FFWD Weekly
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Books by Harry Vandervlist Set in Darkness by Ian Rankin Orion, $21.95. Edinburgh, with its damp grey stone, haunted history and long dark winters, offers the perfect setting for murder mysteries. Your requisite hard-drinking, tragically solitary yet good-hearted detective with a shred of integrity has some high-quality drinking choices there, too. (Historic pubs and smoky single malts, or is that smoky pubs and historic single malts?) In Set in Darkness, Rankin's 11th book featuring detective John Rebus, weighty current events like the founding of a new Scottish parliament add resonance and importance to the atmosphere. It's grand, really, and Rankin makes good use of a setting that has as much colour – in its own grey overcast way – as Carl Hiassen's Miami. You'd think Rankin was a football hero, from the publicity material they send out. Phrases like "staggering domination of the Scottish Bestseller List" contend with "dedicated and enthusiastic readership." Rankin readers probably all wear those special scarves, too, and chant those pro-Rankin chants. A sober reader would have to say that Rankin is a pretty good crime novelist, but not nearly as deft as Elmore Leonard. Set in Darkness does have some really tasty crime-novel elements, though. There's a well-aged skeleton, quickly dubbed "Skelly," immured in the foundations of the soon-to-be built new Scottish Parliament. And Skelly's wearing a really old Rolling Stones T-shirt (from the "Some Girls" tour). There's a former celebrity groupie who is much better preserved (it's that single malt again), and who was once featured in NME and on album covers. Then there's a suspiciously well-off vagrant, an enraging series of rapes, and some old score-settling to do with criminals involved in soulless Edinburgh development and new suburban sprawl. Knitting all this together requires John Rebus to explore some nasty parts of Edinburgh, while dealing with nasty careerist cops and crooks, fending off emotional isolation and revisiting his musical youth. (Shades of Nick Hornby's High Fidelity!) Things slow a bit in the middle, but overall it's a darkly diverting amusement, perfect for anyone seeking temporary relief from the excessive sunshine, fresh air and general salubriousness of a Calgary summer. Cyberselfish by Paulina Borsook PublicAffairs, $36.50 High-tech really does rule these days. Governments panic and bow down at the awesome sound of the holy words. "We promise to lower corporate taxes, repeal labour laws and subsidize infrastructure," they mumble, "in order to attract the divine favour of high-tech to our region." Any aspect of culture that attracts such mindless veneration requires a few good blasphemers, and tech is finally getting its share. In the tradition of Clifford Stoll's Silicon Snake Oil, former Wired editor and contributor Paulina Borsook adds a useful and entertaining contribution in Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp Through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High-Tech. The word "romp" in the title is apt. There's no finely reasoned analysis in Cyberselfish, just a series of informed musings on its central question, which is this: why is high-tech culture so often linked with extreme individualism, opposition to almost any form of regulation, and a widespread failure to share (i.e. donate) beyond "less than one half the business norm of one per cent of pretax earnings"? Borsook's telling anecdotes and reflections draw on years of personal acquaintance with key figures, and alert attendance at arcane, cultish tech conferences. For Borsook, Wired magazine's decline from innovator to tech-biz hype rag was a formative disappointment. And clearly it's hard not to gain critical perspective when you're female, and a feminist, in boy-heavy techland. Borsook makes good use of a couple of great academic studies which show that Silicon Valley was not a pioneering entrepreneurial creation, but instead developed as a highly subsidized, market-sheltered sandbox for an elite group of young white men from the U.S. Midwest. This group hardly reflects the whole human universe, yet Silicon Valley is often held up as a model for the 21st century utopia. What the actually very small and often paranoid culture of techno-libertarians doesn't get, says Borsook, is the value of "something larger, such as connection, commitment, a sense of reliability on the artifice of human society, intimacy and emotional interdependency, and the benefits of a generalized, free-floating social contract." The scary thing is that these guys remain so largely, maybe even wilfully, unconscious of their power and privilege, and have so much influence – for now.

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