Author Topic: PC081: On Bookstores, Burners, And Origami  (Read 16008 times)

kibitzer

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Reply #25 on: December 14, 2009, 07:48:14 AM
I didn't listen past about 20 minutes. The story did not hold my interest and I'm trying to figure out why.

If I get to a point where I don't give a damn about the characters, that's usually where I bail. I guess the characters seemed pretty thin and one-dimensional to me, I never felt they were real enough to listen to.

Also, the mildly steampunk pastiche seemed a little thin; not very original and mildly improbable. The pmail thing? Cute but unlikely.


ElectricPaladin

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Reply #26 on: December 14, 2009, 02:25:43 PM
Also, the mildly steampunk pastiche seemed a little thin; not very original and mildly improbable. The pmail thing? Cute but unlikely.

Mildly improboable? Mildly improbable? Dude, you're going to have to do better than that!  ;D.

But seriously, what about the story's improbability bugged you? The setting was pretty out there, but as steampunk settings go, I don't feel it was unusually unlikely. You had your dirigibles and your anachronistic modern conveniences articulated as produced with 1800s-era technology - classic steampunk. The plot seemed to flow pretty smoothly from the assumption that this was a war of ideas rather than a real life war of money, resources, and death; an unrealistic assumption, sure, but the story was internally consistent within that assumption.

Now, if what you're saying is that the steampunk elements were unlikely within the context of alternate history, I agree with you one hundred percent. But if you're just bothered that they were unlikely... you do know which podcast you're listening to, right? ;)

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Unblinking

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Reply #27 on: December 14, 2009, 04:28:39 PM
Minneapolis is where I live, Edgar Allen Poe is one of my favorite authors of all time, I love steampunk, and golems are one of my favorite mythical creatures.  So, just taking all that into account, it had a lot going for it, and kept me going despite being nearly 70 minutes long.

Overall I liked it, but it was too long.  I haven't heard a story over 45 minutes long that couldn't have been improved by significant word-trimming.  And that's not directed at Podcastle or at Escape Artists in particular.  Even in the printed pro magazines, I rarely like novellas completely because I haven't come across one that isn't 25-50% longer than it needed to be, and the extra time just made it seem a little dull despite the cool ideas.

Like ElectricPaladin, I tend to prefer my alternate history to just be alternate history without the fantasy added in, but that's just a personal preference.

It did feel rather Farenheit 451 to me, except for the paper golems, which I suppose is a good argument for including them, since it would otherwise be a steampunk Farenheit 451.

Having the dual threats of President and the Burners seemed a bit much.  No direct actions were taken by the President's lackeys, so it ended up just being a conflict between Burners and book-lovers, the President was kind of a distraction from that, and a distraction which added much of the Farenheit 451 vibe.  Much of the story's space was spent concerned with Hornby, which ended up not having that much to do with the central conflict.

I liked the Burners' motivations being all driven by one man's illiteracy, a fanatic organizations driven by one man's mania.  He was able to recognize that literacy eternalized the poverty gap, but came to the wrong conclusion from it:  rather than making everyone literate (which has become mostly true in America these days), he wished to make everyone illiterate.  Despite his intentions, a small group of fanatics burning books would never make society illiterate in any case.  A literate person can carve into wood or write in the sand or any number of mediums, and one could never burn every book without societal cooperation--A dictatorship might come close, but a cult could never pull it off.

Despite the Minneapolis setting, there wasn't anything particularly Minneapolis-y about it.  I don't know if either author has been to the Twin Cities, but the lack of pertinent details made me suspect that neither have been here.

In any case, overall I enjoyed it.  I would like to put in a vote to see more steampunk round these parts--I love the gadgetry.  :)




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Reply #28 on: December 14, 2009, 04:33:31 PM
Oh, and one more thing:

In the story, when they were trying to figure out why the Hornby book didn't act of its own volition when threatened, the explanation for that did not seem self-consistent within the story.  They guessed that it was because its contents were not creative, that the entity could not be creative. But the origami birds, which had no story on them, just the words themselves, were able to act of their own volition, so this hypothesis violated their own rules.

An alternative explanation that makes more sense to me within the context of the story world:
Though their fire retardant nature makes them immune to fire, the paper golems do not act of their own voliton to defend themselves.  In any case, since they do not burn, fire is not a threat.  But the golems do act to protect people, or perhaps just their own creator.  Since the people refused to leave the store, the burning would be a threat to them and the book-golems acted to protect the people.

I did kind of think it weird that the people refused to leave the store, despite knowing that the books would not burn...  But I suppose it was intended to be a noble stand, even if it didn't accomplish anything but their own deaths.



kibitzer

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Reply #29 on: December 14, 2009, 09:22:04 PM
Mildly improbable? Mildly improbable? Dude, you're going to have to do better than that!  ;D.

Well given that I didn't listen to the whole thing I'm maybe judging it unfairly. The main improbability is the pmail system. I know those things exist(ed?) but I can't see a pneumatic tube delivery system being much wider than a single building. Spanning a city? No.

But if you're just bothered that they were unlikely... you do know which podcast you're listening to, right? ;)

Sure, it's... The Java Posse, right?


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Reply #30 on: December 15, 2009, 06:33:19 AM
I don't think the reading was off, I just think the story was written very matter-of-factly and it didn't lend itself very well to fanciful reading. 

As far as the story itself was concerned...my problem was that it felt like it didn't really need to be set in a steampunk alternate history, and seemed to use the setting as an excuse rather than a reason for the events to unfold.  Beyond that, it just felt a bit empty to me, as though the world and the events were but a black and white drawing waiting for color to arrive.




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Reply #31 on: December 16, 2009, 12:22:54 AM
This story is going into my collection of favourites for one particular stand out reason. The description of how the paper could be anything at all was put into words I only could have wished for when I had a show and tell assignment for an English course in College.

The assignment was based on our study of the romantic poets and we were asked to bring in to the next class what inspired us the most. I brought something to class that I do not remember because I changed it before my time to present. I instead presented a blank sheet of paper to the class and explained that for as long as I can remember I have had a fascination on what could be done with an empty page whether it was art, a story, a paper airplane or anything else. It's a true fascination for me since I find myself browsing the same in a stationary store as a bookstore.

That is something that will keep this story in my mind forever.

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Reply #32 on: December 16, 2009, 05:09:49 PM
Slooow.  I agree with other commenters, diverse elements that have NOTHING to do with the story.  The constant restating of the premise shows that the author has great distain for his readers and considers them idiots.  And the restatement.  Discovering grandpa made magic origami, that could have taken 3 sentences, not MOST OF THE STORY!  Or at least it had when I couldn't stand listening anymore.
The writer needs an editor who has a delete key, not an editor who acts as the writer's therapist.
Poe invented the short story.  A story where no element is not developing the end of the story.  If you include Poe as a character, you should at least learn from Poe.  He struggled with the form as well, but he knew where he was going.  This writer did not.  It was obvious the writer started writing "to see where it would go," and then did not cut out the dross.



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Reply #33 on: December 16, 2009, 06:26:35 PM
[...]
The writer needs an editor who has a delete key, not an editor who acts as the writer's therapist.
Poe invented the short story.  A story where no element is not developing the end of the story.  If you include Poe as a character, you should at least learn from Poe.  He struggled with the form as well, but he knew where he was going.  This writer did not.  It was obvious the writer started writing "to see where it would go," and then did not cut out the dross.

Er, I like Poe, and not to diminish his import, but short stories have been around for a while in a lot of forms, and even in American English there are earlier version of them (Irving's Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle for two).

But the main reason I'm responding is that I don't really think comments on what happened in the editing process are worthwhile unless you were there. For all you know there was another third to the story that was chopped out, and the editor resembled Edward Scissorhands. You can say more should have been cut, but attempting to divine the editing process doesn't strike me as a fair comment unless you know what happened.

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spork

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Reply #34 on: December 17, 2009, 02:53:27 AM
"But the main reason I'm responding is that I don't really think comments on what happened in the editing process are worthwhile unless you were there."

Yeeaah, maybe you're right.  It might not matter who this writer's editor was, he would prbbly stll be a pr wrtr.

Myb hs dtr s ls hs gnt, wh slls by th wrd, nd hs n mmdt fnncl t trm  stry.

S  gr wth y.  Lt's nt gv hm nthr chnc, vn f h gts  nw gnt.  Ths ws hs frst pblshd stry.  slly frst ffrts r bttr.  t shld b hs lst.  N mnt f prctc cn rmv n tttd f sprrty frm  wrtr, thy jst lk fr mr ppl wh wll pt p wth thr drvl.

Mod: Really a bridge or two too far with that. Be nice.
« Last Edit: December 17, 2009, 03:04:34 AM by Heradel »



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Reply #35 on: December 17, 2009, 04:18:27 AM
- Hornbee is evil, but he doesn't actually stifle dissent in any meaningful way.  Why is he scary? 

-  The Burners are trying to destroy books, and they're well known enough to have their iconography immediately recognized by official firemen and stuff, but no one's ever asked WHY they burn books?  Usually you can't get terrorist groups to shut UP about their lofty goals.

- Are all the Burners dyslexic?  If not, why do they follow the nutjob, who does a pretty piss-poor job of justifying his crusade.  It seriously read like the author started from the premise, "I need a group who burns books.  Now why would someone hate books enough to want to destroy them all?"  That sort of approach rarely leads to good places.

- The Burners are bad, but they explicitly avoid harming any people, ever.  Again, why are they scary?  They're basically just the threat of property damage. 

Now, if the Burners were being funded and/or encouraged by Hornbee, and specifically directed at 'underground' bookstores, and if official help was regularly refused to victims of Burners on flimsy excuses as a way to pointedly edit their activities without actually involving oneself, and if there was also the unspoken threat (perhaps realized at a dramatic moment in the story) of actual physical harm to an 'underground' author, then... well, then we'd be reading a different story that would have been more interesting to read.

I agree with the criticisms that the cast members - even Poe, most regrettably - were distressingly thin and didn't hold my attention well.  (I mean, we even have an Old Guy, a Woman, an Asian Girl, and a Black Dude.  All they needed was a Handicapable Fellow to round out the full set of Approved Diverse Cast Members.)

The living books kind of came out of left field, both telegraphed heavily and yet somehow not explained enough (and I agree with Unblinking's criticisms about the story having an unclear and contradictory magic system.  Like, why do the books only speak Japanese if their creator obviously speaks English as a primary language now, and if they are mostly written in English?  There were just a lot of, 'Wait, what?' moments in this story.)

Overall, a solid "meh."  I don't regret listening to it, and I liked the themes and overall premises, but it meandered too much, didn't attack the plot clearly enough, and had a lot of noise in the signal in terms of what we were supposed to pay attention to and what we weren't.



wyrder42

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Reply #36 on: December 17, 2009, 01:04:38 PM
The ideas in this story are good, but the execution leaves a whole bunch to be desired.  I'm not trying to be mean, but I found much of the dialogue actually painful to listen to.

Perhaps this was the author's first?

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eytanz

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Reply #37 on: December 27, 2009, 07:48:53 PM
So I finished this story feeling that I should have liked it more than I did. It had plenty of cool ideas in it, and many were quite well executed. But... well, there was something very haphazzard about it. The feeling that a lot of different ideas were tossed into the bag with no thought or planning, just because they appealed to the author. There were a lot of threads here, but it mostly seemed like the main plot just proceeded ahead, ignoring them. I see, from looking at the thread above, that several others had the same impression.

I would have liked to know, for example, why a Japanese woman not only emigrated on her own, but also moved halfway across the US. This is commonplace nowdays, but in the 19th century this would have been quite notable. But the story treats this just as a random biographical note.

Others have commented about how the president and his thread on book publishing was not really used. Instead, it just opened unexplored possibilties. I thought, originally, that the burners were working for him - that they were a covert means to get rid of competitiors' books. But, it turned out, not only is this not the case, but it is not really necessary, as he has a strangehold on all publishing. Fair enough, but then, if paper is so expensive to the point where anyone else publishing cannot make a profit, how is this bookshop surviving? Where do they get their paper from? They certainly do not seem to have any lack of it.
Of course, a story doesn't have to answer every question. But the problem is, with the above questions and more, that it feels like the author didn't really think of it. That rather, he just invented facts about the world without thinking of their consequences.

I think this would have been a much stronger story if it had just been set in a fantasy/steampunk world, not in an alternate Earth.

But, this serious quibbling aside, I did enjoy the story. But I enjoyed it for what I would consider somewhat unsatisfactory reasons - I enjoyed it because of what it was *about*, not because of the quality of the writing or the storytelling.

A note on the reading - I agree that it was not one of the best EA readings. But, as was pointed out elsewhere, readers are volunteers and are not getting paid. Therefore, we should not expect anything better. I wish EA podcasts would pay their readers. But until they do, I think it behooves us to maintain out expectations low (of course, that doesn't mean we should give feedback on it, but the tone of the feedback should remember that, technically, we are to expect an amatuer-level reader).

Oh, and one thing I want to comment on:

Oh, and one more thing:

In the story, when they were trying to figure out why the Hornby book didn't act of its own volition when threatened, the explanation for that did not seem self-consistent within the story.  They guessed that it was because its contents were not creative, that the entity could not be creative. But the origami birds, which had no story on them, just the words themselves, were able to act of their own volition, so this hypothesis violated their own rules.

Actually, this was established by the beginning of the story - the origami of Hitomi and her grandfather was true art, based on creativity rather than following a template. For the books, the creativity the magic needed was in the contents, in the orgiami, it was in the construction.

The fact that, even though the story spent a chunk of time explaining the role of creativity in origami and creativity in writing, this was not obvious to everyone, is, in my indication, an example of how the story failed to deliver part of what it was attempting.



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Reply #38 on: December 28, 2009, 06:14:13 PM
Actually, this was established by the beginning of the story - the origami of Hitomi and her grandfather was true art, based on creativity rather than following a template. For the books, the creativity the magic needed was in the contents, in the orgiami, it was in the construction.

That makes more sense, though it still seems a bit shaky to me.  How does the magic determine what is creative and what is not?  Even propoganda must be created by someone.  Is it the intent to mislead that differentiates?  But then perspective-skewing art like Escher might not be considered art.  It can't just be the fact that it's following a template, then any writing would cease to be creative once it was arranged on a printing press.

I'm not arguing, just philosophizing.  Don't mind me.  :)



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Reply #39 on: December 28, 2009, 06:31:25 PM
The thing is, I got the impression from the story that the president wasn't so much trying to deceive anyone, as much as he just really had no understanding of art or literature, and was using his money and influence to spread his otherwise soulless literature out there. His book was apparently trite and formulaic, a self-help book that probably contained no insight.

This story does seem to believe that good art has intrinsic, objective, value, and that the magic responds to that. That may well be up for debate, but it doesn't seem to me to be a very unusual belief. Ironically, it's a belief that the bookshop group and the president in the story share - it's just that they disagree on what has value. The story, by taking sides, seems to say that it's not a matter of subjectivity, but of the bookshop people and Poe being right and the president being wrong.



mbrennan

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Reply #40 on: December 29, 2009, 02:37:37 AM
Wanted to like this one, but it felt to me like the author bit off too much to chew -- the ideas flying around here could have filled a novel.  Which sometimes is a compliment (it's awesome when the narrative world feels that rich), but in this case it meant that nothing really got enough exploration.  The President, as others have mentioned, isn't much of a real threat, nor are the Burners, and the two don't really link together, nor does either have a whole lot to do with the magic-origami aspect.  And as someone who really likes history and cultural difference and all that neat stuff, the fact that you have an independent young Japanese woman living in Minneapolis in the late nineteenth century REALLY should have shaped the narrative, in ways that go beyond "she knows origami and calligraphy."  Take out Poe and the steampunk window-dressing, and this felt more like modern America.  So why not just set it in the modern day?  Because then the whole illiteracy angle, and nobody recognizing dyslexia, wouldn't really work?  Then maybe it's time to rethink the story.

Too much stuff jostling together, none of it really fitting, without the kind of solid extrapolation that can make alternate history great.  I don't mind my alt-hist being fantastical, but I want it to be well-developed either way.

I should also say that the prose itself kept glitching me out of the narrative flow, for reasons belonging to both the author and the reader.  There were lots of sentences with distracting word repetition, or other clumsy bits of phrasing; I kept thinking of why I taught my students to read their stories or papers out loud, because then you're more likely to catch those infelicities.  And the voice work was flat and frequently awkward, with loss of flow or mispronounced words.  (I know EA is done by volunteer readers -- I've been one myself -- but it's worth mentioning these things, in the hopes of better results in the future, whether from this reader or others.)

So, not for me.  I would have preferred to see this reduced to one or maybe two of its myriad of strands, and explored more fully.  A whole set of stories, all linked by the uses of magic origami in nineteenth-century alt-hist America, could have been awesome; this felt too much like idea salad.



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Reply #41 on: January 19, 2010, 02:06:06 PM
I think the reader would have been better for a shorter story. He did a good job differentiating the characters without using character voices, which not a lot of readers can pull off, but there were a lot of weird pauses (which may have been related to the editing, not the reading, necessarily) and he didn't imbue the narrator with the "I care about this story" aspect that a good narrator must have. I think it made the story feel longer than it was, and a little tedious.

As for the story... I really, really wanted to like this. 1870-1900 is a fertile period for steampunk and alternate history -- I've got one brewing in that time period myself. But there were a lot of choices made in the telling that I didn't really like. For starters, the Burners' mission was ridiculous. This one guy has dyslexia (or something) and can't read so he forms a whole underground movement dedicated to the remembering of stories but the destruction of the printed word? Really? I would've bought them as governmentally-ignored terrorists or just asshats, but I didn't feel that they were adequately legitimized as villains.

Also, the Hitomi angle -- WHY did she come to America? Did she have nothing left in Japan? Does she have a relative in SF? And why move to MINNEAPOLIS? It's freaking COLD, and there are bugs everywhere in the summer. I like Minneapolis as it is now, but in the late 19th century? Really? All we know is that she had an interesting childhood and that her grandfather died at some point and willed her his magical calligraphy box.

That whole thing, by the way, was by far the BEST part of the story. I could see it as the basis of an anime series or film, where young Hitomi learns magical calligraphy and has to use it to save a bookstore. I just didn't buy it all happening as it did, especially with Mrs. O'Morphy as the deus ex machina.

Maybe that's why I didn't care about Hitomi as much as I should have: she was interesting, but I was too stuck in her motivation for coming to America that I didn't get into the story. And the steampunk aspects -- dirigibles, mostly -- were just passed off as normal. What's the point of bringing them up if you don't use them?

I could pick at the story a lot more, but I'm not going to. I think it had a TON of great stuff in it, but there was too much, it was too long, and maybe the narrator had something to do with it, but I can overcome narration troubles if the story works. This one didn't work for me. I would like to see this writer do the story of Hitomi's grandfather; I think that would be awesome.

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Reply #42 on: January 20, 2010, 10:11:15 PM
I love automata.  Golems, robots, sentient typewriters,thinking difference engines, whatever.  I love em.  I also love Japanese calligraphy and origami, and I could go into a diatribe about both(but won't).  And I love Poe!  So yes, I loved this story. 

That said, I think it could have used some tightening up.  The bit about the box being willed to Hitomi, but her not opening it, was repeated a few times in the span of about 2 minutes, jarring enough to me to make sure it wasn't a missed audio edit.  And like others said, some of the ideas were thin, like the pmail, and Minnesota, and the secondary characters.  Some of them could have been removed, and some of them could have been fleshed out.  For instance, there is a bit in the story that goes something like:
"when Hitomi emigrated to America, first to San Francisco, then to Minnesota" .  This gives no reasoning, no context, etc.  If this was changed to:
"when Hitomi emigrated to America, first to San Francisco, then to Minnesota, chasing that boy", I think it would do a few things.  It would establish WHY Hitomi moved to America, and it would give her some more depth as a character.  At least in my opinion. 

So in short, I think the skeleton of the story was excellent, and the final product was a little sloppy, but enjoyable. 

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yicheng

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Reply #43 on: February 01, 2010, 10:49:47 PM
This was a bit of a snooze-fest for me.  What always intrigued me about Alt-history was the geo-political/social aspects of historical speculation.  In that department, "On Bookstores" was all tease and no delivery.  We're given tantalizing glimpses at the start (police dirigibles, p-mails, Poe living to old age), but we aren't really told anything about how this world is really different.  As far as I can tell Hornsby is a fictional character (maybe I'm wrong), and the Civil War seemed to have turned out pretty much the same.

The origami angle was interesting, but just barely.  The main character, Hitomi, didn't feel like an Immigrant Japanese at all.  It may have been an artifact of the reading (which was a bit flat to be honest), but she sounded and felt like an cardboard cut-out American girl with a Japanese name and a +10 to origami tacked on.  Where's the backstory about how/why she ended up in Minnesota, the culture-clash of adjusting to American culture & food.  Heck, it would have been nice to know what kind of kanji she was actually writing instead of "and then she wrote some Japanese...".