mataglap -- an Indonesian word meaning "dark eye" or, probably, "dilated eye." It is an indication that someone is about to go berserk and start killing people at random. Used in Walter Jon Williams' novel Aristoi as the name of a berserk form of nanotechnology that devoured the planet.

You can e-mail Mataglap SF at mataglap@yahoo.com

 
(Wireless, Ace)



The word "palimpsest" is one of those that sticks in your brain for its odd sound, even though you don't remember what it means.  While it sounds like something you'd go see a dermatologist about, it in fact has its origins in the ancient Greek and Roman practice of reusing some sort of writing surface, eradicating the original script and replacing it with something else.  This has particular interest to archeologists because they of course are interested in what was there before, and go to great lengths to try lifting the original text off of the parchment or tablets or whatever they may be.

Stross takes a different tack, with a palimpsest referring to a period of time which is "overwritten" by someone going back and changing an event to make things happen differently.  The story concerns a young man named Pierce, who is going through a 20-year long training program as an agent of the Stasis.  In the far future, humanity has been able to engineer huge  cosmic interventions to keep their own species alive as the universe ages and starts to decay.  Through the magic of time travel, they're able to disperse agents throughout human history to keep things in check, and to overwrite those periods that get out of whack, which seems to happen mostly because other people can also go back in time and meddle in things.  The Statis is the powerful agency in charge of this task, and it actually outlives humanity many times over, it is expected that civilizations will rise and fall and occasionally have to be reseeded from scratch and allowed to develop all over again over billions of years.

The story lurches forwards through Pierce's own career in training, at one point he has a wife and kids and then a few scenes later they no longer exist and Stross doesn't dwell on how it happened.  The author also interrupts the narrative a few times for poetic descriptions of the life of the universe, starting with the one we're familiar with and then branching out from there as things change.  Pierce crosses paths multiple times with his former and future selves, as well as those of his fellow agents, and the complexity of the task to which Stasis has him assigned causes him to eventually seek out an insurgent group known as the Opposition.  But even that isn't what it seems, and at the end Pierce is faced with the notion that in spite of always bumping into all these other copies of himself, he may just be able to still exercise free will in the present after all.

There's a lot going on in this story, it's probably not long enough to really flesh out all the ideas Stross has floating around, but at least here everything is focused on the central idea, and maybe by keeping it at this length Stross avoids the pitfall of over-explaining (or else going off on too many tangents) and keeps the narrative concise and if you can't keep up well then that's your problem, go back and read it a few more times.  Besides all the cosmic intrigue and long-view cosmology, there's also a love story in here and some commentary on how any powerful organization, even one that outlasts human evolution a zillion times over, will eventually grow corrupt and decay.  The plot makes just enough sense at a superficial level to hang together and keep the reader involved, forcing you to pay attention before everything shifts out from under you all over again.   Stross has put a complex story into an enormous canvas and made it comprehensible enough to follow along, you don't even get the time to appreciate just what a broad structure he's taken on.  Never one to back away from audacious storytelling, Stross outdoes himself here with what has to be one of the best, and certainly most ambitious, stories of the year.
posted by Mark at 10:33 PM