The Puget News

James Tiptree, Jr. was the pen name of famed American science fiction writer, Alice Sheldon, a writer most famous for exploring the perceived differences between male and female authorship and who committed suicide in 1987.

I recently picked up The James Tiptree Award Anthology 2,” a collection of work intended “explore and expand our notion of gender” since I was intrigued by what I had read about the life of James Tiptree, Jr. I wanted to spend some time thinking through the notions that he spent his life confronting; after all, it’s not every man that looks back at their childhood as a little girl (and alternatively remembering it as a little boy for the purposes of epistolary exchange).

The opening essay in the book is by a woman named Julie Phillips, a writer who has spent the last 9 years working on “James Tiptree Jr.: A Life of Alice Sheldon.” The essay sets a good baseline for understanding the work in the anthology and so it’s easy to understand why the editors would choose to lead with it. It’s essentially a rediscovery of the author via correspondence and personal mementos.

James Tiptree, Jr. corresponded with famous authors, notably Joanna Russ, acclaimed feminist and science fiction writer. In reaction to a piece of fan-mail from Tiptree, Russ told him off for making a chauvinist remark. Tiptree responded so apologetically that Russ asked him if he were gay. He assured her that he was not but claimed it would be much easier if he were. A correspondence between them began. What’s interesting is that it appears Russ intended to learn a bit about male culture from Tiptree (initial questions were about whether men found vampires sexy and why) while Tiptree responded to these questions as if reliving her childhood, this time as a boy. I’m sure this led to some interesting exchanges.

Tiptree spent his life exploring gender issues in fiction, a field in which he felt being male lent a voice that being female had somehow denied him:

I find, in all the writings of women, a strange muffled quality, as if the living word, as it left the lips, had been hastily suppressed and another substituted, one which would conform to some pattern imposed from without. […] I am trying, from the living urge of my own life, to force open channels of communication so far mostly closed. […] To press out naked into the dark spaces of life is perhaps to build a small part of the path along which others like myself wish to travel. [9]

And so, to kick off this anthology, we learn about a person who chose a separate destiny for herself in the hope of helping others who might come after her. What a fitting tribute it is then to have an annual literary award for those that keep pushing. I’m eager to see what the rest of the book brings.

This slim volume on the history of operating system development, written in 1999, is way more entertaining than the subject would seem to indicate. Using vivid metaphor, Neal compares each of the major OSes to car dealerships selling and marketing the following vehicles:

Microsoft Windows 95 = station wagon
Microsoft NT = hulking off-road vehicle for industrial users
Apple = European sedan
BeOS = Batmobile
Linux = free tanks

One of the central questions of the book is whether there is a future in the OS business for the major non-free providers. Since the book’s publication, we’ve learned the answer for at least one of them - apparently selling and marketing Batmobiles ended up being too much of a niche market for BeOS…

The far more interesting question is about the industry Goliath, Microsoft. Can it be that Microsoft has over-defended their desktop dominance when they should be concentrating on complex application development (which they are also really good at)? Is Microsoft doomed to suffer a new flavor of Apple’s classic blunder? Recall that Apple used to be the largest OS maker in the world. In hindsight, they handed the market to Microsoft by refusing to sacrifice their hardware division. Microsoft worked solely on the higher-margin software that could operate across many more hardware platforms and ended up commoditizing what had been a niche industry.

Fast-forward to today, Microsoft currently enjoys a market-dominating share of the OS marketplace. Will they lose out to a new breed of competitor while protecting their dominant position at all costs? Will they forget to jump when the time comes? While they protect their competitive moat from competitors, their competitors are developing some pretty big catapults. A whole army of next generation dev-shops are creating efficient (and free) OSes and new waves of applications that are OS-agnostic, accomplish much of the same work as Microsoft’s applications and cost much less money (or come for free).

Who wants to be in the OS industry anyways?

Applications create possibilities for millions of credulous users, whereas OSes impose limitations on thousands of grumpy coders, and so OS-makers will forever be on the shit-list of anyone who counts for anything in the high tech world.

Another interesting analogy of the ever-competitive OS landscape is the following:

In your high school geology class you probably were taught that all life on earth exists in a paper-thin shell called the biosphere, which is trapped beneath thousands of miles of dead rock underfoot, and cold dead radioactive empty space above. Companies that sell OSes exist in a sort of technosphere. Underneath is technology that has already become free. Above is technology that has yet to be developed, or that os too crazy and speculative to be productized just yet. Like the earth’s biosphere, the technosphere is very thin compared to what is above and what is below.”

While certain of the facts of this book are dated (Apple’s new OS X can access the underlying command line, directly in contradiction to certain points about abstraction which Neal was making) it is the recurring cyclical themes that drive the essay and yield real food for thought. We learn about Americans’ ingrained love of mediated experiences, the need for UI, and that the current complexities of life demand levels of abstraction never before necessary. The questions become what interfaces do we allow ourselves and what do we give up in the process of this abstraction?

This is a wonderfully entertaining book for any non-coder trying to get a basic understanding of general OS concepts and history or any coder trying to understand the generalities of the marketplace in which these OSes exist. It’s an entertaining middle ground ripe for debate.

Murakami’s characters are nearly always animated by intensely personal searches for their own versions of truth. This is what makes them so striking and so odd to follow as a reader. They move in straight-lines, fatalistically drawn towards strange climaxes which delight and occasionally, to be honest, befuddle even sophisticated readers. “Kafka on the Shore” is vintage Murakami. While I would not place it on the same high pedestal I have for the ambitious “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle” or the taut “Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World,” this is a book well worth reading if you are fan of his other speculative works.

In a very broad sense, “Kafka on the Shore” is structured similarly to “Hard-Boiled Wonderland” in that there are two main characters and plots converging throughout. The main character is a teenage runaway who has re-named himself Kafka Tamura. The reader is never told what Kafka’s original name might have been, but we initially meet him as he has an internal dialogue with a split personality named “Crow.” Crow says the following about Kafka’s plans to run away on his fifteenth birthday:

And you really will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm. No matter how metaphysical or symbolic it might be, make no mistake about it: it will cut through flesh like a thousand razor blades. People will bleed there, and you will bleed too. Hot, red blood. You’ll catch that blood in your hands, your own blood and the blood of others.

And once the storm is over you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain, when you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm is all about.

The other character driving the plot is an older man named Nakata, whose job is to find lost cats for people. We find that Nakata suffered a strange accident during World War II. After collapsing on a school field trip and reawakening weeks later, Nakata had lost much of his mental faculties but gained the ability to speak with cats. Nakata is on a bit of a quest to rediscover that part of him which was lost on that odd day. He becomes thrust into the main plot by an action he is forced to take when the life of a cat he has been searching for is threatened. This action becomes a driving force for self re-discovery.

As in other Murakami works, these two plots require the outside assistance of a panoply of strange and bizarre characters and forces. The interactions are grossly entertaining, absorbing and heaped in quirky symbolism and metaphor. I’d strongly recommend this book to people who are already fans of Murakami - you’ll get what you’re looking for. If you’re just getting your first taste, however, I’d instead recommend “Hard-Boiled Wonderland” as an appetizer. It’s a bit more accessible and has a less strained resolution.