For an 18 year old growing up in a rich country, though, they’ve had a very different experience.

They were born in 1994; next year, the Playstation would be available worldwide. GoldenEye 007 was on sale on the Nintendo 64 when they were 3 years old, along with Final Fantasy 7 on the Playstation. By the time they were 4, Gran Turismo had sold 10 million copies. The following year, the Dreamcast had launched worldwide with Space Channel 5, Sonic Adventure, and Virtua Fighter 3.

At 6 years old, the Playstation 2 was released in 2000. It’s likely that this, or the cheaper PSOne, was probably their first console. They’ve always had 3D graphics. Grand Theft Auto 3 came out when they were 7 and GTA: San Andreas was out after their tenth birthday. They probably played it, even if they weren’t supposed to. Halo 2 came out in the same year.

The XBox 360 was out when they were 11 years old, along with World of Warcraft. They may not have an iPhone, but the iPod Touch came out in 2007, when they were 13. There’s a good chance they’ve owned one – but maybe they’re still hanging on to the Nintendo DS, which was released a couple of years earlier.

I’m sure they enjoy retro games – 18 year olds play Flash games like everyone else. But that’s not retro for them. Retro is Grand Theft Auto 3, it’s Halo 2, it’s Super Mario Sunshine. Not 8 bit graphics.

That said, I really enjoy doing it, so: please look away, SPOILERS AHEAD!

Click to enlarge

In no particular order, here are some of the questions I had, with accompanying speculations:

So, what exactly happened with Commis?

The most straightforward answer is that Kerith Sington, after having been beaten up by Commis (in non-mime garb), really did drop the pane of glass on him; and that this was made possible by Chas Kammeston loosening its bindings and leaving the door open (not to mention putting it up there in the first place, although that wasn’t entirely his fault).

However, it is curious that many people looking into the murder – including the police and the Attorney who gave Sington a posthumous pardon – didn’t realise that the ‘third passer-by’ who got into the fight with Sington (and didn’t appear as a witness) was the same person as Commis. Why? Because Caurer clearly figured it out – she says that a young man (i.e. Chas Kammeston) was “involved in a violent street scuffle with the murdered man … according to witnesses in the street”.

Now, Caurer knows this partly because Kammeston told her, but that doesn’t explain how the witnesses knew that the non-mime Commis was the same as the mime Commis – and so we’re left wondering why the Attorney didn’t check this out further. It’s not as if Caurer’s book was obscure.

What’s up with Dryd Bathurst?

I’ve seen it suggested that Dryd is in fact a serial killer; that he’s not just sleeping with every woman he can find, but that he’s murdering them as well. I’m not wholly convinced by this, despite the death of Kal Kapes and his wife.

However, he does appear to be surprisingly long-lived and I don’t remember seeing anything about this death in the book, either. Perhaps he’s an athanasian.

What are the Drones doing, and what’s with the explosions in Tremm?

Other than mapping? My take is that they’re investigating the Temporal Vortices – trying to determine exactly how they operate so they can use them for other purposes. Tomak called them “passive communications devices, passive receptors”, which on the face of it suggests a simple surveillance network. But that seems insufficiently weird to me, and having the drones fly around at random doesn’t seem very effective either. Tomak also said that “on Tremm we have access to almost everything.” That’s quite a claim, and one that can only be explained by some genuinely universal surveillance, either electronic or ‘vortex weirdness-enabled’. I opt for the latter.

As for the explosions, these are quite strange. It’s suggested that they can’t possibly be the drones exploding, since they wouldn’t be carrying enough fuel or explosives; instead, something is destroying the drones in the tunnels. Why would you destroy a drone?

One possibility is that it’s dangerous; infected, perhaps. A second is that you need to destroy it in order to do something else – destructive analysis, let’s say. A third is that they’re being destroyed by a hostile party, although it’s odd that this would be going on for so long. And a final possibility is that they’re simply surplus to requirements, and after they’ve relayed their information, they’re no longer needed (or someone doesn’t want them falling into the wrong hands).

What are the creepy Towers and the Intercession Authority?

Torm says that in his tower, he can “see everything, hear everything, within me and without, past, present, and future.” Of course, he might be totally nuts, but it does seem that the Towers have specifically temporal effects given his and Alvasund’s terrifying encounter earlier in their story. One might think that such towers could be used quite effectively for surveillance, even if Torm’s only partly right – a little like what might be going on in Tremm.

The Intercession Authority is principally a mainland thing, based in Faiandland, but not necessarily a governmental operation. They are probably being truthful when they say they’re attempting the “first properly funded scientific investigation into what’s inside those towers” although, once again, one would think they might have some interesting ideas about what to do with any knowledge they gain.

Are the towers essentially prisons for the creatures inside them? Or are they houses? They appear to be man-made. What are they doing? My first thought was that they were responsible for generating the temporal vortices. I’m no longer so sure of that, since I now think the vortices are just a natural phenomenon in the world; and instead, my take is that the creatures in the towers (which could be humans – Torm certainly seems to be turning into one) are feeding off their energy. Or something.

Speaking of the temporal vortices…

Ah, yes, those things. The reason I think they’re purely natural is because they are clearly modelled on the very real phenomenon of vortices in water currents around islands. In a book about Ocean Currents, I found this quote:

[In Micronesia], it was found that ‘The islanders had discovered stable vortex pairs and used them in their fishing and navigation long before they were known to science.’

Sound familiar? In the book, our islanders have discovered their own temporal vortex pair and are using it for speeding up travel around the world, even if they don’t wholly understand it. In the real world, vortices create all sorts of strange environmental and ecological effects, and one imagines that the same would be true in the book. Plus the guy who first studied them is called Dedeler Aylett – get it, islet?

The vortices would clearly be of great interest to the mainlanders, if only to figure out a faster way of getting troops and materiel to the southern continent; that’s why I think that they’re busy investigating all apparently vortex-related phenomenon that they can find (the Towers, for example).

And the glass?

We can be reasonably confident that the polymerized borophosphosilicate glass, BPSG, really does block the weirdness from the Towers. It seems remarkably high-tech, containing ‘molecular mini-circuitry within’. Incidentally, BPSG is a real compound, usually used in semiconductors; intriguingly, it is affected by cosmic radiation.

The plate glass that Hike/Chas had made for the Lord and later was used to murder Commis came from Ørsknes, the same town by the first tower that Torm and Alvasund visited. A similar plate glass was found in Nelquay. None of this means that Lord’s glass was BPSG though – sometimes glass is just glass.

Of course, glass is a major theme in the story. Jaem Aubrac keeps the thrymes in a glass container, Lorna uses glasses to look at Tremm, Alvasund pretends there’s a sheet of virtual glass between them, not to mention the BPSG and the killer plate glass. You can understand why Christopher Priest finds it so interesting, as a transparent barrier that is usually faithful but can sometimes be used to trick people, and as a cold, dangerous, fragile material. It keeps things in, and it also keeps things out.

Yo, Oy, and the Tunnels

One way of looking at The Islanders is that it’s a story about art. Jordenn Yo creates tunnels around the world, works of art that nevertheless are dangerous to its admirers (the Torrent) and to its hosts (Siff). She is rarely welcomed and has to resort to plenty of trickery to dig her tunnels, but we are meant to admire what she does; she’s very much an islander.

We can see the temporal vortices in the same way – they’re fascinating, not simply just as shortcuts but as a way of preventing the Dream Archipelago from being definitively mapped and, one imagines, made boring and staid like the mainlanders no doubt want. However, the vortices cause all sorts of terrible problems such as the Towers, and they can be used for nefarious purposes.

Tamarra Deer Oy produces art of a different kind, filling things in. He’s far less disruptive; he might think he’s dangerous, but he’s often welcomed by authorities since he’s more likely to shore up walls or increase tourism than kill anyone or sink an island. You can see him as a balance to Yo, a way to tamp down her more destructive tendencies; the whole thing about filling in tunnels is hardly subtle. He’s more of a mainlander.

If you want, you can find similar comparisons elsewhere in the book. There’s the secular Caurer Foundation, a rather boring affair that notably has administrative offices in the northern mainland city of Glaund; the Caurer Shrine Trustees are a more interesting bunch based in that most islander of islands, Derril. There’s Piqay versus Muriseay, Dryd Bathurst versus Esphoven Muy, the fact that many islands have military bases that confer benefits and hazards to nearby inhabitants.

Of course, this puts it all in a terribly dry fashion. The book is more complicated than ‘art is great but messes things up, so we need someone to tidy everything up afterwards’. It doesn’t explain everything. But it’s an interesting start.

Here are the steps required for Harper’s Bazaar:

1. Unlock my iPhone 4
2. Go to Home Screen
3. Open the App Store
4. Switch to the Search tab
5. Type in ‘Zappar’
6. Select ‘Zappar’ from the list of apps
7. Tap to download (3.1MB)
8. Type in my password
9. Wait for the download to complete
10. Open Zappar
11. Skip the tutorial
12. Select ‘Harper’s Bazaar’ from the list of ‘zaps’
13. Tap to download this specific ‘zap’ (4.4MB)
14. Wait for the download to complete
15. Tap ‘Zap’ to start the AR feature
16. Watch the thing

That’s a lot of steps. Going at full speed and using a wifi connection, plus starting from step 2, it took me 90 seconds from start to finish. If I wasn’t in such a hurry I would imagine it’d take about 2 minutes, and if you actually bothered to swipe through the Zappar tutorial you’re looking at 3 minutes.

But at least with a magazine there’s a good chance you’ll be at home when you’re reading it and on a fast wifi connection; plus you might be more inclined to try it since you bought the thing – why anything imagines that someone would do this while walking around outside is beyond me.

It would be OK if what you got was the most awesome augmented reality experience ever, but with Harper’s Bazaar, it was just a video. To be precise, I watched a video superimposed onto a magazine cover that I’m looking at through the camera of my iPhone. My iPhone screen isn’t that huge, and when the video only covers part of the magazine, it’s really quite tiny. If it was a great video, then you’d probably want to watch it on a computer or tablet, or at the very least, full screen on the iPhone; but here it’s just a gimmick, and a bad one at that since it pales in comparison to superior gimmicks that show 3D objects or similar.

So basically my point here is that it’s a big waste of money. What’s new? Precisely nothing at all – we’re just seeing augmented reality go through the classic hype curve in which a new technology makes possible something that we’ve always wanted to have (i.e. Terminator-vision) but in a form that is manifestly unsuited to most applications. Consider:

• There is no standard platform and it’s not built-in to phones. If you want to view any AR, you must download a special app, and people underestimate the public’s tolerances for downloading any old thing.
• It’s not hands free, and usually you’re extending your hands right out in front of you. It severely limits interaction possibilities, plus it’s not comfortable to hold that position for more than a few minutes.
• Most applications are desperately unimaginative, often involving advertising or some kind of navigation system that’s better executed in standard top-down maps.
• It’s too small. How much useful information can you overlay onto a small screen that only displays a tiny slice of the world? I have no doubt that pictures like this will make kids of the future crack up with laughter and be featured in the Paleofuture blog of 2031:

None of these challenges are insurmountable, but it’s foolish at best and disingenuous at worst to suggest that smartphone-based AR is anything other than experimental and highly unlikely to provide any conventional return. So, hey, if you’ve got money to burn, by all means play around with AR, although it wouldn’t hurt to try something a bit more interesting; but if you don’t (as is the case for most of the publishing industry), save your cash. No-one wants AR yet because there has been no clear demonstration of its strengths above and beyond what we already have.

Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should do it.

We’ve treated ’scale’ like an unalloyed good for so long that it seems peculiar to question it. There are plenty of reasons for wanting to scale businesses and services up to make more things for more people in more areas; perhaps the strongest is that things usually get cheaper and quicker to provide.

The problem is that scale has a cost, and that’s being unable to respond to the wants and needs of unique individuals. Theoretically, that’s not a problem in a free market, but of course, we don’t have a free market, and we certainly don’t have a free market when it comes to politics and media.

Just look at how the Occupy movement have been covered – or not, as the case may be. National news organisations naturally want to cover the biggest movements that they think will be of the most interest to the most people, and crucially, can be explained in the least time possible; no wonder they were so adamant on getting a single demand or list of issues from Occupy Wall Street and the rest of the movement – it’d make their lives easier.

And that process of simplification has a feedback effect on politics, focusing attention on just a small number of actors who appear to have ’scale’ and an interesting story. Who cares about some little protest in some town when you can profile Michelle Bachmann, potential Republican presidential nominee (or indeed, Donald Trump, Sarah Palin, Tim Pawlenty, Herman Cain, etc.)? But there is one good reason behind focusing on them – it’s the ultimate instance of scale, one person representing over 300 million people.

I find that disturbing. I’ve made no secret of my belief that bad gatekeepers (like commissioners and editors) can waste money, favour their friends, and harm creativity. Some think that the solution to this is to have better gatekeepers. I think the solution is to have fewer gatekeepers – as few as we can manage with.

The system of politics in the US and UK has a similar problem, where you have a single person wielding a massive amount of power. When we see a bad leader in power, we think the solution is to elect a better leader. For some reason, we don’t think of having fewer leaders.

So, on second thoughts, I can see understand the strengths of the Occupy movement. By being a leaderless organisation, small groups that are loosely connected, it neatly eliminates the problem of abusive or ineffective leaders and devolves power to a much more local level – a level that can be more reflective and responsive to the people directly involved.

OccupyX is not perfect by any means but it demonstrates an alternative to the lure of scale. Just by itself, that’s a remarkable achievement.

Of course, it hasn’t all been perfect. Each magazine has a completely different method of operation and user interface that conspires to frustrate me in big ways and small. Before a recent trip abroad I dutifully opened up every single content app and synced everything, but The Atlantic proved too wily and when I tried to read the magazine while offline, it sniffily informed me that another update was required. Thanks for nothing. It turns out that because the app delivers both web content and magazine content, it’s often confusing whether you’ve actually downloaded the whole magazine or not.

I shall refrain from going too much into The Atlantic app’s failings (powered by Rarewire) as a reading experience; the fact that it delivers magazine pages as images that are just-about-but-not-quite readable without zooming in; the practically non-existent navigation; the weird text-only mode that is missing images (at least when offline). The short story is that it has very little in common with other iPad reading experiences – apart from, presumably, other Rarewire apps – which is more than enough to cause irritation.

The Economist has been cited as one of the best magazine apps out there. I can’t disagree – it’s simple and it works well. I don’t understand why it isn’t on Newsstand yet, since auto-downloading would be nice, but otherwise I can’t complain. It’s worth noting that you have to swipe left to read the next page though, which sort-of makes sense given its two column layout but is nonetheless at odds with many other apps (other The Atlantic, which doesn’t count).

The New Yorker is an interesting one. It has the usual Conde Nast engine so the download takes forever and frequently hangs (although last week it downloaded itself automatically, which was great). Despite this, I personally think that the New Yorker has one of the best reading experiences out there. The font size and layout is very agreeable and I like the way in which you flick up and down to read through articles. There are plenty of adverts, but it’s easy to skip them and the multiple navigation options allow me to get to where I want to go quickly (i.e. skip the entire first half of the magazine). If only it were faster.

The problem with The New Yorker app, though, is that it has all sorts of weird UI quirks. Articles rarely have genuinely interactive elements, and when they do, they behave in all sorts of strange ways. I gather that red links to supplementary material require you to be online, but I wish they were downloaded at the start. I also only realised last month that you could actually tap the ‘buttons’ on the Cartoon Caption competition page to see the nominees and winners; the buttons just don’t look like buttons. I imagine that a lot of other readers have the same problem of just not knowing what the hell is going on.

Then there’s newspaper apps like The Guardian, The New York Times, and The Globe and Mail, all good in their own ways and all with completely different modes of navigation. Some have articles scrolling left to right, others up and down, some have sections arranges horizontally, others vertically, and so on. I wouldn’t have any problem with these differences if they were justified (I don’t expect aggregators like Flipboard or Zite to work in the same way) but let’s face it – these newspapers all have a pretty similar structure, meaning that it’s annoying to have to learn new conventions every single time.

This Cambrian explosion of interfaces that touchscreens have ushered in is exhilarating in the truest sense; I’m pleased to see new ideas flourish, but I’m frankly tired at having to keep track of so many different UI conventions. They frequently get in the way of the content and the experience. I’m not so bothered about whether we swipe left to right or up and down to read articles as long as there’s some kind of consistency.

It’s this consistency that, I believe, has made so many people enamoured of iOS. We might complain about how the home screen and its grid of apps is getting rather long in the tooth, but at least you know how it works. In contrast, when I pick up an Android phone I don’t immediately know how to navigate the home screen with all of its widgets, and even if I did learn, that knowledge wouldn’t necessarily translate to other Android phones. I wouldn’t be surprised that the end result is users just not taking advantage of all the features out there.

That’s not to say that the Android experience is necessarily any worse (although it may be) – it’s just that its inconsistency between implementations places a real cognitive burden on users. I just bet this bugs the hell out of a lot of Android users since people ‘ought’ to find the ‘best’ OS or UX and use that, but guess what: we’re only human.

The same reason lies behind why people like ‘personal newspapers’ like Flipboard, Zite, and arguably Instapaper (along with their earlier incarnations, RSS readers); these apps make the reading experience consistent across every blog and newspaper and magazine, and just make things easier to read, even if they don’t actually have best-of-class UX. They also download stuff faster and provide a one-stop shop. I could frankly care less about the social stuff, it’s just the convenience that’s important.

(Two notes: I wonder why Flipboard and Zite don’t have a bookmarklet that mimics Instapaper’s functionality. Seems like an obvious thing to do. It also goes without saying that Flipboard and Zite have completely different navigation systems, although I suppose that’s the point.)

It’s slightly puzzling, then, that Flipboard has introduced custom skins and UX for selected websites like Wired. I understand that this is a quid pro quo for those websites getting visibility/not being too pissed off at being aggregated, but it breaks the consistency of the experience for me and I don’t appreciate it, even if it does look better. Maybe they don’t think it matters that much.

I expect that newspaper/magazine apps will eventually converge around one or two general reading conventions just as blogs and news websites mostly have. For instance, I’m heartened to see more and more sites losing the infernal pagination and going to single-page articles.

But maybe things won’t settle down. Maybe the characteristics of our devices – tablets and smartphones today, voice tomorrow, head-up displays next week – will outpace our ability to reach consensus. In that case, expect ‘old’ interface conventions to linger on well past their welcome simply due to our familiarity with them; who knows, perhaps the virtual reality user experience of 2030 won’t be a glitteringly efficient yet totally alien cyberspace, but a mahogany desk bearing a calendar bound in rich Corinthian leather…

This week, the iPhone 5 – sorry, the iPhone 4S – was announced by Apple to millions of anxious fans across the world. Despite containing a significantly faster processor, better antenna, longer battery, higher resolution camera, and more memory and storage space, many were disappointed because it didn’t look any different from the previous model, the iPhone 4 – specifically, because it didn’t have a bigger screen and a thinner body.

I can understand that this may have been a letdown. Over the past few years, we have been accustomed to constant improvements in performance and form-factor among all consumer electronics – not just from Apple, but from all manufacturers like HTC and Samsung and Sony. For better or worse, these devices have taken the same role as jewellery and watches in terms of being status symbols and signs of wealth and taste.

These outward changes, however, can blind us to the remarkable changes in software that are constantly making it easier for a wider number of people to use computing devices. It wasn’t so long ago that to use a computer, you had to master the instructions of a command line in UNIX or DOS; and even more recent versions of Windows and Mac OS have required an understanding of graphical user interfaces that can fox the more timid or cautious user. The touchscreen interfaces of iPhone and Androids, in comparison, are much more intuitive to use – not only do you not need to use a mouse, but the ’skeuomorphic’ designs they frequently employ which mimic existing physical interfaces (like calculators and address books) help ground us in the familiar.

It’s easy to deride these changes as being mere crutches for those who aren’t smart or quick enough to learn Windows or Mac OS. After all, the very notion of computers and the internet is tied up in most people’s minds as involving scrollbars and mouse pointers and menu items and so on. But the truth is that there are millions of people out there – from infants to the elderly – who are now able to use applications, browse the web, write email, and play games, in a much easier and less frightening way than before.

With its new voice recognition system and Siri, its ‘intelligent assistant’, the iPhone 4S takes matters even further. According to the demonstrations, iPhone 4S users will simply be able to speak “Tell my wife I’m running late” or “Remind me to call the vet” and the phone will be able to send the appropriate text message or to-do item.

Now, this is not the first phone to include voice recognition – the iPhone 3G and 4 have included it, along with numerous Android phones; indeed, Android phones also allow you to dictate text messages and find out what the weather is without any button presses. However, the big difference is that you have to be much more specific in how to speak to those older phones – you can’t be too conversational about it, you need to say something like “weather in London” or “indian restaurants near SW4″.

Any self-respecting geek will not find it at all difficult or unusual to phrase requests in that way; they’re used to writing commands and performing operations that suit the limitations of computers. Normal people, though, don’t actually speak in that way. We don’t say to each other “weather in London?”, we say “What was the weather like down there yesterday?” Yes, it takes longer, but it’s much more natural.

Ultimately it’s the ability of computers to adapt to human habits and limitations rather than vice versa that will determine how useful and widespread computers will be in the future. There’ll always be a place for the command line and the graphic user interface for programmers and scientists and engineers, for whom ambiguity can cost millions and kill lives, but for the rest of us, it will be much easier to be able to speak to computers as we speak to anyone else.

It has a Downton Abbey/Mad Men retro vibe, mixed with a go-getting drive to the future; we’re meant to admire these brave ‘young men’ (as they’re always called – not ‘young people’ and certainly not ‘young women’) as they venture forth to build ’superhighways in an unknown sky’.

For all the gorgeous visuals, the overwrought narration destroys any chance of nostalgia by continually reminding us what we should feel, eventually descending into a mish-mash of increasingly similar-looking shiny planes (including, amusingly, the Concorde, which conveniently zooms out of sight at the end lest we start thinking too hard). It could have been much more powerful if they had just a little bit more confidence in themselves.

It reminded me of two, better, time-travelling commercials that also try to impress viewers with their company’s longevity:

Hovis’ attempt is better simply because it’s more interesting and doesn’t have any godawful narration. However, the fact that it has practically nothing at all to do with bread is perhaps not the wisest of choices.

As an aside, these sorts of ‘historical vignette’ stories always make me wonder what would happen next, after the present day; might the little boy jump into a driverless car and then zoom off on a spaceplane to avoid the AI civil war in 2030? Speaking of vignettes, Hovis is clearly hitching its wagon to what it feels are all of Britain’s finest moments like suffragettes, wars, the 60s, miners’ strikes, and, bizarrely, the millennium fireworks celebration. One might have thought that a gay pride parade wouldn’t be amiss, but perhaps that’s too risque for such an old brand.

Then there’s the master:

I still remember watching Honda’s ‘The Impossible Dream’ commercial for the first time. Not only did I immediately go and download Andy Williams’ song, but I watched the video again at least a few times. Unlike Hovis, it’s actually about what Honda makes – cars, vehicles, and other transportation devices – and unlike British Airways, it has enough confidence in its message and audience that it doesn’t need to tell people what to think.

One can only imagine what British Airways’ advertising geniuses would have put on top of it:

Those first young men, the pioneers, the drivers, building superhighways across an unknown land … roaring across roads to go really fast … they didn’t have seatbelts or shit like that, they drove where they were no traffic lights … they drove motorbikes, small cars, big cars, fast cars, and hey, even a motorboat! We follow them to fulfill an unbreakable promise*, the same four words stitched into every uniform of every engineers who builds our stuff: The Power of Dreams.

Luckily, that didn’t happen and we got a good commercial instead. And while I’d be the first person to be cynical about what commercials are meant to do (often, to get us to buy things we don’t need), I’d rather watch a good commercial than a bad one.

(*Is it wise to make ‘unbreakable promise’ in a commercial? I suppose if it’s as vague or uninspiring as BA’s “To Fly. To Serve.” then it doesn’t really matter)

Sadly, someone at Honda decided to update ‘The Impossible Dream’ last year, adding on some boring scenes with robots and completely robbing the commercial of its dramatic, uplifting, and frankly inspired (since, after all, the song – and the video – is about Don Quixote) ending. Somehow, a guy slipping into a nice jacuzzi doesn’t elicit the same emotion:

I’ll leave you with a final commercial I discovered while trawling YouTube that proves that at least someone at British Airways once had a sense of humour, even if they presumably got fired five minutes after this aired:

Have I missed any good time-travelling story commercials? Let me know!

When I heard about Reamde’s premise of hackers, spies, and gold mining in a massive multiplayer online game called T’Rain, I had the same worried feeling that I had when I heard about Anathem’s monasteries – that Neal Stephenson was venturing away from the sort of adventure/SF capers I enjoyed best. However, I was pleasantly surprised at Anathem and I held out the same hope for Reamde.

The problem with Reamde is not that it’s trying to be more ‘accessible’, if by ‘accessible’ we mean it’s set during the present day and has no obviously futuristic elements that might put the ‘mainstream’ off. No, it’s problem is that it’s frequently boring and it doesn’t add up to much at all.

Sure, there are flashes of the classic Stephenson brilliance – the insightful observations of how technology is changing the world, the clever ideas about business and gaming, the tangents into the finer points of grammar and MMO economies. But these are buried in literally thousands of words describing stuff that I frankly couldn’t give a shit about. Every fight, every journey, every thought is explained in excruciating detail, often from multiple points of view, and a lot of the time, none of it is particularly relevant to the plot.

Even worse, the usual and excusable Stephenson vices seem to be on particular show in Reamde: the tendency of almost all the smart characters to speak in the same over-specific way, the cliched over-weaponed and sprawling family of hard-bitten survivalists, the revisiting of Manila and Trinity College in Cambridge, the baffling hookups. I accept these things as being integral to Stephenson’s soul and writing, just as Iain M Banks frequently lapses into forced-jokiness and gratuitously violent torture scenes in his novels, but usually there are more than enough good moments to balance them out. But not this time.

It’s upsetting because there are some fantastic moments in the book where Stephenson was clearly having a lot of fun. I was impressed by the man-hunt in Xiamen, and later on, a massive battle in T’Rain occurred simultaneously with real world shenanigans. Many reviews (such as the WSJ’s*) suggest that these moments, and others like them, are the meat of the book; in fact, they’re far outweighed by tiresome detailing of gun battles and people travelling from A to B. Perhaps if it was a mere 500 pages instead of 1000, I’d have enjoyed it more. Unfortunately, as it stands, I can’t see myself recommending this book to anyone.

Stephenson is still clearly capable of writing awesomely interesting and entertaining fiction. The question is, what happened with Reamde? I can see three possibilities:

1) It really is fantastic and I just have poor taste; certainly most newspaper reviewers seem to like Reamde. However, Amazon.com’s reviews are decidedly mixed, and many Stephenson fans seem disappointed.

2) Stephenson really believes Reamde is a good book. It’s possible. But in contrast to his latest few novels – Anathem, The Baroque Trilogy, Cryptonomicon, etc – I cannot detect any deep philosophical message or personal interest behind Reamde other than ‘hey, isn’t it weird what might happen when lots of people use the internet for games?’ It doesn’t strike me that this was a novel he was dying to write. Which leaves…

3) Stephenson needs the cash and has written an ‘accessible’ novel to turn open the money spigot (which, I realise, is basically what the two writer-characters in Reamde are essentially doing). He knows it’s not his best work, but what the hell, it’s not terrible either.

But why would he need the cash now? Obviously I have no insight into his financial situation. However, Stephenson must be spending an awful lot of time on The Mongoliad these days; writing an online serialised story with updates every month is a proper job, as I can attest to, and you need a lot of paying subscribers to make it work.

I subscribed to the Mongoliad, sight unseen, just as I buy all of Stephenson’s books. I recall it costing a very reasonable $10 for a year’s subscription, and I rubbed my hands in anticipation of the good stuff that was sure to come. Yet after a year’s worth of updates and god knows how many thousands of words published, I haven’t even been able to finish the first chapter.

There are a few reasons why. The first is that the opening didn’t grab me – it seemed rather slow. But probably a bigger reason is that the website and iPad app are so awfully designed that I couldn’t bring myself to read any further. Every time I look at it I feel like I’ve been teleported back to 1995 years. Worse, the iPad app – where I would theoretically do most of my reading – steadfastly refused to remember what I’d read or download new content automatically.

If all of this sounds petty, a friend who has been reading the story confessed that he only managed it by copy-and-pasting the text every week into Microsoft Word and printing it out from there, purely to avoid the terrible design.

As we well know, Stephenson is not one who cares overmuch about appearances, and one might argue the same applies here: why get upset about how the site/app looks as long as the story is good? The problem is that it’s not just that the site and app look terrible, it’s that they don’t even work very well, either. They’re barely intuitive and a lot of the things I’ve tried to do (like log in via Twitter, view some wiki pages) are plain broken. It looks and works like shit.

It could be that the story is great and I’m just totally shallow, but I happen to think that these things matter, and I find it truly sad that my friend felt forced to use Microsoft Word, of all things, to read the story. Just look at what you’ve reduced us to, Stephenson!

All of these failings might be excusable if it really was 1995 and the site had just launched, but it’s not. There is nothing – graphics, design, interaction, UX – that a developer and designer couldn’t fix in a month, tops. Instead, we’ve been saddled with this monstrosity for an entire year, all while the folks at Subutai (the guys behind The Mongoliad) are talking about making an online game and film and whatever.

Maybe that’s where all their energy is going, into this extra transmedia stuff. But if their lack of care towards the written story is indicative of what to expect on other platforms, disappointment is too gentle a word for me to use.

Stephenson is the very last author I would want to criticise in this way. I can’t praise The Diamond Age, Cryptonomicon, and Anathem highly enough. I just hope he gets it together.

• TEDxSheffield on 22nd Sept
• Improving Reality in Brighton on 23rd Sept
• This Happened in London on 23rd Sept
• Over the Air in Bletchley Park on 30th Sept
• BAF Game in Bradford on 8th November

There’d be three more if I weren’t going on holiday to Sudan for a couple of weeks in Oct/Nov. Plus I’m not including two workshops I’m doing with the British Museum about A History of the Future (for kids).

At the games/tech conferences, I’m going to be speaking about some of the new things we’ve been doing with mobiles and in particular, Zombies, Run! At the other conferences, I’m more interested in talking about some new thoughts I’ve had about the change shape of creative work (not terribly original, to be honest, but maybe I can give it a new spin).

So, things are very busy these days between Six to Start and all the extra-curricular stuff I’ve signed myself up to. I’m hoping to break the back of A History of the Future before the year is out (along with Balance of Powers) meaning that next year should be pretty different!

Finally, if you’re wondering why I’m not posting here as much, it’s partly down to the time I’m spending on A History of the Future (22,000 words and counting) and my blogging at the Telegraph. Sorry about that.

The Southwest Pacific islands of Melanesia are some of the most remote places on the planet. Until the Second World War, its inhabitants had few encounters with technology or war, let alone planes and tanks. When Japanese and American soldiers arrived to set up bases, the Melanesians would have been astonished to see planes setting down on their newly-cleared runways disgorging massive amounts of materiel, medicine, food, weapons and clothing.

It would have been difficult for the Melanesians to grasp the reasons why the soldiers were there, or the vast and complex logistics chains that produced the planes and the weapons that moved the supplies around. And so when the soldiers left, taking their supplies with them, the Melanesians did what made perfect sense to them – they imitated the US soldiers by clearing the forest, building wooden control towers, carving headphones, and they fruitlessly waited for planes to arrive with cargo.

Today, we call the Melanesians’ behaviour a ‘cargo cult’ and use the term to describe anyone else who imitates superficial features of a system (in this case, military logistics) and hopes to replicate the original’s success, without any thought or understanding of the intrinsic workings of the system.

Though the cargo cult story is fairly well known, it’s hard to believe that anyone could be short-sighted enough to repeat their mistakes – yet there are countless examples of cargo cult thinking from the small to the massive, all showing how tempting it is to believe that the success of others can be copied as easily as an MP3.

One website that’s succumbed to cargo cult thinking is Unbound. Unbound is a new kind of book publisher that invites readers to help authors write books by buying them in advance. Each book has a target amount it needs to raise, and if that target is met, the author will finish the book and supporters will receive a copy. The venture has been described as a new and innovative way of harnessing the crowd to fund books that traditional publishers might otherwise shy away from.

But there’s another way of looking at Unbound, and that’s as a cargo cult version Kickstarter. Kickstarter is a crowdfunding site that helps creators to fund projects via pledges, for everything from documentary films to book, games, toys, and exhibitions. Most of the pledges aren’t donations but advance purchases of products or tickets, and over the past two years its has raised over $40 million for 8000 projects (including hundreds of books,
one by me), and so when Unbound launched, it was immediately labelled as a ‘Kickstarter for books‘.

On first glance, it’s easy to see why: Unbound has a very similar layout and format to Kickstarter. So far, so good. But the closer you look, the more differences you spot.

Instead of having a clear fundraising goal (e.g. £20,000), Unbound only has a target number of supporters (e.g. 2000). Since 2,000 people pledging £10 each raises much less than 2000 people pledging £250 each, this has caused some confusion. It later emerged that only a quarter of people would be allowed to pledge at the lowest £10 level and that fundraising targets could be ‘adjusted’ at any time.

Where Kickstarter is transparent, Unbound is bafflingly opaque – although this coyness may stem from publishers’ reluctance to talk about hard numbers even when they’re raising all their money from the public. Transparency also applies to creators; on Kickstarter, they write their own project descriptions and film their own videos, allowing their personality, experience, and trustworthiness (or lack thereof) to shine through, and from the earnest amateurishness of some efforts actually helps convey how much they could use the money.

Unbound writes project descriptions for their authors. They’re slick, but they’re also soulless (which is odd, since if anyone ought to be able to write well, it’s authors) and distancing. This leads to another issue – do successful authors like Terry Jones even need the money? After all, they’re asking for a lot – £10,000 at a minimum, and much, much higher in most cases – so you want to be sure it’s being used wisely.

In fact, Terry Jones has already written a big chunk of his book and Tibor Fischer’s Possibly Forty Ships (on Amazon) is already published. I wonder whether these books would be published one way or another even if they don’t meet their targets.

These questions would be less important if pledges weren’t so expensive at £10 for eBooks and £20 for hardbacks. Higher level rewards are also frustratingly vague, talking about ‘goodie bags’ for pledging over £150; again, in contrast to the often more specific and highly-imaginative rewards that many Kickstarter creators offer. There’s a reason why Kickstarter’s average pledge is £44 – it’s because people look forward to getting something really special.

I could go on – Unbound doesn’t have a wide enough selection, it’s too UK-centric, Gavin Pretor-Pinney’s Clouds iPad app vanished without a trace (although with only 2 per cent raised after a few weeks, it’s easy to speculate why).

But the biggest difference is its success rate. Of the six projects Unbound started with, it seems that one has been funded so far: Evil Machines by Terry Jones, and only by a gnat’s whisker at that, even though it’s by a Monty Python member with over 30,000 Twitter followers. Four other books on the brink of failure have had their deadlines unexpectedly extended, hopefully long enough for the public to come to their senses and cough up more cash. Unbound isn’t some fly-by-night operation; it was heavily promoted at the Hay Festival, it’s received gushing praise across the media – yet it may end up with a one in six success rate.

So, why was Unbound set up in the first place? It’s because they constructed a cargo cult, believing that if they mimicked the superficial elements of successful crowdfunding, they could enjoy the same success as others – but perhaps even more, thanks to their relationships with publishers, agents, authors, and the media.

Unbound are learning. Unlike Kickstarter, they’ll refund supporters’ money if the books aren’t delivered, and their newest author, Rupert Isaacson, has more specific rewards and a more realistic (i.e. lower) fundraising goal. Yet with a such a low target, you wonder whether a small publisher or Kickstarter might be a better choice.

I genuinely admire the sentiment behind Unbound, but there’s been a real lack of understanding of what makes for successful crowdfunding. I hope they can fix it soon.

Kickstarter isn’t the only success to attract cargo cults. Mere months after the iPhone was announced in 2007, a parade of competitors built their own cargo cults around it, hoping that by mimicking the iPhone’s design and its characteristic ‘apps’ they’d attract customers who don’t know any better, even if their phones didn’t have the same range of apps as Apple, or weren’t as fast.

Cargo cult thinking in technology products might have worked in the past, when customers really didn’t know any better and you could overwhelm them with slick marketing campaigns, but things are different now, thanks to online reviews and word-of-mouth. Yet they still try, wasting millions and millions on modern-day equivalents of wooden radar towers, or rather, yet more iPhone and iPad imitators.

Cargo cults abound in governance as well. The institutions that underpin western liberal democracy – universal suffrage and free and fair elections – are so strong and have produced such comparative stability and growth that you see other organisations and countries erect their own cargo cults, hoping that the illusion of elections will quell the people and produce similarly positive results. The sham of the FIFA voting scandal and recent ‘elections’ in countries such as Egypt and Iran have put paid to such craven hopes.

In our own country, the events of the last few weeks have shown that the Press Complaints Commission has been another cargo cult. With its Code of Practice, power to impose sanctions, rules on conflicts of interest, we thought it could deliver the goods, but we didn’t understand what really made for effective commissions, like functional and financial independence and an actual desire to challenge power.

Someone once said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.” A cargo cult is copying the most superficial parts of a success and expecting the same results. It comes from our desperate desire for quick success and power. It’s magical, childish thinking made more seductive now that it’s so easy to copy things, both online and in the real world. We forget that the beautiful and apt verse by Ecclesiastes:

I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Success is rarely as simple or straightforward as we hope it to be. Just ask the Melanesians.