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

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!

Omnitopia Dawn (Duane)

oops, that was me, delete the other comment?

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

no subject