Eating Muffins

Posted by Sari

Kim Stanley Robinson The Years of Rice and Salt

I have problems with alternate history novels. I either think that the point of divergence is too small or trite, or badly imagined. In this case, I can not really say that the chosen point of divergence is too small. Robinson after all, wipes the whole population of Europe off the map with the plague in 14th century, and re imagines the history of the world from that point until approximately present date. The result is a very robinsonian novel, a vast panorama of world and time which somehow ends up pretty much like our world in the end. To create some sort of continuum Robinson introduces the idea of reincarnation and follows three intertwined souls, K, B and I through history.

Somehow this just did not work for me. I kind of liked the idea of a longue duré novel but there were just too many points where I found the argument unconvincing. What kind of plague would wipe out all the people of Europe (including very sparsely inhabited Scandinavia?) but miraculously stop short of Asia? Could one Japanese really prepare the North American Indians for the onslaught of invaders from East and West? Could scientific revolution really be the work of few isolated geniuses in Samarkand? A trench war of sixty years without the invention of tanks? And how and why would everything happen pretty much the same and exactly the same pace as in a world where European culture dominates? If you take out such a huge thing like Europe out of the calculation, I think there would have been cumulatively more changes and differences than Robinson shows us.

Maybe Years of Rice and Salt is meant to be a meditation on humanity and history more than a nuts and bolts kind of alternate history, but even so, the point escapes me. It is bold, it’s language has surprising power, but in the end… just no.

Fawn Brodie: The Devil Drives

Sir Richard Burton was undoubtedly one of the strangest and most compelling men Victorian age ever produced. A solider, a truly remarkable linguist, ethnologist, explorer, adventurer, spy, one of the greatest swordsmen of the period, a poet, a translator, a diplomat and collector and publisher of erotica. He served in India and in Crimea, went on a Hajj to Mecca and Medina in disguise, discovered lake Tanganjika, served as a consul on four continents, had a tragic and well publicized quarrel with John Speke on the sources of the White Nile, and wrote about all of it in voluminous detail.

He also translated oriental erotica like Kama Sutra, and most famously Thousand and One Nights into English, was friends with such more or less notorious characters as Monckton Milnes, Algernon Swinburne and Fred Hankey, and suspected his army career in India was blocked by his rather frank report on male brothels in Karachi. He spent most of his life restless, always looking for something, always shocking the establishment and often taunting his superiors because usually he had known better than they.

Brodie’s biography of Burton from 1967 is thorough, engaging and well written, but it does leave reader asking for more. Burton’s life was so rich and full of controversy, his writings and opinions so varied, so simultaneously at odds with and reflecting Victorian England that the four hundred pages barely seem to scratch surface. Unfortunately his wife Isabel – a fascinating woman on her own right – burned Burton’s diaries and manuscripts after his death leaving generations of historians and anthropologists devastated. Even so I think more modern biographies might open up his character better.
This one sounds really interesting. And  here is a link for a short lecture given by its author.

Richard Dawkins: The God Delusion

Dawkins is witty and funny and passionate and I pretty much agree with him, so reading God Delusion was one of those reaffirming rather than revealing readings experiences. It is bit of a sprawl, discussing religion (mainly Christianity and Islam) and religious questions from arguments of God’s existence or nonexistence to morality to possibility of evolutionary explanation for religion. Many of the arguments and examples are familiar from Dawkins earlier writings, and there are a few “yyeeess but…” moments, at least for me.

Nonetheless, The God Delusion is a worthy argument for atheism, wonderful debunking of ID and sent me surfing information on sundry things from Russell’s Teapot to Cargo Cults. Also, it is dedicated to one of our ages true humanists, Douglas Adams. How could it be bad?

Oh, and if you get BBC World, try to catch Hard Talk with Dawkins, it gives you the arguments from the book in a nutshell.

Posted by Sari

To prove to Marko I have been reading:

John Gribbin: The Fellowship. The Story of a
Revolution

 There is a
wonderful chapter near the beginning of Neil Stephenson’s Quicksilver where
Daniel Waterhouse makes his way to Epsom where John Wilkins and Robert Hooke
have in 1665 retired from the plague-infested London to continue their work.
Based on John Evelyn’s often quoted description of the two famous natural
philosophers at work, Stephenson creates a snapshot of the Scientific
Revolution. There is Wren’s see-through beehive ,
experiments with wells and weights and carriages, Wilkins working on
Philosophical Language, Hooke
putting all possible things under the microscope and even a description
of Hooke’s self-confessedly gruesome experiment to keep a vivisected dog’s heart beating
by blowing air to its lungs by bellows. 

It is of
course fiction, alternate universe or secret universe fiction at that, and
should not be taken for a fact, but I think Stephenson has managed to catch
something that was true about the way these great natural philosophers worked.
Firstly, they argued and had bitter sometimes mysterious feuds, but they also
worked together, shared information and collaborated in most unexpected ways
with each other. Secondly, they thought – as Shapin delightfully puts it –
“that the poor shape of existing natural philosophy [had resulted from]
inadequate quality control over its register of facts”. Thus they were busily
building up a store of better quality facts by conducting experiments, being
interested in all things – and reveling in it. 

John
Gribbin, an astrophysicist turn to prolific popular science writer tackles the
same cast of characters in his “The Fellowship. The Story of a Revolution”. In a
series of biographical sketches from Galileo to Halley he traces the
development of scientific ideas and method. Gribbin is out to prove that there
is no such thing as a Kuhnian shift of paradigm, that the scientific revolution
was a collaborative effort, and that Halley and Hooke are unfairly shadowed by
Newton (who spent all that time with useless alchemy anyway).

The end
result is frustrating. The frame on which the biographical sketches hang is the
Royal Society, but for a book arguing for the collaborative nature of science
the format really underplays the exchange of ideas. Also, his inclusion of
biographical detail and exclusion of all their areas of interest not part of the
path towards the modern scientific world-view makes the sketches unbalanced and
extremely selective. Why is Sir Kenelmn Digby, Kitty Barton or Hooke’s
incestuous affair with his niece relevant but Newton’s alchemy or Boyle’s astrology
are not? These men did not, could not know which of their experiments and
theories would end up being important and which would lead into a dead end.
Looking at the shakers and movers of scientific revolution as teleologically Gribbin
does might arguably be viable from the point of view of a scientist who is not
interested in the byways and alleys the search for scientia took the cast of Gribbin’s characters, but for someone
interested in the persons and the process, this book is ultimately a failure.

Tamara Siler Jones: Ghosts in the Snow, Threads
of Malice, Valley of the Soul

The Pitch
would be something like fantasy meets Patricia Cornwall. Jones writes murder
mysteries in fantasy setting. Her “detective” Dubric Byerly is an old Castellan
who sees ghosts of murder victims until he has solved what happened and
punished the guilty parties. He is aided by his squire and pages, and the
murders he is called upon to solve are usually more gruesome serial affairs.

What I like
about Jones’ work is a good fit of two very different genres, competent story
telling, and the fact they are also mentoring fics. Dubric has and is mentoring
Dien and they both are mentoring the pages. Why is there so little good fiction
about mentoring? It is such an interesting dynamic and so under-utilized. One
of the reasons I have grown frustrated with Harry Potter was that Dumbledore is such
a crap mentor and Rowlings keeps telling us he really is great.

Steven Saylor: Murha Via Appialla (Murder on
the Appian Way)

Saylor’s
novels set during the first century B.C. often have a back drop of great
events. His detective Gordianus the Finder has helped the rich and famous of
the city from Cicero to Caesar, always observing the defining moments of the
fall of the Republic. This time Gordianus gets commissioned to find out who
really murdered the rabble rousing politician Publius Clodius Pulcher on the
Appian Way. Was it his rival Milo or someone else? With his customary skill
Saylor weaves together the facts we know with pure invention arriving in an
interesting resolution to the plot. Gordianus and his family are as
unconventionally adorable here as before and the way Saylor through them
depicts the city boiling over and descending towards anarchy is really the best
part of the novel, quite outstanding, actually.

Posted by Sari

Library Thing went down a bit last week, and us hopelessly addicted were encouraged to other activities to keep us sane. One was a Book pile competition: stack a number of thematically or otherwise appropriate books on a pile to make statement, take a picture and put it up in Flickr. As I havent updated the "is reading" sidebar for a while, I thought I copy the idea. So here is a book pile of all the books I am reading at the moment. What should I finish first?