August bukes part last

[realthog]

Sure enough, LJ thought that even Part Dukes on its own was too big, so here I am with an unprecedented








Monday Redux (2003) by Robert Favole

One Monday a youth called Lance perpetrates a gun massacre at his school. The nearest Lance has to a friend is the timid Rego -- and this is Rego's story, starting with him in police custody under suspicion of being Lance's accomplice after having failed to prevent the shooting spree . . . having failed for the second time. The first time it happened, Lance killed nearly twenty people, although he spared Rego when encountering him mid-massacre, shooting instead the girl beside him. Rego is still consumed by guilt because he knows that he was only too glad to see the girl die rather than himself. On the evening of that first Monday, having been treated to the sight of the news media exploiting him and twisting his words to fit their preconceived narrative, he was startled to discover an e-mail on his computer from "Maverick" of the CyberTimeSurfing Institute offering to open up a portal in Rego's house so he might have a chance to relive Monday and perhaps avert the catastrophe. Unfortunately, Lance, who has infiltrated Rego's home, comes along for the ride, and thus is forewarned that Rego is out to thwart his enterprise.

Hampered by his own lack of self-confidence, Rego fails to avert the spree but at least his efforts have the result of bringing the death toll down to less than a handful. The cops briefly believe him to have been Lance's accomplice, but then receive an e-mail from one of their number who, in the school on other business, died stopping the onslaught: according to this e-mail, Rego had been helping the cop. Transformed from villain to hero, Rego faces another wave of media distortion of the reality -- not to mention the spectacle of his self-serving parents trying to make his presumed heroism their own.

Another e-mail from "Maverick" admits the authorship of the lie about Rego having assisted the dead cop, and offers the boy yet another chance to relive Monday -- a chance he seizes, this time doing things right so that there his no massacre. Which is not to say that his problems are over . . .

This book functions well as a thriller and also as a satire: the sections depicting the scurvy manipulations of the broadcast media -- especially the Bill O'Reilly figure who bases venomous suspicions on the slightest of rumours regardless of the human damage he is doing -- are almost painful to read: they're spot on. Even more excruciating are the scenes featuring the ghastly parents -- not just Rego's mom and dad by Lance's mom: the fear of turning into a parent like that is every parent's nightmare.

I now have to keep an eye open for Favole's earlier book, Through the Wormhole -- another time-travel adventure -- as well as anything he might have done since Monday Redux.


A World Out of Time (1976) by Larry Niven

Niven's essay "The Theory and Practice of Time Travel" (1971) is his well known (perhaps better known than it should be!) exploration of the various common sciencefictional notions of time travel and why they wouldn't work, with particular attention to paradoxes. In  a sense this novel is his fictional counterpart to that essay, exploring a slew of time-travel devices of which at least a couple are plausible within the confines of genuine science.

Jerome Branch Corbell (geddit?) -- usually called Jaybee -- wakes from cryogenic sleep (time travel method #1) into a future where the State is all-powerful and the human population, because of overcrowding, lives much like ants in an ants' nest; it's explained to him that his corpsicle in fact didn't survive the Long Sleep but that it's been possible to scan his brain patterns into the wiped-clean brain of a rebel against the State. It's also explained to him that he is State property, and that the State only bothered to revive him because in need of pilots to take ramjets on trips to distant star systems to feed likely planets with proto-life; these trips are essentially one-way, because relativistic time-dilation (method #2) will mean the earth he returns to will be 70,000 years in the future. He doesn't complain too stridently to his mentor, Pierse/Peerssa, because "at some point Pierce had mentioned that Corbell was the fourth corpsicle personality to be tested in that empty body" (p5).

En route to deep space, Corbell alters his destination to the galactic hub, figuring there's not much the State can do to stop him. He's right: the State can't catch him, although Peerssa does the next best thing, transmitting his own personality into the ship's computer. The journey to the hub is decades long, although the sting is taken out of this through the use of chemically induced suspended animation (method #3). At the hub, Corbell, with Peerssa's cooperation, makes the ramjet flirt with the black holes found there, thus exploiting the other (gravitational) form of time dilation to (in effect) travel yet further into the future (method #4): by the time he finally returns to the solar system, it is three million years since the time of his departure.

He finds the solar system much changed: clearly there has been engineering on a colossal scale, The earth is now a satellite of Jupiter, warmed not just by that planet's heat but also by a vastly inflated sun -- in fact, most parts of the earth are now 'way too hot for easy survival. Much technology survives, still functioning, from earlier eras, though; even more remarkably, it still has a power supply. Through use of a sort of worldwide supersonic subway system, Corbell encounters the batty, vicious old lady Mirelly-Lyra Zeelashisthar, an interstellar explorer and thus temponaut like himself, who departed earth later and returned earlier. She's been here for thousands of years, extending her lifespan vastly through the use of zero-time rooms -- rooms in which time does not pass (method #5). She believes Corbell must have some kind of elixir of youth, because his physical age is so much less than hers; and she promises to make his life hell until he coughs up the secret.

There's more, quite a lot more, including that the human race is now split for the most part into two near-immortal neotenous races, the Boys and the Girls, with a few people being allowed to develop into adulthood in order to replenish any neotenous stocks lost through accident, etc. In fact, there are probably too many ideas floating around for this to be a satisfying novel, which it isn't: by the time you get a Peerssa-driven ramjet shoving Uranus around the solar system like a swimmer playing with a beach ball, credibility has long flagged, and hence interest. Matters aren't helped by the fact that its hero has an obnoxious lack of the least sense of social responsibility: at every turn he seems to take much and give little, having only his own interests at heart; the urge to give the seat of his pants a comprehensive kicking soon becomes oppressive. As implied above, though, the book does have merit as a sort of set of worked examples of time travel.


Time Storm (1977) by Gordon R. Dickson

A novel which -- as per Murray Leinster's "Sidewise in Time" and Fred Hoyle's October the First is Too Late -- envisages the earth convulsed as different areas across its surface come to have different locations in time, from far prehistoric to far future: "It's like a world-sized crazy quilt" (p114). The borders between regions are marked by "mistwalls", which can move unpredictably and at some speed, although they can be outraced by car. The moving mistwalls, and the havoc created by the abrupt transition from one time to another, have wiped out most of the earth's human population; among the survivors is a little party consisting of: Marc, a youngish man whose extreme difficulties in relating normally to other people has given him a kind of cockamamie libertarianism (he's really an Outsider in the Wilsonian sense); a leopard called Sunday, who became imprinted on him as he rehabilitated it after the passage of a mistwall; and an adolescent with a psychological block against speaking who's consequently called just The Girl. The trio have fugitive adventures dodging the mistwalls (and often enough their fellow humans) until one day Marc decides to try walking through a mistwall; as he's begun to suspect might be the case, he's immune -- as are his companions -- to whatever it is within mistwalls that's lethal to so many others. Beyond this first mistwall he encounters Marie, who promptly becomes his mistress, and her daughter Wendy.

Exploring terrain and timeframes, the group increases in number, the most important additions being the technologist Bill and the alien being Porniarsk, who's the avatar of a far future time engineer who's working elsewhere in the galaxy in hopes of nullifying the time storm, which is affecting not just the earth but the farthest reaches of space. Marc proves to be sensitive to certain patterns important in time engineering; with the help of Porniarsk and a community of future-style humans, Marc succeeds, through stealing energy from the tachyon universe that sort of mirrors our own, in stabilizing the effects, at least on earth, of the storm. But that's only the start of the problems . . .

So what exactly is a time storm? It emerged slowly that the storm was related to the universe having made the transition from its expanding to its contracting phase. Several bits of information scattered through the text give us a fuller picture than that.

[A]ll time and space are affected. The universe has been fragmented from one order into a wild pattern of smaller orders, each with its own direction and rate of creation or decay. We can't cure that situation, but we can work against it. We must work against it; otherwise, the process will continue and the fragmentation will increase, tending toward smaller and smaller orders, until each individual particle becomes a universe unto itself. [p147]

Perhaps it might help you to think, provisionally, of the time storm as a wave-front intersecting the linear time you know -- the time you imagine stretching from past to future -- at an angle, so that your past, present and future are all affected at once by the same action. [. . .] If the time storm is like a wave-front on a beach, we and our worlds are less than individual atoms in the grains of sand that make up that beach. What we experience as local effects appear as phenomena having very little resemblance to the true picture of the wave-front as a whole. [p177]

The forces of the time storm, and the device he was building so I could come to grips with them, belonged not so much to a physical, or even a psychological, but to a philosophical universe. [p185]

What I looked at were the patterns of a universe that had been uniformly expanding, all its galaxies spreading out from each other, creating an entropy that was running down at a uniform rate. [NB: Here and elsewhere Dickson has the meaning of "entropy" wrong, clearly believing it to be a measure of order, not of disorder.] But now the pattern had been expanded too far. It had been stretched too thin, and now it was beginning to break down in places. Here and there, galaxies were beginning to fall back into the pattern, to reapproach each other; and where this was happening, entropy had reversed itself. In those places, entropy was increasing, side by side and conflicting with those still-expanding patterns in which entropy continued to decrease.

The result was stress; a chaos of laws in conflict, spreading like a network of cracks fracturing a crystal, spreading through the universal space, riding the tides of movement of the solid bodies through space. It was stress that concentrated and generated new fractures at the points of greatest mass, primarily at the centers of the galaxies; and where the fracture lines ran, time states changed, forward or back, one way or another.

[. . .] What had gone wrong was everything. What was falling apart was not merely this galaxy, but the universe itself. [p286]

Phew! Pulling all those partial explanations together, one does get some idea, however fuzzy, of the mechanism Dickson envisaged as underpinning what's seemingly an impossible phenomenon -- the juxtaposition of regions working their way through different eras. At least he attempted an explanation at all!

There's a very great deal more plot than I've indicated above in this long and sprawling novel. Aside from the howler about entropy (and a puzzling reference to "Klein bottle forces" p407), the text is not exactly without its flaws at both macro and micro levels. In the latter category fall a number of silly typos and spelling errors as well as an endemic habit of tautologizing, as per "It took about an hour or so" (p164); at a guess, the book would have been 10-20 pages shorter if someone had struck out all the cases of this sort of redundancy. In plotting terms, the biggest error seemed to me to be that, with people gathering together into a social group who've originated in all sorts of different eras, no one ever seems to ask anyone else about what those eras were/are like. If you ran into someone from the 25th century, wouldn't you be bursting with questions about how people will live centuries from now, about their glamorous hi-tech, about how humanity survived the climate-change catastrophe of the 21st century and how many in fact did, and on and on and on. You'd have about as many questions to put to an 18th-centurier. I think it inconceivable that a group like the one Dickson envisages wouldn't spend much of their time engaged in such enquiry.

The text is also very uneven, as if Dickson spent the whole time he was writing this novel trying to find the right voice in which to do so. In one section the narrative even devolves to become a sort of Eric Frank Russell pastiche (though without the wit), as our smartypants hero outfoxes some stolidly unimaginative military types . . . at great and excruciating length.

For all these criticisms -- and there are more -- I overall greatly liked this book. Dickson handles pretty well the fact that, especially in the earlier stages, Marc may not be the most reliable of narrators. And, while the text is hardly stylish, it has its moments of genuine perception, as when Marc is mourning the paucity of animals in the modern (to him) world:

[In zoos] I had looked into wild animal eyes from only a few feet of distance. And there had to be something within those eyes that was not to be found in the eyes of my fellow humans. There were eyes that looked at me from the other side of the universe. [p219]

But what I liked especially about it -- having come across over the past few weeks more than one sf/fantasy novel where it seemed clear the author really didn't much care about his book, was just cynically churning out stuff good enough to pay the mortgage and not much more -- was the conviction of the text: it shines through even the most pedestrian pieces of prose that Dickson believed he had a tale worth the telling, and worth the reading. For that reason I willingly entered the world he was creating and let myself feel alongside his characters. Great art this book isn't, but at least it's some distance along the road toward being a great book.

Comments

[al-zorra.livejournal.com]

That's quite a list of reading, I, for one, am certain these aren't the only reading you did in August either.

Sometimes I think it's people like you / us who do all the reading in this country. We read many, many books a year, while most people don't read a single one.

Love, c.

[mastadge.livejournal.com]

It's not the people who don't read books who bother me. There are many smart and well-informed people who don't read many or any books. (I have one friend in particular who feels ashamed of not being a reader, always feels like she should read books, and it always amuses me to hear her try to convince herself that she's going to start reading them.) And many ignorant people who read plenty of them. What bothers me is the people who have an aversion to those who read books. The anti-intellectuals and the willfully ignorant.

[al-zorra.livejournal.com]

Yes, that too, or yes, as you said, or rather!

Love, c.

[realthog.livejournal.com]

What bothers me is the people who have an aversion to those who read books. The anti-intellectuals and the willfully ignorant.

I couldn't agree with you more: I find it terrifying. I know outwardly seemingly normal people who refused to vote for Al Gore and later Barack Obama because "He's too clever." What kind of a screwed-up mindset must one have to prefer that the guy running the country be stupid? "This doctor's good at his job and knows what he's doing so I'm going instead to the guy down the road who's completely bloody useless." Yet the attiude seems not uncommon.

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

It's related to the fear of being shown up as dumb.

People walk into my office,look at the bookshelves and ask "Have you read all those books?" as if there's something odd about having read several hundred books in the course of 54 years of life. The answer, "most of them", never seems to satisfy for some reason.

[realthog.livejournal.com]

You mean you haven't read all of them? Shame on you!

One of the dourer exercises in life is to look at all the books on the still-to-be-read shelves and start calculating how many years it might reasonably take to read them all . . . and whether or not one is likely to live that many years. It would be nice to be able to steal all the time that the people C talks of aren't reading books so that it could be put to good use . . .

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

I agree.

[realthog.livejournal.com]

I'm not certain to what extent that's true. One of the (few) cheering things I find about riding the subway is that it's rare, as I look up and down whatever coach I'm on, not to see at least a few passengers buried in books. True, they're outnumbered by the newspaper readers and by the folks who're just staring fixedly into space, but they're -- and we're -- not rarae avidae (I think that's the correct plural!).

[al-zorra.livejournal.com]

I know exactly what you mean.

But, out here in America, you will never see anybody carrying a book or even an e-reader. Really.

NYC is exceptional, and that is why They hate cosmopolitan, sophisticated cities so much, and NYC in particular.

Love, C.

[realthog.livejournal.com]

out here in America, you will never see anybody carrying a book

That's almost infinitely sad if it's really true and not just a matter of perception (it could be, for example, that they read at home, out of your sight): I cannot imagine how bleak life must be without books.

[al-zorra.livejournal.com]

They have video games and online gaming, and casinos and fishing -- and television, glorious television. Plus the fun-filled tbagger events. And church at Nascar.

Love, C.

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

Or the Church of Basketball.

[realthog.livejournal.com]

Or the Church of Basketball.

When everybody knows the one and only True Church is cricket!

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

Of course!

[al-zorra.livejournal.com]

Nascar events hold church services so people don't have leave on Sunday, or feel guilty for not leaving for church.\

Love, c.

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

You mean they're not all worshipping the cars?

[realthog.livejournal.com]

Plus the fun-filled tbagger events.

Does this mean you're likely to return from your rustication . . . changed?

[al-zorra.livejournal.com]

It is up to you all to prevent me from turning into a forest fire.

Love, C.

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

We're required to wear those hats are we?

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

That is, as C., said, an impressive amount of reading.

I was particularly struck by the biography of Galton in part the first. Galton has long fascinated me. I'd love to read a proper bio, with good scholarly apparatus.

[realthog.livejournal.com]

I'd love to read a proper bio, with good scholarly apparatus.

Then this book is perhaps 95% of what you want -- it seems quite incredible they missed out the last few percent.

I think there is a good scholarly bio of Galton around -- I just can't remember offhand where I've seen it. If I get inspired I'll start combing around on Amazon . . . and then, if I buy the book, getting it from The Book Depository (plug plug).

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

Galton was an outlier among the scientists of his age. They were almost uniformly Liberals, he was not. Darwin and Huxley, for example, were supporters of the Jamaica Committee that sought to prosecute the murderer Eyre.

[realthog.livejournal.com]

I think he was a bit more of a complex character than that: some of his attitudes seem surprisingly liberal, especially in the context of their day. This may be, of course, just me suffering an example of the historico-I'm-sure-there-must-be-an-appropriate-word effect, whereby if one tries to map today's spectrum of political positions onto those of a past era one becomes, especially if as ignorant of history as I am, mightily confused.

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

I suppose you're right. It's hard to map him onto the late-nineteenth-century Liberal Party, though.