OmegaMom

I’m busy reading Predator, by Patricia Cornwall.  It’s creepy.  Really creepy.  And confusing.  Judging by the reviews on Amazon, lots of folks feel the same way.  But, still…

Long ago and far away, when I was a teen-seguing-into-young-adult, I worked downtown in Chicago.  A block away from my office was Carson Pirie Scott & Co. (…sigh…), there were glamorous stores galore on State Street, and half a block away was the wondrousness that was Kroch’s & Brentano’s bookstore.  The paperback books were downstairs, and the science fiction area was tucked away in the back righthand corner.  It was a glorious spot for me to hang out in on rainy or snowy days, either during lunch hour or after work.

For a few years, I noticed a book on the shelves called “The Forgotten Beasts of Eld “, by a lady named Patricia McKillip, but never purchased it.  It had a stylized tapestry cover, with a white-haired girl surrounded by huge Beasts, and I would pick it up, read the back cover blurb–all of a paragraph long–and put it back, never being really tempted enough to buy it.  At the time, my 60 cents was better spent on Andre Nortons or (Oh, please don’t despise me!) Barbara Cartland (I swear, I swear, I stopped buying those things, really, truly, before she started writing in paragraphs one sentence long.).  (God, I can’t believe I am actually admitting to having purchased that woman’s books!)

Anyway.  One day, I broke down and bought the book.

I have been hooked on Patricia McKillip’s writing ever since.

The writing is lyrical, poetic, spare, sometimes haunting.  It is as if someone had taken an old myth, sung and storied for hundreds of years, and written it down as a novel.

Sybel is a witch, living isolated and alone on the top of a mountain, the daughter and granddaughter of cold, emotionless wizards who lived apart from humanity and “called” to whatever they wanted–including female companionship.  She has inherited a collection of Beasts, magical, wondrous creatures from myth and legend, who were “called” by her father and grandfather to live upon the mountain.  There is the Cat Moriah, there is the Falcon Ter, the Lyon Gules, the dragon Gyld, and most wondrous of all, the white-tusked Boar Cyrin, who speaks in riddles and koans.  (”The giant Grol was struck once in the eye by a stone, so that it turned and looked into his mind, and he died of what he saw there.”)

All Sybel wants is to live her life with her Beasts and to find the Lyralin, a huge white bird with trailing wings, and “call” it to her.  But one day, her life is upended by a man in armor pounding at her gate.  He is carrying a baby.  He insists she take and rear the child, because it is the only place in the world where the child will live.

She takes in the child, saying she has cared for Beasts before, and surely caring for an infant can’t be that much different?

The warrior returns over the years at uneven intervals.  And between these visits and the growth of the baby, Sybel becomes drawn into the loves, hates, dramas and wars that pervade the outside world.  All the while, she is searching for the Lyralin, and begins being stalked by a mysterious, dark, foreboding being called Blammor. 

Darkness and light, love and hate, loyalty and betrayal, isolation and immersion, and the nature of being true to yourself are all balanced in this book, written in a murmuring, poetic manner.

It’s short, it has absolutely no Dark Lords or elves or we-must-stop-the-end-of-the-world quests, but it ended up winning the World Fantasy Award the year it was written.  It was out of print for many years, and apparently McKillip does not regard it fondly, but it has been re-released.  I love McKillip’s later books as well, and would recommend any of them, but her writing is more…um…mannered now.  Beasts is McKillip as a fresh young writer, finding her voice, and it knocked my socks off 30 years ago (almost forty?!).

Anne wanted to know if I’ve read any SF or fantasy that I might be willing to recommend (or pan!) to my readers.

I gulp fantasies.  Oh, mostly they’re all cliched and formulaic, but, dayum, I likes me some Dark Lord-on-the-surge/homebodies-who-get-caught-up-in-the-grand-quest/doomed-ancient-hero-families combos.  Then again, there are some fantasies that I’ve read that either take on the Dark Lord with a twist or a new viewpoint, or else have a totally different focus.

You get those in later posts.  (Hah!)  Today’s post is for hard SF.

As is usual, at my last visit to GrannyJ, I loaded up with some of her SF.  I have no idea where she gets these things; every time I visit the book stores lately, what I see is row upon row of vampire/paranormal fantasy (eh) mixed in with a few fantasy authors who specialize in fifty kazillion books all based on the same world, or even the same series (sometimes like, sometimes don’t), plus a plethora of military SF (which I actually love).  But mom is always coming up with New! and Different! SF books and authors who I have never seen.  This may be because the bookstores I have been patronizing are all chain bookstores aimed at peddling the SF-flavor-of-the-month (or year), and the devil take the offbeat or different.

So.  This trip, GrannyJ passed on a trio of books by a guy name of Richard K. Morgan; Altered Carbon, Broken Angels, and Woken Furies, also known as the “Takeshi Kovacs novels”.  As usual, again, her comment was, “You might like these.”

Call them SF noir.  The setting is about four centuries into the future.  Mankind has expanded to the stars, due to finding a slew of old arcane machinery…and associated buried cities…left behind on the planet Mars by a mysterious and long-gone alien race.  Really alien race, as in, “if you try to understand these sapients–or their architecture, or even their technology–you may end up going utterly and absolutely bonkers.”

At the same time, humanity has developed the ability to “re-sleeve” dead humans.  Sort of like an organ transplant, except it’s your consciousness that gets transplanted (after being carefully recorded by a cortical stack).  Taking Larry Niven’s concept of “organleggers” one step further, Morgan’s future is one of a society that gets new bodies for “deserving” people (aka “rich” people or “connected” people) by borrowing them from convicts, whose consciousness gets decanted into a holding pattern.  If you’re lucky, in a well-kept-up virtual reality; otherwise, a poorly-kept-up VR, or even nothingness.  Oh, yeah, and the criminal rings will steal bodies for use in re-sleeving.

Oh, yeah, there are criminal rings galore in this future.  Corruption pervades society from the bottom to the top.  Take Takeshi Kovacs home world, Harlan’s World (a nod to Harlan Ellison?).  It was originally settled by Japanese, some Mafia families, and Eastern Europeans, each ethnicity bringing with it its own take on the underworld.

Takeshi Kovacs was a low-level thug on his home world, until he was recruited into the super-elite Envoy Corps, whose mission in the end is to help the governing elite of the various worlds to maintain the status quo.  This sometimes means starting a war in order to put down revolutionaries who might actually, say, help the downtrodden regain a bit of dignity.  The upside of being an Envoy is being regarded as heroes by the upper-class, and as unstoppable by almost all.  Oh, yes, and you get a never-ending supply of re-sleeves.  The downside is that the military, knowing they can resurrect you, can send you into horrible situations over and over and over and over again.

That was then.  This is now:  Kovacs has long since left the Envoys and is now a sort of free-lancer, a mercenary-cum-detective.  He’s cold, cynical, hard-bitten, vicious, callous–and underneath it all, very idealistic and learning empathy.

The books are vivid, harsh, violent, profane, full of (to me, damned well-written) sex scenes.  There is a growing crescendo of anti-governing classes sentiment that starts (relatively) low at the beginning but blossoms and explodes by the third book.  There’s also the question of the ethics of re-sleeving (on both ends–the “sleevee” and the “sleever”) and what it means to be “you”.  What makes you what you are?  How much of who you are is based on your physical body?  Is love a physical thing or a mental/spiritual thing?  Underlying it all is the mystery of who were the Martians, how did they live, why did they disappear, and can anyone truly understand them?

Lots of interesting questions.  I highly recommend these books, but only if you’re able to handle really graphic violence and sex, and lots of it.

What do you do when the power goes out?  If you’re like me, you wait a minute or two before you do anything, because you know it’s going to come on again Real Soon Now.  If it lasts longer than a few minutes, then it’s time to haul out the candles and lamps, and maybe give a call to the local electric company.

What do you do if it’s not just your house, your neighborhood?  What if it’s your city?  Well, folks who have been in hurricanes or earthquakes know it’s just a matter of time before the services come back on; the news is filled with folks telling you what’s caused the outage, estimates of how long it will take to get things working again, where the evacuation centers are, and passing on the information that people out of the area are working hard and it’s going to come on again Real Soon Now.  The realities, of course, are often different than the estimates, but you are assured that someone’s taking care of things.

What if it’s not just your city?  What if it’s everywhere?  What if, at the same time as the (electric) power went out, all batteries went dead, all internal combustion motors died, gunpowder stopped working…everything stopped working?

Imagine living in, say, Los Angeles.  Or Phoenix.  Or the East Coast metroplex stretching from northern Virginia all the way up to the middle of New England.  Imagine realizing, fairly quickly, that there is no power, that no-one can fix it, and there’s no way to replenish the food at your local grocery store–if you’re lucky enough to live near enough to walk or bike to it.  Imagine 40 million people all getting hungry and thirsty, and all very, very scared.  Add in the fact that no fire engines work, no police cars work, no ambulances work, and every single airplane in the sky has just become a plummeting bomb filled with thousands of gallons of flammable liquids…Top it off with ravaging illnesses in a few weeks, as unsanitary living conditions spread (40 million people pooping and nowhere to put the poop).

Now imagine it happening worldwide.

That’s the premise set up in the first chapter of S.M. Stirling’s Dies the Fire: A Novel of the Change.  News of a strange, enormous electrical storm affecting the island of Nantucket is immediately followed by radios, lights, everything going dead.  The world changes in an instant.  Is it ALIENS?!  Is it THE GODS?!  No-one knows.  The novel follows one woman, Juniper MacKenzie, a Wiccan who leads a group of survivors from Corvallis, OR, and one man, Mike Havel, who was piloting a puddle jumper for a rich man and his family through the Idaho mountains when the lights went out, manages to crash land, and leads them to safety.

Food is a big issue in the novel–the realization by modern people of just how much work is involved in getting food on the table, and how important it is to survive.  And violence.  Lack of order leads to lack of law leads to violence.  (Warning:  graphically described violence–you may get tired of hearing about how people’s bowels let loose when they get thrust by a sword.)

The main focus is how they survive, and how their communities develop and cope with a larger, more ruthless community led by Norman Arminger, a former history professor who is now living his dream of resurrecting post-Norman-Conquest medievalism in the city of Portland.

The next two novels–The Protector’s War and A Meeting at Corvallis–take place nine years later.  All three communities that were the center of the first book have stabilized and grown, and it’s obvious that the younger generation is taking things that most of the olders consider “pretend” morale boosters much more seriously.  MacKenzie’s clan–started almost as a joke–has become more and more “clannish”; Havel’s younger BearKillers, who were just kids when The Change occurred, revere him as a leader and warleader; youngsters who grew up in Arminger’s Protectorate are internalizing the huffy formality of court life.  And there’s a war.  But the bad guys aren’t necessarily as horribly bad as they seemed…and there’s a growing sense that the deus ex machina that caused The Change is interfering in a mystic way with some folks.  Just a bit.

The next two novels–The Sunrise Lands and The Scourge of God–take place twenty-one years after The Change. Juniper’s son, Rudi, who was the focus of a prophecy at his dedication ceremony at the end of the very first book, is now an adult, and facing a Quest–to go to Nantucket Island, source of the mysterious storm that caused The Change.  New characters are introduced, but old characters are there as well.  Old enemies now work together as somewhat comfortable allies.  New enemies appear.  Nantucket is a mysterious place that bends the space-time continuum in weird ways.  Some of the old survivors are dying off, while those that remain are befuddled by how the youngsters have internalized the makeshift morale boosters used to get through the crisis, turning them into a way of life.  The youngsters, in their turn, regard the tales of “before The Change” as so much mythical mumbo jumbo and roll their eyes when the older folks go into reminiscing. 

The mystical clues get thicker and happen more often…is it ALIENS?!  Is it THE GODS?!  Is Rudi the reincarnation of King Arthur?  How can some of the eeevul Prophet’s folk become essentially zombies?  You have to wait until the final volume is published in September.  I hope.

In the midst of all the blood and gore were some really intriguing ideas and amusing byplay.  MacKenzie clansfolk heading to the battlefield with their longbows, riding bicycles.  A social taboo against singing “The End Of The World As We Know It”.  Teenagers who take Tolkein literally, and start the Dunedain Rangers as a do-gooders’ association supported by payments for escorting caravans and a retainer for ridding the land of bandits–they speak High Elvish amongst themselves, and have had to cobble together ways to curse and talk about menstruation.  A society based on leadership of a bunch of yogi who were having a conference in the Tetons on how to use the newfangled internet to advertise their businesses when The Change occurred.  The Society for Creative Anachronism pops up all over the place as people who could adjust to the new world just a little bit easier.

I enjoyed the books.  You do have to suspend your disbelief at the mechanics of The Change–even his characters note that its effects happen only on the surface of the earth–but I assume the deux ex machina has taken care of that.  Some readers have commented that they don’t like Stirling’s descriptive style, so be warned:  he spends a helluva lot of time setting the scene, incorporating sights, sounds, smells.  I like it; you may not.

We are busy doing such things as ditching Comet the chicken (picked up today by a gal in town who is busy setting up a new flock), purchasing new chicks (a Buff Orpington and an Australorp, both less than two weeks old and the cutest little balls of fluff), dying Easter eggs, filling Easter baskets, socializing with school buds and what-not.  I hope to produce a post of some more substance tomorrow, but I had to pass these tidbits on.

First off, we have Ground Truth Trekking, a young couple who hiked across the northwest to their new home, a yurt in Alaska with a grand view of the volcano, and promptly had a new baby.  They have some lovely time-lapse photography of the volcano, plus some composite pics of the lightning during the nighttime volcano eruptions; go take a look.

Then we have a very nice slice-of-life blog featuring Sarah Palin’s own hometown, Wasilla!  It’s called “Wasilla Alaska, by 300…and then some“, published by a guy named Bill Hess.  I found him while looking at pics of volcanic ashfall from the Big City newspaper.  Those who like OmegaGranny’s blog, Walking Prescott, might like his.

Many moons ago, when I was a young lass in Chicago, I dipped my toes into the outskirts of science fiction fandom.  Alas, I was at the time too shy and uptight to let myself be sucked in further (it would have been easy, but I think I was wildly in tragic love at the time, which distracted me).  Anyhoo, I encountered Phil Foglio at a party or two, and got to know folks who knew him and said he was Going Places.  But…he did comic strips.  Ugh!  I thought, and promptly made sure to avoid all of his stuff since then.  But a few weeks ago, I decided to do a websearch.  Allow me to introduce two excellent web comic timewasters that are courtesy of Phil Foglio:  Girl Genius (set aside about five hours) and Buck Godot, Zap Gun For Hire (you will need fewer hours for this one, as it started in 2007, whereas Girl Genius started in 2002).  The latest volume of Girl Genius in print was nominated for a Hugo this year…

And, for your time machine needs, this handy-dandy posterized list of general scientific principles which will allow you to RULE THE WORLD!!!! BWAHAHAHAHA!!!

Today I:

• Kibbitzed over the dotter’s shoulder while she played Farm Mania.
• Spent about an hour “helping” her do gymnastics.
• Snuggled with her while she read GrannyJ’s latest letter (a few weeks after we received it).
• Helped her type an answering letter.
• Played Farm Mania myself.
• Spent too much time reading Twitters.
• Got ridiculously defensive when boss asked if he and coworker could help with the website revamp.  Why?!  Partly because I’m trying to get rid of years’ worth of accreted code schmutz and I don’t want to have to explain each and every step, partly because I’m trying to develop a “style” using the stylesheet and I need to write it down before passing it on, partly because…?
• Reveled in daylight when I was driving the dotter to school–we’re gaining five-and-a-half minutes each day, woot!
• Tried very hard to keep away from depressing here-comes-the-Depression websites.
• Read the memo from school about What To Do If The Volcano Blows.  (Yes!  We got an official memo about it!)
• Spent all day in my pajamas–driving the dotter to school, working six hours, helping with homework, playing, hanging out, eating dinner–and didn’t feel guilty about it, though did make sure not to turn on the video when we had a Skype meeting at work.
• Dipped in and out of Godel, Escher, Bach, which I am enjoying immensely, even though it’s–at the same time–immensely slow going.
• Suppressed any sneaky moments of gloom-n-doom.
• Determined that Wall Street is sorely in need of a good overall PR person, or else a bunch of sadly lacking common sense.
• Tried to figure out if I agree with the various incarnations of the stimulus plan or not.
• Felt amazed, astounded, and somewhat affirmed and proud that the dotter’s recital of friend S.’s tendency to peek at her math work at school and copy it ended up with, “That’s bad.  She’s not learning it.”
• Felt equally amazed, and very happy, that the dotter said about her latest assigned book from school, “I want to keep reading–it’s like TV in your head!”

I am finding that simply getting out of the house each day, and doing a little bit of exercise, plus a heapin’ helpin’ of commiseratin’ commentary from my readers, has helped keep the blues to a minimum for the past few days.  Fingers crossed that this continues!

For your enjoyment:

This is the lazy person’s way to do a blog post:  Get her kid to do it for her!  I like how the Prins was sort of an afterthought, kind of, “Well, these are the standards of the form, so I need to get it in there…”  Also, I think the servant girl who hated her job but had to do it anyway might be a subversive form of rebellion against clearing the table after dinner.

John Scalzi has a regular feature on his blog called “The Big Idea“, wherein writers can do a guest column about their latest books, describing the “big idea” behind them.  It’s really kewl, and allows one to peep behind the book cover into the mysterious workings of authors as they view their books.  I’ve gotten a few of the books listed, and enjoyed many of them.

One that sounded interesting was a SF book named Red, where the heroine–working for a multi-government police force in the future–was investigating the mysterious vicious murder of a girl.  The premise was, “What if Little Red Riding Hood went looking for the wolf–and discovered it was herself?”  It promised hawt werewolf sex and a mystery, and when I saw it in the airport bookstore while waiting for my flight to Phoenix, I promptly remembered the blog post and decided to give it a whirl.

Sigh.

Yannow, hawt werewolf sex can be overrated.  Just sayin’.

Red, like Snow Crash (yesterday’s post), is set in a future world where the U.S. and other governments have been rent asunder.  Whereas Snow Crash’s world was an amusing melange of corporate franchises running urban and suburban enclaves, Red’s world is a post-global-warming desert where water is a precious commodity and people live in collective apartments in domes erected to collect and hold moisture.

Or do they?  Because most of the action in Red is centered in a small, dusty desert town located near ancient Phoenix, where everyone’s living quarters seem to be in separate houses separated by streets that tumbleweeds spin down.

Then there’s the question of the “Others”, fabled genetically engineered soldiers from the Last War.  Are the “Others” a mysterious, mythical story believed by some but scoffed at by most?  This is one presentation in the book.

Do they need to hide out in a small, dusty desert town, carefully not revealing their real essence, for fear of being victims of a bloodbath?  This is another presentation in the book.

Or are they well-enough known to be the rallying cry for the election campaign of a racist pedagogue trying to gain chairmanship of the world council, as in “Let’s clean up our neighborhood and get the Others out!”?

Um, yeah.  This is, IMO, a serious problem with the book.  Either the Others (genetically engineered werewolves, vampires, and what-not) are well-enough known to be the stand-ins for the U.S. right’s illegal immigrant campaign, or they’re shadowy, mysterious, mythological, and laughed off.  They can’t be both.

Then there’s the fact that this racist pedagogue is paying (blackmailing?) a werewolf into giving in to his hunter instincts so that he can drum up the pogrom against werewolves…the werewolves who are (supposedly) just a legend.

Hunh?

He’s also got a blackmailed vampire on his staff.  At least, I think the vampire is blackmailed, because otherwise I can’t see why he’d be on RP’s staff.

To top it all off, everyone in the book talks about their “rest pad”.  Dammit, I know humanity, and know darned well that even if the gummint called the standard issue thing a “rest pad”, the citizenry would call it a “bed”.  Or, if “bed” were a verboten word, they’d come up with a slangy name, like “arpie”.  Or something.

There were some good spots, but the howlers in the overarching structure of the book just made me read with a totally snarkerrific viewpoint.  And the hawt werewolf sex scenes relied too much on phrasing like “she felt his throbbing c0ck pressing against her”, which didn’t do a damned thing for me.

Alas, I give the book an emphatic thumbs down.  If you must read it, get it from the library, don’t spend your own money.

Whenever I visit my mom, she sheds a few pounds of books on me, typically science fiction of the more “hard” variety.  I am, frankly, always amazed at what she collects, because I never see these books on the bookshelves in the stores I frequent.  Or at least, so it seems; this may be a case of selection bias: I may not “see” them because I’m not interested in them until my mom brings them to my attention.

She also often has some modern classic science fiction, which I resist purchasing for myself.  It’s akin to the “why would I want to join a club that would want me as a member??” attitude, but in reverse:  OmegaDad and I find ourselves actively turned off from bestsellers of any type when they’re on the bestseller lists.  An elitism of sorts, in that we think that any book that so many people like probably has Something Wrong With It.

All of this is preface to the fact that I finally read Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash because it was in the stack of books that mom handed off to me as soon as I walked in her door.

Those of you who have already read it–like, maybe, fifteen years ago when it first came out (whoa I’m on the bleeding edge here!)–don’t need to read further.

When I pulled it out of the heap, mom said to me, “You may find it amusing; I liked it.”

Har.  “Amusing”.  Har.

Snarky?  Hilarious?  Witty?  Cutting?  Frightening?  Silly?  Breathless?  Breathtaking?  Sucked in, wound around, turned upside down, and spit out laughing and thinking at the same time, maybe?

The world of Snow Crash is some indeterminate time in the future, not to far distant, where the U.S. and all other countries have splintered into a crazy mish-mosh of franchised corporate states crammed one up against the other.  The Mafia is a corporation that runs a national pizza franchise whose guarantee of 30 minute delivery time is backed up by an occasional hit on the failing delivery person.  Our Hero, Hiro Protagonist (har!), is a jaded hacker who has dropped out of hacking and programming to be a pizza delivery person and spends his free time in the Metaverse, the online virtual reality world that he helped program.  A buddy of his, another hacker, is tricked into viewing a computer virus called “Snow Crash” in the Metaverse, and in the real world he collapses into a coma, his consciousness wiped.

From there it’s a grand romp through this Brave New World and a trail of clues leading to the attempted global power grab of a corporate giant hiding behind a (long-since purchased) Evangelical Christian franchise that features people speaking in tongues.  The speaking in tongues is actually related to what Snow Crash is:  a meme from ancient Sumeria that plunges people back into a pre-conscious state where their actions are controlled by the priesthood.

There’s the aircraft carrier Enterprise which has been turned into a luxury yacht.  There’s a raft of global refugees.  There are secret trapdoors in the Metaverse.  There’s swordplay.  There’s an Inuit kayaker world-class assassin.  There are skateboarding message couriers.  There’s an ancient spell which is really a consciousness virus which also happens to have started all biological viruses…

This Sumerian thing/meme/virus really grabbed me, because it jogged my memory of a (relatively) recent theory of the beginnings of human consciousness.  So I consulted Teh Google and discovered I was oh-so-right.  Stephenson was quite happily playing with the ideas of Julian Jaynes’ The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.  Jaynes’ theory was that human consciousness, as we know it, didn’t really develop until about 1,300 B.C., and that prior to that time humankind lived in a world of gods giving commands–which were actually auditory hallucinations produced by the right side of the brain, based on a synthesis of an individual’s experiences.  The development of consciousness was, in this theory, an evolutionary adaptation to the mental, physical, and emotional stresses encountered by humans as the population density increased and the chances of encountering a novel situation (one which would not produce a God Voice explaining it and what to do) grew exponentially.

(Wikipedia has a succinct discussion of bicameralism, and a write-up on Jaynes himself.)

Anyway, I thought the book was a hoot and quite thought-provoking, and highly recommend it to anyone who is willing to let go within the first few pages and just be swept along into a totally new world.

As a young lass, I lived in Chicago and had numerous relatives around and about (or at least what I considered “numerous” relatives).  It so happened that Grandpa and Grandma W lived in Evanston, in a lovely, large, rambling duplex on a quiet tree-lined street; I spent a great deal of time there, weekends on and off, a Saturday or Sunday afternoon once I was fluent with the El, holiday dinners, Halloween trick-or-treating.

It was an interesting house; two stories with a finished attic and a dim, dismal basement, a large, open stairway to the second floor in the front, with a secret “servants’” staircase in the back, hidden away by doors at the top and bottom, the brass dinner bell hung in the entry hall at the bottom of the stairway, the old safe stashed away in the walk-in coat closet.  There were books in various spots all around that house.  There was the complete collection of Dickens up in the glass-front bookcase in the attic (both of which are now in my possession).  There was the set of lawyers’ bookcases that was endlessly fascinating to me, solid and heavy, which now graces OmegaBro’s home.

There was great-grandfather W’s steamer trunk up in the attic, from when he was in the merchant marines.  It was filled to the brim with old Halloween costumes and party dresses from when my father and his sisters were young, and even from the childhoods of earlier relatives.

The house was heated with forced air that emanated from elaborate foot-square (or larger; it’s hard to tell looking back) cast iron grates in all the rooms.  The grate in the living room was one of the most excellent places to stand on cold winter mornings as the house was heating up; the grates in the attic, alas, gave mere wisps of heat, anemic from the air’s journey from the basement up to the third floor.  This made the row of windows in the large main attic room a splendid place to examine frost, because every winter there was a 1/4-inch layer of frost on the insides of the windows, and you could add to it by breathing on the glass, and watch the feathers of frost swirl outward from where you breathed.

Tucked away in a small bookcase on the second floor, next to the doorway to the stairs to the attic, was a collection of Time-Life books.

They were fabulous books, with titles like “The Planets”, “The Oceans”, “The Human Body”, “The Mind”, “Mathematics”, “The Atom”, “The Universe”.  I spent many a quiet hour with those books, leafing through them, admiring the illustrations, reading the captions, and rarely (if ever) reading any of the essays that started each chapter.

The one that sticks in my mind the most is, coincidentally enough, “The Mind”.  There were chapters on madness, on illusions, on perception, on how the brain works, on what the brain looks like.  It fascinated me, and I kept returning to that one, over and over again.

On chapter that arrested my attention was the chapter on madness.  The illustrations for this chapter opened up with this illustration by Hieronymus Bosch, “The Extraction of the Stone of Madness”, which was quite delightfully gruesome and scary.  It proceeded through Munch’s “The Scream“, equally lurid in a different manner.  Then, when discussing schizophrenia, it examined the paintings of a man named Louis Wain, who had made a quite pleasant living providing rich bourgeoisie with paintings of cats, both portraits and fanciful situations, until he started to go insane later in life (which is suspected, these days, to be the result of toxoplasmosis).  The paintings featured started with a relatively ordinary looking cat, then a cat with somewhat unnerving large green eyes, then to a cat with demonic red eyes and fur outlined in jaggedy red paint, until he ended up with “cats” that were–essentially–just an abstract, neon notion of “catness”.

The books on space and the planets were filled with wonders, too:  glorious color photographs of stars–the Pleiades as a smoky glimmering nursery of stars, the Crab Nebula, the rings of Saturn, Jupiter’s red spot, the sun, the moon, the Ring Nebula.  There was a chapter on the development of rocket ships.  There was a diagram of the varying sizes of suns, the life cycle of stars, eerie illustrations of what the origins of the solar system might have looked like.  There were medieval outlines of the constellations.  There were cutaway diagrams of the sun, and the earth.

These memories are smatterings of what was in the books, but they leaped full-force into my mind prompted by one of the commenters on the science books thread that I tabulated; he wrote that the Time-Life book series had instilled in him a love for science from a very early age.  A few nights ago, OmegaDad and I were talking about it, and he wondered just how many grown scientists were originally prompted by books like those, or specifically that one series.  He remembered it as well, and how wondrous those books were to him as a child.

So we’ve decided to scour the used bookstores in our area to see if we can find some of those books, so we can put them on the bookshelves in our house for the dotter to wander through, now and then.

My stupid machine keeps bombing on me and I don’t know why; I’ve already lost this post twice.  Grrr.

So there you have it:  the Top 10.  Go forth, buy, read, and be blinded by science!

(P.S.  If this shows up as horribly formatted, I apologize; the left-right-left approach to the pics may not work very well.  Also, it occurs to me that my NaBloPoMo problem–which apparently showed up earlier than I thought–may have to do with the fact that my blog software still thinks I live in Arizona.  Both the “skipped a day” posts were posted here before midnight.  Harrumph.)

A few days ago, Pharyngula (PZ Myers) asked his readers “What science books ought a bookstore stock?”

In my cold-bedimmed fog, I have been tabulating the answers from the 438 responses that question got, carefully entering them into Excel.  I have finally listed them all and tabulated the results, but now I am just tired, tired, tired and I have x’s in my eyes, like a cartoon character.

So you get the Top 10 tomorrow.  It’s an interesting list.

I’m just posting this so I get in under the wire for NaBloPoMo, and to tease you all.

(ETA:  Well, damn.  I didn’t get in under the wire after all.  So *poof* goes my attempt at NaBloPoMo.  Bah.)

A few years ago, I produced a lame-ass lifebook for OmegaDotter.  I did it in Word, I cribbed pics from clip art and random websites, and managed to confuse her the first few times we read it together because there was a picture of a Chinese woman, and the dotter automatically assumed that she was her birthmother.

Um.

Okay, so it didn’t work out too great.  I’ll have to find it and re-read it to her, see how it goes; it was definitely aimed more at a 4-year-old than a 6-year-old-on-the-verge-of-16.

Anyway, one thing about the lifebook that I was very proud of was that I had a (cribbed from the web) diagram of a fetus inside a woman’s uterus, which prompted all sorts of intensely interested dialog, including the dotter deciding that she was going to demonstrate to all and sundry just how a baby comes out of its mother.

Um.  Ahem.  It provided OmegaDad and me with some hastily-subdued amusement when she would wander into the living room, squat down, go, “EEEAAAAGGGGHHHHHHH!”, and then produce a baby doll from between her legs, then brightly announce that this was her new daughter.  At least I managed to explain to her that she needn’t do that at pre-school, thankyewverramuch. 

Anyway, I’ve been on the lookout for sex-ed books aimed at kids, and finally found one that seemed to fit the bill:  It’s Not the Stork!: A Book About Girls, Boys, Babies, Bodies, Families and Friends (Robie Sex Books) talks about everything on a 6-year-old’s level, gets the basics covered, talks about good-touch/bad-touch, and isn’t boring.  After two tries at the local bookstore, which supposedly had it in stock, I finally gave in and ordered it through them, then waited around for the phone call, then forgot it was there, then remembered one day while off at the grocery store getting Pepperidge Farm Chesapeake Cookies to feed my addiction that it was there, at the bookstore, and the bookstore was two doors down, and hey, I had some extra time…

So I finally got it home a few weeks ago.

The dotter took one look and was immediately demanding I read it to her.

She was thrilled to get the info, interested in all the “right names for things”, and so eager to read it that she ditched Ramona for quite a few reading nights in favor of this book.  She giggled and exclaimed, “EW!” at the anatomically correct drawings of boys.  She kept demanding to see what was next.  I found myself blandly talking about pen1ses, test1cles, vulv@s and vag1nas and smoothly segueing into a brief description of the sex act itself without stuttering, blushing, getting tangled up, or desperately wanting to Be Somewhere Else.

We took our time going through it, doing about 4 pages per session.  There’s a lot of information; it covers what sperm is, what eggs are, relative sizes, what happens to your body when you go through puberty (though a great big gaping hole is a lack of mention of menstruation), ess eee ex, how babies are made (not the ess eee ex part, the sperm and egg part), how babies grow, a glossed-over description of how babies are born (any child who is read this book will not get the “EEEAAAAGGGGHHHHHH!” part), a quick talk about twins, triplets, and higher, a paragraph about adoption, etc.  It’s filled with cheerful cartoon drawings, shows “diversity” without being preachy about it, and has a cartoon bird and bee mascots who make smart-alecky commentary as you go along.

So, if you’re like me, ready to tackle it but needing help getting through some of the parts, this book is for you.  Highly recommended.

Last night OmegaDad and I finished watching our movie at 12:30 a.m. (there was a break at 11 p.m. to go pick up the dotter; she couldn’t quite do a full night away from home).  When I turned off the light in the office, which we were using as indirect light for the family room where we were watching the movie, it was dark.

Holy moly.  When did that happen?!

So here we are, a month past solstice.  At solstice, the sun set at 11:42 p.m. and rose at 4:20 a.m., and the sunrise/sunset calculator at my favorite site showed “light” for the start and end times of all forms of twilight.  Now, in last third of July, the sun is setting at 11:09 p.m. and rising at 5:02 a.m.  And we now have official start and end times for “twilight”, with “light” showing for civil and astronomical twilights.  According to this calculator, we will get civil twilight starting on August 6.

(The U.S. Naval Observatory has a nice discussion of the difference between “twilight”, “civil twilight”, and “astronomical twilight”.)

Anyway, the gloaming was noticeably less gloamy last night, which means we may actually get to see some stars in, oh, two months.

After the movie ended, we headed upstairs and piddled around, clearing away used dishes, turning off lights, closing blinds, and I went outside to the kitchen porch to have my last smoke of the night.  I leaned on the railing, and gloried in the dimness, then glanced down at the rose bush beneath me.  And there, flitting about in the twilight, were moths.

Flittering back and forth, silver, white and gray.  When had those moths appeared?  I didn’t remember them from a few weeks ago.  Did they need the dimness to avoid being eaten by birds?  If so, what did they do when there was more light around, just a few weeks ago?

Ahhhh…

All of these questions were prompted, actually, by my recent reading of a gem of a book called “In A Patch of Fireweed“, by Bernd Heinrich.  A few weeks ago I was left bereft by having read all my new science fiction books, re-read all my old SF and fantasy books, and needing something to keep me entertained while I sat by OmegaDotter’s bed when she fell asleep at night.  I started with OmegaDad’s copy of John McPhee’s “Coming Into the Country” (a great read, and very descriptive of the type of mindset that one finds amongst Alaskans), and then found myself needing another book.  So I browsed OmegaDad’s bookshelf and found this one, purporting to be an autobiography of a biologist.  It was a slender volume, so it seemed to be a fairly quick read, and the mention of fireweed appealed to me as the fireweed are beginning to bloom here.

It’s a lovely book.  It’s lyrical, it’s gently humorous, it describes a boy’s journey from a childhood in a war-torn Europe to adulthood as a biologist who spends his time studying insect thermoregulation by sticking thermocouples up the ass of hornets and bees.  And it does a splendid job of describing the constant babble of questions that prompt a biologist (or any scientist, I would think) to pursue his or her studies.  A glance at some ants emerging from a nest raises a quick question, which raises another, which leads to some study on a few consecutive days, which leads to yet more questions and some answers.  A few months later, looking at some bees foraging on a hot summer’s day leads to another set of queries, which circle back to the original questions.

It’s hard to describe how wonderful the book was.  I loved it.  It was his description of his endless curious observation of the world around him that led me to looking at those moths and asking those questions.

Later, as OmegaDad and I laid in bed trying to sleep, I mentioned the moths to him, and shared some of the things I had wondered, and we had a great little discussion, then snuggled up in spoon fashion, closed our eyes, and fell asleep.

There is something profoundly satisfying about being able to toss a small bomb at a living creature and feel righteous about it.  It gives me a teeny tiny glimmer of understanding about people who are willing to subsume themselves into hatred and prejudice; it’s visceral.

In other words:  I threw a firework at a pair of moose who were in the yard and felt a warm glow of achievement as these huge critters went barreling off through the woods.  Into one of our neighbors’ back yards.  Oh, well.  They’ve lived here a long time, surely they already have the moose thang sussed out, unlike us hapless Alaska newbies.

Aside from that, nothing is roiling my brain right now.  OmegaGranny sent me a link to a blog post about kids books and end-of-the-world catastrophism, prompted by a write-up in Newsweek.

Eh.

Frankly, the majority of stuff that kids read right now is so fluffy and frilly and substance-less that a few more meaty books here and there don’t bother me.  After all, we’ve got Barbie and Bratz and My Little Pony and CareBears and sweetness and light all over the place.  (Speaking of “sweetness and light”, have you seen JibJab’s take on the latest presidential campaign, in particular the very amusing part about Barack Obama?  And you should read their blog about pulling it all together, too.)

Good old-fashioned disaster lit just takes one back to an earlier, more gritty age, when Cinderella’s stepsisters cut off their toes and heels to try to fit into the glass slipper, and one princess’s evil stepmother was forced to dance at her wedding in iron-hot dancing shoes.  It’s not like catastrophe, disaster, vengeance, killing, and what-not is anything new.  Bambi’s mother, for instance, is shot.  And Disney movies are run through-and-through with dead or absent moms.

Anyway, if the disaster lit wasn’t written specifically for juveniles, you can be assured that the juveniles will just find grown-up disaster lit to read.  Or movies to watch.  Poseidon Adventure, anyone?  Towering Inferno?  On The Beach?  Godzilla?

I think that humans are hard-wired to want drama.  Humans against humans!  All against the backdrop of war! or disaster! You’ve got yer Ulysses.  You’ve got yer Beowulf.  You’ve got yer Bayeaux Tapestry, Don Quixote, Les Miserables, Gone With The Wind, The Day After Tomorrow…  Probably those ancient humans who did the cave paintings in Lescaux had their own version of the disaster/drama/horror story while sitting around fires and eating freshly slain bison.

Right now, my personal desire is for a rockin’, sockin’ disaster novel that ends up with the End Of All Moose, and the Flourishing Of All Veggie Gardens.  I’ll settle, however, for a few books that are due to show up in my mailbox within a week or so, good old-fashioned escapist fantasy and science fiction, replete with–of course–catastrophic end-of-the-world shenanigans…

(ETA:  Ack!  I forgot to mention Dr. Horrible’s Sing-A-Long Blog!  You must check it out within the next two days, before they make you pay for it!)

“Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger.”

In the world of fantasy, magic is a mainstay.  Ya gots yer elves, dwarves, wizards, Deep Ancient Evils, warriors, nice nerdy dudes or dudettes who were just living their lives being sucked into a vortex of terror and history, yadda yadda yadda.  And laced through everything is magic.

On the whole–except for elven realms–the magic sets the magic-wielder apart, separates him or her from the mainstream of his culture.  Great power brings great responsibility.  Small power brings mischief.  The Joe Sixpacks of the fantasy worlds eye magicians and wizards askance, probably imbued with the feeling that, hey, if I had magic, I’d use to do give Glenna-down-the-street a whoppin’ case of warts and fleas…so surely–surely–Mr. High-And-Mighty Magician is gonna Do Me Wrong if given half a chance.

In most fantasies, magicians and wizards and suchlike are just plain born that way.  It’s a talent.  Like playing the piano.  Or making artwork.  Or being able to get on a podium and have 50,000 people chanting “Yes, we can!”  You’ve either got it, or you don’t, but if you’ve got it, you’ve got to train it.

These are the norms.

I’ve recently read two fantasies that explore the question of “what if the Price Of Magic were outrageously great?”, and the repercussions of the price.  One went the expected way:  the Price Of Magic is searingly tragic, forever exiling you from mortal humanity, turning you into a snobby elitist who regards mortals as something akin to mayflies.  The other went a totally different path:  Magic is a tool of…something (gods?)…that uses you, and you are physically transformed into something that makes you an object of scorn and pity in your native milieu.

Feast of Souls, by C.S. Friedman, is the first, and the first of the Magister Trilogy.  To work magic, you burn up your life force.  If you’re a nice person who has compassion for the world, you use up your life force and *boom* you die.  If you’re not a nice person, or you have an infinite hunger to keep living, you’ll start using other people’s life force.  (Not a spoiler, since the review on Amazon says this already.)  You become cold, aloof, willing to play with mortal’s lives, countries, history as if it were a toy to amuse you.  You can’t let anyone know what your source of power is, because they’d hunt you down and kill you like a…well…a serial killer.

But, really.  Yeah, yeah, it’s a mighty moral dilemma and all that, and C.S. Friedman does her usual amazing job at telling a bang-up story that grabs you and drags you along.  But, in all honesty:  it’s a price that lots of people would see as tragic but worthy.  You mean I could do magic forever, live forever, so long as I’m some sort of weird psychic vampire that never sees his victim?  Ya sure!  Okay, maybe it’s not as easy as all that, but it’s still monumental, tragic, and in a weird way, empowering.

Then you have the central premise of the Soldier Son Trilogy, by Robin Hobb, which is totally different.  First off, you don’t get to choose to be a magic wielder–the Magic chooses you.  And if you don’t do what It wants, It lays waste to your life, separating you from everything you love, pushing you into paths that It wants.  So first off, you lose your volition.  You don’t get to play around with the magic and become a mysterious, all-knowing figure that wanders the world, solving problems for mere mortals, providing solemn wizardly advice or sage wizardly protection to those who can afford your fees.

If that weren’t bad enough, it makes you fat.  Not a little bit.  A lot.  Because the Magic requires a lot of fuel.  And you find yourself loving food, glorying in the sensuous textures, frantic for food.  But in your world (just like in ours), it’s quite socially acceptable–in fact, almost required–to be scornful of those who are fat, judging them as wastrels, gourmands, gluttons, lazy folk who aren’t willing to take the time and effort and responsibility to keep themselves in trim condition.

We’re talking being the butt of everyone’s jokes, scorned, harassed by your family, dumped by your fiance, outcast, seen as an ineffectual fool by the world at large–all the while you’re coming to grips with being yanked away from your life.

This approach is not seen as tragic but worthy.  In fact, the reviews of the Soldier Son Trilogy are pretty dismal, which I found an interesting reflection of our culture.  My supposition is that not only do the characters in the book find the fat hero worthy of scorn, but so do the readers.

It is a slow series.  There are no “right” people, no “wrong” people.  There’s a clash of cultures, neither of which is wholly admirable (it is a twist on the European colonists marching across the Americas and driving away or killing or assimilating the natives).  The hero is–understandably–pretty obsessive about the whole thing and frequently wildly depressed, because he, too, considers being outrageously fat as being worth less.

I’m eagerly waiting for the second book of Friedman’s trilogy (I love her writing), and waiting–almost grimly–for the third Soldier Son book to come out in paperback.  I just thought it was interesting how they approached the question of paying for the power in such wildly different ways.

(As an aside, it makes me wonder why the idea that “magic has a price” is so ingrained in our culture, and, so far as I can tell, in others as well.)