Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 25

I read Quantum Night when it was new, back in early 2016. And while a key part of the premise doesn’t add up, I keep thinking back to it.

It links human cruelty, psychopathy, and mob behavior to the nature of consciousness and quantum entanglement, mostly focusing on the main characters but playing out against a global crisis brought on by a rising tide of xenophobia.

There’s an ultra-conservative US President who makes grandiose statements. A rising trend of anti-immigrant murders. A war launched by Putin.

Through all this, the main characters are investigating their own dark pasts, trying to figure out what caused them to change for the better… and ultimately, can we reboot humanity?

Spoilers (Concept)

The idea of consciousness being a 2-bit quantum state – 00=unconscious, 01=flocking behavior, 10=psychopath, 11=full consciousness with a conscience – is intriguing, and works for the sake of the story, but…

1. It seems to me that flocking mechanics can’t explain the wide range of human behavior, especially for 4/7 of the world’s population.
2. While “sheeple” isn’t used in the book (as far as I remember), it’s a premise that even the non-psychopaths of the world could use to justify treating people like animals, since, well, chances are they’re not really conscious people, right?

I read this when it was new, and I had a child in preschool. It was very good. And I never, ever want to read it again.

Not that I have a reason to. It’s already seared into my memory.

There’s a zombie outbreak in an elementary school, a cascading failure of one preventative measure after another, and it follows how one teacher manages to get some of her students out alive. At a terrible cost.

It’s an extended metaphor for school shootings, but years later, during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, schools reopened with children entering the campus one at a time after a health screening (temperature checks, not blood tests), sanitizing everything…and then I saw a picture of a classroom with individual transparent barriers around each desk. And it’s worked about as well, though at least Covid doesn’t turn its victims into mindless killing machines. That’s what cable news and social media are for.

An enjoyable tale of first contact, colonialism, environmental stewardship, corporate greed vs. ethics, and most importantly, who counts as “people” – all wrapped up around a cute, inquisitive, furry species encountered by humans on what they thought was an uninhabited planet, threatening to upend the status of the humans’ established mining colony.

It’s a worthy classic: engaging aliens, big themes and a high-stakes struggle. But it’s also very clearly of its time (1962). Everyone smokes and drinks highballs (in space!), there’s only one woman of consequence, and it’s much heavier on plot than characterization, which is mostly flat. There’s a twist near the end that feels a bit like a deus ex machina because some of the most important work has been going on off-page. Though I imagine it wouldn’t have bothered me if I’d read it when I was ten instead of as an adult.

A Fuzzy Summary

It starts out simple: A grizzled space prospector encounters a creature he nicknames “Little Fuzzy,” and quickly comes to realize that his new friend is more than an animal. As the fuzzies explore his settlement, everyone from biologists and psychologists to sherrif’s deputies is captivated by their antics, and debating whether they really are a newly-discovered sapient species.

Just one problem: It’s a company planet, an established mining colony where the corporation has free reign…on the condition that the planet is uninhabited. If the fuzzies are animals, the company can keep exploiting the planet. If they’re people, the charter is revoked. And the company’s leaders will do anything up to and including genocide to stop that from happening. As long as they can manage the public relations.

What ensues is a struggle between honesty and psy-ops, a fight for public opinion, kidnappings, escapes, and finally a trial to determine the fate of a species and a world.

Notes

Nextcloud Notes is a note-taking and syncing application that runs on Nextcloud, a cloud service you can run (and control!) yourself – even on your own hardware if you choose.

It’s simpler than Google Keep, more private depending on where you host your Nextcloud server, and in my experience it tends to sync faster.

Plus the data is human-readable since it’s stored as plain text (or markdown) in your synced folder. If you can’t access the website right then, or you want to use a local text editor, you have the files right there on your system.

The Android app from Niedermann IT is a lot faster than Nextcloud’s built-in editor and manages to open and sync cleanly and quickly even when I have a spotty cell signal.

I’ve hosted all my personal websites (including this one!) at DreamHost for over a decade now. Their VPS service (a virtual machine with a managed OS+web stack, but completely flexible within userspace, with an optional managed MySQL server) has been rock solid since the mid-2010s, and when problems do come up, tech support is on it quickly, friendly and informative. They support easy WordPress installs on their web hosting, plus a managed WordPress hosting service (that I haven’t tried).

Their cloud computing service has been less stable, though, and after waiting a while for problems to shake out, I tried out a few dedicated cloud providers and settled on Linode (review) for better stability, decent prices, and more datacenter choices.