Well, dear readers, I appear to be in a reading funk. I’e read very little since early August, with only two serious reads within the last month and only a few novels besides that. I don’t want for books to read– I have four I’m pecking at — but nothing I try is sticking. Homo Deus has, so far, been more about animal rights than transhumanism; Our Only World by Wendell Berry is rather like everything else I’ve read by Berry; and Fly Girls is interesting enough– just not, as yet, compelling. I’ve also been reading Where Wizards Stay Up Late, a history of the internet. I’m hoping to find the exit sign from Funkytown soon, however, as I’ve just purchased a few promising titles from Bookbubs. I was also tempted by two Trek titles, but my inner miser kicked me and pointed to the existing Trek titles I’ve yet to read.
Earth was a sad memory for the crew and colonists of the good ship Unity, who fled its radioactive remains in hopes of building a new society near a not-too distant star, Alpha Centauri. But an unexpected assassination brings the fears of the past alive once again, and when Unity arrives at her target, she no longer lives up to the name. Instead, the people of the dying colony-ship cling to like-minded ideologues, and the sorry spectacle of human history begans to unfold again, this time on a planet covered in mysterious xenofungus and populated only by mind-destroying worms.
Such is the premise of Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri, a turn-based strategy game that compels a player to pick a faction and see them through to victory. The sequel to Civilization II, SMAC remains one of the best-critically received PC games of all time — holding, for instance, the PC Gamer record with a score of 98%. It was a logical successor to Civ 2, which allowed players a ‘peaceful’ victory if they built a colonyship and sent it to Alpha Centauri. While the traditional Civ games have players choose a civ to play as — the Persians, the Japanese, the Aztecs, etc — SMAC’s factions were sorted among ideological lines, championing religion, science, capitalism, miltarism, etc. Unusually for an open-ended “4X” game like this (explore, expand, exploit, exterminate), SMAC had a plot which would develop as the player played, learning about the planet “Chiron” — specifically, learning that the planet is alive, with a collective consciousness, and that the constant attacks on human outpost by mindworms were a response to the constant terraforming. The story of Alpha Centauri — the human in-fighting amid the alien world’s exploration — is presumably the setup for the trilogy of novels written about them.
This first novel, Centauri Dawn, only covers the ship breaking up into factions, and the first decade of life on the planet as a few of the colony pods find one another and try to maintain some semblance of unity despite tensions over resources. Not all of the factions feature here, as the first novel focuses on the conflict between the UN Peacekeepers — the alleged ‘government’ of all the settlements — and the Spartans, who are militarists. The Gaians, who are…tech-hippies, feature, and the capitalists and religious fundamentalists also make an appearance. Mysteriously absent is the Human Hive, which is a totalitarian society with obvious Chinese influences. (They’re supposedly based on the Chinese philosophy of Legalism.) The Hive does appear in the second novel, however.
If you are interested in a storied playthrough of the game, I found a good one on the Let’s Play Archive. The player chose the Gaians, who are supposedly the easiest faction. Also, just for flavor, I’ve inserted the Spaceship victory cinematic from Civ 3 below, as well as the intro video for SMAC. Also, in the last few years another SF 4X game called Beyond Earth was intended as a spiritual successor to SMAC. It wasn’t anywhere near as critically acclaimed, but it does have some interesting elements. Here’s a review if you’re interested!
Boot camps on Earth may promise to make a new man out of you, but the intake camps of the Colonial Defense Forces do it for real. At the tender age of seventy-five, John Perry enlisted in the Colonial Defense Forces and disappeared from Earth, never to be seen again. No knew what happened to CDF enlistees, but on Earth the rumors were pervasive: they can make you young again. Why else would they only recruit 75-year olds? Perry thought it was a gamble worth taking, and even when he woke up in a new body — a green one — it was still better than being hunched over and arthritic. But then the mysteries around the CDF fell away to reveal ugly truths: the universe brims over with intelligent and aggressive species, and all of them are fighting tooth and nail to expand faster than the next guy. Ordinary soldiers stood no chance against the universe of horrors, but auguments — with increased strength, stamina, and abilities — could at least hold their own, especially when coupled with the experience of mature humans transferred into them. Even so, 75% of augments would not survive their term of enlistment.
Old Man’s War is first in a trilogy, and is somewhat reminiscent of Starship Troopers given the supersoldiers fighting against a galaxy of monsters. The alien creatures vary widely, from slime molds to biological shredders. The Hork-Bajir would not be out of place here. Part of the reason so many CDF troops die is that they’re in constant use: if humans aren’t defending colonies, they’re attacking alien colonies or clearing out native species to make room for human colonists. Can’t we all get along? …no. The last person to ask that question in the novel got turned into a puddle of goo in an alien church, so…no. It’s kill or be killed. The only diplomacy in the novel occurs after a ritual of individual combat designed to see how many questions the winners earn the right to ask.
This is the first Scalzi novel I’ve not read which is intended to be more serious than funny, and while there are light moments, Old Man’s War is chiefly a SF combat thriller. There are creepier elements to explore, too, like the “Ghost Brigades”. I could see reading more of this series, but I was mostly interested in the idea of transferring consciousness from an aged body into a lab-grown young one. Unfortunately, a lot of the tech the CDF uses is above the heads of our newly-arrived narrator, so we don’t really get an inkling as to how it works. Because humans often steal technology from aliens, even the upper echelons of the CDF don’t know exactly how things work, and they’re not the only ones. I might continue with this series if the kindle books go on sale, but I mostly read this for the basic ideas of consciousness-transferal. More monster-slaying doesn’t strike me as too exciting.
When the United States government formally announced that the Doolittle raid — a flight of B-17s over Tokyo in early 1942 — had been carried out, President Roosevelt informed a reporter that the bombers had been launched from a secret base in “Shangri-La”, an island from a novel popular at the time. I was thus intrigued to see this ad while searching for obituaries in 1943, encouraging Americans to buy stamps to support the building of the “mystery ship” Shangri-La. I assumed this was a codename, but it proves to have been the actual name: a USS Shangri-La was laid down in January 1943, completed in early ’44, and put into service in the autumn of that year. An Essex-class carrier, the ship participated in late-war bombing raids against the Japanese home islands, so this is a rare case of an advertisement getting fairly close to the mark. According to Wikipedia, the ship served through Vietnam, specializing in anti-submarine warfare, and was retired in 1974. Although I’m familiar with war bond campaigns, this is the first I’ve encountered where bonds or stamps were linked to a specific project, in this case a bonafide ship.
The human brain is an incredible organ, capable of storing vast amounts of information and using that information creativity, to change the world and to fascinate itself. It is also a belief-making engine. In The Believing Brain, psychologist and skeptic Michael Shermer examines the nature of belief and the biology which sustains it. He then applies lessons learned there to evaluate human beliefs in politics, religion, and the paranormal.
Most readers will have heard the expression that there is a thin line between genius and insanity. The Believing Brain bears this out, because the same abilities of the brain that allow for creativity, insight, and wisdom can lead to conspiracies and schizophrenia. Human intelligence is based on the ability of our brains to discern patterns: to associate a noise or a smell in the wild with a looming predator, to interpret behavior as safe or hostile. Because the biological incentives for robust pattern-detection are great — literally life and death — humans are extraordinarily good at it, to the point that we see things that aren’t there, like human faces in Mars or in whorls in wood. The same pattern-making ability that allowed early farmers to plan their labors by the seasons also led them to believing the position of the sun in the sky at the time of their birth meant good or ill.
Another key concept of the early book is the pervasive tendency for humans to believe there’s a force behind the patterns — an agent. Early on Shermer addressees dualism, which in this context refers to a divide between the mind and the body. Shermer’s most recent publication, Heavens on Earth, rebukes (among other things) the transhumanist fantasy of downloading brains into computers and achieving life eternal. The brain and our minds are inseparable, Shermer states; every aspect of our personalities has a physical cause within the cranium, and it’s a little disconcerting to realize at first. Just as we think of a ghost in the machine — a discrete Mind controlling the body — we tend to look for a purpose behind the connections we see, inventing conspiracies . We all experience this — a stray thought that the universe is plotting against us when the traffic lights are all red during a trip made in haste. Our brains continually invent stories to explain what happens; even if a person’s nervous system is manipulated by outside lab equipment, prompting them to suddenly stand up, the subject will instantly invent a reason why he stood up — “I wanted to get a Coke”.
Shermer has previously examined beliefs like alien abductions, conspiracies, etc. in detail, using books like Why People Believe Weird Things. Here he dissects them again in brief, but chiefly as as an extension of the aforementioned discussion on patterns and agency. Shermer believes that alien abductions and conspiracies have erupted in part to fill the vacuum created by secularization. Societies were once bound together by religions which gave the cosmos and the beings within it meaning; now, many people are led to recreate that sense of meaning by attaching themselves to causes which are part of a grand narrative of the world.
Crucial to understanding belief — any belief — is that emotions precede reason. Whatever our pretensions, human beings are not rational creatures who approach a subject, collect facts, and then determine whether this or that policy is effective, or this suspicion is valid. Instead, we lean in toward ideas; we attach ourselves to things that sound good, and then support them with facts. A disciplined mind can then correct itself — but we’re inherently believers. The more emotionally active our brain is at the time of encountering an idea, the less likely we are to make a rational decision.
There’s an enormous amount to process in a book like this, and it recommends itself to those with an interest in lucid thinking.
They’re heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeere. Extraterrestrials exist, and they’ve been watching our television. The good news is they don’t hold it against us — though they don’t want to meet any of our politicians. They’ve seen the debates. Who are they? They are the Yherjak, an amiable race of aliens who have the misfortune of looking like giant mounds of snot. They smell like fish. And…they’re aware that this will cause a little image problem in a first contact situation. Obviously, they need a good agent to finesse things — to maybe use Hollywood to introduce the planet the idea of repulsive-but-friendly aliens. Such is the setup for Agent to the Stars, a wonderfully funny light-SF tale that features sarcastic aliens, talking dogs, and a little Hollywood drama, including abducted paparazzi.
After reveling in the Star Trek spiff that was Redshirts, and especially in the codas which so transformed a comic novel into something seriously touching, I looked forward to this on its premise alone. Scalzi doesn’t disappoint. This is not ‘serious’ science fiction, or anything close to it; our aliens are smelly blobs of goo that have learned everything they know on Earth by watching TV, and their language is laced with culture references and sitcom quips. Their interactions with humans — main character Tom Stein, rising talent agent, is not the first — have helped them put things into perspective, and to realize that people don’t spontaneously have conversations in which they recommend laxatives to one another while watching TV — but their fanboy passion for television makes them goofy fun to hang around.
This is not purely a comedic novel; as with Redshirts there are serious moments, developing late in the novel when one character is involved in a serious accident that, tragic as it is, presents an opportunity if the morality of it can be worked through. Tangentially connected to the main story is Stein’s well-meaning attempt to help one of his starlets branch out by landing her a serious role as a Holocaust survivor who later becomes a civil rights activist in the US’s turbulent sixties. The movie is a biopic about a real-world survivor-activist, and her efforts to help people see the essential humanity of one another, looking past differences in appearance and culture, obviously gives the aliens’ desire to contact humanity and be received in brotherhood a little more oomph.
That aside, the novel is consistently funny throughout, and I’m going to keep poking around for more by Scalzi.
Note: I read this in August 2016, but the review of it languished as a draft.
In most presidential elections, 2016 being an obvious outlier, Americans are presented with that most exhilarating of choices: a career bureaucrat-politician wearing a red tie, and a career bureaucrat-politician wearing a blue tie. Coke or Pepsi, behold the variety! Tom Woods contends that the range of media-approved opinion available to Americans today is small enough to fit on an index card — one that should be set fire to. Real Dissent is written as the match. The book collects over a decade’s worth of Woods’ political debate and writing, organized into categories on war, markets, monetary policy, and other material, chosen with an eye for conversations and opinions that push the envelope — and addressed to Americans of all political stripes.
Although the political parties gamely put on a show every two years about social issues and spending, in practice little changes regardless of who is in power. Both parties reliably support military excursions abroad, resulting in a state pf permanent war and an omnipresent surveillance state. Both are enthusiastic proponents of regulating every facet of American lives, increasing costs and frustration, but despite their track record will still announce themselves champions of the people. The problem goes beyond politics, however, as the traditional media tends to walk hand in hand with DC. The wars which have permanently mired American lives and resources in the middle east were promoted by the media, and views outside the establishment are only mentioned to quickly dismissed so the grey-suited grownups and go back to whether DC should bomb the Iranians or just starve them.
Woods’ declared goal in destroying imposed restrictions on thought implies that he isn’t merely writing to libertarians. He frequently highlights books that transcend party lines, and gives special place to Bill Kauffman, whose screenplay of Copperhead saw a community stressed and destroyed by a feud between two good if disagreeable men. The tragedy of of Copperhead was born because those men placed ideology above their relationship to one another as neighbors. Woods’ section on the Federal Reserve includes many overtures to progressives, as do his writings on the problems of centralization in general. He also attempts to appeal to conservatives’ better angels, using the anti-war writings of the traditionalist godfather, Russell Kirk, to offer reproach..
Although the last American election saw two populist candidates challenge and — in Trump’s case, rout — the establishment candidates, neither of the populist figures is particularly promising for the future of American politics given the short-lived nature of populist movements. Personally, as much as I dislike the establishment, I don’t like its present challengers much better. In a culture flooded with toxic politics, the peaceful clarity of libertarianism, rooted in as sensible and humane a conviction as we can ask for — the golden rule — would be welcome.
This morning I spotted a used copy of my Antonia in a used bookstore and picked it up for the daunting price of $0.25, having previously enjoyed Cather’s works in O Pioneers! and Death Comes For the Archbishop. Seeing it reminded me that I’d seen a news headline about the anniversary of the book’s publication, and I looked it up. Based on the description below, it sounds promising:
My Àntonia is an antidote for much that ails the exhausted West. How is it that with our enormous wealth and comfort we are still unhappy, witnessed by the rising drug and suicide problems? Àntonia is not a self-creator, a cosmopolitan, a world-traveler, and she is quite poor. She ages before her time, taking on a haggard look, missing some of her teeth. But she is happy. With Àntonia as a model we can see that loving the place you are is essential to happiness. The vice of acedia is not just that of “sloth” as defined by laziness or lethargy, but that of being unable, in the words of Peter Lawler, to be at home with one’s homelessness. It is a kind of restlessness that Tocqueville put at the heart of the American condition. Flannery O’Connor opined that it is better to be someplace rather than no place. Making the best of our locale, trying to improve it, truly loving it and the people who are our neighbors, makes for a more fulfilled, contented life than one of rootless ambition.
One of Isaac Asimov’s robots short stories features a curious problem: a robot is running in circles, unresponsive to commands. The troubleshooters who feature in the story quickly realize that there’s a logic conflict: the robot’s in-built orders, both to save humans and to preserve itself, cause it to advance in one direction, then retreat as the danger grows. I’ve been running in circles the past week or so myself, with an array of really promising books before me — all enticing, but none so compelling that I can fight the distraction to dabble in the others. On the table are The Believing Brain; Where Wizards Stay Up Late– The Origins of the Internet; Flygirls; Ravensbrück, Life and Death in Hitler’s Concentration Camp for Women; Our Only World; and The Moral Animal. And there are more inbound, because when you can’t get into what you’re reading the obvious solution is to..buy more things. It’s the American way.
Speaking of buying things, I finally succumbed to the temptation to acquire a Windows 98 retro-gaming rig. My original intent was to re-format an old machine, but while trying in vain to find appropriate software, I saw someone selling a refurbished Dell for a pretty good price. It boasts 100 GBs of hard drive space and 512 MB/RAM. (Laughable now, but ten times the resources of my first Windows machine.) It booted to an error screen because the shipper inserted a floppy disk, which gave me a laugh. Once the empty floppy was removed, I was in business. I bought the machine solely to play Star Trek Elite Force, Star Trek Armada, and Star Trek Away Team, all of which are now installed and running. Since I still have the hard drive from my defunct 2004 computer, I’ve imported old custom maps that can’t be found online anymore.. I suppose this is the 21st equivalent of someone digging around in their attic, finding boxes of records from high school, and then buying a record player to relive their salad days.
I’ve forgotten surprisingly little Windows 98 navigation, in part I think because I learned to use computers on a Windows 95 system, and my ‘formative years’ so to speak were using it at school and then Windows 98 at home. It wasn’t until 2004 that I began using an XP, and I didn’t stop thinking outside of 9x’s architecture until Windows 10 made it possible to access everything on the PC via the search bar. That was also possible on Windows 8, but I really did not like the tiles system. It’s fine on a phone, but when I’m in front of a desktop computer, I want my DESKTOP.
My only problem so far is finding utilities that will actually install and run: even finding files published in 97-99 which say they’re compatible hasn’t produced any which will run. The lack of Winzip I can live with, and even Winamp. Not being able to take screenshots, though, is grating. The two shots above were taken with my camera.
Reading Freely 