Executive Summary: Cheap Complex Devices is of possible interest to e-literature readers, where e=electronic OR where e=experimental. And tragically funny.
Quotation: "Assembling itself into a narrative, the subject of Bees is Bees itself, a consciousness coming into being."
Obvious question: Does Bees have anything to do with the ARG I Love Bees? Answer1: Clearly not, since the novel preceded the game by several years. Answer2: Only in the sense that both of them use facts about actual bees as imaginative points of departure [1]. [Footnote numbers in square brackets.] (Item numbers in parentheses.)
You may know John Sundman as a legendary technical writer, or a blogger at wetmachine, or the guy who wrote so candidly about selling his self-published books directly to readers at Defcon. If you are attending this year’s SXSW you can hear more from him on the self-publishing panel. I now put all that knowledge aside and consider his novel CCD as it asks the reader to consider it.
The puzzle began when I tried to find the book on Amazon. Sundman’s commitment to his art extends to his middle name: each of his novels was published using a different one (appropriate to its content), which meant that I couldn’t click on any occurrence of his name and see his other works. However, a search on "john sundman mind over matter" led to all three of his currently extant books. Any female larva may become queen; this posting is one larva’s reaction to Sundman’s Cheap Complex Devices – Mind Over Matter Volume Red, hereinafter CCD [2].
The artefact/artifact CCD consists of a novel, preceded by an introduction to the novel, preceded by an introduction to CCD as a whole, preceded by a raft of epigraphs and dedications. On page 9.000023 the introduction-to-the-novel suggests stopping to read the novel at that point, before the reader’s mind has been contaminated by the information contained on pages 9.999999967 to 26.0000083 [3], and then returning to page 9.000023 to finish reading the introduction-to-the-novel. Since I have the oulipian merit badge (junior class), of course I played^H^H^H^H^H^H followed this direction.
Rather than bore all of you, I will eventually transmit my detailed list of reader-reactions [4] to John personally. Instead, here is a high level reaction in a techwriterish form that – if it doesn’t completely avoid spoilers – casts them in a form such that they aren’t actually spoilers unless and until you’ve read the book yourself.
[here goes: OL]
(1) CCD contains sentences of terrible beauty that are also terribly funny [5].
(2) Huge chunks of it are structurally flawless.
(3) From the evidence of its language, Bees takes place in a slightly altered present. As a reader of science fiction, I admired the way the changes from my own reality became apparent. But I hesitate to encapsulate CCD within science fiction, since I think the alterations are subtle enough that one could read this for entertainment without bothering about them. Except see (6).
(4) The first page (first epigraph) begins to be explained on page 53.111111. From that point, my foremost ongoing question, as noted in my reading diary and cross-referenced with the dedication, came to be, "Is Amadou real?" Eventually I decided that Amadou was either real (from “reality”) or (because of the way truth emerges in fiction) realer-than-real.
(5) I can describe my issues with the ending of the novel in two ways:
(a) It goes off the rails.
(b) The writer (whom I am explicitly not identifying) switched from writing with his head to writing with his heart.
Re (b), perhaps it’s fairer to say that even though the head was still active, the heart took over. And although the heart sections moved and challenged me, I missed the crystalline perfection of the head-created sections. I had previously mentioned (at the end of this posting) that this review would actually be more about me than about the novel; wasn't kidding.
(6) I find myself in total agreement with the narrator when he writes on page 50.000963: “Pay attention.” [6]
(7) Once I finished the "novel", I returned to the "introduction". Page 30.000239 is the heart of a clever attack upon (takedown of?) another of Sundman’s own Mind Over Matter novels. Seemingly they’re all related in some yet-to-be-discovered (by me) fashion. They tell me that once you’ve experienced that uncut crystalline structure, it sets up a craving... "Not for me, they’re for a friend."
[/OL]
A novel that – (I don’t want to use the word "makes" but it’s the most applicable one here). This novel makes its reader take a stand, forced me to decide. Repeatedly. It’s far more than the stunt its introduction suggests it is. Thank you, John.
Footnotes:
[1] Note the way we USians celebrate most fervently that which is lost; as just one example, we began to romanticise "the frontier" (in 1902, by rhapsodizing over Owen Wister’s The Virginian) when all the land stolen from the First Nations had already been divided up and given out and the actual frontier was gone. Similarly, these imaginative celebrations of bees have appeared just as it has become clear the extent to which actual bees are on the ropes. Clearly this is another essay poking its way in here: down, Fang!
[2] Of the three, CCD is the one most worth purchasing in hard cover, because of the pleasures of the frequent changes in typography and the gonzo page numbering scheme, but the power of the text also comes through in the PDF. I enjoyed the many typographical games, with one notable exception: the extensive use of "ct" ligatures in the first section was arch, precious, and unsuited to the content (in Dorothy Sayers’ phrase, "clean out of the period"): each one hit me in the eye like a tiny fist. On the other hand, the joy of self-publishing is that one can do what one wishes, and most of the offbeat things this author has done are very engaging indeed. In early 00speak: whatevs.
Update from John: "...the ligatures were in homage to Donald Knuth, author of "The Art of Computer Programming"-- and father of LaTeX (or however you spell it). The book is set in a faux-Knuth typeface, and Knuth is overly fond of ligatures -- which drives many of his readers batty. Anyway, that's a pretty recerche allusion, but I thought you should know what I was trying to get at." Thank you John, and regardless of the way Knuth's lectures at MIT changed my life, I am definitely one of the readers driven "batty".
[3] Floating point errors are a key plot point, not to say theme.
[4] The first item in the list is: "p. 27: For personal reasons, I do not find jokes about Paavo Nurmi funny." See, you’re not missing much by not reading the rest of them.
Thrillingly, this novel spells “straitjacket” correctly. If there were bated breath in it, likely that term would also be correctly used and spelled. Read it now, people, before language morphs so much further that all CCD’s nuances become little more than static (QRN) and interference (QRM).
[5] In both senses of terrible, (a) "exceptionally" and (b) "catastrophically". Also, as I’ve suggested in my rant about technical writing, some of Sundman’s humor and sarcasm is most easily appreciated by readers who have themselves worked for a computer company. Or who have at least read Tracy the Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine. But appreciation of most of it requires no more than a heart and a brain.
[6] Thereby echoing Simone Weil, David Foster Wallace, and several other writers I consider spiritual teachers.
Final note: I have excerpted the preceding opinions in my Amazon review of CCD. They don't let you use italics or footnotes or links, which is why I so very seldom review there.
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