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A few weeks ago I idly pulled down Kage Baker's In the Garden of Iden from the bookshelf to remind myself of how it starts, and naturally ended up re-reading the whole book. Then had to re-read the second book, Sky Coyote, and the third, Mendoza in Hollywood, and the fourth, Graveyard Game, and last night I re-finished The Life of the World to Come.

I first read these books more or less as they came out, with a year or two between each and the next, which was long enough to forget a lot of the plot twists and characters. Reading them back-to-back is a different experience, because I can hold all the pieces in my mind better.
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Start with the political world of Dune, only even more decadent, decrepit, and dysfunctional. Add a sprinkle of Hunger Games: each of the eight Great Houses has sent two of its youth to compete for glory and immortality. But there's no rule that only one can survive and win -- in fact, there don't seem to be any rules, and they've been told only to figure it out somehow. What do they have to work with? A millennia-old, decaying castle with hundreds of rooms and hundreds of doors, of which a few are locked. Oh, and all the castle servants are animated skeletons, while one of each pair of contestants is a necromancer and the other a fencer.

Gideon and Harrowhark have grown up together all their late-teenaged lives, the only two children in their House, which is abnormally death-obsessed even by the standards of a civilization ruled by necromancers. Harrowhark is the heir, daughter to the Lord and Lady of the House, while Gideon is an orphaned foundling girl. They hate one another with the fire of a thousand suns: Harrowhark delights in torturing Gideon with magic, while Gideon takes every opportunity to either make trouble, insult people, or run away. As the House has only two available youth, there's not much choice which two to send to the competition. You can see where this is going.

My first impression of the book was "this author really loves describing scenes of decay." How many different words are there to describe things and people that haven't been cleaned or maintained for a thousand years, and were pretty hideous even when new? My first impression wasn't wrong: the loving descriptions of scenes of decay run pretty much throughout the book, even in the parts of the castle that were beautiful a thousand years ago. Sometimes the exposition is painfully obvious: the villain explaining the evil plan to somebody who's about to die, who in turn is keeping the conversation going to buy time, stuff like that. The predictable arc of "total hatred becomes mostly hatred becomes tolerance becomes cooperation becomes friendship" didn't always strike me as believable. But eventually most of the plot makes some kind of sense. A lot of secrets are revealed near the end that have been hinted at throughout, and I hadn't guessed most of them (I'm not much of a mystery reader). There is, apparently, a sequel.
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Finished watching Season Three of "A Discovery of Witches" two weeks ago, and went back to re-read the books to see where and why things differ.

SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER

SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER

SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER

SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER

SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER

OK, with that behind us...

I'm still really impressed with Harkness's world-building, and she's given us a bunch of engaging and interesting characters. But a lot of what happens in the books comes from the narrator. In converting the books to screenplays, where having that much "narrator voice-over" would feel preachy and artificial, they substantially improved the dialogue.

In particular, the Marcus-Phoebe arc is much more developed, much more believable, and much less creepy in the TV series than in the book. Book Marcus is sort of a jerk, and gives no reason for Phoebe to be attracted to him at all except that he's decided she will be. And you never see how that happens: the book jumps from her wondering why she didn't kick him out of her office faster to both of them sharing a bedroom at his mother's place. TV Marcus is less arrogant, more considerate, more of an over-enthusiastic puppy dog, and there's enough time to see them plausibly get together; he comes out to her as a vampire, she doesn't believe him until she does, she agrees to meet his family... all in all much more satisfying.

Speaking of abrupt jumps, the book jumps from Peter Knox planning to visit Sept-Tours to Sarah mourning Emily's death, about which we only hear a few details later in flashback. That can be an effective technique, and I could see it making sense if it were the order in which a particular character learned things, but both of the scenes in question are from the omniscient-observer viewpoint, so I'm not sure what purpose it serves here. In the TV series, we see Gerbert visit Sept-Tours and confront Ysabeau, we see Emily become increasingly obsessed with summoning the dead, we see Knox visit Sept-Tours and confront Emily and Marcus, killing one and knocking the other unconscious, and then things start to feel unreal and disconnected, as they would for the characters.

The biggest plot change in Book Two/Season Two is combining two separate long voyages (to Sept-Tours and to Prague) into one with an unplanned side trip. This forces a bunch of other changes: since they need to be in London and meet Goody Alsop before the voyage, they time-walk directly to London rather than to Matthew's place in Woodstock (as in the book). And at the end of their Elizabethan sojourn, the book has them return to an empty house in Madison and then take several stops to Sept-Tours, while the TV series (I guess in the interest of simplicity) has them return directly to a very full Sept-Tours.

In Book Three/Season Three, a supportive coven in Madison is merged into a supportive coven in London, which I guess makes sense if the writers want to reduce the amount of trans-Atlantic commuting. It makes less sense that Diana's best friend Chris, from her years at Yale, is now at a research lab in London too (and that we heard little or nothing about him in Season One, despite him being a "best friend" and only an hour or two away). In the book, Chris seeks and finds Diana in Madison rather than Diana seeking and finding him in London.

There's more hostility, more testosterone-poisoning, in the books than in the TV series. In particular, Nathaniel and Matthew are oil and water at first meeting, for no obvious reason, and Chris punches Matthew in the jaw shortly after meeting him, again for no obvious reason -- this is Diana's husband, so it would be reasonable to assume he cares about her welfare at least as much as Chris does, and he hasn't just done anything to invalidate that assumption.

Of course, there are lots of details in the books that I wish had made it into the TV series. There could easily have been an exchange "Are we expecting guests?" "No, why?" "Because the house just grew another bedroom." And in Book Three there's a conversation among a bunch of witches in a grocery store that would have been fun to see.

I'd better wrap this up (while reserving the right to add things to it as they occur to me). In a nutshell, the TV series inevitably simplifies a lot of plot points, but in many ways -- particularly dialogue -- it actually improves on the books.
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Ten years ago, or so, somebody gave me a copy of Neal Stephenson's novel Anathem, as I'd previously read and enjoyed Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon. Snow Crash, as I recall (I don't see it on the shelf now), was a normal-sized paperback novel, while Cryptonomicon was a (let's see...) 910-page hardback (not counting technical appendix) involving half a dozen story lines in different time periods, all somewhat absurdist-surreal in a Catch-22 sort of way. Anathem promised to resemble the latter, at least in size (890 pages, not counting several appendices).

I dove into Anathem, read several chapters, and got bogged down. Came back to it a few months later, read a few more chapters, and got bogged down. Came back to it a year later, read a few more chapters, and got bogged down. Came back to it a year later, starting from the beginning to get a running start, and got bogged down. The issue seemed to be that Stephenson had spent an enormous amount of effort on world-building and forgotten about plot: nothing ever happened. And there was a remarkable amount of philosophical argument.

For whatever reason, last month I came back to it, started from the beginning to get a running start, and read a few pages whenever I was waiting for a long compile during my work day. And actually finished it this time. In fact, a great deal happens in the last, say, 200 pages, which feel sorta like an ordinary SF novel in their own right, but nothing that happens in those last 200 pages would make sense without the world-building and philosophical argument.

So let's see what I can summarize without excessive spoilerization. The book is set in a world quite similar to ours, and from the first page you can tell that people speak and think in a Romance-based language that's not quite any of the ones we know. It's an old culture: it has written history going back at least 5000 years, at a level of detail comparable to what we have for the past 500 years.

And it's a culture in which academics have consciously (and not entirely voluntarily) divorced themselves from popular culture, living sequestered in what are effectively monasteries. To maintain their perspective and avoid being polluted and confused by transient fads, many of the (co-ed) monastic/academics live under a rule that they can only leave the monastery, or even hear news from outside the monastery, once a year. To maintain even more perspective, other monastics live under a stricter ten-year rule: no information from the outside can get in except at ten-year intervals. An even more elite group live under a hundred-year rule, and the really hard-core ones live under a thousand-year rule; they've only opened their gates twice since the monastic rules were set up 3000 years ago. (The monastics aren't celibate, but they're sterile due to their diet; an unanswered mystery, which bothers the protagonist from time to time, is how the Hundreders and Thousanders stay populated.) There are even rumors of a sect living under a 10,000-year rule, which has another 7,000 years to go before they'll open their gates.

So some of the book explores the resulting sense of detachment. For example, the monastics and the outside world experience linguistic drift, so the longer they've been apart, the less they can understand one another. The monastics of different sects can mostly understand one another because they're all trained from the same books in Classical Orth, the analogue of Classical Latin. And when they do observe the outside world, it's all "the city had gone through cycles of growth and shrinkage over the millennia, and was currently in a shrinking phase, as shown by such-and-such characteristics typical of shrinking cities," or "the current governmental institution was dominated by a religious belief system with properties X and Y, but not Z," all properties identified in other religious belief systems over the millennia. The monastics have observed how the outside world thinks about them, and have categorized such beliefs into a dozen or more named Iconographies, each of which recurs every few hundred years (e.g. the monastics are a bunch of mostly-harmless mental patients, the monastics are secretly developing technology that will bring about a Golden Age when they finally share it with the rest of us, the monastics are a bunch of malevolent magicians scheming to take over the world, the monastics are a bunch of malevolent magicians who have already taken over the world but are keeping it secret, etc.) In short, the monastics view the current outside world as anthropologists might view an isolated tribe, comparing and contrasting it with other isolated tribes while trying to avoid getting thrown in a stew-pot.

Another thread of the book starts with a philosophical question which (in our world) is called Mathematical Realism. Mathematicians studying a topic like (say) prime numbers generally feel as though the concept of prime numbers was inevitable -- that any culture, or even any species, with sufficient cognitive powers would eventually come up with the same concept, and prove the same theorems about them. Indeed, a great deal of mathematics has this feel of inevitability to it: we're not inventing new things, but discovering things that in some sense were already out there waiting to be discovered; when we prove a theorem, we now know not only that it's true, but that it couldn't have been false in any conceivable world. A mathematics developed by small furry creature from the planet Zrax would have isomorphic conceptual structures to our own, differing only in names. But where is "out there"? Is it a world of Platonic ideals, made up of isosceles triangles and automorphism groups in the same way our world is made up of photons, electrons, protons, etc.? And how do we know this stuff is inevitable, as opposed to being artifacts of our own culture or historical accident?

This doesn't happen only in number theory or group theory. In theoretical computer science, people point out that the problem classes Rec [recursive], r.e. [recursively enumerable], and P [polynomial-time-computable] can each be defined in at least half a dozen simple, elegant, apparently unrelated ways that all turn out to be exactly equivalent, and conclude from this robustness that they're "natural" or "real" classes. Discoveries, not inventions. Which makes people more motivated to study them: it feels more rewarding to study something that "really exists" than to study a historical contingency that might have worked out any of a hundred slightly different ways instead.

An alternative view could be called Mathematical Formalism: this dispenses with the question of whether these mathematical concepts are "real", and says "we've agreed to manipulate symbols according to such-and-such rules; what results do we get by following those rules? What if we changed the rules slightly; what results would we get then?" This approach is summarized in the Bertrand Russell quote "Mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true." We "don't know what we are talking about" because there is no "about": we're just shuffling symbols according to arbitrary rules. And "we don't know whether it's true" because a statement's "truth" is a property not of the symbols but of a particular world (while in a different world, the same statement isn't true).

In our world, mostly starting in the 20th century, logicians have made serious progress reconciling these views. We can study a set of axioms and their implications under certain syntactical proof rules (we call this "proof theory"), and (following Tarski et al) we can also talk about concrete worlds that "model" those axioms and proof rules in the sense that, when you interpret each formal symbol as a particular object in or assertion about the world, the axioms all turn out to be true and the proof rules preserve truth ("model theory"). Logicians explored the difference between formal provability and semantic validity, showing that in certain simple systems they can be made to coincide perfectly ("Completeness"), while for complex systems of arithmetic they can't (to oversimplify Gödel's famous Incompleteness Theorems). For example, one of the tasks my thesis advisor set me (and at which I never entirely succeeded) was to take a particular result that a colleague had proven using model theory, and see if I could reach the same or a similar conclusion using proof theory instead. There's a branch of logic called "modal logic" which talks about not whether things are true but whether they could be or must be true; logicians for the past few centuries had dismissed this as meaningless mysticism, but it was given a precise proof system in the 1930's, and a precise semantics in the 1960's; see this overview article.

In the world of Anathem, the realist and formalist schools have been feuding for thousands of years, the formalists accusing the realists of quasi-religious mysticism and the realists accusing the formalists of pointless mental masturbation. The realists hypothesize that yes, there really is a world (or "causal domain") of Platonic ideals from which we get all our mathematical ideas, which means that information somehow flows from that abstract world to our concrete one. But once you've postulated two worlds with a unidirectional information flow, a natural question (to any mathematician) is "why only two?" Could there be several "concrete" worlds, independent of one another but all getting their ideas from the same abstract world? Could there be several abstract worlds, independent of one another but all contributing ideas to our world? Could there be an even-more-abstract world from which the Platonic world gets its "ideas"? Could there be an even-more-concrete world that gets its "ideas" from ours? Could there be an arbitrary DAG (directed acyclic graph) of worlds connected by information flow? And why does it have to be acyclic: could there be information flow in both directions? (Although if there's information flow in both directions between two worlds, they've effectively collapsed into one causal domain.) The formalists, of course, say this is all mystical nonsense. Until they meet visitors from one of these other worlds... but that's getting into spoiler territory.

A seemingly-unrelated philosophical thread in the book is about epistemology within a single concrete world. When you see a frying pan, or a friend, how do you know it's "the same" frying pan or friend as it was yesterday, or as it was when you looked at it from the other side? There's an argument from simplicity -- Occam's Razor (or "Gardan's Steelyard" in the world of Anathem) -- that it's simpler to hypothesize one persistent object than to hypothesize distinct objects that coincidentally have a lot of observable properties in common. But those observable properties aren't identical; they vary, but only in certain predictable ways. If I move clockwise around the frying pan, I expect to stop seeing what was on its right side, and see additional things adjacent to what was on its left side, and things fall down but not up, and people get older but not younger, and so on. All this requires building a complex model of how the physical world works, which implies a lot of conclusions about "what would happen if ...": if I looked at the frying pan from the other side, if the table the pan is on weren't present, if my friend were wearing different clothes, etc. In other words, you can't make sense of even a single concrete world without a lot of counterfactual reasoning -- or in other words, reasoning about worlds that are extremely similar to this one, but differ in one particular way. The realists of Anathem further hypothesize that this ability of the human mind is implemented using quantum computation: that rather than one classical brain exploring all these counterfactual worlds classically, it actually explores all of them at once in a superposition of quantum states, or in parallel universes, or something. And we're back to talking about multiple worlds -- except that now the information flow among them (via quantum interference), while limited, is symmetrical. Each version of your brain directly perceives the universe that it's in, as well as picking up some quantum interference from versions of itself in other nearby universes, and uses this to form counterfactual models and thus to reason about its own world.

So now that I've finally finished the book, I have some things to think about. And some logic to reread.
hudebnik: (Default)
The publisher of my textbook, Picturing Programs: An Introduction to Computer Programming, says 13 (print-on-demand) copies were sold in 2021, and they owe me GBP 88 in royalties. Woo hoo! Still got a way to go for the NY Times best-seller list....

Seriously, it's sorta surprising that even 13 print copies were sold, given that one can download the entire text (with color pictures, not the greyscale ones in the print edition) for free from the web site, and are invited to subsequently pay me what you think it's worth.

Since the textbook is written to go with a particular language and development environment (which are also a free download), I should probably update the textbook to make sure it still works with the current versions of those.
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I'm late to the party, having never heard of this author until I saw her mentioned in one of [personal profile] hrj's posts in LHMP, but on that basis I ordered two of Donoghue's books, Kissing the Witch (1997) and The Woman who Gave Birth to Rabbits (2002) through our local indie bookstore. Both are collections of short stories about women's lives, In Rabbits (which I just finished), each story is based on tantalizing story-fragments surviving from the lives of actual women in history (the title character perpetrated, in the 18th century, the fraud that she had given birth to numerous rabbits, all of whom alas died at birth). Another protagonist is Elizabeth Bell, a black gentrywoman in England whose story also became the 2013 movie Belle. One story is set during the 1381 Peasants' Revolt in England, and another has a peripheral character named Richard Ledrede, Bishop of Ossory, with whom [personal profile] shalmestere and I are familiar because he wrote a collection of sacred "filks" of secular songs in the 14th century and, infuriatingly, didn't write down any of the music, saying only "this is sung to the tune of _____, which everybody knows."

Donoghue has a knack for engagingly capturing a feel of daily life, of the choices ordinary people (especially women) make to survive in the world. I'm not sure what to say beyond that: the stories and the sometimes-scanty historical facts on which they're based speak for themselves. Highly recommended.

In Witch, each story is a retelling of a classic fairy tale. I have nothing to say about this yet, as I haven't gotten it out of [personal profile] shalmestere's hands to read it for myself.
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Last month we did some book triage, looking for books that we could bear to give away to save storage space, and ran across a copy of Stephen Jay Gould's Full House. Apparently my mother gave it to me for Christmas 25 years ago, it wasn't at the top of the pile of books to read on Christmas afternoon, and I somehow never got to it. So I'm reading it now.

Gould's target in this book is the idea of "progress" in evolution: the idea that evolution through natural selection produces successively "better", or at least larger and more complex, organisms, because large size and complexity (however you define that) are generally pro-survival traits. Even today, and more so in the 1990's when he wrote the book, the standard popular image of evolution is of a ladder from bacteria to algae to jellyfish to trilobites to reptiles to mammals to primates to humans. And we see the same within lineages: we've all seen the picture of the evolution of horses from the dog-sized Eohippus to modern horses, donkeys, and zebras, and of primates from lemurs to monkeys to apes to humans, all illustrating the trend towards greater size and greater "complexity" or "sophistication".

And Gould says, in a nutshell, there is no such trend -- or if it is, it indicates a statistical artifact, rather than any advantage inherent in large size or "complexity". (In particular, modern horses represent not a pinnacle of evolutionary perfection but the pitiful remnants of a failed evolutionary branch: 5-10 million years ago there were dozens of genera, in a wide variety of sizes, then they all died out except Equus, and then a million years ago Equus died out over 90% of its geographical range, spreading a few species again only with the help of human domestication.)

What we perceive as a trend appears for several reasons.


  1. We tend to pay attention to the largest or "best" of any group. If we're looking at batting averages in Major League Baseball (as Gould does for about a third of the book, to illustrate his point), it's easy to look up the best averages in the league, but much harder to find the worst averages in the league, because nobody's interested in those. If, hypothetically, the mean batting average were to stay the same but the standard deviation increased or decreased, we would perceive the maximum increasing or decreasing, not because batters as a whole are getting better or worse, but because they are getting more varied or more uniform. When Gould analyzed not only the best but the worst batting averages in MLB from year to year, he found them moving symmetrically: on rare occasions, either or both might move away from the mean, but in most years, they both move towards the mean (precisely what one would expect from a sport as it matures and standardizes on better ways of doing things).

    But why would the mean be staying the same? Wouldn't you expect overall batting skill to get better over the decades? Yes, but pitching and fielding skill also get better over the decades. And whenever some technological or technical breakthrough has given an advantage to one over the other, the rules have been changed to "restore the balance"; as a result, the mean batting average in MLB has been remarkably constant for a hundred years.

    Gould concludes that the "extinction of the .400 hitter" (nobody's hit .400 in a season since, IIRC, 1941) indicates not a degradation in play, but rather of an improvement (and, more importantly, a uniformization) of play: as the bell curve of performance gets narrower, there are fewer and fewer examples at any given distance away from its peak.

    The reverse happens in biology: the real trend in evolution is increased variation among individuals of a species, among species, among genera, etc. (Until there's a mass-extinction event, at which point most of the groups disappear completely, and the survivors start over, increasing in variation again from their new starting point.) If we pay attention preferentially to the largest or "most complex" members of any group, as seems to be the human tendency, we'll perceive a trend towards increasing size or complexity when in fact there's only a trend towards increasing variability.


  2. If a drunk is walking along a sidewalk with a wall on his left and a gutter on his right, randomly staggering to left or right, he'll eventually end up in the gutter -- not because his stagger is biased towards the gutter, but because when he's close to the wall, he can't move any closer to it; the only direction he can go is away from it. The "bell curve" of his possible paths is truncated on one side, so it's necessarily skewed and asymmetrical. Of course, how long it takes him to fall into the gutter is an exponentially decaying function of the distance from wall to gutter, so if it's a hundred yards, he may die of old age first.

    Similarly, there are probably physical limits to how good a human baseball player can be. The maximum fast-ball has been between 100 and 105 MPH for a hundred years; IIUC, nobody has ever thrown 110 MPH, much less 140. As a sport grows and matures, you expect any given performance measure to get steadily better, but as it approaches the physical limits, it will get better slower and slower. And those farthest away from the limits will get better faster than those closer to the limits. For example, when women were first allowed to run marathons with men, their times were much longer, but their rate of improvement from year to year was much faster -- exactly as one would expect because their sport was less mature and they were initially farther from their limits. As a result, one expects to see the best in any field with a hard upper limit get microscopically better while the worst get substantially better, thus drawing the curve tighter and narrower (while remaining skewed away from the wall).

    In biology, we know that life developed "from the bottom up", from simple organic molecules, to more complex organic molecules, to self-replicating molecules, to prokaryotic cells, to eukaryotic cells. This isn't necessarily because life "wants" to be more complex, but simply because for any given definition of "life", there's a lower bound of complexity below which something can't meet that definition. If organisms have the option of evolving greater and lesser complexity, some will probably do each, but the ones that fall below the lower bound will die (or at least no longer qualify as "life" for our purposes). So one would predict that a purely random stagger in biological complexity would produce gradually more complex (and exponentially rarer) organisms.

    One particularly revealing example involves foraminiferans, a group of microscopic organisms that (fortunately for biologists) produces silica shells that survive nicely in fossil records. The standard way to find them is to take a bunch of silt or sand and filter it through successively finer sieves, recording how many you find at each size. But the finest sieve available in most biology labs is about 150 μm, which means any foraminiferan below that size will never appear in a sieve and therefore in a biology paper. This serves as a "wall", or lower bound, on the size of foraminiferans, not in the wild but in our observations. And, just as one would expect, the data indicate that the maximum and mean size of foraminiferans gradually trend upwards over time, not necessarily because they're actually getting bigger, but because we're seeing the large end of the distribution and ignoring the small end (which may well be getting smaller as the biggest get bigger -- at least, there are still plenty of them near the 150 μm lower bound).



Fortunately, there are several ways to tell the difference between a measure increasing as a statistical artifact, and a measure increasing because of selection pressure.

  1. You can look at not only the maximum but also the minimum: if maxima and minima move symmetrically around the mean, that suggests it's just a change in standard deviation, while if they both move in the same direction, that suggests an actual selection pressure.

  2. You can look at the mode rather than the mean or the median. Means are notoriously susceptible to asymmetric skew: if my brother and I are in a room with Jeff Bezos, the average per capita income in the room is billions, but that doesn't tell you much about my brother or me. Medians are less susceptible to asymmetric skew, but still somewhat. It appears that the mode of vertebrate evolution (whether you count species, individuals, or biomass) is still fish; the mode of multicellular evolution is still arthropods (especially beetles); the mode of life's evolution is still bacteria. If you surveyed all the life on earth objectively, you could be forgiven for not noticing the existence of two tiny evolutionary branches called "plants" and "animals"; if you surveyed all the animals objectively, you might not notice the vertebrates; if you surveyed all the vertebrates, you might not notice the mammals; and if you surveyed all the mammals, you might not notice the existence of humans. At each of these levels of grouping, the overwhelming majority of individuals, species, and biomass are small and "simple", suggesting no evolutionary pressure towards greater size and complexity.

  3. You can look at ancestor/descendant pairs in speciation events. If a "parent" species that's not up against a wall is equally likely to produce "child" species larger or smaller than itself, that suggests a random stagger; if, on the other hand, "child" species consistently tend to be larger than their immediate predecessor species, that suggests an evolutionary pressure for larger size. This is difficult research to do, as it requires identifying lots of ancestor/descendant pairs in an incomplete fossil record, but in most of the cases where it has been done (according to Gould, writing in the 1990's), the results have indicated a random stagger, not a consistent selection pressure. If anything, there's actually a tendency in the direction of simplicity, as formerly-independent organisms become parasites (or at best symbiotes) on other organisms and shed the now-redundant parts of their bodies and genomes.



Wild stuff. And Gould was such a good science writer.
hudebnik: (Default)
Or more properly "speculative fiction".

There are various aspects of our current predicament that have been explored by SF authors in the past. Some that I know of:

  • Philip Roth's The Plot Against America. I haven't actually read this one, but I hear that it's relevant to the Trump presidency.

  • Octavia Butler's The Parable of the Talents, in which a populist demagogue wins the Presidency on the slogan "Make America Great Again" and a lot of sucking-up to the religious right. But one gets the impression in the book that he's a competent adult, not a petulant toddler, and that he actually believes some of the religious-right stuff he spouts.

  • "Being There", the movie starring Peter Sellers as a mentally handicapped gardener who makes decisions and pronouncements by watching TV, and by the end of the movie is the Republican nominee for President. But he's gentle and good-natured.

  • Robert W. Sawyer's WWW: Wake, in which a highly-contagious disease jumps from animals to humans in a remote Chinese province. The Chinese government exterminates the human population of the infected area and temporarily shuts down China's Internet connections to the rest of the world to prevent the story from leaking.
    (Not really a spoiler: that all happens in the first few chapters of book 1 of a trilogy.)

  • And of course lots of people have written about racial conflicts in the U.S.



But there must be an already-written SF story in which a modern industrialized society responds to a pandemic by shutting down face-to-face businesses and social contact, and the effects of this. Such as what happens if workers don't go back to the office?, and how children who grow up being told not to leave the house or be within 6 feet of anybody outside the family will adjust when it's over.
hudebnik: (Default)
As the OED points out, today is Isaac Asimov's 100th birthday.

Isaac Asimov was a formative influence on me. He was a decent science fiction writer (with occasional flashes of brilliance -- The Gods Themselves springs to mind), a good mystery writer, and an AWESOME non-fiction writer. For umpty-ump years he had a monthly column in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in which he could discuss pretty much whatever topic he wished, and he used that freedom to the fullest, covering topics from biochemistry (his Ph.D. subject) to astrophysics to geography to etymology to history to myth to... pretty much anything. Periodically these columns were collected and published in book form, and throughout my pre-teen and teenage years a good fraction of my bookshelf was these books of collected free-form articles, which I read and re-read voraciously. Another good chunk of my leisure reading was his book-length non-fiction, e.g. The Roman Republic and The Roman Empire.

And of course, he was mind-bogglingly prolific. It took me several years to write a textbook; he wrote at least two books each year from 1950 to 1993, and frequently half a dozen or more in a year, a mix of textbooks, popular non-fiction, and fiction.

Back to the science fiction, for which he's probably best known. He was never a master of character or dialogue, which was fine with me because I wasn't either; his science fiction was, in the classic John Campbell mold, "here's a cool scientific idea; how would people react to it and use it?" The aforementioned The Gods Themselves, the Foundation trilogy (and prequels and sequels), The End of Eternity, the short story "Nightfall", and no doubt dozens more that I'm not thinking of right now, are all splendid examples of this.

Anyway, thank you, Isaac.

Reading

Jan. 1st, 2020 10:47 am
hudebnik: (Default)
My print copy of [personal profile] hrj's Floodtide finally arrived at the local indie bookstore yesterday (only six weeks after official publication date; apparently there were some problems at the printers). And I may have piqued the interest of the lady behind the counter and a customer who overheard me talking about the series, so there may be a few more orders coming.

The series is set in early 19th-century Europe, with magic. But "magic" means something very different to different people. In the first book it means ceremonies invoking Christian saints for divine aid; in the second book it means alchemy; in the third it means music; and in the fourth (whose main characters are on a lower socioeconomic rung than those in the previous books) it means folk charms.

And of course, many of the central characters in all the books are lesbian, but there are no sex scenes (so far) so I gather the books don't really fit into "lesbian fic". Being lesbian is just one more complication in the protagonists' already complicated lives as they try to make a living, find love, and stay out of trouble.
hudebnik: (Default)
... Octavia Butler's The Parable of the Talents, the sequel to The Parable of the Sower. And I think I have a better idea of what the quasi-religious-leader protagonist is getting at. Her religion is a (not necessarily unique) solution to a set of equations or imperatives or syllogisms or something:

Humanity should survive.
For humanity to survive, it needs dreams and a future bigger than "survive".
(Similarly, for any individual to survive, that individual needs dreams and a future bigger than "survive".)
Space colonization is a big enough, expensive enough dream that the protagonist won't live to see it happen, and that's a feature, not a bug. It's also romantic enough to stir the imagination.
Space colonization will never be profitable, so we can't rely on the profit motive to do it; we need something irrational like a religion.

I think this book touched me more than Kindred because of my own history with religion. I imagine the following dialogue (which does not appear in the book) between two of the characters:
"I had to think of the child's best interest."
"You've got a lot of damn gall deciding on your own that it's in her best interest not to know her mother."
"You've got a lot of damn gall deciding on your own that it's in her best interest not to know God."

Neither of these people is objectively wrong. Indeed, both of them are self-evidently right in their respective frames of reference, and in that frame of reference the other is deluded by superstition and blinded by power. One could say that the "mother" relationship is objectively demonstrable, while the existence of "God" isn't, but to somebody to whom the existence and properties of "God" are self-evident, that argument makes as much sense as "my hovercraft is full of eels".
hudebnik: (Default)
A year or so ago I heard or read a news story about the late science fiction author Octavia Butler. I had heard of her but never read any of her work, so I decided to find some. Conveniently, an independent bookstore had just opened in my neighborhood, and this was a good excuse to give it some business in hope that it stays afloat.

I've read three (or five) of her books so far: Kindred (in which the protagonist time-travels into the body of one of her slave ancestors in antebellum Mississippi), The Parable of the Sower (in which the protagonist, living in a falling-apart near-future society, becomes the leader of a religious/social community devoted to treating people decently, rebuilding society, and eventually emigrating to other planets and stars; I gather it's the first of a series but I haven't looked up the rest), and most recently Lilith's Brood, which is actually a trilogy bound together. So let's talk about the last one.

In Lilith's Brood, humanity encounters an alien, star-traveling species (the Oankali) who are born genetic engineers (as one human character says, "They manipulate genes as easily as we manipulate pens and pencils"), so their every offspring is the result of conscious genetic choice. And the Oankali's driving motivation is to seek out new interesting species and exchange genetic material with them to produce a new species, just as individual humans seek out other humans and exchange genetic material with them to produce a new individual. Every million years or so, they discover a new species and their own species Divides: part goes on as it was, while another part interbreeds with the newly-contacted species to form a new species with selected genetic characteristics of each.

Since humanity has just killed off most of itself and much of the Earth in a nuclear war, the Oankali pick up all the survivors, heal their injuries and radiation damage, and offer each survivor the choice between staying on the starship with them or returning to an Earth whose less-radiation-ravaged portions the Oankali have restored to livability.

But the human race has a deadly combination of intelligence and hierarchical thinking that inevitably leads to oppression, war, and misery, so they won't be allowed to breed as humans did before: it would be just too irresponsible, like a skilled carpenter seeing a crooked table or a warped door frame without fixing it. Each survivor is also offered the choice to interbreed with Oankali or to be sterile, living out an extended, healthy life but not producing any more of those intelligent-hierarchical-murderous humans. The "Resisters" who choose not to interbreed remain purely human, but in a dead end, unable to propagate their pure humanity. Some respond to this dead end with suicide; others kidnap the most human-looking hybrid babies from hybrid communities and try to raise them as humans, hoping to back-breed them with true humans to produce a sustainable population that's as human as possible. And they view the people who choose to interbreed as traitors to their race.

Which leads to the question at the top of this post: "Are you human?", which forms a sort of ostinato theme to the book. The first non-Resister, Lilith, is given some minor genetic enhancements and assigned the task of training other humans to get along with Oankali; her students suspect her of being not entirely human, and certainly not "loyal" to the human race. And various other characters have their humanity and/or their loyalties questioned. You can justify almost any treatment of a person that you've decided is non-human.

If there's a moral to the book, it might be "Life is messy. It doesn't fit into neat categories with clean boundaries."

What does "human" mean when most of the living humans have some Oankali genes, and others have had Oankali change the activation state of some of their in-born genes? (Or, in our own world, when most living humans have some Neanderthal and/or Denisovan genes?)

What do "male" and "female" mean if, like the Oankali, you have three possible sexes, and you don't know which one you'll be until adolescence? (Or, in our own world, when nobody has all the characteristics we associate with "male" or "female", a small number of people have ambiguous genitalia, and rather more people have social identities that don't match what's between their legs?)

What does "individual" mean when a good deal of your body mass is mitochondria (which used to be independent organisms) or symbiotic bacteria (which still could be)?

Not to mention: what do "white", "black", and other race names mean when in fact almost every human has ancestors from a variety of ethnic groups, and every human descends from eastern Africa two million years ago?

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