Tacos Lupita! with extra Vinge

[prog]

Working from home today, and took a combo lunch/laundry break. While my clothes were drying, I went across the street to Tacos Lupita (at Wilson Square in Somerville, this is), from which I have purchased many a to-go taco or burrito. Since I had time to kill I thought I'd finally try one of their combination plates, and so, feeling protein-deficient, ordered a steak platter.

Wow! I wasn't expecting it to be as good as it was. While I knew the tortillas would be fresh and yummy (this being the reason to buy tacos there), the beans and rice were very good too, and the steak was wonderful; thin, crispy, and seasoned just right. Shockingly good, given that the meat in their steak tacos is usually leathery little nodules. (So why, knowing this, did I order what promised to be an entire plateful of it? Maybe I am just that magical. Or absentminded.) And the portion was also perfect, for me... just enough to make me feel full.

Therefore, if you are stranded near Porter Square, are hungry for something Mexican, and can partake of the animal flesh, do that↑. It's good.

---

While enjoying this rare meatgasm (You gain a Moxie point!), I started in on the epilogue of A Fire Upon the Deep, so I'm all but finished with that story. Quite a feast to be had there, too; I don't think a single SF lover I know wouldn't like this book. Even the ones who hate dogs would probably like it, despite all the dogs that are in it. It's that good! It overcomes its own dogginess. (I think I have at least two SF-loving, dog-hating friends. Coincidence? Meh.)

I am intrigued by the single truly fantasy-flavored element that the book's universe contains, the mysterious cosmic speed-zone structure that basically defines the whole setting. While characters and narration make constant references to it, neither ever describes what it is, exactly, or how it works, or why. It's just there, and the characters deal with it, just like they deal with gravity, or time. I want to say it's handled more like an element of magical realism than a piece of an SF setting. Magical futurism? Shrug!

Anyway, it's delightful. Maybe the epilogue will have something more to say about it... and I'm rather suspecting that the followup novel has more to do with it.

Comments

[queue.livejournal.com]

Anyway, it's delightful. Maybe the epilogue will have something more to say about it... and I'm rather suspecting that the followup novel has more to do with it.

Not really, in either case. Well, I'm something like 2/3 of the way through the next book, and it doesn't really explain any of that.

[wrog]

what's there to explain, really?

It's a plot device. Rather like the "hyperspace"/"warp drive" FTL dodge that permeates the entire space opera genre. An interesting version of the "space gets weird at the edge of the galaxy" chestnut, to be sure.

The universe is divided up into distinct zones whose inherent physical laws differ. These differences have an impact on the ultimate speed-of-communication/travel and the quality-of-computation available within a given zone. The center of the galaxy is really stupid and slow and everything gets faster, smaller and more intelligent the farther out you go; for FTL, real AI and nanotech, you need to be in the Beyond or higher. I seriously doubt that Vinge has worked things out in much more detail than that.

That's not to say he hasn't worked out rather a lot of details, but they all pertain to consequences of the zones rather than the question of what the zones really are, i.e., exactly how to mess with the underlying physics to obtain the results he wants --- and I'd say any such attempt at explanation would ultimately devolve into technobabble that doesn't really add anything to the story

see, what's really going on is that Planck's constant decreases the farther out you go, which reduces the error margins set by the uncertainty principle, thus removing fundamental limitations on nanotech; Boltzman's constant changes, too, which changes the measure/definition of entropy and thus increasing Chaitin's information theoretic bounds on bandwidth, blah blah blah... and yes I'm pulling this all straight out of my ass and my guess is if any part of it were true, there'd be physically measurable effects that Earthbound astrophysicists could see today; there's also the small matter that Vinge's universe has FTL + no time travel, which is logically inconsistent with what we know from Special Relativity, and if SR didn't hold at the edge of the galaxy, that, too, would have effects observable from here... but who cares, really?

I'll grant that every so often you get people like David Brin, Gregory Benford, or John Cramer who, being real physicists by trade, can spin plausible/interesting technobabble --- to the point where it may take another physicist to spot the rubbery bits and the logical holes that you can drive a truck through. But even there, one can still end up with something that reads far too much like a physics paper rather than an SF story --- Brin is rather good about not doing this; Benford and Cramer less so. And if I'd wanted to read a physics paper, there are plenty of real ones out there.

In any case, Vinge is not a physicist and thus knows better than to try.

(and too bad for all of the non-physicists [e.g., James Hogan] who don't know better...)

tacos!

[hrafn.livejournal.com]

I have walked past that place many, many times, and always thought, "Gee, I should try them out sometime, given that it's so close to me," and never have. Perhaps I have more incentive now that I have heard a good review.