All reviews copyright 1984-2008 Evelyn C. Leeper.
THE CAVES OF STEEL by Isaac Asimov:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 06/18/2004]
Isaac Asimov's CAVES OF STEEL (ISBN 0-553-29340-0) still holds up well. Oh, a lot of the social conventions and attitudes are somewhat dated, but I find that adds to the "charm" of it all. Asimov was one of the first authors who managed to meld science fiction with mystery and not have either suffer as a result. I may even go back and re-read the sequel, THE NAKED SUN. (Asimov eventually tied these into all his other works--unwisely, in my opinion.)
To order The Caves of Steel from amazon.com, click here.
The "Foundation" Trilogy by Isaac Asimov:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 02/01/2008]
THE FOUNDATION TRILOGY by Isaac Asimov (FOUNDATION, ISBN-13 978-0-553-29335-7, ISBN-10 0-553-29335-4; FOUNDATION AND EMPIRE, ISBN-13 978-0-553-29337-1, ISBN-10 0-553-29337-0; SECOND FOUNDATION, ISBN-13 978-0-553-29336-4, ISBN-10 0-553-29336-2) was our January science fiction discussion book. This has been discussed endlessly, but I will make a few observations. First, everyone seems to be smoking. When there is one character who doesn't smoke, a big deal is made of it. There are still newspapers with sports and comics pages, and one paragraph describes how tens of millions of them are being printed each day. All the names are European--and western and northern European at that--with an occasional Latin or Egyptian one in the Empire. There are no names that might have been Japanese, or Indian, or African. And everyone in a position of power or authority is male. (Asimov tried to fix that in FOUNDATION'S EDGE, written much later, by making some of the minor female characters more important than they appeared in the first three books.)
Scientifically, everyone is stuck in the 1950s. Asimov refers to "that kindergarten toy, the logarithmic Slide Rule" ["The Conspirators"]. It is not clear that in even just another fifty years anyone will know what a slide rule is, much less consider it a toy. (Oddly, in "The Psychohistorians", Seldon has a calculator--we seem to have regressed rather than progress through the series.) Computers seem strangely absent (though ships have them), and even such basic (to us) items such as video recorders and personal electronic equipment are practically unknown. People carry briefcases with sheaves of paper in them.
Two questions I have not seen before: Where does Trantor get its oxygen if all but 100 square miles are covered with buildings ["The Psychohistorians"]? And where does it get its soil when it reverts to agriculture ["On Trantor"]?
Another problem is psycho-history itself. Psycho-history "reached mathematical maturity with one man, Hari Seldon, and died with him, for no man since has been capable of manipulating its intricacies." ["The Dead Hand"] So nobody really has any proof that it works, and no falsifiability. Or rather, the whole episode with the Mule *does* falsify the theory--clearly Hari Seldon's predictions failed when the Mule came along. In fact, even when Seldon's Plan does work, it often works because of chance occurrences--a derelict spaceship is found, or some such. On the one hand, Seldon claims one can only predict in the macro sense, but it seems clear that a lot of the changes we see are driven by micro events.
For that matter, after a while people keep saying that they will know they have reached a Seldon Crisis when their actions are completely determined--when they have no options left. And they refuse to take any action until they do reach a Seldon Crisis. So the question arises, why should anyone do anything? Well, obviously Joe Average--or Joh Avron, to pick a more Asimovian name--has to go to work, plow his field, or whatever. But the politicians get into a mindset where they have determined that the correct action is either no action, or whatever action is inevitable.
And as Joseph Patrouch points out, Asimov often conceals key plot points or produces a deus ex machina to solve each short story's situation. "Oh, I just happened to be taping that room--and I also just happened to decide to flood the room with undetectable ultra-violet light--and the suspect just happened to turn his hand a certain way so that we got a split-second glimpse of his tattoo."
It is a sign of differing standards of prose that Asimov could use a word like the French "ci-devant" without Campbell telling him to change it--I suspect that it would no longer appear in this sort of fiction.
To order Foundation from amazon.com, click here.
To order Foundation and Empire from amazon.com, click here.
To order Second Foundation from amazon.com, click here.
THE GODS THEMSELVES by Isaac Asimov:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 10/05/2007]
THE GODS THEMSELVES by Isaac Asimov (ISBN-13 978-0-553-28810-0, ISBN-10 0-553-28810-5) is so old that the *hardback* I checked out of the library had a cover price of $5.95. But that's the way it is with the library discussion books--we cannot request current books via interlibrary loan. The irony is that most of the older books have been "de-accessioned"--i.e., gotten rid of. Only classics like Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein seem to avoid this fate. (We wanted to read a Robert Silverberg, but there were not enough copies of any one Silverberg book to go around.)
Asimov has one of his characters say, "It is a mistake to suppose that the public wants the environment protected or their lives saved and that they will be grateful to any idealist who will fight for such ends. What the public wants is their own individual comfort. We know that well enough from our experience in the environmental crisis of the twentieth century. Once it was well known that cigarettes increased the incidence of lung cancer, the obvious remedy was to stop smoking, but the desired remedy was a cigarette that did not encourage cancer. When it became clear that the internal-combustion engine was polluting the atmosphere dangerously, the obvious remedy was to abandon such engines, and the desired remedy was to develop non-polluting engines." This was true in 1972 when he wrote it and it is true now. Sugar is bad, so we don't cut back on sweeteners--we invent cyclamates, and saccharine, and Equal, and Splenda. We want sugar with the bad effects. Fat is bad, so we don't cut back on fat-- we develop Olestra. But why not? There is nothing inherently wrong with cigarettes or internal combustion engines. If one could make an internal combustion engine that ran on grass and did not pollute, why not? People used to get sick drinking water until they figured out how to purify it--should they have just given up on water?
But my real problem with this book is its treatment of gender. The first section has no female characters. The second has a "three-sex" alien race, except that it is obvious that two are male and one is female. And the males are the "Rational" and the "Parental", while the "Emotional" is the female. Now, the main "Emotional" is exceptional, but the rest of the "Emotionals" are flighty ditzes. This is what passed for well-written gender roles back then? (There is a female character in the third section. She is a tour guide, sort of a glorified stewardess.)
THE GODS THEMSELVES was supposedly Asimov's way of showing that he could write alien aliens, and sex scenes. Reading it now (and probably even then), it is clear he could not, but this still won a Hugo for its year. Go figure.
To order The Gods Themselves from amazon.com, click here.
I, ROBOT by Isaac Asimov:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 05/28/2004]
Isaac Asimov's I, ROBOT, unlike the "Nancy Drew" books, has not been revised since the original 1940s and 1950s publication of the stories, and remains extremely readable even now. And while many of the stories are "mere" puzzle pieces, several had deeper philosophical issues that remain pertinent even today. (And I may have more to say after our science fiction discussion group discusses it.)
To order I, Robot from amazon.com, click here.
THE RETURN OF THE BLACK WIDOWERS by Isaac Asimov:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 04/30/2004]
Isaac Asimov's THE RETURN OF THE BLACK WIDOWERS (ISBN 0-786-71248-1) collects some stories from each of the previous "Black Widowers" volumes as well as some previously uncollected stories. The Black Widowers is a men's club which meets monthly for dinner and somehow always gets a puzzle to solve from whoever their guest is. When I started this volume, I found myself knowing the solutions early on in each story, but I thought it might be because I remembered them from the earlier volumes. But this continued even in the stories that I hadn't read before, so unless Rupert Sheldrake is right about morphic resonance, the only explanation is that the puzzles are really pretty obvious. Or maybe I'm getting better at this. I can remember liking this series years ago, but it seems fairly simplistic now.
To order The Return of the Black Widowers from amazon.com, click here.
THE HANDMAID'S TALE by Margaret Atwood (Fawcett Crest, 1986 (1985c), paperback):
[This first part of this was originally printed in the April 10, 1987 MT VOID.]
They say that politics make strange bedfellows, and they point to the feminists and the fundamentalists marching side-by-side to "take back the night" and punish all those horrible, evil pornographers. Well, Margaret Atwood has brought new meaning to that cliche of bedfellows. In a world where the fertility rate has been drastically reduced because of pollution and who knows what other evils, the Gileadean solution is that of Rachel and her handmaid Bilhah. And this is made palatable by couching it as the solution that both the anti- pornography ("AP") fundamentalists and the AP feminists have been promoting for years. The AP fundamentalists get the strict morality, the elimination of divorce, the return of woman to her role as keeper of the home. The AP feminists get the banning of pornography, the death penalty for rape, and the elimination of violence against women. So why do I have the feeling that none of those promoting these goals today would actually want the reality Atwood gives us?
Actually one of the characters makes the point best. There are two kinds of freedom, she says, freedom to and freedom from. Both the AP feminists and the AP fundamentalists have been emphasizing the freedom from: freedom from fear, freedom from violence, freedom from anything that offends, etc. (Sounds a bit like Franklin Roosevelt, doesn't it? But I digress.) They have forgotten that freedom from and freedom to have to balance out: an increase in one is only achieved by a decrease in the other. Or, as Henry Drummond says in Inherit the Wind, "Yes, you can learn to fly. But the birds will lose their wonder, and the clouds will smell of gasoline." In the case of The Handmaid's Tale, the freedom from fear et al has been achieved by giving up the freedom to live as one chooses, to work in a profession, to have financial independence, to have an identity of one's own. The handmaids are "Ofglen" or "Offred"--which Atwood mislabels as patronymics--having given up their own names when they were recruited. The AP fundamentalists and the AP feminists have been so busy joining forces on what they want everyone to have freedom from that they have overlooked the fact that they disagree on what people should have freedom to. If they achieve their goals they may discover that the world they have made is not to their liking after all.
The other interesting point about the society that Atwood portrays is that it is very similar to another science fictional society--that of John Norman's "Gor" series. Bizarre though this sounds, let's examine the two. Atwood describes women's roles as being one of five types: Marthas, Handmaidens, Wives, Aunts, or Colonists. The Marthas do the cooking and cleaning; they are the equivalent of Norman's state slaves. Both dress in drab colors and do the menial work. The Handmaidens provide procreation (and sex); they are the equivalent of Norman's pleasure slaves. Both dress in red. The Wives are the equivalent of Norman's free companions--honored and respected, living their lives on a pedestal. The Aunts are the equivalent of the slaves who train the pleasure slaves (I don't recall if there is a specific term for them). The Colonists have no direct parallel, though a disobedient slave on Gor does end up doing some sort of unpleasant/dangerous work. While it's true that these roles are not unpredictable, the parallels between Gilead and Gor are thought-provoking, to say the least. Add to this that Atwood, as part of the main character's description of her indoctrination, includes graphic descriptions of violent sex, and one wonders if those who would ban Norman's books would do the same to The Handmaid's Tale. Consider the following excerpt from a proposed anti- pornography ordinance: "Pornography is the sexually explicit subordination of women, graphically depicted, whether in pictures or in words, that also includes one or more of the following: ... women are presented dehumanized as sexual objects, things or commodities...." (Note that the portrayal does not have to be favorable.) My reading of this is that The Handmaid's Tale would be considered pornographic by this definition. All this indicates, of course, is that this definition is crap.
I haven't said much about the book itself. That's because the plot itself is not that original, or enthralling, or amazing. It's what the book makes you think about that counts. Atwood makes you think about what can lead to this society and, conversely, what the actions and attitudes of today can lead to. It doesn't bear multiple readings the way a novel like Last and First Men does. It's not a masterpiece of literary style. But the thoughts it generates will stay with you long after the details of the book itself have been forgotten.
[Addendum after seeing the film: In general, the film remained true to the novel, but some important bits were only hinted at or left out entirely. In the film we see all the shops are labeled by icons rather than lettered signs; in the novel we discover this is because women are forbidden to read and even the signs were considered too much temptation. This makes the Scrabble game take on a whole new level of meaning as well. In the movie, everything is bar coded--is someone claiming that bar codes are evil or what? The movie also drops all references to the fate of the Jews in Gilead, but uses--rather unsubtly--a scene in which women who fail their fertility test are first directed into a separate line from those who pass and then are put in a cattle-car to transport them to the "Colonies" for "resettlement." There are other bits, important to the novel, that are dropped entirely in the film, and the film suffers from it.]
To order The Handmaid's Tale from amazon.com, click here.
CITY OF GOD by St. Augustine:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 05/06/2005]
I am slogging my way through the thousand-plus pages of St. Augustine's CITY OF GOD (ISBN 0-14-044426-2), but am finding a lot to dispute. Well, the fact that Passover affected my schedule should tell you something, but it's more than that. The first part of the book is Augustine trying to explain why Christianity is objectively provable as better than the Roman religion. In I:6-7, for example, he says that while the Romans would plunder Roman temples in the cities they were attacking, the Romans and even the barbarians respected the Christian churches. Well, even if this were entirely true then (which I doubt), subsequent centuries have shown this to be an anomaly. (And one reason it might have been true then was that the barbarians--the Goths--of which he was writing were also Christians.) In II:3, Augustine talks about all the "calamities [that] befell the Romans when they worshipped the pagan gods." Of course, since 413 C.E. when Augustine wrote that, lots of calamities have befallen Christians, so that argument seems to have caved in as well.
This is not to say that Augustine is not sometimes amazingly topical. In II:11, he writes, "It is another mark of consistency in the Greeks that they regarded even the actors of those stories as worthy of considerable worth" and admitted them to political office. (He thinks this is improper of them, because he disapproves of the stories those actors performed.)
I may have more to say about CITY OF GOD when I get past the Roman stuff and into the theology.
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 06/03/2005]
One doesn't expect to get mathematics from St. Augustine, but I did actually find some in his CITY OF GOD (previously discussed in the 05/06/05 issue of the VOID). In Chapter XI, section 30, Augustine discusses "the perfection of the number six". God created the world in six days, he says, because six is the first number which is the sum of its "parts" (by which he means factors). Six is divisible by one, two, and three, and is also the sum of one, two, and three. He explains the mathematics of perfect numbers and then says, "This point seemed worthy of a brief mention to show the perfection of the number six . . . and in this number God brought his works to complete perfection. Hence the theory of number is not to be lightly regarded, since it is made quite clear, in many passages of the holy Scriptures, how highly it is to be valued. It was not for nothing that it was said in praise of God, 'You have ordered all things in measure, number and weight' [Wisdom 11:21]." Of course, I'd be more impressed with his number theory if in XI:31 he did not say, "Three is the first odd whole number, and four the first whole even number," which is some odd definition of either "first" or "even". (He goes on to say that seven, being the sum of these two, is often used to stand for an unlimited number.)
To order City of God from amazon.com, click here.
THE ESSENTIAL MARCUS AURELIUS by Marcus Aurelius (translated by Jacob Needleman and John P. Piazza):
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 09/19/2008]
THE ESSENTIAL MARCUS AURELIUS (translated by Jacob Needleman and John P. Piazza) (ISBN-13 978-1-58542-617-1, ISBN-10 1-58542-617-2) is in some ways riding on the whole self-help advice wave. (The fact that the blurb by Thomas Moore chosen for the cover starts "Set aside all your contemporary self-help books and read this classic slowly" supports this.) I don't dispute that Marcus Aurelius is worth reading, but the "distillation" of his writings to a series of brief precepts to live by of the sort one finds on a pull-off calendar is not exactly what Marcus had in mind.
One of the things Marcus recommends is "to read with precision and not be satisfied with the mere gist of things." (1.6) In some ways this is directly contradicted by the translators, who have tried to extract just the "gist" of Marcus's writings rather than presenting the full text.
While there is an appeal to having lines like "The noblest way of taking revenge on others is by refusing to become like them" (6.6), it hardly seems fair to reduce Marcus's "Meditations" to this.
To order The Essential Marcus Aurelius from amazon.com, click here.
THE ANNOTATED PRIDE & PREJUDICE by Jane Austen, annotated by David M. Shapard:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 03/07/2008]
THE ANNOTATED PRIDE & PREJUDICE by Jane Austen, annotated by David M. Shapard (ISBN-13 978-0-307-27810-4, ISBN-10 0-307-27810-7) is well done. First, the text is on the left-hand pages and the notes on the right-hand ones, with every note on the page opposite what it is annotating. If that meant that there would be blank space at the bottom of the text page (because of lengthy notes), then there is. The notes are very thorough, covering definitions as well as comments on mores and attitudes, and even drawings of various types of carriages and so on.
To order The Annotated Pride & Prejudice from amazon.com, click here.
NORTHANGER ABBEY by Jane Austen:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 11/04/2005]
NORTHANGER ABBEY by Jane Austen (ISBN 0-375-75917-4) is a wonderful send-up of both Gothic novels and some of Jane Austen's own works. She knows all the cliches, and nails them. For example, she begins, "No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be an heroine. Her situation in life, the character of her father and mother, her own person and disposition, were all equally against her. Her father was a clergyman, without being neglected, or poor, and a very respectable man, though his name was Richard--and he had never been handsome. He had a considerable independence besides two good livings--and he was not in the least addicted to locking up his daughters. Her mother was a woman of useful plain sense, with a good temper, and, what is more remarkable, with a good constitution. She had three sons before Catherine was born; and instead of dying in bringing the latter into the world, as anybody might expect, she still lived on--lived to have six children more--to see them growing up around her, and to enjoy excellent health herself."
And Catherine Moreland has been reading all those novels, and she has expectations that life will be like that. When she is invited to be a guest at Northanger Abbey, here is her reaction: "She was to be their chosen visitor, she was to be for weeks under the same roof with the person whose society she mostly prized--and, in addition to all the rest, this roof was to be the roof of an abbey! Her passion for ancient edifices was next in degree to her passion for Henry Tilney--and castles and abbeys made usually the charm of those reveries which his image did not fill. To see and explore either the ramparts and keep of the one, or the cloisters of the other, had been for many weeks a darling wish, though to be more than the visitor of an hour had seemed too nearly impossible for desire. And yet, this was to happen. With all the chances against her of house, hall, place, park, court, and cottage, Northanger turned up an abbey, and she was to be its inhabitant. Its long, damp passages, its narrow cells and ruined chapel, were to be within her daily reach, and she could not entirely subdue the hope of some traditional legends, some awful memorials of an injured and ill-fated nun."
And Austen is cognizant of some of the cliches and stereotypes she had written when she writes, "Where people wish to attach, they should always be ignorant. To come with a well-informed mind is to come with an inability of administering to the vanity of others, which a sensible person would always wish to avoid. A woman especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can. The advantages of natural folly in a beautiful girl have been already set forth by the capital pen of a sister author; and to her treatment of the subject I will only add, in justice to men, that though to the larger and more trifling part of the sex, imbecility in females is a great enhancement of their personal charms, there is a portion of them too reasonable and too well informed themselves to desire anything more in woman than ignorance. But Catherine did not know her own advantages--did not know that a good-looking girl, with an affectionate heart and a very ignorant mind, cannot fail of attracting a clever young man, unless circumstances are particularly untoward."
What more needs to be said? This is definitely my favorite Austen novel, and I don't know why they don't made a film of this instead of re-doing PRIDE AND PREJUDICE again.
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 10/27/2006]
Our discussion group read NORTHANGER ABBEY by Jane Austen (ISBN 0-375-75917-4) this month. Although the basic plot is very similar to other Austen works, the style is not--it is a send-up of all the conventions of the Gothic novel, and to some extent those of her own novels. For example, when our heroine s forced to sit out a dance for lack of a partner, Austen writes:
"She could not help being vexed at the non-appearance of Mr. Thorpe, for she not only longed to be dancing, but was likewise aware that, as the real dignity of her situation could not be known, she was sharing with the scores of other young ladies still sitting down all the discredit of wanting a partner. To be disgraced in the eye of the world, to wear the appearance of infamy while her heart is all purity, her actions all innocence, and the misconduct of another the true source of her debasement, is one of those circumstances which peculiarly belong to the heroine's life, and her fortitude under it what particularly dignifies her character."
The one question none of us could definitely answer was how "Northanger" was supposed to be pronounced. Is it "north-anger" or "nor-thanjer" or what?
To order Northanger Abbey from amazon.com, click here.
PRIDE AND PREJUDICE by Jane Austen:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 03/11/2005]
Last week we went to see the film BRIDE & PREJUDICE, a Bollywood- UK co-production that is an adaptation of Jane Austen's PRIDE AND PREJUDICE (ISBN 0-553-21310-5). Screenwriters Paul Mayeda Berges and Gurinder Chadha have transposed the Bennets into an Indian family in Amritsar, made the Bingleys an Indian family living in the United Kingdom, and made Darcy and Wickham Americans. This allowed them to film in three countries, giving a wide visual palette for the film. I definitely enjoyed the film, and particularly enjoyed the songs. (Many of them were dubbed into English, and fairly well, because I didn't realize that they were dubbed until I went to a web site to play samples of them and discovered that there they were in Hindi.) One song ("No Life Without Wife") was staged in a manner reminiscent of a song from "Fiddler on the Roof", and the songs in general showed a wide range of other influences. And the adaptation worked--the use of the Indian culture allows for a stronger emphasis on arranged marriages and family dynamics in a modern-day version than if someone attempted to set it in a strictly Anglo-English family. Of course I recommend the book, but I recommend the film as well. Even if you're not an Austen fan, if you like romantic musicals, go see BRIDE & PREJUDICE.
To order Pride and Prejudice from amazon.com, click here.
MAN IN THE DARK by Paul Auster:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 10/24/2008]
MAN IN THE DARK by Paul Auster (ISBN-13 978-0-8050-8839-7, ISBN-10 0-8050-8839-3) is an alternate history--sort of. The narrator Owen Brick (well, one of the narrators--the book has multiple first- person narrators) wakes up in a pit and soon discovers that he is in an alternate world and has been brought there to be given instructions to kill someone. The other narrator, August Brill, is entangled in this story in a very unusual way, and what makes things even odder is that the alternate history aspect vanishes entirely from the final third of the book. Given that the book is only 180 pages long, Auster has a lot going on in such a small space. As an alternate history, it's okay, but its real appeal is its convoluted structure rather than the alternate history aspect.
To order Man in the Dark from amazon.com, click here.
LINT by Steve Aylett
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 06/16/2006]
LINT by Steve Aylett (ISBN 1-56025-684-2) is a novel, a purported biography of the (fictional) author Jeff Lint. I emphasize the fictional aspect, because this book comes with all the paraphrenalia that would make you think that Lint was real and that this is a real biography--footnotes, bibliography, index, .... But certainly an early hint is that Lint's mother has him reading Pierre Menard (a fictional author created by Jorge Luis Borges). Another is that he sells a couple of stories under the pseudonym "Isaac Asimov". And while Lint sells some stories to real editors such as John W. Campbell and real magazines such as "Astounding" and "Startling", he also sells to magazines such as "Baffling", "Useless", "Terrible", "Bewildering", "Confusing", "Frazzling", "Scalding", "Mental", "Marginal", "Fatal", "Made- Up", "Meandering", "Appalling", "Tales to Appall", "Daring Adventure Stories", "Troubling Developments", "Maggoty", "Maximum Tentacles", and my favorite, "Way Beyond Your Puny Mind". A little of this goes a long way, though, and this book is best taken in small doses. While I managed to get half-way through (with the promise of a Lintian "Star Trek" script mentioned in one review luring me on), I only skimmed the rest. As one reviewer noted, a problem is that it is not just Lint who is bizarre, but everyone (including the narrator), so there is no respite from the surrealism. Aylett may have intended this, but to me it is overkill.
To order Lint from amazon.com, click here.