What I've Been Reading -- April 2011 to May 2011

Here are some comments of varying length on the many books I've read in the past two months. I should point out that the length of the comments do not necessarily correlate to how much I enjoyed the book; in fact some of the books that I enjoyed the most I wrote the least about.

The Time Ships by Stephen Baxter
The Time Ships, a science fiction novel by Stephen Baxter, is an “authorized sequel” to the classic The Time Machine by H.G. Wells. What most immediately impressive about Baxter’s work is that it really reads like it could have been written by Wells, at least as far as the writing style goes. Even many of the technologies that make appearances in the novel could have come from Wells (and indeed it seems that Baxter did deliberately include things from some of Wells’s other stories).

The Time Machine was the earliest of Wells’s classic stories and, along with The War of the Worlds, remains his best known work. Its ambiguous ending made it a good candidate for a sequel. The Time Ships is told from the perspective of the Time Traveller (like in the original book, his true name is never given), and begins with the events at the end of The Time Machine. Baxter’s portrayal of the Time Traveller is also consistent with that in the earlier book. In both novels, he is clever, persistent, and dedicated in the search for knowledge, but also impulsive, somewhat prone to violence, and has a few unreasoning prejudices. Baxter even neatly accounts for a major scientific inaccuracy in the original – since physicists at the time did not know of nuclear fusion, they believed the sun would burn out in a few tens of millions of years, an idea Wells incorporated into his novel. When the Time Traveller goes more than 30 million years into the future, he sees the sun burn out (we now know it will be several billion years before it reaches a red giant stage, and even longer before it completely burns out). In The Time Ships, what the Time Traveller witnessed is explained as a failed experiment in solar engineering.

I will not go into the plot of The Time Ships in detail here, except to say that it makes use of the idea of multiple histories existing simultaneously, and involves travel both far back and far forward in time, to histories (or universes) that progressively diverge from our own. Time travel stories have never been my favorite type of science fiction, but The Time Ships is engaging and well done, and I would recommend it to anyone who likes The Time Machine (which should certainly be read first) and other works by H.G. Wells.


Gideon’s Wall by Greg Kurzawa [Gage Kurricke]
Gideon’s Wall is a fantasy novel by Gage Kurricke, writing under the pen name Greg Kurzawa. This novel is quite different from most others in the genre, and that is one of the keys to its success. The frame story is that of an archeologist (he calls himself an archaist) who travels to the wasteland that was once the empire of Shallai, before it was destroyed virtually overnight in an unknown disaster. The archaist’s investigations reveal the tale behind the fall of Shallai, told mostly through the eyes of Del, a soldier sent as an ambassador to the Bedu, a people who resemble the Arabs of our world (even their religion has much in common with Islam). He gradually comes to identify closely with them, becoming friends with their chief ruler and standing by them when they are threatened with annihilation. Though the reader knows the ultimate fate of Shallai, the tale of how it happened is riveting, Del is an interesting and sympathetic character, and the Bedu are a colorful people. A good read for anyone who likes fantasy, history, or stories about different cultures.


The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and other writings by Karl Marx
Over the past few years, one type of bedtime reading I have been doing is of famous religious and philosophical works (because I’m interested in finding out what they have to say first hand, and because most of them are pretty effective at inducing sleep). In this time I have read most of the Bible, the Koran, a selection of the Upanishads, the Bhagavad-Gita, a selection of Buddhist scriptures, the Analects of Confucius, the Dao De Jing (Tao Te Ching), The Republic by Plato, Aristotle’s Politics, a little bit of The Book of Mormon, A History of God (discussed in an earlier blog) and more that nature (the majority of this I read before starting this blog, which is why I have not written about it, though perhaps I may do so in the future). My most recent reading of this sort was of a central work of what some have called a secular religion – Marxism.

The Communist Manifesto, a collaboration between Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (though Engels himself said Marx deserved most of the credit for the work), was first published in early 1848, the same year that revolutions against the conservative aristocratic regimes of the day swept through much of Europe (a situation paralleled to some degree by this year’s revolutions in the Arab world). The Manifesto itself is quite short (less than 40 pages in the edition I have), but the book I read also included an essay by Mark entitled The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and a selection from Mark’s Capital (Das Capital) that the editor gave the name “The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation”.

I found a number of Marx’s criticisms of the capitalist system valid, and he does raise issues worth thinking about. But his economic theory, while complex, is nevertheless far too simple to be an accurate reflection of the real world (though the same could be said for capitalist economic theory in general and certain aspects of it in particular). To some degree, it is clear that Marxism is a product of its times, as he was clearly basing his theories on conditions prevailing in the mid-19th century, which were quite different – and much worse for workers, at least in what is now the developed world – from today (though the essential point that the labor of workers is devoted primarily to the benefit of their employers remains valid). His view of history, specifically the idea of economic determinism (under which the prevailing economic system determines everything else about a society, including its political system), is obviously a gross oversimplification, and fails to adequately describe many historical societies. Likewise, while I can appreciate the argument that a total transformation in the society is difficult or even impossible to accomplish in a piecemeal fashion, I have a problem with his insistence on the necessity of violent revolution.

Nevertheless, as I said, he does have a number of thought-provoking ideas. He also made an interesting statement in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte that applies very well to the sort of nonsensical statements made in the last few years by some on the American right. Describing the situation in France in 1848, in which the more conservative groups united to crush the more radical revolutionaries, he says: “Every demand for the most simple bourgeois financial reform, for the most ordinary liberalism, for the most commonplace republicanism, for the flattest democracy, is forthwith punished as an ‘assault on society’, and is branded as ‘socialism’.” This sounds like a perfect description of the criticism of many of President Obama’s policies. It’s worth noting that to Marx himself, not only were things like “the most simple bourgeois financial reform” or “the most ordinary liberalism” far short of “socialism”, but even socialism as he defined it fell far short of the sort of revolution he advocated. This was why he and Engels rejected the label “socialist” in favor of “communist” and included a critical look at several types of socialists in The Communist Manifesto. Likewise, Marx would almost certainly take the same view of Obama as that expressed in the quote above, as falling far short of even socialism, let alone Marxism, and in this he would be completely correct.


The Aeneid by Virgil
The Aeneid, written in the 1st century BCE by Publius Vergilius Maro (better known as Virgil), is perhaps the most famous work of literature from ancient Rome; it is certainly the most famous Roman epic poem. Perhaps due to my cultural background, the epic poem has never been a favorite genre with me (that they were originally meant to be read out loud may also have something to do with it), though the stories themselves are often entertaining enough (I particularly enjoyed a prose translation of Homer’s Odyssey that I read a few years ago). Given this, it is no wonder that I found parts of the Aeneid slow going. The endless recounting of the deeds of various, often obscure characters can get a bit tedious at times, and the overly patriotic (to me at least) view of the Rome that Aeneas is supposed to be the ultimate ancestor of (though that was a pure fiction invented by the Romans after they came into contact with the Greeks) doesn’t help. But there are certainly some well-written passages, and the story picks up somewhat in the second half, which, with its emphasis on battles between the Trojans led by Aeneas and his allies on the one hand and various Italian opponents on the other, is the part most clearly influenced by Homer’s Iliad, down to the very graphic descriptions of the fatal wounds suffered by participants in the battles.

Other notable parts of the book are Aeneas’s encounter with Dido, the semi-legendary founder of Carthage, and his descent into the underworld to see his father, which provided a model for Dante’s Divine Comedy (in which Virgil served as Dante’s guide through Hell). This latter passage contains a look forward (from Aeneas’s perspective) at the history of Rome, including a lengthy, rather overblown lament over the death of the young Marcellus, the prospective heir of Virgil’s patron, the emperor Augustus, but also a few lines implicitly criticizing Augustus’s adoptive father Julius Caesar and his opponent Pompey for the civil wars they fought, even particularly calling on Caesar to “be the first to show forbearance” and “cast down the weapon from [his] hand.”


The Road by Cormac McCarthy
The Road, a novel by Cormac McCarthy, is set in a grim post-apocalyptic world dominated by sadistic cannibals and slavers and darkened by a permanent cloud cover (the conditions seem to be those of nuclear winter, as temperatures have dropped to a level that is barely survivable, especially in winter). It is the story of a father and son, never identified by name (they are referred to only as “the man” and “the boy”), who are traveling south to find a place where they have some hope of survival. McCarthy’s prose is made up of spare, fragmented sentences with minimal punctuation (except for periods): “The road was empty. Below in the valley the still gray serpentine of a river. Motionless and precise. Along the shore a burden of dead reeds. Are you okay? he said. The boy nodded.” The world he depicts is a terrible, bleak place in which very little is left alive.

The theme at the heart of the novel is the struggle between the good and the evil in human nature. On the one hand are the cannibals and other sadistic people who seem to dominate the surviving population (not that the man and boy encounter a great many people in their travels) – as the boy calls them, “the bad guys”. On the other hand, there are the man and the boy, who represent what the boy calls “the good guys”. More particularly good is represented by the boy himself, who often acts as the man’s conscience, urging him to good deeds and against evil ones when he’d rather do whatever seems most conducive to their survival (not that he always goes along with what the boy says).

While it isn’t necessarily the easiest or most purely enjoyable novel I’ve read recently, there’s no question that The Road is well written and deserving of much of the praise it received. Its picture of a destroyed ecology also makes it a worthwhile read from an environmental standpoint. It is rather depressing, but it ends on a note of hope (though this comes after a particularly low point, and the hope offered is limited in scope). It’s an excellent choice for those who enjoy good literary fiction.


Casino Royale by Ian Fleming
Casino Royale was the first of Ian Fleming’s novels featuring James Bond, the world’s most famous fictional spy. Despite being familiar with the character, I had never actually read a James Bond novel, and I’ve only seen one or two of the many James Bond movies. The book was well-paced and entertaining, though it has a very 1950s flavor to it (it was published in 1953). Bond is depicted as more than a little sexist, though he is aware of a certain degree of “hypocrisy” in his attitude toward women. The cool competence I tend to associate with the character was on display in a key episode at the gaming table in the casino, but was otherwise surprisingly absent. This isn’t to say he was bumbling, but most of his successes outside the casino came from luck or fortitude rather than from his own actions. He survived one attack purely by luck, and while his ability to endure torture (in a particularly nasty episode) was characterized as exceptional, his ultimate survival again was due to luck. He was also fooled more than once. In another interesting episode, he expresses doubt about the righteousness of his job, questioning whether the people he operates against are really bad people just because they work for their country the same way he does for his, though ultimately his friend and his own experiences lead him to conclude that “there are plenty of really black targets” working for the other side (i.e., the Soviets), so as long as he targets them, he will be doing good.


The Dark Elf Trilogy by R.A. Salvatore
The Dark Elf Trilogy is an omnibus edition of three novels by R.A. Salvatore, Homeland, Exile, and Sojourn (I picked up my copy for free, as it was left behind by the friend of a friend when he had to leave Taiwan at short notice). They feature the character Drizzt Do'Urden, who is, as the title suggests, a dark elf, a member of the race also known as drow. The drow are evil subterranean-dwelling elves, originally created by Gary Gygax for the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons (I have copies of the classic adventure modules in which they first appeared). Though the dark elves are characterized as thoroughly evil, Drizzt is an exception, a drow with a conscience that drives him to do good. Indeed, the theme of the novels is basically Drizzt’s struggle to come to understand his conscience and find a way to live in accordance with it. In this respect, if no other, the novel resembles The Road.

But while these novels are entertaining enough as adventure stories, in other respects they were somewhat disappointing. I wasn’t particularly impressed by Salvatore’s writing, but a bigger problem was the believability of the characters, most particularly Drizzt himself. In part this is not exactly Salvatore’s fault, as the problem can be traced to D&D and even to some extent to the great Tolkien himself, blasphemous as it may be to say it. In D&D, certain types of creatures are seen as inherently evil, including the drow and races such as orcs, and others are inherently good, such as deep (subterranean-dwelling) gnomes and surface elves (though there are quite a few exceptions in these cases). This to some degree reflects the situation in Tolkien’s work, where orcs are always evil and elves and halflings (hobbits) are almost always good. But how can a race of creatures be inherently good or evil? Is their moral outlook inborn, or a product of their society, or some combination of the two? Salvatore tries to grapple with this question, with upbringing playing the most obvious role, but the problem is that Drizzt (and his father Zaknafein, who becomes something of a model for him) are too dramatically different from all the other drow in terms of moral outlook to be credible (and in their case the implication is that their moral sense is inborn and strongly resistant to perversion through their upbringing). Most implausibly, some of Drizzt’s supposedly instinctive moral standards are based on rather conventional American ideas of what is good, such as when he is revolted by witnessing a sexual orgy among the drow (this to some extent reflects Gygax, who portrayed the drow as being “sexually depraved”, with both of them implying that sexual promiscuity is somehow evil in and of itself) or when he wishes he could have brought a marauding humanoid before a court of law (given his background, how would the idea even occur to him?). This flaw dooms Salvatore’s laudable attempt to write a set of D&D-based novels with philosophical depth.


Inca by Suzanne Alles Blom
Suzanne Alles Blom’s novel Inca is an alternate history, a historical novel in which the course of events is altered from what occurred in real history. I have read a number of novels of this sort, the most recent being The Difference Engine (which I discussed in a past blog post). In Inca, Blom changes a number of things about the initial encounters between the Inca and the Spanish, allowing her to speculate on how things might have happened differently.

Overall, this novel is a well-done example of its genre. The story is told from the Inca point of view, and Blom succeeds in creating a vivid picture of Inca society (whether it is completely accurate I can’t say, not knowing enough about the Inca) and allowing the reader to see the Spanish the way the Inca might have seen them. Her portrayal of the Inca might be slightly idealized (though she does refer to some bloody deeds in their history) and her portrayal of the Spanish might strike some as overly negative (though even her Inca characters do note a few talents that the Spanish have aside from war), but from what I know of that period, I would say it is largely accurate. Her main character, Exemplary Fortune (known to history as Atahualpa, the last Inca ruler), is perhaps depicted as a better and wiser person than he probably was in real life, though he does seem to have been both more likeable and a better leader than his half-brother Huáscar (Cable in the novel), who he overcame in the civil war that divided the Inca immediately before the Spanish conquest in the real world (here the civil war is averted). But since we know very little for certain about any of these people, this is not a major problem. I recommend this book, with the caveat that it ends without the ultimate conflict being resolved, and it seems that Blom has not yet written a sequel.

Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams
Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency is a novel by Douglas Adams, best known as the creator of the science fiction comedy classic The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. While the majority of Dirk Gently is set on Earth in the present day, it still involves travel through both time and space, as well as some supernatural elements (specifically ghosts). While this book doesn’t contain quite as many laugh-out-loud bits as the Hitchhiker books, it is still quite funny, and the plot is more coherent. While not absolutely necessary, some knowledge of the poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge is helpful for full enjoyment of the novel (though I must confess I only remember the poems in question vaguely myself). Interestingly, while Dirk Gently is the title character and Adams went on to write a second novel featuring him, he doesn’t actually appear until nearly halfway through; his friend Richard MacDuff is much the chief protagonist as he is (MacDuff appears from almost the beginning). Another interesting feature of the novel is that it features the Electric Monk, an amusing Hitchhikeresque creation that the band of the same name (see also this site) took its name from. Definitely recommended for any who like the Hitchhiker books or just humor, science fiction and good times in general.