Month: November 2001

If you’re relatively new to this whole Internet thing, you may not remember the olden days when there was no such thing as Internet Explorer. Web browsers started out as simple things (ah, good old NCSA Mosaic!), used by researchers for publishing papers and documents. Then came Netscape, and an increase in popular and recreational usage of the Web. Around 1995, Microsoft decided they wanted a piece of the pie (it was only later they decided they would like to have the whole pie), and out popped Internet Explorer.

Now, in 2001, the Internet is one of the main reasons people have a computer at home. Your web browser is now much, much more than a simple document reader: it’s your gateway to the on-line world. Chances are, it’s the first thing you start up when you switch on PC, and it’s the last thing you shut down. It’s a newspaper, a TV, a radio, a telephone, a shopping centre, a village hall. There are few people who would dispute that it’s a communications revolution.

And more likely than not, your gateway to this revolution is Internet Explorer. But why?

Two reasons. First of all, Microsoft fought a hard battle to make Internet Explorer the default browser for anyone using any form of Windows. Because most people use a Windows PC (sorry, Mac fans), and have a natural reluctance to change default options, Microsoft was going to win that battle from the start. (Although recent court actions in the US have proved this to be an illegal business tactic, this conclusion is about five years too late for it to matter.) But secondly, Internet Explorer is a very good product! It had features that people wanted, and after version 5 it was much faster at displaying web pages than Netscape was. As we all know, on the Internet speed matters.

But is there anything even better out there? For me, the answer is yes, and the product is Opera.

I say “for me,” because of the way I use the Web. My browsing habits include reading a lot of sites whose primary purpose is to serve up news, opinion or information in text format. I’m out to absorb as much information as I can, as quickly as possible. I don’t care about pretty logos or snazzy animations. Just plug me into the wire and feed me from the source!

I first tried Opera earlier this year, when I was revamping my own web site. I was trying the page designs in the various versions of Internet Explorer and Netscape. I’d just read an article about Opera, so I decided to try it out as well. After just a few hours of using version 5.11, though, I knew I had something special on my hands. So I kept on using it, and being pleasantly surprised by how good it was. And a few days later I was hooked completely. At work, I still use Internet Explorer (most of the projects I work on use IE as their sole target platform), but it seems awkward and slow now, just like Netscape did when I first switched to IE.

So here is the list of things that, in my opinion, make Opera a better product than IE (in reverse order):

5) Multiple Document Interface (MDI)

Michael Marshall Smith is the author of three novels, Only Forward, Spares and One of Us, which have assured him–in Britain, at least–the status of Hot New Author. This status is quite rightly deserved. Only Forward is a true masterpiece of modern fiction, weaving a unique blend of science fiction, psychological horror, fantasy, dark humour, and genuine literary charm. He has been a bit quiet of late, but this appears to be because he is taking more time than usual over his next book, The Straw Men. (Working title, currently due some in August 2002. Check www.michaelmarshallsmith.com for updates.)

Smith has an engaging narrative voice that draws you into his books like a snake charmer hypnotising a cobra. You’re led into a world that you know is strange, but because his characters are so convincing and sufficiently comfortable with their own reality, you go along with it, thinking, yeah, this is cool, this is interesting, and then suddenly–snap. The trapdoor shuts behind you and you can’t get out. The protagonist is on a nightmare ride, and you’re right there with him.

What you make it is Smith’s first story collection, and it brings together eighteen pieces from 1988 to 1998. The stories range from humorous (“Diet Hell”) to downright disturbing (“More Tomorrow”), with several excursions into tender and deeply touching (“The Man Who Drew Cats”, and “Always”). What they all have in common, though, is Smith’s confident narrative. Whether his protagonists are witty and urbane bachelors bemoaning their lot in life, or old men sipping their beers in their favourite bar and swapping tales of old times, they are always believable. You know these people. You see them every day. You live and go to work with them.

This is exactly what makes you uncomfortable when the world in these stories suddenly takes a turn for the worse (which it does in most cases). Rather than choosing the option of supernatural horror (although in “A Place To Stay” he does his own take on vampires), Smith stays firmly with the psychological. Inside the human mind lie terrors far more upsetting than the worst creature from the dark dimensions.

One of his recurring themes is the continual questioning of reality: has the world gone mad, or have I? As in his novels, Smith explores the possibilities of this question in several of these stories. “The Owner” and “The Fracture” follow the protagonists through their descent into insanity. In “Foreign Bodies”, like in all three of his novels, he examines his characters’ reaction to the revelation of truths so hideous they’ve kept them hidden from themselves.

Another common thread running through the stories is that of (romantic) relationships gone awry. Many of his characters have been through a psychological wringer, involving painful break-ups and the inability to find or keep hold of love. Smith’s sharp wit is at its finest when he lets his twenty-something single males rant about women, work and life in general; his tenderness and compassion shines through most when he talks about love. Here is a writer with a lot to say, and I have a lot of time to listen.

If this all seems a bit heavy and deep, well, it is. This isn’t an easy read. In places it is profoundly unsettling. The first story, “More tomorrow” built up a feeling of genuine dread in my stomach, and left me feeling shocked at its end. “Always”, the second-last story, produced a lump in my throat. It took me about a week to read through the whole collection, because I had to give some stories time to sink in before I was ready to read the next. Like strong drink, it doesn’t take much to intoxicate. Take too much too quickly, and you’ll feel like you’ve been kicked in the head.

There are inevitably a few weaker stories here as well. “Sorted” is blunt, and covers the same ground as “More Bitter Than Death” but with much less flair. “The Dark Land”, one of the earlier stories, is fairly perfunctory in terms of its plot, but is interesting in that it seems to lay a lot of the foundation upon which the novel One Of Us is built.

On balance, though, the good stories outnumber the bad, and the excellent outnumber the merely good. I can’t give the book anything other than a top rating, but I should warn that it will not be to everybody’s taste. To draw a somewhat inaccurate analogy, in terms of the experience it provides it is far more Blair Witch than Scream: deep discomfort rather than slash ‘n splatter. Read it and be impressed.

When Joe Haldeman won the Hugo award for his novel _Forever Peace_ in 1998, a lot of people were disappointed that the book wasn’t a sequel to his 1974 Hugo and Nebula award-winning classic, _The Forever War_. Both books have a similar thematic underpinning, though, and put across a strong anti-war message. As a Vietnam veteran, Haldeman is always at his best when he writes about his “core values”.

In _Forever Free_, he does return to the same characters he left behind in _The Forever War_: William Mandella and his wife Marygay. In _The Forever War_, the main characters are soldiers, fighting battles on distant worlds. Because of relativity, whenever they travel such interstellar distances, they also hop forward through time. Each time they return to Earth hundreds of years have passed, and they find society changed almost beyond recognition. Eventually, human society evolves into a group mind known as “Man”, and the war the soldiers had been fighting ends.

Between the two books, some twenty-odd years have now passed. Mandella and Marygay have settled down on the planet Middle Finger. They have a family, and live in a peaceful farming community. Life is hard (the planet spends most of its 6-year “year” in deep winter), but peaceful. Mandella and his fellow veterans, though, believe that Man (the group mind) is keeping the old humans around as a genetic backup for the human race, in case something goes wrong with Man as a species.

To Mandella, the society is stale. His life is stale. He doesn’t have confidence in the future of Man, and wants to do something about it. And if he can’t change the society itself, then he will escape from it. He and a group of other veterans come up with a plan to borrow an ancient spaceship, crank it up to relativistic speeds, and take a short-cut to the future. They want to come back in 40,000 years’ time to see how things will pan out.

So far, so reasonable. This is a fairly logical extension to the first book, and takes the ideas forward at a gentle pace. Haldeman sets up some interesting conflicts between Mandella and Marygay, who consider the society a dystopia, and their children, who think the opposite. The group mind of Man is initially willing to go along with the whole expedition idea, but puts up resistance later; this ultimately leads to a showdown in which the veterans are forced to steal the spaceship.

…And then it all goes a bit strange.

I don’t want to give too much away about the second half of the book, but it’s like Haldeman decided he’d had enough of the original plot, and threw it away in favour of something completely different. All of the interesting questions he sets up in the first half get dropped unanswered, and the emotional conflicts get rolled back to a previous state, as if they hadn’t happened at all. The characters are the same, but they’re in the middle of a bizarre and completely unexpected adventure. This new story doesn’t depend on the original characters in any way, and could have been set in any generic SF world–no need to place it in an established and well-loved environment. He introduces not one but _two_ dei ex machina, and then doesn’t do anything with them!

I’m baffled. It’s like a head-on collision between two different novels. The characters ultimately end up walking around in a bit of a daze.

What bothers me most is that Mandella and his fellow veterans to have no apparent stake in the outcome of the second part of the book. Why did Haldeman not choose characters upon whom the outcome would have a deeper (read: “any”) impact? I wanted to see the first part of the story brought to its conclusion!

I feel like this is a waste of a sequel, and I can’t help wondering if this book was more inspired by marketing forces than a genuine desire to explore the further story of William Mandella. Haldeman is a master writer, and he has written some of the best SF in the last quarter century. (In addition to his novel Hugos, he has also won numerous awards for his short fiction.) But although this book is unquestionably well written, I found the story terribly disappointing. Perhaps I had my hopes up too high.

_The Forever War_ is a hard act to follow. I wish Haldeman had left it to stand on its own.