I’m so glad about myself when I manage to restrain myself from writing here, so if this shows up it means I’ve failed.
This has been triggered by reading a blog post about a (series of) book with a cool premise, that I think I’ve known in a form or another for years, maybe? But being this thing originally not in English, and being part of a series of seven(?) books, I simply continued to file it into some possible future interest. Waiting for it to wrap up and hopefully converted in a format that isn’t stupid (as seen below, why it’s indeed stupid).
The article is here: https://profadamroberts.substack.com/p/slovej-balle-on-the-calculation-of
Even before reading it, and in my previous “encounters” with the thing, it always ended up irritating me rather than stimulating curiosity. It’s a story of time travel, and non-conventional presentation of it, so it’s really good as a premise. But it’s a story broken down in very small volumes of 200 pages each, if not less, and released very slowly.
It triggers an immediate negative response from me because it feels artificial. You have a story but want to milk it into as many minuscule installments. It’s not merely about asking for more money, as this type of theme can have many different and complex layers to it. This isn’t some mainstream novel where the publisher wants to artificially extract as much money as possible. But it still feels WRONG.
Was this really the best format to tell this story? I don’t know, I haven’t read it. But all I read “around” the concept seems to point in the other direction. You can now read that article I linked.
It is described as a very mundane story, whose sci-fi premise stays in the background. Not as the focus, but as shaping the lens of mundane observation. In the comments someone suggests “this book is definitely more about the journey than the destination, isn’t it?” Well, then what is that is so precious about the journey? I can’t obviously judge the base literary value of the writing, but if I have to read some poorman Jon Fosse or Knausgaard, then I’d read those (and I strongly disagree that there’s no layering in those authors when it comes to represent the mundane, it’s there to be MORE).
Everything I read there seems very weak and lacking even the premise to build something interesting to me. On top of that, the premise is also outright bullshit (I quoted and commented this briefly on bluesky):
If the premise is that, for whatever arbitrary reason, this woman can “gift” persistence to objects, as long she holds them, therefore she gets a laptop and the laptop doesn’t vanish, since it gets applied the same rule… Then on what logical premise “its memory is wiped clean” if memory is just CONTINUOUS physical state same as EVERY OTHER OBJECT? Why the physical state of the laptop as an object is preserved, but the internal storage makes a distinction?
You see, this is, again, arbitrary sci-fi, and the premise is that it’s authoritative. This is a first person type of narration, whatever the world you face, the world is true to itself. So, best you can do, and what this article explains in minute detail, is to experiment and observe, in order to eventually discern some rules, make some hypothesis, and then with the very little information you have you ponder about the “whys.” The lack of sufficient information is what makes this sci-fi novel universal: no matter the fantastic element, the base condition is shared. You don’t have all the answers and can only pose questions to a deaf world.
But then, again, you’d certainly end up obsessively testing. Since you can only do that, and since it seems the focus of the story how it is written. The quotidiana and mundanity is not about what I decide to cook and eat today, for fuck sake. The quotidiana is about questioning this fucking quaint premise that exists illogically: why an object that stays far from you resets, but one close doesn’t? How far, depending on what rules? If the book was to be even remotely consistent and believable, it would be ALL about testing rules in order to find some consistent reproducibility. Because that’s how you get a bare minimum of information on the world. And because, more importantly, if you think about it the way it is presented, it makes zero logical sense and is full of holes. You would be peering into those, because your life DEPENDS on them.
So, me, reader, gets the attention not to the text, not to the authoritative world, but over to the writer: is this just a bullshitter? Is there going to be an explanation for a bunch of stupid rules that don’t add up and seem to be made on the go? Is this just a writing exercise someone decided to commercialize because readers are surely gullible? Is it all a scam with a literary air?
And of course you’ll be onboard, because it’s a long series that is trickling down, tiny book after tiny book, luring into its own bullshit, with the promise of not explaining anything at all because this is serious literature, the sci-fi time travel concept is just suggestive without it being the point. Don’t think too hard about it, it’s just fiction.
Whatever it is or might be, we’ll only know after all cards are on the table.
More importantly, here, whatever it is, it brings forward a more important theme: seriality of storytelling.
This is where I generalize and conclude everything is more or less ultimately falling apart. I can jump between very different examples, apparently with nothing to share. Whether JRR Martin survives to complete ASOIAF, the point is that the vehicle of delivering this story is COMPLETELY BROKEN. Absolutely no one can enjoy a volume, read in a day or a month, only to then wait ten years to see where the story goes next. You can always rely on the fantasy of a future scenario when “the story is done,” and so an ideal reader could pick it up from the first page and read it all the way to the end without a single pause, but are we really all building things based on utopian visions? Martin’s story has already been broken by the infiltration of the TV series. The ideal reader doesn’t and won’t exist. The story has already been digested and spitted out. The real world itself doesn’t offer a positive future scenario where this story exists within a better context. Even if you read a book by Charles Dickens, today, you can enjoy it, but it’s delusional thinking you now have a privileged position. Today’s reader lacks the context and culture to sink deep. We move and we constantly lose. These literary products don’t lose their value, of course, but they certainly lose something, and they transform into something else, that grows more and more out of the control and vision of the original author.
The best moment to read ASOIAF, probably, was when the third volume was just released. No spoilers, only some dedicated fans attention. It would have been you and the book, without a clue about what was going to hit you. That show is over and gone.
These stories have their shape. When you decide to cut a novel into three, release them year after year, you’re altering the shape of the story. You’re altering how it will be absorbed and potentially the effect it has.
My point is that things are falling apart because the modern world and its production constraints created a pressure that destroyed the formats that were working perfectly fine up to this point. I’ll make the example of US super-hero comics.
Among other reading “projects”, I recently started some giant arcs. I wanted to read the whole X-Men/mutant cycle that started with Claremont, but then decided to jump back to Stan Lee original run. Then I wanted to read DC crisis, but kept back pedaling, in stages (the original pre-crisis, then Wonder Woman early comics, then the JSA…), until I rolled back till the start of the first DC issues in 1939 (Superman, Batman, Sandman and Flash). Then I started Grant Morrison’s run on Animal Man (read the first four issues, masterpiece), and then I started the original 2000s run of Marvel Ultimate universe (read recently the first 13 Spider-Man by Bendis, these I also read when they got published, back then).
Right now, from what I see, Marvel comics are in a deep crisis, whereas DC seems doing quite well on the “Absolute” line (that also absorbed many “manga” tendencies, manga that were very popular in Italy, when close to no one knew them in the US, and now, in the US have eaten the whole market).
What I’m pointing at is less a critique of quality of stories and art (that has its merit, Spider-Man current run, I’m told, is complete trash, and the ambitious X-men Hickman run, that I commented on this blog, spent a year setting everything up, and then the writer left the project so that the whole thing was entirely pointless and meaningless), and more a deeper, more general problem of formats and the seriality of these stories.
There are some very simple, hard facts. When I was personally reading US comics, in the early 90s, stories were 24 pages long. In Italy we had different formats, because one single issue had 72 pages and contained three stories. This gave some space for those stories to “breathe,” some cycles could be compacted together and it was also easier to follow the whole family of comics rather than the single story/issue. Still, even if you consider the original format, and make a direct comparison between the golden age of pre 1970/80, then the 90s, and then the 00s(*), the very first thing you’d notice is that objective average reading time has been halved for a single issue. I’ve read a while ago the beginning of Kirby’s 4th World on DC comics and how the story would often progress through text boxes working as summaries. Big battles could be over in one small panel. There simply was TONS more text on a page. The style of telling stories entirely different. Of course the more modern styles are far more effective than those golden age stories that are very naive and formulaic, but staying on the objective, the simple reading time is much shorter, even for me, spending time just observing the art, not just reading and turning pages.
(*) (the Bendis Spider-Man run in Ultimate is meaningful precisely because it can set a modern standard, and comics storytelling has not moved one inch since then, there has been literally zero evolution in the last 26 years, when it comes to comics)
On top of that, pages have been cut. If the standard, back then, was 24 pages, now the average is 20. Four less pages might not feel significant, but they are when you add up all these factors. The storytelling style now stays with the characters longer, because it gets closer and closer to movie screenplays. Battles are meticulously narrated, every single punch and counter move. Dialogues get witty, characterization needs to deepen. This is all stuff that you expect demanding MORE DETAIL. More realism. Stronger characters with deeper motivations, that you want to dig into. And then side characters and side plots to let the story grow. And how the hell can you reconcile this tendency, when pages are cut and reading time halved? How do you reconcile the purpose of comics sold on paper, versus movies you go see in a cinema?
It’s actually quite simple: the foundational trait of comics is that THEY ARE CHEAP TO MAKE. You just need a writer and someone who can draw. Paper & ink. Colors optional. It’s utterly basic. The production of comics is a whole different deal, but it doesn’t quite change the formula. Comics are simple, whereas movies are big and complex, especially super-hero blockbusters. Within this objective scenario you’d expect comics being the playground for all sort of crazy experimentation. Because you can actually go wild, take big swings, risks. It’s just the domain of pure ideas. And yet, in practice, comics on paper just became pale reflections informed by movies. Because you want to sell comics to that large public that went to see the movie, and now needs a short connection to more of the same, familiar, but in comics format. Without baggage of complex continuity and no clear starting point.
It should be glaringly obvious that it doesn’t work. A two-three hour movie is a whole lot of space to cover a story, present a load of characters and develop a plot. Because movies compress information through the use of image and sound. Books, and then comics, are obviously much slower.
In general we all understand that derivative products are usually worse than whatever they are derived from. If you have a book, then make a movie based on that book, the the movie is likely worse. But when the opposite happen, and you have an original movie that someone turns into a novelized version, the book form is usually crap. Bunch of similar observation you can see in the Japanese market, where everything comes from something else: manga into anime, but also visual novels into anime, anime into games, games into manga. You have the largest amount of cross pollution, but the rule generally stands: the original product is usually the better. But why? Usually it’s because it feels more complete. When you adapt a book into a movie, you select and compress, whereas the book indulges with added, expanded content. When the reverse happens, depth is rarely added. The original form is almost always the expanded, complete one.
This is precisely what broke with comics and movie adaptations. If a comic book is 20 pages with super-short reading time, and movie-like screenplay, released monthly, then what you buy and sit down 3 minutes to read feel LESS than a movie trailer. It’s a tiny crumb of story you have to wait a whole month to see where it goes, if it ever goes somewhere. As the original format for a story that might be turned into a movie, it becomes just a vague suggestion, that the movie will expand and elaborate into something far more impactful and effective. It’s the movie that will give the story enough space to shine. Whereas the comics chokes it down. No story, no matter how good and powerful it is, makes a lasting impact if you just sit down for two minutes and then it’s over. It just doesn’t have time. It doesn’t have space. This practical thing makes actual comics into derivative products, sucking away all the qualities they had.
You can see obvious proofs of this everywhere. People don’t buy the monthly issues, now they buy collections. They are cheaper and can contain complete story cycles. The problem of short reading time is solved! Yeah, but this too had very negative consequences. Now every title gets constantly rebooted every 6-12 months. Because all those stories are now built precisely to be collected into volumes. Artistic teams leave for every cycle and everything becomes utterly formulaic. Stories, side stories and characters don’t grow organically, but as short-lived deadlines that go nowhere. They don’t build on anything because the continuity that made US comics “more”, now becomes a barrier for new readers. While every point is a starting point, no point ever go anywhere else now. It’s all pointless navelgazing and sitting on the same spot. Comics merely languish between inertia and short lived hype.
TV series in general are in a very similar spot. I didn’t fully embrace LOST, at the time (some sparse commentary I should have written, on the mirror blog), the first series seemed to me just mimicry of the Japanese manga “Battle Royale” (and then, Hunger Games). Sending a bunch of people into a stressful situation. Single episode focused on giving a character personality, through flashbacks, then death that feels meaningful because of that convenient character development that was just shown. Mystery for the sake of mystery and cliffhangers. Polar bears? Because of dissonance with tropical island, and so on. So I gave up almost immediately. But then I was caught, later than broadcasted, with season 2 and deepening of that mystery. The underground installations, signals and so on. It was starting to build its mystery rather than a macguffin. It was still extremely incoherent and rambling, but there was some genuine sense of wonder. The last two seasons I followed closely as they got broadcasted and even timed myself some off-sync subtitles in order to watch some episodes just after they aired (again, Italy).
Thing is, seasons where meaningful, had more than 6 or 10 episodes, and you had something to look forward that you could somewhat rely upon. And then there was also Battlestar Galactica going on at the same time. We were treated quite well. Nowadays it seems the best that comes out of TV production is… Severance.
I don’t usually watch… things. In the sense I don’t watch movies, don’t watch TV series, don’t watch anime (and I haven’t watched a movie in several years, I haven’t seen ANY Marvel movie outside of the first Iron Man, and that was because I was at a friend’s house). But I do all these things in localized bursts, once every several years. So a year or two ago (can’t even remember) I made me a little chronological list of things I wanted to catch up, because of several reasons:
But because I am myself, I didn’t start there. I started somewhere else, that was meant to be a kind of warming up, starting from the completely crap with the idea that what I was going to watch would only get better. So I started from… Manifest.
I mention this because I expected the worst from it, and instead it’s the one that left me with mostly positive impressions. The whole premise is ridiculous, the whole plot is silly, and yet it manages to work out BETTER than even LOST conclusion, while also being somewhat related to it (by the way, LOST for me is now meaningful only as the first act of something that then develops into The Leftovers and then Watchmen, the tv series, they are all the same line for me and necessary as a whole). For the last two seasons I think Manifest changed network, and while it affected both quality and budget, it also meant it aimed straight to the end with no distractions. To the point the two seasons feel somewhat rushed, but at least you get the story wrapped up. And in the end I enjoyed it.
Then, following my neat list, I continued to what I perceived was very well received, a distinct jump up in quality coming from Manifest, and that instead revealed to be utter shit: Yellowjackets, From, Severance.
In between, there was cool stuff. The very best is probably White Lotus. Writing and execution top level. Three very different seasons. Just excellence. The first episode of Succession is 10/10 masterpiece. Best thing ever. Season 1 continues strong, but falls into utter crap with the last episode. Season 2 starts from the exact same crap but improves, but the thing is that season 2 to 4, where it ends, are entirely superfluous. It’s the exact same pattern that repeats over and over and over. It’s still awesome to watch because of quality of execution that always stays far above average, but it literally has nothing to say that wasn’t already obvious. And it becomes predictable until the very end (ending included). The only actual quality I see is that the writers really succeed at making you personally hate EVERY character, without exception. No one gets out alive saving face, they are all utter shit and disgusting. And this was very obviously intended. So it hits its goal. But again, there is no real story, just a show that continues despite having nothing to say. It just eloquently repeats itself.
Dark Winds was also good, pondered for a moment whether to pick up the novels, but that’s about it. It’s traditional TV done quite well, but it’s not incredible. Then I moved to FROM, and this broke my plan, because I watched all three seasons, then moved to Severance to watch the two seasons that were available, and then I had enough and gave up.
More or less both FROM and Severance broke me, because they were the two most hyped, and they ended up being the two most crap. Especially Severance, since I didn’t have that many expectations about FROM.
But here we return to the theme here of how you tell a story broken into parts. And how, as it happened with comics, some recipe that worked for decades can actually break down at a fundamental level. Because that’s what I think happened with TV series and this Netflix and similar takeover. It’s the same as when I watched The OA, something with immense ambition but that would obviously trip on itself, because it has no ground under it.
From is this series made in the same style of LOST, and so with this whole mythology that gets extremely diluted across seasons. Contrary to LOST, From only comes in seasons of 10 episodes, and now it’s been two years since the last (I’ve just realized I haven’t watched the fourth series, since it came out recently, nor I had any idea it was broadcasted, go figure). The result is that the bullshitting is neither convincing, nor compelling. Even with LOST, especially at the beginning, the reaction was skepticism. That it had something more to tell, other than pure exploitation of characters’ deaths & woes, and mystery for the sake of it. Bullshit that gets made as you go without any coherence or further purpose. And yet LOST, in the end, got the drive, to move on and try to be more. FROM hangs on the same threshold, the single episode lives on the premises of strong character drama and the mystery is all a string of bullshit. But is there more? Is it driving toward something coherent? Watching this show requires that you take it somewhat seriously, to engage with that mystery, but what are the premises that should buy my trust? There are absolutely NONE. These ten episodes for each season build absolutely nothing and lead nowhere. The plot barely moves on, and when it does it’s not even coherent season to season. These short seasons feel too fragmentary to me, seen all together. And then you’re supposed to archive it all in your memory, wait a couple of years, and then resume it for another minuscule step forward into this thing that may have or not something worthwhile to tell. The journey IS NOT more important than the destination, because the journey sucks already.
And on top of this you have Severance. Another giant, compelling mystery. Great execution. 9 episodes season 1, 10 season 2. But you get to wait THREE years in between. The plot completely dies at episode 3 of the first season. Everything else? It’s an elaborate side quest that repeats that one idea in a slightly altered format. Over and over. No one knows when they’ll decide to show the third season. Should anyone even care? How do you expect to tell a story in this format? Three years of nothing, for a story that already goes nowhere seems like a self-conscious parody of itself. The first season ends on one mother of all cliffhangers. I saw season two right away, but I was already certain of how it was solved. Because of how it was “worded.” It was shown to make you believe everything was about to chance. Then season 2 starts and you realize nothing has changed. It will then take several episodes to show you precisely why nothing changed despite you expected the opposite. And then? Two more side quests rather than one. We’re generous. Either you swallow all this bullshit with your eyes closed and no questions asked, or you’re like me and watching this series is an exercise in frustration. Maybe the story will go somewhere, one day, it will work out as a whole. But everything they’ve actually shown, up to this point, is that it’s not. And that the journey SUCKS. Despite it’s a great execution and style. The triumph of form over substance. It’s like a giant cake that looks delicious, and yet has no taste. A fraud.
(More recently, all attention was on Pluribus, that also gets a concept that is intriguing. I didn’t watch it, but read how response cooled to it, episode after episode. The season ended without any resolution or movement, and they don’t seem to give any shit about releasing season 2 in a reasonable timeframe. No thanks. I’m glad I didn’t take that bait.)
Whatever the ultimate judgment, whenever, if these series get to see a conclusion, it’s the shape of these stories that objectively just doesn’t work. It doesn’t matter how popular they are, because this only speaks of the quality of everything else. The point here is that the format isn’t in service of this story. It’s not telling this story in the best way available. Having three years between short series means that no one truly cares, no one truly follows, and there are going to be harrowing production shifts. In three years everything changes. Not just the actors themselves, but it’s just impossible to maintain a coherence within a writing group. It’s just downright impossible to tell a story that will feel homogeneous.
You can observe and say the same when it comes to book series. Where we have one author, so only that single unity of change. Yet series evolve, because the writers get older. It made sense, maybe, for Erikson to plan and propose a 10 book series. Not because he could guarantee quality all the way, but because he could keep up the production. Could he have taken more time to hone and perfect it? Sure, it would have almost surely derailed (and that’s also why I’m doubtful about where the prequel trilogy goes, now). Ten book, ten years as a very bare, almost super-human minimum. But who the fuck can realistically a plan a project that takes longer than ten years (see Danielewski’s “The Familiar”, as an example)? How do you expect keeping it uniform? How do you even expect to survive it with some certainty? How do you expect it’s successful enough to the very end, so that it won’t get cut? You can be ambitious, but you need be pragmatic. Brandon Sanderson has already significantly backpedaled on his own grand multi-volume project. Because it made no practical sense. And even the Stormlight 10 book got split in two halves, of 5 books, whose first part was recently concluded, long, LONG after it was originally planned, and didn’t even end up so well received. All these plans seem built to be shattered. Not because they can’t be honestly good, but because NO ONE can guarantee the homogeneity to tell the story. These things don’t exist in a vacuum.
So we add all of this together. Comics cannot survive if they way of telling a story is a lightweight read of 20 pages once a month, written by a team that gets regularly swapped every 6 or 12 months. The story has no space to develop, no matter how good you are to write or draw it. These comics became abstract, quick “trailers” to prop up ideas for movies, where there’s enough space to make a compelling story. The same if you want to write a sci-fi story that takes its time and wants to be patient. You can’t release it in breadcrumbs of 180 pages where you’re done a moment after picking up the book, leaving you with nothing at all, and somewhat all tenuously relying on blind faith on the writer to deliver something that is more rather than less, some years into the future. And so the TV series that get shorter and shorter, but whose mystery devices get stretched across DECADES, and it all falls apart because they just keep baiting you so you’ll return, and never deliver anything of value.
Thankfully we have plenty of great stuff, you just have to look back. I recently made that post about Twin Peaks, but that’s a good example of how you layer a mystery in a meaningful way. It’s not like we chasing chimeras. We have the good stuff, we all know what the good stuff is. The problem of modernity, putting writing quality aside, is that formats just aren’t working anymore. You cannot tell good stories like that, no matter the writing quality and even execution. Stories need time and space to grow organically, and they also need to stay homogeneous as much as possible. This imposes focus. You cannot just skip around and return years later. You cannot read a book of 1000 pages, one page every three weeks. The format that worked perfectly well for White Lotus, where each season was a self-contained and compact story, is a complete failure for something like Severance, if not to reveal the show as a giant fraud. That is all cold showmanship without a care within. That it has nothing to show, and so merely conjures excuses for you. A nothingburger show that could go on forever by simply repeating its pattern.
The practical solution to all this is very predictable because it will be inertia. We know “the public” asks for short series. Best if they are over in a single season. Same as in comics everyone just buys the volume collections with full story arcs. My point is that this inertia is self-defeating, not the solution. It doesn’t solve the problem, and doesn’t deliver better stories. It just lowers the bar so that modest stories can fit the weak format. But the result of this process is only less attention, less appeal, less ambition. We are aiming to the ground, and then dig lower. It’s a general cultural collapse that only matches the general political collapse. Things only get worse from here.
P.S.
Go figure the main reason why I started writing this, was mainly to comment another short story by Greg Egan “Eugene.” Now I realize I haven’t even mentioned it. Brief note then. I haven’t read anything in the last couple of months. I’m 200 pages into The Instructions by Adam Levin, but then didn’t continue because I started reading some books on math and Python programming. Not because I have to write any actual code, but just because I felt like it. But it also means that when this happens it replaces my normal narrative book reading. Then, to catch up, rather than going back to The Instructions, I resumed my reading of Greg Egan short stories collection “Axiomatic”, and the following story after the one I already commented a while ago is “Eugene”, that also is a sort of time travel story. The real core of this story is more a venomous political satire, so that’s where its merits are, but in the last two pages it slips in a plot twists that makes it in yet another clever time travel story. So this is another practical example of how you can use these ideas consistently and without all the bullshitting. In this case the immediate reading left me quite baffled because I didn’t quite understand what happened. This is going to be spoiler on, of course, but there’s not really more to a 20 page story with a final plot twist.
Leaving the political commentary aside, that again is the point, this is the story of a couple, they win lot of money, and consider whether or not using that money to manipulate the genes of their child. Since it becomes a concrete possibility. They initially are against the idea, by posing the very common counter-arguments you can imagine, but they get eventually persuaded. Any control you give back to nature and chance is not control you gain, but freedom you lose. Physical and mental constraints that you are subject to and can’t avoid. Whereas gene manipulation would open all sort of potential, and so would deliver real freedom. More than this, in a world that is ravaged by destruction on various levels, the unlocked potential of this artificial son is to became a genius so advanced, that he could deliver genuine solutions to humanity. So why would you sabotage it? In the end the couple gets persuaded and agrees to this project. Yet, this potential son shows up on a TV screen, and delivers this speech:
When I first read it I felt like I was missing something, or that there was going to be something added to it, later. But that’s the whole of the story. Now I think I have a better grasp, even if when it comes to the economy of the story it feels like way too much is left out of the page… I think the idea here is that in order to study them, the genes were inserted in some kind of simulation. The, rather giant, leap of faith (and judgement) is within “aspects of a possible future are revealed.” My idea is that the simulation simulates this genius mind they were going to create, and gave it enough leverage to develop itself, within this artificial simulation. Within the scope of what is possible, much as recent AI stories, from the real world, this simulated genius was able to hack the simulation itself and control it. Essentially by simulating this mind they lost control of it. Not written here is that the simulated mind ends up erasing itself by simply erasing the money the couple had, so stopping the process. I think it’s clever beside a slight suspension of disbelief, because it’s an inner type of time travel that doesn’t violate the boundary of the world. The simulated future world is mere calculation within a computer, yet it can develop far enough to take control of itself, then exit its own “cage”, as the simulation, and being able to understand current technology, it can hack it so to sabotage the whole process. It controls everything from the inside, and in a way that cannot even be detected, because it happens within the premise that this inner world can be insulated.
My point, again, is that this is a neat time travel story where time travel barely appears for half a page and is not the point. Yet it’s fully consistent and clever. Why then should I read SEVEN books, built on the premise of time travel, where I cannot even be sure the author cares enough to make it consistent? Greg Egan likely told a better story, with deeper themes, and it took him 20 pages.
