The Girl with the NSObject Class Reference tattoo
Verity tackles Swedish noir
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Stob What better occupation, at this time of year, than to polish up one's IT skills with some background reading? What have the great programming publishers got lined up for our delectation in 2011?
Alas, as far as this reviewer is concerned, these rhetorical questions must remain unanswered. A certain Amazon parcel, containing several kilos of Addison-Wesley's and O'Reilly's latest, is delayed-believed-lost in the region of the Park Royal depot, and I haven't got time to go running off to shops to acquire replacements. That tap-tap-tapping at the window is Dudley Deadline, and he is wearing his mean face.
This is the sort of situation that distinguishes the ovine from the caprine. But have no fear. My name is Verity, and I am your Nanny for today. We can get through this; we have seen worse.
It so happens that I do have to hand a couple of paperbacks, freshly bought, which represent a very Swedish approach to modern software issues. And we all know how important the Swedes are becoming in our speciality, what with Joe Armstrong and everything. If you are sitting comfortably, I shall begin.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
(Author: Stieg Larsson, pub: Quercus, 538pp.)
The late Stieg Larsson's book is a quaint, nostalgic look back at the very early days of the computing - ie five years ago - masquerading as a ripper thriller. The text was originally written in Swedish, but has been translated into idiosyncratic English for the convenience of Anglophone readers.
The translation contains various curiosities. The computer abbreviations are spelled out with full stops, thus: 'A.D.S.L'. This makes them look like defunct trade unions, as referenced in yellowing press cuttings from the mid-1960s. One wonders: what has the Association of Domestic Servants and Loafers got to do with the Interweb? However the 'AK4', apparently a kind of rifle (see p10), is presented unpunctuated, following some linguistic algorithm that I do not pretend to understand.
We may be confident that Stieg Larsson was an Apple fan. Not only does he make the hero purchase an early model iPod as a Christmas gift, Stieg actually stops the action and uses the narrator's voice to recommend an OS X shareware program called 'Notepad' (a very confusing name for Windows users), even bothering to supply its url in the text.
However, he does allow some characters to use Windows. Here is a summary of the principals and their machine/OS choices:
| Character | Occupation | Machine |
| Hr Mikael Blomkvist | Our hero, a middle-aged, journalist who is the editor-in-chief of Millennium magazine. For some reason, not really made clear, all the women in the book are keen to hop into bed with Blomkvist. (Incidentally, if you turn to the author's biog at the front of the book, you will find that in real life Stieg Larsson was a journalist: editor-in-chief of Expo magazine, founded 1999. Just saying.) | Apple iBook, see, eg, p124 |
| Frk Lisbeth Salander | Kooky, gothy 'genius computer hacker' (says back cover blurb), not afraid of wandering the wrong side of the law when justice requires it. The eponymous girl. | Apple iBook 600 (p193), then Apple Powerbook G4/1.0 GHz with 960 megs of R.A.M. and N.V.I.D.I.A. graphics 'which shook the P.C. advocates' (p194) |
| Hr Hans-Erik Wennerstrom | Maxwell-like entrepreneur and fraudster, and oppressor of Hr Blomkvist. | I.B.M. (sic) laptop, using the software programme (sic) Microsoft Explorer (sic, no 'Internet') to surf the web, p471-472 |
| Hr Benny Bjorn (not his real name, which I withhold to avoid spoiling the surprise) | Incredibly evil and unpleasant serial rapist and Nazi, who starts off by forcing his sister into incest, then goes on over a period of many years to kidnap, imprison and murder a long string of women. Also vivisects a cat, by way of a change. | Dell laptop, model unspecified, p416 |
Do you notice anything? Just as the moral allegiances of cowboys used to be identifiable by the colour of their stetsons, author Larsson distinguishes a good egg from a bad one by the egg-in-question's choice of computer. The heroes are all equipped with Macs; the villains must click through their wretched and perverted lives with Windows.
God knows I carry no spear for Microsoft, but I do think this is taking fanboism a bit far.
(I would love to know if this computer brand-based approach is also used in the other two volumes of Hr Larsson's Millennium trilogy. If anybody happens to have read them, an answer in the comments section much appreciated.)
COMMENTS
Fanboy adolation or deliberate literary device?
@ LHO & others on William Gibson:
Having read the Bigend books recently, I don't think the Apple=good, PC=bad is as clear cut as in TGWTDT.
Gibson has said that despite the "tech" aspects of his books, he is not very computer literate himself. He uses a Mac to write and research his books, and that is about it. Word processing and web browsing. In this case it really is a matter of writing about what he knows. He actually uses a Mac, but if you read his comments he isn't much of a fanboy. Having started on a Mac pre-Windows, he hasn't needed or wanted to move.
He also has said that the people in the Bigend trilogy use iPhones and Macs because he felt that that is what the people of this social type (arty/creative) use. You notice that Milgrim doesn't use an iPhone, and he isn't a bad guy. And nor is Hollis' boyfriend whats-his-name.
The Bigend books are very much about branding, descriptions include liberal use of them. It isn't an anonymous SUV but an armoured Toyota, or the plane is a Cessna, or the jeans are Levis. Are these fanboy references? It was a deliberate choice and Apple was a part of it, how its brand is everywhere until you get sick of it.
I also had another thought about the Apples/PCs in these books while making my argument. Apple's product style is almost unique to the Apple brand or at least is most attributed to it, and it is possible that the very ubiquity of PCs makes them anonymous with their generic style and nonsense lettered/numbered model names.
The Bigend trilogy are set very much in the now, whereas the Sprawl and Bridge trilogies aren't. I don't think there was any mention of Apple products in these books, despite their being written on Apple computers, and indeed he has said that Neuromancer was inspired by an Apple IIe commercial.
Disclaimer: I should point out that I own a Mac, a Power Mac 8100/100 from 1995, so I must be biased. Other than that I own 6 Windows and Linux-based PCs.
Another gem from Stob.
I could have read a dozen more reviews along the same lines.
I see a bright future for the "It's encrypted, this may take a little longer" meme. In time it may even supplant "I'll have to use the back door".
Reminds me of...
"This fictional account of the day-to-day life of an English gamekeeper is still of interest to outdoor-minded readers, as it contains many passages on pheasant-raising, the apprehending of poachers, ways to control vermin, and other chores and duties of the occasional gamekeeper. Unfortunately, one is obliged to wade through many pages of extraneous material in order to discover and savor these sidelights on the management of a Midlands shooting estate, and in this reviewer’s opinion the book cannot take the place of J. R. Miller’s Practical Gamekeeper."
— Field and Stream Magazine's review of Lady Chatterley's Lover, November 1959
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