Donaldson's Next Book

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

My Latest Geek Pleasure

It's Evil Dead: The Musical!

Okay, first point: this is not as good as Fellowship, my last geeky-pleasure-turned-soundtrack. It's not even close, actually.

But there are moments of real gold here. "All the Men in my Life Keep Getting Killed by Candarian Demons" is a wonderful Grease homage. The moose in "Join Us" has Bullwinkle's voice. And "Evil Puns"... well, they are.

Meanwhile, Back on the Internet...

Whew! INSURV came, and went, and I slept for a week afterward. (That's the short version.)

But now it's over, thank goodness, and I can try to catch up on my reading, and my posting, and my posting about my reading.