June bukes #1

[realthog]

As I did for May, I'm splitting my monthly bukes roundup into two parts to ease the strain on LJ's software. Our quick trip to Toronto, with its long train journeys fore and aft, helped my reading efforts toward the two current projects.

Lots of good books encountered or re-encountered this month. Details behind the cut. I've still not posted the notes from April and May onto GoodReads; perhaps I'll try to get that done tonight.

The Big Time (1961) by Fritz Leiber

I read this in my early teens and was crushingly disappointed by it. I knew enough about sf to know that for a novel to win a Hugo was a Big Thing, I'd read Isaac Asimov's first anthology of Hugo-winning shorts, I'd read a few Hugo-winning novels that had pinned me gasping to my seat . . . and yet this novel I'd picked up and hurried home with eagerly because of the big HUGO WINNER on the cover was a slight little thing, staged entirely in a single room and its antechambers, narrated in a quirky fashion, and with not a lot going on of yer actual dramatic action. Galaxies remained unspanned, gobs unsmacked.

So I was a little nervous when I picked up The Big Time again after an elapse of, gawdelpus, nearly half a century. This time around the novel's slenderness struck me as one of its major appeals . . .

. . . and then I read it, and discovered at last why it's absolutely right that this book should have won a Hugo -- in fact, it's depressing the book was published at a time when the ghetto walls around sf were tall and strong, because really the novel deserved wider recognition than a Hugo could offer.

Greta Forzane is an "Entertainer" in The Place, a Recuperation Station, one of a number of Places where troops go for R&R in between tours of duty as they fight the Change War, the war between the Spiders and the Snakes that's waged by altering history in order to effect desirable changes in the future. The troops -- and ancillary personnel like Greta -- are recruited ("Resurrected") by being plucked out of their lives in the Little Time soon before their deaths and brought into the Big Time, which is the amorphous spatiotemporal region that's outside spacetime and via which it's possible to travel immediately from one point in the Little Time's chronology to another. (One of the possibilities the denizens of the Big Time especially dread is Change Death, which happens when a change in history shifts the moment of your death to a point before that of your "Resurrection".) Making desirable changes to history is not as easy as you might think, because, as Leiber explains in his Introduction to the 1982 Collier edition (the SFBC version of which is the one I read),

I assumed a Law of the Conservation of Reality, meaning that the past would resist change (temporal reluctance) and tend to work back quickly into its old course, and you'd have to go back and make many little changes, sometimes over and over again, before you could get a really big change going [. . .] It still seems to me a plausible assumption, reflecting the tenacity of events and the difficulty of achieving anything of real significance in this cosmos -- a measure of the strength of the powers that be. (p3)

Into The Place, which has something of the Blue Angel about it, tumble one day three weary temporal soldiers -- a Nazi officer, Erich (who is Greta's occasional lover and who beats her), a Roman legionnaire (whom she also knows) and a stranger, an English poet who met his death in WWI. While they are still settling in for their R&R, another trio arrives: a centaur, a creature from the moon when the moon was civilized millions of years ago, and a Minoan warrior princess . . . bearing with them what proves to be a 1950s atom bomb. One of Greta's fellow-Entertainers falls in love with the poet, whose work she has adored all her life and whose tragically early death in the trenches has always made him seem yet more romantic. While the principals are discussing various surprisingly interesting existential matters ("Can we tell the difference between the past and the future? Can we any longer locate the now, the real now of the cosmos?" -- p 65), one of their number switches off and hides the Major Maintainer, the gadget that maintains The Place in its correct relationship with not just the rest of the Big Time but the rest of all reality. The cast (a term I use because the novel reads in some ways like a stage play) could be trapped here in isolation forever. Yet, since The Place is only one big room and a couple of secondary ones, where -- and how -- could the Major Maintainer have been hidden in such a fashion that even the most painstaking search fails to reveal it?

Minds are concentrated when Erich, the sociopathic Nazi, arms the atom bomb so that it'll detonate within half an hour. The only way to escape the blast would seem to be to locate the Major Maintainer and then, reconnected to the rest of reality once more, sling the device out of The Place before it can explode. In other words, the characters' survival depends on their ability to solve what's a fairly distinguished locked-room mystery. (The solution, when it finally appears, is one that John Dickson Carr would have been pleased with.)

As noted above, the Change War is being waged between the Spiders and the Snakes. No one knows what the purpose of the war is, or what result could possibly constitute victory for one side of the other. None of the cast, although their nominal allegiance is with the Spiders, have ever met a Spider, and certainly they've never met a Snake; they have no idea, in fact, who or what the Spiders and Snakes are. To most of the characters, especially the soldiers, this barely matters: they loudly detest the Snakes, have great loyalty toward the Spiders. Exceptions are Greta herself, with whose thoughts we grow most acquainted since she's our narrator, and the poet, Bruce, who is likewise, as a poet, introspective. It's Bruce who, in an impassioned oration to the others, spells out the reality of war as it affects ordinary soldiers and civilians:

But I'm forgetting that this is a cosmic war and that the Spiders are conducting operations on billions, trillions of planets and inhabited gas clouds through millions of ages and that we're just one little world -- one little solar system [. . .] -- and we can hardly expect our inscrutable masters, with all their pressing preoccupations and far-flung responsibilities, to be especially understanding or tender in their treatment of our pet books and centuries, our favorite prophets and periods, or unduly concerned about preserving any of the trifles that we just happen to hold dear. (p63)

Now, of course, I have to try to lay hands on Leiber's spinoff shorter Change War pieces: "Try and Change the Past", "Damnation Morning", "The Oldest Soldier", "Knight to Move" and "No Great Magic".


Time Trap (1970) by Keith Laumer

Laumer has always struck me as being Ron Goulart without the wit . . .

Roger Tyson's car breaks down in the midst of a thunderstorm. He tries to flag down a cute lady motorcyclist but she swerves to miss him, plunges off the road, and hits a tree. Before she dies she gives him instructions as to what he should do, most notably that he should take the gadget she's just pulled out of her ear and stick it in his own -- which he does, to discover that, even though she is dead, her thoughts aren't and she can communicate with him. Back on the road, he tries to flag down another motorist, noticing just too late that this one looks like a giant tentacled rutabaga with a pizza for its single eye. This traveller, too, swerves; it dies in the resulting smash. Roger climbs aboard the dead woman's bike and heads for town. There, with the help of the instructions from his earpiece, he discovers in the restroom of the bus station an Aperture -- a dazzling line of light. To escape arrest under suspicion of intent to commit graffiti in the restroom (I told you this lacked Goulart's wit), he dives through the Aperture and into another world.

Thanks to Apertures, he proceeds to pass through an array of other worlds, often pursued by the rutabaga (whom he later discovers is an alien being of a species called the Rhox) -- which continues the pursuit no matter how often he kills it. Indeed, as he adds friendly (and not so friendly) companions, he discovers that, in whichever world they might be, they seem to be confined to a single, endlessly looping day: with each new dawn the food that they ate yesterday is restored, anyone who died yesterday is restored to life, and so forth. It's up to Roger to try to establish the rules of this time trap and, of course, to break them. His adventuring eventually leads him to the far-future epoch where the lady motorcyclist, Q'nell, came from; he recognizes her, although for her it's the first time she's met him. She and her colleagues are in effect museum curators; all the different realities through which Roger has chased are, so Q'nell and co believe, museum exhibits, and they're intent on putting an end to the disruption to the museum that he and his chums have been causing. To this end, they propose to send Q'nell back in time . . . thereby, as Roger points out, futilely restarting the loop. So, this time, he goes back with her . . .

Obviously, this being a wacky novel, that doesn't go to plan either. At last Roger finds himself in the presence of a robot, UKR, who really knows what's going on: there are 10,404,941,602 capsule realities, of which Roger has experienced but a tiny fraction, and they're in effect the 10,404,941,602 microscope slides of an experimental series that UKR is maintaining as part of a Filing System he -- it? -- runs for the mysterious extratemporal Builders, or Builder. By story's end, all is stabilized and of course Roger gets the girl. No one gets a cigar for guessing who the Builder turns out to be.

As will be evident, there are some jolly good skiffy ideas mixed in here among the lavatory humour, some truly appalling sexism and a plethora of jokes that aren't so much overburdened as beaten repeatedly into the ground with the flat of a shovel. Here's the moment when Roger gets a glimmer of understanding as to what the whole string of realities, and his place therein, might represent:

He paused as a concept formed in his mind: three-dimensional reality, gathered up at the corners, pulled up to form a closed space, as a washwoman folds up the edges of a sheet to form a bag . . . (p29)

And here's UKR's explanation of the way that four-dimensional creatures function:

[T]here's only one Rhox in the entire cosmos; like most entities above fourth level, he is unique. When the process you know as evolution progresses beyond a certain point, the species-fragmentation characteristic of [the] third order merges to form a higher, compound life-form. Such a being can insert a large number of third-order aspects into contiguous space. (p137)

While these and a few other ideas are very pretty, I'm not sure they're enough to make me hunt down this book's sequel, Back to the Time Trap (1992).


Johnny and the Bomb (1996) by Terry Pratchett

Amazingly, this book took eleven years from its UK publication to be published in the US, appearing here in 2007. The version I read was the US one, whose Americanization has its dumber moments: I did at least a triple take when there was mention of the High Street being littered with, among other typical items, empty "chip packets". Just to add to the conceptual confusion, later in the book at least one discarded packet of fish and chips played a minor role; I had to be grateful for the small mercy that this didn't become "fish and fries".

Such quirks -- and they're few -- don't really detract from the enjoyability of the book, which is considerable. Young Johnny Maxwell and his pals Wobbler, Yo-less, Bigmac and Kirsty, know old Mrs Tachyon as one of Blackbury's characters: babbling battily and pushing her decrepit supermarket trolley around town, her vicious cat Guilty aboard it among the numerous mysterious black plastic bags, the bag lady is hard to miss. When she's involved in an accident and has to be rushed to hospital, Johnny takes cart, bags and cat home for safekeeping in the family garage. Inadvertently manipulating one of the bags, he undergoes what one might call a spontaneous time-travel experience. It seems that what Mrs Tachyon has been storing in her bags is time. A little later, in a more controlled experiment, Johnny takes his chums with him, and they find they're in Blackbury as it was in 1941; moreover, Johnny realizes that it's not just any day in 1941 but the day leading up to the night he's just been reading about for his school history project, the night when a German bombing mission, off course, dropped its load on Blackbury's Paradise Street, causing huge damage and the loss of many lives.

Kirsty is the brains of the group; she's also widely regarded as insufferable, because of her intelligence, her pronounced feminism, and her pushiness . . . so I loved the character most of any in the book She has numerous good lines, but none (in my opinion) better than the one she comes out with on the pals' arrival in 1941:

"Oh dear, it's going to be that kind of adventure after all," she hissed, sitting up. "It's just the sort of thing I didn't want to happen. Me, and four token boys. Oh, dear. Oh, dear. It's only a mercy we haven't got a dog." (p83)

Johnny is keen to avert the night's tragedy; even so, he's aware of the Trousers of Time effect, that if you alter something in the past you can find yourself going down the wrong leg of the Trousers to arrive in a different future from the one you expected. Indeed, exactly this happens during the pals' various adventures when Wobbler, who's got separated from the rest, unwittingly manages to make his own grandfather (who at the time of encounter is Richmal Crompton's William Brown in all but name) a victim of the bombing raid, thereby cancelling out his own existence in a future to which the rest of the kids briefly return. (The section of the book featuring this subtly different alternative future is especially nicely handled.) In the end Johnny realizes the challenge is to get the air raid siren sounded in time that, while Paradise Road and its nearby pickle factory are destroyed, just as the old newspaper he read for his school project told him, the residents are able to get to their shelters. But this isn't as easy as it sounds, because the switch for the siren is in the police station in town, and will not be pulled until the rozzers hear from the lookout post on a distant hill; the storm that has misled the German bombers has blown out the phone from the lookout post, and the backup motorbike there won't start . . .

Like all the best kids' books, this holds as much to engage adults as most adult novels do, if not more. As noted, Kirsty's a joy; also wonderful among the characters is Yo-less, who's black but also, clashing with ignorant racial stereotypes, the class nerd -- a nerd so nerdish that, as is observed somewhere in the text, if you gave him a baseball cap he'd put it on the right way round. In connection with Yo-less, the book refreshingly confronts casual racism, in both past and present Blackbury, face-on: people do not mean their remarks and attitudes about Yo-less unkindly, not really, but they're fucking offensive all the same. At first Kirsty makes the excuse for them that "it's only the way they've been brought up" and tells Yo-less not to worry; but then, when she encounters some 1940s casual sexism, he tosses the same line back at her and she gets the point. The time-travel aspects of the tale are neatly worked out, as are the potentials for paradox. Much recommended.


The Cross-Time Engineer (1986) by Leo Frankowski

Polish computer engineer Conrad Schwartz, on a mountain walking holiday, drinks too much one night at an inn which is, unknown to him, a sloppily run front for the time-travelling Historical Corps. He stumbles into the basement to sleep it off, little realizing that he's doing so within a time machine. When he wakes in the morning, everything seems . . . different. As he eventually discovers, he has been transported back to the Poland of the year 1231; his knowledge of history tells him that in a mere decade or so this country will be overrun by the Mongols, with extraordinary loss of life. Unless . . .

He ends up at a remote settlement, Okoitz, ruled by the moderately powerful Count Lambert Piast, who befriends him and allows him a lot of latitude to do all the engineering he can manage relying on memory and the local tools and materials; in his enterprises he is helped, yet again without his knowing it, by the fact that his uncle works for the Historical Corps and, having located in the distant past, has planted, for the young man to acquire, a hyperintelligent horse and a hi-tech sword.

There's a nice European feel on occasion to the use of language in the telling of this tale, as for example when Conrad is discussing with his companion Father Ignacy the latter's detestation of Germans. Comments Conrad to the reader:

I had an uncle who had survived being a partisan in the 1944 Warsaw insurrection. He hated Germans, but his hatred was like a dislike for cabbages compared with the hatred of the supremely mild man who walked beside me. (p25)

Overall, though, I was less than delighted by the book -- for two main reasons, one to do with its rationale and one to do with my own qualms. To take the first of these first: For fear of affecting the flow of causality, the Historical Corps cannot simply retrieve Conrad from the past, yet it seems there's no problem about allowing him to build up Poland's technological capabilities with extraordinary anachronicity and thereby create a new history. I'm not sure I'm prepared to buy this: it seems like a very significant plot problem to me, too significant to be glossed over with a few bits of misdirection and a general waving of hands.

My other reason for unease is also the reason I'll not be reading further books in the series. Conrad spends a lot of his time at Okoitz boffing, usually but not always singly, the "handmaidens" kept around the castle by Count Lambert for this use by himself and his guests. That it's all a bit masturbatory is forgivable. The trouble is that these wenches, who're essentially paid servants and unpaid harlots, are underage -- and not just trivially so: they're 14. On discovering, early on, quite how young his bedmates are, Conrad has a minor crisis of conscience, confesses to a priest, etc., but then tells himself that in 13th-century Poland 14 was a marriageable age, after all, ho ho, and carries on boffing. This really unsettles me. I don't think the "marriageable age" argument washes. In terms of a time traveller from the 20th century, those girls are mere adolescents -- in fact, Conrad occasionally remarks on the schoolgirlishness of his favourite underage mistress -- and those are surely the terms in which said traveller must judge his own actions. That what he's doing is accepted as just dandy by the people among whom he's arrived is not, I think, ethically relevant: had Conrad landed among a thuggee band in 18th-century India, would it have been all right for him to rob and murder innocent strangers? And the odd thing about this element of the book is the complete unnecessariness of the pedophilia: I can't imagine any reader batting an eyelid at the historical implausibility (if any) had the girls been described as 16 or 17 years old, making them safely over the age of consent in the UK and, I assume, in the 20th-century Poland Conrad came from. As I say, this aspect meant the book left an unpleasant taste in my mouth.


The Sleeper Awakes (1910) by H.G. Wells

This was Wells's revised version of When the Sleeper Wakes, which was serialized and published in book form in 1899; the version I read was the 2005 Penguin Classics edition, with a Foreword by Patrick Parrinder and useful notes by my old friend Andy Sawyer of the Foundation.

On a walking holiday in northern Cornwall, a man called Isbister comes across another, Graham, in great distress: Graham has been suffering insomnia for days. Isbister takes him back home, but before he can summon medical attention Graham falls asleep at last, and indeed into a coma -- and what a coma! It lasts for two centuries. When Graham finally wakes it is into an almost unrecognizable world. In due course he finds that he essentially owns this world: at the time he fell asleep he had money of his own, and both his richer solicitor cousin and Isbister had left their fortunes to his somnolent form; compound interest has done the rest. In the modern age, a Council has for some time been ruling the world tyrannously, supposedly on his behalf, while his motionless form has been on display to a public who've come to regard him as a sort of messiah-in-waiting. It is of course a profound disaster to the Council that he has woken, and they try to keep the fact a secret from the people, while preparing to dispose of this inconvenient waker. But Graham is rescued and a successful revolution mounted by the demagogue Ostrog, a supposed Man of the People who's soon revealed as having intentions just as despotic as those of the ousted Council. (Ostrog's explanation of his behaviour includes a passage [p167] that could have come straight out of Orwell's Animal Farm.) As Graham is taken on carefully guide tours of a domed and massively bloated London, and as he becomes aware of Ostrog's perfidy, his natural 19th-century radicalism begins to stir itself; and finally, having learned how to pilot one of these newfangled flying-machine things as a hobby, he takes to the air in an attempt to destroy  the demagogue as a second rebellion, this time genuinely of the people, seems on the brink of success . . .

According to the editorial material, in the years leading up to 1910 Wells had intended to write a sort of self-parody, but instead came out with this revision of his earlier novel. Signs of the self-parodic intention persist, as when Isbister and Graham's cousin discuss the sleeping man (after Isbister has [p21] described the comatose Graham as "like a seat vacant and marked 'engaged'" -- beautiful!):

"He was a fanatical Radical -- a Socialist -- or typical Liberal, as they used to call themselves, of the advanced school. Energetic -- flighty -- undisciplined. Overwork upon a controversy did this for him. I remember the pamphlet he wrote -- a curious production. Wild, whirling stuff. There were one or two prophecies. Some of them are already exploded, some of them are established facts. But for the most part to read such a thesis is to realize how full the world is of unanticipated things." (p24)

I would say this must certainly be a tongue-in-cheek self-portrait by the same H.G. Wells who couldn't resist adding a snooty little footnote to the opening of Chapter 24, "While the Aeroplanes Were Coming":

These chapters were written fifteen years before there was any fighting in the air, and eleven before there was an aeroplane in the air.

Obviously Graham has difficulty acclimatizing himself to this future world. There's a sense throughout that, even as he flees terrified through a roiling nighttime mob or takes to the skies in a monoplane, he's not really a part of the activities despite the fact that he's in the midst of them. It's as if he hasn't quite left the world of sleep and is experiencing all this in the manner of a dream. To be honest, I found this a problem with the book: it's very difficult to become involved in the action when the protagonist seems incapable of doing likewise. Even when the door opens for Graham to the possibility of romance, with the attractive revolutionary Helen Wotton, Graham closes it again: his duty must come first.

Perhaps he's right to heed duty's call, for this is a ruthless and, for the powerful, self-indulgent age he's found himself in, with a lot of wrongs to be righted. The social structure has become enormously stratified, with the powerful elite having almost everything they could desire, the middle classes having just enough to keep them from riot, and a vast underclass who have nothing to live for and who are kept viciously downtrodden by social structures and no fewer than fourteen different categories of police. As example of the exploitation of these folk, Graham visits a factory (pp194-5) and finds many of the workers suffer a horribly disfiguring disease (the descriptions like that of phossy jaw) because of a fashionable purple dye they're handling. When he brings this to the attention of his companion, he gets a chilling response:

"But, Sire, we simply could not stand that stuff without the purple," said Asano. "In your days people could stand such crudities, they were nearer the barbaric by two hundred years."

Some of Wells's predictions are successful: in particular, he anticipates the development of windmills as a significant power source. His footnoted prediction of aircraft dogfighting is not nearly the success one might think, in that, far from trying to shoot each other down, the pilots use collision as a tool, the trick being to seriously disable your opponent while doing your own plane only tolerable damage. There's an interesting example of a prediction being since realized . . . but only in science fiction. Wells envisaged roadways whose surfaces moved to convey people from place to place; the central strips are slow-moving, but those strips further out are progressively more rapid, so that you can climb aboard the system near the centre and step easily from one strip to the next until you reach the fastest-moving strip of all, which is the one where you stay for the bulk of your journey. Around now, you'll doubtless be leaping from your seat shouting about Robert Heinlein's 1940 story "The Roads Must Roll" . . . Another prediction in this only-in-sf category is that the world will be using the duodecimal system. But then we find this:

But now he saw what had indeed been manifest from the first, that London, regarded as a living place, was no longer an aggregation of houses but a prodigious hotel, an hotel with a thousand classes of accommodation, thousands of dining halls, chapels, theatres, markets and places of assembly, a synthesis of enterprises [. . .] People [of the middle classes] had their sleeping rooms, with, it might be, antechambers [. . .] and for the rest they lived much as many people had lived in the new-made giant hotels of the Victorian days, eating, reading, thinking, playing, conversing, all in places of public resort [. . .] (p177)

I know plenty of people whose urban lifestyles are not so very dissimilar from Wells's description.

The extended travelogue-style sections, where we're supposed to boggle at the way world looks now, are pretty dull stuff -- and I suspect were so even when the book was first published. There's some appalling sexism in the book, but I suppose one can write that off as being a product of Wells's era. What I cannot excuse similarly is the racism. By the time Wells was writing, there were plenty of his compatriots who'd achieved sufficient enlightenment to realize that ghastly racial stereotypes like the ones in this novel -- the "subject races" (p172) are "fine loyal brutes" (p167) -- were purest bunkum and utterly loathsome. It gets worse. The final straw -- a major plot point -- that makes Graham resort to launching an uprising against Ostrog is that the latter plans to import "Negro police" to quell the rioting populace; not only are the "Negroes" prone to committing the kind of atrocities no white man would countenance, but "White men must be mastered by white men" (p202), and so forth. It's all quite unforgivable, and my estimation of Wells has plummeted.


Denying AIDS (2009) by Seth Kalichman

This is as definitive a book as we have so far -- as close to a standard work as exists -- on those who would deny the connection between HIV and AIDS; or that AIDS is a heterosexual as well as a homosexual disease; or that AIDS can be transmitted through sexual contact rather than just through sharing needles or through blood transfusion; or even, in extreme cases, that AIDS exists at all. Then there are those who believe AIDS exists but that it's a man-made bug designed to exterminate gays, or blacks, or prostitutes, or Africans, or . . . Of course, the people who are shouting their denials the loudest, or who're most effective in convincing these groups of their fantasies, are rarely members of these groups themselves: with glaring exceptions like South Africa's ex-President Thabo Mbeki and ex-Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, they're more likely to be comfortably off white American or Australian males in the twilight of their careers. Of course, there are HIV/AIDS denialists to whom this description doesn't apply -- as well as those mentioned, journalist Celia Farber is a prime example -- but an overall characteristic of the denialists that Kalichman frequently stresses is that none of them have done any direct research into AIDS or the HIV retrovirus. While some, like Peter Duesberg, have an extraordinarily distinguished past in some vaguely related field (in Duesberg's case it concerned the genetic basis of cancer), none have actually performed the research that would qualify them to speak authoritatively. They are no more qualified to promulgate their conspiracy theories than are you and I. And those conspiracy theories are costing lives by the thousands, hundreds of thousands, and likely millions. So why do they do it? It's a question Kalichman comes close on occasion to answering, although I suspect it remains, in the very end, as much of a mystery to him as it does to anyone:

Having read a great deal of what the denialists have to say  and having communicated at length with several of them myself, I am left to question how much any of these people actually care about AIDS and those affected by the disease. (p150)

So, if you want to find out about HIV/AIDS denialism, this is definitely the book you should seek out. At the same time, it's one of the most abysmal pieces of publishing I've ever come across -- and I'm including here the stacks of self-published POD books I used to read for review. This book isn't self-published: it was released by the Copernicus imprint of the revered scientific publisher Springer. Yet there can be scarcely a page without half a dozen mechanical errors on it, from typos (right down to the level of reversed quote-marks, where someone has blanket-applied smartquotes but not checked the results), homophone errors (I especially liked the term "ad homonym arguments" [pxv] and the description of the Rev Jeremiah Wright as Obama's controversial pasture [p108]), misuse of words (most particularly the word "refute", which Kalichman uses throughout when he means "rebut"), incompleted sentences, or sentences in which subject and verb don't agree . . . The list could go on and on. I'd say the index reads like a parody except it goes beyond that: it's as if it were compiled by a ten-year-old who knew what an index looked like but didn't understand why it was there. I didn't spot-check it for accuracy because almost everything I wanted to look up wasn't listed, including people who play a major part in the text. At times I wondered if the book had been dictated into voice-recognition software, and then somehow the first draft had accidentally been typeset in place of the finished version. Certainly there has been no copy-editing and no proofreading. It's a mess. To repeat, the book was published by Springer.

A further difficulty is that the citation of sources is incomplete. Kalichman admits as much at the outset, saying that he was concerned to make the book readable rather than a text barely discernable through a thicket of glosses; and that's a fair enough argument, I suppose. However, checking up by dint of tedious googling on quite a number of the papers he mentioned but gave no citation for, I discovered that more often than I was comfortable with the paper didn't say quite what Kalichman claimed. I'm pretty certain these discrepancies arose through sloppiness rather than mendacity because they rarely affected his argument (in only one example was his argument strengthened by the error, when he gave a figure for prostitute rates of HIV infection clearly unaware that the research was among male, not female, prostitutes; and in one case his misquotation of a paper actually weakened his argument, where he described "just under 50%" of a group as believing a conspiracy theory when the true figure was 54%). Since one of his complaints about the denialists is that they have a habit of misrepresenting their source material, this unreliability is, to say the least, a bit ironic.

As I say, this is as near as we have to date to a definitive text on the subject, and fundamentally it's a very good piece of work. If you simply want a sort of grand overview of HIV/AIDS denialism, this is definitely the book for you. But I hope fervently that there's a second edition sometime Real Soon Now and that this time Springer's editorial dept does its job and eliminates the myriad footling errors that mar the version currently published.


A Walk Through a Window (2009) by kc dyer

One of the liabilities of our having made a quick jaunt to Toronto recently is that, while Pam was off businessing for the day, I was within easy walking distance of, er, three -- countem, THREE -- good bookshops. My rucksack was interestingly . . . heavy on the way home: a good thing we did the journey by train rather than 'plane. But the good thing about the bookshops was that they offered a distinctively different selection of books than I'm accustomed to seeing here in NJ, and so I was able to pick up this Canadian YA time-travel novel. And jolly good it is too.

13-year-old gloomyguts brat Darby is sent to spend a few weeks with her grandparents in "one-lobster town" Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, and immediately assumes she's going to have a ghastly time of it. But then she runs into the mysterious boy Gabe, who lives in the big blue house on the corner even though everyone assumes that house is derelict. Still whingeing in her customary way, Darby allows Gabe to lead her to the ruined chapel in the blue house's big garden; on stepping with him through the gaping window she is transported back through time, to a prehistoric era where the ancestors of the Inuit survive as best they can in a glaciated Canada. Gabe is a member of the little clan among which Darby finds herself, and apparently always has been; she herself has a different status in that she has a sort of weak interaction with the physical world, whereby she can't influence it (humans aside from Gabe are unaware of her presence and animals have just a vague inkling that she's there) but it can influence her -- if she falls over she hurts herself. During one of her later trips she realizes the nub of it: "She was a ghost from another time" (p127).

She spends a couple of days with the proto-Inuit, then is directed toward a means of getting home to her own time. In each of her two subsequent trips -- one to a coffin ship come to Canada bearing immigrants from Ireland and plagued witrh smallpox and typhus, the other aboard a much more civilized immigrant vessel, carrying one of her ancestors -- the pattern continues of Gabe, her guide, being already present in, and playing an active role in, the world while Darby herself has just a ghostly presence and, at visit's end, must find a portal to be able to escape homeward. Meanwhile, between trips, Darby is learning about her own and Charlottetown's history, learning to relate to her idiosyncratic Nan and, as he descends into Alzheimers, Gramps, and (no prizes for guessing this bit) generally growing up to a much nicer child than when she came to Prince Edward Island just a few short weeks ago. The events of her real life, and the lives of those around her, are not trivial; but what she has witnessed during her cross-temporal journeys helps her cope with them, if for no other reason than that, however grim things might get for her in the 21st century, she's come face-to-face with worse elsewhen.

The book has it moments of humour, as when the still rather prissy, self-absorbed Darby at one point goes through the reasons why her latest temporal sojourn isn't a dream:

"Two: Shoes do not get soaked in dreams." Well, unless you counted that unfortunate time when she was four and mistook her mother's closet for the bathroom in the middle of the night. But hey, she was a little kid. (p117)

We never do discover who Gabe really is, which is just fine: that's what you'd expect of an elemental, after all. Less satisfyingly, there's another kid whom Darby encounters a couple of times in modern Charlottetown: he serves no plot purpose and seems just to get forgotten about. And I did get rattled when what's been established archaeological knowledge for decades was described half-dismissively as "some professor who had a theory that the way the first native people came to North America was over a land bridge on the Bering Strait" (p84). Otherwise I enjoyed this adventure just fine . . . although I did wonder if its intended YA readership would like it as much as I did, if they might fi\nd it a bit -- gasp! -- educational in feel. Well, if so, that's their tough luck: the book worked just fine for moi.


Bring the Jubilee (1953) by Ward Moore

This classic alternative world/time travel novel, which I last read over forty years ago, begins with one of sf's classic sentences: "Although I am writing this in the year 1877, I was not born until 1921" (p1). This is possible because, to begin with, our narrator was born into a world where the South won the Civil War; where he dwells is in an economically backward 26-state United States, the rump of the Union, which can only envy the good fortune and prosperity of the Confederate States.

Young Hodge Backmaker, restless in back-end-of-nowhere Wappinger Falls, sets off to New York to seek his fortune. There he soon falls in with and is employed by the bookseller Tyss, seemingly an enlightened man but in fact doing much covert work to support the violently terrorist Grand Army, which seeks to . . . well, as with many Liberation Fronts, the aims of the Grand Army are not entirely clear. Hodge keeps his nose clean of this clandestine activity as much as he can during his eight years with Tyss, during which he devours practically every book in the shop and decides his vocation in life is to be a historian; his ambitions are focused by his friendship with the Haitian ambassador, Enfandin, a man of enormous intellectual ability, knowledge and sagacity who's nonetheless sneered at as Sambo and Rastus by most of New York's populace: the people of the Confederate States are beginning to move out from under the shadow of racism but those of the US, blaming the slaves for having caused the ruinous war, are still in the full throes of the racist atavism. Hodge fires off application letters to all the universities he can think of, hoping for a place to read history; but the only response he gets is from Haggershaven, a strange, utopian community of scholars. He is summoned there by Barbara Haggerwells, daughter of the man who runs the place. She proves to be quite seriously psychologically damaged, yet a brilliant physicist; once at Haggershaven Hodge enters into a semi-destructive, almost masochistic off-on relationship with her that will last for years. But, while traveling to Haggershaven, Hodge rescued from a murderous gang a young Spanish girl, Catalina, and as she grows up she captures his heart -- a development disliked by the paranoidly jealous Barbara.

Barbara succeeds in building a functioning time machine. Various Haggershavenians take trips into the past, always obeying as near as possible Barbara's strict instructions that they should do nothing to change things in the world of the past. When it comes to Hodge's turn, he chooses to go back to witness the Battle of Gettysburg to determine at first hand if the historians are right about the precise wrinkle of chance that won the battle -- and the war -- for the Southrons. As Barbara throws the lever:

The expression on her face was the strangest I'd ever seen her wear. I could not, then or now, quite interpret it. Doubt, malice, suffering, vindictiveness, entreaty, love, were all there as her hand moved the switch. (p173)

Needless to say, Hodge inadvertently alters the course of the battle and brings into existence the timeline we know. And, in a delicious irony, it seems not to occur to him -- despite the sentence cited above -- that Barbara knew all along something like this would happen, and that she was in effect murdering her world, herself included, as vengeance against the man she perceived to have spurned her.

The bulk of this novel concerns Hodge's life in the world into which he was born; by the time he makes the trip back to Gettysburg we're just twenty pages or so from the end. I've seen people complain about this: that the book's boring because nothing much happens until the last few pages. All I can really say is that such critics should hang up their spectacles and go do something else more commensurate with their talents, like listening to Britney Spears. Although he has an annoying tic of missing out apostrophes from some but not all contracted words (with no rhyme or reason that I can see: it's "can't" but "couldnt", for example), and although I could have done without the various cutesy references to major figures in our own timeline having minor roles in the alternative US, Moore is a fine enough writer that he makes Hodge's tale an absolutely absorbing one . . . to the point that I was actually pretty fed up when the time-travel stuff started: I could have gone on reading about Hodge, Catalina and Haggershaven for a long while yet. This is one of those rare and precious books that really does transcend genres. I'd feel happy recommending it to people who'd normally shy away from a piece of sf; at the same time, devoted skiffers who've not read this classic should definitely make the effort -- if only because this must be among the three or four best-written novels of sf's (late) Golden Age.


Future Human Evolution: Eugenics in the Twenty-First Century (2006) by John Glad

This curious little book attempts to advocate the pursuit of eugenic solutions to many of the problems currently assailing our world, approaching the subject from scientific and ethical standpoints. I found a lot more to like -- or less to dislike -- in it than I'd expected, although I had a sense throughout that the author was ducking the most important perceived flaw in notions of eugenics ever since they were first floated by Francis Galton in the latter half of the 19th century: who gets to decide which are the favorable and which the unfavorable traits in their fellow human beings. It's a flaw that led, so most people would argue, to the horrors of the Holocaust; Glad acknowledges the existence of it to the extent that, even as he (very evidently genuinely) deplores the countless crimes against humanity the Nazis committed in their attempted exterminations, he claims eugenics was not among the Hitler regime's motivations -- it was merely invoked as a phony justification. I have to confess that there seems to me to be only the breadth of the thinnest possible hair between these two portrayals of the circumstance, and I was left unconvinced. I was also unconvinced by Glad's account of another problem faced by any ethical proponent of eugenics: his section on "Possible Abuse of Genetics" (pp91-2) runs to just a paltry three paragraphs -- a paucity of treatment that seems to smack of denial.

Yet there are good things to be found here too. For example, he makes this point: "The question is whether parents have a moral right to bring children into the world who will be disadvantaged by their heredity" (p34). It's a refreshingly thoughtful observation in a society that is all too keen to stress the rights of parents -- as for example in the option to home-school, or to indoctrinate with a particular ideology or religious faith -- while often oblivious to the rights of those parents' children. A child who's brought up brainwashed into Creationist views, say, or racist ones, is likely to be handicapped for life in the evolving society he or she is set to inhabit; yet this goes ignored as we defend the rights of parents to be science deniers or bigots and to pass those values on to their offspring. This is obviously not rational. One could say that Glad is merely taking the matter a step further by saying parents have the responsibility to their offspring to make sure those offspring are born as the best and brightest they can be; one could also say that this further step is an unacceptable one.

There's plenty that's wrong with this short book -- for example, its potted history of the eugenics movements, begun on p62, just sort of peters out a dozen pages later after a longish discussion of WWII -- but, as indicated above, there's also some interesting and useful material in among the rest. The print version, which is the one I read, is full of plugs for the free downloadable-PDF version, available from www.whatwemaybe.org; I've just checked that URL and it's still functioning.


Darwin's Gift to Science and Religion (2007) by Francisco J. Ayala

Ayala's intention, as one might guess from the book's title, is to demonstrate that a rejection of evolution is not just bad science but bad theology. As with, it seems, so many books these days, he spends most of his time talking about matters other than his stated topic, in this instance with lengthy explanations of natural selection and the many ways in which it has been shown beyond doubt that "Darwinism" is the way thinks work, and with extremely competent dissections of the pretensions of the IDiots. All of this stuff is very well done and, not only was I greatly absorbed and entertained, I learned quite a deal that was new to me; especially useful were his discussions of the precursors of the modern ID movement -- people like William Paley, whose ID hypotheses might well have been woefully wrong but who was at least doing his best within the boundaries of the science available in his age.

But what of the 10% or so of the book, maybe less, that focuses on Ayala's supposed subject matter? His primary contention seems to be that evolutionary theory does theology a great service by solving at a stroke the theodicy problem -- that is, the problem of having to explain why a benevolent and omnipotent God permits so much cruelty and evil in the world. The argument goes that all this cruelty and evil we see around us is a natural consequence of the way that natural selection works, and therefore not God's fault -- even though it was God who chose to use natural selection as a means of producing the living world we know, us included.

In other words, thanks to evolution and natural selection, theologians would no longer need to trouble their heads about David Hume's famous quibble, summarizing Epicurus:

Is [God] willing to prevent evil, but not able? then he is   impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? whence then is evil?

It's difficult to follow this rationale, because it seems that -- evolution or no -- Hume's first two questions seem answerable only thus: "He's either unwilling or unable or both." The problem is that, outside the human species (and possibly one or two others) the concept of evil has no meaning, as neither does the concept of good. For sure, the operation of natural selection is immensely cruel and immensely wasteful, but there's nothing evil involved: that's just the way evolution works. On the other hand, it can be argued that, if God has indeed chosen to operate His planet through the mechanism of natural selection, with all its necessary suffering, then there is evil involved.

Or is the argument that human beings became infected by evil through evolutionary happenstance? But, if so, surely an omniscient God would have known this could happen and taken steps to insure against it.

What Ayala and his teachers seem to be arguing for is an ever-diminishing role for God, who is blameless for all disagreeable things because, heck, they're outside His province. But if God doesn't do anything, and if He isn't responsible for anything, what reason can there be for His existence at all? Even if one argues that, Him being God and all, He doesn't need a reason for existence, the related question remains: What reason can there be to believe in the existence of a God who takes no part in the running of His Creation and washes His hands of anything in it that goes awry? It's as if Ayala and his cohorts were calling on the principle of the God of the Gaps and then making the Gap infinitesimally small.

This same issue seems to arise when he claims:

However, we know some basic features that account for human distinctness and therefore can serve as foundations for a  religious view of humankind: the large brain and the accelerated rate of evolution of genes such as those involved in human speech. (p110)

So God's role was to wait some billions of years while natural selection did its stuff and then, a few thousand years ago, to intercede in order to speed up the evolution of particular genes and increase cranial capacity, after which He pushed off and left us to our own devices? This sounds very much like Intelligent Design, which is what Ayala elsewhere roundly (and rightly) disparages; moreover it again leaves God with only a very small Gap within which to operate. If I've misunderstood Ayala and this isn't at all what he means, then of course we're back to the Hume/Epicurus dilemma.

It's at about this time that I expect someone to come charging in to tell me that if only I'd studied theology a bit more exhaustively I wouldn't be making any of these foolish observations, to which my response must be: I can read all the fairy stories in the world and that still won't convince me that fairies exist, or that the hypothesis of a fairies-populated world makes internally consistent sense -- or any sense at all.

They say that the sign of a good book (or movie or play, whatever) is how much you talk about it afterwards, even if the "talk" takes the form of an internal conversation. Ayala's book is good enough that, as well as being a very pleasurable and stimulating read, it made me think. I suppose that for many that won't excuse the fact that so much of the text is, as it were, off-topic; but it's okay by me. As I'm sure everyone has frequently remarked, digressions are often the best bits.

Comments

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

How could I have forgotten The Big Time, containing as it does, one of my favourite bilingual puns, "got mittens"?

But what I wanted to say is that what I like about Bring The Jubilee is the tone. It is, indeed, a very well-written book.

[realthog.livejournal.com]

one of my favourite bilingual puns, "got mittens"

That is indeed a goody. There are several other very clever wordplays in the book . . . all of which have now, naturally, fled my mind.

It is, indeed, a very well-written book.

It has the same sort of feel to it (although the styles are different) as a Christopher Priest book, doesn't it? -- that sense of a writer who cares not just about the story but about the way he's telling it, who's making the effort to ensure you read this, and live it, rather than skip along from plot-point to plot-point.

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

I have to confess not having read anything by Christopher Priest. I should, having seen the film of The Prestige and enjoyed it.

[realthog.livejournal.com]

Start with The Affirmation, or The Glamour, or even A Dream of Wessex (avoid the US version of the last of these, which was retitled The Perfect Lover and Americanized really crassly . . . so you have people stopping at gas stations in the middle of Hardy Country). All of his novels are good, but these I think offer the easiest way in, as it were.

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the recommendations. I'll put them on the list.

[realthog.livejournal.com]

Glad to've been of service, guv.