandon hope all ye who enter here.

Yes, I'm a Dante fanatic, so this will annoy me more than other (uh, sane) people. But look at all the problems here! I'll pass by the mistranslation of Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'entrate because it's so common, and because I don't know Latin I'll just note briefly that google gave me facilis instead of facile, but more than that, the first quote is from Virgil, not from Dante, and even more than that, Dante wrote the Divine Comedy in Italian! The whole point of the Divine Comedy is that it's not in Latin!

(Also, when I was typing in the top quote, I really, really wanted to change it to the proper subjunctive. But never mind.)

Anyway. Rant aside, I think I do best with Duane when I take her SF and translate it into a sort of simplified fantasy world (which is arguably what her Wizard books already are). Her Trek novels submit to this admirably, and Omnitopia Dawn, as well, read as a fantasy (where we don't have to worry about SEC filings and such) is a much better book than as a near-future-SF work.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I wonder whether the SEC thing has to do with her long residence outside the U.S.

No excuse on the Latin. I haven't studied Italian, but years ago I did take a college semester of the first half of Aeneid.... One could have "facile" if the entity descending were neuter, not m or f, since "facilis" is, IIRC, a substantive adjective here; "facile" can also be translated as an adverb, "easily," but that doesn't work semantically.

Ditto on proper subjunctive ;)

Thanks for the rec -- I think I came down a little harder on it in the post than I intended (this always happens to me, where I seize on something, like Dante, that is really kind of tangential to what I actually thought), but I really did enjoy it!

Ah, so maybe the Latin was intentionally neutered?

Well, I'm glad to see your post because I haven't read the book yet myself! It wasn't so much a rec as a "may find interesting."

Possibly? I guess it depends on the context in the story. Duane was once a language aficionado, as witness the pieces of Rihannsu and Vulcan she made up (less so the cat stuff, IMO), and it seems a weird mistake if it's a mistake. But I got nothin' re: the Italian mislabeling, which would put her story into a definite AU if not a mistake....

I'd say it's vintage Duane, with all that it implies. There's nothing surprising about this book -- it recycles a lot of themes she likes to talk about -- and, like I said, it's got sloppiness that she can get away with in the Wizard books but that does not sit well with me in near-future SF. But, again like the Wizard books, I found it a great comfort read where you can comfortably cheer for the good guys. :)

Ah, so maybe the Latin was intentionally neutered?

I suspect it's just a typo, since facilis agrees with decensus ("the descent to Avernus is easy").

ETA: Although it's an unusual one: google only turns up a few instances. (compare to the other big Vergil tag "labor omnia vicit improbus" which so often shows up was labor omnia vincit."

Or maybe she just got her languages mixed up. Had I not googled it (which I only did because I knew it wasn't Dante) I would've accepted facile, which is the proper French :)

Having reached the page in question, I think it was neutered intentionally, given that many of Omnitopia's denizens aren't human and thus on an implicit M/F binary system. The bit just after it says, "Dev chuckled to himself, realizing they were reminding of another, older joke." That's Duane's nod to the reader that she isn't an idiot--I think. And it would be possible to take Dante and translate him into pre-republican Latin, to invert what Dante had done, as a joke. Like, when I first read your post, I had no context and thus read the slippages as error; on p. 242 of the book I am prepared to believe that she incorporated a little of remix culture, which often expects an audience geeky enough to understand that the slippage is intentional. *shrugs* FWIW.

The book reads to me a bit as though Duane wanted to give a de-aged Harb Tanzer his own adventure, except in a day-after-tomorrow setting. :)

*reminding him
I typed without checking before posting :(

OK - I believe the intentional neuter, since your reasoning sounds good and also since it seems like anyone who knew enough Latin to stick it in would know the proper quote. I'm still a bit dubious about the Dante... both my experience (with other geeks, even though I'm opposite girl here) that medieval Italian is less of a geeky skill than Latin and the fact that she did, in fact, mistranslate it in English makes me a little less inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt there. But I may well be being too harsh, as I sometimes am when my man Dante is dragged into it :)

The book reads to me a bit as though Duane wanted to give a de-aged Harb Tanzer his own adventure, except in a day-after-tomorrow setting. :)

Hee -- it really does!

Oh, that's one of my favorite Aeneid lines! It's the original "how do I get to Carnegie Hall" joke.

hee! Hey, apropos of this, I've really been enjoying the Ruden translation you pointed me to. We've been taking a hiatus on reading it because the Little One has temporarily given up being read to out of books-without-pictures, so I may have to finish it on my own (horrors!) :)

oh I'm glad you enjoy it! (I mostly just talk to classicists about translations, and the amount of hatred Ruden gets is kind of sad -- especially because I've never heard a male translator of anything, no matter how controversial, be described in such dismissive terms. But obviously we girls have no business with Major War Epics, I suppose...)

Gah, that's horrible! (And I can think of a couple *cough*Mandelbaum -- okay, I have issues with him, sorry -- I'd dismiss rather more :) )

I imagine classicists think very differently than I do -- and even I have flip-flopped on my thoughts on translations. I used to think translators should get as close to the mechanics of the original as possible (e.g., terza rima for the Divine Comedy), but getting older and more crabbed has made me decide that making it readable and accessible is the most important thing by far, and Ruden does that really well, I feel.

Omnitopia Dawn (Duane)

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

oops, that was me, delete the other comment?

Re: oops, that was me, delete the other comment?

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject