Books read, July 2018

[swan_tower]

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Robert B. Cialdini. Exploration of the principles and techniques used by what Cialdini calls “compliance professionals” — anybody whose job is to get you to go along with them. Salespeople, fundraisers, advertisers, interrogators, con artists, etc. I have to admit it’s a little creepy reading this book, identifying all the knee-jerk reflexes we have and how they can be leveraged against us . . . but also very useful for a writer, because it gives me a more solid grounding for figuring out how to get one character to manipulate another. The six broad categories Cialdini identifies are reciprocity, consistency and commitment, social proof, authority, liking, and scarcity; he says up front that he’s leaving out material self-interest because it’s straightforward and self-evident. Just ignore the part in his introduction where he tries to explain participant observation (a bedrock of anthropological fieldwork), because omgwtfbbq no, it isn’t “spying” or “infiltration.”

Rogues, Vagabonds, and Sturdy Beggars: A New Gallery of Tudor and Early Stuart Rogue Literature Exposing the Lives, Times, and Cozening Tricks of the Elizabethan Underworld, ed. Arthur F. Kinney. Last month I read The Elizabethan Underworld, which turns out to be the Cliff Notes for this book. Depending on your background, Cliff Notes are vital; although this has some commentary from Kinney, the bulk of it is primary texts from the genre of “Elizabethan rogue literature,” i.e. pamphlets exposing the tricks and society of such people. At least he modernized the spelling for you? But oy, it’s been a while since I read this much Elizabethan prose. My favorite touch in here that I didn’t get from Salgado’s book previously was a catalogue of various people in Hell and what they were there for, including “the Citizens for their City-sins” — I thought that was an excellent play on words.

The Regency Underworld, Donald A. Low. Moving forward a couple of centuries . . . I liked this one quite a bit, but it’s fairly small. Has a particularly good discussion of the process by which London finally dragged itself to admit the necessity of having actual, y’know, police — there was quite a bit of maneuvering for several decades before the Metropolitan Police Bill of 1829. (Turns out the reason it took so long was that they thought of centralized police as being very <shudder> French, and an unacceptable abridgement of the rights of free Englishmen. The quantity of crime it took before they agreed that a high risk of being robbed and raped and murdered ten feet outside your front door, or even ten feet inside it, was a more severely unacceptable abridgement of the rights of free Englishmen, is astonishing.)

The Big Con: The Story of the Confidence Man, David W. Maurer. If you’ve ever seen the movie The Sting, you basically know this book. It’s a discussion of con artists in the early part of the 20th century, written by someone who apparently managed to conduct what amounts to anthropological fieldwork (the real kind, not the “Cialdini thinks it’s like espionage” kind) among them. The big con is distinguished from the short con by the addition of an element where you send the mark home to get more money, which allows for much bigger scores in the end, but it also tends to feature what they called “the store” — a fake betting hall or stockbroker’s office or whatever, staffed entirely by other con artists, which allows the con mob to control every part of what the mark sees rather than leaving it up to chance. He also gets into questions of what con artists tend to be like, what sorts of marks they target, and other such related topics, not just the cons themselves.

I would love a book on the short con, though; there’s a place in here where Maurer rattles off a list of about two dozen short games and never says anything more about them.

Trail of Lightning, Rebecca Roanhorse. Debut novel from an author currently up for a Hugo and the Campbell Award. I haven’t read much urban fantasy in a while because I am honestly tired of abrasive, psychologically scarred heroines whose stories careen from one crisis or disaster to another with hardly any breathing time in between. This . . . has that. But it also has a post-climate-apocalypse setting where the Navajo Nation, aka Dinétah, has established itself as an independent state, and all the supernatural aspects are drawn from Diné beliefs, and as soon as I saw that I made grabby hands. No vampires here; instead you get things like ch’įįdii* and tsé naayéé. I’m interested enough to read the next book, and hope that it works in a little more space to develop the post-apocalyptic society and the relationships of the characters.

* Not quite spelled correctly because I don’t know how to get HTML to put both an ogonek and an acute accent on that first i. Partway through reading this novel I got down my copy of Diné Bizaad: Speak, Read, Write Navajo to refresh my memory on pronunciation — I studied the language for two weeks in grad school, before the professor unfortunately had to take a leave of absence. It’s kind of a shocker for anyone accustomed to Indo-Europrean langauges, but I’m glad Roanhorse didn’t flinch from using it here.

My own work, read for editing purposes, does not count.

The Black Opera, Mary Gentle. Alternate historical fantasy. I adored the parts of this that were about the characters having to stage an opera in six weeks flat with the literal fate of the world resting on their shoulders. The challenges inherent in doing so are enough to generate plenty of tension and conflict, and it’s rare to see the creative process really put at the forefront of a whole novel like this. Unfortunately, there were also lots of things that annoyed me about the writing: there are many sequences of single-sentence paragraphs, which reads choppily; the text occasionally wanders off into present or future tense for no apparent reason; and there seems to be no pattern to which of the viewpoint character’s thoughts are rendered in italics and which (despite being direct thoughts, not indirectly reported) are in roman type, plus the occasional line of narration italicized as if it were his thoughts. Minor issues, but over the course of a 500-page book they grate — and more fatally, I simply did not give a rat’s ass about the love triangle that was supposed to carry much of the emotional weight of the book. I like how it resolved, but since I wasn’t very invested my liking was more intellectual than anything else . . . and like many other things in the story, the resolution kind of dragged out rather than being delivered as a punch. Which might be realistic, but it makes for less satisfying fiction. So if you love the idea of a novel about creative collaboration under pressure, I recommend this, but it does have its flaws.

*

London’s Underworld: Three Centuries of Vice and Crime, Fergus Linnane. Normally I don’t report on books I don’t finish, but in this case the DNF wasn’t because of the book’s quality as such. It’s a little disorganized, with some information repeated unnecessarily and other things tossed off in passing without explanation, but the reason I stopped reading is that it would better be subtitled “A Little Bit About the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries But Mostly the Twentieth Century of Vice and Crime.” Since what I was interested in was the older history, I stopped reading when it got past that.

Mirrored from Swan Tower.

Comments

[sovay]

(Turns out the reason it took so long was that they thought of centralized police as being very French, and an unacceptable abridgement of the rights of free Englishmen. The quantity of crime it took before they agreed that a high risk of being robbed and raped and murdered ten feet outside your front door, or even ten feet inside it, was a more severely unacceptable abridgement of the rights of free Englishmen, is astonishing.)

I have to say that sounds distressingly topical.

I would love a book on the short con, though; there’s a place in here where Maurer rattles off a list of about two dozen short games and never says anything more about them.

What are some of them?

the text occasionally wanders off into present or future tense for no apparent reason

The tense shifts have been a feature of Gentle's writing for years:

"I do it for immediacy.

"It's not an unusual technique, it's just one we're more likely to use in speech than in formal narrative – 'So I went down the shop, and I met Maggie, and she says to me, "Did you hear about Dave?", and I chuck a can of beans in the trolley, and say "No, but –"' and so on. Some things, it seems to me, have to happen in real time, as if they're being experienced at that very second. The combat in Ash is one of those things."

She's talking about it in context of Ash: A Secret History (2000), but I think her first novel which she wrote as a teenager may be the only one which is the same tense all the way through. She was one of my favorite writers from the time I picked up Rats and Gargoyles (1990) in college until Ilario: A Story of the First History (2006/2007), where I wiped out so badly that even though she had previously been buy-on-sight or -as-soon-as-I-hear-about-the-new-book, I never got around to reading The Black Opera. I'm glad to know it's at least partly worth it.

[moon_custafer]

it also tends to feature what they called “the store” — a fake betting hall or stockbroker’s office or whatever, staffed entirely by other con artists, which allows the con mob to control every part of what the mark sees rather than leaving it up to chance.

I think a few of these tend to crop up in the mystery fiction of the ‘twenties and ‘thirties. I’ve seen at least three plots that involved conspiracies of half-a-dozen people or more luring a single mark into a rigged poker game, which seems like a lot of trouble, but the idea seems to be that if the stakes were high enough and you could bring in several marks a day, it would pay off.

[sovay]

I think a few of these tend to crop up in the mystery fiction of the ‘twenties and ‘thirties.

There is an extremely famous example in The Sting (1973).

[edit] Which was referenced in the post, never mind.

[swan_tower]

I re-watched the movie after reading The Big Con and wow, yes, that film is SO drawn directly from the book. Down to the vocabulary -- half of it flies by in the script without explanation ("I'm gonna need a boost of at least twenty or thirty"), but it's all there in Maurer's glossary.

[swan_tower]

The scores at the time were regularly in the tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars, so yeah, it paid off. But very few con artists had the restraint to save their money, so they tended to blow through their profits very rapidly.

[swan_tower]

I have to say that sounds distressingly topical.

Half-yes, half-no; they loathed the way the French police operated as information-gatherers for the government, so the extent to which we cheer on the surveillance state is diametrically opposed. But on fronts like gun control, yes.

What are some of them?

"In addition to the short-con games discussed in this chapter (the smack, the tat, the hot-seat, the tip, the money box, the last turn, the huge duke, and the wipe), the following were once very popular with con men and are still played by short-con men [...] the spud, the bat, the send store, the green-goods game, the rocks, the tale, the lemon, the tickets or the ducats, the fight send store, the wrestle send store, the strap, the short-deck, the pigeon, the poke, the shiv, the sloughs, the broads, the autograph, the tear-up, the big-mitt, the big joint, T.B., the single-hand con, the dollar store, the high pitch or the giveaway, the slick box, the penny-box, the double-trays, the cross, the slide, the boodle, the count and read, the electric bar, the transpire, and three-card monte."

Some of those get one-line descriptions in the glossary, but not all.

The tense shifts have been a feature of Gentle's writing for years:

It's been more than a decade since I read Ash, so I couldn't remember if it featured there or not. I know what she means about shifting tenses in speech, and I could see it working for something like combat -- but here it feels semi-random, not effectively deployed. Especially when paired with all the other prose tics like the short paragraphs and the "flip a coin to see whether this thought is italicized or not" issue.

Are you willing to go into detail about what you mean re: wiping out on Ilario? I tried to read that one recently and bounced out hard, so I'm wondering if it was for the same or similar reasons.

[sovay]

Some of those get one-line descriptions in the glossary, but not all.

That's a tantalizing list! I'll ask spatch what he knows.

Are you willing to go into detail about what you mean re: wiping out on Ilario? I tried to read that one recently and bounced out hard, so I'm wondering if it was for the same or similar reasons.

Sure! See here. I'm happy to elaborate on any point so far as I can.

[swan_tower]

Thanks for the link! I didn't make it all the way through; there were too many things that just rubbed me wrong, like Rosamunda. But I got off on the wrong foot from it even at the start. At this date I don't remember the specifics well enough, but the entire first encounter Ilario has read to me like the only way Gentle could think to convey to her readers that Ilario was intersex was to throw them into a problematic sex scene three pages into the book, and it felt incredibly off-putting -- like it was reducing Ilario's identity to their complicated fuckability. I seem to recall it also being one of those books where everybody around the main character defaults to hostility, which is a vibe that just puts me off the whole story.

In case it affects your decisions, The Black Opera has one character (the protagonist's sister) who is a transvestite -- I don't think she's a trans man, just someone who likes the freedom granted by male clothing and passing as a man. (The narration is wildly inconsistent about whether it calls her Isaura, Paolo, Paolo-Isaura, or Isaura-Paolo, without it feeling like there's an underlying logic.) There are also a number of women involved with the opera, and I found them to be sympathetic, though not central to the story; my utter lack of interest in the woman in the love triangle was more about me finding the triangle uninteresting than about her -- and also partly, I think, about Gentle's structural choices, because the protagonist spends a good half of the book trying (very sensibly and laudably) to avoid her on the grounds that the three of them can sort out their romantic bullshit after they've saved the world. Which makes sense, but it also means she spent a lot of time as Lady Not Appearing in This Story.

As for religion, it's . . . weird. The Catholic Church figures in, but the protagonist is an unconvincing atheist, and the bad guys are sort of semi-Gnostics. Other religions do not appear, and neither does race, except insofar as not everybody in the story was born in Italy.

[sovay]

I seem to recall it also being one of those books where everybody around the main character defaults to hostility, which is a vibe that just puts me off the whole story.

I really do like Ilario's father, Licinus Honorius, who is a widowed career soldier and utterly delighted to discover in late middle age that he has a child, complicated gender and legal standing irrelevant; he's a well-written example of not having to understand someone's identity in order to support it and he gets probably the best line in the book when, anticipating the HEA of the story by at least a volume but totally misunderstanding the current relationship of the characters, he bellows across the lagoon of Venice at a very startled Egyptian envoy, "How dare you get my son PREGNANT!" I just found myself writing to people afterward that I really wanted more novels with non-binary protagonists and their non-binary lovers and their supportive cis family members that were not written in the assumption that being cis female is awful and irredeemable while being cis male is actually pretty okay. I don't even have a particular personal need to see conventionally feminine characters represented as heroic. But that doesn't mean I can't tell the opposite's a rigged game.

(The narration is wildly inconsistent about whether it calls her Isaura, Paolo, Paolo-Isaura, or Isaura-Paolo, without it feeling like there's an underlying logic.)

Does it have to do with which aspect is seen uppermost, as it were?

There are also a number of women involved with the opera, and I found them to be sympathetic, though not central to the story; my utter lack of interest in the woman in the love triangle was more about me finding the triangle uninteresting than about her -- and also partly, I think, about Gentle's structural choices, because the protagonist spends a good half of the book trying (very sensibly and laudably) to avoid her on the grounds that the three of them can sort out their romantic bullshit after they've saved the world. Which makes sense, but it also means she spent a lot of time as Lady Not Appearing in This Story.

It's good to hear that the women in Black Opera are not just obstacles, although the thing where the main female character is tied so closely to the romantic plot that she disappears when it does is not ideal. Do they save the world and/or sort out their romantic bullshit?

As for religion, it's . . . weird. The Catholic Church figures in, but the protagonist is an unconvincing atheist, and the bad guys are sort of semi-Gnostics.

Okay, what?

[swan_tower]

I really do like Ilario's father, Licinus Honorius

I didn't make it far enough into the book to meet him.

Does it have to do with which aspect is seen uppermost, as it were?

Not that I could tell. Nor did it seem to reflect Conrad, the protagonist, grappling with how to view his sister (largely because he mostly doesn't grapple at all; he just shrugs and moves on). It just felt random.

I forgot to mention that one of the characters is revealed at the end of the book to be in a happy polygamous situation -- he has three wives.

although the thing where the main female character is tied so closely to the romantic plot that she disappears when it does is not ideal. Do they save the world and/or sort out their romantic bullshit?

How okay are you with giant spoilers? (Not of the "she gets fridged" sort or anything like that. Credit where credit is due, the whole thing gets handled more innovatively than that.)

Okay, what?

Basically, they think the demiurge is evil because he created a world with suffering in it, and the "devil" is the Prince of the World who will remake everything perfectly if they use magic opera to change reality so that he is able to influence it directly. The good guys are trying to stage a counter-opera to stop them, because raising the Prince of the World requires a massive blood sacrifice, which the bad guys are going to arrange by making Vesuvius erupt and wipe out Naples. (Tambora was their test run.)

It's a Mary Gentle book. Of course the plot is like that. :-P

[sovay]

I didn't make it far enough into the book to meet him.

I figured. I wished he had been in a better book.

How okay are you with giant spoilers?

I am fine with them. I'm not sure I'm going to read the book and I am generally spoiler-indifferent anyway.

Basically, they think the demiurge is evil because he created a world with suffering in it, and the "devil" is the Prince of the World who will remake everything perfectly if they use magic opera to change reality so that he is able to influence it directly.

I see how you got "semi-Gnostic" out of that. There's something else it reminds me of, too—I thought first of Tanith Lee's "Malice in Saffron" and then Harlan Ellison's "The Deathbird," but neither of them is exactly it. Philip Pullman?

The good guys are trying to stage a counter-opera to stop them, because raising the Prince of the World requires a massive blood sacrifice, which the bad guys are going to arrange by making Vesuvius erupt and wipe out Naples. (Tambora was their test run.)

One should not have been able to fuck up a novel with that premise!

It's a Mary Gentle book. Of course the plot is like that.

It does satisfy the dictum that if you are going to base a novel around an opera, the novel's reality should be at least as batshit as the opera's plot.

[swan_tower]

I see how you got "semi-Gnostic" out of that. There's something else it reminds me of, too—I thought first of Tanith Lee's "Malice in Saffron" and then Harlan Ellison's "The Deathbird," but neither of them is exactly it. Philip Pullman?

Possibly? I have the same back-brain itch, but can't quite place it.

It does satisfy the dictum that if you are going to base a novel around an opera, the novel's reality should be at least as batshit as the opera's plot.

Oh, and then there's the plot of the opera Conrad is writing: L'Altezza Azteca, i.e. The Aztec Princess, which features a love triangle between Cortez, a princess whose name is about as Aztec as I am, and a Jaguar General -- so far, so reasonable -- and then a second love triangle with a captured Amazon princess, because Conrad temporarily forgot that just because the river in South America is called the Amazon doesn't mean that's where Amazons come from and shrugged it off when that was pointed out to him -- with final-act appearances by the Queen of the Amazons and the King of Spain, and meanwhile the guy building the sets is ripping his hair out screaming at Conrad to make up his fucking mind whether the final scene will take place on a step pyramid or a volcano and is the pyramid collapsing or the volcano erupting we have only three weeks left to build this shit.

Like I said: the opera part of the novel is fabulous. As for the plot . . . I'm going to email that to you, because it's a bit much to keep translating in and out of rot-13.

[sovay]

Like I said: the opera part of the novel is fabulous. As for the plot . . . I'm going to email that to you, because it's a bit much to keep translating in and out of rot-13.

No problem. I am sorry the whole thing isn't as good as the set designer's travails.