January 16th, 2022
The Madman's Library was a great Xmaholisolstizaah gift from Dr. Pookie. Subtitled The Stragest Books, Manuscripts and Other Literary Curiosities from History, the book is lavishly illustrated in color with all these oddities. Too many good things to even summarize. If you're into old books, moldy books, books bound in human skin, fake books, giant books, microscopic books, and so on, this is for you. Seeker by Jack McDevitt has a great sort of historical/archeological spaceship mystery in it, and is not a bad page turner, but I don't see how it won Nebula for novel (although I guess I should look at the competition that year - I haven't read any of them). One beef I had is that it's set thousands of years in the future, at a time when not only is English not spoken, but Roman style characters are apparently unfamiliar. And yet most of the human names are basically English names. That's not the only detail that makes the far future setting seem unconvincing. Honestly, much of the writing feels like a noir tec story of the 1940s. Which is not a bad thing, but it doesn't feel far future.
December 31st, 2021
Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro, is written from the perspective of an artificial friend (AF), an android companion for children. We learn a lot about Klara as she waits to be chosen by a customer along with the other AFs. In particular, her devotion and adoration of the sun. Perhaps because she is solar powered, she comes to essentially worship the Sun. Klara is chosen by Josie, a sickly teen, and does her best to befriend and help Josie navigate her illness and her relationship with a neighbor boy and her future. Klara is both perceptive and naive about different aspects of the world, which makes for an interesting read. Without cribbing from BladeRunner or the android section of Cloud Atlas, the novel certainly raises similar questions about the human experience. WIth Klara's innocent voice, the ultimate meaning or theme of the book is somewhat ambiguous, and probably I'm just projecting my own prejudices, but one truth of the novel is that we can never know what's going on in the head of someone else. Klara generally responds appropriately in human situations, but her idiosyncratic religion is literally insane. Although one might suppose this is what could distinguish androids from humans, I rather think the implication is that it's a similarity. --- The War with the Newts, by Karel Capek Speaking of androids... the author who gave us the word 'robot' also wrote this satire in the interwar period. I recognized the title, but really knew nothing about the plot, and picked this up at the Little Free Library when I was dropping off some books. Glad I did. Some of the humor may not play as well in modern America as in 1930s Prague, but there's still some great insight into the human condition. Mankind's essential flaw in the novel is quite apparent today in climate change denial (and to some extent from COVID-19 idiocy.) So maybe this book should find itself some new currency. I did what I could; I warned them in time ... I preached, don't [enable the Newts by doing business with them], well -- you know what happened. They all had a thousand absolutely sound economical and political reasons why it's impossible. I'm not a politician or an economist; I can't change their opinions, can I? What is one to do? The earth will probably sink and drown; but at least it will be the result of generally acknowledged political and economic ideas, at least it will be accomplished with the help of the science, industry, and public opinion, with the application of all human ingenuity! No cosmic catastrophe, nothing but the state, official, economic, and other causes. Nothing can be done to prevent it.There are also some faint but eerie allusions to Nazism. Capek was antifa before it was cool, and he had the good fortune, probably, to die of pneumonia before the Gestapo got to him. "Several months later, just after the German invasion of Czechoslovakia, Nazi agents came to the Čapek family house in Prague to arrest him.[11] Upon discovering that he had already been dead for some time, they arrested and interrogated his wife Olga.[36] His brother Josef was arrested in September and eventually died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in April 1945." --- Some of Your Blood, by Ted Sturgeon You can almost hear Sturgeon saying to himself in 1960, "That little shit Bob Bloch wrote about some psycho murderer with a sick and twisted ending and now he's in Hollywood having money fights. I'll show him a psycho murderer with a sick and twisted ending." A little hokey, a little gimmicky, but fine airplane fodder.
December 25th, 2021
Secret Santa tells the story of a cursed publishing house, and an unusual gift received by a new employee there. In a genre that lends itself to self-parody, this at least wears its exsanguinated heart on its sleeve. Merry Christmas everybody!
November 22nd, 2021
The Playboy Book of SF collects a lot of big names Bradbury, Le Guin, Niven, Vonnegut, PKD, Ellison... The collection comes from 1998, and some of the stories date back to the 50s. But not every author is a household name, and while most of these were *somebody* at the time, many of them were not yet undying giants of SF. Like most jumbled anthologies, the quality varies, and some age better than others. I will not approvingly one of my favorite shorts of all time, "Gianni" by Bob Silverberg. They use a time machine to resurrect Pergolesi and he gets pulled into the world of dubstep (more or less). The Apotheosis of Myra is pleasantly wwird. PKD's "I hope I shall Arrive Soon" was sadly retitled "Frozen Journey" for Playboy. Many of the authors take the license Playboy offers to add some sex, but not all. Of Sound Mind by Nina Kraus How Our Brain Constructs a Meaningful Sonic World Kraus is a researcher with a penchant for interdisciplinary looks at sound and the mind. There's a lot of great research on how the brain processes sound in terms of hearing and music and speech. But her penchant for everything leaves especially the latter half of the book more scattershot. Less a cohesive picture than a list of experimental outcomes. The Rim of Morning by William Sloane collects two weird novels from the 1930s that feel like they dropped out of a parallel universe. The New York Review of Books resurrected them with an added intro by Stephen King. Both have science fictiony, horrory elements, but their general outline and shape is more akin to straight fiction. The closest comparison to the mood that leaps to my mind is something like Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca. A story of romantic, but possibly ill-considered, love. Manners and insults. But brooding dread and death lurking here and there. As for content, the first novel, To Walk the Night, is basically Lovecraft's Thing on the Doorstep, crossed with Lovecraft's Beyond the Wall of Sleep. And then written by du Maurier. Some of the similarities make me hard to think it coincidence, but Sloane had the good fortune to have Lovecraft die before he published it. I keed. The second, The Edge of Running Water, is less interesting and even more ploddingly paced. Somehow, it's the one that was made into a movie with Karloff -- The Devil Commands (1941).
October 18th, 2021
The Afflictions, by Vikram Paralkar (a doctor in real life) is sort of a compendium of fantastical illnesses, in very very short story form. At its best, the book's entries are something that could have fallen from the pen of Jorge Luis Borges as an encyclopedia of things that never were. But few of them reach that level of substance. Most have that correct tone, but just read like (correctly) abandoned Twilight Zone concepts. Pointless framing story adds nothing to the mix. Automatic Eve, by Rokuro Inui, also seem to edge toward some significant meaning (especially given the inevitable comparison to Blade Runner and its source material) but also falls short of being profound. Nevertheless, it is a much more successful story, or series of linked stories really. A lot of people have likened it to Steampunk in Shogunate Japan. I can see why, but it's a misnomer. Certainly it's set in shogun era Japan and that adds some interest to the story, but it's not really steampunk. The automata are the only real sign of technology, and they are really more magic or mirales than technology.
September 27th, 2021
Kind of interesting for being written in the time of Gorbachev and glasnost and perestroika. Not long before the Soviet Union collapsed. But as a story, I found it kind of a let-down. The first two-thirds is kind of a jumble of bits and pieces, and while the last third holds together better, it's on some pretty inevitable rails that take us to the end. While Le Carré is often... arid... this one sinks into the sin of being boring.
While I'm usually a stalwart on the side of book in book vs. film, I admit I'm curious to see the 1990 film with Connery and Michelle Pfeiffer. I expect a screenplay that cuts some of the fat and crap off could make for a better story.
September 8th, 2021
The Glass Hammer, by KW Jeter, bears the stamp of Jeter's mentor Philip K Dick, both thematically and in a character that seems very much like a stand-in for PKD. There are some thoughtful idea about reality and media scattered throughout the science-fictiony tropes and Dickian paranoia of post-whoops America, psychic computers (or are they?), new religions, and the messiah (or is he?). Nancy L. Rosenblum and Russell Muirhead The book makes the case (pretty well) that what we're seeing now, most notably typified by Trump, but by no means confined to him, is a changing nature of conspiracies in modern political life. And that it is corrosive to democracy and the nation and the very idea of that 'knowledge' and 'expertise' are possible. The new conspiracism is something different. There is no punctilious demand for proofs,4 no exhaustive amassing of evidence, no dots revealed to form a pattern, no close examination of the operators plotting in the shadows. The new conspiracism dispenses with the burden of explanation. Instead, we have innuendo and verbal gesture: “A lot of people are saying …” Or we have bare assertion: “Rigged!”—a one-word exclamation that evokes fantastic schemes, sinister motives, and the awesome capacity to mobilize three million illegal voters to support Hillary Clinton for president. This is conspiracy without the theory.
For JFK and 9/11 conspiracy theorists, there was always a lot of talk about the evidence. Magic bullets, grassy knolls, the melting point of steel and so on. Now it's just smoke and bluff and bare assertion. Millions of illegal ballots? What's the evidence? At best you get allusions to affidavits that assert millions of illegal ballots. Referencing the claim itself is now tantamount to evidence for the new conspiracists. Obviously, this allows for a free-floating phantasmagoria of fraudulent claims. That lead to people shooting up pizza parlors or storming the Capitol. Anyway, more quotes that resonated with me.
The most striking feature of the new conspiracism is just this—its assault on reality. The new conspiracism strikes at what we think of as truth and the grounds of truth. It strikes at what it means to know something. The new conspiracism seeks to replace evidence, argument, and shared grounds of understanding with convoluted conjurings and bare assertions. Among the threats to democracy, only the new conspiracism does double damage: delegitimation and disorientation.
the new conspiracists call for repeating and spreading their claims—“liking,” tweeting, and forwarding. Repetition takes the place of organized political action. What Trump, for instance, wants is not the architecture of an organized political party or even an organized movement but a throng that assents to his account of reality. “You know what’s important,” he said about his fantasy of illegal Clinton votes, “millions of people agree with me when I say that. Affirmation of his reality is the key act
Representative Bryan Zollinger perfectly capture the ethos of true-enoughness in his suggestion that the Democratic Party might very well have brought white nationalists to Charlottesville in 2017 to create a violent clash: “I am not saying it is true, but I am suggesting that it is completely plausible.” The new conspiracism sets a low bar: if one cannot be certain that a belief is entirely false, with the emphasis on entirely, then it might be true—and that’s true enough.
When it comes to true enough, what matters is not evidence but repetition. Participation in conspiracist social networks triggers assent. Echoing, repeating, sharing, liking, and forwarding a conspiracist claim is a show of affiliation with others who are angry and confident that things are not as they seem. Conspiracist narratives refresh these passions by reminding members of the group of what they feel with renewed energy.
modern democracy depends on expert knowledge. This comes to bear especially in what has come to be called the administrative state, which comprises the myriad agencies staffed by career professionals who rely on specialized knowledge they create or draw on from research institutions and from civil society groups outside government. This is the basis for formulating, implementing, and enforcing public policy touching everything from safe water to consumer protection to interest rates and banking rules. These scientists, statisticians, economists, and ethicists are not elected; they are insulated to a reasonable extent from political controversies and partisan influence. They are “disinterested” as a matter of professional discipline and seek to apply impartial standards in the general interest.
These experts, of course, are the focus of a lot of the ire of the conspiracy-minded. Climate scientists, Dr. Fauci, our intelligence agencies, ivory tower academics
It turns out that conspiracist claims are easy to create, and easy for officials to embellish, endorse, or just allow to play out. What lies behind complicity by insinuation, equivocation, or silence? As we detail in chapter 7, representatives are vulnerable to angry constituents who subscribe to conspiracy. When reelection is in jeopardy, or an official is haunted by the specter of a potential primary challenge, silence or coy encouragement seems a safer posture than correcting the record and offending one’s supporters.
Closed to the world of shared understanding, conspiracism distorts what it means to know something. At a deeper level, the new conspiracists claim to own reality, and in doing so, they assault our common sense of reality. We experience a special form of anxiety and disorientation. We have been unwillingly drafted into a contest over who owns reality.
if the community in which we place our trust gets it wrong or is corrupt, then what we take to be knowledge may be unjustified and erroneous. Some put their trust in a community of scientists and public health officials who affirm that vaccines do not cause autism; others put their trust in an internet community of anonymous conspiracists who affirm that Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman is running an international child sex-trafficking ring out of a pizzeria. What is the difference? At the level of the individual who gets his or her knowledge from others, there is not much difference. The difference is found at another level, in the characteristics that define the community whose authority we accept on trust. In one case, these communities are defined by their commitment to publicize the evidence on which their conclusions are based, and thus to subject them to the scrutiny of others. In the other case, the community is defined by access to private knowledge that is unsharable,
When we decide what community is worthy of epistemic trust, we are implicitly also deciding what it means to know something.
August 6th, 2021
Waking Nightmares is an anthology of Ramsey Campbell short stories. No particular theme to them, although many of them do have an element of dream logic that make them nightmarish. All good stuff. Interesting mix of protagonists. Beside the many good people to whom bad things happen are quite a few bad people to whom bad things happen. -- Some Assembly Required (DECODING FOUR BILLION YEARS OF LIFE, FROM ANCIENT FOSSILS TO DNA) by Neil Shubin Another great science work by the discoverer of Tiktaalik. This one is more about some quirks (important ones) of evolution that defy the elementary cartoon picture of gradualism. That sometimes when it looks like a whole bunch of things have to come together for some 'leap' of evolution, that many of the enabling factors were already well in place, but now used for a new purpose. Like lungs and limbs in the water-to-land transition, the inventions used for flight preceded the origin of flight. Hollow bones, fast growth rates, high metabolisms, winglike arms, wrists with hinges, and, of course, feathers originally arose in dinosaurs that were living on the ground, running fast to capture prey. The major change is not the development of new organs per se but the repurposing of old features for new uses and functions.
...
The transformation of fins to limbs is a world of repurposing at every level: genes that make hands and feet are present in fish, making the terminal end of their fins, and versions of these same genes help build the terminal end of the bodies of flies and other animals. Great revolutions in life do not necessarily involve the wholesale invention of new genes, organs, or ways of life. Using ancient features in new ways opens up a world of possibility for descendants. Other sections talk about the importance of particular genes being influenced by control mechanisms within particular cell types: Imagine a house with many rooms, each with its own thermostat. A change to the furnace will affect the temperature in every single room, but changing a single thermostat will affect only the room it controls. The same relationship is true for genes and their control regions. Just as a change in the furnace will affect the entire house, an alteration in a gene, and the protein that is produced, can affect the entire body. A global change would be catastrophic, producing dead ends in evolution. But since the genetic control regions are specific to tissues, like a thermostat in a room, a change in one organ won’t affect any others. Mutants can be viable, and evolution can work.
Or using 'tamed' viral insertions as raw material for evolution. An important gene for the mammalian placenta is derived from an ERV. A defect in the gene is what causes preeclampsia. The gene is used by the virus to sneak things across cell barriers. In the repurposed version its what allows nutrients and other molecules to pass between mother and fetus. The genome is the stuff of B movies, like a graveyard filled with ghosts. Bits and pieces of ancient viral fragments lie everywhere—by some estimates, 8 percent of our genome is composed of dead viruses, more than a hundred thousand of them at last count. Some of these fossil viruses have kept a function, to make proteins useful in pregnancy, memory, and countless other activities
August 1st, 2021
Xander Schauffele, citizen of Earth, wins Olympic golf gold
The meaning of this turn of Olympic golf ended up being that the gold medal went to that man for all nations, the polyglot delight from San Diego who stood for one national anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” but could have stood for several. This 27-year-old with the Californian ease and the Taiwanese mother raised in Japan and the French-German father finally won a big-deal tournament after inveterate contention in golf majors, whereupon he gave an Olympian answer to an Olympian question about the values of multi-nationalism and travel upon this planet.
“I think that I can just use myself as an example,” Xander Schauffele said after one-shot win over Rory Sabbatini, the South Africa-born, 45-year-old multinational playing for Slovakia. “I’m the only natural-born citizen in my family [of four], being born in the United States … I think that being very international, it’s taught me a lot about different cultures and it’s made me very understanding of different cultures. I think that if everyone sort of had the ability to travel more and experience other cultures, they would be more willing to get along, potentially.”
He could look over at the bronze medalist and say, as an American, “Yeah, my fellow countryman right next to me. My mom was born in Taiwan, so actually by blood I’m half-Taiwanese.”
--
In Orange County, Anti-Vaccine Activists Attack Top Elected Official For His Vietnamese HeritageBut at this week’s unruly meeting, anti-vax sentiments turned into a torrent of racist and xenophobic tirades against [Republican] Supervisor Andrew Do, the board’s chair, who is of Vietnamese descent. In his role as board chair, he has been directing the county's COVID prevention efforts. One speaker who identified himself as Tyler Durden, a character from the film Fight Club, blasted Vietnam’s COVID quarantine policies and said to Do: “You come to my country, and you act like one of these communist parasites. I ask you to go the f—k back to Vietnam!” Do was a refugee whose family fled the communist regime in Vietnam and has lived in the U.S. for 46 years. Another speaker said: “You have the audacity to come here and try to turn our country, Andrew Do, into a communist country. Shame on you!” “You talked about escaping communism this morning,” said yet another speaker. “Why are you bringing communism to Orange County? We want our freedoms. We're Americans, we have freedoms.”
Do is an outspoken critic of communism and perhaps the best-known Vietnamese American leader in Southern California. Some critics say his measures to combat COVID have not been aggressive enough compared to neighboring Los Angeles County, and they find it ironic that anti-vaccine activists are focused on him. "I think most people look at Andrew Do and say he's certainly not at the vanguard of some of these efforts to limit COVID," Min said.
July 13th, 2021
The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood, by Sam Wasson I guess I thought this was going to be more generally about 1970s film-making in Hollywood, but the book is very tightly focused on the production of Chinatown from inkling of a story through the whole process, focusing on writer Robert Towne, producer Robert Evans, Polanski and Nicholson. It does a great job of bringing that process to life, and the characters involved, although the book occasionally strays into fleshing out the details with some story-telling flavor. Lots of interesting details. Hard to imagine Jack eating at Norms. Or Jack dating Anjelica Huston at the same time that Jake is romancing John Huston's screen daughter Faye Dunaway. Or Jerry Goldsmith (who studied under Miklos Rozsa at USC) coming in at the last minute to score the film in less than two weeks, after Philip Lambro's score bombed in test screenings and with the studio. -- Red Pill, by Hari Kunzru A fictional tale of a somewhat feckless author type, who gets a prestigious fellowship at a German literary center, and as his life comes unglued, he also gets strangely attracted/obsessed with neo-Nazi types. And his life becomes more unglued. Does a good job of hinting at the maddening attractiveness that sucks some seemingly sane people into these bizarre undergrounds, but ultimately kind of pointless and doesn't quite deliver in my view. There's also a strange interlude as our feckless narrator interviews a maid whose story of East Germany is 10 times more interesting than his own life, but it seems very disconnected plotwise, even if it hits common thematic elements of paranoia and secrecy. I did appreciate the real-life references to Heinrich von Kleist woven in to the mix.
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