Of kidneys, the Lionheart, and Star Trek

Posted on June 18, 2022 by smellincoffee

Ever since my kidney transplant Tuesday, I’ve seen doctors, surgeons, and nurses on a daily basis with updates. They’re all very pleased about the progress I’m making toward recovery: my new kidneys (I received two, from a deceased juvenile) are fully online, and my blood toxins continue to fall despite not having had dialysis since Monday evening. It appears I am forever done with that period in my life, for which I am profoundly grateful. The doctors told me this morning that I’m surpassing their usual milestones, so they will discharge me Sunday morning. They were tempted to do it as early as Friday! This won’t mean a return home, as I’ll require frequent checkups with the clinic to make sure there’s no risk of rejection and that the kidneys are continuing to work away. Since I’ll be seeing them three times a week, I will be staying in a nearby hotel with shuttle service to the hospital. I’m hoping once I’m more mobile to explore downtown Birmingham a bit, but I don’t want to overexert myself. I’m been able to get out of bed and walk around my room and the hospital already, but this is an environment altogether different than the chaotic city streets!

In other news, this week I finished off Ben Kane’s King, the conclusion to his Lionheart trilogy; How to Think Like a Roman Emperor; and Greg Cox’s The Weight of Worlds. The latter is an Original Series adventure, set during the original run of the show and features a plot that would have fit in on the show were it not for the technical limitations at the time. The Enterprise is hailed by a remote science station who have come under attack: after arriving in orbit, Enterprise realizes the station’s inhabitants have been attacked by some kind of gravity weapon, and naturally the command staff beam down to investigate. In quick time, Kirk and Spock find themselves marooned on an alien world, Sulu and a redshirt are forced to pretend to be new cult members of an alien Crusade that’s intent on converting the galaxy to The Truth, and the Enterprise isn’t faring much better, being targeted by a gravity cannon. In true TOS style, Kirk goes head to head against a ‘god’, but readers are also treated to Uhura in the captain’s chair. The premise and execution are a bit goofy if you’re more accustomed to serious Treklit, but it’s always nice to have an old-school episodic-like novel.

‘King Richard.’ Heinrich spoke in French. ‘Emperor.’ Richard’s tone was even. ‘Men are supposed to kneel in my presence.’ ‘Men.’ Richard stood up straight, emphasizing his great height. ‘I am a king.’ How proud of him I was in that moment.

More recently, I finished Ben Kane’s excellent Lionheart series by reading King, which dramatizes the last years of King Richard’s life. It opens with his return to a largely hostile Europe, where every road leading home routes through territories of men who would be eager to capture the King to hold him to ransom. Despite his best efforts, Richard and a few of his most faithful men are indeed captured. With Richard’s blessing, Rufus effects an escape, and on his orders returns to Normandy to investigate the damage that Richard’s perfidious brother John has done in his absence. Many of Richard’s possessions in Europe have been promised or directly surrendered to the French dog Phillip Capet, and “Johnny’s” treachery is made worse when Rufus realizes his suspicions about one of Richard’s men, FitzAldelm, were true: the man is an agent of the French court! As Richard’s nobles work to secure his release, Rufus attempts to fulfill his long-burning war against FitzAldem (a man who has tried to kill him numerous times) and disarm one of the Frenchies’ agents at the same time. Rufus also has personal struggles to contend with: his love for Princess Joanna, who can never be his own, even though Richard recognizes their bond and is gratified for the happiness that they brought to one another in Outremer. Even once Richard is released, the war against the weasel Capet continues, and brings the novel to its predestined, tragic end.

A review for How To Think Like a Roman Emperor is in the works. I’m currently reading Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs, and a lady friend has introduced me to an interesting fantasy series — and delivered several volumes of them to me in the hospital!

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Update

Posted on June 15, 2022 by smellincoffee

Good morning, all. Yesterday around 5 am I was taken down for transplant surgery. I am in recovery now. Lots of discomfort and some pain but those will pass in time. Kidney appears to be working.

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Exciting update

Posted on June 13, 2022 by smellincoffee

Earlier today at work I received a call from UAB, which at first sounded very routine: I was asked if anything had changed in the last few months. Then “Gregory” announced that they had a possible kidney for me, and how quickly might I be able to get to Birmingham? One fillup and obligatory dash to Walmart later, I’m in my hospital room between various tests. So far the docs are very pleased with me, and surgery, if the bloodwork locks me in, is scheduled for tomorrow. One of the first things I did after I left the hospital last year was purchase a laptop to replace my chromebook, and the wireless is strong here. I’ve got a bag of books, so don’t be surprised if I post away during recovery. I am sure things will go well, but if not — it’s been fun reading with you all.

Until later!

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Collateral Damage

Posted on June 13, 2022 by smellincoffee

Star Trek TNG: Collateral Damage
© 2019 David Mack
383 pages

Years ago, the decisions of Federation leadership and Starfleet command placed Captain Picard and the Enterprise between a moral Scylla and Charybdis, and his dogged efforts to keep the peace were covered in the A Time To… series. Now, after a succession of crises — the Borg war, ongoing tensions with the Typhon Pact, and the revelation of Section 31 — the dust is settling and the past must be reckoned with. Captain Picard is summoned to Paris to attend a hearing which may result in his being court-martialed. Meanwhile, the Enterprise responds to a Nausican raid on a Federation outpost that proves to be far more dangerous than anyone reckoned with, after it’s revealed that the Nausicans also stole a superweapon from a Starfleet Intelligence operation. As Commander LaForge works to keep the outpost aftermath from growing worse, Commander Worf and the Enterprise tackle the Nausicans. The result is a superb mix of legal, military, and engineering drama, as the Enterprise crew and Titan scramble to head off disaster. I’d expect nothing less from David Mack.

I missed the prolonged ‘Tezwa Crisis’, in part because I was a penniless high school grad when it started, and by the time I had money there were a lot more interesting ST series out there to consider — chief among them, David Mack’s Destiny trilogy. In the near-twenty years since that series began, Picard and others have referenced the Crisis enough that I’ve grown some appreciation for how big a deal it was, despite not knowing its specific details beyond its resulting in the Federation president disappearing courtesy of Section 31. A prior read of that series isn’t necessary to enjoy Collateral Damge, as the details of the crisis come out during the trial. The trial is well done, though I find it difficult to believe anyone in the Federation could be as hostile to Picard as the opposing lawyer: however true her professed belief that everyone should be held to the same legal standard, even Heroes of the Federation, her antagonism appeared more personal than professional. Far more interesting were the conjoined B&C plots, Starfleet’s response to the Nausican raid and the resulting plot. The Nausican homeworld was destroyed by the Borg during the Destiny trilogy, and the Alpha Quadrant’s favorite chaotic bikers blame the Federation for the destruction of their world. Hunting them down and putting an end to their Marvin the Martin-esque plan isn’t straightforward, though, because Starfleet Intelligence has an outrageous agent working his own op, and SI’s interests aren’t aligned with Enterprise’s. The Big E is crippled twice in this book, and all while Picard is being grilled by a vicious lawyer. Worf’s resolution was a little unexpected, but absolutely in keeping with Star Trek idealism.

Collateral Damage is (yet another) great work in David Mack’s continuing contributions to Treklit.

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CS Lewis, alt-history Brits, and a Trek repast

Posted on June 9, 2022 by smellincoffee

Still offline, so — quickie reviews.

Call C.S. Lewis’ friends to mind and the mental image, invariably, will be that of Lewis and the Inklings gathered around a table at the Eagle and Child, drinking and talking.  But one of Lewis’ closest friends, the person whose death moved him to tears, was a woman – Dorothy Sayers, an English novelist and playwright who bonded with Lewis over their shared love of literature and their unexpected roles as Christian apologists.  Dorothy and Jack examines their friendship, drawing on their extensive letter-writing to one another,  with an eye for how the two challenged one another and helped the other to grow. Sayers was a particularly invaluable friend to Lewis, Dalfonzo suggests, because she was his first genuine female friendship after an early life spent in all-male environments: a motherless home, male-only boarding schools and the similarly exclusive arenas of the Western Front and Oxford. Sayers was someone who Lewis could respect, even given prejudices he might have had about her sex, and in addition to supporting one another as creative writers and defenders of the faith, as their friendship grew they could unburden themselves about their private challenges — Sayers’ marriage and Lewis’ difficult relationship with Mrs. Moore, particularly. Definitely worthwhile for a Lewis or Sayers fan.

In a completely different genre, I finished Len Deighton’s SS-GB. Deighton has written histories of the air war in World War 2, as well as novels set in the same period, including Bomber. SS-GB is alternate history, or rather is a detective novel turned political thriller set in a 1942 where Britain lost its independent fight against Nazi Germany and is an occupied territory. Europe is at ‘peace’, with the Nazis and Soviets pledging eternal friendship to one another, and the United States is thoroughly distracted by Imperial Japan. A senior inspector for Scotland Yard, Douglas Archer, is toeing the line between law and injustice, balancing his need to keep his German superiors happy with his own self-loathing at being a collaborator with the occupiers. A murder that attracts the attention of the S.S. and connects to rumors of the King being rescued from the Tower of London, and of an German attempt to create a super-bomb, makes Archer’s position all the more untenable: suddenly he has two bosses, one in the Wehrmacht and the other in the S.S., and both are actors in their respective organizations’ struggle for power within the Nazi scheme, a struggle that sometimes takes priority even over the need to consolidate Britain into the Greater German Reich. Deighton’s eye as an historian is helpful in creating a finely detailed version of Occupied Britain, complete with subtle market stresses induced by the occupation costs. I enjoyed the tale well enough, but found it mostly interesting for the setting. I couldn’t figure out what the exact point of departure was, though — why did Sealion happen in this timeline when it didn’t happen in ours?

Finally, a bit of rare good news on the Trek front: Star Trek Strange New Worlds is good. Ever since the 2009 movie, I’ve had to tolerate-at-best Trek’s television & movie offerings, but SNW actually looks and feels like Star Trek. The episodes are episodes, and begin with the “Space….the final frontier” recitation that is Trek’s signature. It’s a prequel series like Discovery, set aboard Captain Pike’s tenure on the Enterprise. He’s joined by characters both old and new, and from the episodes I’ve watched the focus is definitely more ensemble-oriented than being dominated by one personality. More importantly, though, Strange New Worlds is drawing on what made Trek so popular to begin with — its focus on human potential, on what we might achieve through courage and creativity. One of the things I’ve missed most about PrimeTrek, particularly TNG – DS9, is its incorporation of the arts: that made a splendid comeback in “The Children of the Comet”. I am actually excited about SNW, and that hasn’t been true about Trek-on-the-screen since…well, Star Trek (2009). I actually checked Amazon for SNW novels, and am pleased to see that one will be released in September. Although I still hate the death of the PrimeTrek lit verse, I won’t mind seeing what novels emerge from this new show.

Coming up….a foresensic thriller, Stoicism, Star Trek, and cosmology.

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Doctorow duo on digital rights activism

Posted on June 2, 2022 by smellincoffee

I recently read two short titles by Cory Doctorow, a SF author and internet freedom activist.

For  at least the last twenty years, Cory Doctorow has been thinking about the future of intellectual property, copyright, and the open internet. He often works these themes into his novels, but in Information Doesn’t Want to be Free,  he addresses them directly.   Although it initially appears aimed at content creators, who he urges to resist the urge to use Digital Rights Management on the grounds that it would make them subservient to publishers,   Doctorow’s argument should be of interest to everyone – for, as he points out, technocratic schemes powerful to stymie any and all  violations of IP or copyright law are potent enough to destroy any veneer of privacy online, not to mention the cost to human creativity.  Although I understood why DRM is a bad deal for consumers, I’ve noticed and wondered why Doctorow’s own works were purposely published without it  – until now.  I’ve never  tried to understand the vagaries of international copyright treaties before, so Doctorow’s explanation of them was helpful, especially his analysis of the SOPA/PIPA bills that were narrowly defeated ten years ago.   Part of the book’s contents are expressly aimed at creatives,  as when Doctorow suggests different models for monetizing work that don’t depend on intrusive digital locks, but the book recommends itself more generally to those interested in the future structure of the Internet. 

Doctorow’s second work, How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism, argues that the rise of big tech powerhouses (Google & Facebook, chiefly) who command much of the Internet’s traffic or serve as giant platforms for destructive minorities to broadcast their views and radicalize others owes not to the unique nature of these industries, but to their growth during a period of deregulation: he points to the concentration of other services and industries in the same timeframe as proof that the legal environment of American tech corporations has been the main reason for their success, not necessarily their unique nature or skill for innovation. Google innovated and mastered one thing, Doctorow writes — Search — and the rest of its commercial dominion has come from purchasing other products like Android and then fusing them with its own. I was disappointed that an author as deeply immersed in the culture of the free web (witness his characters’ frequent evasions of corporate-state spyware in the Little Brother and Pirate Cinema books) could only suggest More Regulation as the solution, especially given that Doctorow frequently pointed out how often the regulators of industries are drawn from the industry’s own executive pool. That is not a unique quirk of big tech: it happens in every industry that’s regulated, and it’s how corporations create rules to shelter them at the expense of their competitors. And it gets worse, because as Doctorow points out, the state has a vested interest in maintaining the potency of big tech, using the corporate mesh of surveillance and data collection to feed its own desires for information about potential reichsfeinde. Doctorow’s analysis is fine, but the recommendation is feeble and uninteresting to anyone who is seriously concerned about solutions for subverting big tech.

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Warmer

Posted on June 1, 2022 by smellincoffee

I’m currently without internet (going on a week now) because AT&T is as efficient as one might expect a bloated former monopoly with decades of entrenched bureaucracy and labyrinthine phone trees to be. I’m still reading, though: I recently finished When Darwin Comes to Town and am a third through Dark Matter and Dinosaurs; I also read two pieces of nonfiction by Cory Doctorow, as well as a handful of smaller ebooks. This post, though, is about a SF collection from Amazon Original Stories.

Last year I read the Forward collection, an interesting set of near-future SF stories. I noticed then that Amazon had another such collection, Warmer,  collecting stories about human life in the wake of climate change.    Unlike the Forward collection, they were disappointing on the whole: the stories are short, largely unimaginative, and often pointless. I’d assume anyone reading a series of short stories about climate change is already concerned about it, so it was disappointed to see nothing but low-hanging fruit here: people complaining about the heat, thinking about extinct polar bears, and pondering coastlines where land used to be. I enjoyed two of the seven stories.

This is the Way the World Ends  follows two professors competing for the same job, marooned in Mississippi during a freak blizzard.  This story was unique in the collection in focusing on the ‘weirding’ effect of climate change, instead of heat and sea levels.

Controller features a man’s frustrations living with his elderly and miserable mother as they battle for control of the AC. 

Boca Raton kicks off when a young woman discovers something ghastly on the beach and drifts into a week of insomnia, brooding, depression, and madness. 

There’s No Place Like Home is one of the few stories in this collection that has an actual plot, and follows a young woman reeling in the wake of her father’s suicide. She’s a member of the ‘youngest generation’, a large cohort of young people whose poor health in wake of food shortages has caused them to miss puberty. This is set in an increasingly deserted Los Angeles, as much of the city’s population has fled to cooler climes.

Falls the Shadow sees a paratrooper turned environmental commercial actor attend a sustainability conference.  Yes, that’s the plot.

The Hillside is….the sort of thing you might read in middle school. In some fantastical future where human civilization has collapsed and the world is now run by a bureaucracy of animals whose main activity is lecturing humans (who they keep kenneled in a little valley) on how terrible their ancestors were for destroying the planet.   


At the Bottom of a New Lake was the other interesting title in this collection, set on the East Coast after flooding turns the seaside into a new lake and returns the waterfront to the working class. A young Chinese girl sees the lake as a beautiful thing – her place, and one with buried treasure to boot – and can’t understand her teacher’s moaning about the world that was lost to the waters.

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CS Lewis and the Catholic Church

Posted on May 26, 2022 by smellincoffee

C.S. Lewis and the Catholic Church
© 2013 Joseph Pearce
280 pages

When C.S. Lewis began writing on Christian belief and practice in the mid-20th century,  reviewers at the time took it for granted that he had joined the Catholic church, despite his Mere Christianity purposely avoiding controversial issues that divided Christendom.   Despite that assumption, however, Lewis  never converted to Catholicism, and often made pains to insist he was no papist –even as he took theological positions more in keeping with historic Christendom than protestant modernism.  Joseph  Pearce here offers a biography of Lewis focusing on his background and conversion, shifts to a study of Lewis’ theology that examines his overlap and differences with the Catholic church, and ends with Pearce’s suggestion that Lewis never fully escaped the anti-Catholic prejudice of his Ulster youth.

Although Americans may naively think of Lewis as an Englishman, he was born in northern Ireland and raised in what he’d later dismiss as “Puritania”, a Protestant enclave created by King James to assert authority in Catholic Ireland. Lewis’ autobiography suggests that his faith was shallow indeed in his youth, little more than praying to God to give him what he wanted, and the tragedy of his mother’s death overwhelmed it. In college, Lewis developed his critical thinking skills, explored philosophy and occult, and began developing friendships that would alter his life. During this period of exploration and debate, Lewis encountered the work of G.K. Chesterton, and that famed convert to Catholicism was instrumental in Lewis’ own reconversion. The final push, however, came from friendships Lewis developed around the same time, particularly with Hugo Dyson and J.R.R. Tolkien — the latter a devout Catholic whose religion permeated the works he’d eventually create at Lewis’ urging. Lewis and Tolkien were alike not merely because of their interest in myth, but for their contempt for modernity: they rejected not only the shape of early 20th century society, but the conceits that drove it. After his conversion, Lewis was particularly concerned with the invasion of modernism into the church, and used works like The Screwtape Letters and The Great Divorce to mock clerics who were more concerned with what academics had to say about Christ than with what Christ had to say to the world. Theologically, Lewis’ views were often square with the Church’s: he rejected, for instance, the Manichean idea popular among Puritans and kindred protestant denominations that the body is irredeemable. Lewis pointed instead to God’s use of the material world to embody grace – through Christ and the Eucharist, most notably. His view of sin and the afterlife were far more Catholic than protestant, including a belief in Purgatory  borne not not just by The Great Divorce, but by letters to his friends.  Of the Sacraments, Lewis received all seven despite including only three in his Mere Christianity.  Most interestingly, in one letter penned in the 1950s, Lewis hinted that he was considering conversion but never took the final step.

The only major departure Pearce could consistently find in Lewis’ writings from Church teaching was his emphatic rejection of Marian devotion, and relatedly,  his  skepticism about the large profile that saints play in the Catholic and Orthodox tradition.  Pearce suspects that for Lewis, Marian  devotion  was a signal-flag for Catholicism, and that his ingrained prejudice against Catholicism was invariably triggered by it.  This prejudice, Pearce suggests, hurt Lewis’ scholarship in other ways: his Discarded Image analyzing medieval literature neglects to mention the role Mary would have played in medieval culture. Although Pearce is successful in illustrating how formative Catholic sources were in Lewis’ adult faith, and how compatible much of Lewis’ beliefs were with Catholic doctrine, the core issues dividing protestants from Catholicism (the authority of the pope) are never directly addressed. Pearce ends the book with biographical listing of writers and other personalities who attribute their conversion to the Catholic church to Lewis, despite his own Ulsterian reservations.

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Optimal

Posted on May 23, 2022 by smellincoffee

Optimal
© 2020 J.M. Berger
355 pages

Jack has known nothing but the System his entire life.  He rises when it tells him to, he dresses in the outfit its algorithms choose for him, he follows prompts to a selected diner and finds a delicious and nutritionally-varied meal waiting for him at the table, no waiting required.  From his work to his social life (romantic interactions included), the System has taken good care of him.    When the System assigns him a new task – finding a man who has disappeared, somehow dropping off the System’s grid – his tidy, content world will begin to unravel.  Optimal offers us food for thought as we travel through a world only different from ours by degree.

Most of us can still remember a world before big data:  we’d come of age when Gmail arrived and when we began learning that Apple,  Microsoft, Google, and others routinely collected and analyzed the data our online activity generated, we were properly horrified – at least, for a few minutes. Then another news story pushed itself to the top of the feed, Amazon  alerted us to a new book that was exactly the kind of thing it knows we liked to read, and we forgot.    Imagine a world, though, so completely ruled by algorithms that most people needn’t make any decision at all: their clothes, food,  and even leisure activities are suggested to them. The System is always watching, always making helpful suggestions.   Optimal’s main character was reared in such a world, and he’s found it works very well for him, most of the time. Sure,  there are times when the System’s benevolent administration of Jack’s life doesn’t square with what he’d like( he yearns to be an artist, for instance, despite the System insisting that he has the soul of an accountant) but on the whole, he can’t complain. He’s a happy, safe hamster on his wheel – until he begins investigating the disappearance of a man whom he discovers was sharply critical of the System. An antique radio reveals an illicit broadcast that blows into Jack’s mind and awakens him to new possibilities.

There’s not much I can say about the plot of Optimal that won’t give it away and deny potential readers the sinister thrill of learning about this Brave New World and its hidden flaws.    Perhaps what’s most notable about Optimal’s world is that there’s no obvious coercion:  the System rules by suggestion. If its prescriptions are followed, users can expect a steady stream of rewarding moments: if not,   they encounter subtle friction, to the point that the desired object loses interest for them: the juice is no longer worth the squeeze.   For some, though,  impulse and reward are insufficient:  they demand fulfillment, meaning, purpose – agency.  Optimal creates a picture of a world that is dystopian despite its idyll,  and bears thinking about given how much of our own reality is shaped by algorithms. It’s not an accident that the rule of the System came about through ‘information wars’, chaos created by people living in different intellectual worlds from the other  – each living in their own filter bubble, in increasingly smaller conceptions of the outside universe. (Berger has done previous work on the origins of extremism, making his analysis particularly interesting despite the fictional setting.)  How many people evaluate their own view of reality, moderated as it is through TV and social media feeds? How many people deliberately consider the view from other eyes?    Entertainment queues, too,  push our being: we Flanderize ourselves by allowing the discovery menu to make part of our interests  become the whole of our viewing consumption. 

Optimal is a fascinating, thoughtful thriller about the world to come. Definite reccommendation.

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Excellence requires work

Posted on May 23, 2022 by smellincoffee
Posted in quotations, Religion and Philosophy | Leave a comment