What I've Been Reading - 2010, Part 3

Of the variety of books I've read or finished reading in the last few months, the first was a novel called The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. Gibson and Sterling are both well-known authors of the branch of science fiction commonly called cyberpunk (Gibson was the author of The Neuromancer and the originator of the term "cyberspace"). While computers play a major role in The Difference Engine, however, it is not a novel based in the future, but an alternate history novel, based on the premise that Charles Babbage successfully completed his Difference Engine, a mechanical calculating machine he was designed to calculate advanced equations, and his more advanced, programmable Analytical Engine. Babbage produced several such designs in the mid 19th century, but they were never built, due to funding and Babbage's own eccentricities. Just a few years ago, an actual Difference Engine was produced using Babbage's original plans (with adjustments for minor errors) and 19th century manufacturing tolerances, which proved that his machine could actually have been built.

In the novel, the successful manufacture of a working computer has led to a technological revolution that has radically transformed Britain and the rest of the Western world. Britain is the world's leading power, with only France as a major rival, having ensured that the United States splintered over slavery. The government is dominated by intellectuals and scientists, led by Babbage and Lord Byron, who is prime minister. Other powerful individuals include Byron's daughter Ada Byron (Lovelace), who works with Babbage and is a brilliant "clacker"(programmer), though also a gambling addict (much like the real life Ada Lovelace, who was a skilled mathematician and writer of what many consider the first computer program, but was also fond of gambling), and Lords Thomas Huxley and Charles Darwin. A number of other historical figures appear or are mentioned in the novel, including Sam Houston, Benjamin Disreali, John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelly in some cases in roles quite similar to those they played in real life and in other cases quite different, though generally believable based on their views and personalities. Like in Wolfe's Book of the New Sun and Zindell's Neverness books, distinctive words are used for objects and professions, in this case often analogous to but not identical with those of the 20th century, e.g, "clacking" (programming), "kinotropy" (cinematography), "linestreaming" (streamlining) and "gurneys" (coal and steam powered vehicles).

The novel follows three major characters (the third, Laurence Oliphant, was a real person) through the transformed society of late 19th century London. Though in many ways technological progress and meritocracy have seemingly resulted in a better world, there are evidently many hidden flaws and injustices, and even a sinister undercurrent in the use of citizen-numbers and other Engine-based information to identify individuals -- and in some events, erase any evidence of their existence. The novel is not particularly profound, but it is an entertaining read and a creditable imagining of the way things might have been.

I also read a collection of short stories about the Templar knights called Tales of the Knights Templar, edited by writer Katherine Kurtz and assembled in more or less chronological order from early days of the order in Palestine during the Crusades up to modern times. The stories contain varying degrees of the fantastic, in some cases being essentially historical realism but in other cases involving mysticism, time travel, magic, and other supernatural elements. They are generally sympathetic to the Templars, and in many cases make use of the (in reality highly improbable) idea that they had some kind of hidden knowledge. All in all, an interesting diversion, though basically light reading.

Much less light, but just as entertaining, was The Urth of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe. This is a sequel to his Book of the New Sun, narrated by the same character, Severian. As I don't want to give away too much to those who haven't read the previous book, I will simply say that the sequel resolves certain mysteries from its predecessor, including exactly what the New Sun is and Severian's relationship towards it, as well as the origin of the Claw of the Conciliator, and is a dramatic example of the idea that sometimes you need to (virtually) destroy something in order to save it. There is a bit more obvious science fiction in this book, as it more heavily involves space and time travel, but it is still, as Wolfe himself calls it, science fantasy rather than "hard" science fiction. Like in the other book, not everything is clear, as we only see things through Severian's eyes, and he does not always spell things out, even assuming he understands them perfectly himself. Severian, despite the role he plays, remains an imperfect character (as he says himself, "a bad man trying to be good") and sometimes he does not explain his own actions clearly. However, The Urth of the New Sun is a helpful aid to understanding the complex Book of the New Sun, as well as being a worthwhile tale in its own right.

An entirely different sort of character is the prototypical sword and sorcery hero, Conan of Cimmeria, who features in a collection of the original stories of Robert E. Howard entitled The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian. This book contains close to half of Howard's Conan stories, with most of the other half appearing in second anthology and a few more in one covering all of Howard's best known characters, including Kull of Atlantis and Solomon Kane (who featured in a recent major film). The stories in this anthology are from Howard's original texts, without the latter additions by other writers that appear in many Conan books.

Howard's Conan is a character of more depth than he appears to be in later portrayals (at least according to several critics -- I haven't read the later extrapolations myself), being somewhat melancholy and prone to brooding. He is not completely flawless, nor is he unintelligent or ignorant. But he does at times seem almost superhuman, as he is frequently described as succeeding in feats far beyond the abilities of normal humans, not to mention surviving wounds that would kill most people several times over (one can imagine him as a major inspiration for the concept of "hit points" in games like Dungeons and Dragons). Aside from his fighting skills, he is a skilled sailor, thief, and leader of men -- in fact there seems to be little he can't do. It is easy to imagine that Fritz Leiber and his friend Harry Fischer to create Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser as more human heroes in contrast to characters such as Conan, as they are said to have done.

Conan is also proud of the fact that he is a barbarian, in contrast to weak and untrustworthy "civilized" men. Howard clearly sympathizes with the barbarian viewpoint as he conceives it, though not in the sense of a noble savage, but more as being somehow purer and less corrupt. Nevertheless, Howard's idea of the barbarian is still somewhat stereotypical, as indeed many of his characters are. His women are generally weak and helpless (not too mention underdressed); a few are at least somewhat more capable and strong-willed ones, such as the princess in "The Black Colossus", but nevertheless are essentially dependent on Conan. The most notable exception is the pirate queen Belit in "Queen of the Black Coast", who is a powerful and ruthless leader in her own right, but even she feels an irresistible attraction to Conan that leads her to surrender leadership to him, or at least make him her equal. Howard also makes use of (whether he believed it or not) a completely erroneous concept of evolution, with peoples in his Hyborian Age evolving separately from apes and in some cases even "regressing" to apedom, none of which is actually possible. He seems to have subscribed to the idea that racial purity is somehow superior (when the opposite is actually true); the fact that Conan is a "pure-blooded" Cimmerian is emphasized, and while some "mixed" races are portrayed as being accomplished, the implication is that this is in spite of mixed origins rather than because of them. Most disturbingly, he had an obviously racist view of blacks, who are always physically powerful but extremely savage and almost subhuman. Of course, given that Howard was a Texan writing in the early 20th century, his racism is no more surprising than that of Margret Mitchell (author of Gone with the Wind), but in both cases it can be disconcerting to see on the page.

Despite these obvious problems, and the fact that a few of the stories were more clearly churned out using a formula in order to sell, Howard's Conan stories are exciting and fun to read. Having read this volume, I don't necessarily feel compelled to try to obtain a complete collection of Howard's work or even of his Conan stories, but I would like to obtain or at least read some of the other stories that are generally cited as being his best (including those featuring other characters). While heroes such as Frodo, Severian, or even Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser might have more depth or at least seem more realistic, it's easy to see why Conan has a hold on the imaginations of many and remains highly influential.

Speaking of influential, another one of my recent reads was a novel generally considered one of the most influential of the 20th century, To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. A greater contrast to Howard's Conan stories is hard to imagine (though the two authors have at least one thing in common -- they both committed suicide). To the Lighthouse doesn't have a conventional plot, but rather focuses on the thoughts and feelings of a family spending the holiday on an island in Scotland and their guests. Interior monologues (particularly based on the perceptions of the characters as they observe their surroundings) feature heavily, so like in James Joyce's Ulysses, it is sometimes hard to distinguish what the characters think from their actual thoughts and actions (though generally To the Lighthouse is not as difficult in this sense as Ulysses, in part simply because it is much shorter, but also because it doesn't have the dramatic shifts in style that Joyce employed). Rather than telling a tell in the usual sense, the book explores the characters' relationships to each other, including their sometimes contradictory thoughts about each other, as well as women's relationship to men in the society of the day and the struggle to create, as typified by Lily Briscoe's attempts to paint.

The family at the heart of the story is the Ramsays, headed by the brooding philosopher Mr. Ramsay, who despite his intellectual accomplishments feels insecure and has great difficulty relating to others, and his wife Mrs. Ramsay, who holds the family together but accepts a subordinate position despite her own capabilities. The first section of the novel takes place in the course of a single day (again like Ulysses), culminating in a dinner party presided over by Mrs. Ramsay. In contrast, the middle section (appropriately titled "Time Passes"), only slightly touches on the human characters at all, but instead focuses on the deterioration of the house during a ten-year period when the family doesn't use it. The third part of the story takes place during another single day, when the remaining members of the family and their guests return to the house on the island.

Though it is not the kind of novel I would want to read just for fun, I can see why To the Lighthouse has a good reputation among critics. It is well-written, very original, and thought-provoking (though I would argue that books like Wolfe's and Zindell's are just as thought-provoking, though in different ways). Wolfe's insights into individual perspectives are fascinating. As a personal aside, I found it almost disturbing that I have a number of things in common with the intellectual student Charles Tansley, who is not a big favorite of many at the house, though I'm pretty sure I'm not as insensitive to the feelings of others as he is (particularly the little boy James Ramsay, whose obvious desire to go to the lighthouse is trampled on by both Charles and James's father, who keep saying the weather certainly won't allow it).

Among the other fiction works I've read in the last few months have been a number of sci-fi short stories, including some older ones by Frederick Pohl and newer ones from a recent anthology, and a Terry Prachett Discworld novel, Equal Rites. Regarding these, I'll just briefly state that Pohl's stories are good, though usually cynical and sometimes a bit out of date in certain ways (such as the role of women), a lot of the more recent sci-fi stories were also quite good, and Prachett's book, though not the equal of some of his best satire and straight humor (such as may be found in Small Gods, Wyrd Sisters or Hogfather), was still fun, and contained more than a little serious commentary in the guise of humor.

Just recently I also completed a book that I had been reading over a long period of time, a non-fiction work by Isaac Asimov entitled Asimov's New Guide to Science. This book I had been employing mainly as bedtime reading material, and as I have had less opportunity to read before bed than in the past, it took a lot longer to finish than it would have otherwise. The book is divided into two parts, "The Physical Sciences" and "The Biological Sciences", the first of which I actually finished perhaps a year ago or earlier, and the second of which I started some months later, having read other things before bed in the interim (such as Darwin's Origin of Species, which I have discussed in a previous post). But while I chose to read the book before bed in part because its relatively soporific qualities in comparison to a lot of fiction (including Asimov's own) or even some more dramatically paced nonfiction, it was by no means boring (nor nearly as sleep-inducing on average as Darwin's book). It was very educational, and written in about as clear and understandable a manner as possible considering the often very in-depth subject matter.

I cannot claim to have thoroughly understood every topic Asimov covered -- though I think I can fairly claim to have follow the vast majority, at least in a general sense -- and I have already forgotten much that I did understand clearly, all this despite the fact that I would have said (and in fact would still say) I knew more about science than the majority of people. But I do now comprehend more thoroughly certain things that I had previously only had a vague grasp of, and learned a lot of new things as well. For instance, despite all the references to enriched uranium and occasionally to centrifuges in news about Iran's nuclear program, I had previously no idea of the significance of either. In fact to create a sustained fusion reaction in a bomb, it is necessary to have sufficient quantities of a relatively rare isotope of uranium (to be precise -- with a quick reference to the book -- uranium 235, as opposed to the far more common uranium 238). The centrifuges are used to separate the lighter, more fissionable form of uranium from the more common form.

Likewise, I hadn't previously been aware that starch and cellulose (used by plants such as trees and grass for their bodies, as it were) are both made of glucose, and in terms of chemical makeup are basically the same thing, the only difference being their structure -- something which nevertheless makes a huge difference, as we can digest starch (and do in large quantities) but not cellulose. For that matter, even cattle and horses (which eat grass) and termites (which eat wood) are themselves also unable to digest cellulose, but have bacteria in their systems which do it for them, another thing I hadn't known. Likewise, I hadn't previously had any real idea how antibiotics work, or why they don't work on viruses. (Essentially, they closely resemble the structure of chemicals that the bacteria need to reproduce and function properly, and they attach themselves to the receptors for these proteins, in effect jamming the cells' machinery. Viruses, on the other hand, are so simple they have little or no machinery to jam, at least without damaging cells you want to leave untouched, such as those of our bodies.) Certainly I can say I got a much better understanding of organic chemistry than I had previously had from the book, though there is still a huge amount I don't know.

Not all parts of the books were equal informative to me personally -- the first chapters, for instance, cover astronomy, a subject I am far more familiar with, and so consequently had little that was new to me. And of course, given the fact that the book is an early 1980s update of a work first published in the 1960s, there is much that is out of date in many fields (astronomy not least among them). But in some cases, even the out of date passages were informative. For instance, at the end of the chapter "The Earth", Asimov explains how human production of large amounts of carbon dioxide may result in a warmer planet, and that studies were already showing that glaciers were receding. He goes on to say, however, that while temperatures had clearly gone up in the first half of the 20th century, there had been a slight downturn in temperatures since then, which he speculates might have been due to increasing smog and dust in the air blocking sunlight, so that the two forms of human pollution were canceling each other out. Of course since the book was written, the average global temperature has resumed its rise, so his last comments no longer apply. But this passage alone shows that despite what some global warming deniers like to assert, the concept of anthropogenic global warming is by no means a recent invention but was widely accepted in science decades ago, nor was there any kind of consensus among scientists in the 1970s that the Earth was entering a long-term cooling trend. In fact, everything since is simply a confirmation about what Asimov had to say about global warming three decades ago.

Another point about the book I might note is that, as befits a scientist who is also a science fiction writer, Asimov at times speculates about future trends. He also does not attempt to restrain himself from occasional comments about human society and behavior, and what he thinks people can do to improve things. He has particularly harsh comments for those who try to deny evolution and those who resist non-coercive population control measures. But all of these comments come out of the science he is discussing, so they don't bother me (of course it helps that I agree with nearly all of them anyway). He is also not entirely above a little self-promotion, as in the section on robots where he talks about his own three laws of robotics (and mentions, accurately, that he coined the term "robotics"). But considering the detail he goes to regarding other people's achievements, these references to his own don't seem like much. All in all, while there are certainly more up-to-date science books for the general reader out there, I can't imagine that there are many which can as easily give the reader as comprehensive an understanding of science in so many fields.