Three Cups of Tea

This seems rather interesting. In 1993 an American gentleman by the name of Greg Mortenson went to Pakistan to attempt to climb K-2 (the second highest mountain in the world). He failed, and on his way down the mountain got lost and fell ill, ending up in a poor village. The villagers nursed him back to health, and when he found that the village was so poor that it had to share a teacher with the next village over, he vowed to return and fund a school.

What ensues is Mortenson's struggle to build first one school, then to expand the program to other villages in northern Pakistan and Afghanistan, founding the charity CAI on the way. Mortenson, never a wealthy man, at one point lives in his car while trying to save money for his dream. Thrown in are thoughts and conversations about 9-11, about the Taliban, the Iraq War, the 2005 Earthquake, and how best to fight the war on terror. (Hint: the book quotes a Pakistani Brigadier-General: "The enemy is ignorance.")

Apparently this book has been making waves over the last year or so in the states. (Mr. Mortenson's daughter also sang a song that was composed in order to help raise money for the charity.)

I haven't read this yet but my interest in certainly piqued and I'll be on the look out for it.

IZ

1000 and Counting!

Ladies and gentlemen, I bid you all doff your caps to commemorate a most auspicious event - the acquisition of my 1000th (that's right, one thousandth) fiction book.

And the book that has the fortune of being the millennial work of (prose) fiction in my library is 'Whit' by Iain Banks. Needless to say, I shall dive into reading it as soon as possible and then post up my thoughts on it here. I'm quiet looking forward to it - it seems like a most interesting read.

I now have 1009 works of fiction in my library.

My recorded non-fiction library currently stands at 474. And for those of you who are simply dying to know, the 474th book is Cloak and Gown, Robin W. Winks' historical study of the connection between scholars from Yale and the OSS (which would later become the CIA) from 1939 to 1961.

I have the original hardback which has a different cover, but this one looks kind of cool too, so there you go.

IZ

Book: Hominids

The first in a trilogy called “The Neanderthal Parallax” Hominids is a book that uses various debates and discussions in paleo-anthropology, evolutionary psychology and socio-biology to posit a world in which Neanderthals rather than Sapiens are the highest evolved intelligent life form (more on that later). Through an accident that occurs while working on a quantum computer, a Neanderthal physicist is dropped into our (parallel universe) world – where Neanderthals died out tens of thousands of years ago (or according to another theory were bred out of existence) and homo sapiens became the dominant species. The Neanderthal spends the next few days learning about and debating various features of our social world with various humans. Like Voltaire’s Candide, or Usbek in The Persian Letters he is an outsider who reveals the flaws, follies and contradictions that are part and parcel of our world, including sexual mores, the institution of the family, notions of privacy and liberty, ecological destruction, religion, racial discrimination and capitalism.

What first drew me (and I suspect will draw many others) to this book was the fact that it won the Hugo Award for best Science Fiction Novel in 2003. Despite the Hugo Award having been awarded to some real clunkers in the recent past (Forever Peace anyone?) this is why I decided to give the book a chance, though I thought I would read it before forking out any cash on any of the rest of the trilogy. My qualms were due, to a large extent, to the many negative reader reviews I came across on amazon.com, accusing the book of being too didactic in tone, or too thin on plot, or even playing too fast and loose with science, or, predictably enough, too harsh on the finest achievements of human civilization. After reading the book through its only the accusation of dodgy science that seems to have merit.

Hominids is a throw back to the golden age social science fiction of the 50s and early 60s. Many of its tropes are similar, many of its themes have already been explored in one way or another by several stalwarts of the sf canon. Despite this, it stands on its own feet as a exemplar of the genre and a fine synthesis of these themes with modern scientific ideas. The science is subordinated to the needs of the story and Sawyer’s deft, uncomplicated prose makes for a smooth read. If you’re like me, and not overly credulous of many of the claims made by either evolutionary psychology or socio-biology, you may raise an eyebrow at how Sawyer believes the biological differences between homo sapiens and homo neanderthalis would have been the basis of a radically different society, but this is a minor point and doesn't have any bearing on the enjoyment of the book. As an example he posits that the Neanderthals' heavy reliance on a meat diet and significantly greater musculature would have meant that they would not take to agriculture or domesticate animals for labour which would have set lower limits to how much their population could grow, which in turn would affect the ecological impact of their society. At the same time, Sawyer posits that their impressive tool making abilities and the fact that their brains were 12% larger than that of homo sapiens would have meant that they would have been able to develop technologically. Also particularly interesting is how he feels gender relationships would develop differently based on the Neanderthals highly developed sense of smell.

This is all fair enough, but there is some dodgy use of science later in the book, where Sawyer tries to marry concepts of quantum entanglement, the notion of parallel universes and the rise of human consciousness. God as a unified network of human consciousness is not a new idea (the anime Serial Experiment Lain touched on this idea), and the notion of a "divine" observer that pegs each quantum event one to another in a chain that essentially creates reality (or verifies one reality over all possible others) has also been explored before in fiction (Dan Simmons’ The Hollow Man was one example). Both are intriguing concepts in their own ways. My problem is that the theory put forward by one of Sawyer’s characters puts Man, i.e. human beings (whether homo sapiens or homo neanderthalis), very much at the centre of the universe. The idea is far too anthropocentric, even for a non-gaian like me. And claiming that consciousness exists only in humans, and that too in humans only from 40,000 years ago (when we have the first significant evidence of art, religion and “sophisticated” tool making) seems to be tough to swallow.

Still, be that as it may, the science in the book never eclipses the narrative and I for one, unlike some readers, never felt that it was being rammed down my throat. Some fans of hard-sf are very exacting in their demands of the science of a sf book, but like I had said earlier, this is primarily a work of social science fiction and not hard sf. The science is necessitated by the narrative and not the other way round. The book’s greatest asset is that it is well written, has engaging characters, a swift-flowing narrative and much food for thought. Its these elements that drew me into the book, so much so that before I was finished, I had gone out and bought the next two in the series, Humans and Hybrds.

IZ

Books: Bones of the Earth

I just finished reading Michael Swanwick's Bones of the Earth. Yes, I know, I know, I was reading Freedom & Necessity, well I got distracted by this. I've been wanting to read more stuff by Michael Swanwick ever since I read The Iron Dragon's Daughter which was a phenomenal book, so when I came across this I simply had to snap it up. Originally I was a little sceptical about the dinosaurs all over the cover, and some of the blurbs seem to make this sound like it was a rehash of Jurassic Park, but it was Michael Swanwick after all so I gave it a go.

So here's my mini-review (and then I'm going back to Freedom & Necessity).

The premise of Bones of the Earth is an interesting one. Inhabitants of Earth’s distant future have established a system of time travel and have made it available for use to palaeontologists of the 21^st century to study the Mesozoic era. In return, they are expected to use the system responsibly and avoid the creation of paradoxes that may tamper with time. It seems like a godsend to the scientific community, but this gift threatens to become a dangerous tool in the hands of mavericks looking to bolster their own reputations, and to fanatical ideologues looking to destroy ‘Darwinian heresy’ and prove creationism. And there are a few who wonder just why their ‘benefactors’ from the future have established this system in the first place.

In terms of narrative structure, characterisation and quality of prose, Swanwick displays once again his inventiveness and literary ability. Bones of the Earth starts off well, with a pacey narrative and interesting characters. The structure of this tale of time travel is also interesting, with plot twists and surprising developments unfolding swiftly one after the other. Michael Swanwick juggles the complexities of cause and effect and time-travel paradoxes gracefully and intelligently, building an intriguing mystery and making for a compelling storyline. With different narrative threads featuring different characters at different times to follow, one might think that there is a danger of the author getting tangled in a cat’s cradle of narratives, but this never happens.

The book does however, seem to somewhat lose focus towards the end, when the author chooses a narrative thread to follow which, while having its high points, doesn’t quiet satisfy in terms of providing explanations in the most satisfying manner. Indeed it feels as if what should be the main climax of the story is brushed over quickly in order to move to the denouement.

That said, Bones of the Earth is a compelling and well written novel. Any fears that a book that features dinosaurs so prominently on the cover will be “sci-fi lite” are unfounded. This is first and foremost a work of speculative fiction, rooted firmly in the great science fiction themes of time travel and evolution, with dinosaurs being a secondary (though also provocatively handled) feature. More generally, the book is also an impassioned defence of scientific endeavour, and on this level is succeeds most admirably.

IZ

And Now: Rehabilitating Kofi Annan?

An interesting book review on Kofi Annan and the UN. Annan is almost universally panned. On the one hand by Western politicians as an inept member of an inept bureaucracy compromised by the influence of dictatorships and on the other by third world commentators as an inept patsy of a fawning bureaucracy compromised by the influence of post-colonial imperialists. Where does the truth lie?

IZ

Rehabilitating Ralph Nader

Remember Ralph Nader? Scourged by the whip of democrat scorn and anger after Gore's loss of the 2000 elections, he seems to have faded into obscurity. Some democrats have even heaped all the ills of American domestic and foreign policy from 2000 onwards on his shoulders.

I'm not sure that's fair. As long as the the mainstay of Democrat election campaigns will remain "we are not Republican", even as candidates inch ever closer to the right, I don't think American foreign policy (or even domestic policy to a great degree) is going to be necessarily very different from Republican policy. Many of the Democrat winners of the 2006 elections could easily pass for Republicans in terms of their ideas and policies save one: public criticism of Bush. Now that 2006 is in the past even that dividing line isn't as thick as it used to be.

Here's an article on a documentary on Ralph Nader. I would be very interested in seeing it and if it reminds people that there was more to him than the sucking away of votes from Gore in 2000, so much the better.

IZ

New addiction

I can't help it. LibraryThing is more addictive than crack! Throw in a bibliophile and compulsive book collector like me and its a marriage made in heaven.

On the subject of my book collection, I've been thinking about how I'm going to store and organise my books once I'm back home. Randomly came across this article on storing books on andre norton's website. It has some useful tips, though obviously its more useful to hardcore collectors out to preserve 'precious' old editions etc. which isn't exactly my thing. So many of my books have come from dusty bookstalls at Itwar Bazaar, to call them 'used' would be a major understatement. Still, I would like to do something to keep out some of the humidity and dust that starts pitting and yellowing even new books very quickly.

IZ