Intellectual property, as a concept, is a very, very fresh invention in human history, and for the most part, it seems to be a parasitic memeplex intent on stifling the free flow of information. This line of argument seemingly veers into the naive sloganish “information wants to be free” direction, however, there is more to it. Yes, the concept of intellectual property does  provide for individuals who “come up with new stuff” to live off of “coming up with new stuff”, but this is not, in fact, how our modern understanding of IP works.

The modern concept of IP is that when a person whose job it is to come up with new stuff does, in fact, do their job, they get paid for it. And then get paid again. And get paid again and again, whenever someone makes use of, or in some forms of this twisty system, even mentions what they came up with. You could argue that this is a fine system, since the person who came up with something should get duly compensated for that piece of cominguppingness, but I’d argue that the moment they cease coming up with new stuff, and start living off of others using stuff they already came up with, they are becoming a parasitic life form.

I am aware that analogies are always imperfect, but in general, in proper economic branches, people get paid to provide a scarce item or to provide scarce, desired labor; let’s say we are dealing with a miner. A miner would get paid for providing designated labor – mining things – for a set amount of time, with an expected level of productivity. If this miner suddenly decided to stop doing their job, they would, naturally and without moral qualms on the part of society, stop getting paid for their labor (to simplify things, I am ignoring temporary cessation such as sick leave, etc.). The result of their previous labors, the materials being mined, would likely go on to benefit society in some way, either as energy, or as raw materials, and would twist and wind their way through the economy, yet the miner who mined them would not see a dime off these subsequent uses – for him or her, there is no percentage, there are no rights retained against the nugget they dug up, the equation is simple: keep working to get paid, and get paid a set sum for your skills and efforts, regardless of whether your product goes on to be a lump of coal burned carelessly to heat a sports stadium or a nugget of precious metal that will go on to become a hi-tech gizmo that will help launch people into orbit. Yet with the concept of intellectual property, the system we are trained to believe is sane is: do a bit of work, get paid constantly, and get paid exorbitant rates and percentages, based on how good other people’s uses of your comeupping are. That, to me, sounds like straightforward parasitism.

It was a hard start. The bleak, vaguely Eastern-European noirish police procedural opening of China Mieville’s The City and the City really put me off. It reminded me of Michael Chabon’s Yiddish Policemen’s Union, another highly praised novel in a similar vein that I found rather dull and unengaging.  But friends and relatives prodded me on, and the quirky police procedural unraveled into a gorgeous depiction of a reality far too familiar on so many levels; living in big cities with their parallel, invisible and frequently untouchable societies, living in multicultural melting-pot border towns,  living in the Balkans with its fragmentary, as it is, balkanized countries, states, municipalities, towns and even villages. It is fascinating how the spirit of this fictitious and, obviously, quite absurd place, dreamed up by a dude in London, managed so veraciously to capture the atmosphere of the places I grew up and lived in.

Dense as I am, the title of Yellow Blue Tibia, a delightful atompunk (and yes, it’s the first of two *punks on the list) novel by Adam Roberts remained a mysterious jumble of words until the author spelled his clever little bit of wordplay near the end. Much like Mieville, Roberts managed to capture the atmosphere of socialist-communist living in this mashup novel of espionage, adventure, unlikely romance, and perhaps most prominently, hidden history, as we delve into the events behind the Chernobyl disaster wearing oddly gray psychedelic eyeglasses.

Aurorarama by Jean Christophe Valtat drew me, I’ll admit, mainly based on its look and title. The fact that it is a steampunk-ish (that would be the second *punk on the list) depiction of life under a somewhat oppressive regime in an arctic city with zeppelins (there it is, right on the cover) just contributed to its appeal, but the main selling point should definitely be the fact that it is beautifully written. If a few of the fellows from a couple of posts back would like to learn how to write engaging and excellent yet pretentious and snotty-nosed prose, this is the book to study.

The game developers asked Peter Watts directly to write the storyline for the sequel to the original Crysis, and in addition, he also got to put the story into novel form. The fact that, as it would seem, the dude whom I consider to be the hands-down best SF author of today had full creative control over the contents means that Crysis: Legion is something entirely new in the sea of tie-in novels flooding the market; a viciously smart, brutal and engaging book you will actually learn things from. I do occasionally enjoy the guilty pleasure of a Starcraft or Clone Commando or Alien vs. Predator tie-in novel, but this is a book that doesn’t need this type of justification. Get it. Read it. You don’t even have to play the game, the story is, well, identical, but see if you can resist.

The first of two non-fiction titles on this list, I am Spock by Leonard Nimoy is, much like the brilliant alternative video for Bruno Mars’ Lazy Song, a book simultaneously funny and sad. Funny because this biographical sequel to 1975′s I am not Spock is chock-full of amusing anecdotes from the man’s storied life and his work on various incarnations of Star Trek throughout the years, as well as his relationship with the people gathered around that epic franchise. Sad, because they both feel like he’s summing things up as the finishing line draws near… almost like he’s saying, “well, that was that for me, good bye, folks, it’s been a hoot.” I certainly hope he’ll get to write another sequel, through I’m not sure what the title of that one may be.

Finally, one of those “you need to read this” encyclopedic books on comics. Supergods by Grant Morrison is an overview of superhero comics through the ages, interspersed with autobiographical tit-bits that make the book a delightful read and a rumination of what superheroes, in fact, mean as a cultural phenomenon in our modern and post-modern environments by a man whom you should all be well familiar with by now, eh?

I have a few reserve writers, people who are so reliably good that I can grab literally any of their books whenever there is nothing new and glitzy to read and be sure to be entertained, at least. A major name on the reserve squad was, for a long time, Tim Powers, until I started to translate his books into Serbian, when he resurfaced with a bang and a wow, and now he’s permanently off the bench, but I kind of left him out of these lists, because no matter how enjoyable his books are (and they are), he is now work, not leisure. Alistair Reynolds landed on the same list after I read Revelation Space, a few years back. It’s a nice, decent book, it really is, but it put me off slightly, because it felt so nineties. If felt cyberpunky, and that  whole vibe was getting seriously worn out by the time I ran across it. Chasm City did nothing to improve on that feeling, and so Alastair Reynolds ended up on the bench, waiting for an opening whenever the top stars were out of action.

This year they did. There was an opening, I clicked him and well, this year saw me burn through Redemption Ark, Absolution Gap, Galactic North and then Pushing Ice just for an extra fix. Amazon tells me this is 2320 pages of Alastair Reynolds in a single year, an epic amount of his curious mix of grand-scale, galaxy-spanning hard science fiction and blazing, explosive, action-packed space opera, precisely what the doctor ordered. When the Revelation Space series ended (many say disappointingly, yet I demur), I did shed a tiny, bitchy tear, not for any of the protagonists or antagonists, but for the fact that the story was definitely and fully over. You can bet your sweet sixer that Blue Remembered Earth, his latest work with as wicked a book trailer as they come, is firmly in my cross-sights.

Elizabeth Bear started her Jacob’s Ladder trilogy a bit shakily, and I was afraid the book would devolve into some kind of mishy-mashy romance between whiny Mary Sue  characters, but that initial feeling was swiftly kicked in the nuts and then repeatedly bashed in the head by the brilliant, and somehow, I have to say femininely different approach and style of the same mix of hard scifi and space opera I so liked with Reynolds. Not wishing to make the same mistake as with him – a huge break between books 1 and 3 in the Revelation Space series made me forget characters and plotlines – I plowed straight through all (as Amazon informs me) 1056 pages of Dust, Chill and Grail, with no effort at all. The story of the lost generation ship and its inhabitants is, for once, utterly believable, with the problem not being the simple forgetting of the fact that they are, in fact, space travelers, but the hard fact that they are all, really, just people.

This year also saw me finish or continue a couple of long standing series. Vortex by the always brilliant Robert Charles Wilson put a lovely cap on the travails of the protagonists of the highly recommended Spin series, though the huge leap in time and space was somewhat jarring. It was so good that I hung on to the Wilson feeling for a bit more, reading through Mysterium, one of his one-offs, about the unexpected quantum dislocation of an entire community that was, again, utterly believable, unlike some other lame coughstirlingcough attempts. Just like Stephen King who, whatever you may think of his work, writes actual, living and breathing characters into horror, there is no one currently writing SF who can bring to life such vivid, real people in hard sci-fi surroundings like Wilson.

Honorable mentions go to Vernor Vinge and his Children of the Sky, the latest in the Zones of Thought series - the book is good, it is a lovely, enjoyable action-adventure novel, our high-tech protagonists stranded on a low-tech world trying to make do with what they can, yet the reasons it merely gets an honorable mention for its seven hundred fucking pages of effort is that the powerful sense of dislocation, of otherness he brought with the truly weird and different aliens from the first two books in the series is gone, replaced by a jarring sense of almost colonial naiveté, a handful of players juggling the fate of an entire world through trade and invention of trinkets with a handful of natives. Still, however, a lovely read and, what’s increasingly rare in these types of books, a lovely ending.

I remember a time when a book per week was the minimum.  Time for reading was distributed across three distinct slots: before sleep,  on the shitter and in public transport on the way to and from work, with the latter being dominant with a minimum of two half-hour stints, often significantly more, what with the vagaries of public transport in Belgrade.

The current annual grand total? Twenty six finished, and a tiny crack in number twenty seven. That’s precisely one book every two weeks. Though the car and the lack of proper job are not solely to blame. Alistair Reynolds and Elizabeth Bear bear (ha!) some of the guilt, as well, but more on that later. Most people would  stop here, and list merely the best, but I am not such a lovely person and will start with the  mediocre and shitty first, believing it important to warn people away from crap, as much as to draw them towards the light, and then I will list them all (with the exception of a couple I’m reading for research purposes), secure in the knowledge that none of you will bother to hang around ’till the end.

A few were merely good, decent books, such as Pratchett’s latest, Snuff - he is a wonderful storyteller, but thirty-something books in, reading him feels like listening to a good, old friend, slightly tipsy after his third beer in the local pub, telling the exact same story he’s been telling you for the past five years. There’s Vimes, and Lady Sybill, and much the usual cast of characters and the obligatory minority in distress, with a lovely message, but it’s come down to “another one of those books” with a warm nod and smile, but distinct lack of laughs.

Charlie Stross’ Fuller Memorandum is much alike the above, though the books are significantly fewer in the series. The Lovecraftian spy joke-thing is starting to feel overstretched after this many pages, while on the other hand, Rule 34 still holds up, but only barely – after Accelerando I do love him dearly, but the books are starting to feel more and more like overextended smart-assish  blog posts with a plot resolution almost unintelligibly compressed into a single-page vague infodump. 

Tau Zero by Poul Anderson has a cool concept, and it was probably amazing back when it first came out in 1970, especially as a cornerstone of hard sci-fi, but the paper-thin characters are seriously annoying and, honestly, distracting from the intriguing scientific concepts.

Move Under Ground by Nick Mamatas is one of those books where I just couldn’t decide if it was absolutely, gorgeously brilliant in its psychedelic Lovecraftian ‘fifties road trip, or just a shitty mish-mash of famous names and disjointed concepts, but by the end, I leaned heavily towards the latter, since the book committed that one horrible crime I cannot forgive – it started to bore me, with much of the psychedelic adventuring of its celebrity protagonists feeling like disjointed non-sequiturs.

A few of the books were disastrously dull and uninteresting, to the point that I stopped reading, despite the slight bookish OCD that makes it a torturous effort to drop a book mid-way through; such were Joe Hill’s Heart Shaped Box, its voice tired and uniteresting and unable to evoke the chills it promised, or the annoyingly pretentious and void Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl, and finally, Cipher by Kathe Koja, a short story idea at best, stretched  torturously to novel length by the whining of its annoying and, again, pretentious protagonists. As tweeted, this is probably a lovely book, if you are an angsty, depressed teenager, but if naught else, I’m sure as hell not a teenager any more. I did make it to the end of Company by KJ Parker, a book that started full of promise, with a lovely premise (grizzled vets after the grand medieval-style battle is over), but fizzed out into uninteresting drivel roughly half-way through, leaving me with absolutely no payoff for the time invested.

B’day reflexively reached for his gun, and was almost surprised to find it still dangling on his shoulder, after all the tumbling and turning. He drew the rifle up to aim, but then remembered the shot.

“No bullet,” he shouted to the Major.

“Bullets won’t help,” groaned the Major, pushing against the oars. “Get down! Everybody!”

“What?” asked B’day, but then fell to his hands and knees as a hollow thump rang off the back of the boat. Hervick stood up, bracing his legs wide for balance, twisted around lifting one of his oars like a spear, and poked at something in the water, once, twice, hard. Then, seemingly satisfied, he sat back on his bench and reset the oar in its lock. The two soldiers fell back into rhythm, and as B’day managed to get upright again, he saw the animals were slowly falling behind.

However, a loud squeal drew his attention to four more of the beasts, running along the riverbank, tracking their progress.

“Why they hunt us?” asked B’day.

No one volunteered a response, until the girl, prone in the front of the boat, spoke in a hoarse voice.

“Whatever their motives were before… I’m pretty sure now they’re just out to eat us.”

Their group was never one for subtlety – they usually bulled through confrontations with sheer force of numbers and firepower, but now, even the tentative veneer of martial orderliness was gone, and B’day found himself trotting to keep up with the grownups, branches and leaves whipping his hands and face, legs skidding on wet roots and mud, as the adults hacked a path of destruction through the foliage. The air around him felt heavy with the green smell of spilt sap.

B’day noticed some of the company members were unusually quiet and subdued, marching with a steady, but sullen step, hands gripping guns and eyes cast groundwards, and he couldn’t help but wonder if they, too, had seen something last night?

[...]

Polo lifted an eyebrow and silently tried to tell him something, mouthing some cryptic message with exaggerated grimaces, but B’day could not read his lips, and merely shrugged. Then their time for talking was up, the company was on its way once more, following, as quietly as they could, the whizzing of the lieutenants machete through the branches. B’day crouched low, held his gun tight, and tried to walk as silently as a forest spirit. [...]“

Two Januaries ago I decided that I’d do two things during the coming year.  Both were ambitious, especially for someone who has to work for a living, and particularly for someone as good at procrastinating as myself, and quite predictably, though in the end I did make a heroic (oh, how the silent “h” version of that phrase niggles at me) effort, I accomplished neither.

The will was there, and the gestures were done, I took a good, hard run at the hill and managed to get more than mid-way up one of them, and lay a solid foundation for the other one, but in the end it all sort of collapsed under the pressing need to make more money and to, well, honestly… goof off.

So, this last January, I made no plans whatsoever. I entered this year with zero expectations. I knew I would work hard, I knew I would travel here and there, and knew I’d inevitably goof off again, but decided that was OK. I do regret coming here to write merely thrice, but it was a busy summer. Bosnia to ski in, Brussels to hobnob in, Tuscany to drive around in, Norway to trek across, Rovinj to lounge in. And then two hard months of finger-and-eye-cracking work to buy the dream car.

All that done, the rains of October are drawing to a close, and I’m not much further in accomplishing my two things. But November is coming in for a hard landing, and I’m reading up on my research, exploring the west coast of Africa, just beneath its famous horn, looking up from the gravity well, towards geostationary orbits and Lagrange points.  I’ll be ready, when it comes.

And if I fail again? Well, so it goes. I’ve skied the mountains of Bosnia, hobnobbed around the EU offices in Brussels, drove around the forts and vineyards of Tuscany, trekked across the wilderness and cities of Norway, dove and bathed on the rocky beaches of Rovinj, laid down some beats,  translated some books, bought a midlife crisis car, and wrote the nub of a hardish SF novel. Not exactly a Sinatra year, but then again, I have no need of plurals, when I have the one girl.

So, a very damn good year, all in all. And far from over yet.

The fascinating thing is that these wondrously odd yet stupendously naive stories are the product of a mind that should have been in the know. A casual stroll through Wikipedia shows his fascinating background; his godfather the man who spawned the Chinese revolution, he obtained a PhD in political science by the age of 23, he was close confidant to Chiang Kai-shek, a colonel in the US army, one of the founders of the modern discipline of psychological warfare…

On the one hand, I suspect that long-term human space travel, if it ever happens, will entail a transformation of a habermanesque  degree, yet on the other, I cannot shake the feeling that the politics of his books is at the level of playground intrigue we engaged in as kids. Somewhat baroque and occasionally deviant, but still unmistakably childish. Yet, he was there, he met the people, he did the work, and the thought that that’s how high-level politicking works, unless he deliberately made it more naive than it really is… it is slightly terrifying.

On the other hand, he did sort Mother Hitton’s beasties not only in the wrong species, and not only in the wrong genus, and not only in the wrong family, he sorted them in the wrong suborder, so what does he know, eh?

The summer is here to remind us, because we tend to forget.

It is easy to forget in the winter, wrapped in layers upon layers of insulation, hibernating beneath the frozen cover of ice and frost, but in summer it is all around us, in the rub of sweaty flesh, the moist stench of containers wafting from the street, the myriad little phlegmatic coughs and guttural croaks of stiff, lazy throats.

It explodes at the root of a clogged sink or a broken-down dishwasher, deep in the plastic drainage pipes and the undersides of shiny chrome shower fittings, adding the tiny little thrill of  the occasional molten bit of scruff someone stuck under the bench  to the overall symphony.

We do try to forget, don’t we?

We try to forget what a slimy, dirty, smelly affair life itself is, staring at the meadow of colorful flowers on a shaggy green carpet patrolled by diligent bees and the too remote flutter of a butterfly, ignoring the foundation that supports is all, the twisted, filthy roots tangled in the musky, muddy, worm-riddled earth where odd-shaped things with feelers and patchy fur and segmented, carapace bodies burrow and scamper.

We force ourselves to forget by stealing the scents of ripe flowers and fruits our primate brains are wired to respond to and smearing them over ourselves to  mask the nature of reality and ignore its flip side. But oh, how summer makes us leak.

Summer reveals everything.

The city is beautiful this morning.

A chilly midwinter mist collides with the harsh grey-white rays of the waking Sun, sprawling across the cityscape like a transparent canvas. Short snippets whiz by, across the wide viewport opening above my gloved hands as they grip the steering wheel. Here, the grey shadow of a bridge is silhouetted against the brushed-metal sky with the skeleton of a construction site rearing in the background; cars and trucks are crossing it; a bird slowly and ponderously takes flight. There, the tower of Ušće, afloat on a cloud, like a castle suspended in mid-air, straining against its tethers to balloon away into the fluffy heights. Right next to it, on a grassy field of puddled mud, two dogs lie motionless, perhaps sleeping, hunting the first icy fangs of the morning Sun. Perhaps dead.

I turn the Zepp to eleven and gun the engine, ripping down the wide boulevards to soak in the faerie ambiance before the morninglight regains its full power and unweaves the mystery. Gripping the sensation firmly before it inevitably slips away and becomes just another bleary-eyed day of exile from the house, shopping and running errands while the cleaning lady dents my favorite ukulele or rips another hole in the So British patterned PVC floor of our kitchen.

And that, right there, is the core of the experience reading Shadow of our Desire (“Senka naše želje”) by Darko Tuševljaković. The sensation of trying to hang on to a thing slipping away, of hazy childhood dreams and sensations, sense of wonder becoming blurred away by the awkward world of adult responsibilities, of a time of magic and fantasy becoming a gnarly neorealist’s wet dream. Much like the protagonist, I was a child of the flatlands, of the infinite rows of deutscher houses and swampy little networks of rivers, rivulets and lakes, growing up in a localized version of a default stephenkingian setting template, a world of petty desires and squabbles, of people drinking themselves into oblivion and fucking around for the simple lack of anything else to do, of people leaving, never to return and people returning, sometimes to visit, never to remain, people utterly changed and unrecognizable after exposure to the outside. Becoming aliens at home. Awkward, ill-adapted, twisted creatures, their form familiar, yet their essence somehow palpably altered, their shadows, our shadows, alive, tentacling out to infect the next generation to be lost to the siren’s call of a life beyond the infinite, rolling plains of their childhood.

In some ways, this is a book I wanted to write, a record and reflection on the process of being a child in a particular and peculiar time and space, and of becoming an adult elsewhere. But I guess now I can focus on writing gratuitous zombies-in-outer-space pulp, knowing full well that the job was done, and done well.

Ah, there.

The Sun is fully up.

And so are the dogs.