Robot Dreams

Posted on November 11, 2008 by smellincoffee

Robot Dreams
Isaac Asimov © 1986
Berkely Publishing, NY
349 pages

When I first started reading Asimov’s fiction, I started with short story collections — and this week I returned to that type of literature. Robot Dreams is a collection of short stories that deal with robots or computers. Some of these stories have appeared in collections I’ve read in weeks past, and so I re-read them — and enjoyed them again, as much as I did the first time I read them. Asimov begins the book with an introduction, and it is his introductions and commentaries that first made me such a fan of him.

Although the collection is titled “Robot Dreams”, the stories in the collection don’t all have robots. Many of them are about the role of computers — which for Asimov, writing in the forties and fifties, was real science fiction. A few of his stories feature Multivac, which is a character by itself. Multivac is always depicted as a massive computer that coordinates all of the other computers on the planet — Asimov never predicted personal computers (although he did predict hand-held computers and personal consoles that could access the “real” computers). In Asimov’s stories, computers are industrial and government tools, each section having a part of the globe to handle its problems. Asimov also depicts computers building better computers, to the extent that humanity forgets how to and becomes as dependent on the computers as — well, there’s no real anagram, I don’t think.

A few stories from the collection, with comments:

  • “The Feeling of Power” is one of my favorites. People have completely forgotten how to do ordinary math, so dependent on computers are they. Earth is at war with the planet Deneb, which is similarly addicted to computers and is probably settled by humans. Then a lowly technician realizes he can do math in his head, which has implications for the war effort.
  • “Little Lost Robot” deals with robots at a hyperstation. It features Susan Calvin, Asimov’s first female and one of his most memorable characters. One robot with a superiority complex is told to “get lost” and promptly does so — compromising the security of Earth’s hyperspace program and possibly the future of robotics.
  • In “Robot Dreams”, an experimental robot brain leads to a robot that have subconscious thoughts and dream about them — but its subconscious thoughts of those of it freeing robots from human servitude.
  • “Lest We Remember” is the story of a man whose life is changed when he takes part of a medical trial designed to increase the ability to recall stored memories — and who learns that an infallible memory doesn’t necessarily make one wise.
  • “The Ugly Little Boy” is always mentioned by Asimov as one of his personal favorites. I find it enjoyable, but it’s not a favorite of mine. Still, I mention it because he likes it so much. The story is about a Neanderthal boy who is ripped from time and brought to Earth to be studied.
  • “Franchise” is one of the more interesting stories, because it predicts the importance of voting machines. Asimov wrote this in 1955, remember. In Asimov’s future — in our reality, November 2008 — Multivac has come to control the elections by analyzing data and coming to a rational prediction about who the elecorate would vote for — if they were in fact to vote. So complex has Multivac become by 2008 that it only needs to ask a few questions of one voter to come to its decision. This voter is apparantly chosen by Multivac to be the most represenative of all his citizens. He is informed thusly: “Mr. Norman Muller, it is necessary for me to inform you on the behalf of the President of the United States that you have been chosen to represent the American elecorate on Tuesday, November 4, 2008”. Considering the week I happened to read this in, you can imagine what I found so interesting about it.

I enjoyed almost every story, even those I have read before. There are a couple of shorter stories that I didn’t quite “get”, but they were vastly outnumbered by the interesting ones. I enjoyed the collection immensely and reccommend it.

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World Made By Hand

Posted on November 8, 2008 by smellincoffee

World Made By Hand
© 2008, James Kunstler
Atlantic Monthly Press, NY
317 pages

I think this is the first book I’ve ever seen with its own trailer — with the narration taken directly from the plot summary on the book’s dust cover. A few weeks ago, James Howard Kunstler spoke at my university and I went to go see him. He spoke on “Life After Peak Oil”. Our way of living in the west, as you know, is completely dependent on oil. We receive manufactured goods from overseas courtesy of oil-using transport ships: we receive our food from great farms in the midwest through oil-using transfer trucks, and that food is grown by a mere few through the use of oil-using mechanized tractors. In the United States, the overwhelming majority of people go to their jobs and schools and everything else using automobiles — we live in vast fields of subdivisions far from urban centers. Kunstler is very critical of surbanization and has written a book about it — one that I intend to find. World Made By Hand is a book written in America’s post-oil future. He never gets a specific year, but I would estimate that this takes place in the 2020s.

Rather than repeating Kunstlers’ various predictions, I’ll simply write about the book — because Kunstler makes his predictions come true in it. One of the blurbs on the back of the book says that “…since this brooding powerful, novel takes place in the future, you could call it science fiction. Except the end of the fossil fuel economy has preetty much done away with science — and the advent of peako oil means it may not be entirely fictional much longer.” World Made By Hand is the story of one small community in upstate New York, “Union Grove”. It is near Albany, as the characters make their way there in return in a matter of a day or two. If you want a complete synopsis, you can just go to the trailer link above: it gives you the essence of the plot without spoiling the story.

In Union Grove, civilization after oil is decaying. Most of the people here still retain memories of the old days. Some, like the viewpoint character Robert Earle, don’t particularly miss the old days. Earle was an executive of a software company in the old days, making regular flights across the United States and the world. Now he works as a carpenter and will as the plot goes on become the town’s mayor. The people of Union Grove have been adjusting slowly to the loss of the old order. While we are never given specifics, we know war came to Earth as the oil wells ran dry. One particular war in the so-called “Holy Land” is referred to numerous times, but it is the only conflcit mentioned specifically. Nuclear bombs from terrorists destroy D.C. and Los Angeles. Without automobiles and electricity, the globe collapses — people become aware of only local concerns. There is no more United States: there is only Union Grove and the surrounding county.

The people of Union Grove are lucky in that they escape the complete loss of law and order that takes over other areas. As the summer begins, the town of Union Grove sees its population increase substantially when a religious sect arrives. They call themselves the “New Faith”. They wear simple, sober clothing and are described as a cult by the fearful Union Grover citizens. Their leader, “Brother Jobe”, is amiable if a bit devoted. The New Faithers left their homes in Virginia and have traveled north. They describe the complete chaos that pervades most of those areas, and announce that they intend to build a “New Jerusalem”. The Union Grovers react with skepticism, but acknowledge that even in Union Grove, things are falling apart. The town’s electricity is nonexistant, and its water pressure is falling. Their system relied only on gravity, but now even it seems to be failing them.

At the book’s beginning, Robert Earle, Shawn (a young farmboy), and his friend Reverend Loren head off to the town dump to forage for supplies. The dump is under the care of a New York redneck by the name of Wayne Karp. Karp controls the dump and rules over “Karptown” — a community of trailers — with an iron fist. The dump’s supplies are sorted by the Karptown lot, though, so they have their uses. When one of Karp’s men shoots the farmboy in cold blood, Earle begins to realize that things have fallen too much apart. Encouraged by Brother Jobe, he sets out to a psuedo-plantation run by a man named Bullock. Bullock is the town’s judge, and Earle and Jobe aim to convince him that he should start doing his duty.

At Bullock’s plantation, Jobe and Earle find a nicely-working community that has been rebuilt from nothing in the past twenty years. The townsfolk have most of the amenities of the old life, including electricity and hot dogs. Bullock relies on riverboat transporation to trade goods, and when one of his boats goes missing, he asks Earle and Jobe to help him recover it and his crew. They wil eventually do so, and Bullock agrees to help Union Grove bring order. Earle is elected the new town mayor, and the three of them work together to turn rebuild the Union Grove community. While the Union Grovers join a levee at Bullock’s plantation/manor, thugs from Karpstown drift down to pilfer supplies from the town.

This presents the book’s ending conflict: the forces of law must prove they can deal with the community’s criminal element in a lawful and orderly way without resorting to violence. Earle is a student of history, and sees the need for his community to maintain some kind of civil decorum. The book ends on a hopeful note, as the community moves on and continues rebuilding. Its last lines: “And that is the end of the story of that particular summer when we had so much trouble and so much good fortune in the world we were making by hand.”

Kunstler has been called “cantankerous”, accused of both Luddism and nostalgic bullshit by varying people I’ve spoken to. I don’t think the world presented in World Made By Hand is nostalgic, although it may be a bit romanticized and hopeful. I didn’t mention the full range of activities that the petty criminal lord Wayne Karp indulged in, but Earle and the townspeople are remarkably civil in their treatment of him even though he probably deserved a round with a bullwhip. The world Kunstler creates is a gritty world — one I would not want to live in. I do want to live in a “human-scale” community, and I already do — Montevallo, where I can walk everywhere I really need to go, and where I could bike to places further than my walking range. I love living here, and would be content to remain here for all of my days — although that probably will not happen, as I will have to move wherever there are jobs.

While the book’s setting is harsh and unforgiving, there is a bit of romanticism about it, I suppose. Union Grove’s citizens, by and large, are there for one another and work together for the common good. They learn to embrace the strangers to their town, and everyone works to rebuild the community into a world made by hand. At the same time, we see plenty of examples of people who have given up, or people who have started to prey on their fellow beings — how much romanticism is there really?

The story was captivating: I was never bored. Kunstler constantly releases details about what happen to put them into this predicament throughout the book. Had I not attended his lecture, I might have been confused. Thought was put into the printing of the book itself. Its pages are not perfectly cut and lined: there’s some technique some printers do to give the edge of the page an uneven, but natural-looking, line. The result is that the book’s pages have actual texture and they feel substantial.

All in all, I enjoyed the read and reccommend it as an interesting story — even though I’m a bit skeptical that this will happen. It seems to me to be a secular doomsday scenario, with society’s “sin” of oil corrupting it and leading to its destruction — giving people the opportunity to rebuild a new world, a “better” world.

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This Week at the Library (5/11)

Posted on November 5, 2008 by smellincoffee

Books this Update:

I started this week with Wampeters, Foma, and Granfallons, by Kurt Vonnegut. The book is a collection of miscellaneous works produced by Vonnegut, ranging from essays to speeches to short stories. While the material is quite diverse, Vonnegut’s wit and commentary prevail.

Next I finished Communism by Richard Pipes, which is a history of ‘Communist’ governments in Russia, China, and the third world. Pipes is a Russian historian, and so the chapters on Russia were rather strong and informative. Communism in Russia is presented as nothing more than a tool for Lenin to gain power to overthrow those he felt had wronged him.

I moved on to Nemesis, by Isaac Asimov — a science fiction story set two hundred years in Earth’s future, at the beginning of a hyperspace age. An Earth settlement is established on a planet orbiting a large gas giant which is itself orbiting a red dwarf star called “Nemesis” for its potential to end life on Earth permanently.

Next I read more nonfiction, namely Marriage and the Family in the Middle Ages. The book begins by exploring the contributions that the Roman family, the German family, and the Christian religion made to the development of the medieval family from 600 to 1500 CE. After establishing this, they then move chronologically through the middle ages, taking time to explore the effects of the Black Plague and the economic revival along the way.

Lastly, I finished Asimov’s Puzzles of the Black Widowers, another of his Black Widower mystery collections. I’ve been reading it off and on for a couple of months. Entertaining and well written as always.

Pick of the Week: It would be between Gies and Asimov. Let’s just go with Nemesis for old times’ sake, shall we?

Next Week:

  • A World Made By Hand, James Kunstler
  • Robot Dreams, Isaac Asimov

I am entering into an extraordinarily busy academic period that will not end until Thanksgiving, so my reading will be limited.

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Puzzles of the Black Widowers

Posted on November 5, 2008 by smellincoffee

I’ve been reading Puzzles of the Black Widowers on and off for a couple of months now. Rather than reading it straight through, I’d read a puzzle or two whenever I ran out of my weekly reading. This morning, I finished another Black Widowers book. Asimov follows the same formula: in every story, the Black Widowers — a small club of six or seven gentlemen who meet once a month for dinner together — go to their restaurant. The host brings a guest, and in the course of the guests’ interview, a mystery arises. The Widowers then try to work out the solution to the mystery through rational thinking. After they have exhausted all possibilities and are stymied, the last Widower — Henry the waiter — points out the obvious and unforeseen solution.

As usual, there are twelve “collections” in this series. A few of the mysteries:

  • In “Unique is Where You Find It”, the Widowers try to puzzle out what element of the periodic table is most unique to a particular college professor who has challenged their guest.
  • In “The Envelope”, the Widowers are asked to speculate on the significance of an envelop tucked into the jacket of a spy.
  • “The Recipe” is a locked-room mystery that the Widowers attempt to solve.

They were all enjoyable, excellently written. I enjoy these Widower tales very much, as the characters are interesting and the stories always quite interesting. “The Recipe” had a fairly obvious solution, though. Usually I have to think about them to solve the mystery, but in “The Recipe”, I simply read and wondered, “When are they going to bring up…”.

All in all, though, superb as usual. Asimov is the master.

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Marriage and the Family in the Middle Ages

Posted on November 4, 2008 by smellincoffee

Marriage and the Family in the Middle Ages
Joseph and Frances Gies, © 1987
Harper & Row, New York
369 pages.

This week I continued reading Gies, this time one of their books concerning changes in the family during the middle ages — from late Roman times until roughly 1500 and the Renaissance. The authors begin by looking at the way three institutions shaped the medieval family: the Roman family, the Germanic family, and the Christian church. After this, the book moves chronologically — Early Middle Ages, High Middle Ages, and Late Middle Ages. The Gies deal with peasants and aristocrats seperately, using specific towns to explore differences.

The book is well-written, which is what I have come to expect from the Gies. In certain sections, the Gies focused on particular families and I found some of the more extended passages to be uninteresting, but for the most part the book is captivating. What I enjoyed most about the book is that it broke the simplistic idea that medieval culture was monlithic. The impression that I had was that the lords and churchmen held absolute sway over the peasants and that the church have this massively strong cult of anti-sexuality going on, so much to the point that even sex outside of marriage was frowned upon.

The authors show that reality varied tremendously in all aspects. I’ll mention a few points from the book as an example:

  • While marriage is regarded as a religious institution, it did not become customary for people to take their vows inside a church until the late 1400s.
  • Some medieval personalities maintained that such vows were unnecessary — that so long as two people committed themselves to one another, consumated their union, and showed ‘marital affection’ toward one another that they were married.
  • In the realm of disicpline toward children, not all attitudes were ‘medieval’. Two men were mentioned as having rather 24th century attitudes toward raising children — treating them with respect, sympathy, and responsibily rather than with fear.
  • Gies again wrote on the life of peasants and their limited self-government.

The Gies don’t only just write about family structure and relations: they also describe the physical makeup of homes that medieval families lived in. There’s a lot of information here, and it’s presented quite well. Were I ever in the position of reccommending a book on this subject, this particular book would be a recommendation.

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Nemesis

Posted on November 2, 2008 by smellincoffee

Nemesis
© Isaac Asimov 1989
Doubleday, New York
364 pages

Having completed Asimov’s Foundation series, I decided to return to a volume of short stories, Robot Dreams. I had some difficulty in finding a copy, and so in the meantime I read Nemesis. Nemesis takes place on Earth, during the twenty-third century. According the Fount of All Knowledge, Nemesis‘s place in the Foundation metaseries (the Robot, Empire, Foundation, and assorted short stories all put together) is as a “legend”. Earth is apparantly united: the characters make reference to a Global Congress and a global president. Meanwhile, humanity is spreading throughout the solar system in “Settlements”. They are limited to the solar system because hyperdrives are not yet available — but they become so as the book wears on.

The first half of the book contains two seperate stories. One is about a settlement called “Rotor” that finds a way to move a bit more quickly through space, if not achieving faster-than-light speed. The commissar of Rotor opts to take the settlement to Nemesis, a nearby star. “Nemesis” is named by Eugenia Insignia, a scientist onboard. During the heyday of the space rage, back when cosmologists began realizing that most stars were binary stars, some theorized that our sun, Sol, had its own counterpart, one they termed “Nemesis”. They named it so because they thought such a system might explain why the solar system is periodically subjected to increases in comet activity.

The first story is about Rotor — its journey to Nemesis, its discovery of a massive gas giant with an Earth-sized moon, a moon that is semihabitable. Asimov does not spend much time detailing their journey, the discovery, or the building of a dome around the planet (which they term Erythro). He quickly moves this first story to a point in time twenty years after their “leaving”. The second story begins twenty years before their leaving, and he goes back and forth between the two. This did not cause any disconnect at all: despite the twenty-year gap, I read the stories perfectly well. The second story, set in the “past”, deals with Earth’s response to Rotor’s leaving. They realize there may have been a purpose behind the Leaving when they discover Nemesis, and predict that its course through space will take it through the Solar System in five thousand years or so.

Without spoiling the book’s plot, the Earthers begin to work on the problem of hyperspace, and use superluminal ability to reach Nemesis for themselves. Consequently, the second story — set in the “past” — catches up to the first story at page number 268. The rest of the book is the covergence of the two stories. The Earthers and the Rotors must work together to reach a compromise concerning Erthyro. There is more going on in this story than political intrigue, however. Most of the first story concerns the mysterious planet Erthyro — a world lit by red sunlight, covered by nude dirt and seas that are filled with a form of prokaryotes. There are a number of strong characters in the book. Eugenia Insignia has already been mentioned, but she has a daughter named Marlene, who has the unusual ability to read people’s body language thoroughly. (She would make an excellent cold reader, no doubt.) Marlene’s father is the subject of the second story on Earth, as he works to find a way to reconnecting with his daughter.

The story was quite good and the characters strong. I enjoyed the book, although not as much as I did the Foundation books. That’s to be expected, I suppose — with the Foundation series, my enjoyment was magnified because of the grand story each book’s seperate story worked into. It was as ever enjoyable.

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Communism

Posted on October 31, 2008 by smellincoffee
Communism

Richard Pipes

While wandering aimlessly through the stacks at my university library recently, my eyes fell upon Communism by Richard Pipes. I opened it up and it appeared to contain a history of the Russian Revolution. Since this is a particular area of history where I have very little knowledge, I thought I might begin remedying the situation by reading this. I’ve been reading it off and on during note-taking sessions in the university library, and I finished it today. I don’t really know who Pipes is: he served under Reagan as an adviser, but I couldn’t find any criticism of his value as a source. In any case, he’s a good writer. The book is short and has a lot of information in it, but Pipes is able to weave it all together into a quick and informative read that left me with a better grasp on the situation.

The book is divided into six parts:

  • Communist Theory and Practice
  • Leninism
  • Stalin and After
  • Reception in the West
  • The Third World
  • A Look Back

In “Communist Theory in Practice”, Pipes writes briefly on the history of communist ideals, going back as far as Greece, to Plato’s Republic. He then goes quickly to the late 19th century, describing the condition of the workers and going into the growth of socialism in the early 19th century. It was in the second chapter, “Leninism”, that I became interested. Pipes offers a brief history of the late 19th and early 20th century Russian Empire — an empire ruled by an absolutist dictator who owned all of the land in Russia like a 13th century feudal lord — who allowed peasants to work the land for him. The peasants and kulaks did not want to live their farms: they were content working the land and viewed with suspicion anyone who made a living otherwise. In return for their loyalty to the czar, they expected that he would allow them to develop more land so that they could further increase their fortunes. After establishing the state of Russia at this time, Pipes goes to Lenin. Lenin was born to the upper class, but was expelled from university after his brother was engaged in some criminal activity. Lenin blamed the nobility and the bourgeoisie for his family’s ill fortunes, and determined to bring it down. This strikes me as typical: rather than being an idealist, Lenin was just a punk — a bitter man who wanted revenge against the people he blamed for making his life difficult. This is not all that dissimilar from Hitler.

Pipes describes Lenin’s rise to power and the Russian Civil War, briefly. It seems to me, judging by this book’s narrative, that the entire Russian “revolution” was a farce. The peasants didn’t want state control of their property: they wanted their own property to be increased. The communist “revolution” seems to just be the rhetoric behind a new class of aristocrats who wanted to rule the empire their own way. Next Pipes goes to Stalin, who assumes power after the death of Lenin. He describes Stalin’s establishment of a state that was truly different — with an established Party and collectivized farms. The reader learns of the rebellion by the peasants, who set their fields ablaze rather than give them to the state. The result was artificial famine that killed millions. Pipes writes about Stalin’s need for a “counterrevolution” to unify his supporters in opposition to — leading to the great purges of the late 30s.

What is left of “Stalin is After” is a very brief history of the Soviet Union until its demise in the late 1980s during Gorbachev’s administration. In “The Third World”, Pipes writes about communism in China, southeast Asia, and the Americas. Interestingly, during the Chinese civil war (between the Nationalists and the Communists), Stalin supported the Nationalists, believing that they were better suited to keep a strong Japan at bay. The rivalry between “Communist” Russia and “Communist” China supports my own belief that both political entities were no more communistic than they were republics — both were just empires, supported by idealistic rhetoric.

Pipes concludes with “A Look Back”, where he examines the flaws of political communistic theory and the states that tried it. He points out that the ideal of land and property being jointly held by all members of a state is a historical myth: it has never happened will never happen. The Russian peasants who wanted to increase their own profits are exactly like unionized workers in industrial societies: they’re interested in making more money, not egalitarianism. He also points out that human beings are not infinitely malleable as the Communist governments would like to believe. This reminds me of Stephen Pinker’s Blank Slate, which I read during the summer. I believe he cited the Communist regimes as examples of how a belief in biological “blank slates” were flawed.

All in all, a good read. I want to read more to get a firmer grasp on the subject from other authors. I think it’s a solid introduction. You can read another review here.

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Wampeters, Foma, and Granfalloons

Posted on October 30, 2008 by smellincoffee

Wampeters, Foma, and Grandfollons (Opinions)
© 1974 Kurt Vonnegut
Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing, NY

I began this week with a collection of essays by and interviews with the late Kurt Vonnegut entitled Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons. The title confused my friendly community librarian. Vonnegut introduces the book with an explanation:

Dear Reader: The title of this book is composed of three words from my novel Cat’s Cradle. A “wampeter” is an object around which the lives of many otherwise unrelated people may revolve. The Holy Grail would be a case in point. “Foma” are harmless untruths, intended to comfort simple souls. An example: “Prosperity is just around the corner.” A “granfalloon” is a proud and meaningless association of human beings. Taken together, the words form as good an umbrella as any for this collection of some of the reviews and essays I’ve written, a few of the speeches I made.

The book is difficult to comment on, particularly the first half. Reading Vonnegut is like making your way through a literary funhouse — you don’t really know where you’re going and the rules, if any, are completely unknown to you. So unpredictable is Vonnegut that when he wrote a chapter on his experience living in Biafra, I thought he had made up a country to make some human-interest point. As it turns out, Biafra was a real country. The book is a collection of various pieces of Vonnegut’s work — a few speeches, a book review, a short play, a travel account, and a few essays. Vonnegut comments: “It is, after all, a sort of map of places I’ve supposedly been and things I’ve supposedly thought during a period of about twenty years. I have arranged these clues in a supposedly chronological order. If time is the straight and uniform string of beads most people think it is, and if I have matured gracefully, then the second half of this book should be better than the first half.”

It is difficult to characterize a compilation of miscellaneous works like this, but I did notice that a common idea seemed to penetrate Vonnegut’s writing and interviews in the second half of the book — the idea that human beings are meant to live in small social groups and that we are uncomfortable in other situations.

Until recent times, you know, human beings usually had a permanent community of relatives. They had dozens of homes to go to So when a married couple had a fight, one or they other could go to a house three doors down and stay with a close relative until he was feeling tender again. Or if a kid got so fed up with his parents that he couldn’t standi t, he could march oer to his uncle’s for a while. And this is no longer possible Each family is locked into its little box. The neighbors aren’t relatives. Thyere aren’t other houses where people can go to and be cared for. When Nixon is pondering what’s happening to America — “Where have the old values gone?” — and all that — the answer is perfectly simple. We’re lonesdome. We don’t have enough friends or relstives anymore. And we would if we lived in real communities. […] Human beings will ber happier — not when they cure cancer or get to Mars or eliminate racial prejudice or flush Lake Erie but when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again. Thats’ my utopia. That’s what I want for me.

The above quotation is from his Playboy interview where he articulates this idea most directly. It reminds me of a lecture I heard recently by James Kunstler on “Life After Peak Oil”: he predicts that as the automobile becomes a smaller part of our lives, communities will become smaller and life will become more local again — back to small, intimate communities. Outside of this idea that pops up several times in the later half of the book, there’s not that much cohesion to the book outside of the broad title he gave it. There are a number of pieces of interest:

  • “Science Fiction“: Vonnegut recalls that he is categorized as a science fiction author simply because some of his stories feature technology. “I didn’t know that. I supposed I was writing a novel about life. […] I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled “science fiction” ever since, and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal.”
  • “Yes, We Have No Nirvanas“: Vonnegut writes about the rise of transcendental meditation. According to him, he looked into it after his wife and daughter became Transcendentals. He writes about his efforts to find out what it was about, and the essay turns into a critique of the “religion-that-is-not-a-religion-but-a-technique” and the Mariashi that created it. I found it humorous.
  • “Excelsior! We’re Going to the Moon! Excelsior!“: He writes on the space program’s reception with people and science fiction. He quotes Isaac Asimov’s perception that there are three stages to science fiction: adventure dominate, technoloy dominant, and sociology dominant.
  • “The Mysterious Madame Blavatsky“: an essay on one of the founders of Theosophy that proved to be interesting.
  • “Biafra: A People Betrayed“: This is Vonnegut’s account of his experiences in Biafra, before it was conquered by the Nigerian army. I actually thought this essay was about a fictional place.
  • “Address to Graduation Class at Bennington College“, 1970. Vonnegut describes becoming a cultural pessimist and instructs the graduating class to go back to believing that humanity is at the center of the universe, the greatest concern of the gods: perhaps then they will be motivated to treat people decency. (Speaking as a student of history, I can safely say that this won’t work.) He also urges them to not buy into the idea that their generation must change the world: he tells them to relax, to “skylark”, to enjoy life. One day they will be in charge, and then they can worry about saving the planet.
  • “Address to the National Institute of Arts and Letters, 1971“: Vonnegut expounds on his idea that we are made of nothing more than chemicals that make us yearn for community.

    How lucky you are to be here today, for I can explain everything. Sigmund Freud admitted that he did not know what women wanted. I know what they want. Cosmopolitan magazine says they want orgasms, which can only be a partial answer at best. Here is what women really want: they want lives in folk societies, wherein everyone is a friendly relative and no act or object is without holiness. Chemicals make them want that. Chemicals make us all want that. Chemicals make us furious when we are treated as things rather than persons. When anything happens to us which would not happen to us in a folk society, our chemicals make us feel like fish out of water. Our chemicals demand that we get back into water again. If we become increasingly wild and preposterous in modern times — well, so do fish on river banks, for a little while.”

  • “In a Manner that Must Shame God Himself: reflections on politics.
  • “Address at Rededication of Wheateon College Library, 1973“: Vonnegut writes on the importance of books and the meaning of social narratives.
  • Playboy Interview: one of the longest parts of the book.

As you can see, there’s a lot here. I rather enjoyed the experience of reading it, particularly the interviews and speeches. I’ll end this with one of my favorite quotations from the book. I don’t know why I like it, but I do.

“You have called me a humanist, and I have looked into humanism some, and I have found that a humanist is a person who is tremendously interested in human beings. My dog is a humanist. His name is Sandy. He is a sheep dog. I know that Sandy is a dud name for a sheep dog, but there it is.”

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This Week at the Library (29/10)

Posted on October 29, 2008 by smellincoffee

Books this Update:

(Click titles for individual comments.)

I began this week with A Life of Her Own by Emilie Carles, the autobiography of an extraordinary woman who is born into an ultraconservative farming village in the French alps, but who develops into a strong-minded woman who thinks freely and offers her insightful commentary about social, historical, and political changes in France during the first half of the twentieth century. I found her personality to be exquisite, for lack of a better word. It is astonishing that someone of her background — discouraged from thinking or feeling freely, raised in a society where loyalty to the king and to the church are paramount, where education is suspect — could develop into such a humanistic intellectual.

Next I finished Harry Turtledove’s Worldwar series, which did not end quite the way I thought but in a way that wasn’t all that surprising. The Worldwar series depicts what might have happened had a race of short lizards invaded Earth in May 1942. Unprepared for lengthy resistance, the Lizards grow more and more desperate as they begin to run out of surprise. The industrialized societies, paralyzed by the damage to their infrastructure, are not that much better off. The reader is led to wonder what will become of Earth: will the Lizards abandon it to the nuclear pyre? Will they seek a truce? Will they continue the war, somehow?

Although my reading since this summer has been dominated by fiction, I’m still a student at heart and it was enjoyable to return to history this week. I read Life in a Medieval Castle by Frances and Joseph Gies, a short but quite interesting book about what life was like for castle-dwellers. That part you may have surmised, but the authors explain what it was like to live in the society that castle-dwellers found themselves in. They explain feudalism, manorialism, the making of knights, the role of women, village life, the castle’s role in military and political history, and various other medieval topics. On the whole I found the book to be very interesting, and I definitely recommend it.

Lastly, I read a bit of Star Wars fiction. Death Star concerns the late-stage construction and service of the Death Star. The book is divided into two parts: “Construction” and “Shakedown”. Construction introduces a wide range of richly-developed characters whose life stories bring them all to the Death Star. As they interact with one another and begin to adjust themselves to life on the Station, the station itself is completed and undergoes a shakedown. In the subsequent part of the book, the stories of those on the ship are connected to that of A New Hope. Through the eyes and mind of Darth Vader and Grand Moff Tarkin, we are told that particular story — and the authors successfully weave the stories of their own characters and their own plots into the plot of A New Hope. It was a quick read and quite interesting.

Quotation of the Week: A Life of Her Own. Yes, the entire book. I cannot possibly choose a single line to do justice to the book, but I’ll go with a short one: “I believe it is splendid to leave life with the thought that you have done the maximum possible to defend the ideas you believe just and human, and to help those who need to be helped without discrimination. For me, that is a wonderful feeling.“

Pick of the Week: Frankly, this week generated three favorites. I have to go with A Life of Her Own, though.

Next Week:

  • Nemesis, Isaac Asimov.
  • Marriage and Family in the Middle Ages, Frances and Joseph Gies.
  • Wampeters, Foma, and Granfallons, Kurt Vonnegut.
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Death Star

Posted on October 28, 2008 by smellincoffee

Death Star
Michael Reaves, Steve Perry © 2007
Random House, New York
363 pages.

“That’s no moon. That’s a space station.” – Obi-Wan Kenobi, A New Hope

The Death Star. It dominated the first Star Wars movie. Its destruction at Yavin, in the Star Wars chronology, is of pivotal importance for fans — events are dated as being “Before the Battle of Yavin“. We see the Death Star for the “first time” in Attack of the Clones, when the Genosian admiral displayed a holographic image of it to Count Dooku. At the end of Revenge of the Sith, Darth Vader and Emperor Palpatine stand before the skeleton framework of the Death Star. This book begins nearly two decades later. The Death Star, rapidly approaching completion, has drawn many different characters to it — almost all of them by the will of the Emperor. In its opening chapters, we meet:

  • Atour Riten, an apolitical librarian assigned to the station.
  • Ratua, a convicted smuggler with the ability to photosynthesize who sneaks on board the station while trying to escape a prison planet.
  • Uli Divini, a surgeon assigned to the statio.
  • Nova Stihl, an imperial guardsman and student of philosophy.
  • Tenn Graneet, a gunner whose abilities are rewarded with a post manning the Superlaser.
  • Villian Dance, an Imperial TIE fighter
  • Roothes, a Twi’Lek bartender
  • and Teela Kaarz, an architect and an imperial prisoner.

All of their lives are drawn together at the Death Star, intersecting those of Darth Vader’s, Grand Moff Tarkin’s, Admiral Motti, and countless others. All the ones mentioned (excluding Motti) are viewpoint characters. The novel is split into two parts: “Construction”, detailing how the various characters lives drew them to the Death Star and telling their story during its final days of completion, and “Shakedown”, telling the story of the characters as the events of A New Hope unfold around them — until the very end, when the Death Star meets its fiery end. “Shakedown” thus tells us the story of A New Hope from the perspective of Darth Vader and Grand Moff Tarkin.


Vader smiled under his helmet as a file of stormtroopers arrived with Leia Organa in tow. It was reported that she had shot a trooper before they stunned her. It was hard to think of her showing such bravery — she was so young, so beautiful, dressed in that simple white gown. She reminded him very much of…

No. He would not allow that thought.

She glared at him, managing to look disdainful even though her hands were cuffed. “Darth Vader,” she said, making no effort to hide her contempt. “Only you could be so bold. The Imperial Senate will not sit still for this — when they hear you’ve attacked a diplomatic –“

He cut her off. “Don’t act so surprised, Your Highness. You weren’t on any mercy mission this time.”

(Click to see the scene on YouTube.) The book is dominated by the pre–A New Hope section, which was fine by me. I found the story quite interesting, especially the characterization — I think it is well done. The last chapter — detailing what happens to the various characters in the last moments before the station is destroyed — jumps around a bit, but not too much. The authors work their characters into the story. The helmeted, anonymous gunner who receives the order to fire the superlaser on Alderaan and the expressionless guard in the conference room, as well as so many others, are given personalities — becoming more than just floating heads in the background.

Tenn felt sweat dripping down his neck, under that blasted helmet. He looked at the timer. 00:58:57.

He pulled the lever. […]

The superlaser beam lanced from the focusing point above the dish.

The image of Alderaan on the screen was struck by the green ray.

It took no more than an instant. […] Alderaan exploded into a fiery ball of eye-smiting light almost instantaneously, and a planar ring of energy reflux — the “shadow” of a hyperspace ripple — spread rapidly outward.

The timer read: 00:59:10.

So little time. So much damage. It was incredible.

[…] Billions of lives snuffed out. Just like that.

There was no sense of triumph in it, none. He had not destroyed a Rebel base or a military target. Instead, a planet full of unarmed civilians had been…extinguished.
And he had done it.

It made him feel sick.

The book also tells the story of the characters we don’t get to see — the civilian cantine barkeeps, the common soldiery. The authors have these characters interact with one another, establish relationships, develop patterns. It’s an enjoyable story, and all the while their story is happening as imperial troopers are searching Tatooine for the droids, driving Luke and Obi-Wan off the planet and to the remains of Alderaan, to the Death Star. The authors weave all of these stories together into one cohesive story, one I found interesting until the last. It was worth my while in reading.

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