All reviews copyright 1984-2008 Evelyn C. Leeper.
FAR FUTURE CALLING by Olaf Stapledon (Oswald Train, 1979, 267pp, hardback):
This volume will be much appreciated by the many admirers of Olaf Stapledon, and rightfully so. The contents give a broad overview of an author who has influenced countless who followed him, but who even today remains relatively unknown to the majority of science fiction readers.
While much of the science fiction of the 1930's and 1940's was the child of the adventure story and the dime novel (by way of Edgar Rice Burroughs and others), Stapledon's writing trace their ancestry to classical origins. His extensive use of similes, for example, shows the influence of Homeric verse on his writings. And while other authors dealt with solar systems (or perhaps galaxies), Stapledon ranged over the entire universe, from its beginnings to its final death. Indeed, one of the difficulties in reading some of Stapledon's works, such as Last and First Men, is that the sheer weight of ideas can overwhelm the reader.
This volume contains five short stories, a radio play (never produced), a speech given by Stapledon to the British Interplanetary Society, and two articles about Stapledon written by Sam Moskowitz. One is a biography of Stapledon which gives the reader a deeper understanding of Stapledon, both as an author and as a philosopher, than did Moskowitz's earlier article in Explorers of the Infinite. The other article deals with Stapledon's trip to the United States in 1949 to attend the ill-fated Cultural and Scientific Conference for Peace. (It is a measure of the respect accorded Stapledon that he was one of only five Britons invited to attend.) While much of the article does not deal with Stapledon directly, it contains useful background information for those who wish to place Stapledon's philosophy in an historical context. The speech is Stapledon's own summing up of his attitudes towards progress in general, and the exploration of space in particular. (A brief summary of an ensuing discussion between Stapledon and Arthur C. Clarke is included following the speech.) The play is based on (a very small segment of) Last and First Men, and unfortunately fails to communicate the scope of that work. Three of the stories could almost be considered as introductions to Stapledon's longer works: in "A Modern Magician" Stapledon explores the concept of a man (or indeed, any being) with vastly greater powers than others of his species, much as he does in Sirius or Odd John. "A World of Sound" and "The Man Who became a Tree" examine the possibility of other forms of consciousness in much the same way that portions of Last and First Men and Star Maker do. "East Is West," while more a sermon on global conflicts than a true alternate universe story, still shows much of Stapledon's style--his use of dreams and trances to provide a bridge to the world he wishes to describe, whether distant in time or space, or even point of view. "Arms Out of Hand," originally published in 1946, seems to have been the inspiration for one of the better "Star Trek" episodes.
Although the cover painting shows a complete disregard for aerodynamics, the interior illustrations by Fabian are quite satisfactory. A necessary addition for any serious collection of science fiction.
To order Far Future Calling from amazon.com, click here.
LAST AND FIRST MEN by Olaf Stapledon:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 08/22/2008]
One reason I never catch up on my reading list is that I keep adding to it in arguably insane ways. For example, each month I have three new reading group books, and each year I have five Hugo novels (and fifteen somewhat shorter pieces). And then there are the conventions.
You see, I am just conscientious (a.k.a. crazy) enough when assigned as moderator to a panel on Olaf Stapledon to decide I have to try to re-read every I have by (and about) him. (Thank God they did not put me on a panel about Robert Silverberg or Edgar Rice Burroughs!) In any case, I managed only Stapledon's four major novels, and three books of literary criticism of Stapledon.
[I say "four major novels", but LAST AND FIRST MEN and STAR MAKER are not really novels in any traditional sense. They did not have characters in the usual sense--even the few individuals discussed in them are most archetypes than characters. Someone described counterfactuals as "alternate history with characterization" and that seems a reasonable parallel. However, I will occasionally use the term "novel" in referring to Stapledon's major works; just translate that as "long work of fiction.")
Let me start by saying that re-reading the books that one enjoyed immensely years ago may be a depressing experience, especially when supplemented by reading critical commentary. For example, I recently re-read Asimov's "Foundation Trilogy" and Joseph F. Patrouch's comments on it. Patrouch observes that the Second Foundation says that the destruction of the planet Tazenda and its "many millions" was necessary because the ends justify the means: "The alternative would have been a much greater destruction generally throughout the Galaxy over a period of centuries." Patrouch points out that this sort of justification has been used by people of less than savory reputations, and he has definite moral problems with it. And in Stapledon's work, one also finds some supposedly good (or at worst, morally neutral) acts that we would similarly condemn. So, while I loved works such as LAST AND FIRST MEN years ago, the negative aspects are now much more obvious.
First, an overview of LAST AND FIRST MEN (1930) (ISBN-13 978-0-486-21962-2, ISBN-10 0-486-21962-3). In its Dover edition it is 246 pages, or about 130,000 words. (All page numbers given are for the two Dover omnibus editions of Stapledon works.) This is really the equivalent of a standard 500-page book. Pretty much everyone who reads this is fascinated by Stapledon's idea of "Deep Time". And it is Stapledon's idea. The only real predecessor that looked at the far future was H. G. Wells in THE TIME MACHINE, and he want only to A.D. 802,701 for the Eloi and 30,000,000, for the end of the world.
Stapledon, on the other hand, gives us five time scales. Time Scale 1 (page 56) goes to 4000 (that is, 2000 years forward as well as 2000 backward). Time Scale 2 (page 99) goes 200,000 years each way. Time Scale 3 (page 141) goes 20 million years each way. Time Scale 4 (page 213) goes 2 (American) billion years each way, and Time Scale 5 (also page 213) goes 10 trillion years each way. (On the final one a single entry on the timeline says, "Planets formed; end of Man"!) When I first read this, I fell in love with the timelines.
Of course, now I notice all sorts of problems. I must have noticed his description of the Jews (page 67) even then:
"One other race, the Jews, were treated with a similar combination of honour and contempt, but for very different reasons. In ancient days their general intelligence, and in particular their financial talent, and co-operated with their homelessness to make them outcasts; and now, in the decline of the First Men, they retained the fiction, if not strictly the fact of racial integrity. They were still outcasts, though indispensable and powerful. Almost the only kind of intelligent activity which the First Men could still respect was financial operation, whether private or cosmopolitan. The Jews had made themselves invaluable in the financial organization of the world state, having far outstripped the other races because they alone had preserved a furtive respect for pure intelligence. And so, long after intelligence had come to be regarded as disreputable in ordinary men and women, it was expected of the Jews. In them it was called satanic cunning, and they were held to be embodiments of the powers of evil, harnessed in the service of Gordelphus. Thus in time the Jews had made something like "a corner" in intelligence. This precious commodity they used largely for their own purposes; for two thousand years [sic] of persecution had long ago rendered them permanently tribalistic, subconsciously if not consciously. Thus when they had gained control of the few remaining operations which demanded originality rather than routine, they used this advantage chiefly to strengthen their own position in the world. For, though relatively bright, they had suffered much of the general coarsening and limitation which had beset the whole world. Though capable to some extent of criticizing the practical means by which ends should be realized, they were by now wholly incapable of criticizing the major ends which had dominated their race for thousands of years. In them intelligence had become utterly subservient to tribalism. There was thus some excuse for the universal hate and even physical repulsion with which they were regarded; for they alone had failed to make the one great advance, from tribalism to a cosmopolitanism which in other races was no longer merely theoretical. There was good reason also for the respect which they received, since they retained and used somewhat ruthlessly a certain degree of the most distinctively human attribute, intelligence."
[I realize that I spend a lot of time in my columns commenting on authors' attitudes towards Jews. For Stapledon, I could have pulled out passages showing his apparent prejudice against Africans, or Asians, or women. But I figure I should choose the category I know the best. There was, however, a certain irony in that all three panelists at Worldcon were Jewish.]
And Stapledon's notion of the effects of time does not seem to match our current knowledge. For example, he claims that the forms of buildings are still visible after 100,000 years (page 76). The recent documentary "Life After People" looked at the effects of time on untended building and materials. After only 10,000 years, they say, iron corrodes, concrete crumbles, and wood and paper decay. All that will remain (according to the documentary) would be the Great Wall, the Great Pyramid, Hoover Dam, and the most enduring of all, Mount Rushmore. Stapledon can be forgiven for not mentioning the last two--they were not completed until after LAST AND FIRST MEN was published. (I am surprised "Life After People" did not mention the Crazy Horse Monument, though.)
Stapledon does predict a lot of current and predicted future problems: atomic energy, oil and coal shortages, metal shortages, and so on (page 73). He even has Arctic islands and Antarctica melting, though with no comments on rising ocean levels (page 62).
In OLAF STAPLEDON (Starmont Reader's Guide 21), John Kinnaird says that Stapledon's publishers pressed him for a sequel to LAST AND FIRST MEN (page 51), proof that sequelitis is not new. I find it ironic that Stapledon wrote the entire future history of humanity/mankind all the way to its end with the destruction of the Solar System--and his publisher wanted a sequel! (Perhaps even more ironic is that Stapledon produced one.)
(Kinnaird lists Stapledon's "principal heirs" as Brian W. Aldiss, James Blish, Sir Arthur C. Clarke, Ursula K. LeGuin, Stanislaw Lem, Clifford D. Simak, and Cordwainer Smith. Many would also include Poul Anderson, even if only for TAU ZERO.)
Sir Arthur C. Clarke [on LAST AND FIRST MEN]: "With its multimillion year vistas, and its roll call of great but doomed civilizations, the book produced an overwhelming impact on me."
Stanislaw Lem [on LAST AND FIRST MEN and ODD JOHN]: "[These] opened new endless perspectives, gigantic possibilities for an ongoing construction of hitherto unarticulated hypotheses."
To order LAST ANF FIRST MEN from amazon.com, click here.
NEBULA MAKER by Olaf Stapledon (Sphere, 1979, trade paperback):
This is one of Stapledon's minor works, which is to say, it is probably only twice as good as anything else to be published this year. This novel appears to be a much shorter version of the type of writing found in Star Maker. The main character is taken, by metaphysical means unspecified, through a tour of the history of the cosmos. He sees the chaos before the beginning of the universe, the birth of the universe, the formation of the giant nebulae, their evolution, and their eventual decay and death. In particular, he tells the story of two nebulae: Bright Heart, who preaches love and cooperation to the imperialistic nebulae, and Fire Bolt, who claims that revolution is the only way to overcome oppression. The parallels between Christ and Bright Heart, and between Marx and Fire Bolt, are perhaps over-emphasized, but Stapledon may be allowed this one flaw.
Stapledon's descriptive passages are exquisite. For example, in describing the birth of the universe he says, "As flax, issuing from between the fingers of a woman spinning, comes forth as thread, so from God's countless fingers chaos issued as fine threads of smoke." Later, when talking about the giant nebulae, he describes them as "small soft globes or flecks of light, snow-flakes whirling in the huge gulf of space." Stapledon's explanation of the consciousness and life of the giant nebulae may not be scientifically convincing, but it is none the less awe-inspiring. Stapledon's poetic style and immense scope combine in this to make it one of the best books published this year.
To order Nebula Maker from amazon.com, click here.
ODD JOHN by Olaf Stapledon:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 08/29/2008]
Last week I discussed LAST AND FIRST MEN at great length. This week I will cover Stapledon's three other major works of fiction. (Remember that I said that several of Stapledon's works of fiction are not novels in the traditional sense, but I may still occasionally use that word as a shorthand.)
Stapledon's third novel, ODD JOHN (1935), is a superman story. If LAST AND FIRST MEN was inspired by H. G. Wells's THE TIME MACHINE, then ODD JOHN may have owed something to Philip Wylie's GLADIATOR (which preceded it by five years). I cannot say for sure my reaction to John the first time I read it, but this time around he seemed a thoroughly reprehensible sort, willing to commit murder, human experimentation, and even genocide without any compunction, because he is, after all, a superior being. Once again, we have Stapledon presenting a very fascist, racialist view of the world, and we have the distressing feeling that he endorses it rather than shows it as a warning. The narrator is called "Fido" by John, and a fair name it is, as "Fido" shows a ridiculously high level of devotion to John--and a low level of moral concern.
[On the Stapledon panel at Denvention 3, Robert Silverberg pointed out that liking the main character was not necessary for a book to be great, or even good, e.g., CRIME AND PUNISHMENT, or LOLITA. In fact, there was a long digression into LOLITA and whether Humbert Humbert was not indeed the victim and Lolita the most negative character. Also presented was the notion of Odd John as a superior character with a tragic flaw, a la classic Greek drama. All this is true, and the parallel to Greek drama is the most convincing argument to me. I guess it was the feeling that I was supposed to sympathize at least somewhat that bothered me, and when people say they like this book because they read it when they were young and felt that they were outsiders the way John was, that just reinforces my feeling.]
Stanislaw Lem [on LAST AND FIRST MEN and ODD JOHN]: "[These] opened new endless perspectives, gigantic possibilities for an ongoing construction of hitherto unarticulated hypotheses."
To order Odd John from amazon.com, click here.
SIRIUS by Olaf Stapledon:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 08/29/2008]
The last of Stapledon's major novels is SIRIUS (1944), about a dog brought up to human intelligence. This may be the most accessible of Stapledon's fiction. Just as Stapledon's other works seemed to have been inspired or influenced by earlier writers, SIRIUS seems to be a descendent of Mary Shelley's FRANKENSTEIN (perhaps by way of Wells's THE ISLAND OF DOCTOR MOREAU). The Frankenstein connection is most obvious when Sirius bemoans his isolation, saying, "Why did you make me without a world for me to live in. It's as though God made Adam and not bothered to make Eden, nor Eve...."
On the other hand, some of the old attitudes are still there. The mother of Sirius's human companion, Plaxy, has been convinced to raise Plaxy and Sirius together equally, and when Sirius is injured, feels the same love toward him she feels toward Plaxy. Now, I am not a mother, but I can't help but feel that a human mother would feel more love and attachment to a human child than to a dog, no matter how much the two were raised together. This makes Elizabeth another in the line of women that Stapledon seems to get wrong--mostly by making them almost sub-human.
To order Sirius from amazon.com, click here.
STAR MAKER by Olaf Stapledon:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 08/29/2008]
STAR MAKER (1937) (ISBN-13 978-0-486-21962-2, ISBN-10 0-486-21962-3) is the most poetical of the four major novels. It is also the least science fictional, in the sense of being more a work of fantasy, or even of theosophy, than of science fiction. While Stapledon discusses planets, stars, galaxies, and so on, his basis is not science. Indeed, his notion of the mechanics of planetary formation is very outdated: "I knew well that the birth of planets was due to the close approach of two or more stars, and that such accidents must be very uncommon." (page 266)
He also misunderstands evolution, saying, "Presently the stage was clear for some worm or amoeba to reinaugurate the great adventure of biological evolution toward the human plane." (page 331) Stapledon assumes that evolution has an ultimate goal and that that goal is humanity (or intelligence, if you prefer). But this is not true--the "goal" of evolution (or rather, its effect) is creating organisms best suited for their environment.
In STAR MAKER, Stapledon again describes most (if not all) the advanced world orders as communistic, but in a very Stalinist way: "Indeed, a highly specialized bureaucracy, or even a world- dictator, might carry out the business of organizing the world's activity with legally absolute power, but under constant supervision by popular will expressed through the radio. We were amazed to find that in a truly awakened world even a dictatorship could be in essence democratic." (page 348) Stapledon seems either amazingly obtuse, or amazingly optimistic, in 1937 to still expect that a dictatorship could be so benign and so easily controlled. (Isn't the very essence of absolute power the ability to silence one's opponents?)
But as Leslie Fiedler says in OLAF STAPLEDON: A MAN DIVIDED, Stapledon's goal was not scientific (or economic), and later science fiction writers "are responding to the challenge which Stapledon made clear constituted a chief raison d'etre for the genre: to replace traditional mythologies of a universe tailored to the human scale with one which--without falsifying the findings of modern science or denying the terror they have stirred in all our hearts--can redeem them for the imagination." (page 348)
STAR MAKER is in many ways primarily a book of poetry. In Stapledon's "On every side was confusion, a rising storm, great waves already drenching our rock. And all around, in the dark welter, faces and appealing hands, half-seen and vanishing" (page 431), for example, I hear the influence of Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach":
And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Freeman Dyson [on STAR MAKER]: "It seemed to me perfectly obvious that this was the way to think about space and about the future-- that kind of broad scope, that kind of scale."
To order Star Maker from amazon.com, click here.
ALL-AMERICAN ALIEN BOY by Allen Steele (Ace, ISBN 0-441-00460-1, 1997 (1996), 267pp, mass market paperback):
[Though this also has "Alien" in the title it is totally unrelated to Illegal Alien, which came out from the same publisher at just about the same time.]
There is no story in this collection titled "All-American Alien Boy," but the subtitle of the book gives us the answer to the title: "The United States as Science Fiction, Science Fiction as a Journey: A Collection." Who is the "All-American Alien Boy"? It's Steele. But it's also each of us. (Well, some of us are All-American Alien Girls, but you get the idea.)
After all, isn't there something a bit alien in the idea of renting out your body for science ("The Good Rat")? Alien, yes, but also very capitalist and, well, American. Whether it's the shopping mall, the demolition derby, or Rock City, Steele takes something very American, and shows us how alien it is at the same time.
As if that isn't enough, Steele's introductions actually add something to the understanding of the stories. Too many authors, when confronted with the task of introducing their own stories, resort to either a bald description of how they came to write the story, or some brief--preferably humorous--anecdote about it. Steele uses this opportunity to talk about the ideas behind the story--what he thinks about UFO abduction stories, for example.
What this means is that even if you have all the stories from their original publications, this book is still worth getting.
To order All-American Alien Boy from amazon.com, click here.
AMERICA AND THE AMERICANS by John Steinbeck:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 04/25/2003]
John Steinbeck's AMERICA AND THE AMERICANS is quite readable, if a bit dated. It does not cover the Norse explorations, but instead looks at the current (as of 1966) state of affairs, including only as much history as is necessary. And Steinbeck's political positions are made clear throughout. Consider his description of moving the Indians from land that white settlers wanted to undesirable land: "This process took an unconscionably long and bloody time, and mistakes were made, such as the prime one of moving the Cherokee tribes from the Appalachian Mountains to the West and settling them on unpromising-looking Oklahoma. When oil was discovered there, the mistake was apparent; but for some of the Indians it was too late--they kept the oil." One can't help but feel that his writing may have been influenced by Mark Twain.
To order America and Americans from amazon.com, click here.
CANNERY ROW by John Steinbeck:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 02/18/2005]
Our discussion group read John Steinbeck's CANNERY ROW (ISBN 0-14-018737-5). One thing that stuck me of interest to fantasy fans was that Steinbeck's description of the "Chinaman" in Chapter 4 seemed like the inspiration for Jack Finney's Dr. Lao.
To order Cannery Row from amazon.com, click here.
THE GRAPES OF WRATH by John Steinbeck
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 04/13/2007]
The movie made from THE GRAPES OF WRATH by John Steinbeck (ISBN-10 0-14-004239-3, ISBN-13 978-0-14-004239-9) is a classic. But reading the book made me realize that the movie-making process had still sucked all the color and almost all the heart out of it. Steinbeck spends a lot of the book giving you intense word pictures of the land, the take-over by the banks, a day at a used car lot, a day at a roadside cafe, and so on. All of these were dropped for the movie. (For example, the Joads have a car, but the whole process of getting it, and what the used car salesman was thinking, is gone.) The entire sub-plot of the joining of the Joads with the Wilsons is gone. And what is left is much shorter--shorter discussions of how the migrants are treated by the sheriffs, by the local merchants, by the growers, by each other. And of course the ending was completely changed as well. I know that a lot of this is part of the process of transferring a novel to the screen, but it would be a pity for people to skip reading a great book because after all, they had seen the movie.
To order The Grapes of Wrath from amazon.com, click here.
THE LOG FROM THE SEA OF CORTEZ by John Steinbeck:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 09/07/2007]
THE LOG FROM THE SEA OF CORTEZ by John Steinbeck (ISBN-13 978-0-140-18744-1, ISBN-10 0-140-18744-8) is Steinbeck's journal of a biological collecting trip (on a shoestring) through the Sea of Cortez, a.k.a. the Gulf of California. Steinbeck explains that he calls it by its older name because "that is a better- sounding and a more exciting name." As you might guess from that, there is more here than just a description of all the specimens they found.
There is travelogue: "One fine thing about Mexican officials is that they greet a fishing boat with the same serious ceremony they would afford the Queen Mary, and the Queen Mary would have to wait just as long. This made us feel very good and not rebellious about the port fees--absent in this case! We came to them and they made us feel, not like stodgy people in a purse- seiner but like ambassadors from Ultra-Marina bringing letters of greeting out of the distances. It is no wonder that we too scurried for clean shirts, that Tony put on his master's cap, and Tiny polished the naval insignia on his, which he had come by no doubt honestly in a washroom in San Diego. We were not smart, not very alert, but we were clean and we smelled rather delicious. Sparky sprinkled us with shaving lotion and we filled the air with the odor of flowers. If the brazo, the double embrace, should be indicated by any feeling of uncontrollable good-will, we were ready." (page 205)
There is philosophy: "There is a strange duality in the human that makes for an ethical paradox. We have definitions of good qualities and bad. Of the good we always think of wisdom, tolerance, kindliness, generosity, humility; and the qualities of cruelty, greed, self-interest, graspingness and rapacity are universally considered undesirable. And yet in our structure of our society, the so-called and considered good qualities are invariable concomitants of failure, while the bad ones are the cornerstone of success. A man--a viewing point man--while he will love the abstract good qualities, and detest the abstract bad, will nevertheless admire the person who through exercising the bad qualities has succeeded economically and socially, and will hold in contempt that person whose good qualities have caused failure. When such a man thinks of Jesus, or St. Augustine, or Socrates he regards them with love because they are symbols of the good he admires, and he hates the symbols of the bad. But actually he himself would rather be successful, than good." (page 112)
And there is even poetry (or perhaps incoherence--take your pick): "For in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the trait of hope still controls the future, and man. not a species, but a triumphant race, will approach perfection, and, finally, tearing himself free, will march up the stars and take his place where, because of his power and virtue, he belongs: on the right hand of [the pi-th root of -1]." (page 103)
It is, however, marred by more typos than I would have expected of a Penguin edition: "whether" for "weather", "wtih" for "with", "string" for "sting", and so on. Not all the errors are Penguin's, though; I suspect the triple occurrence of "octopi" for "octopuses" is Steinbeck's own. There is a glossary and an index for people, places, and animals, but with as much philosophy as Steinbeck included, the index should have included ideas as well. (I have no idea if the typos have been corrected in later editions.)
While not a classic in the same sense as Charles Darwin's THE VOYAGE OF THE BEAGLE, Steinbeck's LOG FROM THE SEA OF CORTEZ is must-reading for anyone interested in how field work was carried out in the 1930s by those not endowed with large grants.
To order The Log from the Sea of Cortez from amazon.com, click here.
SWEET THURSDAY by John Steinbeck:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 09/10/2004]
My "non-specific" book discussion group read John Steinbeck's SWEET THURSDAY (ISBN 0-140-18750-2), a sequel to CANNERY ROW. Everyone else loved it and thought it hilarious, but while I saw some humor in it, it did not strike me that strongly. (On the other hand, I thought Nikolai Gogol's DEAD SOULS was very funny, and parts of Herman Melville's MOBY DICK crack me up.) But since it was so popular, it was decided to read CANNERY ROW for the January meeting.
To order Sweet Thursday from amazon.com, click here.
TRAVELS WITH CHARLEY by John Steinbeck:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 10/24/2008]
I liked TRAVELS WITH CHARLEY by John Steinbeck (ISBN-13 978-0-142-00070-0, ISBN-10 0-142-00070-1) so much that I recommended it for my afternoon reading group. In the 1960s, Steinbeck traveled across the United States and back, making observations about the country and how much things had changed in his lifetime. Reading it now, one gets a second level of realization--that of how much things have changed since the 1960s. (Charley, by the way, was Steinbeck's dog.)
To order Travels with Charley from amazon.com, click here.
AS A DRIVEN LEAF by Milton Steinberg:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 08/01/2003]
As is becoming common, I found strange synchronicity in some of my reading. Milton Steinberg's AS A DRIVEN LEAF is a philosophical novel centered around Elisha ben Abuyah and the famous Jewish sages of his era (during the reign of Hadrian and the Bar Kochba rebellion). It's not surprising that some of the same people are quoted in the "Pirke Aboth" ("Sayings of the Fathers"), but it is a bit startling to see the same *sayings* in both places (in particular, Rabbi Hanina's "Pray for the peace of the government; for, except for the fear of that, we should have swallowed each other alive."). It was even more surprising to pick up Franz Kafka's DIARIES and read the traditional version of the penultimate incident of Steinberg book. The story of AS A DRIVEN LEAF is about Elisha's struggle between the faith of Judaism and the philosophy of the Greeks. (Phrased in those traditional terms, of course, this already shows a bias that "Jewish philosophy and Greek faith" would not.) In any case, Elisha becomes enamored of Euclid's approach and decides he must prove his religion starting with axioms self-evident in their truth and building on those axioms. In this he seems to anticipate Descartes by over a millennium. Unfortunately, the author decides to have the end turn on Euclid's Fifth Postulate in a way that simply doesn't ring true--the argument seems way too modern for that era. Yet that doesn't lessen the worth of the rest of the novel and its musings, particularly its central notion that it is not enough that good should come from something, but that there must be good intentions behind it. "The good which is born by chance out of the evil design is corrupt and rotten at the core. The Empire was conceived in the lust for power [and] is motivated now by the desire to protect a system of exploitation. Everything else in the sight of those who administer it is secondary. ... [Whenever] the liberties of the individual or a group come into conflict with the interests they serve, they will destroy the former unhesitatingly for the sake of the latter." This would seem to contradict Rabbi Hanina, and indeed Elisha's dilemma is in part in trying to resolve these two opposing views.
To order As a Driven Leaf from amazon.com, click here.
THE DIAMOND AGE by Neal Stephenson:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 01/28/2005]
Neal Stephenson's THE DIAMOND AGE was this month's science fiction discussion group selection. This was chosen because we all loved SNOW CRASH by Stephenson, but THE DIAMOND AGE was not nearly as popular. Several people did not (could not?) finish it, and of those who did, only one liked it. The main problem people had in the reading was a combination of the sheer number of new words or concepts thrown at the reader, and the oft-times purposeful copying of ornate Victorian prose. As a sample of the words, here's a list from just the first short chapter: mod parlor, aero, 'sites, yuks, theezed, phased, acoustical array, meedfeed, mediaglyphics, cine panes, racting grid, mediatron, yuvree, decapped, electrostun, Cripplers, and Hellfires. Yes, some can be decoded from context, but having to do so this frequently resulting in a very "un-smooth" reading experience. (A later Stephenson novel, CRYPTONOMICRON, is more readable, but then I found the same problems with his "Baroque Cycle" as with THE DIAMOND AGE. There is not a clear chronological progression here in Stephenson's style.)
To order The Diamond Age from amazon.com, click here.
QUIKSILVER by Neal Stephenson:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 06/22/2007]
This is not a review, but a warning: I had bought the hardcover of Neal Stephenson's QUICKSILVER ("Volume 1 of The Baroque Cycle") (ISBN-10 0-060-59308-3, ISBN-13 978-0-060-59308-7 for the equivalent trade paperback) a while ago, but it was very big and hard to hold. So when at a library book sale I saw a copy of QUICKSILVER ("The Baroque Cycle #1") in mass-market paperback (ISBN-13 978-0-06-083316-9, ISBN-10 0-06-083316-5) that was much more compact, I picked it up. Well, the reason that it is much more compact is that it is only *a third* of the hardcover! The trilogy (in hardcover and trade paperback) is being released as eight separate books in mass market paperback. One bizarre side effect of this is that it will cost considerably more to buy the entire story in mass market ($63.92) than in trade paperback ($47.80). I paid only fifty cents for this abomination, and I suppose I can use it as an easy-to-carry way to start the series, but this sort of marketing is downright sleazy.
To order the complete copy of Quicksilver from amazon.com, click here.
SNOW CRASH by Neal Stephenson:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 09/03/2004]
Neal Stephenson's SNOW CRASH (ISBN 0-553-56261-4) is a favorite of mine (and it still is, in spite of the quibbles I will make in this column).
The writing is utterly enthralling. The main character is named Hiroaki Protagonist, but always called "Hiro". The second lead is nick-named "Y.T." (for "Yours Truly"). This is a hint as to the sort of word-play Stephenson goes in for. He also looks far-fetched (a.k.a. creative) similes and metaphors. For example, the first paragraph says, "The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallowed sub-category. . . . His uniform is black as activated charcoal, filtering the very light out of the air. A bullet will bounce off its arachno-fiber weave like a wren hitting a patio door, but excess perspiration wafts through it like a breeze through a freshly napalmed forest."
It is sometimes hard to follow everything, because Stephenson also delights in acronyms. He does explain them--once. So on page 176, we find out about the Executive Branch General Operational Command (EBGOC). Then a hundred pages later, he's talking about "EBGOC" and you're desperately trying to remember what it stands for. It is a lot like real life.
There is, of course, a certain irony in that the main characters are concerned over viruses (memes) that control people, but the world they live in is already full of them--franchises for everything, including nations,etc. And Stephenson notices this, and acknowledges this (pages 190-191).
I love the discussions with the Librarian about ancient Sumer and other cultures, but I think Stephenson is wrong when (on page 229) the Deuteronomists are described as working to get the Jews to read the book instead of going to the temple (so as to avoid viruses). The problem with this is that the general theory is that the "reading the book" was formulated as a response to what to do after the Babylonian Conquest when the temple was destroyed, the people exiled, and sacrifices were no longer possible, reversing the order of Stephenson's cause and effect.
There are parts that are just sloppy writing (or copy-editing). For example, on page 50, Y. T. negotiates a $750 billion bribe to be taken to a particular jail, on page 146 Stephenson describes "street people pushing wheelbarrows piled high with dripping clots of million- and billion-dollar bills that they have raked up out of storm sewers." and on page 243 someone says that Y.T.'s skateboard probably cost $100 trillion. But on page 175, Y. T. thinks she "has great stuff to tell Hiro now. Great intel on Uncle Enzo. People would pay millions for it." Later on (pages 394 and 409) it becomes clearer than there may be two different kinds of dollars being talking about, but it still seems careless.
There are also several typos of "it's" for "its", on page 140 we find "Catonese" for "Cantonese", and on page 184 a comma where a semi-colon is called for.
However, as I said at the start, I love this book, and it is only because I have read it several times (as well as listening to the abridged audiobook) that I notice some of these things. This is highly recommended.
To order Snow Crash from amazon.com, click here.