May bukes #2

[realthog]

And here's the other half . . .




Other Days, Other Eyes (1972) by Bob Shaw

Bob Shaw's story "Light of Other Days" (1966) is one of the great classics of science fiction. In a mere ten pages or so, it succeeded in introducing a brand-new concept to sf (a rarer even than many of us would like to think) while also generating a genuine and very poignant feeling of empathy for its central character (who is not its narrator). A squabbling couple are driving through the Scottish Highlands when they come across a slow-glass farm. Slow glass is a crystalline structure through which (to simplify) light passes very slowly; it can thus be used to observe past scenes. The "farmer" is allowing sheets of the stuff to absorb the light from the spectacular local countryside so that purchasers can take them home to watch those scenes over the months and years to come. As the couple haggle with each other, a young woman and an infant watch them from time to time from the farmhouse window. By story's end they discover that these are the farmer's wife and child, killed six years ago by a hit-and-run driver. The slow glass in his window is preserving for him the illusion that they're still alive. But for how much longer?

Shaw published two more slow-glass stories, both good though neither as powerful as the first: "Burden of Proof" (1967; a barbaric judge sentences a convicted murderer to die even though in five years the proof of the man's innocence may emerge on the far side of a pane of slow glass) and "A Dome of Many-Colored Glass" (1972; a sadistic Chinese official torments a prisoner by fixing to his eyes slow-glass modules containing footage of Western atrocities like My Lai). There was also a late and very different addendum to the corpus: "The Edge of Time" (1979), co-authored with Malcolm Harris and published in an anthology edited by yours truly, Aries 1. Here the conceit is that there are not one but two time dimensions, Presence and Change, and that what's really expanding in our expanding universe is the Change dimension. Serflike pilots take investigatory craft to the boundaries of this bubble, and flirt with the skin of the time so as to send back scientific data. One of these pilots, his instruments destroyed by sabotage, uses the onboard slow glass cunningly in order to plot his way home -- or so, at least, he thinks.

Back in those days, if you wrote a successful series of stories, the next thing you did was construct out of them a novel -- or a "fixup", as the Clute/Nicholls Encyclopedia of Science Fiction somewhat ungraciously called this mercenary literary form. Shaw's slow-glass fixup, Other Days, Other Eyes, was one of his clumsier efforts. The three primary stories are thrown in as interspersed "sidelights" and have nothing aside from slow glass in common with the rest of the plot, which sees Al Garrod, the inadvertent inventor of slow glass, transform himself into a plutocrat industrialist while developing new techniques to enhance the stuff's versatility and usefulness. In the process he must deal with his bitch wife, solve two pretty implausible murder mysteries (only one of which involves slow glass, finally bring a somewhat gauche and jejune extramarital romance to its consummation, and in general fill enough pages for the publishers to market this as a full-length novel. This framing material does take the opportunity to fix a few technical glitches with the original concept (such as explaining why light passing through the slow glass at an angle doesn't take perceptibly longer to reach the other side), but it almost entirely ducks until the very end the practical and ethical problems generated by the introduction of any widespread means of looking into the past -- the havoc of suddenly creating the ultimate surveillance society, as envisaged by Isaac Asimov in his 1956 novella "The Dead Past" and vastly expanded upon by Arthur C. Clarke and Steve Baxter in their 2000 novel The Light of Other Days. Towards the end of Other Days, Other Eyes there's a nod to this concern via occasional mention of a vigilante-style Privacy League, which runs around throwing bricks through slow-glass windows; but it's only in the final pages, when Garrod discovers the government has been spraying the entire nation with slow-glass dust so that no longer can anything at all be kept secret, that Shaw properly acknowledges the fell purposes to which his "invention" could be put.

There are occasional moments of high silliness. The bitch wife, who stupidly blinds herself by refusing to obey Garrod's instructions to make herself scarce from an experiment that's about to blow, is given a replacement form of sight in the form of (essentially) contact lenses made out of slow glass: this way she can see again, even if everything she sees is a day or two late. (Watching TV involves a ludicrously elaborate palaver in order to record the soundtrack and synchronize it with her watching.) But if that technique can be made to work, I hear you cry, why not simply make the lenses out of ordinary glass, so she could see everything in real time? It's not a question I can answer.

Shaw was rarely if ever a tedious writer, so the pages of Other Days, Other Eyes kept turning rapidly enough, but here he seems to be bored -- as if writing the fixup was not something he actually wanted to do, but undertook merely in order to keep agent, publisher and bank manager happy. I wonder if he had his tongue firmly in his cheek when writing about the slow-glass contact lenses; was he testing to see if his publisher would notice the illogicality? There's a surprisingly smutty sex scene that seems there primarily to keep the writer's interest from flagging, and here's the moment when Garrod has the flash of insight that enables him to solve the first of the two murder mysteries:

His knees felt loose, his heart had lapsed into an unsteady, lumping rhythm, and a chill extended downward from stomach to groin. In his head there was a pressure which rapidly built up to a peak and exploded in a kind of psychic orgasm. (p96)

It never happened to Ellery Queen like that, I'm pretty sure.


Fire, Burn! (1957) by John Dickson Carr

This is the third of Carr's three timeslip detections. (The second, Fear is the Same, published as by Carter Dickson, is now on my reading pile.)  The title is from the Macbeth line "Fire, burn, and cauldron bubble" -- which line is quoted occasionally within the text, although its relevance at any point is a little stretched, as in the observation that the victim get herself killed because her emotional cauldron briefly bubbled over. Perhaps she paused to muse. mid-bubble, about there being more things in heaven and earth . . .

The taxi of present-day Detective-Superintendent John Cheviot has just pulled up outside the Yard when he spontaneously (or so it seems) timeslips back to 1829 where, with remarkably little pause for acclimatization, he becomes the first Superintendent of the fledgling Metropolitan Police; he also discovers that he has a mistress, the beautiful widow Lady Flora Drayton, and a reputation for loose living. He is immediately told to go investigate the mystery of who has been stealing the seed from the cages of the exotic birds owned by dotty old aristocrat Lady Cork; with the instinct of any detective finding himself in a John Dickson Carr, he realizes there is a far more sinister crime here than mere petfood thievery . . .

Sure enough, at Lady Cork's house it proves that she has taken to hiding her family jewellery in the birdseed reservoirs -- in other words, what's been stolen is not the seed but the baubles. Before Cheviot can really register this, however, his attention is distracted by an impossible murder: as he and Flora, plus sidekick Alan Henley, watch, Lady Cork's beautiful, wanton-looking but somehow strangely repulsive niece Margaret Renfrew is shot dead by an invisible hand in the middle of a broad, brightly lit corridor. Solving the murder, protecting Flora and himself from suspicion, recovering Lady Cork's jewels, setting his relationship with Flora on a sound footing -- all these tasks and more besides involve Cheviot in such escapades as penetrating the notorious London gambling house Vulcan's and taking on its fearsome boss and a gang of his hoodlums; in a subplot, Cheviot must also deal with a vile and treacherous Guards officer, Hugo Hogben, who seems determined to murder Cheviot because the latter, a filthy scum of a policeman, has been insufficiently obsequious to him. At story's end, the case solved, Hogben kills Cheviot . . . who recovers consciousness back in his real life, having been knocked cold when his taxi was involved in a minor accident. Has his timeslip been a genuine event, or was he merely dreaming?

Bizarrely, when Cheviot emerges into the 19th century it's as if his persona there, while coming into existence only with his arrival, does so complete with a past history: his romance with Flora is clearly of long standing, other characters know him, some well, and Lady Cork makes occasional references to knowing his father. Also a little puzzling is the ease, alluded to above, with which he acclimatizes to the 19th-century society; despite a few stumbles and hastily corrected anachronisms, it's almost as if he has indeed been living a life here in the past era. This all becomes plausible if we accept the "it was all a dream" explanation. But if not . . .?

Leaving aside any quibbles as to its mechanism, this novel is tremendous fun in the usual romping John Dickson Carr fashion. The timeslip part of the plot does add a layer of extra interest, although the main tale could have been told perfectly well without it.


An Acceptable Time (1989) by Madeleine L'Engle

In keeping with my habit of reading novel series in the wrong order (see Margaret J. Anderson, passim), I've just followed my reading of the first volume in L'Engle's Time Quintet with a reading of the fifth. Next up is likely (for arcane reasons) to be the fourth . . .

Teenaged Polly O'Keefe, eldest child of Calvin and Meg from A Wrinkle in Time, is staying with her genius-scientist Murry grandparents in order to get some studying done away from the sibling horde at home. One day Zachary Gray, whom she met briefly while bumming around Europe the previous summer, turns up at the isolated house; he has romance in mind, though constrained in his ambitions by the fact that he's been diagnosed with a weak heart and not given long to go. Together they see a mysterious man with a mysterious dog; returning to the house, they admire a 3000-year-old stone carved with Ogam lines that a family friend, Bishop Nason Colubra, has brought to show Polly's grandparents. Later, when Polly is having a swim, a mysterious girl appears, Anaral, indicating that she is from a far-distant past -- the time of Bishop Colubra's stone. Next day, when Polly is out walking, there's a rumble of the earth and a trembling of the air and she finds herself transported back to Anaral's time. (Among the reasons she knows she's in the past is that the local mountains aren't their rounded placid selves but are all jagged and new-looking. I'd have said a mere 3000 years' erosion wouldn't have made much visible difference to a mountain, but there you go.)

Polly's first trip into the past doesn't last long. Back home, she and her parents talk a lot about the nature of time and of religion, together with the bishop and his sister. It emerges that the bishop knows a lot more about the opening up of the timegate between now and then than he's been letting on; it's because he's been bopping back there regularly that several of the People of the Wind, as Anaral's tribe are called, can speak fluent English. Polly, an astonishing linguist (and, as we later discover, an Olympic-standard swimmer), promptly teaches herself Ogam -- a neat trick if you can do it. Zachary, hearing about what's been going on, insists on dragging her back to the past era, in the hope that, since modern medical science has shown itself incapable of curing his heart condition, perhaps a prehistoric shaman might have better luck. (I must confess I stared at the page in disbelief when this bit of plotting Bandaid was introduced.)

This time, though, Polly and Zachary -- and the bishop, who's made the transition independently -- find that they can't get home to their own time so easily: the timegate is closed. Further, all is not well with the People of the Wind. The rascally People Across the Lake, who've been suffering a drought, have been raiding for crops and cattle. Because Polly has a mop of red hair and because she appears to have been befriended by a snake, both lots of People tend to think she's a goddess -- and there's a general inclination to sacrifice her to the Mother to either (a) stop the raids or (b) bring rain. Zachary, whose whingeing has by now reached epic proportions, betrays Polly to the People Across the Lake in the hope that their healer will cure his heart condition in return for the tribe being allowed to blood-sacrifice her. The relationship between them will never be quite the same again.

Needless to say, after many a conniption, Polly escapes being forced to perform a propitiatiory function, the two Peoples sort out their differences thanks to her ministrations, the time travellers get home, the news is broken to Zachary that, under the circumstances, rather than anticipating a bright romantic future with Polly, he might be better advised to stick his head in a location inconvenient to describe, and -- this being a L'Engle book -- a whole lot of devoutery is spouted.

In fact, I found the devoutery in this book, while there's quite a lot of it (the very title is from Psalms: "Lord, I make my prayer to you in an acceptable time"), far less oppressive than in A Wrinkle in Time. I think this is probably because it seems to appear just as a natural part of the plot (and with one of the characters a bishop, it's to be expected); in the earlier book, there were instances where the religiosity seemed just to have been jammed in gratuitously while, elsewhere, there was a suspicion that perhaps the whole purpose of the book was to push a religious agenda. Further, in An Acceptable Time, the tone of the religiosity is much altered: it seems far more ecumenical and indeed liberal: there's no attempt to force the People of the Wind to abandon their reverence for the Mother and take up worship of the as-yet-unborn Christ instead. And there are some direct challenges to the faux-Christian right:

"The idea of blood sacrifice is gone from our frame of reference, but it's not that much different or worse than things that go on today. What else is the electric chair or lethal injection than human sacrifice?"
    "We're told that it's to protect society," Polly said.
    "Isn't Tav trying to protect his society in the only way he knows how? [. . .]" (p183)

All in all, although this is a much longer book than A Wrinkle in Time, and although some of the plot's mechanics creaked near-deafeningly, I found it by far the more readable of the two books. I am less apprehensive about reading the other books in the series than I was.


Islam and Science, Medicine, and Technology (2009) by Sally Ganchy

I've been reading around a lot about Islamic science recently. Most of the books concerned I've read only partially (hence their lack of a mention here); one thing many of them have in common is that they're pushing a view of some kind -- either that Islamic science was truly wonderful for reasons that, on analysis, don't really bear up, or that Islamic science is barely worth a mention, being nothing more than preservation of Greek and other texts. (Karen Armstrong's 2000 book Islam: A Short History manages, incredibly, to ignore Islamic science and scientists almost entirely -- no Alhazen, no Geber, no Omar Khayyam. Avicenna and Averroes get a mention, but only to talk about their theology. In a history of Christianity this lacuna might at a stretch be explicable on the grounds that theology was her focus, but that doesn't wash with Islam, where the quest for knowledge is supposedly inseparable from the quest for God.) I felt the need for a short overview of the subject that wouldn't require me to wade through thickets of justification or theological score-settling, and Ganchy's little book, designed I think with young adults in mind, fitted the bill just perfectly. Although it has its flaws (her roundup of modern Islamic scientists inexplicably includes the entrepreneur who founded eBay but excludes Abdus Salam, who shared the 1979 Nobel Physics Prize; she does, however, catch Ahmed Zewail, Chemistry laureate in 1999), I'd recommend this to anyone seeking, as I was, a quick introduction that's clear of unnecessary clutter.


Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus (1996) by Orson Scott Card

It constantly amazes me the gulf there is between Card's obnoxious and forcefully expressed social opinions and the humanitarian voice that speaks through many of his novels, but never more so than in this instance.

In the not-so-far future, the earth seems to be recovering from the onslaught of the 20th and 21st centuries. The human population has stabilized at a smallish fraction of the current level. Employees of the organization called Pastwatch spend their time scanning history using a device that can passively observe the past . . . and, they begin to suspect, perhaps not entirely passively, because it seems the occasional sensitive can detect the "presence" of the observers. One research project is to pinpoint those moments in history whose consequences led to the devastation of the planet and the human species's current sorry shape. The crucial moment appears to be Christopher Columbus's decision, in the wake of his near-miraculous survival after a shipwreck, to sail westward across the Atlantic in search of new lands to exploit and new souls to save for Christ. The Pastwatchers are appalled when they witness the instant of his making that decision: he received a visitation from two human figures and a dove -- Father, Son and Holy Ghost, in the iconography of the time -- who told him the westward voyage should be his holy duty. The Pastwatchers recognize these figures must be time travellers from an alternate future, a future so bad that its denizens have resorted to altering the past in order to erase it and of course, in the process, themselves.

[Why should that be an inevitable consequence? In the physics of time expressed in this book, there are no alternative realities: always only the one. This is because the quanta of time -- "moments" -- are quite discrete from each other. "When the machine was introduced into our history, from that point forward a new infinite set of moments completely replaced the old infinite set of moments. There were no spare leftover moment-locations for the old moments to hang around in." (p194) And the fact that the time device was created in a future that, the instant it used the device, ceased ever to have existed is no paradox because, while it seems to us that causality is timelike, in fact causality is independent of time and its functionings unamenable to rational analysis (rather like the Jungian concept of synchronicity): in particular, "Causality can be recursive but time cannot." (p193).]

So some event in the other history happened that would have been forestalled by Columbus sailing the ocean blue, as he did in our own past. What could it have been? A young Pastwatcher builds a near-watertight case that it was the discovery, not of the New World by the Old, but of the Old World by the New -- the conquest of Europe by the Tlaxcalans, who brought with them the hideous practice of mass human torture-sacrifice that was rife among all the South American cultures of the era.

Around this time in our future, time travel is developed, and the Pastwatchers are obviously highly interested by this field of technology so close to the one they're using. Also, it occurs to them that, just like their counterparts, they could perhaps alter history to lead to a happier outcome. This notion is spurred by the discovery that the earth is not in fact recovering, as people had thought: any recovery will be centuries or millennia in the future, by which time the human species will be long gone. Again they focus on Columbus. If they could, by scuttling his ships, make it impossible for him immediately to return to Europe after his New World landfall, and if they could play upon the Christian sensibilities of the man such as to deflect his mind off gold and slavery toward converting the local civilizations to good liberal values . . . So they send back three volunteers to the 15th century, thereby erasing everyone else after Columbus's time (us included) from reality. Can those three pull off the task?

This book is extraordinarily slow to get itself off the ground -- about two-thirds of the text is occupied by the setting-up (alternating between the 15th century and the Pastwatchers' present) preparatory to the actual time travel -- and the characterization of some of the major movers and shakers manages to achieve the feat of seeming both laboured and perfunctory at the same time. Much of that setting-up is in itself fascinating (there's a really neat Atlantis/Noah hypothesis!), and it was only a few times that a sense of "oh, for gawd's sake get on with it" swept over me. The writing is up to Card's usual high and elegant standard (although near the end there are some signs of apparent haste). Overall, I'd recommend this to friends as worth their time.


Social Darwinism in American Thought (revised edition 1959) by Richard Hofstadter

The original, 1944, edition of this book essentially brought the term "Social Darwinism" into the language; it had appeared in occasional journal papers, etc., ever since the basic philosophy had been put forward by UK philosopher Herbert Spencer in the years starting fractionally before the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species (1859), but Hofstadter's usage popularized it. Not surprisingly, his usage differs in meaning somewhat from our current one, since he's concerned with all the theories of society that modelled themselves on or were inspired by (or simply sought to justify themselves using) the idea of evolution by natural selection -- the attempts of sociologists (another term not used until long after the events described in the earlier parts of this book) to harness to their generally ideological purposes the latest  findings (or at least their understanding of these) of evolutionary and behavioural biology, whatever these might be. Thus, as well as the fairly abhorrent and socially destructive Social Darwinism (modern meaning of term) of people like Spencer and the man whom we might very loosely label his US bulldog, William Graham Sumner, and the even more repulsive ideas produced by eugenicists, racists, theorists of the "evolutionary warmonger" stripe (including Theodore Roosevelt), and those who believed the white man's duty was to exterminate the coloured races, we find the far more beneficent ideas of those like Lester Ward and Thorstein Veblen, both of whom eschewed socialistic notions but at the same time advanced theories which seem to accommodate fairly well with what today we'd call social democracy; in other words, they weren't leftists (though naturally enough they were accused of such by the FOX News equivalents of their day) but good, solid, decent-hearted liberals.

I made a note to try to track down some books by Ward and Veblen through the library system after things calm down a bit for me workwise (before reading Hofstadter's book, while I'd vaguely heard the two names, I couldn't have told you if they were sociologists or baseball players); I must also try to read a little more William James than I have, since he has a way of pithily capturing what should be, but too often aren't, self-evident truths. When Roosevelt was prancing around preaching his horrible gospel that men needed wars with defenceless brown-skinned people in order to prove or enhance their manliness, James pierced the pretension of the man with the observation that Roosevelt was "still mentally in the Sturm und Drang period of early adolescence" (p195), and his rebuttal of the Social Darwinists (modern use of term) made me punch the air with delight:

The entire modern deification of survival per se, survival returning to itself, survival naked and abstract, with the denial of any substantive excellence in what survives, except the capacity for more survival still, is surely the strangest intellectual stopping-place ever proposed by one man to another. (p201)

Although there was a lot to interest me in this book, at the same time I found the text somewhat boring; it was an effort to read, and I had to keep reminding myself of the good bits there had been already and the likelihood that I could be amid more of their like just as soon as I turned the next page. I don't regard this as Hofstadter's fault: first of all, he was writing for a readership other than me (i.e., for social scientists and social historians rather than just lay readers); secondly, he was writing for people conditioned by the attitudes and knowledge-state of the 1950s, not the 2010s -- for example, the text frequently made offhand illusions to people I'd never heard of but whose ideas Hofstadter assumed were familiar to his readers and needed no further explanation: there's little more tedious than the realization that, through ignorance, you're comprehensively missing the author's point. The half-century's social difference works both ways, though; here's a Hofstadter sentence that made me sigh: "Lacking an influential military caste, the United States never developed a strong military cult audacious enough to glorify war for its own sake" (p184).

I was led to read this book by Susan Jacoby's The Age of American Unreason, which Jacoby obviously considers indebted to it (and about which I shall ramble very shortly). I found Jacoby's book a wonderful read -- witty, hilarious and profound by turn, with prose that rattled along like a stream over pebbles -- and so I came to Hofstadter's expecting more of the same. That I was disappointed is, again, both not Hofstadter's fault and likely a product of the half-century that has passed since he wrote the book.


Manifold: Time (2000) by Stephen Baxter

This is an extraordinarily ambitious and complex novel . . . and in it I have at last found an sf story that accords with the pejorative phrase Margaret Atwood uses to diminish all the science fiction she doesn't write herself: yes, this is the skiffy novel that has talking squid in it! In fact, the way Baxter has handled the sections featuring the squid impressed me greatly: I found myself empathizing with the creatures in a way I would not have thought possible.

In a future so near we've actually reached it -- the novel's set in the year 2010 (Baxter, recall, was writing a decade ago) -- roguish entrepreneur and obvious naughty boy Reid Malenfant has a dream of thwarting the bureaucracy of NASA and returning humanity to space. In the remote Mojave desert he has gathered shuttle castoffs on the pretext of using the engines as the ultimate incinerator for toxic wastes; in fact he's building a Big Dumb Booster capable of launching a craft to the asteroid belt. Said craft is to be crewed by an enhanced squid, whose immersion in an aqueous environment will offer much protection from radiation. (The rationale for using a squid rather than, say, a robot was the book's weakest plot element, I thought; but I liked the squid so I wasn't complaining.)

Into Malenfant's life comes Cornelius Taine, creepy representative of a shadowy organization called Eschatology whose conviction it is that humankind has at best 200 years to live. This conviction is based on a probabilistic observation (which for the purpose of the novel is called the Carter Catastrophe): if humanity's future stretches for millions or even just hundreds of thousands of years, with a rising or even just a stable population, the odds against any particular individual humans -- you and me -- being alive today, right at the beginning of humankind's story, are infinitesimal. Since we are alive today, the odds must be heavily in favour of humankind's history not having a whole bundle of time left to run. Hm. I know that lots of probabilistic conclusions are strikingly counterintuitive, but even with that in mind I'm not sure I can go along with this one. Surely it's the case that, no matter how long or short human history will be, some humans have to be alive in 2010 -- somebody has to be "it", just in the same way that somebody has to be the one who tosses 100 tails in a row. If it's near-infinitely improbable that I should be born into the species so early in its history, think how unlikely it would be for, say, Shakespeare to have been born into it several hundred years earlier. And the chances are so slender for Plato and Aristotle and Pythagoras that we can say with some confidence that they never existed at all.

Clearly I'm not the only person to regard the Carter Catastrophe as a false conclusion, because Baxter goes to the trouble of including a section (pp117-19) delineating some of the objections that can be raised to it. He does this in the form of a round-robin e-mail reminiscent of the sort of global-warming denialist communiques that come out of wingnut organizations like Newsmax and WorldNewsDaily, and some of the objections are quite clearly intended as specious, but others are less so: "Since no humans of the future are yet alive, it isn't in the least surprising that we aren't among them" (p118); in other words, if the future is short, the probabilities surely shift the other way, so that it becomes unlikely that you or I could be born so near to the end of the species's story. Even so, "No tame expert would stand up and say he or she could demonstrate the damn thing was bullshit in simple enough terms for the president to deliver to the nation, the panicking world" (p120) rings true: it's about time we stopped demanding simple explanations for everything, and took on our responsibility as adults to try to get our heads around complicated ones.

So maybe I'm talking rubbish, just concealing from myself my reluctance to grapple with something complicated . . .

Talking of complicated, back to the book:

Taine and his buddies are convinced that the folk of the future will be sending us back messages (Timescape-style) to tell us how to get round the Carter Catastrophe and thereby allow them to come into existence. If this seems in its turn counterintuitive, it becomes less so if we take on board the Feynmanesque notion that the universe is full of -- indeed, exists because of -- myriads of quantum standing waves that run "simultaneously" both backward and forward in time between pairs of spatiotemporal locations; these past-future-past "handshakes" can occur because "no time passes for a wave traveling at light speed" (p112). If you communicate in such a means with the past in order to effect a change there, you will alter the universe, which will have to repair itself by creating a whole new set of self-consistent past-future-past "handshakes" -- a new future, in simple. And it's using a similar concept -- the "Feynman radio" -- that our heroes set out to try to receive one of those putative messages from the future . . . which of course they do.

The pair of numbers they receive identifies, they eventually realize, the asteroidal body called Cruithne, sometimes called "earth's second moon" because its orbit around the sun is gravitationally linked to ours. Off they send the enhanced squid Sheena to Cruithne, where she discovers -- 2001-style -- an alien artefact: a time portal in the form of a big blue ring. What our chums didn't know when sending her was that she was pregnant; her offspring, aided by little exploration robots, start creating for themselves the beginnings of an industrial civilization on the asteroid. One of the squid, trailed by a camera-bearing exploration 'bot, takes the plunge and goes through the portal . . . to a time 75 million years in the future when Cruithne, long ago slingshot out of solar orbit, can look "down" upon a Galaxy that's obviously been moulded by the activities of intelligent life -- us. Squid and bot repeat the process several times, each time going hugely further into the future, until all that's left of the universe is a degenerated vacuum; this vacuum can, though, be used as a sort of giant, zero-energy computer RAM in which the final humans live immortally as TRON-style constructs.

Malenfant and Taine broadcast the video of all this to the world, which reacts even worse to it all than it did on receiving news of the Carter Catastrophe. The two men decide they must go to Cruithne to investigate for themselves, taking along Malenfant's ex-wife Emma Stoney (who despite not being mentioned above is arguably the novel's central character) and the boy Michael, who's one of the so-called Blue children.

Ah, yes, the Blue children. Here and there all over the world there've been emerging, born of ordinary enough parents, children who're so much more intelligent than the average that they seem like a different species -- the next evolutionary step after Homo sapiens, as it were. The reaction  of us ordinary saps to these children, even sometimes of the children's parents, is one of instinctive loathing. The special schools set up for them have to be closed down eventually, because the staff start mistreating the kids; when the US Govt takes over, promising kindness and delight, that falls apart pretty fast as well. Eventually the kids in one Govt establishment build a magnetic cage capable of trapping a travelling lump of quark matter (think along the lines of neutronium), using it to kill a Fundie staff member who was about to obey the Voice of God by murdering them; the US Govt decides the kids are too dangerous to live, and nukes the establishment. But, when the smoke clears, the kids escape in a jury-rigging craft to the moon . . .

The Blue children are, we begin to gather, another form of messages from the future folk.

Enraged because Malenfant didn't fill in all the requisite forms before setting off to Cruithne, the US Govt despatches a shipful of Marines after them. That ends badly for the Marines, because their craft is attacked first by the squid and then -- terminally -- by Taine. The one surviving Marine does her best to kill our pals; fleeing her, Malenfant grabs the badly injured Stoney and leaps through the time portal and into the first of a long, evolving sequence of universes, each just slightly more structured by its physical laws than the last, that they witness by passing repeatedly through the portal. Finally they make it back to the Cruithne that exists in our own universe and our own time.

Meanwhile another character, a US Senator who's been playing a sort of Best Supporting Actress role through all the other shenanigans, is discovering from the Blue children on the moon yet another timelike idea:

Perhaps, the children seemed to be suggesting, fundamental particles -- electrons and quarks and such -- were actually spacetime defects, kinks in the fabric. For instance, a positive charge could be the mouth of a tiny wormhole threaded by an electric field, with a negative charge the other mouth, the flow of the field through the wormhole looking, from the outside, like a source and sink of charge. [. . .] The children seemed to be saying that the key was to regard particles not just as loops or folds in space but as folds in time as well. [. . .] This has clear implications for causality. The properties of a fundamental particle would be determined by measurements that can be made on it only in the future. That is, there is a boundary condition that is in principle unobservable in the present . . . [. . .] In this worldview it was this breach of causality that provided uncertainty, the famous multivalued fuzziness of the quantum world. (p359)

There's quite a lot of story still to go, including the discovery that the motives of the future folk are entirely different from the ones we'd been guessing. The novel has a sort of Stapledonian relish for big ideas and cosmic consequences. Its appeal comes less through the tale-telling -- Baxter has never been the most fluent of writers, and this applies here too -- and certainly less through the characterization (the first of the various squid is perhaps the most fully realized character of all, which says something about the others; Reid Malenfant is essentially the bastard offspring of Clark Kent and Superman) than through the juggling of mighty concepts: it's quite in keeping that the grand finale should be the initiation of the process that will destroy the universe . . . while birthing its countless "offspring". I confess I found the first half or so of the book to be hard work, and not just because some of the science required me to screw up my face and pout a bit before I could persuade myself I sort of understood it. In the second half, my reading picked up a fair momentum, and by the end I was decidedly breathless . . . and exhausted.

My brain needs some relaxation after that. I think another John Dickson Carr book is called for.


Fear is the Same (1956) by Carter Dickson

This completes my reading of the three John Dickson Carr timeslip historical detections (the others being The Devil in Velvet and Fire, Burn!). This, the second to be written (and done under his Dickson pseudonym), is much of a muchness with the other two -- which is to say, it's a tremendous amount of fun, the mystery aspect of it is well handled, but the timeslip element is perfunctory. In this instance Jennifer Baird and Philip Clavering, Lord Glenarvon, find themselves in Regency London with a feeling that they've known another life, and that they've known each other, and been romantically entwined, in that life. Jenny, whose "memories" of that life, 150 years in the future, expand slightly ahead of Philip's, soon dimly recalls they were tangled up in a murder case then and that when Phil was in terrible danger -- presumably because convincingly framed for the crime -- she'd impassionedly wished they could be carried off into a different time altogether. Well, so they have been . . . but it looks as if the events of the 20th century are going to be "repeated" back here at the end of the 18th.

Phil's wife Chloris is magnetically sexy but poisonous. Expecting him soon to drop dead of a heart attack so that she can inherit his fortune, she has been carrying on an affair with pompous stuffed-shirt swordsman Colonel Thornton, a man swift to defend his honour even though he evidently has none. When Phil -- "inexplicably changed" into a much stronger and more vibrant man than Chloris has known him, capable of kicking Thornton downstairs -- knowing now that he loves Jenny, starts to demand a divorce, Chloris says she'll think about it, but not tonight. Even so, that night he goes to her room to demand they talk terms, only to find her place has been taken by her similar-looking maid Molly, Chloris having slipped out the back way presumably to the arms of her fancy man. Phil leaves the maid, having helped himself to a glass of what proves to be opium-laced wine, and falls into profound slumber in his own room. The next morning the maid is found strangled in Chloris's room, and everyone assumes Phil went there in the dark and accidentally killed the wrong woman.

The lovers go on the run, being sheltered first by Richard Brinsley Sheridan at the Drury Lane Theatre, then by vicious, untrustworthy underworld boss Samuel Holder. They are rescued from Holder's clutches by a cluster of Regency notables headed by the Prince of Wales himself, who has befriended them and whom Carr/Dickson portrays as a figure not blatantly distinguishable from his series character Sir Henry Merrivale. But even after Phil has unravelled the facts of the murder, events conspire against them . . . In the last few pages, they return to their present, where they find a very similar murder case has been solved in their absence, and that the menace Jenny "remembered" has now evaporated.

For most of the book, my interest had no chance to flag. The sole exception came fairly late on (pp214-43), where Carr indulged in one of those big, contrived set pieces that mar a few of his other novels. Here the Prince of Wales, the Duke of York, Sheridan, etc., all descend on a disused church where Holder intends to force Phil (whose secret life in the 20th century is as a pugilist) to take on Gentleman Jackson in a bareknuckle fight to the finish; the dignitaries intervene, for reasons that aren't terribly clear; the Prince acts as referee while boxer Phil takes on in the ring swordsmen Thornton and Holder simultaneously; when he wins, the dignitaries face down an army of Bow Street Runners to give the lovers safe conduct to Carlton House. I suppose this sequence is all right in its way; it reminded me, though, of one of those stupid Hollywood movies where the directors have thought it witty to stuff in as many cameo parts as possible -- I didn't know whether to yawn or be irritated.

And there's an odd bit. At one point Phil, coloured by his more brutal Regency persona, dishes out a backhander to Chloris. When she picks herself up, she makes it plain that she quite likes a bit of the rough. I'd not have thought much about this except that I recalled, back in The Devil in Velvet, one of Sir Nick's floozies had similar masochistic tendencies. What dark little secret, I wonder, lurked behind the urbane mask of one of my favourite mystery writers . . .


The Age of American Unreason (2008) by Susan Jacoby

Although I'd vaguely heard her name, I hadn't come across Jacoby's work before; now that I have, my Powells wish list has taken a walloping . . .

With a wonderfully fresh, witty prose, a lot of humour and just the right touch of fogeyishness, in The Age of American Unreason she tackles the very evident modern social problem of rapidly spreading irrationality among Americans -- and not just among what I nervously call the underclasses -- that has occurred partially but not entirely in consequence of a catastrophic dumbing-down of our culture. After an introductory chapter on contemporary "just us folks" culture -- try plugging "folks" into all the relevant places in the Gettysburg Address to get a measure of the paucity of modern politicians' thought processes alongside Lincoln's -- she takes up the story at the dawn of the new nation, skipping rapidly from there to the 19th/20th centuries cusp and the impact of the pseudoscience of Social Darwinism. Here she follows the line of Richard Hofstadter's Social Darwinism in American Thought (1944/59), that it's meaningful to describe Social Darwinism as having been a "movement" (or an approximation thereof), rather than the more common recent assessment that Social Darwinism was a later invention applied in retrospect to a rather disparate group of philosophers. Further chapters deal with the McCarthy witch hunts, the importance of the 1950s' middlebrow culture, the gains and excesses of the 1960s (her brief drubbing of Timothy Leary on pp174-5 is alone practically worth the entrance fee), etc., before she reaches the present (and recent past), where a series of chapters examines such topics as junk thought, that "New Old-Time Religion" and the collapse of attention spans in a "Culture of Distraction". Her final two chapters are entitled "Public Life: Defining Dumbness Downward" and "Cultural Conservation".

As many will perceive, this book could have been designed specifically with moi in mind; I was joyously punching the air so often it was begging me for mercy. All of my disgustingly snobby elitisms and intellectual pretensions -- such as my boring-old-fartish preference for cultural artefacts that are worth more than the 30 seconds it takes to watch a YouTube clip -- were amply catered to (lemme tell you about the lambasting of chicklit; or just see Timothy Leary, op. cit.). But don't get the idea that I was enjoying the book just as a sort of echo chamber: I learnt a very great deal from it, in particular from its chapters on the middlebrow culture of the 1950s and on Social Darwinism (I learnt more, I think, from Jacoby's breezy roundup than I did, later, from Hofstadter's book). And her hilarious skewing of various cultural icons is just an aspect of something more important, which is her constant pattern of offering accurate insights into ideas and social pillars that we all too often regard as givens but which are revealed, under Jacoby's spotlight, to be follies.

One of many conclusions I came away with was that the oft-bemoaned political polarization in this country today is likely connected in some way (it's not a one-to-one relationship) with a polarization between those who read widely and voraciously, spending considerable portions of their time in this activity, and those who don't. Another was that the sole major trouble with this book is that the very people who might gain the most from reading it probably never will.


God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom (2009) by Mano Singham

This extremely readable book surveys the legal battles that have taken place in the US as various agencies of the devout have attempted, despite the First Amendment, to get the teaching of the Creationist fantasy into the public schools either in place of or alongside the theory of evolution by natural selection -- Darwinism, to use the slightly misleading shorthand. Although there are introductory chapters discussing the reception Darwin's dangerous idea got in the US, both initially and after the devout had had time to think about its implications, essentially God vs. Darwin is bookended by the Scopes Trial of 1925 and the Dover Trial of 2005, with discussion in between of several other significant court battles, including Epperson v. Arkansas (1968) and Edwards v. Aguillard (1987). There was a lot in all this that I'd come across before, of course, while I was writing Discarded Science and Corrupted Science, but the approach was something of a change (for me) and, refreshingly, there was stuff I hadn't known much about -- like the behind-the-scenes shenanigans leading up to the Scopes Trial: I'd known these were, um, quirky, but not quite how quirky! And, anyway, even had the book contained nothing new to me I'd have kept going: the author has a very engaging style that made this book a joy to read.

My only complaint? There are quite a few text boxes in the book, of which many are serving little useful function. I don't know if Singham was told by his publisher that there had to be something to add visual interest to the text, or if perhaps the worry was that the book was too short and needed some bumping out. Either way, boxes like "Questions Darrow Might Ask Bryan Today" (p48) and "What Might Darwin have Thought about the Turmoil His Work Aroused across the Atlantic?" (p147) seem to be mere distractions, bad ideas dreamt up in a pub somewhere. And, as regards those text boxes that do have something of value to add -- like "Excerpts from Clarence Darrow's Questioning of William Jennings Bryan" (pp43-46) -- my immediate thought was: why not just incorporate this stuff into the main text, which is where it really belongs?

That aside, I found the book a great pleasure -- much recommended.


One of these days I must get round to cross-posting all these to GoodReads -- I still haven't posted my April notes there, so I'm well behind . . .

Comments

[jmward14.livejournal.com]

*sniff* They promised your presence at Balticon. They put your picture in the program and everything. But you weren't there! The whole con was ruined, absolutely ruined!
*whiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinnnnnnnnnnnnneeeeeee*

[realthog.livejournal.com]

Believe it or not, the opportunity to see your good self was a major factor luring us to try to make it to the con. But, alas, it just Was Not To Be. I'm barely getting time to sleep at the moment, because of the book for Prometheus and the time-travel essay for Keith Brooke. Luckily there's no particularly urgent deadline on the Science Fiction Encyclopedia work . . .

They put your picture in the program and everything.

Golly. Now I feel really rotten! Hm. I wonder where they got the photo . . .

xx

[jmward14.livejournal.com]

I'm innocent of that one, honest! I didn't even know you planned to be there until I was flipping through the program.
But of all the reasons to miss a con, having too much work has to be one of the best. :-) Congratulations on all the books and essays.
Love and smiles,