And here we all are together, here we are

Shikasta by Doris Lessing is the refined version of her earlier Briefing for a Descent Into Hell. She has stripped away the visionary excesses, and improved on the core idea: Cosmic forces look with frustration on the state of the Earth, and send emissaries to be born onto it to make it better. But they often get distracted and lose their way, trapped by human corruption and confusion.

The Earth was once psychically linked with Canopus, our cosmic superiors, and everything was bliss. But the link broke, and all went bad. Canopus creates religions to guide us, but they always deteriorate. As the 20th century ends, Earth's diseased materialist culture collapses in a nuclear holocaust.

Shikasta is humanity seen through the glasses of the worst of 60's/70's theory and spirituality. Western culture is explicitly inferior. Science is just a religion. Material well-being is pointless. Canopus often comes across as arrogant, ignorant and, through association with all religious founders, evil. Unintentionally, I think.

But I don't care. This is brilliant. I can't mock it, I would feel small. It's as if Lessing deliberately plays the part of a New Age mystic, saying "you've seen what others have done with this role, now look what I can do with it". And she uses this premise to explore the missed potential in all of us. To dissect, reprimand and inspire.

Shikasta is not a novel. It is prophecy, in the Old Testament sense. Doris Lessing is Jeremiah. And Jesus. And the Buddha. I'm in awe.

All that remained was a future, now even that is denied me

In the Pyat quartet, Michael Moorcock gives a voice to the fascist Europe we left behind. The voice is a Russian engineer, a conceited techno-utopist who escapes the Russian civil war with a hatred of Bolsheviks and Jews. To make Pyat merely a fascist follower would be too simple. He's rather a sibling of the fascists, like the Italian futurists, an independent thinker whose emotions find resonance with the fascist movements when they arrive, without falling in line behind any particular leader.

Byzantium Endures took Pyat through the Russian revolution and civil war. In The Laughter of Carthage he wanders through Europe a rootless emigrant, eventually landing in the US, where he makes friends with the Ku Klux Klan. With all Pyat's faults, it may be excessive of Moorcock to also give him a cocaine addiction and a 13-year old lover, but what's impressive about these novels is how reasonable Pyat appears in his own voice. And his voice is all we hear, apart from Moorcock's introduction. The real story is a puzzle for observant readers to solve.

The novels are narrated by Pyat as an old man, a shopkeeper in London. This gives his story a melancholic slant. Pyat's life has been a failure in every way. The stories he tells of his glorious youth are merely the rants of a bitter old man. The reader pities him. But it's a cautious pity. Moorcock's achievement is to show that the Europe Pyat personifies is neither remote nor fully dead.

You will do your part, and I mine

The only self-help book I need: The Discourses of Epictetus. Stoicism has been out of favor for a while. It's seen as emotionless and puritanical, which is true, but avoidable. You're allowed to pick the parts you like. The Stoics wouldn't approve, but they're dead. The parts I like in Stoicism deal with the power of choice, the one thing nobody can take away from you. Place your happiness and self-worth in things that are within your sphere of choice, and you will never be anxious or bitter. Doing your best is up to you, being rewarded for it isn't. It's not up to you to avoid illness, but it is up to you how you deal with it. It's an ideal: Not possible, but something to aim for.

The greatest flaw of the Stoics was fatalism. Changing the world was not an option to them, so they turned inward. They would have mocked the last 200 years of political and social progress. Again you can pick the parts you like.

Epictetus imagines himself before the emperor and says: "Chain me if you like, but my will is free!" This is a posture, but an inspiring one. Epictetus is not for everyone. Some may find him cold, others depressing. For me he's a safety net. I'm an Epicurean when things go well, a Stoic when things go wrong. The Stoics wouldn't approve, but again, they're dead. All that is left of them is a handful of fine ideas that lie forgotten in a ditch.

One giant airport security area

Security after September 11 seems to be modelled on the court of the Red Queen. Absurd rules, and no sense of humor. Bruce Schneier is one of the sane voices, and Schneier on Security collects his essays on terrorism, privacy and identity theft. It is the book to read on your next plane trip.

Schneier says the choice between security and privacy is false: Some anti-terror measures give you both, others neither. Most security is just security theater, intended to make you feel safe, and to help officials cover their own asses. They're not defending us against the next terrorist attack, but themselves against the next post-attack investigation.

Security is always a trade-off. There's a cost in money, time, or civil rights, and perfect security is never worth it, (otherwise you'd never leave your house for fear of a car accident). Massive surveillance of streets and internet traffic may make us slightly safer, but not much, and at great cost to personal freedom. All state power is abused, and if we give our state the power of East Germany, it will behave like East Germany.

Schneier on Security is so sensible that it hardly seems an achievement. But on this side of the looking glass, sanity is radical. Fear and blame and stupidity works against us with a devilish logic. Schneier's message to people who are worried about their online privacy may thus be extended to all security issues: You're screwed.

DRM-free audiobooks at LibriVox

At LibriVox, volunteers record their own audiobooks out of texts in the public domain, and give them away for free. Isn't that amazing?

Today I listened to Ten Days in a Madhouse by Nellie Bly, written in 1887. Bly was a journalist who infiltrated a mental institution in New York to see what it was like. It was pretty bad. The nurses were sadists, and nobody bothered to find out if she really belonged there. The book caused an embarassment, (much like the 'thud' experiment a hundred years later.)

The recording is not up to commercial standards, but who cares? I don't. I'm just glad to find another source of DRM-free audiobooks. It's easier to use than eMusic, and it doesn't straitjacket you like Audible.

I picked this book at random. That's what I love about public domain book projects, like LibriVox and Project Gutenberg: The chance to find a strange old book that few people remember. When people pick an old book to read, it's usually a Classic, because all book readers feel guilty about not having read enough Classics. But classics are often just old bestsellers. John Grisham, but with more flowery language. No - give me a book that didn't define literature as we know it, but displays a memorable point of view.

What every book at LibriVox has in common is that somebody loved it enough to take the time to record it for you. What better recommendation is there?

Some damned little arrows on a piece of paper

Richard Feynman warns in QED that he cannot help the reader understand the theory of quantum electrodynamics. This is because he doesn't understand it himself. All he can do is draw arrows on a paper and ask us to accept that this is how nature works.

How is this different from religion and pseudo-science? Religion and pseudo-science makes intuitive sense, but is uncomfirmed by experiments. It makes sense that like should affect like, and that we're surrounded by spirits and gods, but there's no evidence for it. Quantum electrodynamics is well supported by evidence, but makes no intuitive sense. And there is no reason why it should.

The point of reading about things you can't understand is to feel the shape of it. What is the theory like? How do scientists think? How do they argue? Then when you read a theory you actually can understand you may recognize that it has the wrong shape. Knowing quantum electrodynamics is pointless. Knowing the shape of real science is not.

Also, science is fun, and even more so when it is Richard Feynman that explains it.

Have fun in Funny Town

Teatro Grottesco by Thomas Ligotti is an anthology of existential dread. Horror should disturb you, but all I feel from reading these short stories is mild fascination. Even the best of them are fashionably nonsensical, ending before the reader realizes how stupid the premise is. There's this boy who has a strange father and a strange mother and sister, and he goes out to a strange neighbour and does strange things, and then it's over. What?

Other stories combine Lovecraft with Kafka, proving that this is a bad idea. A factory gets as a temporary supervisor a shapeless, evil presence who hides in his unlit office. Suddenly the workers become more and more efficient, so efficient that they hardly ever leave the factory at all, and you can't quit, because dark evil forces controls everything, and you can't retire, you can only work and work and work until death frees you from this horrible burden that is life. Okay, okay, I get it. Jeez.

Ligotti is praised as an unjustly ignored master of horror, and he writes well, but I gave up half-way.

Btw, here's how to do Lovecraft fan fiction: A Study in Emerald by Neil Gaiman.

Bringing the light of consciousness

The Risen Empire by Scott Westerfeld could be one of Iain M. Banks's Culture novels. One of the better ones. In Banks's socialist utopia, computer minds and humans live in happy symbiosis. AI runs society, people play. Here, AI is more ambigous: The Rix cult believes that humans must create their own gods, by bringing consciousness to entire planets. They seed computer networks with AI, then worship them as gods. Humans are to these compound minds as bacteria are to a human: Necessary for the whole to function, but valueless as individuals. Against the Rix stands an ossified empire ruled by a class of living dead. They don't value individuals much either. The Risen Empire is concept-heavy space opera, but it still has a soul - a nerdy soul. There's a touching love story based on relativistic time dilation (yes!) One side character is a self-built house that has rebelled against its own architects. Much of the fighting takes place among microscopic military crafts controlled by remote. You get the idea. Not great, but strange and likeable, and tightly focused. I'll continue with the second book in the series, and I've heard people rave about the Young Adult novels Westerfeld turned to writing when he discovered that it pays better and that teenagers send more fan mail.

But things turned out otherwise

In Imperium, Ryszard Kapuściński presents sketches of the Soviet Union as it breaks apart. To find and understand the "Soviet man", Kapuściński travels across the empire. He sneaks illegally into Nagorno-Karabakh, nearly freezes to death in Siberia, visits the remains of a labor camp, tests the patience of Kremlin guards, and speaks to a survivor of the Ukrainian genocide. His emphasis is on the everyday. A recurrent theme is the sight of confused, tired, hungry people who spend weeks in airports, waiting for a plane. Where are they going? Where did they come from? Nobody knows, nobody cares, an already broken system has come to a halt. Kapuściński's sketches span both the everyday and the historic scale. Describing a Gulag town, he reminds the reader of the many thousand human bodies buried beneath its streets. Asking himself if the old men he sees there were victims or perpetrators of the Gulag, he realizes that the question is meaningless. They were of course both. The story he tells of the Palace of the Soviets is strangely infuriating despite the lack of human suffering: Stalin blew up Moscow's greatest church to build an insane monument to Communism. Running out of funds, Khrushchev turned the building site into a giant pool. (The church has later been rebuilt.) Despite the Imperium's diversity and geographic span, Kapuściński does find a "Soviet man" of sorts, in the ability to resign yourself to irrational horrors. As one woman tells him, "We breathe!" Rarely has optimism sounded so depressing.

Fairy vomit is no doubt sweet-smelling to humans

Martin Millar writes like a children's author, with simple, concise sentences. It would be a nice experiment to give The Good Fairies of New York to kids and see how they react. Do they cry? Hide under a bed and vow never to grow up? It would probably be unethical to try. A group of energetic Scottish fairies (yes, tiny, cute fairies with wings) make their way to New York, where they begin to meddle with people's lives. There's an angry slob who watches porn all day, a sad, ill hippie girl, and a homeless lady who thinks she's Xenophon. Millar jumps from hilarious to sad and back again in mid-paragraph, which is disturbing. Millar's jokes hurt. He did the same form of farcical melancholia in Lonely Werewolf Girl, which is so similar to The Good Fairies of New York that if you like one you'll like the other. That one novel is about fairies and the other about werewolves makes less of a difference than you may think. There are perhaps too many similarities, but I can't really fault Millar for reusing these ideas. Read at least one of them.

Thrice for any insult made

The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss is a thick fantasy novel with a world map on the first page. It is the author's first novel, and part one of a yet unpublished trilogy. I ought to hate it. So why do I have the sense that the landscape of fantasy fiction just shifted to make room for a new master? Rothfuss seems to walk into the most overfarmed part of the field with the intention, not to imitate, but to show everyone how to do it right. Out with apocalyptic battles between Good and Evil, out out out with endless braidtugging and plot coupon-chasing Chosen Ones. Tone it all down, down to the most powerful magical incantation of them all: "Once upon a time .." Now, there's a man, and there's a world, and this is the story of his life in that world. It's as simple as that. I could complain about Kvothe's unbelievable awesomeness and more, but the fact is that The Name of the Wind brings back memories from when I first read fantasy, of dreams of setting out on the road in a remote world. It feels like home. It feels like sitting by the feet of a storyteller. Thank you, Patrick. I hereby join the hordes of newly converted Rothfussites, waiting with stupid grins for the next two books.

Jujitsu time

In Nixonland, Rick Perlstein tells the story of why American conservatives and liberals hate each other. Europeans who sympathize with Democrats see only half the story: American politics is divided into two mutually antagonistic worldviews. And the form this split takes today was born in the 1960's, when what seemed like a consensus on mainstream liberalism was fractured over race, war, and the counterculture. When this cultural civil war began, Democrats ruled the South and stood firmly behind the war in Vietnam. When the dust had settled, the Democratic party had torn itself apart, and conservative Republicans had risen up on the anger of the white middle class - people who didn't want to be lectured to by establishment elites, and thought of war protesters as spoiled and cowardly traitors. The anger on display here, the hatred between young and old, is shocking. It's not just the big acts of violence, it's the everyday meanness, the sense of desperation, the sense that the other side will destroy the nation. Perlstein is a liberal and it shows, but he's too young to have a personal stake in the 60's, and too honest to make this a morality play. All sides are portrayed in ugly detail, and in some amoral sense Richard Nixon himself comes out of it the most sympathetic. He's a dangerous crook, but he understands the voters, and boldly surfs their new anxieties to the White House. Like Nixon, Nixonland is mean and ugly and sadly relevant, (yes even to Norwegian politics).

The external appearance of thought

"Here's the whole story of how Fain the Gardener became Fain the Sorcerer. But I'll tell it quickly by leaving out the lies." In my project to read everything by the satirist Steve Aylett, (well somebody should), I've come to his one contribution to fantasy. Fain the Sorcerer is a 90 page riff on fairy tale conventions and time travel. Fain, on escaping from the royal castle where he's failed to revive the enchanted princess, (a local tradition because it gives people "something to think about other than what is important"), comes across a lunatic who grants three wishes. Fain wishes the ability to travel backwards in time, does so, and immediately returns for three new wishes. And so on. Through elaborate attempts to avoid the loopholes of wish-granters, ("I wish to be able to see in the dark, and by this I do not mean to be able merely to see the darkness, but to see in the darkness as though it were illuminated, though without conflagration"), Fain gains many useful powers (and some useless ones), visits remote kingdoms, fights the evil wizard, woos the princess, and goes on a reckless rampage throughout the timeline. And there's the usual Aylettian linguistic bombshells and satirical stabs, though less than in Slaughtermatic. Read it, and read Aylett.

Remarkable to behold and difficult to understand

I know there's something happening in David Lindsay's 1920 novel A Voyage to Arcturus, but I don't know what it is. Maskull travels (by improbably means) to a remote planet, a young and wild world where the local Creator and Devil still walks about, and the landscape changes by the minute. People's bodies correspond to their different personalities, and Maskull's body and worldview changes to match the people he meet. Compassionate people have extra organs to sense the emotions of others, while cruel people have an extra eye that projects pure will-power. He meets a sort of buddhist, a musician who plays ugly-beautiful music that kills people, and a person of a third sex. David Lindsay's purpose is philosophy, not satire as in many such stories of fantastic journeys, but I have no idea what he's trying to say. It's like an ambitious art film: Someone clearly put a lot of thought into it, but don't ask me what the scene where the clown shoots Jesus means. A Voyage to Arcturus is an unfathomable allegory of something-or-other, and that's not for me. I like it less because I have Jurgen by James Branch Cabell to compare it to. Jurgen was published at about the same time, and walks in more or less the same territory, but is one of my favourite novels. Jurgen is a hard-hitting classic of philosophical fantasy, (and read also Cabell's The Silver Stallion.) A Voyage of Arcturus is only imaginative.

With a horribly human intelligence

William Hope Hodgson's 1908 novel The House on the Borderland isn't good, but it's flawed in a memorable and pioneering way. Hodgson writes like a less angsty H. P. Lovecraft, with "inhumanly human" swine-monsters emerging from a bottomless Pit to threaten an isolated house in Ireland. My favourite part foreshadows the "defend your home against the undead army" scene in a zombie movie. The second half is a vision of the end of the world, where the main character fast-forwards through the future at ever-increasing speeds, until both the Earth and the Sun is dead. It's time-lapse photography in writing, secular in content but Biblical in style. And there's an alternate dimension, containing a huge replica of the main character's house and the ghost-like love of his life. All this in less than 100 pages. The House on the Borderland makes no sense whatsoever. It jumps incoherently from one strange event to another, never really trying to tie them together. It's not even confusing. What it has going for it is its proto-Lovecraftian style, and I'm not surprised to learn that Lovecraft was a fan. He was also a better writer. But still - memorable, oh yes! (And I might just check out the comic book version.)

Abstractions four or five or six times removed from reality

Jack Vance takes a sociologist's approach to SF in the three novels collected in The Jack Vance Reader, the first I've read of him: Emphyrio, about a repressive guild-based welfare state, where an old legend inspires a young man to non-conformity. The Languages of Pao, about mass-scale social engineering, where a world's ruler brings in outside linguists to make his people speak (and therefore think) like warriors, merchants, and engineers. And The Domains of Koryphon, from a world where human colonists compete with other races for land. In all these stories, the focus is on social forces and mass psychology, not at the expense of characters, but as the nuanced backdrop against which the characters act. I'll single out (at random) The Domains of Koryphon (aka The Gray Prince) for praise: Vance brings his eye for social dynamics to the issues of colonization and slavery, taking a provoking approach where the colonial landlords are morally wrong but realistic, while their urban, intellectual critics are naive hypocrites. Some have called it a racist novel with a message of might makes right, which is stupid. This is a story for adults who don't turn their brains off when they read. The Domains of Koryphon is not meant to comfort, but to provoke ideas. The moral high ground of the human landlords does makes it a problematic novel, though, and it's more fair to criticize it than to neuter it with the label of escapism. Even so, I'll return for more of Vance's speculative sociology.

All the books in the world except one

A story for book lovers.

A little malnutrition hardens them up

Earlier I wrote about a book I wish I'd read when I was 16. Here's one I wish I'd read when I was 10: The Adventures of Endill Swift, by Stuart McDonald. This is surreal children's literature in the tradition of Roald Dahl and Lewis Carroll. Endill Swift is trapped at Epitaph School, a gruesome place with sadistic teachers, labyrinthine corridors you can lose yourself in for years, a dining room where rows of animal heads grin down at frightened students, and dormitories named after weeds and insects. The library is so huge it has its own abominable bookman, living somewhere far above the floor. Endill wants to escape before the school drives him mad, like it once did his father and grandfather, and clearly also has done to the teachers, who even when they retire don't leave the school island, but go off to wander the uncharted corridors, sad and confused.

It's all done in the clear, intelligent and witty style of the best children's books. There's also plenty of satire aimed at adult readers, and it's really up to you if you want to read Endill Swift as a book for children, or a book for adults about childhood. It's brilliant either way, (and if it all sounds too dark for children to read then you've forgotten what it was like.) It's also out of print and virtually forgotten, something that happens to a frightening number of potential classics.

O Bethlehem is burning down

When Thomas M. Disch killed himself this summer, obituaries said he was the kind of brilliant critic's favourite that readers ignore. After reading On Wings of Song, I see why he was admired, but also why he wasn't read. How do you describe a novel where the only escape from religious conformism and economic depression is to sing so earnestly that your inner invisible fairy flies out of your body in a state of mystical bliss, and not make it sound silly? I sure don't know how. I guess you have to take me on trust when I say that this bleak and quiet satire isn't silly or funny, and definitely not blissful. Anything good in its world is shown only as an unreachable goal that adds to the bitterness of the life of Daniel Weinreb. The near-future America he lives in is falling apart, (quietly, in the background), and it's taking him down with it, coloring him with its hypocrisy. Daniel is not an anti-hero, he seems always at the verge of success, earnestly wanting to live well, and that makes his failures more bitter. It's the moderation I admire in this novel, the way Disch creates a feeling of a world ending, (as well as a feeling that it deserves to), without piling on with tragic horrors. Not a happy novel, this, not at all. I liked it, and I think I recommend it, but neither that nor his lit fic respectability will bring crowds of readers to Thomas M. Disch any time soon.

4 Steve Aylett quotes

"As for Tolkien, I think those movies came along at a time when people would do almost anything to avoid thinking clearly about what is actually going on, and it was good homogenous escapism. I liked Liv Tyler’s mouth, and I think all three movies should have been just a close-up of that."
- Steve Aylett

"Satire works in a bunch of specific ways, like a very precisely-geared bomb. It's a bit like something that looks harmless, and you swallow it, but once it's inside you it's too late, and it triggers, blowing up. And it's your specific inner beliefs and faulty arguments that trigger a satire bomb. If your arguments work, the bomb doesn't trigger, it doesn't need to."
- Steve Aylett

"I would hope that [death is] just the end - I'd feel really cheated if I was woken up into another realm and had a load more shit to deal with. I really just want it finished."
- Steve Aylett

"It’s a shame, sort of a waste, that most people are influenced by what the newspaper supplements tell them is the book they are meant to be seen reading this year. It seems like those people aren’t really interested in books. If you’re really into books, you havoc all over the place picking up disparate stuff which you devour hungrily, and the ‘selection’ process is more like a sixth sense hunger, a billion miles away from fashion."
- Steve Aylett

I reviewed his Slaughtermatic earlier, and I'll be back for more.

Through hollow lands and hilly lands

I've read a lot of crappy short stories lately. Many were in a stack of anthologies by little known authors I bought at random, and there you expect that writing class air of having laboriously learned how to write, but not having anything to say. But what excuse does Haruki Murakami have? Every story in Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman starts out walking cheerfully towards brilliance, but Murakami's artsy affectations derail them towards the merely clever. What a waste of talent.

And then .. Ray Bradbury. The Golden Apples of the Sun. Perfection. Now, maybe the contrast between this and the previous books has skewed my judgement, but I'll tell you how I felt when I read it, and then you may decide for yourself if I'm trustworthy or not. Bradbury's stories have the delicate structure of an origami. They convey emotions that have no name, insane ideas that make sense. Done with less skill the origami would tear, there is no "almost" in this territory, but these, miraculously, never do. The authors I mentioned before all walk in Bradbury's genre-bending footsteps, and they all fail, but he's hardly to blame for that. I bow for Ray Bradbury. Ray Bradbury is God. Okay, that really is the contrast speaking. Then again, maybe one occasionally needs to read bad books, in order to better appreciate the good ones?

Om finkultur og kultureliter

Det er to grunner til at jeg sjelden besøker kulturelitens litterære kanon. Den ene er at jeg, som nordmenn flest, er litt skeptisk til finkultur. Det viktige er at du liker det du leser, og så er det ikke så farlig om det er Sandemo eller Solstad. Den andre er at det er noe tilfeldig over utplukkingskriteriene til listen over De Store. Noen slipper inn fordi de fortjener det, andre fordi de er heldige, omtrent som med andre A-lister, så som A-kjendiser og A-bloggere. Det riktige er å se på kulturelitens litterære romaner som en egen sjanger, en av mange, som hver appellerer til sine personlighetstyper og subkulturer. Jeg tror derimot ikke at kvalitet bare handler om personlig smak. Hva du liker, det handler om smak. Kvalitet handler om hva du ville likt hvis du visste at det fantes. De som i år har kost seg med Jo Nesbø's Hodejegerne, ville nok hatt enda mer glede av å utforske thriller- og krim-forfattere fra utenfor den norske sandkassen. Det er derfor hver subkultur har sin egen kulturelite, som betrakter hverandre med gjensidig nedlatenhet, fordi de som leser mye krim eller horror eller SF har bedre kalibrerte kvalitetssensorer for denne sjangeren enn de som ikke gjør det. Noen forsøker å bryte ned gjerdene, men hvem rekker å sette seg inn i alt? Den norske kvalitetsrelativismen er derfor en sunn tommelfingerholdning: Ikke fordi alt er like bra, men fordi det er mye bra du aldri har hørt om.

Some corner of your life that's yours

Teenagers don't talk and act like they do in Cory Doctorow's Little Brother, but who cares? Veronica Mars-teens make more interesting characters. And everything here apart from that is either real or plausible. The technology is real. Little Brother is the best beginner's introduction you'll find to privacy and surveillance. And if you wonder why privacy should matter to you, it explains that too. The politics are thriller-plausible, reality exaggerated for story purposes. So maybe the Department of Homeland Security wouldn't turn San Francisco into a police state because of a second 9/11, but there's still an important message here about the friction between being free and feeling safe, about the merely symbolic value of many anti-terror measures, and about the two faces of information technology: One takes our freedoms away, the other gives them back. The main character's aliases hint at Doctorow's twin inspirations: W1n5t0n, from Orwell's 1984, and M1k3y, from Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Little Brother is very similar to The Moon.., with the same mood and the same educational purpose. Doctorow's message of hope, that a bunch of teenagers can use technology to defend their civil rights from authoritarian grownups, is actually depressing when you think about it. Doctorow implies that in tomorrow's world you'll need to be a tech geek to have any privacy. That's not the argument he wants to make, but it's not far from the truth: Our governments are sleeping surveillance giants. Everybody be very, very quiet now.

Amid the debris of spontaneous symmetry breaking

This is how to write pop-sci: Select a theme, a Big Idea, but let it flow naturally from the subject. Dumb it down, but not enough to give the reader a false sense of understanding. Keep your anecdotes few and relevant. After too many Wisdom of Crowds-type books that violate all of the above, it is refreshing to find Fearful Symmetry - The Search for Beauty in Modern Physics by Anthony Zee. Zee aims to present not the details but the flavor of 20th century physics. His two central concepts, symmetry and group theory, are both simpler and more difficult than the formula-oriented physics most of us remember from school, allowing a randomly educated amateur like me to enjoy the book without giving me the idea that I know the first thing about physics. Which is how it should be. Written in 1986, Fearful Symmetry says almost nothing about string theory, and that's not really a weakness. One step at a time. In line with the Blake reference, Zee refers liberally to Him (the ultimate creator) and Her (mother nature) throughout the book, which is an unintrusive figure of speech, but it also reflects a deism that evades the question of why there are such beautiful patterns in physics in the first place. When all your explanations for a Mystery are bad ones, ("somebody just made it that way"), it may be best not to explain it at all.

The economies of seventeen imaginary realms

A few pages into Halting State by Charles Stross, you realize that a novel written entirely in the second person has a fair chance of being tiresomely intimate. Your relationship with Stross is a bit strained as it is, a mix of admiration for his alpha geek approach to writing, and annoyance with same. Accelerando and The Glasshouse were smart and funny, The Jennifer Morgue was hip and empty, and you realize that it's now up to Halting State to decide your continued interest in Stross. It doesn't take long for your fears to subside, and you even find yourself enjoying the second person gimmick. This near-future MMORPG bank heist story, an attempt to bring cyberpunk tropes into the age of World of Warcraft, is the good old Stross. It reminds you why you came to like Stross in the first place: Because all his characters talk like hyper-caffeinated tech geeks who read all the science journals you wish you had time for. Then again, you dislike some of his other books for exactly the same reason. It's hard to explain - Stross is like the subcultural equivalent of the town you grew up in: It's a nice place to visit once a while, familiarity greets you everywhere you turn, but it grows tiresome if you stay too long, and it's hard to explain its peculiar charm to out-of-towners.

Mistakes were made

Kluge by Gary Marcus should have been just right for me. As someone who's had more than my share of mistaken beliefs, I'm interested in the psychology of bad reasoning and irrational behavior, and so is Marcus. A kluge is an inelegant, but cheap and effective solution to a problem, a bit like a MacGyverism, and Marcus's Big Simple Idea (can one write pop-sci without one?) is that the human brain is full of evolutionary kluges. Memory, belief, language, decision making, all our effective but flawed abilities reflect nature's quick-and-dirty approach to the problem of survival. Evolution aims for good enough, not perfect. This is a good pretext to summarize interesting psychological research, but I've read it all better and more insightful elsewhere. Marcus's commentary adds little to the research he cites, and his attempt to connect everything to evolutionary advantage is strained and irrelevant. The nicest thing I can say of Kluge is that it summarizes good books on important subjects, with the intention of helping people think smarter. What you should read instead is How We Know What Isn't So by Thomas Gilovich, and Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, and then just follow the thread from there. (Do it! Please! Help decontaminate the meme pool one person at a time.)

No place like it in the world

This is it, the missing piece: Callahan's Crosstime Saloon by Spider Robinson. Do you ever have the feeling that there was something you were supposed to have discovered long ago, a movie or book you should have found at age 16 that would have been with you ever since? Me neither, but here it is, the one I missed. The funny thing is that this is not among the best novels I've read recently, as quality of writing goes. I can see the flaws, and I would be more comfortable writing a snarky put-down of its sentimentalism, (it wouldn't be difficult at all), but that wouldn't be honest. The honest, ugly truth is that Callahan's Crosstime Saloon sucker-punched me. I didn't know you could do these things in a way that didn't come off as fake. Now before you ask me what the plot is, I'll review books the way I want to, thank you very much, and in any case this isn't a book review, this is a "welcome to my library Spider Robinson, make yourself at home". If you must have a TV executive's summary, it's Cheers meets Neil Gaiman's Worlds' End. Genrewise it's science fiction in the same way that its politics are hippie-libertarian: Laid-back and very, very casual about it. And it's full of groan-inducing puns. Is that a recommendation? Maybe, kind of, but that's not really the point. Good or not, this one is mine.

Stress-free as a rabbi playing Twister with a psycho

Like a Tarantino movie written by Grant Morrison, Steve Aylett's Slaughtermatic goes nowhere in a confusing and violent way. When I read Lint, Aylett's biography of a non-existent SF author, I didn't realize just how much of himself he had put into Lint. Jeff Lint is a master of absurd one-liners, and so is Aylett. You approach each sentence as if it were an undetonated bomb, ("the idea broke like a bone, hurting and useless"). Reading Slaughtermatic at normal speed is to miss the point. It will make your head hurt either way, but at quarter speed, and with repeated rereadings of unusually strange paragraphs, you may also enjoy it, though I offer no guarantees. A satire of hyper-violence, from a world of casual murder and philosopher criminals, Slaughtermatic makes about five aborted detours on every page, dropped into the story to derail the reader, ("Specter was an expert in fractal litigation, whereby the flapping of a butterfly's wing on one side of the world resulted in a massive compensation claim on the other"). It's hilarious, and proof that you can be absurd ("there were four dead guns on the floor, one still twitching") without being obscure - which is why I now regret the comparison to Morrison, who is both.

[The cops] had escalated internal cover-ups after the crime strike embarassment four years ago - the only people conspicously unaware of the strike were the cops, who had gone on killing and looting as usual.

Tension, apprehension and dissension have begun

Alfred Bester's own titles for his novels were always better than the ones they got from the publishers. The Stars My Destination (1957) was originally known as Tiger! Tiger!, from Blake's poem, which sets the tone for both Bester's writing style and the main character. Bester's title for The Demolished Man (1953, no relation to the Stallone movie) was Demolition! Apparently you can't have exclamation points in novel titles. I guess it would be tiresome if everyone did it, but if anyone deserved the privilege it would be Alfred Bester. Bester used words in the same playful and violent manner that a thug wields a baseball bat. His novels just skip along, brimming with energy, jumping erratically in new directions on every other page. The Demolished Man (no, Demolition!, with a greedy glint in your eye, as in: power!, ambition!, wealth!) was Bester's first novel, and not as good as his masterpiece The Stars My Destination, but its treatment of telepathy was solid enough to be stolen in its entirety (along with the author's name) by Joe Straczynski for Babylon 5. It won the first Hugo Award, and was among the first of the great modern science fiction novels. The Freudianism feels dated, but - Jesus - look at the way he writes.

Warrior monks make too good a target

There are two novels called The Apocalypse Door, as I found out when I accidentally bought the wrong one. I saw a recommendation for the one by James D. McDonald, but bought the one by William Todd. Todd's novel is a piece of crap. The world does not need more self-published Lovecraft imitators. McDonald's Apocalypse Door is not great, but interesting. It's the kind of good, concept-driven novel that is a bit more fun to describe than to read: Catholic demon-fighting told as hardboiled crime. It's all there - an intricate multi-twisted plot, underground dealings with dangerous powers, a Maltese McGuffin, and most importantly that hardboiled style, but instead of Philip Marlowe or Sam Spade you have two Knight Templars and an assassin nun saving the world from an unholy race of mushroom people. Sounds fun? It is, ("the hairs were standing up on the back of my neck, and I'd been working on the rough side of the scholastic method long enough that I couldn't ignore that kind of feeling"), but it's more clever than good. I feel like politely applauding the worksmanship, and that's not what I'm looking for in a book.

Give me a pill to make me sleep

I am not going to recommend Doris Lessing's 1971 Briefing For a Descent Into Hell, to anyone, ever, probably, or at least not without a word of warning. I liked it, I'm impressed by it, and moved, it's one of the strangest novels I've read in a while, but it's not the sort of book you just hand to someone, "here, read this!" It was only the quality of the writing that carried me through the uneventful first third, and I was beginning to worry that it would all be nothing more than this: a mildly peculiar journey made by a madman in his own mind while undergoing psychiatric treatment. And then it transforms into a mystical experience that combines ancient mythology, science fiction and pantheistic ecology. It's kind of the written equivalent to prog, which is another reason not to recommend it: people have mixed feelings about that sort of thing. Now I like prog, in small doses, and I also like this novel. Lessing is ambitious, but her ambition is matched by her skill. And if I ever go on a cosmic journey to find my true self, I'd want Doris Lessing to document it with her beautiful, hypnotic writing. But I'll respect your decision to stay at home, (you brainwashed materialist zombie!) Now where did I put those Eloy records?

Redd for å bli Finn-Erik Vinje

Det er litt artig at jeg finner Are Kalvøs Våre venner kinesarane i humorseksjonen i bokhandelen, da den, forfatterens status som moromann til tross, har et seriøst budskap, og er på langt nær så latterlig som enkelte sinte unge menn og sinte unge kvinners bidrag i aktualitetshyllen like ved. Våre venner kinesarane er et takkeskrift til kinarestaurantene, for alt de har gjort for å bringe Norge og verden tettere sammen. I over 40 år har de gitt nordmenn sin første smak av omverdenen, ikke bare i storbyene men overalt hvor en foretaksom innvandrer kan klore seg fast. Siden har andre kommet til, vi har fått burger og pizza og kebab og pasta og sushi, men kineserene var først, og det er det Kalvø vil takke dem for. Kinarestaurantene representerer for Kalvø alle de gode sidene ved det flerkulturelle og globaliserte Norge. Mangfoldet. Valgmulighetene. Vår verden er ikke problemfri, men langt bedre enn det gamle monokulturelle Norge, med sitt NRK-monopol, Samvirkelag og hjemmelagde blodpølser. Ja, det er en gimmick å reise rundt til alle norske kommuner (158!) som har kinarestaurant, og nei, dette avslutter ingen opphetete debatter, men resultatet er en ordentlig hyggelig bok, småviktig på en stille og forsiktig måte, ja litt som de bortgjemte kinarestaurantene han rapporterer fra. La meg derfor istemme sammen med Kalvø, til alle som har bidratt til at jeg i dag spiser bedre enn i min mattradisjonelle barndom: Takk. Takk skal dere ha.

Æsj, for en terminologi!

Hodejegerne er min første Jo Nesbø-roman, og jeg er ikke sikker på om det blir noen flere, om ikke noen overbeviser meg om at dette var uvanlig svakt fra Nesbø. For denne kriminalthrilleren om hodejegeren som stjeler fra jobbkandidatene sine, og nå bare skal utføre det siste store kuppet (åjada! "men alt går ikke etter planen" osv), begynner dårlig. Fryktelig dårlig, og den karrer seg bare gradvis oppover til å bli akseptabel. Det er noe klønete over Nesbøs forsøk på å overbevise oss om at vår antihelt er en lynende intelligent drittsekk. Det blir bare på liksom, og den satiriske skildringen av elitemiljøet han tilhører treffer ikke bedre. Det er ikke ekte. Jeg tror ikke på det. Men etterhvert skjer det noe. I takt med økende puls og et eksploderende antall lik finner Nesbø stemmen sin, dialogen er ikke lenger til å le av, (joda, overskriften er et sitat), og karakterene får noe som nærmer seg dybde. Handlingen er og blir idiotisk, men det er i og for seg greit i en god, trashy spenningsroman. Noe dette totalt sett ikke er, men kanskje kunne ha blitt om forlaget hadde overtalt Nesbø til å skrive om de første 100-150 sidene. Så hva skal man lese i stedet? På sitt beste minner Hodejegerne meg om hvorfor jeg liker Øyvind Myhres politiske thrillere: En himmel av jern, og 1989. Du finner dem kun brukt, og du får liberalistisk paranoia med på kjøpet, men det er langt bedre lesning enn dette.

I took what others would have taken

Being a fantasy author is a good background for writing historical fiction. The past is an alien world, and the temptation is to fill it with people just like you and me. Michael Moorcock avoids this in Byzantium Endures, the first of four novels about the life of Pyat, a Russian engineer, in the first half of the 20th century. Born on January 1, 1900, Pyat is headed for hard times, and Byzantium Endures takes him from his childhood in the Ukraine to the end of the Russian civil war. Pyat is a resentful man, often mean-spirited, and an anti-semite. He is in his own view a brilliant engineer of unrecognized genius, far ahead of his time, but he's not a reliable narrator, (he claims he built a flying machine at age 13, and later a ray gun that almost worked), so his actual abilities are a mystery for the reader. Pyat is sympathetic to the proto-fascist futurist movement, he believes in science, technology and reason, but also in tsarist Russia and the Orthodox Church. He hates the Jews and Bolsheviks for destroying the world he was promised, and the story is often interrupted by rants about Orthodox Russia's rightful place in history. Like George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman, the greatest scoundrel and coward in the British empire, Pyat is the ugly past in its own angry words, half revolting and half sympathetic, but unlike the Flashman novels, this isn't comedy. How could it be?

Den onde hyrde

Jens Bjørneboe skriver godt. Jeg vet ikke helt hvorfor dette overrasker meg, for jeg har lest en del av essayene hans, men jeg hadde kanskje ventet meg mer polemikk og mindre romankunst. Den onde hyrde (1960) er ikke polemikk, det er satire, av den typen du ikke ler av. I våre dager er det politisk korrekt å klage på snillisme i fengselsvesenet, men alle reformer til tross kommer jeg aldri til å føle meg vel med innesperring som straffemetode. I beste fall kan jeg føle at noen fortjener det, men ikke at det gir mening på noe høyere nivå enn å holde forbryterne vekke fra ofrene sine en stund. Jeg vet ikke om noe alternativ, men liker det gjør jeg ikke. Det blir ikke bedre av at vi deler ut de strengeste straffene for handlinger som knapt burde vært forbudt. Jeg tror at den dagen ettertiden skal dømme oss - for det skal de, slik vi dømmer våre forgjengere - så er det narkokrigen de vil ta oss på. De vil kalle det en av de store statlige forbrytelsene i vår tid, og de av oss som fremdeles er i live vil ha lite å si til vårt forsvar, for ikke gjorde vi noe og ikke sa vi noe, vi bare lot det skje. Narkotika er ikke et tema i Den onde hyrde, men det er noe jeg vil du skal ha i tankene når du leser den, i tilfelle du føler deg fristet til å tenke at heldigvis er alt så mye bedre nå.

Twins, doubles, twins and doubles

Alternate history is a branch of science fiction, where the science in question is history, and for all its linchpin corniness I like it. (Btw I wonder if Robert Silverberg's 2000 short story A Hero of the Empire, where Muhammed is killed to prevent the rise of Islam, could have been published today - in fact, forget I even mentioned it: look over there instead, my hypothetical Islamist readers, please leave mr Silverberg alone!) In The Separation, Christopher Priest weaves two histories together, one where Britain and Germany signed a peace treaty in 1941, and the other, our own, where they didn't. A pair of identical twins are central to the story and to the mystery of the histories' relationship to each other. This twin-theme and much more will be familiar to people who enjoyed The Prestige, another Priest novel, which was made into a wonderful movie. There's the same sense that you're only gradually being told what kind of story it is you're reading. This trick is easier to pull off in short stories, but Priest manages it here, and he does it by changing the ground beneath you gradually, while you're reading, instead of with a burst of twists at the end. It's all very elegant and I liked it, (Philip K. Dick was good at this as well, although also extremely weird, which Priest isn't, (Dick's later plots generally revolve around drug-abusing schizophrenics, which gets tiresome after ten times or so)). I'll read more of Priest. (He's also a funny guy.)

There's a feeling I get when I look to the east

The Fountains of Paradise by Arthur C. Clarke reads at times like the space travel scenes in 2001: A Space Odyssey: calm and majestic. This is hard SF in the purer sense, science fiction with an emphasis on the wonders of almost-possible technology, and not much on anything else. Crises are resolved in a rational manner, and with correspondingly calm language. On one hand it reassures the reader to know that the author isn't just randomly pulling our hearstrings, that things happen for reasons that go beyond "ooh, time for another race against the clock, now who can I place in jeopardy next?" Doesn't make for a very interesting novel though. The Fountains of Paradise is a wonderful concept sketch of the space elevator, one of the more awe-inspiring solutions to launching people into space. And it's not a bad novel, Clarke is a great writer, and some might find this minimalism refreshing, (it did get the Hugo and Nebula awards), but to me it's all just too .. respectable. The opening, with its parallels between an ancient king of a Sri Lankaesque island who builds a mountain palace to bring Heaven to Earth, and a 22nd century engineer's dream of a space elevator in the same area, made me expect something bold along the lines of "The 9 billion names of God", but the religious themes are quickly resolved and set aside, to give way for scientific awe with some drama attached. That said, this could make an awesome movie.

What is your obvious, dull or unlikely idea?

John Brockman at edge.org asked scientists what their "dangerous idea" is, meaning something they believe may be true but might create a stir of everyone accepted it. Their answers are collected in What Is Your Dangerous Idea?, a book that is far less interesting and provocative than the title implies. Cultural differences is one cause, "there is no such thing as the soul" is not my idea of a provocative proposition, (next you'll tell me we're related to chimpanzees!) Other dangerous ideas are not all that profound, many are a bit silly, (not as in "how dare they say this!" but "eh .. nah I don't think so"), or they're interesting but not the right kind of interesting for a book like this. Some are. I especially like the ones that deal with the unpredictability of technological, scientific and cultural change, meaning we have no idea and no possible way of knowing if we're headed for a world that is better or worse than the current one. (Here's my views on this, and here's Hayek's.) The book as a whole though didn't interest me much - buy it to browse through the pages, or better just read the answers online.