Warp and Wolf

Swamp Thing Lives!

2010-01-14T00:16:00.002-05:00

From Wired:

Green Sea Slug Is Part Animal, Part Plant

SEATTLE — It’s easy being green for a sea slug that has stolen enough genes to become the first animal shown to make chlorophyll like a plant.

Shaped like a leaf itself, the slug Elysia chlorotica already has a reputation for kidnapping the photosynthesizing organelles and some genes from algae. Now it turns out that the slug has acquired enough stolen goods to make an entire plant chemical-making pathway work inside an animal body, says Sidney K. Pierce of the University of South Florida in Tampa.

The slugs can manufacture the most common form of chlorophyll, the green pigment in plants that captures energy from sunlight, Pierce reported January 7 at the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology. Pierce used a radioactive tracer to show that the slugs were making the pigment, called chlorophyll a, themselves and not simply relying on chlorophyll reserves stolen from the algae the slugs dine on.

“This could be a fusion of a plant and an animal — that’s just cool,” said invertebrate zoologist John Zardus of The Citadel in Charleston, S.C.

Well, cool and sort of creepy.

The Long Way Home

2010-01-12T23:51:00.003-05:00

I went hunting through the used bookstores the other day, and came out with Poul Anderson's 1958 novel The Long Way Home. It's about a group of explorer-astronauts who are trying out an experimental new spacedrive- by taking a trip several thousand light-years away.

Their experiments in the solar system seemed to indicate that the drive was instantaneous, so they're shocked and appalled when they get home and discover that 5000 years have passed. In retrospect, they realized that puzzling errors of measurement meant that the trip was only instantaneous for them.

You really have to take this with a grain of salt- it's the same kind of pulp-sf assumption that lets the Fantastic Four fly out into space solely on Reed Richard's smartness, rather than an organized mission plan with ground support from NASA. But if you can get past that, it's pretty good escapist fun.

The future, incidentally, is a stulified caste society with a computer overlord. Needless to say, Anderson's hero gets over his future shock and makes short work of everyone around him.

Are Short Stories Scientific?

2010-01-12T23:40:00.002-05:00

I was at the bookstore today, in the SF/Fantasy section as usual, looking at the anthologies that are lined up between "New Books" and the A's. They were all science fiction.

As I thought about that, it occurred to me that almost all the sf/f short story anthologies I'd seen were science fiction rather than fantasy. Fantasy, on the other hand, seems to have all the super-long Jordan/Goodkind epics.

Why is that? Is it just a quirk of publishing history- i.e. if Jordan had been an SF writer, we'd have a lot of encyclopedia-length science fiction imitators? Or is there something in the vaguely-defined difference between the two that selects for story length?

Did I Know, Did I? No.

2009-03-18T16:30:00.002-04:00

Yet another youtube link! This one is to a presentation called "Do You Know," full of statistics about the accelerating pace of things. It's pretty interesting.

But- perhaps it's a sign that I'm getting old- it does not inspire me with a sense of wonder so much as a sense of dread. A sense that "This cannot last."

"We are living in exponential times," it says: and that is true enough. But there are several exponential curves in human experience; none of them last forever, and most of them end in crashes. To cite the most obvious example, we're in the middle of an economic crash following what seemed like endless exponential growth.

It cites examples of the massive increase in information flow, which is undeniably impressive; but past a point, you have to wonder what is the point? We're already at the stage where information filtering is a big deal; an exponential information increase won't help that at all. It'll simply be wasted, for the most part.

Oh, well. Like I said, I'm probably just getting old. Or maybe it's the atmosphere of the times, which is so much more pessimistic than it was a few months ago.

The Monotone With a Million Eyes!

2009-03-18T16:20:00.002-04:00

Here's the opening sequence to Roger Corman's epic The Beast With a Million Eyes. It's Roger Corman, really, which tells you everything you need to know.

But I love the matter-of-factness of it. "I feed on fear; live on human hatred," he intones, in the almost-cheerful tones of a school documentary film about the wonders of natural science.

The Disappointing Lexcorp Bailout

2009-03-15T21:14:00.002-04:00

Lex Luthor's bailout application, here!

It starts off strong; regrettably, it doesn't stay that way. I wonder why not?

Hmm. The initial joke is the idea that Luthor is a standard corporate CEO. In that context his various anti-Superman plots are pretty funny to listen to, since they're so convoluted and, well, comic-bookish. The humor lies in Luthor's own deadpan lack of awareness; he doesn't seem to realize how absurd it all sounds.

But then the skit suddenly turns metatextual: "I'm Lex Luthor, that's what I do," which doesn't work at all. The shift of tone loses the thread of humor, especially since there doesn't seem to be any real joke involved.

It's a shame, as it starts out pretty strongly. But the ending joke is good!

The Exoplanet Catalog

2009-03-10T01:04:00.002-04:00

I've followed with interest the discoveries of planets outside the solar system; but I had no idea that astronomers had discovered quite so many.

The Exoplanet Catalog is a helpful listing (complete with details and animations!) of all the planets so far discovered. And there are a lot.

I get a real geeky pleasure of the thought that, at last, there are enough planets that we need a guidebook to keep them straight.

Jeremiah 5

2009-03-10T00:54:00.005-04:00

I've been meaning to do Bible excerpts since... well, since I started this blog, actually. Somehow I never got around to it. But better late than never, and Jeremiah is very fitting for our present circumstances.

All quotations are from the excellent Bible Gateway website.

----------------------------
Jeremiah 5: 26-31:

...For among My people are found wicked men;
They lie in wait as one who sets snares;
They set a trap;
They catch men.
As a cage is full of birds,
So their houses are full of deceit.
Therefore they have become great and grown rich.
They have grown fat, they are sleek;
Yes, they surpass the deeds of the wicked;
They do not plead the cause,
The cause of the fatherless;
Yet they prosper,
And the right of the needy they do not defend.
Shall I not punish them for these things?’ says the LORD.

‘ Shall I not avenge Myself on such a nation as this?’
“ An astonishing and horrible thing
Has been committed in the land:
The prophets prophesy falsely,
And the priests rule by their own power;
And My people love to have it so.
But what will you do in the end?

The Lost Temple of 9000 BC

2009-03-09T20:35:00.002-04:00

From the Smithsonan Magazine:

Six miles from Urfa, an ancient city in southeastern Turkey, Klaus Schmidt has made one of the most startling archaeological discoveries of our time: massive carved stones about 11,000 years old, crafted and arranged by prehistoric people who had not yet developed metal tools or even pottery. The megaliths predate Stonehenge by some 6,000 years. The place is called Gobekli Tepe, and Schmidt, a German archaeologist who has been working here more than a decade, is convinced it's the site of the world's oldest temple.

This catches my imagination; it's deep, deep history. (Or rather, prehistory.) It was before metals, before agriculture, before any of the basic things we'd assume people used to support a major building project.

...The abundant remnants of wild game indicate that the people who lived here had not yet domesticated animals or farmed.

But, Peters and Schmidt say, Gobekli Tepe's builders were on the verge of a major change in how they lived, thanks to an environment that held the raw materials for farming. "They had wild sheep, wild grains that could be domesticated—and the people with the potential to do it," Schmidt says. In fact, research at other sites in the region has shown that within 1,000 years of Gobekli Tepe's construction, settlers had corralled sheep, cattle and pigs. And, at a prehistoric village just 20 miles away, geneticists found evidence of the world's oldest domesticated strains of wheat; radiocarbon dating indicates agriculture developed there around 10,500 years ago, or just five centuries after Gobekli Tepe's construction.

To Schmidt and others, these new findings suggest a novel theory of civilization. Scholars have long believed that only after people learned to farm and live in settled communities did they have the time, organization and resources to construct temples and support complicated social structures. But Schmidt argues it was the other way around: the extensive, coordinated effort to build the monoliths literally laid the groundwork for the development of complex societies.

Which is a startling thought.
But it makes sense in many ways; people sometimes have the grandiose idea first, and only later get around to solving the many practical problems that vision creates.

But:

What was so important to these early people that they gathered to build (and bury) the stone rings? The gulf that separates us from Gobekli Tepe's builders is almost unimaginable. Indeed, though I stood among the looming megaliths eager to take in their meaning, they didn't speak to me. They were utterly foreign, placed there by people who saw the world in a way I will never comprehend. There are no sources to explain what the symbols might mean. Schmidt agrees. "We're 6,000 years before the invention of writing here," he says.

So we don't really know, and probably never will. Which is part of the fascination of the find, oddly enough.

A Bad Day

2009-03-09T20:13:00.000-04:00

You know what's a sign that you're having a bad day? When you pull your pants out of the laundry and your ipod falls out of the pocket.

(Grrrr!)

You know what's another sign that you're having a bad day? When you're in school for radio maintenance, and you set the radio on fire.

(Well, kind of. There was smoke. Lesson learned: it's a bad idea to set the card you're troubleshooting in a position where it can accidentally touch the radio's power supply.)

Florida-Bound!

2009-02-07T12:15:00.004-05:00

Well, not exactly. I'm off the ship, but still formally stationed in Norfolk until the 10th. The ship left this morning, off to adventure and excitement on the high seas, while I slept late.

There's an odd feeling of disconnection. It's not just that I've left the people I've worked with for four years (though that's certainly part of it.) But I've had obligations of all kinds over the past few years, and none of them apply to me now. It's low-stress, I suppose, but also isolated and rather boring: I feel like I'm spinning my wheels.

Oh, well. Soon to Florida! (With a stopoff at my parents' to see my dog and my bouncy, train-loving nephew.) And soon I'll be muttering about the complications of radio tech manuals.

We Are The World (Or Its GDP)

2009-02-04T20:55:00.003-05:00

Another weird map, which unfortunately is too large and lengthwise to be shown here. (But click and see!)

So, basically, the names of the states have been replaced by the names of countries with a roughly-similar Gross Domestic Product. Which gives us the bizarre view of an America made up of an entirely-different kind of states.

It's fun to look at, but it doesn't really tell us much as a map, for a couple of reasons. The most prominent states (aside from the one you live in, I guess) are going to be the geographically-largest ones; and California and Texas excepted, size doesn't equate to economic strength. Notice how the tiny northeastern states are crowded with developed-world nations, but the large-scale west has nations like Bulgaria.

Secondly, but closely-related: geographic size doesn't tell us anything about population, and population is much more of an economic indicator than landmass.

But, still. It's fun and interesting to gawk at; if only because the replacements give me geeky parallel-earth imaginings.

(Are there any other kind?)

The Future, Systematically Presented

2009-02-04T20:39:00.004-05:00

A Comprehensive Map of All Possible Human Futures.

Yikes! But it does have a sort of rough-hewn, Darwinian get-right-to-the-point kind of plausibility about it.

Whoops, New Year!

2009-02-04T20:37:00.002-05:00

I haven't exactly been hibernating (ah, that would have been nice...) It's just been extremely busy as I prepare my move to sunny Florida.

But hopefully I'll be posting again, now that I'm home. I've got a couple of things saved up that I'd meant to blog about.

Bolt

2008-11-26T04:14:00.003-05:00

I saw it this weekend. It was funny and clever, and well-done in the Pixar style. (Sample clip here.)

Bleah. My head cold has left me too fuzzy to say anything substantial. More later!

HR8799?

2008-11-14T01:27:00.003-05:00

From cnn.com:

Astronomers capture first images of new planets

The first-ever pictures of planets outside our solar system were released today in two studies.

Using the latest techniques in space technology, astronomers at NASA and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory used direct-imaging techniques to capture pictures of four newly discovered planets orbiting stars outside our solar system.

"After all these years, it's amazing to have a picture showing not one but three planets," said physicist Bruce Macintosh of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California.

"The discovery of the HR 8799 system is a crucial step on the road to the ultimate detection of another Earth," he said.

None of the planets is remotely habitable, scientists said.

Both sets of research findings were published Thursday in Science Express, a journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

A team of American and British astronomers and physicists, using the Gemini North and Keck telescopes on the Mauna Kea mountaintop in Hawaii, observed host star HR8799 to find three of the new planets.

Scientists estimate that HR8799, roughly 1.5 times the size of the sun, is 130 light years from Earth in the constellation of Pegasus. The individual planets in this planetary family are estimated to be seven to 10 times the mass of Jupiter.

Astronomers say the star is too faint to detect with the human eye, but observers could probably see it through binoculars or small telescopes.

"This discovery is the first time we have directly imaged a family of planets around a normal star outside of our solar system," said Christian Marois, the lead astronomer in the Lawrence Livermore lab study.

It continues to amaze me that we can detect extrasolar planets now. Granted, they're humongous superjovian planets, but still. Planets! It gives me a continuing geeky thrill.

I just wish we had a better name for the star- or, rather, any real name at all. HR8799? That isn't a star, that's a bill before Congress.

Mundanity in Science Fiction

2008-11-11T18:43:00.003-05:00

Courtesy of Bruce Sterling's blog, we have Geoff Ryman's Mundane SF Manifesto:

- That interstellar travel remains unlikely; that Warp drives, worm holes, and other forms of faster-than-light travel are wish fulfillment fantasies rather than serious speculation about a possible future.
- That unfounded speculation about interstellar travel can lead to an illusion of a universe abundant with worlds as hospitable to life as this Earth. This is also viewed as unlikely.
- That this dream of abundance can encourage a wasteful attitude to the abundance that is here on Earth.
- That there is no evidence whatsoever of intelligences elsewhere in the universe.
- That absence of evidence is not evidence of absence -- however, it is considered unlikely that alien intelligences will overcome the physical constraints on interstellar travel any better than we can.
- That interstellar trade (and colonization, war, federations, etc.) is therefore highly unlikely.
- That communication with alien intelligences over such vast distances will be vexed by: the enormous time lag in exchange of messages and the likelihood of enormous and probably currently unimaginable differences between us and aliens.
- That there is no present evidence whatsoever that quantum uncertainty has any effect at the macro level and that therefore it is highly unlikely that there are whole alternative universes to be visited.
- That therefore our most likely future is on this planet and within this solar system, and that it is highly unlikely that intelligent life survives elsewhere in this solar system. Any contact with aliens is likely to be tenuous, and unprofitable.
- That the most likely future is one in which we only have ourselves and this planet.

I have mixed feelings.

First of all, I rather like it when artists- whether writers, painters, filmmakers or whatever- develop a code that guides their work. When such codes are designed intelligently, they can lend useful structure and a kind of context to art.

But I love me some space opera. Star Trek, Star Wars, Iain M. Banks, you name it. I know that the first two are goofy science fantasy, and the latter tries to compensate for the lost wonder of space by going for Really Big Effects; but still, I love it. It's the closest thing to a real sense-of-wonder effect that I'm likely to see in SF.

The tone doesn't help much either- it's basically a concession that sf is escapism, but that they will be different. They will be serious, responsible, and relevant. They will address serious causes, not just in their explicit writing, but in the subtle psychological effects of their writing.

I'm not sure that this can possibly work. But i have to give them credit for trying.

Veterans' Day

2008-11-11T14:53:00.002-05:00

Today, that is!

All my respect and honor to those who have fought and died in our nation's wars. May we never forget them.

The Horror Pivot-Moment

2008-11-10T19:40:00.002-05:00

Here's something I've been thinking of lately.

Have a look at this: it's an episode of the original Twilight Zone, "Living Doll," featuring Telly Savalas as an abusive dad who meets a doll with a mind of its own.

There's a moment about three minutes in, where Telly holds the harmless-looking doll for the first time and it tells him, "My name is Talky Tina, and I don't think I like you."

And it's that moment- that one instant of perfect shivery weirdness- that sells the whole thing. All the rest of the episode is just working out the details and consequences of that one moment; it's dull by comparison.

(Not to say that it's a dull episode! It's not. But the emotional impact seems to happen right here at the beginning, where we're suddenly presented with the introduction of weirdness to a normal, if awful, suburban world.)

Is there a word for this? Something like the opposite of "climax" for plot, where it makes an emotional impact at the beginning and plays out the details from there?

Anathem

2008-11-10T18:46:00.002-05:00

Neal Stephenson's latest, Anathem, is... a very Neal Stephenson book.

By that I mean that it has his hallmarks: very-involved worldbuilding, some mildly quirky characters, and an exuberance in writing that sometimes makes his novels go on a bit longer than they should.

The book is built around a kind of monastery, which only opens its gates to the outer world once every ten years. Within this monastery is another monastery, whose contact with outsiders happens only once a century; and within that it yet another, whose inhabitants only emerge once a millenium.

(Yes, it's very implausible. But part of Stephenson's appeal is that he makes it work; in the context of this parallel-Earth society, it all makes perfect social sense.)

It's stated directly at the beginning that this is not our Earth; but that's easily forgotten, because of the fun that Stephenson has with the evolution of English words. It makes the world feel familiar, somehow. It could be us, far in the future, still dealing with the consequences of things that are happening today.

Happy Birthday, Marine Corps!

2008-11-10T18:40:00.002-05:00

The United States Marine Corps was founded on this date in 1775. Happy 233rd birthday to our slightly-younger, slightly-tougher brothers!

Happy Birthday, Navy!

2008-10-13T23:01:00.004-04:00

On this date in 1775, the Continental Congress founded the Continental Navy (meaning, rather oddly, that by the usual count the Navy is older than the Republic.)

Here's to another 223 years!

Military Ranks in Science Fiction

2008-10-13T20:33:00.004-04:00

Gene Roddenberry allegedly said once that everyone on board the Enterprise should be an officer, because they're all trained astronauts, and that makes them all highly-educated.

Allegedly! I hope it isn't true, because the statement is wrong on several levels at once. The most important level is simply one of function: enlisted people deal with equipment, and officers deal with people. Their job is essentially management. But a military composed entirely of managers is probably not going to work very well.

(As a veteran, Roddenberry should have known this. I honestly have no clue what he was thinking; unless it was simply a matter of tone, rather than of fact. He may simply not have wanted a heirarchical military looming too obtrusively in his 23rd-century utopia.)

This is a very roundabout way of introducing Karen Traviss' new book, Order 66. It's the fourth part of her "Republic Commando" series, which covers the events of the Prequel Series from the point of view of common soldiers.

(Well, kind of common. Common relative to the Jedi and the Sith, anyway.)

A large dose of the fun of the books comes from that difference in perspective. Here's Obi-Wan Kenobi, as seen in the Revenge of the Sith novelization:

He is respected throughout the Jedi Order for his insight as well as his warrior skill. He has become the hero of the next generation of Padawans; he is the Jedi their Masters hold up as a model. He is the being that the Council assigns to their most important missions. He is modest, centered, and always kind.

He is the ultimate Jedi.

And here he is, from the perspective of Order 66's lower ranks:

"Cody might think that the sun shines out of his ear, General, but I think he's a glory-seeker who wastes too many men."

... Which is, to belabor the connection I started this post with, how I imagine a lot of lower-level Enterprise crewmen see Captain Kirk.

Mobile, Alabama

2008-10-04T22:15:00.002-04:00

That's where we are, the ship having pulled into this fine southern town to enjoy the Bayfest concert.

(Personally, I'm not that much of a concert-goer, so I'm enjoying the town itself. There's a marvelous two-story used bookstore, and several southern-style restaurants. Ah, the fried chicken!)

Twelve Tribes?

2008-10-02T11:51:00.002-04:00

Some analogies sound really interesting, but work out to be more trouble than they're worth. For example:

http://www.beliefnet.com/story/236/story_23639_1.html

Beliefnet had the interesting notion that America's political-religious groupings could be divided into twelve coherent groups, like the twelve tribes of ancient Israel. I think that's the rationale, anyway: it's not like they try a direct one-to-one analogy (The Christian Right is the Tribe of Judah, or some such.)

Unfortunately, the only thing that the process really illustrated is that twelve is not a good number to divide America's religious groups into. It turns out seeming arbitrary. Some of the divisions seem forced- what exactly is the difference between the Christian Right and the Heartland Culture Warriors? I'm presumably one or the other, but I can't tell which, and that's a bad sign for a tribe.

Likewise, the smaller groups seem to be arbitrary in their own way. Is "Muslims and Other Faiths" really a coherent group that will have things in common? Are Latinos a religious group in-and-of themselves, distinct from Catholics?

Some ideas just don't work out well. This sounded promising at first, but I'm afraid it works poorly as a political analysis.

WorldMapper

2008-10-02T11:30:00.004-04:00

worldmapper.org is a site devoted to demographic maps. That is, instead of maps based on physical geography, they base the size of various nations on a give factor- population, income, religion, or what have you.

The religion maps are particularly interesting. Here's the world map oriented by Christian population:

http://www.worldmapper.org/display_religion.php?selected=554

... which is almost normal-looking.

The map oriented by Islam:

http://www.worldmapper.org/display_religion.php?selected=564

...in which North and South America shrink virtually out of existence, and Africa balloons to enormous size.

Oriented by atheism:

http://www.worldmapper.org/display_religion.php?selected=582

... Which is basically Planet China.

There's a lot more stuff there, all of it interesting.

Personalities and Places

2008-09-27T14:17:00.004-04:00

Researchers have surveyed the US and discovered something really interesting: there are statistically-meaningful differences in the personality types of different regions.

There are several map-charts; it's interesting to look up your state and see how close (or far) you are from your state average. North Carolina is conscientious, friendly, and not very neurotic! Virginia, on the other hand... isn't.

Dr. Horrible

2008-09-27T10:18:00.003-04:00

The trouble with deployments is that you spend six months or so out of touch; and then you spend the next year or so playing catch-up, finding all kinds of little things that everyone else saw ages ago.

On the other hand, getting to see cool stuff isn't bad, exactly. And better late than never!

Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog is a Joss Whedon webmovie- a short supervillain musical. It came out last July, and by every account I've read it was a huge hit.

I can see why. Aside from Whedon's name-recognition (which is undoubtedly a part of it) the play is funny and character-driven (as much as supervillain musicals can be, anyway.)

Darwinia?

2008-09-23T23:36:00.004-04:00

Robert Charles Wilson's Darwinia: A Novel of a Very Different Twentieth Century is just that. The premise is that in 1912, the continent of Europe is replaced by an unearthly wilderness. The geography is the same, but it's been supplanted by a completely new ecosystem. All of Europe's humans and human artifacts have disappeared, and turn-of-the-century America is left to deal with the mystery.

Wilson is good at building up the bizarre situation, and showing how people try to cope with and rationalize something that they will never be able to explain. With that in mind, I would almost rather than Wilson not have explained it; the phenomenon works better as a pure mystery than as the convoluted futuristic plot that develops.

"Darwinia" is a name given the continent as a joke, which somehow sticks in spite of the American embrace of fundamentalism. (I suspect that Wilson just liked the name too much to give it up.)

Character development is decent; the plot starts off with a bracing amount of weirdness, and if it doesn't sustain that, it's nonetheless very readable throughout.

Shameless Self-Promotion!

2008-09-23T22:40:00.001-04:00

What's my blog's educational reading level? Why, I'm glad you asked!

Movie Reviews

(Yes, I do feel more intelligent now.)

Steampunk

2008-09-21T13:37:00.004-04:00

A clever article here about steampunk, and the reasons it appeals to people. Lots of good quotes; this was probably my favorite:

A lot of kids in today’s steampunk music & style scene used to identify with the goth aesthetic — and are pleasantly surprised to discover that normal adults seem intrigued by this new thing rather than alarmed. Well, yeah. People think of goths as weirdoes who take vampires too seriously, and therefore they can’t help being worried on some level that a crazy goth might, you know, want to make them bleed. Whereas steampunks are — what? Weirdoes who take pocket-watches too seriously? What are they gonna do, vehemently tell you what time it is?

Sigh. That makes me all nostalgiac for playing a mad scientist.

Bolt

2008-09-21T13:31:00.002-04:00

Yes, I'm a sucker for dog movies. And superhero movies. How can I resist the combination?

Politics and Moral Reasoning

2008-09-14T23:05:00.006-04:00

This is interesting.

It's a series of polls/studies that you can take to evaluate your own moral decision-making process. Not the moral choices themselves, that is, so much as the grounds by which we make choices.

The first one, the "Moral Foundations Questionnaire," divides moral reasoning into five categories: Harm, Fairness, Loyalty, Authority, and Purity. It ranks your interest in each of these categories, and then generates a chart comparing it with the averages for liberals and conservatives.

I find this kind of thing compelling, because so many political conversations seem to involve people talking past each other. They're not connecting in some way; and I think a lot of our mutual frustration comes from that.

(Well, aside from the frustration that comes from not getting everything we want, of course. Which is also a big part of politics.)

Anyway. The differences are really striking. My entries are in green, conservatives' are in red, and liberals are blue. (Tsk, that's unreadable! Click on it to get a more legible chart.)

What, No Laser Eye Powers?

2008-08-05T15:28:00.003-04:00

Update on Real Life #1: I've just had Lasik surgery done to my left eye. I was hoping that a malfunction in the equipment might leave me with special visual superpowers, but no such luck. Tsk!

I've been nearsighted, particularly in my left eye, since my early teenage years. I never had the money to deal with it until now; to be fair, it wasn't that big a problem. I wasn't blind without my glasses, and I'd much rather be nearsighted than farsighted: needing glasses to read would be a pain.

(Unfortunately, reading glasses are probably in my future. One reason that the doctor didn't want to Lasik my right eye is that almost everyone becomes farsighted in their 40s, and my nearsightedness would defer that for a few years. Which is kind of cool, when you think about it.)

The surgery was uncomfortable, in the sense that you had to stay perfectly still and unblinking; but it was totally painless, for which I am grateful. Now I just have to keep up with the eyedrops, and get used to the fact that I'm not wearing glasses anymore.

(More of an adjustment than I expected- I feel like my face is naked.)

Well, It's Been A While...

2008-08-05T15:26:00.003-04:00

My whole "Post By Email During Deployment" scheme didn't quite work out as planned. It turns out that blogging by email is oddly disspiriting; it's just like sending out emails to someone who never replies.

(Not that I get a lot of replies, granted; but I can see the output, and that's very helpful. On board the ship, it just felt like throwing emails into the void.)

So I'm back. And now, hopefully, I'll have things to say!

Code of the Speechmaker

2008-04-02T16:22:00.003-04:00

James P. Hogan's Code of the Lifemaker starts off very nicely. An ancient alien survey ship, designed to set up automated factories on uninhabited planets, ends up damaged on the moon Titan. There, the imperfect automatons undergo their own kind of evolutionary process, ending up with something very like organic life.

(This prologue is the best part of the novel, and it's excerpted here.)

The rest of the novel deals with a human expedition to Titan, which over the ages since the prologue has evolved its own machine ecosystems and even sentient machine life. The robots are at a roughly medieval/Renaessance level of development, and the humans take great advantage of this as they prepare to make Titan into an economic colony.

The writing is solid. The characters, with one exception, are shallow but tolerable. Hogan works hard to make his bizarre mechanical-organic world plausible, and it kind of works.

There are two problems. The first is that Hogan puts speeches into various characters' mouths- mostly, in this novel, about the advantages of the scientific method. This gets old quickly.

The second problem is something I've noted about Heinlein: the assumption that politics is chess writ large, a completely rational and controllable game that smart people can arrange to their liking. This is implausible enough with humans, especially with religion added in; with an unknown alien race, the idea breaks down completely.

I suppose I was expecting a very different ending to the humans' various machinations and deceptions. But on Titan, you really can fool all the people all the time.

38 And Counting...

2008-04-02T16:13:00.002-04:00

It's my birthday today!

37 was a good year; 38 is beginning to feel the chill shadow of looming 40. But there's two long years to get ready for that.

It's been a good day. I just wish there was cake to be had!

Happy Easter!

2008-03-22T23:20:00.003-04:00

I declare to you, brothers, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed— in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality. When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: "Death has been swallowed up in victory."

"Where, O death, is your victory?
Where, O death, is your sting?"

The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God! He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.

-1 Corinthians 15:50-56

I hope you all have a very happy Easter.

Returning to Land

2008-03-17T22:35:00.003-04:00

We have come to port in the fine city of Limassol! As Wikipedia says, it is the second-largest city on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus.

I would like to say more, but I haven't actually seen it yet, as today is my duty day. Tomorrow will be interesting, however.

The World Without Us

2008-03-16T18:54:00.003-04:00

Alan Weisman's The World Without Us is a thought experiment in which humanity suddenly disappears- from the Rapture, or space aliens who kidnap us, or whatever. The point is that humanity is gone. How long do traces of human civilization last, without anyone to maintain them?

Some things vanish very quickly: most modern architecture is not designed to last for centuries even with human maintenance. Bridges will fall, subway tunnels will fill with water, sidewalks and streets will be broken by weeds, shrubs, and eventually by trees.

Some time ago I posted an article about the recovery of wildlife in the abandoned areas around Chernobyl. Weisman studies the area in detail, since it's a sort of test case for his whole experiment. Wildlife, including large animals, may recover much faster than anyone would expect.

Human-related animals will have a harder time. Cats will do very well; dogs less so. Cockroaches, contrary to what I've always heard about nuclear war, will not do well without humans; they're tropical insects and need constant heat to survive.

The longest-lasting deliberate artifact of humanity may well be Mount Rushmore. The longest-lasting unintentional artifacts will be nuclear wastes, sand-sized particles of plastic, and tires- which, vulcanized into a single superlong molecule, will prove a daunting challenge to any ecological process that tries to break them down.

Chesterton on Loyalty

2008-03-16T18:11:00.003-04:00

From his greatest work, Orthodoxy:

... a man criticises this world as if he were house-hunting, as if he were being shown over a new suite of apartments. If a man came to this world from some other world in full possession of his powers he might discuss whether the advantage of midsummer woods made up for the disadvantage of mad dogs, just as a man looking for lodgings might balance the presence of a telephone against the absence of a sea view. But no man is in that position. A man belongs to this world before he begins to ask if it is nice to belong to it. He has fought for the flag, and often won heroic victories for the flag long before he has ever enlisted. To put shortly what seems the essential matter, he has a loyalty long before he has any admiration.

One of the many appeals of Chesterton is that he makes cheerful, reasonable arguments for things that I never hear anywhere else. When was the last time someone made a justification for blind, uncritical loyalty?

Of course, the loyalty in question is a very primal thing, which seems to be Chesterton's point. We cannot critically evaluate primal questions like "Is life good?" We can only decide.

Shortly later, he discusses the notorious slum of Pimlico:

Let us suppose we are confronted with a desperate thing -- say Pimlico. If we think what is really best for Pimlico we shall find the thread of thought leads to the throne or the mystic and the arbitrary. It is not enough for a man to disapprove of Pimlico: in that case he will merely cut his throat or move to Chelsea. Nor, certainly, is it enough for a man to approve of Pimlico: for then it will remain Pimlico, which would be awful. The only way out of it seems to be for somebody to love Pimlico: to love it with a transcendental tie and without any earthly reason. If there arose a man who loved Pimlico, then Pimlico would rise into ivory towers and golden pinnacles; Pimlico would attire herself as a woman does when she is loved. For decoration is not given to hide horrible things: but to decorate things already adorable. A mother does not give her child a blue bow because he is so ugly without it. A lover does not give a girl a necklace to hide her neck. If men loved Pimlico as mothers love children, arbitrarily, because it is theirs, Pimlico in a year or two might be fairer than Florence.

Some readers will say that this is a mere fantasy. I answer that this is the actual history of mankind. This, as a fact, is how cities did grow great. Go back to the darkest roots of civilization and you will find them knotted round some sacred stone or encircling some sacred well. People first paid honour to a spot and afterwards gained glory for it. Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.

Helliconia Winter

2008-03-03T18:56:00.003-05:00

Brrr!

This one was seasonally appropriate; I mostly read it while curled up in my blankets at home, wishing that it were summer already. But circumstances interrupted, and I wasn't able to finish it until recently, out here.

Brian Aldiss' Helliconia is a planet whose seasons last for several centuries. In that sense, it's conceptually similar to George R.R. Martin's Song of Fire and Ice series. But the resemblance pretty much ends there: in Martin's series, the extended seasons are a background detail which may or may not ever come up again; in Helliconia Winter, the change of seasons is the whole thrust of the plot.

The tone is dry and somewhat anthropological; there are several interesting characters, but the real appeal of the novel is seeing how society adapts to a seasonal change that they don't even have the records to remember; and then noting the hints that all of these changes are part of an ecological balancing act. Helliconia's humans seem to be "wired into" their planet's ecology in a much more direct way than Earth humans.

There are apparently two more novels: as you might expect, they're named "Helliconia Spring" and "Helliconia Winter." When I get home, I'll probably have to look them up.

Zorachus

2008-03-03T18:28:00.002-05:00

I haven't only fallen behind on my blogging, I've gotten behind on my reading as well. Grrr.

Zorachus is a dark fantasy novel by Mark E. Rogers. The protagonist is a saintly young wizard who is thrust into a position of power and wealth in a very dark and corrupt city. What does he do with it? Can he do anything good with it?

There's lots of interesting philosophical discussion, and much of the novel seems to be set up something like a thought experiment. Khymir, the evil city, isn't just corrupt; it was actually founded and maintained by a demon as a proof that life is evil.

Zorachus is an immensely powerful wizard, and his position gives him enough wealth and social status to do almost anything. So his options, against this dark background, are wide-open: he can pursue almost any plan for reform that comes to his mind.

But how do you make people better, when they not only don't want to be moral: they think that "moral" is a strange kind of mental illness that afflicts people who don't live in Khymir?

Another Plan Foiled!

2008-03-01T10:44:00.000-05:00

It seemed perfectly reasonable at the time: since internet access was unreliable at sea, I’d just post via email.

Well.

As it turns out, we haven’t had email lately, either. But such is life. We have it now (obviously) and I’ll try to make up for lost time.

What to say? We’re at sea; therefore we’re not <i>at</i> anyplace in particular, at least subjectively speaking. The landscape is simply the endless sea in all directions; which is compelling or exasperating, depending on your mood.

(We went up on the mast to do some maintenance a while ago; and it’s odd how the difference in perspective changed nothing. From ground level, the sea goes on forever; and when you’re high, high, high off the ground, it still goes on forever. In one of Baxter’s novels, he talks about perspectives that are larger than our eyes are designed to deal with; and I think that this is one of them. Probably that’s why it inspires our imaginations.)

Cosmic intimations of the sea aside, most of the interesting (human, trivial) stuff happens on the ship itself.

Because we’re at sea, they allow <i>no-shave chits</i>. For a few dollars, you can stop shaving for weeks at a time. This is much more convenient than you might think; effectively, it’s the chance to sleep a few extra minutes every morning, and if you’re not a morning person that’s worth a lot.

Convenience aside, my beard comes in thick; and this year, it’s coming in with a fair amount of gray in it. Tsk! When did that happen?

Blogging By Email

2008-02-19T23:50:00.001-05:00

I'm going out to sea shortly. And internet connections will be a little iffy at times. So it's a good time to experiment with the post-by-email option that blogger gives us.

Let's see if it works!

Shed those extra pounds with MSN and The Biggest Loser! Learn more.

Edit: Argh! There's a commercial attached!

Oh, well. It's still going to be really useful.

Rodentosaurus Rex

2008-01-18T12:27:00.001-05:00

From The BBC:

Gigantic fossil rodent discovered

The fossilised skull of the largest rodent ever recorded has been described by scientists for the first time.

The remains of the one-tonne beast, found in Uruguay, indicate that it would have been as big as a bull.

It is thought that the three-metre-long herbivore would have roamed estuaries and forests 2-4 million years ago.

The mammal, which is more than 15 times heavier than the largest living rodent, is described in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

The authors say the animal would have lived alongside carnivorous "terror birds" and sabre-toothed cats.

"If you are a rodent you cannot run so well so you would have had to fight with these predators," said Dr Rudemar Ernesto Blanco of the Institute of Physics in Montevideo, Uruguay, one of the authors of the paper.

"It might have reached this size to protect itself."

Fighting giants

The half-metre-long fossil skull was discovered by an amateur palaeontologist in a boulder on the Rio de La Plata coast in the south of the country.

The remains had lain in the Museum of Natural History in Montevideo for three years before being studied and identified as a new species, Josephoartigasia monesi.

It was recognised as a new creature by examining and comparing its teeth with other known species of Josephoartigasia.

"Its incisors are extraordinarily large - much larger than any other rodent," said Dr Blanco.

The researchers have speculated that the creature may have used the teeth to cut wood in a similar way to a modern day beaver.

"The other possibility is that they used them for fighting."

The team spent nearly one year estimating the body mass by comparing the skull with other living South American rodents.

Most weigh less than 1kg. However, there are exceptions such as the 60kg capybara (Hydrochoerus hydrochaeris), and the closest living relative of the newly discovered creature: the pakarana (Dinomys branickii).

The comparisons allowed them to estimate the creature's weight at nearly one tonne (1,000kg) and predict its length.

"We think it was around three metres from the tip of the nose to the tail," said Dr Blanco.

The creature's tail would have been little more than a stump, according to the team.

Island paradise

The skull is not the first oversized creature to be discovered in South America.

Other finds have included car-sized armadillos, giant ground sloths and hook-beaked terror birds.

The previously largest-known rodent was Phoberomys pattersoni, a 700kg creature nicknamed "guinea-zilla" and discovered in Venezuela.

South America is well studied by biologists because its plants and animals developed in isolation to the rest of the world's flora and fauna.

Until the emergence of the isthmus of Panama, connecting it to Central and North America about three million years ago, the landmass had been cut off for tens of millions of years.

"It is highly probable that we can find more material of this fossil and other related species," said Dr Blanco.

---------------------------------------------

Giant rats!
Car-sized armadillos!
Terror birds!

How cool is that? Now all we need is King Kong.

Swim Call!

2008-01-18T12:01:00.001-05:00

We had a swim call today.

Basically, that means that people can jump off the side of the ship and cavort around in the ocean for an hour. In the many years I've been on this ship, it's the first time.

You'd think that would be fairly common; but there are a dozen issues, from scheduling to water temperature to dangerous sealife, that can cancel it. So we're enjoying the rare opportunity.

We're also grilling lunch on the flight deck, and dueling with pummel sticks. (Pictures may be added when I get back to shore; there are security issues that prevent me from uploading them from here.)

It's a good day!

The Ones Who Walk Away...

2008-01-17T12:38:00.000-05:00

Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” is another one of those stories that are science fiction only in the loosest sense of the word. If I had to place it, I’d probably call it religious fiction (though that isn’t exactly right, either, since there is no explicit reference to God or any organized religious doctrine.)

A fable, maybe? Or a thought experiment? Or just call it fantasy and be done with it.

At any rate, it’s very well-done; you feel the pull of those who walk away, while the analogy to life-as-we-live-it is close enough that it’s hard to be comfortable with that decision. Could we have a society in which there are no victims, at all, in any sense? If not, can-or-should we just walk out?

You can’t make Omelas without breaking a few eggs, after all.

------------------------

Postscript: Wikipedia helpfully clarifies some things. The full title, not included in this anthology, was "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas (Variations on a Theme by William James)."

James' theme was as follows:

Or if the hypothesis were offered us of a world in which Messrs. Fourier's and Bellamy's and Morris's utopias should all be outdone, and millions kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torture, what except a specifical and independent sort of emotion can it be which would make us immediately feel, even though an impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered, how hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain?

With all respect to William James: Le Guin's story tells it a lot better. But it does come to the same point.

The Canadian Comet of DOOM!

2008-01-15T19:16:00.000-05:00

From NewScientistSpace:

Did a comet wipe out prehistoric Americans?

The Clovis people of North America, flourishing some 13,000 years ago, had a mastery of stone weaponry that stood them in good stead against the constant threat of large carnivores, such as American lions and giant short-faced bears. It's unlikely, however, that they thought death would come from the sky.

According to results presented by a team of 25 researchers this week at the American Geophysical Union meeting in Acapulco, Mexico, that's where the Clovis people's doom came from. Citing several lines of evidence, the team suggests that a wayward comet hurtled into Earth's atmosphere around 12,900 years ago, fractured into pieces and exploded in giant fireballs. Debris seems to have settled as far afield as Europe.

Jim Kennett, an oceanographer at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and one of the team's three principal investigators, claims immense wildfires scorched North America in the aftermath, killing large populations of mammals and bringing an abrupt end to the Clovis culture. "The entire continent was on fire," he says...

If the team's impact theory holds up under scrutiny it could help explain three mysterious events that coincided around 12,900 years ago.

Cold spell
At this key time, the climate changed abruptly in the northern hemisphere, suddenly cooling in a period known as the Younger Dryas. In addition, the distinctive Clovis culture seems to have vanished in North America, while at least 35 genera of the continent's mammals went extinct – including mammoths, mastodons, camels, ground sloths and horses.

For years, many researchers have chalked up the onset of the Younger Dryas to a major change in North America's plumbing. Near the end of the last ice age, meltwater from the continent's principal ice sheet flooded into proglacial lakes in the centre of North America, and from there drained southward into the Mississippi river.

But by 12,900 years ago, the ice had retreated sufficiently from the northern Atlantic coast to let meltwater rush suddenly eastward. As an estimated 9500 cubic kilometres of fresh water poured into the Atlantic, it switched off the ocean's salinity-driven "conveyor belt" current, shutting down the Gulf Stream that carries heat from the tropics to eastern North America. It was this that triggered the Younger Dryas cooling, say many palaeoclimate experts.

However, some of the comet proponents now propose a different trigger for the cold spell. The massive airbursts over Canada could have destabilised the continental ice sheet, opening new drainage channels to the east. Additionally, dust and debris from the explosions may have darkened the ice, absorbing solar heat and accelerating melting. "What we suggest is that the meltwater outflow from the proglacial lakes and from the temporarily melting ice sheet was the result of extraterrestrial impact," says Kennett.

The comet-strike also offers a third and radical hypothesis for the massive extinction of mammals, which for years palaeontologists have blamed on the sudden Younger Dryas freeze, combined with the hunting prowess of newly arrived Clovis bands. In the 12,900-year-old carbon-rich layer at Murray Springs, Arizona, and in sediment cores taken from the Carolina Bays (see "Marks of a comet?", below), chemist Wendy Wolbach of DePaul University in Chicago has detected significant quantities of soot – a product of the intense heat of wildfires.

Raging wildfires
Moreover, geologist Luanne Becker at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has detected a chemical signature of wildfire – polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons – in samples taken from three of the team's study sites. Kennett and other team members say this suggests the cometary explosions ignited wildfires that swept across much of southern North America, wiping out large populations of animals. "I don't want to sound catastrophic here," he says, "but this is wild stuff. There is significant evidence of massive biomass burning."

If they are right, the cataclysm could also have devastated bands of Clovis hunters. Archaeologist Al Goodyear of the University of South Carolina, Columbia, reported at the Acapulco meeting that there is indirect evidence of a human disaster in what is now the south-eastern US. Chert points fashioned in the distinctive Clovis style disappear, and a new type of tool appears in the archaeological record: redstone points, judged on stylistic grounds to date from 12,750 years ago. Numbers of Clovis points outnumber redstones by 4 to 1. "If the number of points are diagnostic of the number of people there, which is a pretty reasonable assumption," notes West, "there was at least a 70 per cent decline" in the human population in the region.

Nonetheless, many researchers are likely to greet such apocalyptic scenarios with deep scepticism. Palaeontologist Paul Koch of the University of California, Santa Cruz, says he is intrigued by the new evidence of an impact, but he is far from persuaded by some of the team's sweeping claims. "I'm not convinced yet there were [widespread] wildfires," says Koch. "But if an impact just triggered the Younger Dryas, that in itself is a pretty big issue."

That's kind of staggering. Seventy percent of the people! To say nothing of the ecological devastation.

Who knows what North America might have grown into, if this disaster hadn't struck?

Sandkings

2008-01-15T16:49:00.000-05:00

“Sandkings” is the thoroughly-creepy, and engrossing, entry from George R.R. Martin. Simon Kress likes exotic pets- especially violent, predatory ones. An imports dealer sells him four “Sandkings”- ant-like insects that build castles and fight wars with each other. They also worship the human being that feeds them, creating huge (from their perspective) carvings of Kress’ face on their castle walls.

(In other words, it’s a sort of live-action “Populous.”)

Some people can handle absolute power; Kress is not one of them. He starves the insects, tests them against small predators, and generally shows himself to be much less sympathetic than the insects. This creates some unease on his part, of course, as the insects grow larger; it’s only a matter of time before they get out and stage their own personal Reformation.

The Tunnel Under the World

2008-01-15T16:37:00.000-05:00

Frederik Pohl’s “The Tunnel Under the World” is a beautiful, Philip K. Dick-like story about paranoia and underlying questions of reality. (Actually, it reminds me of Dick’s novel Time Out of Joint- which was also about a thoroughly-normal suburban world that turned out to be completely artificial and false.)

The ending makes the story; and my biggest regret is that, with the advance of computers, the ending is no longer really plausible to modern readers. They could update it, I suppose; but virtual-reality simulations just aren’t the same.

"Repent, Harlequin," Said the What?

2008-01-15T12:52:00.001-05:00

“’Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman” was the contribution of Harlan Ellison.

Ugh. I’m sorry, but this was the only story that I really could not find any liking for at all. Or, rather, I found a great deal to dislike. The pretentious Thoreau quote at the beginning. The affectedness of the names: Harlequin? “Ticktockman”? The offhand remark that no one’s made jellybeans in centuries (then where did he get them? And how did everyone know what they were?)

I got the odd impression, after reading it, that Ellison first came up with the title and then tried very hard to write a story to fit it. And the story just isn’t that good.

Robot Dreams

2008-01-15T11:05:00.000-05:00

It’s peculiar that they chose “Robot Dreams” for Isaac Asmov’s contribution to the collection: it’s a very uncharacteristic Asimov story.

Asimov’s whole point in writing his robot stories was to fight the “Frankenstein complex,” the irrational sense of doom that people had about technology. He felt that AI would inevitably have safety precautions built in, and that robots would almost inevitably end up to be less dangerous than human beings themselves.

As I said, “Robot Dreams” is unusual for Asimov; it's not abou that at all, except perhaps in the sense that the Frankenstein complex afflicts even the robot-makers. I suppose they picked it because it was one of his last stories, and because it’s undoubtedly very good.

Two Stories About Music

2008-01-15T09:55:00.000-05:00

“Tunesmith,” by Lloyd Biggle Jr, and “A Work of Art,” by James Blish, are superficially alike: they’re both about brilliant composers who are misunderstood and neglected by society. The differences are considerable, though.

“Tunesmith” is about a man fighting for the composition of quality music, in a world where all music is controlled by the advertising industry. “A Work of Art” is more introspective; it’s about a man trying to recover the genius of his youth.

What’s interesting is that “Tunesmith” seems much less science-fictional than “A Work of Art”; it’s essentially social commentary with a big shaggy-dog pun. “Art,” by contrast, is sf from beginning to end (especially the end!)

"Art" is ultimately a better story, I think; not just because it’s clearer science fiction but because it seems to be more about the act of creation, whereas “Tunesmith” is about society’s reaction to the artist. The former is a better story for introverts, at any rate.

All You Zombies

2008-01-15T09:48:00.000-05:00

“All You Zombies,” by Robert Heinlein- it’s probably the best mind-blowing time travel paradox story ever written. (Which is saying something.)

What’s interesting, and what I didn’t really pick up until this reading, is the point of the title. The protagonist knows that his circumstances are really unusual, but he’s accustomed to them- what baffles him is how everyone else manages get along.

It’s bizarre to take his point- his life, logically, actually does make sense. It’s our lives, causally sloppy and indeterminate, that require a great effort of explanation.

Masterpieces

2008-01-15T09:41:00.000-05:00

I’m working my way through Masterpieces: The Best Science Fiction of the Twentieth Century. It’s an excellent collection of short stories.

It’s not necessarily easy to review, though, since it’s a collection of short stories from different authors on different themes from different decades. I may just have to do different posts on every story; or, at least, on the ones that seem to require several paragraphs of thought.

The Red Prophet Picture Book

2008-01-13T02:47:00.000-05:00

Orson Scott Card is best known for his novel Ender's Game, which is fair enough. I like it a lot myself.

But my favorite Card novel is Red Prophet, the second novel in his "Alvin Maker" series about a fantasy frontier America where folk magic works.

Alvin is the seventh son of a seventh son, and this mystical conjugation makes him a Merlin-like figure of magical destiny. The first novel dealt with all this; and it was certainly interesting. But Red Prophet goes into the broader world, where ambitious White men plot among and against each other, and Red Indians are slowly dying of rampant alcohol addiction.

Two brothers seek to change this: Tenskwa-Tawa, the Red Prophet of the title, who wants to segregate Red men from White men and pursue his vision of a great Crystal City; and Ta-Kumsaw, the great military leader, who simply wants to drive the White men from North America entirely.

If Ender's Game is a story about how institutions (especially the military) use and exploit people for their own purposes, Red Prophet is about religion and social reform. That is probably part of why I like it better; it's a theme that's closer to my heart.

So I was quite taken to find that there's a graphic novel version of Red Prophet. I bought the first volume and eagerly consumed it.

In retrospect, I could have guessed that there would be problems.

Card has a very strong narrative voice in this book. It's not just happening, as many novels try to suggest, with you as an observer; someone is telling you this story. (If I remember correctly, the series actually confirms this at some point; the narrator is Taleswapper.)

This doesn't translate at all well into comics format, where the ideal is to show things visually. Visually presenting the events of the book loses almost all of the appealing style.

And so they don't. Instead, they cram as much text as they possibly can into text boxes. Virtually every panel in every page is loaded with a few sentences from the novel. The effect is to make it a sort of Red Prophet Picture Book- an unhappy compromise that loses the advantages of both novel and graphic novel formats.

Some novels don't make good comic books. That isn't a sign that anything is wrong with them; it just means that the novel format has its own specific advantages, which other media don't share. Foremost among these advantages is the ability to get inside someone's head- to share their thoughts and feelings.

Card is good at this. Comics aren't. It's a sad way to realize the fact; but at least I've learned something from the Red Prophet graphic novel, after all.

Wendell Berry

2008-01-12T08:35:00.000-05:00

I was reading about Huckabee, across the internet, and came across a reference or two to Wendell Berry. This provoked my curiousity.

The amazon.com page for his essay collection, Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community is intriguing; not because I agree with everything he says, but that he seems to say things in a way that suggests he shares my deeper principles. I'll have to read it to find out, I suppose.

In the meantime, there's poetry!

You will be walking some night
in the comfortable dark of your yard
and suddenly a great light will shine
round about you, and behind you
will be a wall you never saw before.
It will be clear to you suddenly
that you were about to escape,
and that you are guilty: you misread
the complex instructions, you are not
a member, you lost your card
or never had one. And you will know
that they have been there all along,
their eyes on your letters and books,
their hands in your pockets,
their ears wired to your bed.
Though you have done nothing shameful,
they will want you to be ashamed.
They will want you to kneel and weep
and say you should have been like them.
And once you say you are ashamed,
reading the page they hold out to you,
then such light as you have made
in your history will leave you.
They will no longer need to pursue you.
You will pursue them, begging forgiveness.
They will not forgive you.
There is no power against them.
It is only candor that is aloof from them,
only an inward clarity, unashamed,
that they cannot reach. Be ready.
When their light has picked you out
and their questions are asked, say to them:
"I am not ashamed." A sure horizon
will come around you. The heron will begin
his evening flight from the hilltop.

- Wendell Berry

Into the Woods

2008-01-05T21:44:00.001-05:00

Stephen Sondheim's musical "Into the Woods" is a comedy based loosely on several classic fairy tales. I haven't actually listened to it in ages, but I came upon the old MP3s recently.

It deserves relistening. Like most of Sondeim's music, the emphasis is on lyrics, which are clever and highly detailed. Here's Agony, in which two princes discuss the hardships of questing after their destined princesses.

New Year's Eve!

2007-12-31T18:57:00.000-05:00

I'm on duty.

This is not at all a bad thing, because

a) I'm not the partying type, so I'd probably just stay home and surf the internet;
b) My internet connection at home is down. (Grrr!)

So this affords me the chance to sit back, relatively free of distractions, and think about the past year.

It's been a good year. It went by too quickly (good grief, that makes me sound old!) but many good things happened, and the bad things were all weathered without too much trouble.

I hope y'all have a Happy New Year.

Christmas Eve

2007-12-24T23:49:00.000-05:00

Merry Christmas, everyone! From the always-helpful Christian Quotation of the Day email server:

Come worship the King,
That little dear thing,
Asleep on His Mother's soft breast.
Ye bright stars, bow down,
Weave for Him a crown,
Christ Jesus by angels confessed.

Come, children, and peep,
But hush ye, and creep
On tiptoe to where the Babe lies;
Then whisper His Name
And lo! like a flame
The glory light shines in His eyes.

Come strong men, and see
This high mystery,
Tread firm where the shepherds have trod,
And watch, `mid the hair
Of the Maiden so fair,
The five little fingers of God.

Come, old men and grey,
The star leads the way,
It halts and your wanderings cease;
Look down on His Face
Then, filled with His Grace,
Depart ye, God's servants, in Peace.
... G. A. Studdert Kennedy

Baxter's Ambiguous Alternate

2007-12-22T23:49:00.000-05:00

So, after picking it up and putting it down several times, I finished Stephen Baxter's Conquerer.

It's the second book in his "Time's Tapestry" series, about a prophecy delivered (apparently by time travel) to ancient Britain; and the way it affects the many generations of people who encounter it.

The prophecy is a complicated work of Latin poetry which describes the history of Britain by intervals, with dates linked by the regular return of Halley's Comet. As the series progresses, it becomes obvious that the prophecy is accurate- though its meaning is sometimes unclear until it comes to pass.

The legend surrounding the prophecy says that it was written by "The Weaver," a manipulator from the future who is trying to bring some historical incident to pass. It's unclear where this legend came from, or why people would preserve it since it makes the prophecy heretical; though of course as science fiction readers we understand its meaning at once.

Which comes to the odd part (or, I guess, the interesting part): it's unclear if the Prophecy is working. It undoubtedly changes individual lives; many people live or die because of its influence. But every historical incident it impinges on seems to work out in just the way it did in our actual historical record. Either it's very subtle, or it's not working, or else our history is the one it's trying to bring about.

This second book strongly suggests the second possibility; things haven't worked out as expected. But, of course, that's all a matter of perspective.

Mustang by Moonlight!

2007-12-20T14:09:00.000-05:00

I haven't posted much this month; for most of it I was at sea with touch-and-go internet access, and then I discovered the same problem when I got home.

But! I am on Christmas leave, which means that I've rented a car to take the trip home to South Carolina. It turned out that my car was a Mustang.

I've never driven one of these before. It was funny how all the rental attendants kept telling me, "Watch your speed!"

And then I got in and took off. And it all became much clearer. A Mustang is a fun car to drive; especially when you've got a long highway trip that lasts all night.

The Wolves of Chernobyl

2007-12-20T14:06:00.000-05:00

From the Independent:

Chernobyl: Lost world
Two decades after disaster struck, Chernobyl's wastelands are now teeming with wildlife. Should they become a nature reserve?

On 26 April 1986, the worst nuclear accident in history occurred at the Chernobyl power station in the former Soviet Union. More than 135,000 people – and 35,000 cattle – living within 30 kilometres (19 miles) of the stricken nuclear reactor were evacuated and an unprecedented "zone of exclusion" was established around the site, close to the border between the Ukraine and Belarus...

Scientists have had access to limited data when it comes to assessing the true facts within the 4,000 square kilometres of the "zone of alienation". Photographs of the abandoned city of Pripyat, near Chernobyl, reveal that trees and shrubs have started to sprout through the roads and buildings. Nature has begun to reclaim what was originally lost to urban development and agriculture.

Scientists from the International Radioecology Laboratory in Slavutych have documented an increase in sightings of large animals that were rare or absent before the disaster. Several packs of wolves have appeared and they seem to have made easy meals of any stray dogs left behind by their owners. (Wolves Eat Dogs is the title of a novel based on the exclusion zone by Gorky Park author Martin Cruz Smith.)

The rare Przewalski's horse from the Russian steppe has been reintroduced, along with European bison. Beavers and boars are beginning to reshape the forest ecosystems, European lynx have been sighted and many rare birds, such as the black stork and white-tailed eagle, have returned, along with many swans and owls.

For some scientists, the sight of wildflowers growing through the cracks in the concrete roads of Pripyat and the many and varied species of larger animals within the zone are signs that something positive has come out of the disaster. These researchers believe that the detrimental effects of the radioactive fallout have been exaggerated, while the true impact of human activity has been overlooked.

"The benefit of excluding humans from this highly contaminated ecosystem appears to outweigh significantly any negative cost associated with Chernobyl radiation," said Robert Baker, a biologist at Texas Tech University, who has made more than a dozen scientific excursions into the zone. Baker believes that the diversity of animals and plants within the zone is what could be reasonably expected to be seen in a nature park dedicated to conservation. Indeed, there have been calls to turn the Chernobyl exclusion zone into what would become Europe's largest nature reserve...

--------------------------

There's a lot more to the article at the link. But it amuses me that nature can handle a nuclear accident a lot more easily than it can handle the ongoing presence of human beings.

(Or, alternately, there's a lot of hidden mutation going on; and in a few years the animal-men from Kamandi will erupt from their hidden lairs to take over the world. This is also possible.)

The Heat of Fusion

2007-12-10T17:21:00.000-05:00

The Heat of Fusion is a collection of John M. Ford's short stories and poetry. It's marvellous, though (as is usual for Ford) the writing is dense and often ambiguous in meaning.

Ford seems to like a sort of political-psychological story; many of his works are about revolutionary psychology and its darker, more Orwellian elements.

In "Chromatic Aberration," one of the best works in the book, the revolt has succeeded; and part of the new regime's cultural revolution is the invention of new colors. The author claims, with all sincerity, that the revolution has changed human psychology and perception so completely that people can now see real colors; whereas the colors we saw before were just reactionary illusions. The story is creepy in its understatement; Ford creates the impression of a nightmare society without ever actually "breaking character" and telling us about the horrors that may be going on in it.

More lightly, here's one of his sonnets:

------

Janus: Sonnet

Sufficient time for faith and miracles
We find we cannot fit into our days;
And nothing's left at all that joyous dwells
Inside the heart. The spark of spirit stays
Too small for dreamburst, and all earth may prove
Inadequate for art. No human is
This potent all alone, and fear kills love...
Love kills fear, and alone; all-potent, this.
No human is inadequate for art,
For dreamburst; and all earth may prove too small.
The spark of spirit stays inside the heart
That joyous dwells, and nothing's left at all
We cannot fit into our days. we find
For faith and miracles, sufficient time.

------

It's a sort of sonnet palindrome: everything in the second half is perfectly reversed to achieve a meaning the exactly opposite to the first half.

Ford's work is terribly underrated; he was one of the most literate and capable science fiction writers to ever work in the field.

Fatal Revenant

2007-12-06T06:02:00.000-05:00

It's the second book in the last Thomas Covenant trilogy!

Good grief.

Fatal Revenant suffers from the normal second-book-in-a-trilogy problems (i.e. you have to remember what happened in the first one, which is important since Donaldson keeps referring back to it; and you don't really get any resolution yet.)

Against that, you get some genuinely-interesting historical stuff. (Some!) We find out more about Berek, Demondim, the Forests, and so forth. Donaldson doesn't mind retconning his previous writing for the sake of moving the present story forward; sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn't.

The notion that no one knew about the Despiser until Kevin's reign is a little jarring; but it mostly works. The Insequent are another matter; they're so prominent that you have to wonder where they've been before this trilogy.

Decent, but not marvellous. On the other hand, I'll definitely read the last book.

War and Peace (Not Tolstoy!)

2007-12-06T05:27:00.000-05:00

Donald Kagan's On the Origins of War (and the Preservation of Peace) is one of those books that I've been meaning to read for several months. Now that we're out at sea, with a tenuous internet connection that leaves me little opportunity for time-wasting, I've finally gotten around to it.

It's a series of case studies- not of wars themselves, but of several situations that led to wars. Kagan jumps from the ancient world (the Pelopennesian War between Athens and Sparta, and the Second Punic War between Rome and Carthage) to the 20th century with both World Wars. He finishes, optimistically (?) with the Cuban Missle Crisis.

(Well, it's optimistic in the sense that war didn't break out. Though Kagan's picture of the crisis is very different from what I've read before.)

Kagan's points are clear and pretty well-established in his work here. We think of war as an interruption of the natural state of things; but it's not. War historically is much more common than times of peace. We are prone to conflict.

Peace, Kagan says, doesn't exist without someone making an effort to maintain it. It requires proactive behavior, diplomatic skill, and political will; and even then it may fail.

It fails because all nations pursue three things: honor, interests, and security. These are unstable, insatiable pursuits; no matter how much you have, you can never really be done with them. And they often conflict with other nations' pursuits; so it comes to war to resolve them.

Kagan's study of honor was perhaps the most interesting part of the book. He uses the term to cover prestige, respect, reputation; these psychological forces are a real form of power, and nations will fight to keep them. (Paradoxically, if they don't, the result may also be war: because a nation that loses the respect of others will have to fight to prove its strength. Its diplomacy won't be taken seriously on its own merits.)

There's a lot here I still have to digest. But Kagan has shaped and reshaped a lot of how I view international relations.

The Accidental Time Machine

2007-11-25T23:46:00.000-05:00

Joe Haldeman's latest novel, The Accidental Time Machine, is a book perfectly described by its title. Graduate student Matt Fuller accidentally builds a graviton meter that also functions as a time machine, with two major limitations:

1) It only goes forward, not backward;
2) Each jump through time is twelve times longer than the last.

The machine starts out jumping a few seconds into the future; by the time Fuller's ready to try a full-fledged experiment, with himself along for the ride, it takes him a month forward.

The machine isn't really controllable, or navigatable. The only thing it's indisputably good for is escaping your present time; which is good, because Fuller has a knack for getting into trouble.

This is my first Haldeman novel. It's readable (and it helps that I'm a total sucker for time-travel stories.) Some of the entries are weak: the future period ruled by a fundamentalist theocracy (complete with a holographic Jesus Christ) reminded me intensely of Heinlein's Revolt in 2100.

(Hey, I'm linking myself! That's a triumph of blog depth! Or self-indulgence. Don't answer that.)

The ending is disappointingly incoherent; I have no clear understanding of what happened, and I'm not sure that I'm meant to. It may just be a mystery of unthinkably-advanced science and time-travel weirdness. But I'd at least like to be clear on my unclarity, if that makes any sense.

Come to think of it, the entire plot- invent forward-going time machine, explore the future, get into trouble, keep moving farther ahead- was Poul Anderson's novella "Flight to Forever." Which was, frankly, done a lot better.

But this wasn't too bad. Like I said, I'm a sucker for time-travel.

Dogs and Robots and Mutants, Oh My!

2007-11-25T23:09:00.000-05:00

My room was getting its semiannual cleaning this weekend (blech!) and I happened on a long-lost book that had been buried under my winter clothes: Clifford D. Simak's City.

It's a collection of short stories detailing Simak's future history of the decline of the human race. They're framed as myths that the intelligent dogs of the future tell each other about long-departed humanity- though educated dogs doubt that any such creature ever existed.

Humanity in Simak's future doesn't go out with a bang. It fails quietly, through social isolation and a lack of anything to strive for. It is replaced by dogs, who are made intelligent by means of surgery (today we'd say genetic engineering, but it amounts to the same thing) robots, and mutants- superintelligent, amoral beings whose purposes are never entirely clear.

Simak's writing is wistful: peaceful, sad, and ultimately resigned to the extinction of things. He seems to be an evolutionary writer, in the sense that H.G. Wells was; but where Wells triumphantly wrote of the dawn of new races, Simak writes eulogies for the fall of the old ones.

One surprise, in passing, is how much Isaac Asimov borrowed from Simak. His Solaria, with its agoraphobic isolationists, is directly taken from Simak; and Daneel Olivaw is clearly based on Jenkins, the immortal telepathic robot who discreetly guides humanity (and caninity) through history.

Scharr on Patriotism

2007-11-22T15:11:00.000-05:00

The first thing that comes to mind (and is easily accessible, since I have it bookmarked) is John Scharr's essay The Case for Patriotism, which says:

To be a patriot is to have a patrimony; or, perhaps more ac-
curately, the patriot is one who is grateful for a legacy and
recognizes that the legacy makes him a debtor. There is a whole
way of being in the world, captured best by the word reverence,
which defines life by its debts: one is what one owes, what one
acknowledges as a rightful debt: or obligation. The patriot moves
within that mentality. The gift of land, people, language, gods,
memories, and customs, which is the patrimony of the patriot,
defines what he or she is. Patrimony is mixed with person; the
two are barely separable. The very tone and rhythm of a life,
the shapes of perception, the texture of its homes and fears
come from membership in a territorially rooted group. The con-
scious patriot is one who feels deeply indebted for these gifts,
grateful to the people and places through which they come, and
determined to defend the legacy against enemies and pass it un-
spoiled to those who will come after.

Scharr goes on to say lots of other things- most importantly, how difficult it is for us to be patriots in this sense- but this struck me as being especially relevant. Patriotism is gratitude about one's country; how much happiness we will miss if we cannot feel it!

Happy Thanksgiving!

2007-11-22T14:58:00.000-05:00

Today is a day of gratitude. A day to specifically think of all the things that are good in life. Which is a pretty long list.

I think that this is important because, for most of us, gratitude is not a natural emotion. It is far more natural for us to take things for granted, and just assume that "normal life" includes all the good stuff we've got.

So gratitude doesn't always come to us automatically. We have to work at it; we have to deliberately take a moment, or a day, and remember all the things we should be grateful for.

I'm going to try and think carefully on this subject today. Because I suspect that joy and gratitude are, if not identical twins, then very close brothers.

Two Short Poems

2007-11-19T21:30:00.001-05:00

Two short, dark poems about love by women.

Unfortunate Coincidence

By the time you swear you're his,
Shivering and sighing,
And he vows his passion is
Infinite, undying -
Lady, make a note of this:
One of you is lying.

- Dorothy Parker

---------------------------

Humoresque

"Heaven bless the babe!" they said.
"What queer books she must have read!"
(Love, by whom I was beguiled,
Grant I may not bear a child.)
"Little does she guess to-day
What the world may be!" they say.
(Snow, drift deep and cover
Till the spring my murdered lover.)

- Edna St. Vincent Millay

The Deficit Made Me Do It!

2007-11-19T20:20:00.000-05:00

I've been playing a game called Democracy. Its premise is that you've just been elected President; you can pass laws, revoke laws, adjust taxes, and so forth. (Yeah, I know, the President doesn't automatically have the power to do all that. But if you couldn't do these things, there wouldn't be much of a game.)

So you can basically reshape the country's laws into whatever you think would work best; and see then how that works out. It's like a political version of Sim City.

There are two conditions. First of all, obviously, voters may not approve of your changes; and if you're voted out of office, no matter how well things are going, you lose. Secondly, you have the national debt to worry about.

The national debt is by far the harder problem to cope with. You can win people's votes pretty easily, by setting up federal programs that are targeted to their interests; the game's structure is set up to make this pretty clear and easy.

But almost every good idea seems to be expensive! And raising taxes will kill you, politically. And there's already a mountain of national debt to work your way out of. Trying to reduce the national debt changes you from a confident social reformer to a hag-ridden penny-pincher who ends every policy discussion with "We can't afford that."

Into this desperate situation comes a thought: the Flag-Burning Amendment doesn't cost anything. It boosts my popularity with certain groups in a cheap and easy way, so that I can either cut these programs or raise those taxes, which normally would send them into a fury and guarantee my loss next election...

That's just an example. There are lots of free, horrible-idea programs whose only purpose is to please some interest group. And I would never have considered them under normal circumstances. But the fascination of the game is how its logic forces you to consider passing them; not because you like them, but just because it gets you some breathing space to get the real job done.

I don't know if that's even passingly comparable to real-life politics. But it wouldn't surprise me at all.

Reenlistment!

2007-11-17T13:21:00.000-05:00

Yesterday was the day. My parents came up for the occaision, which was cool; they've never really had a chance to tour the ship.

The oath was administered by my division officer:

I, Fenris Wolf, do solemnly swear:
That I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic;
That I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same;
And that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
So help me God.

Four more years!

(It's like being President! Except that it pays less. And nobody votes for it. And it's probably more fun. Okay, it's probably nothing at all like being the President.)

Yeats on the Great War

2007-11-12T07:41:00.000-05:00

At the end of World War I, November 11th was established as Armistice Day, in recognition of all that had gone before, and our relief that it was finally ended. So this is a day late, but hopefully not a dollar short:

Nineteen Hundred And Nineteen

I

Many ingenious lovely things are gone
That seemed sheer miracle to the multitude,
protected from the circle of the moon
That pitches common things about. There stood
Amid the ornamental bronze and stone
An ancient image made of olive wood -
And gone are phidias' famous ivories
And all the golden grasshoppers and bees.

We too had many pretty toys when young:
A law indifferent to blame or praise,
To bribe or threat; habits that made old wrong
Melt down, as it were wax in the sun's rays;
Public opinion ripening for so long
We thought it would outlive all future days.
O what fine thought we had because we thought
That the worst rogues and rascals had died out.

All teeth were drawn, all ancient tricks unlearned,
And a great army but a showy thing;
What matter that no cannon had been turned
Into a ploughshare? Parliament and king
Thought that unless a little powder burned
The trumpeters might burst with trumpeting
And yet it lack all glory; and perchance
The guardsmen's drowsy chargers would not prance.

Now days are dragon-ridden, the nightmare
Rides upon sleep: a drunken soldiery
Can leave the mother, murdered at her door,
To crawl in her own blood, and go scot-free;
The night can sweat with terror as before
We pieced our thoughts into philosophy,
And planned to bring the world under a rule,
Who are but weasels fighting in a hole.

He who can read the signs nor sink unmanned
Into the half-deceit of some intoxicant
From shallow wits; who knows no work can stand,
Whether health, wealth or peace of mind were spent
On master-work of intellect or hand,
No honour leave its mighty monument,
Has but one comfort left: all triumph would
But break upon his ghostly solitude.
But is there any comfort to be found?

Man is in love and loves what vanishes,
What more is there to say? That country round
None dared admit, if Such a thought were his,
Incendiary or bigot could be found
To burn that stump on the Acropolis,
Or break in bits the famous ivories
Or traffic in the grasshoppers or bees.

II

When Loie Fuller's Chinese dancers enwound
A shining web, a floating ribbon of cloth,
It seemed that a dragon of air
Had fallen among dancers, had whirled them round
Or hurried them off on its own furious path;
So the platonic Year
Whirls out new right and wrong,
Whirls in the old instead;
All men are dancers and their tread
Goes to the barbarous clangour of a gong.

III

Some moralist or mythological poet
Compares the solitary soul to a swan;
I am satisfied with that,
Satisfied if a troubled mirror show it,
Before that brief gleam of its life be gone,
An image of its state;
The wings half spread for flight,
The breast thrust out in pride
Whether to play, or to ride
Those winds that clamour of approaching night.

A man in his own secret meditation
Is lost amid the labyrinth that he has made
In art or politics;
Some platonist affirms that in the station
Where we should cast off body and trade
The ancient habit sticks,
And that if our works could
But vanish with our breath
That were a lucky death,
For triumph can but mar our solitude.

The swan has leaped into the desolate heaven:
That image can bring wildness, bring a rage
To end all things, to end
What my laborious life imagined, even
The half-imagined, the half-written page;
O but we dreamed to mend
Whatever mischief seemed
To afflict mankind, but now
That winds of winter blow
Learn that we were crack-pated when we dreamed.

IV

We, who seven years ago
Talked of honour and of truth,
Shriek with pleasure if we show
The weasel's twist, the weasel's tooth.

V

Come let us mock at the great
That had such burdens on the mind
And toiled so hard and late
To leave some monument behind,
Nor thought of the levelling wind.

Come let us mock at the wise;
With all those calendars whereon
They fixed old aching eyes,
They never saw how seasons run,
And now but gape at the sun.

Come let us mock at the good
That fancied goodness might be gay,
And sick of solitude
Might proclaim a holiday:
Wind shrieked - and where are they?

Mock mockers after that
That would not lift a hand maybe
To help good, wise or great
To bar that foul storm out, for we
Traffic in mockery.

VI

Violence upon the roads: violence of horses;
Some few have handsome riders, are garlanded
On delicate sensitive ear or tossing mane,
But wearied running round and round in their courses
All break and vanish, and evil gathers head:
Herodias' daughters have returned again,
A sudden blast of dusty wind and after
Thunder of feet, tumult of images,
Their purpose in the labyrinth of the wind;
And should some crazy hand dare touch a daughter
All turn with amorous cries, or angry cries,
According to the wind, for all are blind.
But now wind drops, dust settles; thereupon
There lurches past, his great eyes without thought
Under the shadow of stupid straw-pale locks,
That insolent fiend Robert Artisson
To whom the love-lorn Lady Kyteler brought
Bronzed peacock feathers, red combs of her cocks.

True North Strong and Free!

2007-11-09T18:23:00.000-05:00

After a dramatic and treacherous voyage through the icy northern waters, we have at last made port in the hallowed land of Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada!

I was too late getting off the ship to do more than a brief reconnaisance. However, I did successfully locate a mall, complete with food court!

(Canadian mall food, it turns out, is very much like US mall food. Who'd have thought it?)

More details tomorrow; I am taking a tour in the morning and shall have learned much of this strange land and its people.

Being Garrulous About "Garrulous"

2007-11-09T00:19:00.000-05:00

This may not really make sense, but: garrulous sounds like it should mean something else.

dictionary.com defines it as "excessively talkative in a rambling, roundabout manner, esp. about trivial matters." All right. But it doesn't sound like that!

I have a sort of intuition (based on lots of reading, I guess) that I use to evaluate words. It normally works pretty well: I can guess what a word means even if I've never seen it before.

But "garrulous" trips me up. It sounds like it should mean "argumentative," or some such synonym of "hostile." Why? Probably I'm associating it with "garrison," a military outpost, and "queruluous", which means complaining.

But beyond that: the sound of the word itself suggests it. Gar-yuh-lus: the syllables lurch from one to the next ungracefully, and generally sound kind of miserable.

Compare "chatty" or "gabby": they're both short words that suggest idle, casual talk. "Longwinded," with its long "o," suggests a politician who goes on and on in a pompous way. "Babbling" sounds like a repetition of nonsense sounds, which is why it's commonly applied to babies and brooks.

But "garrulous"? Where did that come from?

Salome's Dancing Lesson

2007-11-06T23:38:00.000-05:00

I can't believe I haven't done any Dorothy Parker yet. Well, better late than never:

Salome's Dancing-Lesson

She that begs a little boon
(Heel and toe! Heel and toe!)
Little gets- and nothing, soon.
(No, no, no! No, no, no!)
She that calls for costly things
Priceless finds her offerings-
What's impossible to kings?
(Heel and toe! Heel and toe!)

Kings are shaped as other men.
(Step and turn! Step and turn!)
Ask what none may ask again.
(Will you learn? Will you learn?)
Lovers whine, and kisses pall,
Jewels tarnish, kingdoms fall-
Death's the rarest prize of all!
(Step and turn! Step and turn!)

Veils are woven to be dropped.
(One, two, three! One, two, three!)
Aging eyes are slowest stopped.
(Quietly! Quietly!)
She whose body's young and cool
Has no need of dancing-school-
Scratch a king and find a fool!
(One, two, three! One, two, three!)

... A Dorothy Parker Bible study would be either horrifying or brilliant. I can't quite decide which.

The Garfield Sampler

2007-11-03T21:16:00.000-04:00

This is probably a lot more fun than it should be. It takes panels from the comic strip "Garfield" and posts three of them at random, as if they were a regular strip.

Most of them almost make sense, and some of them are actually funny. (At least, funny in the Far Side sense of "What does that mean?") And this is perhaps what makes it semi-compulsive: they make sense just often enough to tempt you to try again.

The Misenchanted Sword

2007-11-03T19:51:00.000-04:00

The Misenchanted Sword is Lawrence Watt-Evans' all-time bestseller. (As witness the name of his homepage.) And no wonder: it's a clever, well-told light fantasy novel.

Valder is a scout for the army of Ethshar, which is fighting an endless war with the Evil Empire of the north. He gets cut off behind enemy lines, hides in the shack of a hermit who turns out to be an eccentric wizard, and gets his sword enchanted by the grumpy old man so that he stands a chance of making it back home.

The fact that the hermit is grumpy, and arguable insane, and working with secondhand components, leads to the misenchantment of the title. Valder is left with a magic sword, "Wirikidor," that cannot lose a fight, which is obviously useful (indeed, he does make it home); but there are drawbacks.

Wirikidor is enchanted to protect his life, so he's basically unkillable by anything else. He's not immune to pain, disease, disfigurement, etc.: he just can't die until the spell is used up. And that will happen on the one hundredth killing- at that point, the sword will turn on Valder and kill him.

The first charm of the book is probably Valder- he's a likeable low fantasy hero, which is to say that he's not much of a hero at all. He just wants to survive the war, retire to find a civilian career and have a happy, uneventful life. When Wirikidor falls into his life, he doesn't want to become a war hero, he just wonders how he can be rid of it. (He can't.)

The second part of the book's appeal is its clear approach to magic. We're given pocket summaries that seem to make sense and delineate what's possible, which is essential since the whole plot is about Valder's dilemma with the sword. It approaches the status of a pure logic puzzle: if the unbreakable spell makes him unkillable, but still prone to the degenerations of extreme old age, then what can he do about it?

The ending, in terms of logic, is a copout; but by the time I got there I liked Valder enough that it didn't bother me.

Well, the Ship Didn't Sink

2007-11-03T19:38:00.000-04:00

... Which is to say: as far as I know, the drills went pretty well. We won't officially know until Monday, but if we'd failed catastrophically I probably would have heard about it.

(Rumor has it that we did fail the swimmer-saboteur exercise; but like the entrenched-invader scenario, this scenario has a high expected failure rate. So hopefully that won't fail us for the whole thing.)

Recessional

2007-11-01T19:10:00.000-04:00

Something important for military people to bear in mind:

Recessional
by Rudyard Kipling

1897
God of our fathers, known of old,
Lord of our far-flung battle-line,
Beneath whose awful Hand we hold
Dominion over palm and pine—
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!

The tumult and the shouting dies;
The Captains and the Kings depart:
Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice,
An humble and a contrite heart.
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!

Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!

If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe,
Such boastings as the Gentiles use,
Or lesser breeds without the Law—
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!

For heathen heart that puts her trust
In reeking tube and iron shard,
All valiant dust that builds on dust,
And guarding, calls not Thee to guard,
For frantic boast and foolish word—
Thy mercy on Thy People, Lord!

Yaah! Terrorists!

2007-11-01T18:03:00.000-04:00

So it's another duty day. Today is special, though, because it's the start of our Force Protection Training Exercises, a 36-hour process where the ship faces one threat after another and we try not to get killed.

(I really wish I'd gotten more sleep last night. Grrrrr!)

We've had a bomb left by the pier gate, an intruder trying to gain access to the ship, and a team of intruders who successfully got on board and had to be rooted out of their entrenched position.

(That last drill is one of the worst, in that it's almost guaranteed to cause casualties. But we passed, which is to say that our casualties weren't horrendously high and our technique didn't have anything especially wrong with it; and so the drilling continues...)

My part varies from drill to drill; but it generally involves me and one other sailor running around with plastic guns, taking cover behind convenient large objects, and guarding whatever space we're assigned to.

It's going to be interesting to see how sleep-deprivation-incoherent I get by tomorrow afternoon.

Interworld

2007-10-30T05:16:00.000-04:00

A while ago, I complained about books that reduce the multiverse to a subplot. And now comes Neil Gaiman's new book, which does nothing of the sort. Huzzah!

Interworld, actually coauthored by Gaiman and Michael Reaves, is a young adult novel about a young man who discovers his power to travel between parallel universes. This immediately sweeps him up into the power politics of two interdimensional empires; and of a resistance movement composed entirely of parallel versions of himself.

The cosmology is well-developed and interesting. The concept of an organization made up entirely of alternate selves is fun, but doesn't get as much development as it deserves.

(It's easy enough to see a parallel in close cases: "He's what I would be if I'd grown up in Georgia," for example. But what does it mean to say, "He's what I would be if the human race had evolved from birds"? Can that person be considered a parallel self, or just a person that coincidentally resembles you?)

The book is fun, and you can see bits of Gaimanesque thinking throughout it.

Startling Campaign News

2007-10-30T05:12:00.000-04:00

My perennial dark-horse Republican candidate, Mike Huckabee, has just been endorsed by Chuck Norris.

We might as well just move him into the Oval Office right now.

Space... The Final Frontier...

2007-10-29T00:15:00.000-04:00

From The Guardian:

'Second Earth' found, 20 light years away

Scientists have discovered a warm and rocky "second Earth" circling a star, a find they believe dramatically boosts the prospects that we are not alone.

The planet is the most Earth-like ever spotted and is thought to have perfect conditions for water, an essential ingredient for life. Researchers detected the planet orbiting one of Earth's nearest stars, a cool red dwarf called Gliese 581, 20 light years away in the constellation of Libra.

Measurements of the planet's celestial path suggest it is 1½ times the size of our home planet, and orbits close to its sun, with a year of just 13 days. The planet's orbit brings it 14 times closer to its star than Earth is to the sun. But Gliese 581 burns at only 3,000C, half the temperature of our own sun, making conditions on the planet comfortable for life, with average ground temperatures estimated at 0 to 40C. Researchers claim the planet is likely to have an atmosphere. The discovery follows a three-year search for habitable planets by the European Southern Observatory at La Silla in Chile...

So how cool is that?

I vaguely remember Isaac Asimov, in his nonfiction book Extraterrestrial Civilizations, laying out some problems with a planet being close to even a cooler sun. I'll have to go look it up to be sure.

But even so, it's remarkable news.

It's Atropecious!

2007-10-28T22:50:00.000-04:00

(But not as much my pun.)

The Television Tropes & Idioms wiki has taken up most of my reading time today. I can't easily account for its fascination; something about the combination of amusement and recognition I get from reading all these entries?

The Multiverse Isn't a Subplot!

2007-10-09T18:16:00.000-04:00

Today's book of consideration is James P. Hogan's The Proteus Operation; there will be some minor spoilage, I'm afraid. (But only minor!)

The novel begins in an alternate history where the Axis had a very successful World War II. It's now 1975, and America and Australia are the only non-Axis nations left in the world; but it's only a matter of time for them.

So they develop time-travel, planning to go back to the early 1940s and change a few things; and make their world, in the process, very much like the one we live in today. But things are much more complicated than they first appear.

(Here go my minor spoilers!)

The Americans actually stole time-travel from the Nazis; or rather, from the 21st-century renegades who decided they'd prefer a Nazi world to their original history. So ours isn't the first history, or the second, but the third; the original course of history is an idyllic world where Europe reached a better ending to WWI, and averted the bloody course of the late 20th century altogether.

So far, so good. I love time-travel stories. And while I'm skeptical of utopias (something I've been seeing a lot of in Hogan) the neatness of the history-behind-a-history-behind-a-history appealed to my juvenile sense of wonder.

But then things get annoying.

It turns out that changing history doesn't scale forward: the Utopia world and the Nazi world keep going on, regardless of what changes occur in 1940. That's a standard trope of time-travel stories, and it seems to resolve some paradoxes.

But these parallel worlds aren't related to the time-travel changes. They're borne of the Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, in which every possible position of an electron manifests in an entirely different universe. So the time-travellers are never really interacting with their own history at all (I think. But, really, who can tell?)

I don't mind the Many-Worlds Hypothesis; it can certainly be the basis for some fascinating science fiction. But it makes a lousy subplot. It's too big; not just in size, but in implications. It affects everything. Any fair treatment of it will tend to overwhelm any other story the author's trying to tell.

Greg Egan's done some good work with the concept: particularly his brilliant Permutation City, which I hope to review someday soon. But he does this good work by acknowledging the way the multiverse has a radical impact on the basic ideas that we take for granted.

Proteus wasn't a bad novel; and I'm still a sucker for time travel. But this treatment removes the logical paradoxes that are the mainstay of time-travelling fun. With that taken away, it's more like a period piece.

Tonight's Geek Pleasure

2007-10-08T23:49:00.000-04:00

Fantasy Bedtime Hour, a public access show in which two nude women lie in bed discussing Stephen R. Donaldson's Lord Foul's Bane. They're completely clueless, and it's hilarious watching them try to interpret Donaldson's overpurple prose.

They also have action sequences!

I Have No Comment...

2007-10-08T22:39:00.000-04:00

... About the report that Mitt Romney's favorite novel is Battlefield Earth.

Well, maybe just one.

BWA-HAHAHAHAHAHA!

The Law of the Jungle

2007-10-08T22:10:00.000-04:00

From The Jungle Book,
by Rudyard Kipling

Now this is the Law of the Jungle --
as old and as true as the sky;
And the Wolf that shall keep it may prosper,
but the Wolf that shall break it must die.

As the creeper that girdles the tree-trunk
the Law runneth forward and back --
For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf,
and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack.

Wash daily from nose-tip to tail-tip;
drink deeply, but never too deep;
And remember the night is for hunting,
and forget not the day is for sleep.

The Jackal may follow the Tiger,
but, Cub, when thy whiskers are grown,
Remember the Wolf is a Hunter --
go forth and get food of thine own.

Keep peace withe Lords of the Jungle --
the Tiger, the Panther, and Bear.
And trouble not Hathi the Silent,
and mock not the Boar in his lair.

When Pack meets with Pack in the Jungle,
and neither will go from the trail,
Lie down till the leaders have spoken --
it may be fair words shall prevail.

When ye fight with a Wolf of the Pack,
ye must fight him alone and afar,
Lest others take part in the quarrel,
and the Pack be diminished by war.

The Lair of the Wolf is his refuge,
and where he has made him his home,
Not even the Head Wolf may enter,
not even the Council may come.

The Lair of the Wolf is his refuge,
but where he has digged it too plain,
The Council shall send him a message,
and so he shall change it again.

If ye kill before midnight, be silent,
and wake not the woods with your bay,
Lest ye frighten the deer from the crop,
and your brothers go empty away.

Ye may kill for yourselves, and your mates,
and your cubs as they need, and ye can;
But kill not for pleasure of killing,
and seven times never kill Man!

If ye plunder his Kill from a weaker,
devour not all in thy pride;
Pack-Right is the right of the meanest;
so leave him the head and the hide.

The Kill of the Pack is the meat of the Pack.
Ye must eat where it lies;
And no one may carry away of that meat to his lair,
or he dies.

The Kill of the Wolf is the meat of the Wolf.
He may do what he will;
But, till he has given permission,
the Pack may not eat of that Kill.

Cub-Right is the right of the Yearling.
From all of his Pack he may claim
Full-gorge when the killer has eaten;
and none may refuse him the same.

Lair-Right is the right of the Mother.
From all of her year she may claim
One haunch of each kill for her litter,
and none may deny her the same.

Cave-Right is the right of the Father --
to hunt by himself for his own:
He is freed of all calls to the Pack;
he is judged by the Council alone.

Because of his age and his cunning,
because of his gripe and his paw,
In all that the Law leaveth open,
the word of your Head Wolf is Law.

Now these are the Laws of the Jungle,
and many and mighty are they;
But the head and the hoof of the Law
and the haunch and the hump is -- Obey!

Donaldson's Next Book

2007-09-30T19:17:00.000-04:00

Fatal Revenant, the new Thomas Covenant book, is out on Amazon. It's officially coming out on October 9th. From the Booklist review snippet:

The second volume (after The Runes of the Earth, 2004) of the final Thomas Covenant tetralogy takes place entirely in the Land, to which Linden Avery has gone in search of her missing autistic son, whom she finds, completely cured and even outspokenly brash, in the company of a hale and hearty Thomas Covenant. The hitch, however, is that they now must find a hidden store of Earthpower, after which Linden may have to choose between using it to return herself and her companions to Earth, health, and happiness or to save the Land from its enemies. Donaldson maintains his propensity for forcing his female characters to jump through flaming hoops, but here the women are more modest, at least physically. Linden's dilemmas and choices are less athletic and more of the ethical variety. Should saving her son, now of sound though rebellious mind, override her duties to the still direly periled Land? The time it takes her, with some counsel from Thomas, to reach a compromise solution and to attempt to carry it out involves much pace-slowing angst, even if it further develops Linden's status as the new saga's real protagonist. The ending is the kind of cliff-hanger that should have readers returning to see how it and the remaining adventures play out. Green, Roland

I'm not sure what I think of that. One of the most jarring and novel things about Runes of the Earth was that Linden Avery really seemed to have her head together. That set her apart from virtually every other protagonist Donaldson's ever written; and it was both refreshing and humorous to see her shrug off Lord Foul's manipulations by simply refusing to listen to him.

From the sound of it, she's going back into a slough of self-doubt and angst. Which could be really annoying; though I doubt that she'll get anywhere near Covenant's exasperating qualities in the first trilogy.

But of course all this is vapor. There's nothing to do but wait, read, and see.

A Top Ten Resolution

2007-09-29T18:47:00.000-04:00

I pretty much review books as I finish reading them. Which is natural: that's when they're fresh in my mind, after all, and inspiration is most likely to strike.

But this leaves out pretty much all of my favorite books. And, in between book-finishings, it leaves me a little dry of blog topics.

So it occurred to me yesterday, as I was sitting here trying to think of something to post about, that I could make up a list of bloggable books; something halfway between a promise and a self-reminder, so that I wouldn't be at a loss for topics in the future.

Here we go (Warning! The following list is off the top of my head, and probably forgets a few items that will make me slap my forehead later.)

The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom
Shakespeare: Invention of the Human, Harold Bloom
Young Miles, Lois McMaster Bujold
The Everlasting Man, G.K. Chesterton
Permutation City, Greg Egan
The Final Reflection, John M. Ford
Modern Times, Paul Johnson
Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis
Cryptonomicon, Neil Stephenson
Distraction, Bruce Sterling

Some of these made a major impact on my life; some of them changed my thinking; some of them were just really fun to read. Hopefully I'll have something interesting to say about them.

(Heck, hopefully I'll get around to blogging more! Hope hope hope...)

A Song of Swords

2007-09-29T18:38:00.000-04:00

From A Utopia of Userers, by G.K. Chesterton's collectiona of essays on capitalism and its dubious accomodation with Christian morality:

A SONG OF SWORDS

"A drove of cattle came into a village called Swords;
and was stopped by the rioters."--Daily Paper.

In the place called Swords on the Irish road
It is told for a new renown
How we held the horns of the cattle, and how
We will hold the horns of the devils now
Ere the lord of hell with the horn on his brow
Is crowned in Dublin town.

Light in the East and light in the West,
And light on the cruel lords,
On the souls that suddenly all men knew,
And the green flag flew and the red flag flew,
And many a wheel of the world stopped, too,
When the cattle were stopped at Swords.

Be they sinners or less than saints
That smite in the street for rage,
We know where the shame shines bright; we know
You that they smite at, you their foe,
Lords of the lawless wage and low,
This is your lawful wage.

You pinched a child to a torture price
That you dared not name in words;
So black a jest was the silver bit
That your own speech shook for the shame of it,
And the coward was plain as a cow they hit
When the cattle have strayed at Swords.

The wheel of the torrent of wives went round
To break men's brotherhood;
You gave the good Irish blood to grease
The clubs of your country's enemies;
you saw the brave man beat to the knees:
And you saw that it was good.

The rope of the rich is long and long--
The longest of hangmen's cords;
But the kings and crowds are holding their breath,
In a giant shadow o'er all beneath
Where God stands holding the scales of Death
Between the cattle and Swords.

Haply the lords that hire and lend
The lowest of all men's lords,
Who sell their kind like kine at a fair,
Will find no head of their cattle there;
But faces of men where cattle were:
Faces of men--and Swords.

Paths to Utopia

2007-09-27T01:35:00.000-04:00

We're underway this week, so I visited the used bookstore and found several James P. Hogan novels. Regular WaW readers (ha!) may recall that I read his Inherit the Stars last month; happily, one of the books I've found is the sequel, The Gentle Giants of Ganymede.

But this post is about Paths to Otherwhere, a novel about geopolitics and parallel Earths.

Scientists dealing with the Many-Worlds interpretation of Quantum Mechanics are being brought together in Los Alamos for a secretive government project to draw information from parallel realities. Things become much more complicated when the researchers start crossing over into these realities, by... well, it's never really understood, but it's sort of like astral projection. For brief periods, they find their consciousness transferred into the body of their alternate self on other worlds.

The military- which is desperately seeking means to deal with an impending world war- sees this as being even more of an intelligence boon than they were expecting. The scientists use the technique to explore the vast realm of human possibility, and end up discovering a world without war.

The good parts: the characters are better-drawn than in Inherit the Stars. Hogan resists the urge to make military people into cardboard cutouts, in spite of the fact that the military is basically the villain of the story. He has fun with parallel-reality computation, especially at the start of the book; I almost wish he'd stuck with examining the implications of these.

The bad parts: the assassination subplot doesn't make much sense. There's less conceptual ping-pong than there was in Inherit the Stars (although this isn't necessarily a bad thing.) And the utopia world is, well, utopia; and Hogan doesn't do enough to make me believe it could work.

Come to think of it: the big problem is that it's set into a historical context. Their world is one where WWI ended early, in a fairer negotiated settlement; and this allowed human progress throughout the 20th century ending in a better place for everyone. That's not unbelievable, in itself; but it becomes jarring when we read that the economy is based on people giving money away. Because it's set so clearly in history, it's hard to suspend disbelief as I would with a pure-fantasy utopia.

But I'm going into some depth on that point because the novel made me think about it; which is fun and worthwhile on its own merits.

The Improbable Libertarian Revolt

2007-09-16T19:06:00.000-04:00

Robert Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is a classic sf novel about libertarians revolting against oppressive authority.

The libertarians in question are moon colonists, most of whom were sent there as political criminals (or, I guess, actual criminals) several generations back. So it's a sort of American Revolution parable set in Australia's frontier culture.

The oppressive authority is the Warden, appointed by Earth's government, and accountable only to them. This becomes an intolerable problem when the protagonists learn that the Moon is facing disaster in the coming years, and that (being governed by Earth) the Warden has no incentive to take the hard steps needed to stop it.

The most important revolutionary is a supercomputer named Mike; unknown to anyone but his repairman, Mike has spontaneously gained sentience and a personality. When the repairman joins the revolutionary movement, Mike is carried along with him, and ends up taking charge.

The characters are likeable, and I can see several popular sf concepts being laid out here- most notably, the idea of a national leader who's nothing but a TV simulation.

But what's really interesting in the book is something similar to Asimov's Foundation novels- practical politics is presented as an elaborate intellectual shell game, with brilliant people secretly controlling the course of society through their own cleverness.

In Asimov it was enthralling; but of course I read Asimov years ago. Now, it just seems implausible.

The rebel leaders spend some time talking about the importance of a cell network, since betrayal is inevitable and is the undoing of rebel movements; but once things start happening, nothing seems to come of it. Everyone does what's expected of them, and the only problem is that some of the low-ranking rebels think they should also have a chance at power once the revolution is over. They are shunted harmlessly into a fake government body where they can't get in the way of the real leaders, and they all buy it.

The book is described as "libertarian," which is true in a way; but a very odd way. The Moon colonists aren't libertarian out of any specific doctrine or political principle, but more as a matter of culture. Libertarianism is simply the way things are done up there.

Perhaps that's how libertarianism works best; as a political movement, it will always be prone to the contradictions of power.

Today's Geek Pleasure

2007-09-16T18:55:00.000-04:00

It's Draco and the Malfoys, a two-man group that does Harry Potter songs from the perspective of Draco Malfoy.

"My Dad is Rich (And Your Dad is Dead)" is funny in a kind of appalling way. "Potions Yesterday" is probably the most listenable, along with "99 Death Eaters," which is based on the melody from "99 Luftballons."

I Heart Huckabee

2007-09-09T21:50:00.000-04:00

This isn't a political blog, and I don't intend for it to become one.

But this left me moonstruck.

PAUL: No, we’ve dug a hole for ourselves and for our party. We’re losing elections and we’re going down next year if we don’t change it. It has all to do with foreign policy and we have to wake up to this fact.

HUCKABEE: Even if we lose elections we should not lose our honor and that is more important than the Republican party.

I don't know if Huckabee will get the nomination (okay, I'm pretty sure he won't; every poll I've seen says he's in single-digit territory) but I loved him at that moment. I loved the audacity of telling Republicans, in a Republican debate, that there are things more important than winning; things more important than the entire party.

Bad Fiction of the Apocalypse

2007-09-08T20:20:00.000-04:00

James F. David's Judgement Day is a recent entry in the Left Behind subgenre: fictional treatments of the Book of Revelations. It has some good points, and many bad ones.

God has inspired a Christian scientist (um, a scientist who's a Christian, not a member of the Christian Scientist denomination) with the designs for faster-than-light antigravity spaceships. He and his church movement build the ships, explore space, and find an unspoiled new planet to move to. So (as one Amazon reviewer put it) they provide their own Rapture; which is good, because God keeps a very low profile in this novel.

Most of this novel's good points are, similarly, its innovations, which lend its characters a very human and fallible tone. Given this wondrous new technology, the Christians spend most of their time making money off of it. They're uncomfortable when black Christians ask to be part of their modern Exodus. And the Antichrist, far from being omnipotent, is clueless and rather inept for most of the novel.

The bad points: um. Well. Most of the characters are flat. The author sets up emotional, dramatic situations and then plods through them with astonishing clunkiness. Several of the names are pseudo-clever, reminding me of license plates: "Ira Breitling," for example.

This is apparently the first novel of a series; which is good, because the ending is appalling in its implications. (And if I could find a way of explaining this that wasn't totally spoilerish, I would.)

But I doubt I'll buy the second book. There's more Heinlein to be read!

Borges and Destiny's Library

2007-09-05T18:04:00.000-04:00

One of the things I'm reading is Jorge Borges' Labyrinths, a collection of short stories. An internet friend lent me this as his part of a mutual book-swap, years ago, and I've always wanted to go back and reread it.

It rereads very well, unsurprisingly; Borges' ideas aren't compelling because of novelty, or surprise endings, but simply in their own intrinsic selves. It's as mindboggling as it was the first time around.

One of the most compelling stories- for a book-lover like myself- is "The Library of Babel." The Library of the title is a seemingly-infinite series of rooms, each filled with shelves, each shelf filled with books. Each book is 410 pages long, and contains a random arrangement of letters, commas, periods, and spaces.

Of course, this means that almost all the books are pure gibberish. But the implication is made that the library is a complete collection- every possible combination of letters is there, somewhere. So all of Shakespeare is there, as are the collected works of Plato, or the printed form of Warp and Wolf- you just have to find them.

It is a fantasy that appeals very much to my book-greed.

But further along, I came upon Borges' essay "A Note on (toward) George Bernard Shaw." And here he says:

Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that no single book is. A book is not an isolated being; it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships... If literature were nothing more than verbal algebra, anyone could produce any book by essaying variations.

Suddenly, my whole understanding of The Library of Babel turned upside down, and I realized: it is a library of soulless books. The whole point of writing- of art in general- is for one human being to communicate a feeling or insight to another, and there is no author for the Library's books. They're just the mechanical iteration of every possible combination of letters.

At this point (Warning! The geek quotient of this post is about rise) I remembered another near-infinite library, the one run by Lucien in Neil Gaiman's Sandman. The premise of Lucien's library is that it not only contains normal books, it also contains books that authors have dreamed of writing. (The only one that I can remember offhand was C.S. Lewis' The Emperor Over the Sea, an eighth Narnia book. But Gaiman showed us many examples.)

The appeal of Lucien's library is the idea that authors had a chance, if only in dreams, to write the perfect books they wished for (and we wish to read.) It is a dream of a consummated literary relationship; the books have meaning precisely because of their authors.

And that is the difference in the two. Dream's world is all about meaning- all the human understandings and implications we bring to life inside our heads, in our stories. It is both free and ambiguous because of this.

His older brother is Destiny, and he is Dream's polar opposite- his world is all about irrevocability, undeniable fact, immutable causalty. It's the world of things which must be what they are. And Borges' library fits there perfectly: its only meaning is in its necessary completeness, which has no relevance to any human need or creative act.