The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans

An interesting review of Jean Pfaelzer's book at the NYT.

“Driven Out” cites records of more than 100 roundups, pogroms, expulsions and ethnic cleansings (to use Pfaelzer’s various terms for these actions) in which white Westerners united to drive the Chinese out of their communities from 1850 to 1906. They used warnings, arson, boycotts and violence to achieve their goal. In many circumstances, labor organizations led the campaigns, casting the Chinese as competitors for jobs and depressors of wages. But middle-class civic leaders often acted in alliance with workers.

IZ

God is Not Great

A great review of Christopher Hitchens' new book 'God is Not Great' here. This digested "summary" of the book in the Guardian is worth a look in as well.

Its absurd that this man is taken so seriously. Its setting the level of discussion of these issues to caveman standards.

IZ

A New Way to Say Hooray! (For April)

Firstly, I'm not sure why I titled this entry as 'A New Way to Say Hooray!' other than because its the title of a song by Shpongle that I listen to off and on...

Now I thought I was being all hoity toity by upgrading my 65 book challenge to a 75 book challenge, when I came across this dude! He's already read 100 books by the end of April... and in 7 different languages! Bah!

Anyhoo, I have come to the realisation that I am never going to actually get around to posting up reviews of all the books that I've read here. So, I thought I'd just post up lists of stuff that I've read - like a round up for each month.

So here's what I read in April:

1. Storm Front - Jim Butcher
2. The Illustrated Man - Ray Bradbury (re-read)
3. Every Man for Himself - Beryl Bainbridge
4. Letters From Atlantis - Robert Silverberg
5. Hybrids - Robert J. Sawyer
6. The Briar King - Greg Keyes
7. The Charnel Prince - Greg Keyes
8. Floating Worlds - Cecelia Holland
9. Temeraire - Naomi Novik

Hybrids was a very bland and rather disappointing finale to the Neanderthal Parallax series. The Briar King and The Charnel Prince were a fine pair of books to kick off the epic fantasy series: The Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone. Storm Front is the first in the now super famous (and made into TV show) Dresden Files series of books that blends noir and urban fantasy elements. It was okay: nothing special but I wouldn't rule out reading more by the author. Letters from Atlantis was a fine novella by Silverberg. I'm beginning to realise that he was a pretty good writer after all, after having given up on him when I read 3 of his books with exactly the same plot back in the 90s. The Illustrated Man is a classic short story collection and should be read and re-read by every man, woman and child on God's green Earth (or anywhere else).

Every Man For Himself is an elegant book set during the voyage of the Titanic - I've now read two outstanding books by Beryl Bainbridge and if her other books are as good she may well establish herself as one of my favourite authors. Floating Worlds was a lovely surprise - a thumping big space opera with an outstanding main character and filled to the brim with a feminist and anarchist sensibility, a la Le Guin. Its been a long, long time since I've read anything like it. Lastly there was Temeraire - fantasy bubble-gum that combines Master & Commander-like antics with dragons set in Napoleonic times. Fun, warm, and I must say I'm looking forward to see what it will turn out like when Peter Jackson (of Lord of the Rings fame) brings it to the big screen.

So I have finally reviewed (sort off) the stuff I read last month. Hooray!

IZ

Book: Humans

Humans turns out to be a somewhat tepid follow-up to the fascinating Hominids. The story picks up where it left off in the previous book and revolves around the growing relationship between the Neanderthal Ponter and the human Mary (technically Neanderthals are also human, but for brevity’s sake I'm using the term to stand for Homo Sapiens). Mary travels with Ponter to her world as the portal between the two alternate Earths is opened up for trade. There we get a closer look at Neanderthal society as Mary tries to adjust to its norms. Ponter also finds that he has to come to term with how his time on our Earth and his love for Mary has changed him.

In terms of plot structure and inventiveness, Humans is inferior to its predecessor. Ponter and Mary aside, the other supporting characters don’t develop at all and seem to recede into the background. None of the new characters take on three dimensions. We don’t see much of Neanderthal society that we haven’t already seen before. Even the social and political ramifications of the establishment of links between the two worlds is avoided altogether. The only plot threads with any weight are those of the love between Ponter and Mary and Ponter’s growing ambiguity about religion – a concept he had initially dismissed as illogical and even detrimental to the functioning of a well-adjusted society. These are interesting themes but neither are handled well enough to give the book the kind of depth and pull of Hominids.

This is not to say that Humans is a poor read. Sawyer’s prose is as fluid and easy on the eye as ever, and our interest in this interweaving of the two Earths carries over from the first book. The urge to discover what happens next provides a powerful incentive to keep reading. All in all, it’s a decent read and forms a bridge to the third book that is sufficiently entertaining, for the reader to want to complete the journey.

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