After the tedious Quicksilver, Ilium was a welcome change.  It’s a wonderful blend of science fiction and Greek myth.

As Simmons’ Hyperion was infused with Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, so Ilium works from Homer’s Iliad.  One of the central events of the book is the siege of Troy.  In Ilium, however, the gods are more science fiction than fantasy—they accomplish their majestic feats via nanotechnology and quantum manipulation.  And the events in the Iliad are only a rough third of the events in Ilium.

The book opens with the words of a twentieth-century Homeric scholar, in a very deliberate reference to the opening of the Iliad.  That scholar has been resurrected by the gods and sent to observe the unfolding of events that shaped the Iliad.  The following chapter introduces humans living on Earth several thousand years past the 20th century, in a world largely abandoned—the “post-humans” meddled with the planet, cleaned up some of their mess, and left it to the old-style humans, whose lives they continue to regulate.  The third chapter sets the stage for the third storyline, involving sentient organic/inorganic machines that live and work among the moons of Jupiter.

Into all three storylines, the reader is dropped without much backstory; the shape of the world in which the characters live must be gleaned from details in the story’s telling.  And the threads don’t tie themselves together until a distance into the book.

The single best thing about the book, however, is the writing.  Simmons does a very good job of taking these disparate threads, blending them together while painting the backdrop for the story, and weaving a thoroughly engaging tale.

Ilium certainly deserves its Hugo nomination.  I can’t speak to whether it should win, since I haven’t read most of its competitors, but if it does, I’ll not be disappointed.

Following in Friday’s footsteps, the MTA gave me troubles getting to work this morning.

The bus I caught going into the city (bus #8877) was stuck on a hill for some time, because the transmission wouldn’t shift into forward.  (I’m not sure how long we were there, since I didn’t think to check my watch, but I missed two Light Rail trains, so it was at least half an hour.)  The driver tried a number of variations on “roll backwards and then gun the engine” but nothing seemed to work.  Eventually, something caught and the bus crept up the hill as people held their breath.

The driver said that she had called for a replacement bus several hours previously (apparently, this had happened earlier today, too), but nothing had been forthcoming.

Quicksilver is probably one of the dullest books I’ve read in some time.  I can see that it might be interesting to someone with a deep interest in European history of the late 17th century, but perhaps not even then.

Quicksilver is the first book in Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, a trilogy of historical fiction novels covering European history of the late 17th and early 18th centuries, focusing specifically on the political maneuverings of the time and the development of science as we know it today.  It involves such people as Isaac Newton, Gottfried Liebnitz, Robert Hooke, Charles II, Louis XIV, and William of Orange.  The main characters are, however, completely fictional: Daniel Waterhouse, Jack Shaftoe, and Eliza.  (Readers of Cryptonomicon may notice the reuse of family names.  Also reappearing are Enoch Root and Qwghlm.)

As I mentioned above, I found the pace of the book to be exceedingly dull, despite the fact that I actually have an interest in the history of science in that period.  (And no such interest in that period’s politics, so the science was merely dull, while the politics were excruciatingly dull.)  That’s really my biggest complaint.  I do feel that the book could have been more interesting if it had been edited down a lot.

Still, I did gain some things from the book.  For one, I have a lot clearer picture of the history of the area (and, as far as my research can tell, the history in Quicksilver is quite accurate).  But I can’t really bring myself to recommend it to anyone other than raving history fans.  Almost everyone I know found the book very tedious, and most never managed to finish it.

Steganography and the ending below the spoiler line.

Spoilers

The steganographic cypher that Eliza used really bugged me for most of the book.  At first, I thought that the plaintext that Stephenson shows was supposed to be derived from the other visible portions of the letter.  Which didn’t make much sense, because the proportions of the two texts did not match at all the stated 5:1 ratio for cyphertext and plaintext.  Later things implied that we were not shown the cyphertext, which is a little more believable, but runs into the problem of boundaries—sometimes the hidden text forms its own paragraphs, but sometimes Eliza appears to insert bits into otherwise cleartext sentences.  Said sentences appear to flow naturally with both the hidden text and without any text, but there must be some steganographic text that is there in the undecyphered letter.  The only way I could deal with the cypher, given the various problems I perceived with it, was to regard it as an unexplained author’s vehicle for plot and try not to think about how it worked.  I don’t like having to do that with a story.

And the ending.  For Stephenson (with whose novel endings I’ve generally been displeased), it’s quite good.  It works very well for this particular book (as one that leads into another such) and, with minor tweaks, would do well as the closing to a standalone novel.  Too bad I probably won’t read the final two books in the Baroque Cycle to see how the whole thing turns out.

The MTA had been behaving itself for a couple of months (inasmuch as it ever behaves—the 8, on the occasions I’ve had to use it, has been as bad as ever), so I suppose it was due for something.

The 31 scheduled for 6:58 at Liberty and Baltimore never arrived.  I waited until roughly 7:20 before a 31 came by.  (The next scheduled arrival was 7:24.)  The bus then sat at the Arena stop for roughly 15 minutes as the driver waited for a replacement.  None was forthcoming, so he eventually drove on, despite the fact that he was supposed to have been relieved.  I got home a bit over an hour later than I ought to have.

newsmap is a visualization of Google News.  It gives you headlines in color-coded bands by category, sized by how many places are reporting the same story, and shaded by age.  This is information pornography of the highest order.  It uses flash.  It may accomplish what even Strongbad and weebl and bob have so far failed to do—get me to install Flash on my home computer.

newsmap comes from the same person who wrote social circles, which also looks interesting.  I may see if I can put together something similar with Perl and Graphviz.