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james_davis_nicoll) wrote2025-11-20 09:09 am
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scalziwhatever_feed) wrote2025-11-20 01:31 pm
I like where I live for most things, but one of the things I don’t love about it is that it is in a not great place for Internet access. I’m on a rural road where providers will not send cable or fiber, because it’s not profitable to do so. It’s always been an access desert: When I moved here in 2001, the only local provider of Internet ran at a speed of 9600 baud, which even for the turn of the century was appallingly slow. Then came satellite at a blistering 1.5mbps (provided there were no clouds), followed by DSL at 6Mbps for a decade and a half, which finally and grudgingly on the part of the DSL provider bumped up to 40Mbps. However, Brightspeed (my current DSL provider) has no intention of ever upgrading anything here, and the connection we do have has been getting progressively spottier.
But! Finally! Networks with 5G capability have finally begun to admit I can get signal at my address, and have offered home Internet via wireless to me. I had a couple of vendors to choose from and I went with Verizon, for no other reason than my phone is already on that network and I know it works here. I got their rectangular prism of a router a couple of days ago, and, after I moved it into Athena’s room, where my computer would not somehow confuse its ability to pick up a signal (this did happen), we were good to go.
And how is it? Good enough so far. The download speeds I get are wildly inconsistent — sometimes it’s at 20Mbps, sometimes it’s at 220Mbps — but most of the time it’s between 80Mbps and 120Mbps, which is twice to three times as fast as the DSL line. The upload speeds are a magnitude faster, too, which is nice. All for a cost that is a third less than my DSL package. Verizon doesn’t have bandwidth caps on the level of service I ordered (which honestly means that bandwidth caps of any sort are just excuses to charge more, not an issue of network capacity), so there aren’t going to be any particular cost surprises on that score. An average 80-120Mbps throughput is still far lower than one can get with cable or fiber (the church has 300Mbps via cable), but, from where I’m coming from in terms of speed, it’s a genuine and substantive bump up.
I’m going to keep the DSL for a month or two to get a bead on the quirks and capabilities of the 5G set-up, but if things continue as they have we’ll make that switchover. The only drawback for this is that we got the DSL as part of a package with our landline, and I am loath to give up that number; it’s still a point of contact for several things. I will have to figure out what to do with that.
In the meantime: Hey, do I feel faster to you?
— JS
file770_feed) wrote2025-11-20 02:42 amfile770_feed) wrote2025-11-20 12:29 amplaidder_tumblr_feed) wrote2025-11-19 07:44 pm
So…in Dorothy Sayers’s The Nine Tailors, which I have commented on a few times in these pages, there’s a cryptic note discovered early on which Wimsey says reminds him of some of “Uncle Lorne’s” visions in Sheridan Lefanu’s novel Wylder’s Hand. Never having read a Lefanu novel other than Carmilla, and looking to divert myself, I decided to read it. It does not shed that much light on The Nine Tailors. But since I’ve read it, I’m gonna write it up. I will try to avoid major spoilers.
First thing to know about Lefanu’s fiction is that it takes a kind of…elastic…approach to construction. There is a first person narrator, but he sort of fades in and out of the story, and 85% of what happens is stuff that he could never have witnessed, narrated in the third person. As far as I can tell the narrator’s main function is to introduce us to the main ‘supernatural’ elements of the plot, so that we can experience them from his freaked-out point of view.
Most of this story is about two landed families, the Brandons and the Wylders, who have both intermarried enough to be inextricable and feuded enough to be constantly at odds. An arranged marriage between the Brandon heiress Dorcas and the eponymous Mark Wylder is meant to end the mutual animosity and strengthen both families by reuniting them. But both of these families are kind of cursed, and so is Brandon Hall where most of this takes place; and things start going wrong pretty early on. Mark Wylder, for instance, doesn’t like Dorcas, beauty though she is; he’s a lot more interested in his cousin Rachel Lake, the loyal and long-suffering sister of Captain Stanley Lake, an outrageously self-involved ne'er-do-well who’s constantly scheming to better his condition and really not being that good at it. Knowing what a heel he is, Dorcas Brandon falls in love with him anyway. So now we have an arranged marriage that neither party wants but in which all the biggest landowners around have invested quite a bit. Add to this one Jos. Larkin, a lawyer who is a giant religious hypocrite as well as the biggest, most devious, meanest schemer of them all, and is determined to exploit every confidential Situation revealed to him for maximum personal gain, and you’ve got quite a lot of scope for intrigue.
The narrator, who is asked down to Brandon Hall by Mark Wylder partly because he’s a lawyer and Wylder has some suspicions about Larkin, is woken in the middle of the night by someone trying to get into bed with him. This apparition freaks the narrator right out, but leaves without doing him any kind of injury. The apparition identifies himself as the ghost of Uncle Lorne, one of the Brandon ancestors, and says that he can foretell misfortunes destined to befall the Brandons/Wylders. The narrator encounters him several times, indoors and outdoors, and is freaked out every time.
So what you have, for a long time, is a typical nineteenth century novel focused on marriage, property, and related shenanigans…and then every once in a while there’s a ghost encounter. It’s kind of jarring, especially because the materialist side of the plot is VERY materialist. Like, you REALLY have to care about property and inheritances and debt and electioneering to get through a lot of this. book. In addition to the ghost, there is a Mystery–because shortly before his marriage to Dorcas is scheduled to take place, Mark Wylder disappears. He keeps sending letters with directions about what to do with his money, etc., from different European locations. But he refuses to marry Dorcas, to return to England, or to provide anyone with a return address.
So, not to get into spoilers, here are my favorite things about Wylder’s Hand:
After a certain point, I did find it very compelling; but I also got frustrated with some of the side quests (especially the election stuff), and the legal shenanigans exhausted even me (and if you know me you know I have a high tolerance for legal shenanigans). So, not a five star recommendation here, but all in all I felt like it beguiled the time acceptably.
james_davis_nicoll) wrote2025-11-19 06:37 pmoyceter) wrote2025-11-19 02:45 pmfile770_feed) wrote2025-11-19 09:23 pmconuly) wrote2025-11-17 01:52 amscalziwhatever_feed) wrote2025-11-19 07:49 pm
If everyone had less than an hour to live, would your actions in those moments matter more or not at all? Author Holly Seddon explores this question in the Big Idea for her newest novel 59 Minutes, taking a closer look at whether people are capable of being kind and good up until their last breath. When the rules no longer apply, who would you choose to be?
HOLLY SEDDON:
The terrifying premise of 59 Minutes is that everyone in the UK receives an alert to say nuclear missiles are on their way, and the characters have a race against time to get to their loved ones to say goodbye. I’m very proud of this hook, I know it grabs people’s attention.
But the theme, the big idea, behind the hook is, How do people behave when all the usual rules no longer apply?
This has always interested me. It’s what draws us to shows like The Sopranos, where characters operate in a world that eschews the rules most of us live by, often running within the guard rails of a whole different set of rules. It’s why films like The Purge are so compelling.
But even if the rules go up in smoke, I have to believe, as a human trying to negotiate my way through this life, that most people are good and well-meaning.
So, in writing 59 Minutes, I was in a constant dialogue between that good and bad human impulse. The selfless and the selfish.
Because some people really would use their last minutes to do terrible things. A last hurrah. You only have to look at the boom in crimes that happened under the cover of darkness in the blacked out London of World War Two to know that. Muggings. Sexual assault. Even murder. The serial killer Gordon Cummins who murdered four women and attempted to murder two more over a six-day period in 1942.
But I have to believe that plenty of people, plenty more people, would have sacrificed their own safety to help other people. They always do.
When I first had the idea for 59 Minutes, and started to cautiously tell people the premise to gauge their reaction, I noticed the same thing happened repeatedly. Their eyes would glaze over, they’d clearly stop listening to me waffling on and then they’d snap back to attention and apologize. What they said next was always a variation on the same thing. “I’m sorry, I was just thinking what the hell I would do.”
I understood. That is the universality of the hook – every one of us if forced to confront extinction would have somewhere we wanted to be, some people with whom we wanted to spend those last minutes. But what if, like in the novel, it’s not that simple. What if missing children need help, do you stop and lose those minutes? What if you are forced to choose between your own safety, and the safety of someone you loved?
In writing this book and asking my readers to consider such existential questions, I couldn’t shy away from them myself. I’d like to think that, if not brave, I would at least be kind right up to the end. But we all like to think we’d be heroic, don’t we?
So what about you? What would you do if the usual rules of the world just no longer applied. How would you spend your final minutes?
59 Minutes: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s|Simon & Schuster
strangehorizons_feed) wrote2025-11-19 01:00 pm
Japan has an aging population. The median age is 49.5 years and the average life expectancy is 85, both about ten years older than the US average. These stats and numbers give rise to a very human dilemma: How do we, as a society, care for the elderly? Dementia 21 tackles that question in the form of an absurdist comedy manga that uses a blend of SF and horror to get its point across.
The main character (and one of the few consistent things in this off-the-wall series) is a young woman named Yukie Sakai who works as a care aide at an elder care company. Yukie is diligent, thoughtful, kind but always professional; she’s the type of care worker you’d want looking after your loved ones, or even yourself. Thanks to glowing customer feedback, Yukie is the top-rated employee at her company. This leads to her co-worker Ayase becoming jealous, and she in turn convinces their boss (whom Ayase is sleeping with) to give Yukie only the most dangerous/demanding clients. This is the framework to explain why Yukie ends up in one bizarre situation after another, but honestly you can forget about the setup pretty early on. There doesn’t need to be a reason for Yukie to end up in these wild scenarios; that’s just the job of an at-home care worker.
An early story, and one that maybe best exemplifies the themes of the series, has Yukie go to a home where three elderly ladies need care. As the client explains, his mother’s two sisters never married, and so his family took them all in. Yukie approaches the job with gusto, despite the challenge of having to do triple the work. On her second visit to the home, there are six elderly family members to care for (“My mother has three other sisters, you see …”[vol.1, p.22]). Yukie stays on top of things, only for the number of patients to double the next day, and the next. When Yukie calls the client to say it’s too much for her to care for thirty-plus old patients, he’s taken aback, saying there are only twelve old folks in his extended family. Yukie discovers that people have started abandoning their elderly family members at the house, expecting Yukie to care for them. The old folks are sanguine about their fate: “I only get in the way at home,” one of them says. “It’s better to be abandoned” (vol. 1, p. 23). Yukie rallies the people in the house, who now number in the hundreds, asking how they can stand to be thrown out like trash by their own families. Yukie’s words spark a flame of righteous anger in the assembled old folks, and they combine into one giant humanoid figure big enough to burst out of the house. The chapter ends with this newly forged giant shambling off with the collective intent of taking revenge on the families who had abandoned them (“We’ll show them the might of senior power!!” [vol. 1, p. 32]).
As outlandish as the dénouement is, this is one of the more down-to-earth stories in the series. I could spend hundreds of words recapping many of the high-concept ideas in Dementia 21. One story has Yukie dealing with a forgetful aging Ultraman proxy and keeping this massive superhero from destroying the city. One has her dealing with an elderly telepath with dementia: Every time the woman forgets a concept/person, her powerful abilities wipe it from existence. Another has Yukie trying to find a client in a foggy city, only to discover that aliens have turned Earth into a pachinko machine and the fog is from their cigarette smoke (that last one is from volume 2, in which some of the author’s ideas are a little less on-theme). There’s even a very Junji Ito-esque story with some mild body horror involving a high-tech pair of dentures.
Shintaro Kago’s main influence, though, is Katsuhiro Otomo. Otomo is best known for being the creator the sprawling manga epic Akira (1982-1990) and the landmark anime film based on it (1988). The similarities art-wise between the two creators is clear but doesn’t amount to a precise copy: There’s simply an eighties sensibility to Kago’s art, and like Otomo he balances the right mix of detail and minimalism to make the absurd seem almost mundane. Thematically, it’s clear that Kago takes a lot of cues from Otomo as well. While Otomo might be most widely known for Akira, in 1980 he created Domu: A Child’s Dream (1980-1981), a manga in which an elderly man and a young child living in the same apartment building use their psychic powers to wage war on one another. He also wrote the script to the 1991 anime film Roujin Z, in which an eighty-seven-year-old man’s robotic hospital bed turns into a giant mecha and kidnaps him in order to fulfill its prime directive of keeping him safe. The main character in Roujin Z is a young nurse in the same mold as Yukie, and the plot of Roujin Z could easily work as a chapter of Dementia 21.
Kago himself talks about his influences in an interview at the end of volume 1, but only just: It’s the type of interview where the questions are often longer than the answers, and most of Kago’s answers boil down to him declaring his desire to let the work speak for itself. While Kago clearly takes a lot of inspiration from the works of Otomo, the similarities between the two men’s works mostly show how the theme of elder care is something anime and manga have been dealing with for decades.
It is a toss-up in any given story whether the elderly characters will come off as plot devices or actual characters. The manga is hilarious and cuttingly insightful, but it is simultaneously juvenile, with jokes and humor that wouldn’t be out of place in Mad Magazine. Not every old man Yukie meets is a perv, but a lot of them are, and if off-color sex jokes put you off, then this might not be the series for you. The manga is at its best, though, when it shows that the elderly are no different from anyone else. My favorite story in the series involves a high-tech care home in which the elderly live in rooms the size and shape of small cargo containers. These box rooms have everything a person could need to live: toilet, shower, food, medical equipment. The boxes are then stacked on top of each other, creating towers that go higher than the clouds.
At first, it seems like this will be a story about automation and the dangers of outsourcing the job of looking after human beings to machines, but that’s not the case. Instead, it becomes a story about the society that the denizens of the boxes have formed amongst themselves. They use wires slung across the towers to trade goods and use the internet to communicate. They elect their own government, create a thriving black market, fall in love with each other, and form rivalries that escalate into people sending bombs to each other’s rooms. For all its outlandishness, the conflicts and machinations remind me a lot of the care home my Nan lives in, where securing a spot at the Friday three p.m. bridge game takes as much cunning and guile as a courtier trying to get ahead at seventeenth-century Versailles. It’s also a story that shows how, just because people might grow frail with age, they still remain people—with all the wants and needs that come with that.
Part of the manga’s humor hinges on a disdainful view of human nature. The characters are all mainly selfish and only concerned with themselves. Even Yukie, who often goes above and beyond for her clients, is shown to be doing so just to keep her top-rated spot at her company. There are other comics out there that have elderly main characters with a slightly kinder view of humanity—one of my favorites is BL Metamorphosis (2017-2020), a manga series in which a teen girl and an elderly woman form a friendship over their shared fandom of boys’ love (small point of disclosure: I work at the company that published BL Metamorphis but I did not work on the series). But Dementia 21 isn’t here to warm your heart: it’s to make you laugh and marvel at the absurdity of life.
Near the end of the series, Yukie changes sides: After being fired from her job, she is recruited by the government to help “reduce the surplus at the top of the population pyramid” (vol. 2, p. 244), which is exactly what it sounds like. The government has stealthily been making the country more hostile to old people in order to kill them off indirectly, by means as diverse as getting rid of elevators and escalators to including more mochi in meals to cause choking. Yukie is at first adamant that she would never take part in such a cruel system, but one panel later a pile of money changes her tune. This sets off all-out war between the generations, with various characters from previous stories coming back for the finale. But even after all that, there is no solution: Aging and the struggles that come with it are part of us indefinitely. Dementia 21 points out the absurdity of capitalism and social norms and bureaucracy, but also the hypocrisy of ageism: The lucky among us will get to grow old; to resent those who already are highlights humanity’s shortsightedness.
james_davis_nicoll) wrote2025-11-19 01:59 pm
oursin) wrote2025-11-19 03:52 pmWhat I read
Finished The Golden Notebook - had a few comments about Lessing and blokes and plus ca change and allotropes of excuses in yesterday's post.
Decompressed with a Dick Francis, Slay-Ride (1973), which is the one set in Norway - period at which The War, resistance, Quislings etc still hangs heavy over them - not a top specimen of his, I spotted Dodgy Person very early on (but maybe protag does not read thrillers....).
Then got a jump on the next volume in the Dance to the Music of Time reading group, Temporary Kings (#11), which is the one set at some kind of cultural conference in Venice.
Also the latest Literary Review.
On the go
Continuing to dip in to Some Men in London 1960-1967.
Was agreeably surprised by the arrival of my preordered Cat Sebastian (had forgotten it was due), After Hours at Dooryard Books, which is being v good so far.
Up next
Latest Slightly Foxed.
james_davis_nicoll) wrote2025-11-19 09:09 am
file770_feed) wrote2025-11-19 09:20 amfile770_feed) wrote2025-11-19 02:10 amscalziwhatever_feed) wrote2025-11-18 11:48 pmFor various reasons I was reminded that two years ago this week, I quit the former Twitter for good; I had been doing a slow draw down of my presence for most of 2023 but on November 16 I abandoned the place entirely, mostly decamping to Bluesky, with additional outposts at Threads and Mastodon. At my peak on Twitter I had 210,000 followers (down to about 180,000 when I pulled the plug), accrued through a dozen years of being on the service, so it was no small thing to go. But the other option was to stay and be complicit in the machinations of a fascist asshole who was actively turning the place into a cesspool. Off I went.
Two years on, I’m happy to say that I don’t regret leaving. One, and most obviously, I’m not wading in a dank hot tub of feculent right-wing bullshit, which is a positive for my mental well-being and my general ability to be online. Two, my career hasn’t suffered a whit for not being on the former Twitter; my book sales have chugged along rather happily and my other opportunities have not lessened at all. Three, those 200+K followers have been replaced by more than twice that number on Bluesky, Threads and Mastodon (there are repeat followers on each service, to be sure). So surely my ego is assuaged there.
That said, the business aspects of being on social media are not my primary reason to be there, although of course I do tell people when I have new books and other projects out, or when I’m doing appearances. Mostly, though, I’m just hanging out. And while none of the other social media services are perfect (he said, delicately and understatedly), none of the rest of the ones I hang out on are so aggressively tuned to be unpleasant as the former Twitter was when I left, and still is today. It’s possible to chat and hang out and have fun on Bluesky (and Threads and Mastodon) and not feel icky for being there. That’s the real win for me: I’m enjoying myself online more. These days, that is not a small thing.
I’m aware that people are still on the former Twitter and even prefer it there, for whatever reason, and they are welcome to their own karma. There’s nothing and no one there that’s so essential to my day-to-day life that I need to go back there. Likewise, outside of a few right-wing dickheads who like to snark about me, the former Twitter seems to have entirely forgotten that I exist, and I can’t say this bothers me greatly. It’s a pretty clean separation.
I don’t imagine I’ll do another update about this again; there’s not much point to it from here on out. But again, maybe I’m a useful anecdotal case study. What happens when you leave the former Twitter? For me, mostly, online life just got better. If you’re still on the site, maybe it’ll work that way for you, too.
— JS
