books » Discount Thoughts

C.S. Lewis on Joel Stein

Apr 032012

Joel Stein wrote an annoying little article in the New York Times recently where he castigated adults for reading YA fiction. I would rebut his article in detail, but a much better writer than I has already done so. Indeed, he did it 60 years ago. I repeat it here for your benefit.

Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

- C. S. Lewis

Inherit the Tropes

books Comments Off

Jan 102012

I got a Kindle for Christmas, thus semi-joining this millenium… at this rate, in another 20 years or so I’ll have a smartphone. I naturally had some high-minded ideas about delving back into the classics, but what really happened was that the travel schedule and desire to read in between watching football games made me grab for the popular fiction. So, in some bits of time I had over the past two weeks, I read Christopher Paolini’s Inheritance cycle.

I didn’t hate it.

This is not to say that the books are modern classics or that Paolini is the next Tolkien (or even the next Feist). The Inheritance novels, particularly Eragon, are an adolescent writing experience made excruciatingly public. Considering that, they’re quite well-written, but as one might expect from the circumstances, they’re derivative, suffer from rather ad hoc world-building, and star a Mary Sue.

It would be unfair to criticize Paolini too loudly for any of it, in my opinion. Almost any creative teenager at one point or another has imagined himself as Jedi ninja Cool G. Beans, Duke of Radsylvania, accompanied by his trusty sidekick Sir Suspiciously-similar-to-your-best-friend on a mission to save Princess That-girl-from-math-class from the evil Lord Obviously-your-gym-coach, adjusting as needed for your gender, orientation, desire to bone your best friend, and whatever horrible slang was used to identify coolness during your adolescence. Paolini happens to be the lucky guy who leveraged that into a reasonably popular novel.

Paolini also seemed to understand the criticism and take at least some of it to heart, although his response mostly took the form of obvious flailing in the second book. In the first novel Eragon can do almost no wrong, going from a simple farmboy to a world-class swordsman and magician within the space of a few months. In Eldest, Paolini does all he can to tear Eragon down, repainting him as foolish, arrogant, and weak, not to mention giving him a pimple in the form of his accidental cursing of Elva. This incident hinges strangely on a point of grammar, makes the rules of magic less clear rather than more so, and generates a powerful character Paolini never really figures out how to use. Like this, the whole effort turns out poorly. Eragon’s disability is temporary, his huge mistake with Elva turns out to be accidentally beneficial, and his most serious weaknesses are magically erased (I mean this literally). Above all, it is very boring because we are already past the point where we as readers really believe Eragon will fail, or even get derailed temporarily in an interesting way.

Yet, Paolini does manage to tell an interesting story in this book, continuing on into the remainder of the series. It is not Eragon’s story, but his cousin Roran’s, that is worth reading. Roran has no magical powers, no capacity for wielding a sword, and nothing to rely on besides his strength, creativity, and charisma. He uses these talents to defeat a group of soldiers, lead an entire village across the world, and rise to high command and great success in the rebel army. Of course this is quite conventional — Roran is motivated by a desire to rescue, then protect, his personal princess — but well-told nonetheless. Having accidentally created a class of essentially unbeatable superhumans in the world-building for Eragon, Paolini ably uses Roran’s story to show how the world can work despite their existence.

Unfortunately, as the cycle winds to a close, Roran has to step back because the actual business at hand is Eragon’s conflict against the unstoppable Dark Lord Galbatorix. The problem is that Galbatorix has been overbuilt: vastly outnumbered, he nonetheless defeated the ancient order of Dragon Riders, spent the next century growing stronger, absorbing all that they knew, and ultimately succeeded in finding a way to control all magic in the world. Thus, he must be defeated by a technicality; despite his insuperable knowledge and power, he is unaware that you can cast spells without saying anything.

Arguably, The Lord of the Rings similarly hinges on a technicality. However, the idea has a kind of logic. Since Sauron put all his power into the ring, destroying the ring will destroy him. Moreover, the technicality is introduced very early on, at a point when we’re still just accepting what we’re told about the world rather than trying to piece things together for ourselves, and it motivates the whole quest that the trilogy relates. Paolini, on the other hand, lays out his (poorly conceived) system of magic in excruciating detail, the relevant technicality doesn’t flow naturally from that system, and it’s buried somewhere in the second book and forgotten until it’s needed for the finale.

All of this could have been overcome. Paolini is a reasonably talented writer, and given some time and some life experience — which might have, for instance, prevented him from exoticizing nearly all the major female characters — the Inheritance cycle could have turned out much better. Unfortunately, Eragon was published before he had enough time to reconsider it, and at that point he was locked into a world that had a bit too much of Tolkien and McCaffrey (the bonding and mental-link stuff is practically straight out of the Dragonriders of Pern novels), and a story that had a bit too much of George Lucas. All the same, the novels are fun to read, and the errors, though numerous, are tolerable and occasionally instructive.

Loss of innocence in space

books Comments Off

Oct 192011

Having read Fiasco, my favorite Stanislaw Lem book remains His Master’s Voice. In part this is because His Master’s Voice concerns scientists and the workings of science, which is a major part of my own life. Also, His Master’s Voice is far closer to how I think SETI efforts will turn out than Carl Sagan’s similar, but insanely chipper, Contact. Fiasco, like Lem’s other works, is pessimistic about humankind’s chances to make productive contact with alien life. If Contact is the counterpart of His Master’s Voice, however, then Fiasco is the counterpart of Star Trek, an epic scolding of America’s quintessential positive contact fairy tale. Although I think the scolding is richly deserved, Fiasco doesn’t quite work for me.

I like Roddenberry’s work well enough, but although it tries to be about “new life and new civilizations”, Star Trek is really a paean to human potential. The humans of Star Trek are insufferable cultural imperialists, and the human way is always the best way. This was always most apparent to me in Kirk’s eulogy of Spock from The Wrath of Khan: he speaks of Spock as being “human”, as if that were a virtue, as if Spock wouldn’t (rightly) find the implication insulting. In many ways, Fiasco is also a story about human potential, especially our capacity for unwarranted war. Of the two visions, only one belongs to the world of Cortes and Pizarro.

Fiasco has a strange structure. It starts with a long, incredibly dense “blizzard story” set on Titan. Two men went out into a dangerous area and were lost, another man went out and was lost. The final man, Parvis, goes out in a mechanical strider to look for the others. An accident occurs, the strider is practically destroyed, and he decides to use a crude flash-freeze apparatus, never proven to be effective, in a last-ditch effort to survive. We never find out whether it works; a man rescued from vitrifax awakes centuries later on the world’s most advanced spaceship as it sets out to the planet Quinta in hopes of contacting an alien civilization. Perhaps he is Parvis, perhaps someone else. He adopts the name Tempe, and gets a chance to see the Quintans.

Fiasco includes, among other themes, a thinly-disguised parable about the Cold War, and particularly the demented kinds of decisions that can be made in the context of seemingly endless stalemate. The humans find Quinta locked in a permanent power struggle, swaddled in satellites and sheathed in white noise meant to jam radio communications. The siege mentality of its warring states contributes to their taking an aggressive stance towards the humans, seeing all that is external as a foe. This attitude results in their choosing to essentially destroy part of their planet in order to make sure the humans are seen as the enemy.

The situation on Quinta is presaged by an earlier story within the novel about endlessly warring termites. The book ends with Tempe’s realization that he has seen the Quintans, but does not explicitly say what they are. It implies, however, that the Quintans are something very like those termites. Tempe’s instruments, for instance, tell him that the Quintan lifeforms feature an aerobic/anaerobic symbiosis (true of humans as well, but an essential part of the termite digestive system), and the wart-like structure he attacks looks like an anthill on the inside. It doesn’t really matter what the Quintans look like, however, because they mimic something here on Earth.

More properly, they mimic something that was here on Earth. Like all Cold-War fables, Fiasco seems far less biting today than it must have in 1986, when the conflict had simmered for 40 years and seemed fit to go on another 40. At that time not even creative fiction writers like Lem saw that the communist empire would crumble within the decade, its threat eventually supplanted by terrorism. With so many now alive who never experienced a day of the Cold War, Fiasco must seem even more fanciful than it is.

The downside of this is that Fiasco can’t rely on its parable of escalation to help tell its story, and here’s where the book faltered for me. The critical moment where things go irretrievably wrong comes when the humans decide to make a show of force by destroying the moon. Lem does his best to make this seem like a deed that is totally within the powers of the humans and that seems to them unlikely to result in disaster. However, in the worst Star Trek tradition, this whole plan rests on technobabble, and it’s a problem because an operation like blowing up a moon does not seem like a harmless show of force, no matter how much technobabble you throw at it.

This gives too big an opening for the reader to distance himself from the human explorers. The moment the characters made this decision, I stopped seeing them as really human, distancing myself from their mission. Fiasco would have topped my list if Lem had drawn me along, put me in a place where I agreed with the actions of the human explorers as they tried to talk to the Quintans. At the destruction of the moon, however, I stopped agreeing even remotely with what the humans were doing. I saw them as monsters too early for their quest to have a real impact on me.

That’s not to say that Fiasco is a bad book. It is miles ahead of most other science fiction, full of fascinating ideas and clever writing. Unlike the best of Lem’s work, however, I was merely watching events unfold, rather than following along on the ride.

East 2 degrees 20 minutes 57 seconds

books, science Comments Off

Sep 062011

Today it is possible to pull out your telephone and know immediately where you are and what time it is, so the prospect of, say, setting one’s watch by Immanuel Kant’s daily walk seems intrinsically absurd. Yet, before the turn of the century, it was not unusual for the time in one town to be very different from the time in the next town down the road, and the only unification of clocks came from the local rail line. Lacking a global idea of time, our knowledge of longitude was uncertain, so much so that cartographers could not pin down even the distance between London and Paris, much less that between the Americas and Europe. Our transit from “here there be dragons” to your iPhone’s GPS function owes much to French mechanist Henri Poincaré and physicist Albert Einstein, contributions Peter Galison examines in his book Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps ^[Amazon].

Einstein comes first in the title, but it is clear from early on that Galison’s real interest is in Poincaré. Most Americans have an opposite preference, and it’s easy to understand why. Einstein’s peregrinations and iconoclasm speak to certain American sensibilities. Poincaré, by contrast, was French, and fiercely so, a student of the École Polytechnique, a member of many Academies and Societies, and an important member of the Bureau of Longitude.

That last may seem faintly hilarious, now, but at that time the determination of longitude was no small task. One of the first tasks of the mighty transatlantic telegraph cables was to fix the time of events at two distant spots, thus determining the longitudinal difference between them. Following on the international adoption of the metric system, the French hoped to have the Prime Meridian fixed to Paris, where the meter, kilogram, and associated measures lay. Poincaré even became involved in an effort to create a metric system of time. Rather than bothering much with Relativity, Galison devotes most of the book to examining the multiple levels where one if its key insights (the synchronization of clocks) played a role. As he puts it:

In to the precision swing of master clock pendulums, out to the undersea telegraph cables crisscrossing the oceans. In to follow the minutiae of individual train schedulers, jewelers, and astronomers; then back out to the legal recalibration of national and world-covering time zones. In this process of scrutiny, historical light necessarily plays off the very different scales utilized by technological, scientific, and philosophical activity. Between 1870 and 1910, conventions of space and time scintillated with a critical opalescence.

One can see that Galison is not afraid to engage flights of fancy, and also that he is unusually fond of the word “opalescent”, which I saw more times in this book than in the preceding 30-odd years of my life. Niggling about style aside, the passage does give a feel for the many lenses needed to capture the drama. In Europe, intellectual titans like Poincaré were involved in the struggle to map the world and unify time, while in America, time became the province of businessmen and rail magnates, eventually resulting in the creation of the time zone system we find familiar (albeit not without digressing into some curious permutations along the way).

If you’re wondering how time itself could be so confusing, Poincaré did not. One of the central beliefs of his life was that systems, like time, were just conventions, only to be used until another, more convenient tool came along. If he had been able to follow this belief to its logical end, perhaps it would be he who was remembered as the discoverer of Special Relativity. Certainly his modifications of the Lorentz transformations were essential. Yet he ultimately became too attached to the familiar ether, insisting that there was one “true” time, while Einstein managed to punch through that barrier and recognize that time itself was variable. Galison seems to like Poincaré just a bit too much to judge this failure harshly, but that’s a forgivable flaw in a work that shines a much-needed light on a somewhat-forgotten genius.

Arcology

books, environment Comments Off

Mar 092011

When I was a boy my family used to joke that crows didn’t fly in Vestavia. Our suburb, like so many others, had a knotty system of streets that made direct travel impossible, and zoning that made driving a necessity. My high school was less than 2/3 of a mile direct distance from my house, but it was a two-mile drive down a road that became pretty backed up around 7:45 AM. Of course nobody rode the bus. Suburban living allowed my brother and I to go to a good school, live in a big house, and play in the woods frequently as we grew up. It also used a lot of gas.

I recently finished reading Green Metropolis [Amazon] by David Owen, a book that I enjoyed in part because it told me so many things I already agreed with. Cities are often derided for being big and dirty, and this is true, but because of their size, their dirtiness per capita is substantially less than that of the suburbs. Owen models his argument off New York City, noting that its residents use less electricity per year than people living in any other part of the country, and produce greenhouse gases at a rate 67% less than the national average. Large multi-unit buildings use heat more efficiently than drafty, oversize suburban houses, and small apartments discourage tenants from acquiring (or keeping) junk they don’t need. Mixed-use neighborhoods encourage people to do much of their travel on foot, and public transport combines with the sheer inconvenience of using a car to discourage driving.

The American environmental and conservative movements may seem to have little in common, but both romanticize a life close to the land and far from the city, albeit for different reasons. Their mutual straining has, without question, been environmentally ruinous, producing the unsightly sprawl that swaddles cities like Atlanta and Washington D.C. like a spreading tumor. The result is misery and waste: hours of productivity lost to endless commutes, acre upon acre of ugly strip malls moated by asphalt, and vast quantities of duplicated infrastructure tea-partying suburbanites don’t want to pay taxes to maintain. All this so people can work two jobs to pay off mortgages they can’t afford for drafty, energy-inefficient houses much larger than they need and enormous water-sucking, pesticide and fertilizer-coated lawns they won’t even let their children play in anymore because of skin cancer and chemicals and sexual predators.

Owen shares my skepticism of popular idiocies such as ethanol, a technology that still consumes more energy than it produces and is only likely to work if we tear up the suburbs that made it necessary in the first place and repurpose the land for agriculture. He also justly ridicules much so-called “green” architecture and LEED certifications that don’t accurately measure a building project’s environmental costs. As he notes, environmental assessments of buildings rarely acknowledge that windows are inherently wasteful of energy, or that elevators are one of the world’s most efficient forms of mass transit.

Yet, there is much to criticize in Owen’s work as well. He derides the phenomenon of tiny “urban” cars, and in the case of New York alone that might be justified. But such vehicles may be helpful, perhaps even essential, to re-urbanizing areas like Atlanta, where lack of efficient public transportation and an unfavorable climate would make city living unbearable for much of the year. Owen acknowledges that efficient cities like New York often came to be that way due to geographical accidents, which does little to guide us towards solutions that might allow us to recentralize America’s sprawled-out suburban dystopias. Although Owen easily enough points out the factors that made city living seem unappealing to him, he has trouble converting that recognition into recommendations that make cities more palatable to the suburbanites who fled them long ago.

The simple fact is that New Yorkers don’t use less energy or produce less greenhouse gas because they’re uniquely virtuous. They’re energy-efficient because they’re forced to be that way by the nature of the place where they live. No quantity of “green” appliances, extra insulation, solar panels, or corn ethanol will ever suffice to make suburban living efficient enough to challenge the environmental benefits mandated by city living, even if every household in America was convinced to adopt all these measures. Our national addiction to cars and big houses will be the ruin of any plan for energy independence or sustainability. Any comprehensive plan for meeting these goals will require some degree of re-urbanization (or de-suburbanization), and that means finding some way to make city living more appealing, more economical, and more convenient than it currently is. That’s a hard sell, and Owen knows it, but he doesn’t seem to have any idea how to close the deal.