Talk:Surface Detail

Prod removed

I've removed the proposed deletion notice because the novel obviously meets the notability guidelines for books. It is a major work by a notable author. -- Scjessey (talk) 21:08, 20 October 2010 (UTC)

Sma Speculation in Plot Twist

I think it is highly speculative that Zakalwe is waiting for Diziet Sma in the epilogue. It might be her, and I would like it to be her, but there is no good evidence for (or against) it. As such I'm not keen on deleting that sentence right away, but I think something should be done about it. Elanguescence (talk) 14:26, 14 December 2010 (UTC)

Someone called John has done something about it, twice now, the first time with reason (there was a lot of speculative language) and with no justification or discussion here. This is odd though because with a usertag like "John" he must surely be one of the first wikipedia contributors and probably a senior administrator. One would expect more. Like the first, his latest deletion was made without discussion of any kind on this page.

"John" has now removed someone's observation that Vatueil and Livueta are mutual anagrams, as well as plot elements following the revelation in the last paragraphs of the novel that Vatueil is Zakalwe. He calls these "or" (presumably he means original research), but they include text like this: "... the closing scene of Surface Detail has him awaiting a table at a restaurant."

I've looked at the Wikipedia page on original research and asked around. Are the anagram pointers Original Research? From the standpoint of ordinary language, surely not. Saying "123" is a permutation of "321" does not require a leap of logic on the part of the reader. Nor does verifying an anagram.

Of course Wikipedia policy uses Original Research as a term of art. As I understand it, WP:OR might apply because the anagrams aren't supported by references. Frankly I don't think they should need to be, any more than one would need a reference for 1+1=2 in ordinary arithmetic. One could provide a reference to the Peano axioms, but for heaven's sake. It wasn't my comment so I have no horse in that race, but if you're going to delete the anagrams it should be for some better reason.

Those anagrams might be caught up on the prongs of another OR horn - perhaps "you have to make a leap of logic". But frankly matching up letters in one-to-one correspondence doesn't require a leap of logic either.

As for the observations regarding the poets, they come straight from the text of the novel and should not require a leap of logic either.

The edit has been reverted for now. It may be necessary to refer the page for arbitration and/or protection, but if John is as I suspect a senior administrator, it's hardly likely to be successful in keeping the text. Sdoradus (talk) 22:34, 28 March 2011 (UTC)

True enough. Let's face it though, that's clearly what Banks was suggesting, given what we know of Sma's character from Use of Weapons and (especially) The State of the Art. Besides, the snippet does say "circumstances which suggest" so it's up-front about the speculation. If that is to be deleted you should consider deleting the entire section (things like anagrams aren't really evidence either), as seems to have happened with "Use of Weapons".

Of course, such a deletion would make the article less useful to the hypothetical case of persons new to the Culture series. If having read the book they can make neither head nor tail of the ending, that section would help. It is also a spoiler. The more I think about it, the more I agree that deletion would be in keeping with the Wikipedia prohibition on Original Research.

On the other hand, someone looking up the plot in an encyclopedia is quite literally asking for spoilers; and on the gripping hand, the article's utility would diminish. Such plot elements are important for reference works and can be found in many encyclopedias.

One written parallel in my possession is Frank Northen [sic] Magill's "Cyclopedia of Literary Characters", copyrighted in 1963 by Salem Press. It contains precisely this kind of plot analysis. Another example would be "Masterplots" (Plots, Stories and Critical Evaluations of world literature). But this is clearly anathema to Wikipedia; the article on Mr Magill has been deleted, God knows why, though you can still find traces of it. He specialized in this kind of analysis. 203.89.168.26 (talk) 11:15, 27 December 2010 (UTC)

--

You all need to read Use of Weapons again. He's clearly waiting for Shia Engin (the *poet*, remember?). —Preceding unsigned comment added by 204.16.158.81 (talk) 23:20, 7 January 2011 (UTC)

I thought so too, initially, until I realized that the timeline made it impossible. It's seven centuries from Use of Weapons to Surface Detail!

There are really only two candidates, Sma and Shias (not Shia) Engin; only Sma is a potentially very long-lived Culture citizen, and could at least in principle still be around.

By contrast;

- Shias Engin belongs to a species which lives "eighty or ninety years". By the time of their encounter, Zakalwe/Elethiomiel is already much older ("I was born two hundred and twenty years ago, I have lived for a hundred and ten of them, and physically I'm about thirty.') so by the time of Surface Detail Shias is surely dead without some unknowable intervention.

- In Use of Weapons, Zakalwe/Elethiomiel recalls "... Shias Engin, whom he'd loved, or thought he had, and certainly lost...";

- if you review the poem "Zakalwe's song" by her which appears just before "States of War", you will find it's attributed to a "Posthumous edition". So, sadly, Shias is as dead as Darkense.

Finally, don't forget, Sma too is a poet ('Slight Mechanical Destruction'). Sdoradus (talk) 11:22, 8 January 2011 (UTC)

• Without a third-party source, this is all original research and verging on off-topic chat. Is there a proper source for it? If not it does not belong in the article as it contravenes our policies. --John (talk) 14:21, 13 May 2011 (UTC)

Proper source? Not sure, I'm not a professional critic, just a reader, and a retired engineer - not one of the learned professions. It's not been easy to reconcile the wikipedia definition of "Original Research" with that I was taught.

Are you referring to all of the above text? Because at least the anagrams, Zakalwe not being Zakalwe, and meeting the "poet" at the end of the novel, are cited from the novel's text. That is the ultimate primary source, but of course Wikipedia prefers secondary sources - apparently because it's too easy to "synthesize" some new idea from primary sources which counts as "Original Research".

That policy's at least comprehensible, though I'd say peculiar to Wikipedia - my grandfather's old eleventh edition Encyclopaedia Brittanica had plenty of such synthesis, thank God, which was quite useful at university. (Generally, articles were written by named eminent scholars in the field, thus acceptable to my lecturers). I'd comment from looking into the WP:NOR policy that it's unevenly policed, to the point that it risks becoming a stick to beat "Neutral Point of View" with, but I can see the reasoning.

In any event, it's quite clear from the novel's published text that Shias Engin is dead, for example. It's also clear that Sma is a poet. And it's explicitly stated that the real Zakalwe was someone else altogether. What's drawn from that is up to the reader, good writing practice since at least Voltaire.

The anagrams are in a different situation. It's specifically mentioned in WP:NOR that "Routine Calculations" are not "Original Research". —Preceding unsigned comment added by Sdoradus (talk • contribs) 02:47, 14 May 2011 (UTC)

I'm glad you've correctly understood our policy. Anagrams are not routine calculations. Though I have no doubt that everything you have written is true (and I thank you as it has in a small way enhanced my enjoyment of the novel), it cannot be published here unless it is published somewhere else first. Our mission is to report on what reliable sources say. Sorry. --John (talk) 04:41, 14 May 2011 (UTC)

"Anagrams are not routine calculations"? Really? There are three problems with that view:

First, Wikipedia:CALC#Routine_calculations mentions not "routine arithmetic calculation" but "routine mathematical calculation". Anagrams are a class of 1-1 correspondence (bijective mapping) which for finite sets is certainly a routine mathematical calculation. In fact the question of whether one word is an anagram of another is 'decidable', which ordinary arithmetic is not.

Second, Wikipedia:CALC#Routine_calculations goes on to mention not just arithmetic but also conversions, and points at a list of templates. Among those templates are calculations which are not by any stretch of the imagination simple arithmetic. They include character mappings like anagrams, only more complex and inaccessible to non-specialists (which anagrams are not). Example: Template:Numcr2namecr takes a digit to its equivalent HTML Character entity (e.g. 0xA0 or (decimal) 160 --> &nbsp). This isn't even a 1-1 correspondence, because digits which don't have an HTML equivalent map to nothing ('Cannot find the name').

Third, other articles in Wikipedia make similar use of anagrams. An egregious example is Augustus the Younger, Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel. That asserts a pseudonym based on an anagram for the authorship of a book (fittingly, on cryptography). It is not an indisputable anagram; gustavus <--> augustus only works in old orthography which allowed a U to be replaced by V. And it's not justified by a secondary reference.

So anagrams are already in use as "not original research". In articles which don't quote a supporting secondary source. Tellingly, similar rearrangements are already implemented in templates which are cited as "Routine Calculation" templates.

If I had to speculate, I'd suggest the reason no-one has cared about this earlier is that it's obviously not synthesis, in the wikipedia sense; that's because the verification of an anagram does not depend on the opinion of the editor. --Sdoradus (talk) 12:12, 27 May 2011 (UTC)

Is this article written well?

Forgive me for being rude but it strikes me that this article could perhaps be written a lot better, particularly the summary of the plot. It seems a bit clunky. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.13.134.136 (talk) 16:50, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

It's not rude. You're right. It's a chronic issue with community contributions accreting over time. There's no central organizing thread. I'd do it myself but no longer have any confidence I'd get it right. Perhaps you could copyedit a new one in your sandbox (still don't know how to do that myself, though) and suggest the new version to a suitable sysop, or duly constituted authority. --Sdoradus (talk) 08:57, 1 June 2011 (UTC)

Floating

Superintelligent 100-km spaceships travelling at 100,000x light speed in hyperspace, sure. But gold won't float on mercury! (Chapter 19, page 360 in the paperback edition). And it's not even relevant to the plot! --Wtshymanski (talk) 20:38, 25 September 2011 (UTC)

Repeated addition of SPOILER ALERT TAG by anonymous user.

They've been reverted once by User:ClueBot NG and once me, but I've got this watched in case they try it again. Both ClueBot and I warned them once. Last time I checked Wikipedia didn't put !!!!SPOILER TAGS!!!! on their book plot descriptions. — T-Boy: (complain bitterly) (laugh contemptuously) 08:38, 24 November 2015 (UTC)