All reviews copyright 1984-2023 Evelyn C. Leeper.
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 06/05/2009]
I own a few books published by AIG. I mention this because I'm hoping to find out they're incredibly valuable, but I suspect they are only marginally more valuable than AIG itself, given that they were distributed in the New Yorker magazine. One is a selection of Aesop's fables, one is Gracian's "Art of Worldly Wisdom", and one is "Well-Versed: Poems for the Road Ahead". All are sixteen pages long and consist of advisory tales, maxims, or poems. The poetry book has such poems as Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" and Rudyard Kipling's "If". What's great is the blurb on the back: "In life, there is no substitute for experience. The same goes for your money. 85 years of helping families and businesses worldwide means you can rely on the AIG companies. Over 50 million customers know that for long-term financial solutions, the AIG companies can help steer you and your family in the right direction." Right. It doesn't make you eager to trust their choice of literary advice either.
DESERT SOLITAIRE: A SEASON IN THE WILDERNESS by Edward Abbey:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 05/23/2008]
We recently visited Arches National Park in Utah. Edward Abbey is the author of many novels and non-fiction books set in and about the West. At one of the book sales a couple of months before the trip, I picked up his book DESERT SOLITAIRE: A SEASON IN THE WILDERNESS (ISBN-13 978-0-671-69588-0, ISBN-10 0-671-69588-6), a collection of essays about his time as a Park ranger in Arches National Park. If this is true, I think the Park ought to have gone after him for dereliction of duty, since he seems to have spent a lot of time helping a near-by rancher herd cattle, rafting down the Colorado, and doing a lot of other things having nothing to do with the National Park Service. But let's give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that although he calls it a season, the book actually covers a couple of years or more.
Anyway, the most pertinent chapter would be "Polemic: Industrial Tourism and the National Parks". In this chapter, Abbey complains that the National Parks are effectively being destroyed in the attempt to make them more "accessible". Now, Abbey worked in Arches in the 1950s, and wrote the book in 1967, so by "accessible" he does not means wheelchair ramps and such, but paved roads and plumbing.
Abbey's suggestion was to close the Parks to all motor vehicle traffic (except for shuttle buses and other vehicles owned and operated by the National Park Service). All visitors would have to leave their cars outside the entrance. They would be issued a bicycle (or horse) for use inside the park. Their tents, bedrolls, etc., would be transported by shuttle bus to the campgrounds. (He even accepts that those "too elderly or too sickly to mount a bicycle" might be allowed to ride the shuttle buses.)
Something like this has been done in the bigger Parks (e.g., Zion, Bryce, Grand Canyon). Cars are allowed in the Park, but they are barred from the most scenic parts, and people wanting to see those parts must walk, bicycle--or ride shuttle buses. This is not quite what Abbey suggested--he did not want shuttle buses running constantly up and down the roads every seven minutes. But it is vastly better than bumper-to-bumper cars and RVs.
Abbey then suggested no new roads be built in National Parks. This follows fairly directly from the first suggestion--if cars are not coming, why build roads? And rangers should be spending more time outside, guiding people on hikes, helping them with camping (in tents, since no vehicles are allowed in the Parks), and so on. All this--ranger service, bicycles, horses--should be free to the public. Abbey claims that by not building new roads or spending money to maintain the old ones--let them revert to unpaved roads again if necessary, but lack of traffic will probably lower the maintenance cost a lot--the Parks would have more than enough money to finance his proposals.
The major obstacle that he sees to this is that "Industrial Tourism"--motels, restaurants, tour companies, road-building contractors, etc.--are going to fight this tooth and nail. Well, maybe, although as I said, Abbey's suggestions have been implemented somewhat.
The real problem (as I see it) is that there is a feedback loop. Abbey bemoans the changes in Arches that the paved road brought. Tourists have to camp in the campgrounds rather than wherever they want, and must bring charcoal or their own wood for fires--there is not enough dead wood around for the numbers of campers that now arrive. But these changes were made because of the numbers of tourists. Are there lots of tourists because the paved road was put in, or was the paved road put in because there were so many tourists that an unpaved road could not support that many people? In the 1950s, it took a long time and a lot of effort to get even as close as the entrance of Arches. Now one can fly to Salt Lake City or Denver, rent a car (or even 4-wheel-drive vehicle) and be there in a day or two. (Admittedly, this may change with global warming and/or the increase in gas prices.) So if thousands of people show up at the entrance, the question is, what can the Park do? One option is to limit the number of people who can enter the Park on a given day. This, understandably, they are reluctant to do. The other is to figure out how to support this many people. The easiest way has been to build better roads, create campgrounds, open a Visitors Center to provide an orientation, and so on. Oh, and the campgrounds need plumbing, because the sort of backcountry camping where one digs a latrine fails spectacularly long before one reaches the numbers of tourists the Parks are currently getting. However, at some point even those changes doesn't work, and the Parks have switched to shuttle buses in the more congested areas.
A reasonable approach for the future is to consider before building a road whether this road is going to be a real solution or something that will be equally congested in ten years. If the latter, put in a dirt road for non-motorized traffic (and possibly Park buses) rather than a much more expensive paved road.
On the other hand, Abbey does make a logical error in his argument. He describes the people who visit the bottom of the Grand Canyon and other remote places in the mountains, or raft down rivers, as being "not consist[ing] solely of people young and athletic but also of old folks, fat folks, pale-faced office clerks who don't know a rucksack from a haversack, and even children." Yes, and Theodore Roosevelt was a weakling before he headed west. The point is that just because some old folks can climb Mt. Whitney, and some fat folks can raft down the Colorado, and some children can horse-back through the Smokies, does not mean that most, or even many, can. The existence of a few professional basketball players under six feet tall does not mean that the profession is as open to shorter people as it is to tall ones.
The irony is that he has an entire chapter about "The Dead Man at Grandview Point". In it, he describes the search for him: "Learning from the relative--a nephew--that the missing man is about sixty years old, an amateur photographer who liked to walk, and had never been in the Southwest before, we assume first of all that the object of the search is dead...." So much for Abbey's argument that anyone can explore the wilds of America on their own.
Abbey makes other logical errors. He says, for example, "To refute the solipsist or metaphysical idealist all that you have to do is take him out and throw a rock at his head; if he ducks he's a liar." This sounds reasonable, but in fact this does not refute the solipsist at all, because if the solipsist is right, he is merely a figment of your imagination, and there is no one to refute. All you have proved is that if solipsism is correct, you can create an imaginary person that does not believe in it. And similarly for metaphysical idealists, because though they believe that the external world exists, they also believe that it is still filtered through their own senses and mind.
Well, that last part had little to do with Arches (unless you are a solipsist, in which case, you have imagined the entire Park). The book itself had an interesting journey, having been bought originally in the bookshop at Capital Reef National Park, traveled to New Jersey, traveled back to Utah, and then back to New Jersey.
BORGES Y LA CIENCIA FICCÍON by Carlos Abraham:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 10/25/2013]
I finally read BORGES Y LA CIENCIA FICCÍON by Carlos Abraham (ISBN 978-84-96013-85-8); first it took a few years to find at a reasonable price, and then it took several months to read (I think I started it before I broke my hip the first day of spring!). Part of the time was because it was in Spanish, but part was that whenever Abraham would draw parallels between a Borges story and an earlier science fiction story, I found I had to go dig them both out and read them.
I wrote a review/commentary/summary of the book, but since it came to almost 20,000 words, I'll do a much briefer commentary here; the full review is at http://leepers.us/evelyn/reviews/abraham.htm.
Briefly put, Abraham's contention is that Borges appropriated various science fiction stories he read and stripped them of their science fictional elements to create derivative works that would be "high literature" rather than "genre fiction." Some pairings he particularly looks at are:
(Apparently he thinks Borges read a lot of Lovecraft.)
Of course, his premise is predicated on the notion that science fiction (or other genre literature) is less worthy than "high literature" ("literatura alta") and if you do not buy into that argument, then the exercise of converting science fiction to non-science fiction does not seem worthwhile in and of itself. Abraham also presumes that Borges perceived the ideas (and indeed, a lot of the language, at least for the Lovecraft derivatives) of the stories as part of the common heritage, available for other authors (such as himself) to use. This may well be true--there are essays in which Borges says something very close to this--but I suspect a court of law might see things differently.
"The Cambist and Lord Iron: a Fairytale of Economics" by Daniel Abraham:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 07/11/2008]
"The Cambist and Lord Iron: a Fairytale of Economics" by Daniel Abraham (in the anthology LOGORRHEA) was apparently written as part of a project to write one story for each National Spelling Bee winning word. A cambist is an expert in foreign exchange, and the cambist in this story is asked to set a monetary value on some peculiar "currency" indeed, starting with ornate bills from the Independent Protectorate of Analdi-Wat and getting progressively stranger. It seems to be a tale pulled from a classic fairy tale, but it is of course entirely new.
THINGS FALL APART by Chinua Achebe:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 03/31/2006]
Our general discussion group chose THINGS FALL APART by Chinua Achebe (ISBN 0-385-47454-7) for this month's discussion. I had intended reading this ever since college--almost forty years ago. (Well, some books stay on the queue longer than others.) I can remember seeing it in the college bookstore in 1968 and thinking that here was something unlike what we had been reading in school or seeing in the library. (The library I frequented was an Air Force base library that emphasized more bestsellers and genre--science fiction, mysteries, and so on--than literary fiction.) Nowadays, of course, with the emphasis on diversity and book superstores dotting the country, finding literary novels by African authors is not a big surprise. (In fact, one reason the group chose it was that it was a book on the high school summer reading list, so the library had a lot of copies of it.)
So after forty years, what about the book? Frankly, I do not know what the fuss is about. The main character is described by critics as being made sympathetic, but I did not find him so. Critics do seem to agree that Achebe's portrayal of Ibo tribal society is unsentimental, but I would go further and say that I found it hard to work up a lot of distress that someone was trying to end such traditional practices as killing twins at birth, or beating one's wives. [How appropriate. See my editorial this issue. -mrl] And the writing is very spare (someone compared him to Hemingway), which is a very tricky style to carry off.
THE CASEBOOK OF VICTOR FRANKENSTEIN by Peter Ackroyd:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 05/17/2013]
THE CASEBOOK OF VICTOR FRANKENSTEIN by Peter Ackroyd (ISBN 978-0-307-47377-6) is a "re-imagination" of Mary Shelley's FRANKENSTEIN. One way it is a re-imagination is that Mary Shelley, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron, and John Polidori are all characters in THE CASEBOOK OF VICTOR FRANKENSTEIN. (There is also a character named Jack Keat. I don't think this is supposed to be John Keats, but I cannot be sure.) Given that the historical facts about the real characters are not entirely consistent with incorporating them into the story as Mary Shelley told it, Ackroyd has to some extent given himself an almost impossible task, but he does pull it off (although the complete explanation is more something to be inferred than explicitly explained).
There is a lot more politics in THE CASEBOOK OF VICTOR FRANKENSTEIN than there was in Shelley's work, but part of this is that Ackroyd is writing with hindsight from almost two centuries later. The biggest problem, though, is that through most of the book the reader is wondering why Ackroyd wrote it, and it is not until the end that it all comes together.
THE MYSTERY OF THE ALEPH by Amir D. Aczel:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 04/25/2003]
And on a more technical note, Amir D. Aczel's THE MYSTERY OF THE ALEPH tries to tie together infinity, transfinite numbers, and the Kabbalah. He is only moderately successful, even if there were serious religious concerns with the whole notion of infinity. But his description of the lives of the various mathematicians who worked on this question is less dry than usual, and you get to find out who didn't get along with whom, and yet another explanation of why there is no Nobel Prize in mathematics. (Actually, he presents two possible explanations.) And in addition, Aczel talks about Georg Cantor's mental aberrations, including that he would leave his work on transfinite numbers for long periods of time in order to try to convince people that Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare's plays. Synchronicity! [-ecl]
THE RIDDLE OF THE COMPASS: THE INVENTION THAT CHANGED THE WORLD by Amir D. Aczel:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 07/29/2011]
THE RIDDLE OF THE COMPASS: THE INVENTION THAT CHANGED THE WORLD by Amir D. Aczel (ISBN 978-0-15-600753-3) is a bit lighter than his earlier books (FERMAT'S LAST THEOREM, THE MYSTERY OF THE ALEPH, PROBABILITY I, and GOD'S EQUATION). Aczel starts in Amalfi, home of Flavio Gioia, cited by the Amalfis as the inventor of the compass. But since the compass seems to have been invented by the Chinese several centuries earlier, and since Flavio Gioia seems not even to have existed, the amount of time Aczel spends on this seems excessive. He also talks about Marco Polo, but barely mentions the current controversy about whether Polo actually made the trip himself. Given that I think there is considerable support for the view that Marco Polo got most of his information about Asia from other travelers and did very little traveling himself, this is odd. There is also a lot about navigation before the compass in this book and surprisingly little about the compass itself.
THE HITCH HIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY by Douglas Adams:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 11/20/2009]
THE HITCH HIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY by Douglas Adams (ISBN-13 978-0-345-41891-3, ISBN-10 0-345-41891-3) was the choice for the joint meeting of the general book discussion group and the science fiction book discussion group this month. (The science fiction book discussion group normally meets the fourth Thursday of each month, a problem in November.) This time through I noted all the cultural and literary references. For example, Chapter 10 ends with Arthur Dent saying, "Ford! There's an infinite number of monkeys outside who want to talk to us about this script for 'Hamlet' they've worked out." Or in Chapter 5: "He was experiencing the aural equivalent of looking at a picture of two black silhouetted faces and suddenly seeing it as a picture of a white candlestick."
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 08/20/2010]
The book-and-movie science fiction group chose THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY by Douglas Adams (ISBN 978-1-400-05292-9) for this month, and the film (rather than the radio play, the record, or the television series) for the dramatization part.
Even though the work is very familiar, there are still new comments to be made. "They still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea"--nowadays I think digital watches are in decline, as more and more people are using their cell phones as their timepiece. "Small green pieces of paper" made no sense in a British context--it was only American money that fit that description and even American money seems to be moving away from it. (The movie also seems to be Americanized, with American billions, and "zee" rather than "zed").
[As Keith Lynch pointed out in the 03/19/10 issue of the MT VOID American billions have been the same as British billions since 1974. That is, in both countries a billion is 10^9. That is called the "short" scale. Prior to 1974 as in Britain and in many other countries all along a billion was/is 10^12. That convention is called the "long" scale. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales. -mrl]
The actual "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" seems to be an early example of an ebook in fiction.
Was the eponymous character in the film FORD FAIRLANE inspired by Ford Prefect?
One of Adams's distinctive stylistic touches is the use of positive adverbs (e.g., totally, exactly) paired with negative verbs or prepositions (e.g. failed): "more or less exactly failed to please the eye" or "almost entirely, but not quite, unlike tea".
[This is distinct from litotes, which is exressing a positive by the use of a double negative of sorts, e.g., "not a bad dinner."
Adams wrote about Prosser being a direct male-line descendent of Genghis Khan well before a geneticist discovered the Genghis Khan Effect, which is that there are approximately 15,000,000 direct descendents of Genghis Khan alive today (though not all in the direct-male line). (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genghis_Khan#Descent for details.)
Adams claims that in space you asphyxiate and taking a lungful of air before being ejected helps. Actually, that's backwards--expelling the air from your lungs is what you want to do.
And I found Alan Rickman's voice far too familiar to use for Marvin; I kept thinking of Rickman as walking around in the Marvin suit.
WHY WE READ WHAT WE READ: A DELIGHTFULLY OPINIONATED JOURNEY THROUGH CONTEMPORARY BESTSELLERS by Lisa Adams and John Heath:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 12/14/2007]
WHY WE READ WHAT WE READ: A DELIGHTFULLY OPINIONATED JOURNEY THROUGH CONTEMPORARY BESTSELLERS by Lisa Adams and John Heath (ISBN-13 978-1-4022-1054-9, ISBN-10 1-4022-1054-X) tries to analyze the bestsellers of the last couple of decades. While bemoaning the lack of depth in most of what made the bestseller lists, Adams and Heath skim over a lot of books, dismissing them with quips and zingers. Yes, it is fun to read, but in the back of my mind is the thought that they are not raising the level of discourse. Adams and Heath do find books of depth on the lists, though not in the numbers they (or we) might wish. And even if books sell, are they read? Adams and Heath claim that 92% of Americans own at least one Bible, yet fewer than half can name the first book of the Bible. (Then again, all they know is that 92% of Americans say they own at least one Bible.)
The book is amusing and entertaining, and the authors do pinpoint recurring themes and trends, but whether there is any more depth to it than to many of the books they skewer is a matter of dispute.
TRAVELLER by Richard Adams:
[From MT VOID, 1991]
At first glance, this sounds like a pretty silly idea: to tell the story of the Civil War from the point of view of General Robert E. Lee's horse. But then, Adams's first book, WATERSHIP DOWN, was rejected by dozens of publishers because it was a "bunny story." When Penguin finally published it, it went on to become their best-seller ever, and was recognized as an adult story told with non-human characters, rather than "just" a children's story. Adams followed this up with SHARDIK, the story of a bear revered by a primitive tribe, and PLAGUE DOGS, a dark tale of animals used in medical research. So Adams has a history of taking unlikely approaches to fiction and making them work.
And it does work. Clayton Cramer said, "I can see it now. 'Hmmm. Today we went to a place with very tasty grass. Spent much of the day walking slowly past thousands of boots, standing on lovely green grass. Had my shoes replaced today. Nice blacksmith -- very gentle on my hooves.'" This is not far off the mark, at least as far as style goes, but it misses the point of the book. Traveller (Lee's horse in real life, by the way; many of the events recounted in TRAVELLER are based on documented events in history) does see things from a horse's viewpoint, but he sees more than just eating grass and getting new shoes.
One of the things that struck me when reading TRAVELLER is that what we have here is a different point of view (in the technical sense) than one usually has. We have seen third person omniscient, and third person non-omniscient, and first person, but what we have here is first person "reader-omniscient". That is, because the story is based on history the reader knows what is coming, and what is really going on, in a fashion not normally encountered. Well, perhaps other historical novels would have this, but the ones I can remember are either third person omniscient or first person, but with the narrator finding out everything of importance in the course of the book. This is not true here. As is mentioned on the dust jacket (so I fell it's not a major spoiler), Traveller never realizes Lee lost the war--he thinks Lee won! But Adams does this in such a way that the reader finds herself asking whether that is really so unreasonable a conclusion. Certainly many people have asked of World War II whether we really won, or whether the Germans and Japanese won in the end, for many of the same reasons. So do we really understand what is going on in the world better than Traveller? (Adams does help out the reader a bit by interspersing historical summaries every few chapters, so that we can keep track of what is going on in terms we can understand.)
Adams does a good job of giving his characters individual personalities. His animals (in other books as well as this one) are not the usual caricatures, but real individuals. His horses act like horses, not like "humans in horse suits," and his rabbits act like rabbits, and so on. He manages the dialects well in TRAVELLER, balancing readability with accuracy of sound. The only quibble might be that his animals can communicate inter-species (he talks to cats and other non-horses), but not with humans.
Some of the techniques in TRAVELLER parallel techniques Adams used in previous novels. For example, there is a prescient horse (Sorrel) in TRAVELLER who seems patterned after a prescient rabbit in WATERSHIP DOWN: both see vague hints of what is to come, but not specific events.
The use of an animal as a narrator also allows Adams to make some strong statements about slavery. Traveller's constant comparison's of his life to that of the slaves ("always saying goodbye") brings home the reality of slavery more than writing it from a human point of view might. And again, Traveller's incomplete understanding of reality leads him to believe that Lee's black valet Perry is the most important man around other than Lee himself, because Perry is so close to Lee.
Traveller sees things from a horse's perspective. This leads him to conclude, for example, that there are fewer guns at some point because there are fewer horses around to pull them, rather than that there are fewer horses around because the guns have been damaged and so the horses aren't needed. When Lee talks to himself, Traveller naturally assumes that Lee is talking to him, and when Lee says, "Lord God, why is this happening?" Traveller naturally assumes that Lord God was a previous horse that Lee had, and Lee is just confused about who he is talking to. And all this talk about "the War" makes Traveller think "the War" is a place with glorious soldiers and fine grass and a big white house. When all is over, his one regret is that they never got to this place called "the War." We laugh at this naivete, but is this so difference from our preoccupation with the glory of war and our tendency to brush over the ugly reality?
Yes, maybe Traveller is just a horse. And maybe he is a little dense. But he's no more dense than we are at times, and maybe seeing things through his eyes can help remove the blinders from our own.
CATO by Joseph Addison:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 12/26/2003]
Somewhere I had read that Joseph Addison's CATO was a favorite of John Adams, and one can see why. While Shakespeare's JULIUS CAESAR concentrates on the treachery and in-fighting of the conspirators against Caesar, Addison looks at the situation from the point of view of those who genuinely feel that Caesar is becoming a dictator and destroying Roman freedom, but who don't necessarily want to assassinate him. That someone like Adams, concerned about American liberty, would like this play is not surprising. (It's a bit hard to find; I got it in an anthology edited by Richard Quintana titled 18TH CENTURY PLAYS.)
OUTWITTING SQUIRRELS by Bill Adler, Jr.:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 08/04/2006]
OUTWITTING SQUIRRELS by Bill Adler, Jr., (ISBN 1-55652-302-5) is subtitled "101 Cunning Stratagems to Reduce Dramatically the Egregious Misappropriation of Seed from Your Birdfeeder by Squirrels". (The whole book is only 188 pages long, which makes it a bit title-heavy.) In addition to suggestions (most of which he admits do not work very well), Adler provides a lot of information about squirrels and their biology. It's of interest even to people like us who want to feed the squirrels.
The Oresteia by Aeschylus:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 10/05/2007]
I was listening to the Oresteia on CD recently, and I noted that one character tells Clytemnestra that "nothing happens except through the will of Zeus"--and then proceeds to criticize her for killing Agamemnon! Wasn't that through the will of Zeus by his own argument? Also, the only reason I can come up with for Electra and Orestes being so bent on vengeance against their mother for taking revenge on their father for his sacrifice of their sister is some sort of patriarchal bias. After all, shouldn't they be angry at him for murdering their sister, and grateful to their mother for exacting revenge?
THE BOOK OF CHAMELEONS by José Eduardo Agualusa:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 08/02/2013]
It is purely coincidence, I believe, that the next book I read after THE YEAR OF THE DEATH OF RICARDO REIS was THE BOOK OF CHAMELEONS by José Eduardo Agualusa (translated by Daniel Hahn, ISBN 978-1-4165-7351-7). Like THE YEAR OF THE DEATH OF RICARDO REIS, this novel was originally written in Portuguese. Like THE YEAR OF THE DEATH OF RICARDO REIS, this novel has a literary figure as one of the characters--or more specifically, the spirit of a literary figure. Like THE YEAR OF THE DEATH OF RICARDO REIS, this novel is a magical realist view of life. THE BOOK OF CHAMELEONS is about an Angolan albino who does what everyone describes as selling memories to people, and is narrated by a tiger gecko who turns out to be the reincarnation of Jorge Luis Borges. What the albino does seems more like the selling of new identities than the selling of memories, but that may be because when I hear the phrase "the selling of memories," I take it much more literally, probably because of my familiarity with science fiction. It reminds me of the discussion of the different modes of reading the sentence "Her world exploded." In a "mundane" novel, this is read figuratively. But in a novel set on Alderaan, this is a literal statement.
Unlike THE YEAR OF THE DEATH OF RICARDO REIS, this novel does not require a knowledge of Portuguese history. Instead, it seems to require a knowledge of Angolan geography. Sometimes you just cannot win.
HOW TO DISAPPEAR by Frank M. Ahearn with Eileen C. Horan:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 06/15/2012]
HOW TO DISAPPEAR by Frank M. Ahearn with Eileen C. Horan (ISBN
978-1-59921-977-6) was recommended in Bruce Schneier's blog about
security (
THRONE OF THE CRESCENT MOON
by Saladin Ahmed:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 06/21/2013]
THRONE OF THE CRESCENT MOON by Saladin Ahmed (ISBN 978-0-7564-0711-7)
was okay. As many have noted, it is nice to find a fantasy not
based on some European mythology or legend, and it is nice that
though this is the first book in a series, it does actually have an
ending, albeit one that leaves room for sequels. However, on the
down side, the female characters are not developed as well as the
male characters, and it seemed as though Ahmed could not decide if
this was taking place on an alternate Earth with a slightly
different geography, or a completely unrelated world. It really
must be the former, because the names of kingdoms, animals, foods,
etc., are all from Earth, but the addition of the fantasy elements
and the map depicting a non-Earth geography works against this
interpretation. (Yeah, I know, a lot of fantasy has this problem.
"A Song of Fire and Ice" seems to take place not on our Earth, but
it has horses and all the biology works like our biology.) It is
not that I disliked THRONE OF THE CRESCENT MOON, but that I do not
think it Hugo-worthy.
MIDWINTER NIGHTINGALE
by Joan Aiken:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 02/20/2004]
Much of what I read this week were middle books of alternate
history series as part of my responsibilities as a judge for the
Sidewise Awards. The main thing I can report is that they do not
stand on their own. The first was Joan Aiken's MIDWINTER
NIGHTINGALE, the tenth of her young adult "Wolves of Willoughby
Chase" series, set in a world in which the Stuarts won the
Jacobite Wars and werewolves are real. (I don't think there is a
cause-and-effect relationship here. :-) ) It seemed like the sort
of book that children who had been reading all the others would
like, but I can't say for sure.
MURDER ON THE LEVIATHAN
by Boris Akunin:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 05/17/2013]
MURDER ON THE LEVIATHAN by Boris Akunin (ISBN 0-8129-6879-4) is an
interesting mystery novel, in that it is apparently in a series
featuring Erast Fandorin, and billed as "A Fandorin mystery", but
the main character is not Fandorin. It is as if someone wrote a
Sherlock Holmes novel where Lestrade was the main character and
Holmes appeared only in a secondary role. Akunin's solution is
ingenious, but not absolutely original. (I won't say more, since
any explanation might be a spoiler.) This is not a great novel,
but it's a reasonable way to pass the time.
AS TIMELESS AS INFINITY: THE COMPLETE TWILIGHT ZONE SCRIPTS OF ROD SERLING,
VOLUME ONE
edited by Tony Albarella:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 01/28/2005]
Tony Albarella is editing a series of books of Rod Serling's
"Twilight Zone" scripts. The first is titled AS TIMELESS AS
INFINITY: THE COMPLETE TWILIGHT ZONE SCRIPTS OF ROD SERLING,
VOLUME ONE (Gauntlet Press, ISBN 1-887368-71-X); the next volume
is due this February. At $66, this is even more expensive than
the Christopher Lee bibliography I reviewed last week. The
commentaries here adds some to each episode, but not appreciably
more than Marc Scott Zicree's TWILIGHT ZONE COMPANION of several
years ago (still in print, ISBN 0-553-01416-1). So the main
reason for buying this would be for the scripts themselves.
Included are the scripts for "The Time Element", "Where Is
Everybody?", "Third from the Sun", "The Purple Testament", "The
Big, Tall Wish", "Eye of the Beholder", "A Most Unusual Camera"
(two versions), "The Mind and the Matter", and "The Dummy". By
my count, Serling wrote 78 scripts, so we're talking about at
least eight volumes. What I don't understand is why Albarella is
not doing the stories sequentially--the first volume selects from
the first two seasons, but seemingly at random. This is the same
objection that people had to the initial release of the shows on
DVD--they were assembled in sets at random, rather than "Season
1", "Season 2", and so on. (They have since been re-issued by
season.)
TUESDAYS WITH MORRIE
by Mitch Albom:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 02/06/2004]
Mitch Albom's TUESDAYS WITH MORRIE is the story of the author's
visits with his old college professor, who is dying of ALS. I
suspect it was chosen for high school students because it does
deal with old age, and serious illness, and death. The advice his
professor gives is good, but hardly new, and the work is too
overly sentimental for me.
LITTLE WOMEN
by Louisa May Alcott:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 01/24/2020]
Having just seen the new movie of LITTLE WOMEN I figured I should
probably finally read the book (which was a favorite of my mother's
when she was young).
One thing I noticed was that while everyone rags on Jules Verne for
his Moebius-like chronology of 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA and THE
MYSTERIOUS ISLAND, no one seems to call Alcott out for her errors.
The book clearly starts during the Civil War ("You know the
reason Mother proposed not having any presents this Christmas was
because it is going to be a hard winter for everyone; and she
thinks we ought not to spend money for pleasure, when our men are
suffering so in the army"), so it is December 1861 at the earliest.
[The timeline I cite below says it must be December 1862.] So
later, when Amy writes, "To this will and testiment [sic] I set my
hand and seal on this 20th day of Nov. Anni Domino 1861," she
clearly has the year wrong.
There are few external events mentioned to pin down the date. At
one point Alcott writes, "The three years that have passed have
brought but few changes to the quiet family. The war is over, and
Mr. March safely at home." If this is three years from the year
that March returned on Christmas Day, then it must be 1866 at the
earliest.
In the film, Jo was the oldest. The book starts with Meg at
sixteen, Jo at fifteen, Beth at thirteen, and Amy's age not given,
but younger still.
In the film, Jo has some traits considered masculine, but this is
actually more subtle than in the book. Alcott writes, "Jo wanted
to lay her head down on that motherly bosom, and cry her
grief and anger all away, but tears were an unmanly weakness,"
When her father returns after a year, he says, "I don't see the
'son Jo' whom I left a year ago." But even after this, "Jo felt
quite in her own element, and found it very difficult to refrain
from imitating the gentlemanly attitudes, phrases, and feats, which
seemed more natural to her than the decorums prescribed for young
ladies."
Today this would all seem natural, given that both men and women
wear pants, walk with their hands in their pockets, and in general
act much more similar than they did in Alcott's day.
It would not be surprising if people reading all this read Jo as a
lesbian, or with lesbian leanings. This might be re-inforced by
Jo's interest in "love of all kinds": "Mothers are the best lovers
in the world, but I don't mind whispering to Marmee [her mother]
that I'd like to try all kinds. It's very curious, but the more I
try to satisfy myself with all sorts of natural affections, the
more I seem to want. I'd no idea hearts could take in so many."
SPOILER (can one spoil a book that is 150 years old?)
But pretty clearly this is not the case, as the rest of the novel
(and series) shows.
END SPOILER
The contrast is sharp between Jo's freedom and the constraints
indicated by "Meg's high-heeled slippers were very tight and hurt
her, though she would not own it, and Jo's nineteen hairpins all
seemed stuck straight into her head, which was not exactly
comfortable, but, dear me, let us be elegant or die."
Apparently authors were not treated very well by publishers back
then: "And when I went to get my answer, the man said he liked them
both, but didn't pay beginners, only let them print in his paper,
and noticed the stories. It was good practice, he said, and when
the beginners improved, anyone would pay." Alas, this still goes
on.
People also aged faster. "Amy is with truth considered 'the flower
of the family', for at sixteen she has the air and bearing of a
full-grown woman." On the other hand, Jo thinks, "Almost twenty-five,
and nothing to show for it, and "At twenty-five, girls begin
to talk about being old maids, but secretly resolve that they never
will be. At thirty they say nothing about it, but quietly accept
the fact, and if sensible, console themselves by remembering that
they have twenty more useful, happy years, in which they may be
learning to grow old gracefully." In other words, the best they
can hope for is a life expectancy of about fifty. (And
Beth--SPOILER--dies at nineteen.)
The book has no villains, and everyone is so concerned about doing
good and helping people, especially the poor. But their help is
sometimes a bit patronizing. The Hummels are a poor family who
live nearby. Alcott writes of Jo's cooking efforts, "While the
cooking mania lasted she went through Mrs. Cornelius's Receipt Book
as if it were a mathematical exercise, working out the problems
with patience and care. Sometimes her family were invited in to
help eat up a too bounteous feast of successes, or Lotty would be
privately dispatched with a batch of failures, which were to be
concealed from all eyes in the convenient stomachs of the little
Hummels." Somehow sending all one's cooking failures to the poor
and considering it charity seems mean.
Another difference between the book and the film is that in the
book Jo says, "I'm glad Amy has learned to love him. But you are
right in one thing. I am lonely, and perhaps if Teddy had tried
again, I might have said 'Yes', not because I love him any more,
but because I care more to be loved than when he went away." In
the film, she has not come to this conclusion when Teddy returns,
she doesn't discover that he and Amy are married until they return,
and it takes her a while after that to get over it.
"Haughty English, lively French, sober Germans, handsome Spaniards,
ugly Russians, meek Jews, free-and-easy Americans, all drive, sit,
or saunter here." One rarely sees Jews stereotyped as meek.
"Demi learned his letters with his grandfather, who invented a new
mode of teaching the alphabet by forming letters with his arms and
legs, thus uniting gymnastics for head and heels." And you thought
this was invented by the Village People.
The movie is also made with modern sensibilities. In the book, Jo
says, "Boys. I want to open a school for little lads--a good,
happy, homelike school, with me to take care of them and Fritz to
teach them." In the film, she wants to starts a school for girls,
but then says she will take boys also.
In the book, Alcott also says, "There were slow boys and bashful
boys, feeble boys and riotous boys, boys that lisped and boys that
stuttered, one or two lame ones, and a merry little quadroon, who
could not be taken in elsewhere, but who was welcome to the
'Bhaer-garten', though some people predicted that his admission would ruin
the school." In the movie, the dances and parties we see
African-Americans mixing with whites (although not actually dancing with
them), so in the movie version it seems unlikely the school would
be an issue.
[There is a suggested timeline for LITTLE WOMEN and its sequels at
https://louisamay.livejournal.com/19017.html.]
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 03/13/2020]
I wrote about LITTLE WOMEN by Louisa May Alcott (Dover, ISBN
978-0-486-82806-0) in the 01/24/20 issue, but I just watched the BBC
mini-series and it occurs to me that Alcott uses many tropes from
Jane Austen's SENSE AND SENSIBILITY. For example, in both books a
daughter is deathly ill and the mother is sent for (in person in
SENSE AND SENSIBILITY, by telegram in LITTLE WOMEN), rushes to be
by her daughter's side and arrives to be told that the daughter has
just turned the corner and will recover.
And there is also the idea that one can easily transfer one's
affections from someone to their sibling (Lucy Steele transfers her
affections from Edward Steele to his brother Robert, and Laurie
loves Jo but then decides he love Amy). One can argue that Lucy is
basically a gold-digger and never loved either, but still...
BURY MY HEART AT W. H. SMITH'S
by Brian W. Aldiss:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 07/25/2003]
Brian W. Aldiss has written a couple of autobiographies. One was
BURY MY HEART AT W. H. SMITH'S. Another, dealing more (from what
I know of BURY) with his earlier years, was THE TWINKLING OF AN
EYE. I found the latter in a used bookstore and tried it, but it
somehow failed to grab me the way other literary autobiographies
have. (It's possible a greater familiarity with all of Aldiss's
work might have made a difference.)
GREYBEARD
by Brian W. Aldiss:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 02/02/2007]
Spurred by comments from various readers about books similar to
CHILDREN OF MEN, I read a novel that has been compared to CHILDREN OF
MEN, GREYBEARD by Brian W. Aldiss (ISBN-10 0-755-10063-8, ISBN-13
978-0--75510063-7). The reason for sterility here is a series of
atomic tests in the atmosphere that interfere with Earth's
shielding from damaging solar radiation. (At least here it seems
to be an equal opportunity disaster--in both D. F. Jones's IMPLOSION and the
film CHILDREN OF MEN, it appears to be only the women who are
affected. I am told that in P. D. James's original novel CHILDREN
OF MEN it is the men that are sterile.) This is even more
"English" than D. F. Jones's IMPLOSION, with characters fairly
stoically slogging along in a world without any children for
decades. The story gradually unfolds (backwards, with flashbacks
to more recent events first and the explanation of what originally
happened last), and Aldiss manages to include all sorts of
settings: England, United States, market town, college town, rural
village, etc. The ending, which seems a bit unlikely, is the
novel's only weak point.
THE MALACIA TAPESTRY
by Brian W. Aldiss:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 01/29/21]
I started THE MALACIA TAPESTRY by Brian W. Aldiss (PS Publishing,
ISBN 978-1-84863-792-4) but after about a third I realized I had no
interest in it. I went back and looked at the books I had added to
my "to-read" list from Time Magazine's list of a hundred best
fantasy books, and realized I had little interest in them and they
would be "obligation" reading rather than books I actually wanted
to read.
I find a lot of books end up this way. When I was younger it
almost might have made sense, but at this point I figure I don't
have time to waste reading books I'm not really enjoying. Of
course, this means I am doing more re-reading of books I have
already commented on, which makes it more difficult to fill these
columns.
THE ADVENTURES OF MENAHEM-MENDL
by Sholem Aleichem:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 06/10/2011]
Having just watched a documentary on Sholem Aleichem, and a Russian
silent film, JEWISH LUCK, which was based on one of his Menahem-Mendl
stories, I decided I should read THE ADVENTURES OF MENAHEM-MENDL
by Sholom Aleichem (translated by Tamara Kahana) (no ISBN).
Menahem-Mendl is the ultimate schlemiel--everything he puts his
hand to turns to lead. He tries to speculate in currency, and
loses everything. He dabbles in stocks, and loses everything. And
so on. All of these are very topical--he writes long explanations
of buying stocks on margin to his wife, to whom it makes no sense,
and frankly, it is not clear it makes sense to us either. And his
description of speculation on houses sounds distressingly familiar:
"You probably imagine that in Yehupetz you buy a place to live in,
the way you do in Kasrilevka. Well, you're mistaken. When you buy
a house here in Yehupetz, you immediately carry it over to a bank
and get money for it; then you mortgage it and again get some
money; then you rent the apartments and get some more money. In
short, you buy a house without spending a single penny, and you
become a houseowner painlessly." Or as Qoheleth says, "The thing
that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done
is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the
sun." (Ecclesiastes 1:9)
TIME AFTER TIME
by Karl Alexander:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 11/16/2007]
I recently watched the film TIME AFTER TIME and have a couple of
comments. First, the "vaporizing equalizer" on the time machine
is similar to the planetary ignition switch in FORBIDDEN PLANET--both
of them seem like amazingly bad designs. (In Karl
Alexander's book TIME AFTER TIME, the plot purpose served by the
"vaporizing equalizer" is handled in a more realistic manner.)
Also, it is often said that some people are too dumb to live, and
I would say that anyone who knows they are in danger and has to
leave in an hour and still takes Valium and brandy together may
fall into this category.
THE MEZUZAH IN THE MADONNA'S FOOT
by Trudi Alexy:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 05/21/2004]
Trudi Alexy's THE MEZUZAH IN THE MADONNA'S FOOT: A WOMAN DISCOVERS
HER SPIRITUAL HERITAGE (ISBN 0-06-060340-2) began as an
examination of the phenomenon of Fascist Spain as a haven for Jews
fleeing the Nazis, among them Alexy's parents. It covers this, of
course, with stories both of the Jews and of the people who helped
to save them, but it also expanded to include the stories of
Marranos in Spain and the Crypto-Jews of the American Southwest as
well. This was a wise decision, I think, because the original
idea was not all that different from many other books. It's true
that Alexy does attempt to explain why a country that expelled its
Jews five centuries earlier, and persecuted any suspected Jews for
another three hundred years, and was friendly with Nazi Germany,
would make such an effort to rescue Jews from the Nazis. Her
conclusion--that because the Spanish had no experience with Jews
for so long that they had no basis for any anti-Semitic feeling--is
intriguing but not entirely convincing or encouraging. But her
experiences dealing with Marranos and Crypto-Jews, and their
reactions to her research, are far more interesting from a
psychological point of view.
"The Art of Space Travel"
by Nina Allan:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 06/30/2017]
"The Art of Space Travel" by Nina Allan (Tor.com, July 2016): This
is more a story about dreams for one's future than a science
fiction story. Even the inclusion of a couple of Mars missions as
catalysts and focal points does not make it science fiction.
MY FRIEND MR CAMPION
by Margaret Allingham:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 09/29/2017]
MY FRIEND MR CAMPION by Margaret Allingham (ISBN 978-1-848-58025-1)
is a collection of mysteries centered around amateur sleuth Albert
Campion. (In keeping with British usage, the "Mr" in the title has
no period after it; the British rule is that abbreviations are
followed by a period only if they form an initial segment of the
word. Hence, "Hon." and "Rev.", but "Dr" and "Mr".) There is
nothing very amazing or startling about these--they are just cozy
comfort reads, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Allingham
wrote twenty-one Campion novels and enough short stories to fill
four collections.
ROME'S REVOLUTION: DEATH OF THE REPUBLIC & BIRTH OF THE EMPIRE
by Richard Alston:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 04/01/2016]
ROME'S REVOLUTION: DEATH OF THE REPUBLIC & BIRTH OF THE EMPIRE by Richard
Alston (ISBN 978-0-19-973976-9) shows the reader a depressing
number of parallels to today's political situations (the trading of
liberty for security, the establishment of political dynastic
families, the economic disparities, the labeling of opposition as
treason, and so on). This is not surprising, since the closing
lines indicate that this is probably Alston's purpose:
"Historians and politicians have too often allowed themselves to be
awed by Rome's empire, and by the Augustan age in particular.
Before we praise the Caesars and their civilization, we should
consider what was taken from the Roman people in exchange for those
imperial benefits. We should remember that dissident voices, such
as those of the Christians, were often silenced. We might think of
the numerous aristocratic victims of the emperors who found
themselves on the losing side in the vicious politics of the
imperial court. We should reflect on the vast and increasing
inequalities of imperial society which divided aristocrat from
slave, rich from poor. In sum, we should consider the value of the
liberty lost in exchange for the supposed peace of an imperial
age."
So clearly Alston has an agenda for his book. The thing is, I
noticed the same similarities to current politics in Edward
Gibbon's THE HISTORY OF THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE,
which covers a much later (and longer) period of the Roman Empire.
But all the same parallels seem to be present. It could be that
these are permanent parts of the human condition, and we are unable
to escape them.
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 04/29/22]
Another book connected to Mike Duncan's podcasts and books is
ROME'S REVOLUTION: DEATH OF THE REPUBLIC AND BIRTH OF AN EMPIRE
(Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0-199-73976-9) by Richard
Alston. This could serve as a follow-on to Duncan's THE STORM
BEFORE THE STORM: THE BEGINNING OF THE END OF THE ROMAN REPUBLIC
(Public Affairs Books, ISBN 978-1-610-39721-6). However, while Alston's book
may be one of the best covering the period of the first century
B.C.E. through the early first century C.E., there are a lot of
books covering this period. (There are also a lot of movies and
television shows, but don't trust any of those for accuracy. Only
HBO's ROME comes close on the historical figures, but the two main
characters are totally fictional.) Duncan's book is the only one I
know of that covers how the Republic got to a state leading to the
end of the Republic.
OMNE IGNOTUM PRO MAGNIFICO
by Donato Altomare and Mike Resnick:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 11/09/2012]
I did not read OMNE IGNOTUM PRO MAGNIFICO by Donato Altomare and
Mike Resnick (translated by Roberto Bianchi, special Chicon 7
edition), because the translation was into Latin, a language in
which I am not fluent. Bianchi included a
Latin-to-Italian/English glossary for all the words he had to coin (or
possibly he got some from papers issued by the Vatican). This is
not a co-authored novel, but rather four stories by Altomare and
one, "Article of Faith", by Resnick. "Article of Faith" was first
published in JIM BAEN'S UNIVERSE and then translated into Italian
for an eBook prior to this publication.
THE KING'S ENGLISH
by Kingsley Amis:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 10/26/2007]
THE KING'S ENGLISH by Kingsley Amis (ISBN-13 978-0-312-20657-4,
ISBN-10 0-312-20657-7) is a follow-on book to FOWLER'S MODERN
USAGE (and who knows what either of them would have had to say
about the word "follow-on"?). Two samples:
"-athon" and "-thon": "... Competitive events demanding
comparable endurance were quickly set up, like the so-called
'dance marathon' in the USA. This institution may have been in
doubtful taste but at least its name and nature were clear
enough. Not as much could be said for what followed, when the
second half of the word 'marathon' was taken as a sort of verbal
building-block when devising names fir less edifying activities
... [telethon, sale-a-thon, walkathon-talkathon]. Not every
Americanism deserves to have its credentials carefully examined.
Some ought to be shot on sight."
"Twice two": "Whether you should say twice two is four or
are four was the sort of 'argument' people interested in words
were sometimes asked to 'settle'. All right, then: either is
correct, and the two have been so for a half dozen centuries.
The 'was' and 'were' in the first sentence are in the past tense
because the problem involves some acquaintance with
multiplication. Next question."
I cannot say I always agree with Amis, but he does make many good
points, and also realizes that languages evolve and that there
are perfectly good American usages which do not pass muster in
Britain (though obviously not all of them, as evidenced by the
passage above!). Even if you do not agree with his conclusions,
his style is full of wit and intelligence, and well worth
reading.
LUCKY JIM
by Kingsley Amis:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 03/17/2006]
Last week, I reviewed LEAVE ME ALONE, I'M READING by Maureen
Corrigan. In that book, Corrigan recommended LUCKY JIM by
Kingsley Amis (ISBN 0-140-18630-1) as the funniest book about
academia she had read. And the blurb on the edition in the
library says, "No one has been so funny in this vein since Evelyn
Waugh was at his best." [Arthur Mizener] Well, add this to the
list of books that I tried, but could not see the point in
finishing.
TIME'S ARROW
by Martin Amis:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 06/230/23]
After Martin Amis died, I re-read his "science fiction" novel,
TIME'S ARROW (Vintage International, ISBN 978-0-679-73572-4). I
put "science fiction" in quotes, because there is no real science
fiction premise, just the idea that time runs backward. There is
no scientific explanation for this--it just is.
As with COUNTER-CLOCK WORLD (by Philip K. Dick), one difficulty of
writing a novel with this premise is the dialogue. In
COUNTER-CLOCK WORLD, the conversations started with "good-bye" and
ended with "Hello" but otherwise proceeded in the same time flow as
in our world. Amis goes further, with conversations also running
backwards, the words and sentences are still shown in our time
direction. But his narrator, who at least some of the time seems
to understand that everything is reversed, early on gives an
example of how the dialogue really sounds: "Dug. Dug." "Oo
y'rrah." And so on.
Why they do this is not clear, since they also say, "I have noticed
in the past, of course, that most conversations would make much
better sense if you ran them backward." This implies that they
don't realize that their world the the backwards one, so why they
give the conversations in our world's pronunciation order is not
clear.
And the description of "progress unrolling" (syringes no longer
disposable, a color television being replaced by a black-and-white
one) given as a series of short statements is so similar to
Baoshu's "What Has Passed Shall in Kinder Light Reveal" that one is
tempted to see an influence there, although it seems unlikely.
[See also Time's Arrow comments in
"Time Reversal in Fiction" (2017).]
THINGS WE DIDN'T SEE COMING
by Steve Amsterdam:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 02/18/2011]
By contrast, THINGS WE DIDN'T SEE COMING by Steve Amsterdam (ISBN
978-0-307-37850-7) is a post-apocalyptic novel written in 2010.
The apocalypse here is less well-defined than in EARTH ABIDES; at
first it appears to be a Y2K breakdown (making this an alternate
history, I suppose), but then there seem to be climate disasters
(e.g., areas of never-ending rain), virulent epidemics, killer bugs
from Brazil, and a host of other problems. Hence, I suppose, the
title: THINGS WE DIDN'T SEE COMING--not just one thing, but many.
And it is told as a series of vignettes/short stories, each one
with a different explanation for the problems that are besetting
our protagonist in that story. In classic post-apocalyptic
fiction, the reason for the break-down of society is given, and
usually some lesson is supposed to be learned from it. Amsterdam
has a much more nihilistic approach: something is bound to get us,
and there's nothing we can do about it, and everything will be a
meaningless struggle. Amsterdam may be more accurate, but it does
not make for a better story.
"Six Months, Three Daus"
by Charlie Jane Anders:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 06/29/2012]
"Six Months, Three Days" by Charlie Jane Anders (Tor.com) is about
two clairvoyants--with a twist. One sees "the" future, while the
other sees a branching tree of futures. Needless to say, their
relationship is affected--one might almost say controlled--by their
differing world views. He sees the future as fixed, hence is a
firm determinist, while she see a range of choices, hence believes
in free will. It is, I suppose, a somewhat constrained form of
free will, but then to some extent all free will is. (You cannot
decide to call spirits from the vasty deep, or rather, you can
decide to, and so can any man, but you cannot actually do it.)
A couple of sentences really seemed to encapsulate the hoarder in
all of us: "Judy hoards items she might need in one of the futures
she's witnessed, and they cover every surface. There's a plastic
replica of a Filipino fast food mascot, Jollibee, which she might
give to this one girl Sukey in a couple of years, completing
Sukey's collection and making her a friend for life--or Judy and
Sukey may never meet at all."
SIX MONTHS, THREE DAYS, FIVE OTHERS
by Charlie Jane Anders:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 10/05/2018]
SIX MONTHS, THREE DAYS, FIVE OTHERS by Charlie Jane Anders (ISBN
978-0-765-39489-7) is Anders's first collection, containing the
Hugo-winning title novelette ("Six Months, Five Days") and, well,
five others (all short stories). All were previously published on
tor.com.
"The Fermi Paradox Is Our Business Model" does not give a new
solution of the Fermi Paradox, but rather a suggestion of one
possible consequence of one of a standard solution of it. (And a
depressing solution it is, basically implying that while
intelligence may be a common path of evolution, it is an
evolutionary dead end. (Though this does lead to a bit of a
paradox/contradiction in the story.)
"As Good as New" is a variation on the classic "three wishes"
story, and proves it is true that a good author can take what seems
an over-used idea and still find something new in it. And even
though one is fantasy and one is hard science, there are definite
connections in philosophy between this story and "The Fermi
Paradox Is Our Business Model".
"Intestate" is an interesting twist on prosthetics and augmentation,
but did not really seem to go anywhere.
"The Cartography of Sudden Death" has a strange view of time
travel, presuming that is made possible by the unexpected death of
an important person, which causes a time gate to open. Of course,
since everything takes place on a world totally different from
Earth, it is impossible for the reader to understand any of the
historical issues involved.
"Six Months, Three Days" is at bottom a debate over the question of
free will versus determinism. Judy can see many different futures
branching ahead of her; Doug can see one future ahead of him. Judy
is convinced she has free will; Doug is convinced there is no such
thing. One can argue that she is deluded, but this raises a host
of new questions. Even if one accepts free will, why does she not
see an infinite set of futures? But Doug's ability leaves
questions also. In "The Golden Man" (made into the film NEXT), the
protagonist can see into the future, but he can also change the
future. How is this possible?
I am sure "Clover" is more meaningful to people who have read ALL
THE BIRDS IN THE SKY, to which it is apparently a sequel/coquel of
sorts (or perhaps it is just an offshoot of a minor plot point), or
to people who have cats. Since I am neither, I suspect that I did
not get as much out of it as I should have.
SIDEWAYS IN CRIME
edited by Lou Anders:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 10/10/2008]
SIDEWAYS IN CRIME edited by Lou Anders (ISBN-13 978-1-844-16566-7,
ISBN-10 1-844-16566-3) is an anthology of (mostly) alternate
history mystery stories. As is also true of science fiction
mysteries, the biggest problem is reconciling the two, in that the
alternate history means that some of what we know and take for
granted in our world is not true in the story's world, and yet we
are in general expected to be able to pick up clues based on
something being out of place. For example, if a clue is the
presence of a written note, it is important that we know whether
most people can write or not.
But in addition, the author has to come up with both a reasonable
alternate history and a reasonable mystery, and this is not easy,
especially in short story form. The result is often lopsided. For
example, "Sacrifice" by Mary Rosenblum has the most interesting
alternate history (Aztecs not conquered by Spain). But it is
hampered by too much "info-dump" about the alternate history, not
to mention bad proof-reading (missing or superfluous commas in
particular), and copy-editing--Rosenblum scatters Nahautl words
throughout, even when an English word would be just as good, but
then refers to a "turkey", surely incorrect in this world. Tobias
Buckell's "The People's Machine" is also set in an Aztec-Empire-survives
world--this seems to be very popular these days. But
Bucknell's story has a conclusion that makes no sense. (I'm not
talking about the solution to the crime, but rather to the thoughts
of the protagonist at the end.)
Both Kage Baker's "Running the Snake" (Boudicca successful) and
Theodore Judson's "The Sultan's Emissary" (no Crusades) show
different histories of England, and both run into the same problem:
too much the same or similar after centuries. In Baker's case,
it's Shakespeare; in Judson's, the entire royal line. Judson also
has problems with names such as Abdul Erickson representing someone
from a long line of Norse Muslims--but he would be something like
Abdul Jafarson then.
John Meaney's "Via Vortex" is a "Nazis won" story, but involving
the use of energy vortices for teleportation in what seems like a
particularly unlikely and bizarre way. There is far too much
"peculiar science" to make this a believable alternate history (at
least to me).
Stephen Baxter's "Fate and the Fire-Lance" is yet another of the
"history repeats itself across timelines" sub-genre, this time with
the son of a (Serbian) Roman Emperor being assassinated in 1914.
This story is weakened by the extremely unlikely introduction of a
royal tutor, first as translator and then as detective, fully
accepted by the police.
Jack McDevitt's "The Adventure of the Southsea Trunk" has someone
else publishing the first few Holmes stories that Doyle wrote but
could not sell in that world, but the whole thing seemed like a big
"so what?"
Kristine Kathryn Rusch's "G-Men" takes us to a change point, but so
little forward of it that we have to do all the extrapolation. (I
agree with William Mingin when he says in his review of SIDEWAYS IN
CRIME in "Strange Horizons": "To my mind, the most pleasing and
productive sort of alternate history story gives us a world in
which there has been a significant historical disjunction some time
in the fairly distant past, so that we find ourselves in a
political and cultural reality much different from our own. The
stories themselves tend to (but don't have to) occur some time
after the hinge event, and also in the 'past,'" relative to our own
time."
Jon Courtenay Grimwood's "Chicago" has cloning and memory
adjustments in Capone's era without any explanation whatsoever.
Some are not even alternate histories. Pat Cadigan's "Worlds of
Possibilities" is a many-worlds story with not much focus on any of
them. The same is true of Chris Roberson's "Death on the Crosstime
Express". S. M. Stirling's "A Murder in Eddsford" is one of his
"Change" stories (the laws of physics change on March 17, 1998, and
you can no longer get "a useful amount of mechanical work out of
heat." This is way too off-the-wall to even be considered as
fantasy, let alone a reasonable alternate history. (At least Poul
Anderson's BRAIN WAVE had a reasonable answer for why everything in
that story suddenly changed.)
Paul Park's "The Blood of Peter Francisco" is so dense with
cultural referents that I am unable to understand it. The same may
well have been true of his "Roumania" trilogy, which everyone
seemed to like a lot more than I did. So I will only say that I
may be tone-deaf to his appeal, and you should judge it for
yourself. (In his review, William Mingin says this is an example
of what the "Turkey City Lexicon calls "Card Tricks in the Dark:
'Elaborately contrived plot which arrives at (a) the punch line of
a private joke no reader will get or (b) the display of some bit of
learned trivia relevant only to the author. This stunt may be
intensely ingenious, and very gratifying to the author, but it
serves no visible fictional purpose.")
Both "Murder in Geektopia" by Paul Di Filippo and "Conspiracies: A
Very Condensed 937-Page Novel" by Mike Resnick and Eric Flint are
supposed to be humorous, but I found them both too much interested
in constant culture references and other humorous techniques to
tell an interesting alternate history story. (Which is not to say
it cannot be done--just that they did not do it.)
QUEST OF THE SNOW LEOPARD
by Roy Chapman Andrews:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 12/19/2008]
At first glance, QUEST OF THE SNOW LEOPARD by Roy Chapman Andrews
(no ISBN) seems to be a travelogue, recounting one of Andrews's
expeditions to Asia for the American Museum of Natural History.
But what it turns out to be is a novel. If it were written today,
it would be marketed as a "young adult" novel because the main
character is a seventeen-year-old boy on this expedition. (Indeed,
the book is dedicated to the Boy Scouts!) Andrews claims that
everything in the book really happened at one time or other, though
not always to the same small set of people, and excluding the
actual capture of the snow leopard(!). The capture he says could
have happened that way, and he wanted to include it.
Actually, if it were written today, there would probably be much
outrage over it, as Andrews gives instructions to his hunters that
when they shoot a particular species, he wants them to get a male,
a female, and a few young so they can make a nice exhibit of their
stuffed skins back at the Museum. It is clear that the attitudes
of 1916-1917 (when the expedition supposedly took place) or
even 1955 (when the book was written) are not those of today.
OLIVE ODYSSEY
by Julie Angus:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 08/12/22]
OLIVE ODYSSEY by Julie Angus (Greystone, ISBN 978-1-553-65514-5) is
half about the history, biology, and uses of olives and olive
trees, and half a travelogue involving a sailboat and a
ten-month-old baby. For what I was interested in, there was too
little of the former, and too much of the latter. My attitude was
not improved when Angus talked about how her baby screamed through
the entire flight from the United States to France; she expressed
no remorse about subjecting her fellow passengers to this. The
details of their difficulties in buying a sailboat had nothing to
do with olives either. (And she told someone that she had thought
that light olive oil had fewer calories than regular olive oil.)
Ultimately, I somewhat gave up, flipping through what was left of
the book to read about olives in the sections that talked about
them.
SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT
by Anonymous (translated by Simon Armitage):
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 11/05/21]
As I write this, I have not yet seen the new movie, THE GREEN
KNIGHT, but I figured I should re-read the original, especially
since I last read it back in college fifty years ago. The
"Classical Stuff You Should Know" podcast had an episode and read
some of SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT translated by Simon
Armitage (Norton, ISBN 978-0-393-06048-5). This is a wonderful
translation that preserves the alliterative form of the poem. Note
that I do not say it preserves the alliteration of the original; in
fact, most of the lines seem to have been considerably changed.
(For example, in lines 150 through 159, only one line of the
translation has the same alliterative sound as the original.)
Armitage notes this in his introduction (which is very informative
about English poetry of the 14th Century), saying that the need to
choose words in modern English determined the patterns.
However, I sometimes find Armitage's word choice odd. "Ebullience"
(line 86) is a modern word, but seems out of place in this epic.
"Inveigle" (line 804) may have a French/Latin origin, but still
sounds out of place. "He leaps from where he lies at a heck of a
lick" (line 1309)--a heck of a lick? Really? "Snooty" (line 1496)
also seems a bit informal.
Sometimes Armitage abandons modern English altogether. For
example, I don't think "gralloching" (line 1340) or "nithering"
(line 2002) are words much in use today. But oddly, they are not
the original words either. I have no idea how Armitage came up
with them.
Obviously some of these observations depend on seeing the original.
Luckily, this edition has the original Middle English (not Old
English--it was written around 1400) and the Armitage translation
on facing pages. I had the idea of reading the original--after
all, I had read all of THE CANTERBURY TALES in the original in
college, and it was written at the same time. But it is like
comparing William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway (or Gabriel Garcia
Marquez and Jorge Luis Borges). Just because two works are in the
same language does not make them equally accessible.
So you can see what I mean, here are the Prologue from THE
CANTERBURY TALES, and the opening lines of SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN
KNIGHT:
[The capitalization and punctuation of SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN
KNIGHT are Armitage's, as well as the substitution of "th" for
"thorn" and "y" for "yogh".]
As for the poem itself, I still have the same problem--the fantasy
elements seem out of place for the time and setting. Yes, I know
Arthurian legend is full of fantasy--the sword in the stone,
Excalibur (not the same sword!), Merlin's prophecies and
imprisonment in a tree, etc.--but those don't seem as wildly at
odds with the medieval Christian context as someone who disguises
himself as totally green and survives having his head cut off. Or
that no one at the dinner where that happens seems even surprised
by it.
[Merlin living backward seems to be the invention of T. H. White in
THE ONCE AND FUTURE KING.]
FLANDERS
by Patricia Anthony (Ace, ISBN 0-441-00528-3, 1998,
384pp, hardback):
In Flanders Field the poppies blow ....
To Flanders in 1916 comes Travis Lee Stanhope. He has volunteered
for the British Army, looking for escape and adventure. What he
finds is hell. (As a Southerner, one suspects he refused to listen
to General Sherman's statement along these lines.) Kim Stanley
Robinson summarized it well in "A History of the Twentieth Century,
with Illustrations": 54,000 men who died over a fifteen-year period
are remembered on the Vietnam Memorial. Imagine one of those for
the Triple Entente losses every six weeks of the Western front of
World War I, or thirty-five Vietnam Memorials in all, lined up in a
row. Along the Western front, there were 7500 casualties each day,
not in battle, but from sniping; this was called "wastage." This
is particularly noteworthy, because it is as a sniper that Stanhope
comes to Flanders.
Stanhope is an outsider: an American in the British Army, a
Southerner constantly called "Yank," a reader of the Romantic poets
in a company of men more interested in more earthly delights, a man
blessed (or cursed) with "second sight." As such, he finds himself
attracted to other outsiders, and Anthony does a good job of
showing us the many faces of the outsider.
Publishers Weekly compares this book to Erich Remarque's All Quiet
on the Western Front. I also saw a lot of parallels between
FLanders and Stanley Kubrick's classic film Paths of Glory. There
is the heartlessness of the distant commanders in their commands.
There is the insular attitude, the use of the outsider as
scapegoat. What there is more of in Anthony's novel is the hell of
war, a hell that could not be brought to the screen in the 1950s.
She lays it all out--not just the battles and sniping and
"authorized" killing, but also the disease and the maggots and the
hardening of men's hearts and souls.
Stanhope tries desperately to hold on to his humanity in all this,
but he finds himself gradually sinking further into not just
despair, but death--the death of his soul.
Although the fantasy content is on a much more restrained level
that most fantasy novels, it is necessary to the story. Without
it, Anthony would still have a powerful novel, but a different
novel. As it stands, though, this will be on my Hugo nomination
ballot next year.
PANDORA'S PLANET
by Christopher Anvil:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 02/04/2011]
I picked up PANDORA'S PLANET by Christopher Anvil (no ISBN, DAW No.
66) because I heard a friend discussing it with the owner of a
local used bookstore and it sounded like fun. Although it is
constructed as a "surprise" in Chapter VIII, it is obvious from the
first page that the point-of-view characters are aliens and the
"aliens" are humans. And even though the aliens have spaceflight
and the humans do not, it turns out that the humans are smarter
than the aliens. (Given that it was published in John W.
Campbell's "Astounding", that is not very surprising.) Reading it,
I was strongly reminded of the alien point-of-view sections of
Harry Turtledove's "Worldwar" series. In both, the aliens seem to
have the technological advantage, but the humans are smarter,
shrewder, more adaptable, etc.
Oh, and while the Centrans on the Kelly Freas cover may fit the
description in the book, the woman is more a typical Freas female
than anyone in the novel.
THE BEST JAPANESE SCIENCE FICTION STORIES
edited by John L. Apostolou and Martin H. Greenberg:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 12/12/2003]
Though it was published in 1997, John L. Apostolou and Martin
H. Greenberg's THE BEST JAPANESE SCIENCE FICTION STORIES doesn't
include anything more recent than 1989. I suppose the time and
effort required to translate works makes it more reasonable to
choose older ones that have proved their worth--certainly the
Seiun Awards for translated works are for older works as well. At
174 pages, this book is much shorter than many anthologies, but
because the stories are all fairly short it does include thirteen
stories. (No novelettes or novellas here!) I don't know if most
Japanese stories are this short, or if these are atypical. Not
surprisingly, the best stories in this volume are by what everyone
seems to refer to as the "big three" of Japanese science fiction:
Ryo Hanmura, Shinichi Hoshi, and Sakyo Komatsu. I loved Ryo
Hanmura's "Cardboard Box", though I can't say why. And I would
call it fantasy rather than science fiction. Shinichi Hoshi's
"He--y, Come on Ou--t!" was science fiction but a bit predictable.
However, it was somehow short enough that the predictability
didn't bother me. Sakyo Komatsu's "The Savage Mouth" was so
disturbing that I actually stopped reading it, so I have to say it
was effective horror. His "Take Your Choice" was another story
that seemed predictable, but again, this didn't bother me.
Thinking about it, I think there is a difference in ... something.
Not style, but perhaps purpose. The predictable stories don't
have the purpose of giving you an amazing new idea, but they do
let you consider the implications of what is happening while you
are reading the story, rather than the "American" style of having
the reader think about the implications only after the story is
finished. It's almost as if you are re-reading the story, even
the first time through. On the other hand, some of the other
stories I found rather opaque, suggesting that there may be some
major literary differences between English and Japanese science
fiction. Still, a good anthology. One might wish for more like
it, but I suspect that there aren't enough Japanese translators,
or enough of a market for the translations to pay them very well.
If Japan wins the Worldcon bid for 2007, it would be nice if they
could do a similar book as a souvenir book. (And I wrote this
review before I realized that this issue would end up as a
Japanese-themed one.) [-ecl]
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 10/17/2008]
I recently read a selection of THE ARABIAN NIGHTS (a.k.a. "Kitab
Alf Laylah wa Laylah", a.k.a. "Mille et une Nuits", a.k.a. "The
Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night", a.k.a. "1001 Nights"),
in this case the Barnes & Noble edition (ISBN-13 978-1-59308-281-9,
ISBN-10 1-59308-281-9).
When talking about THE ARABIAN NIGHTS, one is almost obliged to
talk about the various translations. The translation I read was by
H. W. Dulcken (also spelled Dulken) (1863-1865) from Antoine
Galland's French translation (1704-1712). As a sample passage,
consider the beginning of "The History of the First Calender, the
Son of a King":
"That you may know, madam, how I lost my right eye, and the reason
why I have been obliged to take the habit of a calendar, I must
begin by telling you, that I am the son of a King. My father had a
brother, who, like himself, was a monarch, and this brother ruled
over a neighbouring state. He had two children, a son and a
daughter; the former of whom was about my age."
By comparison, Edward William Lane's translation (1840) calls it
"The First Mendicant's Story of the Royal Lovers" and starts:
"Know, O my mistress, that the cause my my having shaved my beard
and of the loss of my eye was this: -- My father was a King, and he
had a bother who was also a King, and resided in another capital.
It happened that my mother gave birth to me on the same day on
which the son of my uncle was born; and years and days passed away
until we attained to manhood."
And Sir Richard Francis Burton's translation (1879-1888) calls the
story "The First Kalandar's Tale" and begins:
"Know, O my lady, that the cause of my beard being shorn and my eye
being out-torn was as follows. My father was a King and he had a
brother who was a King over another city; and it came to pass that
I and my cousin, the son of my paternal uncle, were both born on
one and the same day. And years and days rolled on; and as we grew
up, ..."
Obviously, which one prefers stylistically is a matter of taste,
but the consensus seems to be that Lane "toned down" some of the
scenes, and Dulcken bowdlerized them even further, while Burton
left it all in. On the other hand, Dulcken's translation stressed
readability, which I think one might agree is not a strong point of
the Burton translation. Even Jorge Luis Borges, in his lecture
"The Thousand and One Nights", says that Burton writes "in a
curious English partly derived from the fourteenth century, an
English full of archaisms and neologisms, an English not devoid of
beauty but which at times is difficult to read." (It should be
noted that English, not Spanish, was actually Borges's first
language.)
By the way, Borges confirms Burton's "raciness", saying that he
loved THE ARABIAN NIGHTS when he was young, but, "La obra de Burton, llena de lo que entonces era considerado obsceno, me estaba prohibida y tenía que leerla a escondidas en la azotea. Pero en aquella época yo estaba tan entusiasmado con el mágico que no prestaba atención a las partes censurables." ["Burton's work, full of what was then considered obscene, was forbidden to me and I had to read it secretly on the roof. But at that time I was so enthusiatic about the the magic that I did not pay any attention to the censurable parts."]
Borges also says, "The Arabs say that no one can read THE THOUSAND
AND ONE NIGHTS to the end." He adds, "Not for reasons of boredom:
one feels the book is infinite," perhaps to head off anyone from
responding, "That's because they are reading the Burton
translation." Borges also provides an example of how one must be
cautious of reading too much into a work from a translation. He
describes the story of the fisherman and the genie as saying that
the fisherman goes down to "a sea" and casts his nets. "Already,"
Borges says, "the expression 'a sea' is magical, placing us in a
world of undefined geography. The fisherman doesn't go down to
the sea, he goes down to a sea and casts his net." This may be
true in some translations, but Dulcken says, when [the fisherman]
had got to the sea-shore..." No indefinite article here (although
no specific sea is named either). Lane says, "One day he went
forth at the hour of noon to the shore of the sea..." Even Burton
says, One day he went forth about noontide to the sea shore...."
Lane and Burton provided notes; indeed, Lane's notes are now
considered the main "selling point" of his translation. My edition
of Lane has 963 pages of text and 300 pages of notes--and the notes
are in a smaller font than the main text--say 70% story, 30% notes.
Burton's are not collected at the end of the book, but appear with
each story, so the calculation is not as easy, but it appears that
the division is about 80% story, 20% notes. Barnes & Noble
provides no notes from Dulcken, and I don't know if he even
published any.
However, the Barnes & Noble edition does include a lot of
introductory material by Professor Muhsin al-Musawi, a renowned
scholar of Arabic studies. He points out (among other things) that
the tales of Aladdin and Ali Baba are not authentic to the "Kitab
Alf Laylah wa Laylah", having appeared first in Galland's
translation and apparently based on stories narrated to him by a
Syrian, and not found in any written sources. But they are
included, partly because they have traditionally been included, and
partly because they are so enormously popular with readers (and
filmmakers, I might add).
Now if someone would produce an edition combined the readability of
the Dulcken translation with both Lane's and Burton's notes--I
envision a sort of "Arabian Nights Talmud (*)"--that would be
ideal.
(*) The Talmud (for those who don't know) consists of text and
annotations from multiple sources, these annotations being arranged
on the page around the text such that a given source is always in
the same place. So, for example, one might put the text of THE
ARABIAN NIGHTS in the center of three columns on a page, with
Lane's annotations in the left column and Burton's on the right.
FLYING THROUGH HOLLYWOOD BY THE SEAT OF MY PANTS
by Sam Arkoff:
Sam Arkoff's autobiography, FLYING THROUGH HOLLYWOOD BY THE SEAT
OF MY PANTS is a much less polished autobiography than one
usually finds. It is more informal chatting than thorough, and I
have to say that it doesn't necessarily paint a completely
favorable picture of the man who started American International
Pictures. (Of course, this may be more that's it's not the usual
self-aggrandizing autobiography we have become used to from
celebrities.)
THE BIBLE: A BIOGRAPHY
by Karen Armstrong:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 11/21/2008]
THE BIBLE: A BIOGRAPHY by Karen Armstrong (read by Josephine
Bailey) (audio ISBN-13 978-1-400-10394-2, ISBN-10 1-400-10394-0;
book ISBN-13 978-0-871-13969-6, ISBN-10 0-871-13969-3) seems to be
more a condensation of Armstrong's book THE HISTORY OF GOD than a
book about the Bible per se. For example, she spends a lot of time
on the Talmud and the Mishna, which are not part of the Bible.
(She justifies this, as far as I can tell, by talking about them as
an oral rather than a written Bible, even though they are
eventually written down.) There are also odd slips, such as when
she contrasts second Isaiah with "the rest of the Pentateuch," even
though second Isaiah is not part of the Pentateuch at all. I
thought THE HISTORY OF GOD was excellent, but I have been
disappointed in all her other books that I have read.
MAMMOTHS OF THE GREAT PLAINS
by Eleanor Arnason:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 08/13/2010]
MAMMOTHS OF THE GREAT PLAINS by Eleanor Arnason (ISBN
978-1-60476-075-7) is a small press publication that contains the title novella
(novelette?), a revision of Arnason's 2004 Guest of Honor speech at
Wiscon ("Writing Science Fiction During World War III"), and an
interview of Arnason by Terry Bisson. Oddly, the cover design does
not include mammoths, but in a way it makes sense, as the mammoths
are really superfluous to the story. It's a story of living in
balance with nature (or restoring that balance with technology),
and how the Indians were better at it than the Europeans, and how
the mammoth spirits and the bison spirits speak to people. The
mammoths are basically off-stage for the whole book, and so far as
I can tell if you told the story with just bison, it would not be
that different.
CONFABULARIO AND OTHER INVENTIONS
by Juan José Arreola:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 05/11/2012]
CONFABULARIO AND OTHER INVENTIONS by Juan José Arreola (translated
by George D. Schade) (ISBN 978-0-292-71030-6) is an omnibus volume comprising
VARIA INVENCION (1949), CONFABULARIO (1952), and PUNTA DE PLATA
(1958). In 1961 these three works, plus some additional pieces
were published as CONFABULARIO TOTAL 1941-1961. It is a collection
of essays, stories, and other, un-categorizable short pieces, many
of which can best be described as "Borgesian". There are a couple
of interesting items I want to note.
BESTIARY (the English title of PUNTA DE PLATA) may seem the most
Borgesian due to its similarity to THE BOOK OF IMAGINARY BEINGS,
but the pieces in PUNTA DE PLATA were published mostly in 1958 and
1959, while THE BOOK OF IMAGINARY BEINGS was not published until
1968. (I doubt that Borges copied Arreola either--the concept of a
bestiary goes back to at least the Middle Ages.)
The most "Borgesian" story might be "The Switchman" (1951), which
is also the most fun.
The story "I'm Telling You the Truth" (1951) talks about a project
that has "the sympathy and moral support (not officially confirmed
yet) of the Interplanetary League, presided over in London by the
eminent Olaf Stapledon." It is not often that one finds a
reference to Stapledon, even in science fiction, let alone outside
of it.
"Walk in Silence"
by Catherine Asaro:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 06/25/2004]
I found "Walk in Silence" by Catherine Asaro a fairly standard
human-alien love story, competent but nothing special.
HAY BEFORE THE BOOKSHOPS
by Bridget Ashton:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 02/10/23]
Shaun Bythell's books lured me into searching for other books about bookselling,
but what I found was, ironically, a book that was 100% village life
and no bookselling whatsoever: HAY BEFORE THE BOOKSHOPS by Bridget
Ashton (Austin Macauley, ISBN 978-1-398-45206-0). This is Ashton's
reminiscence of her childhood in Hay-on-Wye in the early 1950s,
when there were *no* bookshops in Hay--and not much else in the way
of modern amenities (or mod cons, if you prefer). Of course, it
doesn't claim to be anything but that (although the title means it
is trading at least a bit off the while bookshop thing). I suppose
the most accurate review would be, "For people who like this sort
of thing, this is the sort of thing they would like."
(*) Hoopla is a great way to borrow ebooks/audiobooks from your
library; check if they offer it. The big drawback is that each
library has a daily limit on how many books it can lend out that
day, and if you try to download something in the evening, you may
well be told you have to wait until the next day. For that matter,
I've gotten that message at 10AM. On the other hand, you night
owls are good to go, because the count resets at midnight.
THE HANDMAID'S TALE
by Margaret Atwood (Fawcett Crest, 1986 (1985c),
paperback):
[This first part of this was originally printed in the April 10,
1987 MT VOID.]
They say that politics make strange bedfellows, and they point to
the feminists and the fundamentalists marching side-by-side to "take
back the night" and punish all those horrible, evil pornographers.
Well, Margaret Atwood has brought new meaning to that cliché of
bedfellows. In a world where the fertility rate has been drastically
reduced because of pollution and who knows what other evils, the
Gileadean solution is that of Rachel and her handmaid Bilhah. And this
is made palatable by couching it as the solution that both the
anti-pornography ("AP") fundamentalists and the AP feminists have been
promoting for years. The AP fundamentalists get the strict morality,
the elimination of divorce, the return of woman to her role as keeper of
the home. The AP feminists get the banning of pornography, the death
penalty for rape, and the elimination of violence against women. So why
do I have the feeling that none of those promoting these goals today
would actually want the reality Atwood gives us?
Actually one of the characters makes the point best. There are two
kinds of freedom, she says, freedom to and freedom from. Both the AP
feminists and the AP fundamentalists have been emphasizing the freedom
from: freedom from fear, freedom from violence, freedom from anything
that offends, etc. (Sounds a bit like Franklin Roosevelt, doesn't it?
But I digress.) They have forgotten that freedom from and freedom to
have to balance out: an increase in one is only achieved by a decrease
in the other. Or, as Henry Drummond says in Inherit the Wind, "Yes, you
can learn to fly. But the birds will lose their wonder, and the clouds
will smell of gasoline." In the case of The Handmaid's Tale, the
freedom from fear et al has been achieved by giving up the freedom to
live as one chooses, to work in a profession, to have financial
independence, to have an identity of one's own. The handmaids are
"Ofglen" or "Offred"--which Atwood mislabels as patronymics--having
given up their own names when they were recruited. The AP
fundamentalists and the AP feminists have been so busy joining forces on
what they want everyone to have freedom from that they have overlooked
the fact that they disagree on what people should have freedom to. If
they achieve their goals they may discover that the world they have made
is not to their liking after all.
The other interesting point about the society that Atwood portrays
is that it is very similar to another science fictional society--that of
John Norman's "Gor" series. Bizarre though this sounds, let's examine
the two. Atwood describes women's roles as being one of five types:
Marthas, Handmaidens, Wives, Aunts, or Colonists. The Marthas do the
cooking and cleaning; they are the equivalent of Norman's state slaves.
Both dress in drab colors and do the menial work. The Handmaidens
provide procreation (and sex); they are the equivalent of Norman's
pleasure slaves. Both dress in red. The Wives are the equivalent of
Norman's free companions--honored and respected, living their lives on a
pedestal. The Aunts are the equivalent of the slaves who train the
pleasure slaves (I don't recall if there is a specific term for them).
The Colonists have no direct parallel, though a disobedient slave on Gor
does end up doing some sort of unpleasant/dangerous work. While it's
true that these roles are not unpredictable, the parallels between
Gilead and Gor are thought-provoking, to say the least. Add to this
that Atwood, as part of the main character's description of her
indoctrination, includes graphic descriptions of violent sex, and one
wonders if those who would ban Norman's books would do the same to The
Handmaid's Tale. Consider the following excerpt from a proposed
anti-pornography ordinance: "Pornography is the sexually explicit
subordination of women, graphically depicted, whether in pictures or in
words, that also includes one or more of the following: ... women are
presented dehumanized as sexual objects, things or commodities...."
(Note that the portrayal does not have to be favorable.) My reading of
this is that The Handmaid's Tale would be considered pornographic by
this definition. All this indicates, of course, is that this definition
is crap.
I haven't said much about the book itself. That's because the plot
itself is not that original, or enthralling, or amazing. It's what the
book makes you think about that counts. Atwood makes you think about
what can lead to this society and, conversely, what the actions and
attitudes of today can lead to. It doesn't bear multiple readings the
way a novel like Last and First Men does. It's not a masterpiece of
literary style. But the thoughts it generates will stay with you long
after the details of the book itself have been forgotten.
[Addendum after seeing the film: In general, the film remained
true to the novel, but some important bits were only hinted at or left
out entirely. In the film we see all the shops are labeled by icons
rather than lettered signs; in the novel we discover this is because
women are forbidden to read and even the signs were considered too much
temptation. This makes the Scrabble game take on a whole new level of
meaning as well. In the movie, everything is bar coded--is someone
claiming that bar codes are evil or what? The movie also drops all
references to the fate of the Jews in Gilead, but uses--rather
unsubtly--a scene in which women who fail their fertility test are first
directed into a separate line from those who pass and then are put in a
cattle-car to transport them to the "Colonies" for "resettlement."
There are other bits, important to the novel, that are dropped entirely
in the film, and the film suffers from it.]
THE HANDMAID'S TALE
by Margaret Atwood:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 02/21/2020]
THE HANDMAID'S TALE by Margaret Atwood (Anchor, ISBN 978-0-385-49081-8)
was chosen for both my local science fiction discussion
group and the film-and-book group in a nearby town. I had read the
book when it came out in 1985 and seen the movie when it came out
in 1990, but had not read or watched them since, nor seen the
television series at all.
There were a couple of details about the movie worth noting. One,
the budget was so low that the costume department had only about
$60 per costume, which is not much at all. So the majority of the
women's costumes were simple shifts in the named colors, and the
handmaids had plain veils rather than elaborate headdresses with
wings. The other is that the movie was very careful to avoid
offending Christians. The society was based explicitly on "the Old
Testament" (I guess they didn't care about offending Jews), the
symbology contained no crosses, and one of the guerilla groups
opposed to them was a Baptist group. (The last is also true in the
book.) Apparently the series is less worried, and hence more
explicit, about Gilead being a Christian society. At one point,
the narrator cites a modification of Marx's famous slogan, "From
each according to her ability; to each according to his needs," and
attributes it to St. Paul, in the Book of Acts, a New Testament
book. (Note the subtle modification: the women have to contribute,
but the men are those who reap the benefits.)
The book is also much more explicit about why Serena Joy may be
more resentful of her situation than others. She used to be a
television preacher of sorts: "Her speeches were of the home, about
how women should stay home. Serena Joy didn't do this herself, she
made speeches instead, but she presented this failure of hers as a
sacrifice she was making for the good of all." But after the
creation of Gilead "she doesn't make speeches anymore. She has
become speechless. She stays in her home, but it doesn't seem to
agree with her. How furious she must be, now that she's been taken
at her word."
And one thing Atwood says that often gets overlooked in real life
is, "Better never means better for everyone; it always means worse
for some." People trying to design utopias, or even just pass laws
to "improve things" need to keep this in mind. Prohibiting murder
makes things worse for would-be murderers, but this is probably a
good thing. A flat income tax, on the other hand, makes things
worse for low-income families, and this is probably not a good
thing.
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 03/13/2020]
One more comment on THE HANDMAID'S TALE by Margaret Atwood (Anchor,
ISBN 978-0-385-49081-8) (reviewed in the 02/21/20 issue of the MT
VOID) [SPOILERS]:
One of the people in my discussion group seemed to think that the
fact the cassettes were found in the safe house in Maine indicates
that Offred did not make it to Canada, or she would have taken the
cassettes with her. My feeling is that the fact that the cassettes
were found in Maine really tells us nothing, except that Offred
probably wasn't caught in the safe house in Maine, since I assume
her captors would have searched the house (and probably burned it).
When she left it to flee to Canada, it would make a lot more sense
to leave the cassettes than to take them:
- If she made it to Canada, she could always recreate them, under
better conditions.
- If she was caught on the way to Canada, her captors would not
also have the cassettes--they would still be in the safe house
where they might still be of use.
One could argue that the fact that the researchers in the epilogue
know Offred only from the cassettes in Maine might indicate that
she did not make it to Canada, since there is no other record of
her. Then again, there are plenty of diaries, etc., that get lost
over a period of hundreds of years.
On the whole, then, the mere existence of the tapes in Maine tells
us nothing.
CITY OF GOD
by St. Augustine:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 05/06/2005]
I am slogging my way through the thousand-plus pages of St.
Augustine's CITY OF GOD (ISBN 0-14-044426-2), but am finding a
lot to dispute. Well, the fact that Passover affected my
schedule should tell you something, but it's more than that. The
first part of the book is Augustine trying to explain why
Christianity is objectively provable as better than the Roman
religion. In I:6-7, for example, he says that while the Romans
would plunder Roman temples in the cities they were attacking,
the Romans and even the barbarians respected the Christian
churches. Well, even if this were entirely true then (which I
doubt), subsequent centuries have shown this to be an anomaly.
(And one reason it might have been true then was that the
barbarians--the Goths--of which he was writing were also
Christians.) In II:3, Augustine talks about all the "calamities
[that] befell the Romans when they worshipped the pagan gods."
Of course, since 413 C.E. when Augustine wrote that, lots of
calamities have befallen Christians, so that argument seems to
have caved in as well.
This is not to say that Augustine is not sometimes amazingly
topical. In II:11, he writes, "It is another mark of consistency
in the Greeks that they regarded even the actors of those stories
as worthy of considerable worth" and admitted them to political
office. (He thinks this is improper of them, because he
disapproves of the stories those actors performed.)
I may have more to say about CITY OF GOD when I get past the
Roman stuff and into the theology.
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 06/03/2005]
One doesn't expect to get mathematics from St. Augustine, but I
did actually find some in his CITY OF GOD (previously discussed
in the 05/06/05 issue of the VOID). In Chapter XI, section 30,
Augustine discusses "the perfection of the number six". God
created the world in six days, he says, because six is the first
number which is the sum of its "parts" (by which he means
factors). Six is divisible by one, two, and three, and is also
the sum of one, two, and three. He explains the mathematics of
perfect numbers and then says, "This point seemed worthy of a
brief mention to show the perfection of the number six . . . and
in this number God brought his works to complete perfection.
Hence the theory of number is not to be lightly regarded, since
it is made quite clear, in many passages of the holy Scriptures,
how highly it is to be valued. It was not for nothing that it
was said in praise of God, 'You have ordered all things in
measure, number and weight' [Wisdom 11:21]." Of course, I'd be
more impressed with his number theory if in XI:31 he did not say,
"Three is the first odd whole number, and four the first whole
even number," which is some odd definition of either "first" or
"even". (He goes on to say that seven, being the sum of these
two, is often used to stand for an unlimited number.)
THE ESSENTIAL MARCUS AURELIUS
by Marcus Aurelius (translated by Jacob Needleman and
John P. Piazza):
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 09/19/2008]
THE ESSENTIAL MARCUS AURELIUS (translated by Jacob Needleman and
John P. Piazza) (ISBN-13 978-1-58542-617-1, ISBN-10 1-58542-617-2)
is in some ways riding on the whole self-help advice wave. (The
fact that the blurb by Thomas Moore chosen for the cover starts
"Set aside all your contemporary self-help books and read this
classic slowly" supports this.) I don't dispute that Marcus
Aurelius is worth reading, but the "distillation" of his writings
to a series of brief precepts to live by of the sort one finds on a
pull-off calendar is not exactly what Marcus had in mind.
One of the things Marcus recommends is "to read with precision and
not be satisfied with the mere gist of things." (1.6) In some ways
this is directly contradicted by the translators, who have tried to
extract just the "gist" of Marcus's writings rather than presenting
the full text.
While there is an appeal to having lines like "The noblest way of
taking revenge on others is by refusing to become like them" (6.6),
it hardly seems fair to reduce Marcus's "Meditations" to this.
OF HOPE: A TRAGEDY
by Shalom Auslander:
WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT ANNE FRANK
by Nathan Englander:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 01/11/2013]
I decided to check out some of the books recommended by THE NEW
YORK TIMES for 2012. OF HOPE: A TRAGEDY by Shalom Auslander (ISBN
978-1-594-48646-3) they said, "Hilarity alternates with pain in
this novel about a Jewish man seeking peace in upstate New York who
discovers Anne Frank in his attic." They also recommended WHAT WE
TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT ANNE FRANK by Nathan Englander (ISBN
978-0-307-95870-9). The latter is a collection of stories, of
which only the first is "about" Anne Frank, but there does seem to
be either a trend in writing, or a theme in the NYT's choices. I
cannot say that I was bowled over by either.
MAN IN THE DARK
by Paul Auster:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 10/24/2008]
MAN IN THE DARK by Paul Auster (ISBN-13 978-0-8050-8839-7, ISBN-10
0-8050-8839-3) is an alternate history--sort of. The narrator Owen
Brick (well, one of the narrators--the book has multiple
first-person narrators) wakes up in a pit and soon discovers that he is
in an alternate world and has been brought there to be given
instructions to kill someone. The other narrator, August Brill, is
entangled in this story in a very unusual way, and what makes
things even odder is that the alternate history aspect vanishes
entirely from the final third of the book. Given that the book is
only 180 pages long, Auster has a lot going on in such a small
space. As an alternate history, it's okay, but its real appeal is
its convoluted structure rather than the alternate history aspect.
BORGES' TRAVEL, HEMINGWAY'S GARAGE: SECRET HISTORIES
by Mark Axelrod:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 01/11/2013]
BORGES' TRAVEL, HEMINGWAY'S GARAGE: SECRET HISTORIES by Mark
Axelrod (ISBN 978-1-57366-114-7) is best summarized by the blurb on
the back: "Mark Axelrod has scoured Europe and the Americas,
photographing products and businesses that bear the great names of
Western civilization and then has recounted the little-known turns
of fate by which our immortals ended in these mundane straits."
(He seems to have scoured some places better than others: out of 45
names, he has six each from Brussels and Paris, and four from
Helsinki.)
The places and products fall into two categories: the accidental
and the intentional. For example, Borges' Travel in Tustin,
California, is probably not named after Jorge Luis Borges, but
after a different Borges who happened to open a travel agency. And
I doubt that Fig Newtons were named after Isaac Newton. On the
other hand, one can reasonably suppose that the James Joyce Irish
Pub in Brussels or Virginia Woolf's Restaurant in London were named
after the real authors.
In either case, Axelrod has decided that since the premise is
fantastic, he does not have to accept any rules of time or place.
So he claims that Marx sold the film rights of "The Communist
Manifesto" to Warner Brothers in 1878, which is not only decades
before Warner Brothers, but well before motion pictures. He also
has E. M. Forster selling film rights to Merchant-Ivory in 1931,
and a cafe in that same year serving "macrobiotic sandwiches."
Axelrod has Casanova in Carmel, California, in 1789. He also says
that Casanova lived in "a charming cottage owned by Chenille
Eastwode (a great-great descendent of a former Carmel mayor)."
Descendents are in someone's future; what is meant is a great-great
ancestor. (I have seen this mistake other places as well.)
You cannot read this straight through; it has to be read a bit at a
time. And you have to be willing to accept both Axelrod's premise
and also all the impossibilities of his histories. On the other
hand, what may happen to you after reading this is that you will
start noticing famous names everywhere and start composing your own
stories. (It is harder here in suburban New Jersey, where the
cafes, restaurants, an shops are all chains rather than being named
for someone. I'm stuck with purely imaginary names: Romeo's Pizza,
Wendy's Hamburgers, and the Athena Grill.)
LINT
by Steve Aylett:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 06/16/2006]
LINT by Steve Aylett (ISBN 1-56025-684-2) is a novel, a purported
biography of the (fictional) author Jeff Lint. I emphasize the
fictional aspect, because this book comes with all the
paraphrenalia that would make you think that Lint was real and
that this is a real biography--footnotes, bibliography, index,
.... But certainly an early hint is that Lint's mother has him
reading Pierre Menard (a fictional author created by Jorge Luis
Borges). Another is that he sells a couple of stories under the
pseudonym "Isaac Asimov". And while Lint sells some stories to
real editors such as John W. Campbell and real magazines such as
"Astounding" and "Startling", he also sells to magazines such as
"Baffling", "Useless", "Terrible", "Bewildering", "Confusing",
"Frazzling", "Scalding", "Mental", "Marginal", "Fatal", "Made-Up",
"Meandering", "Appalling", "Tales to Appall", "Daring
Adventure Stories", "Troubling Developments", "Maggoty", "Maximum
Tentacles", and my favorite, "Way Beyond Your Puny Mind". A
little of this goes a long way, though, and this book is best
taken in small doses. While I managed to get half-way through
(with the promise of a Lintian "Star Trek" script mentioned in
one review luring me on), I only skimmed the rest. As one
reviewer noted, a problem is that it is not just Lint who is
bizarre, but everyone (including the narrator), so there is no
respite from the surrealism. Aylett may have intended this, but
to me it is overkill.
THE TWINKLING OF AN EYE
by Brian W. Aldiss:
Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote,
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open ye,
So priketh hem Nature in hir corages,
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
And specially, from every shires ende
Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende,
The hooly blisful martir for to seke,
That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.
[--THE CANTERBURY TALES]
Sithen the sege and the assaut watz sesed at troye,
The bory brittened and brent to brondez and askez,
The tulk that the trammes of tresoun ther wroyt
Watz tried for his tricherie the trewest on erthe.
Hit watz Ennias the athel and his highe kynde
That sithen depreced prouinces and patrounes bicome
Welneye of al the wele in the West Iles:
Fro riche Romulus to Rome ricchis hym swythe,
With gret bobbaunce that burye he biges vpon first,
And neuenes hit his aune nome as hit now hat;
Ticius to Tuskan and teldes bigynnes;
Langaberde in Lumbardie lyftes vp homes
And fer ouer the French flod Felix Brutus
On mony bonkkes ful brode Bretayn he settez
Wyth wynne,
Where werre and wrake and wonder
Bi sythez hatz wont therinne,
And oft bothe blysse and blunder
Ful skete hatz skyfted synne.
[--SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT]
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