SOUNDTRACK: RONG-“Shrugging at the Dearth of Discourse” (2019).

Every year Lars Gotrich publishes his list of favorite music in an NPR podcast called Viking’s Choice: The Year In The Loud And The Weird.  I always listen to these songs because I’ll never hear them anywhere else (he mostly seems to scour bandcamp for unknown music.

One that he especially liked was by the band Rong from Boston.

He says:

Just bonkers. Boston’s Rong channels the joyous chaos of Japanese punks Melt-Banana and the aggro skronk of Brainiac with a tad of Deerhoof’s weirdo-pop hooks, in what sounds like a swarm of bats fighting a comically large industrial fan… and the bats win. Dissect the noise and you’ll find some truly athletic guitar interplay, held together by a sturdy rhythm section and Olivia W-B’s vocal acrobatics.

This song starts out with Olivia screaming quickly and almost inaudibly while the drummer thrashes away on every surface nearby.  There appears to be two guitars each playing their own riff that seems irrelevant to anything else. It’s a chaotic statement that will likely make most people turn the song off.   After 30 seconds one of the guitars plays a riff and at 35 seconds the riff is actually really catchy and Olivia sings along with it.  Wow.

And the song is not even one third over.

After a few more rounds through similar styles things really slow down around 1:45.  It is just bass and drums and vocals for a bit before two separate solos happen at once.  About five more parts occur before the song ends at 3:11.  This includes a riff that is repeated a few times and a absolutely berzerk ending.

That’s the first of 8 similarly eclectic and, yes, bonkers, songs.  Finding the melody and connections between the parts is rather strangely rewarding.

Incidentally, the final track on the album is called . ༼ ༎ຶ ෴ ༎ຶ༽   In a bigger font, that’s:

༼ ༎ຶ ෴ ༎ຶ༽

[READ: Summer 2019] The Long Cosmos

The “Long Earth” Tetrology is complete.

This was a series that was pretty much impossible to end.  I mean the very premise is that there is unlimited exploration to be had in the various “Earths.”  So how do you end it?  Well, really you end it by following the main protagonist of all of this, Joshua Valiente to his logical conclusion (or something like that).

This book also serves as a kind of reconciliation for many of the estranged characters, but, thankfully does not resurrect any dead characters (well, except for Lobsang–whatever he may be).

The Foreword to this book answers a question that I had: If Terry Pratchett died in 2015, did he have anything to do with this book which came out in 2016?  Baxter explains that indeed, he and Pratchett had created drafts of the final three books by August 2013.  Terry and Stephen worked on the book together as late as autumn 2014.  Then Baxter dealt with final editorial and publishing stages.  So that makes me happy.

I am, as always with this series, puzzled as to what Terry’s contributions were to the books.  I haven’t read anything else by Baxter, so I don’t know if this is a Baxter book with Pratchett sprinkled in or if it’s a combination of their writing styles   The one thing is that this series is never really all that funny (with one huge exception later).  Not to say that Pratchett had to be funny, but it was certainly what he was known for.  Maybe I’ll try a Baxter book one of these days to see just what his works are like.

But back to the concluding chapter of this long series.

This book opens with the invitation: JOIN US.

Set in 2070, it is three years after Joshua’s ex-wife Helen’s death.  He is on the Earth West 5 away from Datum earth, where she wished to be buried.  He hears the invitation.

Jump to Gap Earth where two scientists working at Gap Space–Dev Bilaniuk and Lee Malone–see that the invitation is Long Earth Wide–an unprecedented event sent from the center of the galaxy.  Dev works with Stella Welch, who is a Next–an evolved human who is vastly more intelligent than us normal humans (and rather obnoxious about it).  Dev tells her that this invitation comes from a species that is vastly more intelligent than her.

Further away, on an earth that Joshua will chance upon later in the book lives a troll that Joshua will call Sancho. The trolls heard the call too.

Another person who heard the call was Nelson Azikiwe, now 78 and retired from all employment.  He was aware of the invitation from following SETI boards.  But Nelson gets another message.  This one from Lobsang: Lobsang has found Nelson’s grandson.  Nelson is quite surprised by this because he didn’t even know he had a son.

Finally, Admiral Maggie Kaufmann, now 68, was formally retired from active duty.  And yet, she was called by her fellow Admiral (whom she did not respect) to investigate something.  Something to do with an invitation.So Joshua is now 68 and, as he is prone to do, (much to the dismay of friends and family, and one of the reasons he was divorced) he decided to go off on a “sabbatical.”  Before he leaves, his son Rod, now 38 comes in to say goodbye.   Their relationship is frosty–no better since Helen, Rod’s mother–died.  Joshua decides to step out to Earth West 1,217,756 and get his head centered.

This series has had many deaths.  Deaths of beloved characters.  This time we are to lose Sister Agnes.  She was now cyborg (or whatever it is that Lobsang did to her) and while she could live forever, she felt it was time.  But before her death she comes to say goodbye to Joshua and to tell him about a young boy much like he was back at the orphanage, a boy named Jan Roderick.   Jan Roderick loves all those old movies (like Contact–a source of a lot of information for this series).  Jan Roderick also read old books, which allowed for a nice nod for Practhett fans when Jan Roderick asks if the Long Earth is bigger than Ringworld (Pratchett said Discworld was a “pisstake/homage/satire” of Larry Niven’s Ringworld).

But the addition of new characters shows the continuum of life.  Dev and Lee studied at Valhalla U under a Next professor and as such they are called upon to help the Next.  Yes Dim-Bulbs are helping the Next with their plan to build…something, based on the JOIN US invitation.  The Next want to have all opinions as to this message and Dev and Lee’s insight is valuable and sometimes surprising.

Much of the book, however, is taken up with Joshua’s trip.  Unlike the very heavy science fiction and futurism of the rest of the series, this is down to basic survival in the wilderness (with 2070 technology of course).  It’s an interesting change of pace.  He sees the local animals, and the terrifying predators (humanoid alligators (!)) and then he meets the troll that he will call Sancho.

Sancho is a librarian for the trolls (I imagined this was a nod to The Librarian of the Discworld) which means he collects all of the collective wisdom of the trolls and shares it with other like Librarians.  Joshua and Sancho bond, as best as these two species can, with Sancho capturing food (in a fascinating hunting style) and Joshua cooking the raw meat.  The trolls, despite all their advancement could never master fire but they sure did enjoy cooked meat.  This bond saves his life shortly after when he is caught in a stampede and his leg is broken.  It is only through the care of Sancho that he survives.  Much of Joshua story is spent in a cave with the trolls tending to him.  It’s sweet and mildly funny because Joshua is pretty delusional most of the time.  While their care isn’t very tender it is loving.

Nelson’s journey is a relatively sweet one.  He goes out in search of his grandson Troy and discovers that he (as well as his son and his lover) are aboard one of the Traversers, this one known as Second Person Singular.  I really enjoyed this exploration of this fascinating island-like character whose sole reason for existing is absorbing anything it can.

The Jan Roderick story is pretty entertaining.  He is a precocious and exploratory kind of kid and he is minded by Sister Colleen, a woman who does not wish to travel at all.  The fact that she agrees to Jan Roderick’s idea is pretty astonishing.  But he has figured out that someone (the Next it turns out) have sent out a signal, a signal to go to specific worlds.  That signal comes in the form of pi.  So Jan Roderick knows which planets to go to.  It’s a matter f convincing Sister Colleen that they should travel hundreds of thousands of planets West.

It’s fascinating that so much of the action (such as it is) takes place without Joshua’s knowledge because he is with the trolls for quite some time before Rod finds him.  There is some action on this planet as well.  Rod rescues a young troll from a predator who then snatches Rod and steps away.  It is up to Sancho to find him.  And Sancho knows ways to step that are so far advanced of anyone else that Joshua’s mind reels.

They land on a world with trees that extend miles into the air.  The whole discussion of these trees is really quite cool.  And I’d love to see more about this idea.

But as must happen, all of the plotlines converge on one of the pi worlds (apple pi, in fact). And here the Next have built a structure the size of a planet. Maggie Kaufmann is nominally overseeing it but she really has no idea what it is either.  The biggest surprise comes when Douglas Black, now 112, comes out of his Fountain of Youth planet to have input into this structure.  There is some intense stepping ahead for the conclusion of the book.

I wanted to make a special note that this book had a ton more comedy than the others (which means a few funny passages), but there were a few sections that were really funny.

Like in Chapter 56 which is titled: Extract from Make Sure You get This Down Correctly For Once In Your Life, Jocasta: The Authorized Biography of Professor Wotan Ulm.  There not a lot of humor in this series, but this (brief) chapter got me to laugh out loud.

I’ve never read a series quite like this before.  The first three books are so slowly paced–but not in a boring way.  I don’t really know how they did it.  Nothing really happens for much of the books.  And yet all of the things that everyone discovers are really interesting–it’s just that nothing happens with them.  And I think that’s just fine.  By the end, some real action comes into the series and I found the final two books to be really quite exciting.

I wonder if this was the planned conclusion of the series or if they would have done more had Pratchett lived.

Maybe he’ll return as AI someday too!