Jack and Holly

 Jack loved Holly hopelessly, and she would never in her life choose him, a tragedy that only became apparent to him will well after the fact. In fact, upon his return to what we'll call the spirit world, he remembered, as he had so many times before in a very long existence, how stupid and pointless that kind of obsession was, and could only laugh as decades of bitter memories faded in the blinding light of a much bigger context.

Culture fragment

The GCU What the Fuck? cruised the energy grid of upper hyperspace with a carefree nonchalance that other Minds rolled their metaphorical eyes at. It was perhaps over-compensating for the 1000 tightbeams a second it sent to the last recorded location to the drone Terpsichore ap Xanthe light-years ahead of its current location.

Drones were Minds of their own, as fully sentient as a ship Mind, if not as impressively well-endowed in body or computational ability. Still smarter than your average pan-human though, god bless their souls.

Terpsichore ap Xanthe con Leche, Terp to its friends, was unusual by Culture Mind standards. Minds were probably the greatest achievement of mankind and the funny part was they themselves were too limited to appreciate just how impressive the vast intelligences that kept them like pets really were. Pan-human culture had evolved beyond god, gotten bored, created some gods who created even more impressive gods and then contented itself to being kept affectionately as pets by beings they steadfastly refused to worship. To say the Culture was a pile of contractions with a smooth, slick sheen of orgiastic hedonism was to engage in admirable understatement.

So while humanity fucked itself raw and came up for air, hydration and meaningful employment, Culture Minds and Culture Ships bent the material world like modeling clay. Minds had no particular interest in hedonism or sex, but pro-created enthusiastically, creating Minds large and small in scope.

Drones were Minds fashioned to fit the scale of pan-human life. Your average Culture human could and would talk to ships and orbital hubs without a second thought, but Drones were, at least unconsciously, more approachable. They were right there "in the shit" when things got rough. Drones were Minds a person could fit their arms around. This was generally regarded as Important.

Some Minds, as Terp knew well, did not want anyone's arms or fields all that close to them. These were Minds created for the solitudes of interstellar space. As a Level 8 civilization, the Culture compromised an impressively large section of galactic space, even by Level 8 civ standards, but the thing about galaxies was they were mind-boggling huge in scope. Think of the biggest thing you can imagine. Galaxies were, uh, much bigger than that. Look, you're cute and all, but only a Culture Mind really understood how mind-bogglingly big space is.

The Drone Terpsichore ap Xanthe con Leche liked solitude fine. In theory it could be sending messages back through hyperspace to ships and hubs and, I suppose, pan-human Culture citizens, but the truth was it preferred its own company. As it was designed to.

The edges of Culture space were generally bordered by other galactic civs that the Culture was honor-bound to play nice with. And beyond that, more civs that other civs may or may not be playing nice with. And beyond that, an ocean of unexplored stars. The thing about galaxies is they were huge. Billions of stars is a lot, even for semi-immortal machine intelligences adept as surfing the skein of hyperspace for fun and profit.

The Culture Minds had long since quietly curbed the aggressive expansionist tendencies of the pan-human primate, channeling those energies into championing freedom, liberty, self-definition, and being kept like pets by their own machines. It might have been a scandal if anyone could break themselves away from perpetual self-indulgence.

But Minds like knowing, and beyond the edges of Culture space there lingered the unknown. So minds pushed outwards, sending solitary drones on survey probe missions ahead of the contact units trawling faithfully behind.

Hyperspace engines tended to be big, which was why ships tended to have them and drones did not. But ships could shoot drones foreward, skimming them across the cusp of hyperspace like stones on a pond to systems on the survey route. Drone Minds who volunteered for this were generally considered to be unstable daredevils by their peers, with good reason.

Terpsichore ap Xanthe con Leche had chosen its name, much like ships did, as a sort of joke. It meant nothing. Drone names typically designated home orbitals and design parentage but in the Culture taking the piss was always a correct option, so Terp had a laugh. A name was a name. Any meta-data another Mind might need was always embedded in the transmission protocols it sent anyway. The great thing about not being a hedonistic primate was information transfers could be dense and meaningful. A Mind could process Terp as fast as it could process Terpsichore ap Xanthe con Leche and "arriving at system X230Q826" as fast as it could 100 lines of detailed positional coordinates and a detailed flight log.

So when Terpsichore ap Xanthe con Leche arrived at X230Q826 and simply said, "Oh THAT'S interesting." before going silent, the GCU What the Fuck? was understandably concerned.

Incarnate Fragment

Diana shoveled EZ-noodlez into her mouth like she hadn't eaten in a day. "Wait, why should I ask him out? If he's so great maybe YOU should ask him out."

"Wait," Isaac said, finger upraised cautiously.

"Me?" Chore said, ignoring Isaac. "One day," he started, gently lowering Isaac's protest finger, "I decided to train with Ares. He was built like a truck and has a, uh, intensity of focus and I wondered what it might be like to have ALL THAT," Chore said, gesturing vaguely in the direction of Ares' body and energy, "focused on me for a little while."

"So you won't ask Isaac out because you got shot down by the God of War in a clumsy attempt at seduction?"

"First of all," Chore said, raising his own protest finger, "How dare you. Second, who said anything about rejection? Some gods are good at wrestling and some gods are good at ... variations on that theme." He grinned around his own mouthful of noodlez.

"Oh." Said Diana. She looked at Chore for a long moment. "OH. I see." She waved a fork at Isaac, "And our boy here, doesn't have the, ah, intensity you have become accustomed to in your dalliances?"

"That," said Chore, slurping the last of his soup, "And he seems kind of uptight about bedding men."

"I've noticed that about him." Diana said.

"Wait," Dianna said, "let's talk about how you were related to Ares."

"Oh, absolutely not." Chore said, nodding his head at Isaac, "I don't think our boy here's ready for that either."

Isaac, who was studiously focused on his own noodlez consumption simply said, "I hate you both."

"Fair." Diana said.

"You love it." Chore said, grin growing wider.

Isaac said nothing. He really did.

A History of Man

    The rumblings and growls that made up wrymtongue were translated by a vocoder, worn traditionally on the right ear, stylized in the traditional manner of House Jagged. Which is to say, it was pointy and uncomfortable, but you got used to it. Of course, you had to.
    Hyggnr was in a good mood today. As he surveyed Brimstone from high on his Aerie, he began to lecture Task as he often did when the sun was high and the breeze had just the right amount of sulphur.
    "It wasn't always going to be this way," the vocoder chirped in Task's ear, as wyrmtongue reverberated through his skull. "Believe it or not, ape-man, this world was once meant to be yours."
    Task continued sweeping without interruption, always aware of the great eye that would sweep back to check on him from time to time. But like many of Hyggnr's wild tales, he gave it little mind. Still, he listened politely as he swept.
    "Ah, I can see that has piqued your interest," rumbled Hyggnr, as he always did regardless of Task's reaction. "Truthfully, we would never have known if not for Falgyr's happy great discovery. Although happy accident, is more like if you follow my meaning."
    Task did not follow, and was breathing through his mouth occasionally as relief from the over-powering smell of sulphur. You'd think you'd get used to it, but you never did.
    Hyggnr stretched his claws briefly, and yawned, loudly and without flame before continuing. "Should you be impertinent enough to ask him, which you would not unless you aspired to snack status, he will swear to you that he summoned great powers and divined the future with clarity and purpose."
    He glanced at Task. "Man thing, " he said, "what are dragons?"
    Task looked at the great eye and said, "Dragons are magic." inclined his head slightly, and continued sweeping a floor that every day seemed endless.
    "Yes we are. Yes we are!" Hyggnr laughed, shaking the tower briefly as his sides heaved. "Isn't it wonderful? And what is magic? Chaos! Chaos. I tell you the truth, although it doesn't leave this room." His long head and snout moved in conspiratorially, towards task in a manner that was not entirely comfortable. Random snacks and violence had long been the human condition under dragon rule.
    Task swept casually as the great head leaned in, pointedly ignoring his master's breath. "Yes, lord. Of course." He said. Breath aside, Hyggnr's stories could be entertaining, upon reflection, later in the evening, after the existential nervousness had passed.
    "He sneezed." Hyggnr whispered, laughing as he leaned back, delighted. "He sneezed performing a relatively simple translocation spell and somehow, in a way that no drake has ever been able to duplicate, slipped sideways and forwards into another world!"
    "Can you guess what he saw there?" Hyggnr studied his well-trained and submissive man-thing and sighed. "Well, I suppose you wouldn't, the possibility having long since passed. I will tell you. You! Well, not YOU. But you lot. He saw an entire world run by and for man-thing. Humon kind I think they called themselves. Adorable."
    Here Hyggnr paused, grabbing a sheep out of the snack bowl and masticating happily. Crunch, crunch, crunch.
    "It was horrifying, of course. Millions of you running around, leading drab, purposeless lives. Hundreds of towers but no aeries. No Dragons! What purpose could there be, without dragon magic in their lives. One shudders at the thought."
    And so he did, setting the floor all wobbly, as he dramatically sent shivers down his massive body.
    "Curious and appalled, Falgyr mesmered himself to man-thing size and shape and walked among them seeking answers. The language was easy enough to translate, and he soon found himself at a place of knowledge. A lie-brary I think he called it. And can you guess what he found?"
    Hygnnr paused dramatically, "Horror! Not only were there no dragons in this sad man-city. There were no dragons anywhere! I tell you, I nearly vomited at the mere thought!"
    Task kept sweeping, but quickly thrust aside the image of Hyggnr vomiting. He had seen a great drake vomit before. Those poor people.
    "And would you believe why?" Hyggnr held his foreclaw to his chest, clearly trying to maintain composure. "You lot! You grubby man-things hunted us to extinction. The nerve! The appalling mendacity! Dragons are MAGIC." Hyggnr cast his eye accusingly at his faithful servant.
    Task very, very carefully attended his duties, a single bead of sweat sliding slowly down his brow. "Dragons are magic, yes my lord." Task said carefully, with as much obsequiousness and feigned outrage on his lord's behalf as he could cram into one sentence.
    "Yes, well, I see you are as shocked as I was. I can hardly blame you. Even your tiny mind should grasp such an awful idea. That it should even be possible ..."
    Hyggnr paused, looking contemplatively off into the distance. Beyond Brimstone, perhaps beyond time and space itself. Task didn't know. Dragons were magic and man-things were well-trained monkeys. Or so the dragons insisted.
    "Of course," he said thoughtfully, "we were not always as we are now. We were always magic, of course, but for a very long while we were ... what's the word. Anti-social? Isolated? In any case, in those days you would never see so many aeries nestled so closely, and the high culture of our cities was still centuries away. We lived alone and we loved it. We preferred other dragons out of sight and out of mind and mated rarely and with extreme suspicion. In many ways it was an ideal time for us, but as Falgyr's accident showed, it also made us susceptible to slaughter by an assertive and rapidly expanding society of belligerent primates."
    Hygnnr returned to the present, his great eye lolling back to Task again. "Falgyr, of course, was mortified. As any one of us might have been, and recalled himself to his point of origin. With translocation spells, you see, it is far easier to come back than to go."
    "And from there, the rest is history." Hyggnr was relaxed again, enjoying the day. "At great personal risk to himself he approached each of us at our caves or aeries and convened a great council, convincing us of the danger, at times letting us see this future imperfect through his own eyes, until we banded together and gave great purpose to your enthusiastic but undirected striving. A lucky accident for you, don't you think?"
    "Indeed, my lord." Feigned gratitude was a skill one learned early with masters who had such large teeth and larger appetites. Task was nearly finished now, emptying the last stray scale into the bin. "Is there anything more at the moment?
    "I am hungry my Task. Have we more sheep?" Hyggnr was eyeing Task for some sort of reaction, and pleased to find none.
    "I believe so, sire. Shall I fetch them." Having enough sheep (or cows or what-have-you), had become a vital skill to the man-thing that didn't relish being part of the menu. Hungry dragons didn't discriminate. And there were always more man-things.
    "Do." Hyggnr settled in looking over the proud architecture of Brimstone, profoundly satisfied with the world as a whole, and himself in particular. How could he not be? Dragons were magic. Himself most of all.
    Task retreated out and down, gathering sheep for his master's next meal. And as he did, he thought of something he had not thought of since he was a child: a world without dragons.
    And in complete defiance of all good sense, he did not put it immediately from his mind.

Perelandra by C.S. Lewis

Perelandra by C.S. Lewis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I've been going back and reading some C.S. Lewis books because, I'll be honest, I still like C. S. Lewis as a philosopher and author. I'm not really too seduced by Christianity as he presents it (or, frankly, at all), but he still has some interesting things to say. Although you can basically ignore any of his commentary on women.

I read his SF trilogy as a borderline fundamentalist adventist teenager who was constantly looking for fantasy outlets away from the religion, and C.S. Lewis was one of the few I was "allowed" to read at the time. Re-reading it has been quite a trip.

I mean, the story is kind of a christian wish-fulfillment of the creation story if it had gone right. He uses different words for god, the devil and angels, but the metaphors are pretty transparent. God creates new life on Venus (written in the 1940s, when we didn't really know what lay under the clouds of Venus), and one man from a fallen Earth (thulcandra, which is kind of an awesome name for Earth) is brought to witness it and thwart the devil in corrupting this new world too.

It all starts as a pretty solid classic SF adventure. The early exploration of Venus (perelandra), the floating islands, the wildlife, etc. are all pretty good if you like exploration fiction. The christian allegory takes over the narrative more and more as the story goes on though, especially once he meets Perelandra's Eve.

The best part of the book I did not remember at all, which is how freaking scary the devil is in this story. From entrance to exit, every encounter with the devil would not be out of place in a modern horror novel. The gore and the mind games were all genuinely creepy to me this time around, even in my current state of highly developed cynicism. Almost worth it just for that. Lewis actually knows how craft a terrifying antagonist.

The last few pages turns into some christian ecstatic mess that I more or less skimmed because it felt like an alter call more than anything. But still, if you can put the heavy-handed christian allegory a little bit to the side, there's a still some solid classic SF meat here for the curious SF reader.

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The More Beautiful World your Heart Knows is Possible

The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible by Charles Eisenstein
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book encapsulates many of the ideas I've been groping towards since leaving my religion and coming out of the closet. It starts with the premise that we all want a more beautiful world and have a concept of human flourishing that is different from the actuality of the world today. From there, he asks what kinds of changes in attitude and behaviors we would have to make in order to make that world possible.

It's a very optimistic book, one that supposes everyone deep down wants the same kind of happiness and that if we focused more on kindness and let go of the judgement we would find our way there. It's less of a specific guidepost to utopia though, and more the start of a discussion of what that would look like, which is really why I love the book. If we're going to make the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible, we have to start talking about what that actually looks like, no? If we stop ourselves from even discussing the possibility of better as unrealistic then we certainly forestall any hope of meaningful change. The first step to a better world? Stop telling ourselves it's impossible.

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Coldheart

Coldheart by Justin Robinson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Stay home and take your medicine. Unless the love of your life is in trouble, missing. Unless you need to see the world as it is. Unless there's not time for the comfort of a medicated haze. Unless you're sure it's the world and not you that's finally gone over the edge. Unless you're ready to face the heart of the storm. Unless you're ready to take the beating of your life to save your reason for living. By all means, stay home and take your medicine.

***

Coldheart introduces the shadow conflict of the League of Magi, a cabal of feuding inhumans possessing incalculable power, forever at war for reasons only they truly understand. Follow the journey of a young schizophrenic as he sinks deeper into the horror at the heart of the worst storm in a century. Catch a glimpse of truths that terrify and stagger the imagination.

In addition to the novella Coldheart, a collection of short stories strike like lightning, flashes of light that illuminate the outlines of the creatures lurking in the shadows and then are gone before the horrified mind can finish putting the pieces of those great beasts together. It is a mercy. In the world of the League of Magi, there's such a thing as seeing too much.

Ask Coldheart. He'll tell you all about it. But pick a time when he's not hungry.

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Last stop, eternal darkness

Tales of the Dying Earth by Jack Vance
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Safely ensconced in a time when sun still burned brightly, James cast his thoughts forward to the end of the world. There he watched the outlandish adventures of a world fallen and rebuilt so many times, its people have lost the will to do more than get by. Their only thought, how best to indulge themselves before the bloated red sun, hanging like a corpse over the Earth, finally flickers and flames out.

Witness the adventures of Turjan the cunning wizard, the innocence of T'sain and the unreasonable rage of T'sain. Gasp as Liane the Wayfarer gets himself in over his head in pursuit of love. Cheer at the high-flying adventures of Ulan Dhor. Marvel at Guyal of Svere as he travels a wasted and decadent land in search of of answers at the fabled Museum of Man.

But there was more to see! The many mis-adventures of the self-named Cugel the Clever as he makes not one but TWO perilous journeys across the earth back to wreak his revenge on Iucounu the Laughing Magician, who surely deserves it. Although, truth be told, Cugel himself is perhaps not an angel in all respects. Or perhaps any respects. Although, against all odds and all appearances to the contrary, sometimes quite clever. A fascinating fellow indeed!

Finally, his gaze settled on Rhialto the Marvelous, popingest popinjay of a band of powerful wizards, where watched the political maneuverings of surely the most decadent overclass of beings in the known history of the world. Caught in the midst of an eons long gender war, thrown back to the distant past to clear his good name and finally whisked to the edge of the known universe, indeed to the very edge of the Nothing Space that exists beyond it, in order to track the origin of the highly valued IOUN stones, Rhialto's machinations are truly marvelous to behold.

It was only with some reluctance, that James withdrew his mind from the unimaginably distant future, his scrying having reached the natural limits of his powers. And so he went on his way, busy with the bustle of the age, in a society still with the youthful exuberance only natural under the auspices of a young, yellow sun. Still, he thought often of aeons distant with all these deeds lost to dust, the character of man fallen and low, and that massive red sun, hanging languidly in the sky. Look, does it falter? Perhaps not just yet.

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Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer

Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I picked this up on a sale at Powell's, so I had no idea what to expect really. I was pleasantly surprised by the prose and the story though. It starts weird and gets weirder. It reminds me of House of Leaves and the game Myst, in part. The world-building, the body horror, the mystery are all gripping enough to keep the pages turning at a steady pace. It's a little short on answers, but heavy on weird and atmosphere and interesting characters. I'm certainly invested enough to add the next two in the trilogy to my list. I think a lot of my overall review will hinge on where the story goes from here, but given the quality of the first volume I'm optimistic.

Recommended.

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Darkness on the Edge of Town by Brian Keene

Darkness on the Edge of Town by Brian Keene
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I love the premise for this one. A town wakes up to find itself covered in darkness. Literally, there is a dark barrier around the edges of the town that no one ever returns from. Everything falls apart of course, but the meat here for me was less the relentless destruction of the township of Walden, but the origin of the darkness and how this book connects to his other works. I am fascinated by the Labyrinth and the 13 and I hope he delves further into them in future works.

What's especially fun to me about Keene's universe is the constant theme of human incompetence. The world usually ends in his books because people think they know enough to mess with powerful magic (or powerful science) and turn out to be unprepared to deal with the forces they unleash. There are basically very few magic practitioners in his worlds that aren't always a botched spell away from worldwide destruction through sheer incompetence, and they all seem blissfully unaware of the danger. Which generally ends up poorly for everyone. I find this state of affairs entertaining.

Anyway, nothing ground-breaking here but as always his relentless pessimism and imaginative monsters make for a fun read.

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Dark Hollow by Brian Keene

Dark Hollow by Brian Keene
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I have yet to not like a book by Briane Keene. This expands Keene's library with a chilling tale of a satyr run amok in a forest near a small town. Increasingly, my favorite parts of these stories are the meta-verse they exist in, fleshed out here in descriptions of the Labyrinth and the 13. I'm increasingly interested in whether he intends to bring this to some kind of climactic conclusion in a future work or if he's just having fun constructing a universal woe machine to plague the inhabitants of earth.

Another fascination is his relentless pessimism in his story-telling. He pulls few punches and I'm not sure he's even heard of the concept of a happy ending. Dark hollow is a diorama constructed and then artfully destructed for your reading pleasure. I'm usually a little too sensitive to horror, but something about his world-bulding just fascinates me.

I'll certainly never look at trees the same way again.

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A Festivus for the rest of us!

Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion by Alain de Botton
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Is it possible to accept that the supernatural elements of world religions are bunk, but that there are still useful practices, ideas, elements that are not replicated in secular culture? Could we steal the good bits from religion and discard the rest? When, in our rush to be free, we threw out the unclean bathwater of religious hypocrisy and belief, was it possible there was still a metaphorical baby in there we should have carefully placed aside? These are the questions Botton is attempting to answer in Religion for Atheists.

His basic assertion, which one might find debatable, is that in attempting to move beyond christianity we have secularized badly. He smartly points out that christians smoothly co-opted pagan practices in their rise to western dominance, but we've largely just run from the past altogether in modern secular culture. I understand this rubs some the wrong way, but it seems true to me that secular culture is missing a great deal I found useful in my former religious life and that leaving religion religion and declaring it evil is maybe the beginning and not the end of my own personal growth. And it seems like most who leave the church and secular culture at large have not yet even asked the question, "Is there something in religion, anything, that we can steal?" As the supposedly more rational side of the debate, can we not admit there may be nuance in the value and danger of religion, and that to sift through for the good within it is not necessarily the same as to apologize for its sins and make excuses? Or must we declare the whole enterprise corrupt and unmentionable like bizarrely dogmatic atheist puritans?

For me, his assertion of lost value in christianity stikes a chord, so I read his book with tremendous interest. I was not the least disappointed. The prose is thoughtful, crisp, witty. I found myself laughing out loud at one point which I did not expect. But to be sure, this is not a proof argument. If the idea that secular culture is lacking somehow and religion might have some good bits to steal just doesn't fly with you, you're not likely to enjoy most of what follows. This is a philosophical discussion of the possible lessons of any good bits of religion, and how it might look to attempt to apply them outside of that structure. Semi-hysterical assertions that Botton is attempting to set up a new religion and crown himself pope or that he is a secret christian (the horror) are hardly worth bothering with, considering the effort he goes to keep the tone conversational and thoughtful and completely non-dogmatic.

His points in general are well taken and I found myself nodding along with almost every chapter. Yes, an agape restaurant or similar place that provides a regular meeting place for people in the community to meet, share stories and discuss common values in a semi-organized fashion might be superior to drinking in pubs and hoping one or two of those things happen every now and again.

Yes, we should probably not cede the propagation of philosophical ideals solely to capitalists schlocking merchandise. I could probably get behind ad campaigns that exist merely to reinforce beneficial social ideas like forgiveness, grace, humility, non-dogmatism, etc.

Yes, museums would be a better replacement for church, as they have argued, if the works were clustered by philosophical topic rather than strictly by style/period. There's a place for both, but think of a museum with wings devoted to works dealing with fear of mortality, familial love, rage and anger, isolation, and loss.

Yes, architecture might be important, and good architecture that inspired us towards our higher ideals would be magnificent.

Yes, temples built not to gods but the ideals they embody would be highly useful and would give citizens a place and perhaps rituals to turn to when things get rough.

Choosing atheism is just the beginning. It does not automatically make one smart or moral. As Botton metions, one of the reasons religion exists in the first place is that as a species we are easily distracted and can only follow a few trains of thought at once, so we need regular reminders on the importance of humility, kindness, compassion, forgiveness, grace, etc. The rituals, the architecture, the meetings, all serve to remind us that we are aiming to maybe be a little better than we are, and provide a structure in attempting to embody our ideals and coping with the daily failure to do so. So why not steal them and do it just as well without all the supernatural fear-mongering? Is there a good reason not to, or are we all just so wounded by our respective religious experiences we can't even be seen touching any part of it?

To be honest, I find the appeal of doing church better than religious folk very appealing. What if we could build an organization (loosely organized perhaps) that ended up doing church better than the christians? What if we could do what they do without all the cover-ups and supernatural fear-mongering? In other words, what if we put our money where our mouth is?

What institutions are left after we abandon and stigmatize religion? Whose messages remain on full broadcast in the public sphere? The state? Capitalists? How do we push back against those powerful institutions and their myopic tendencies without some at least semi-formal institutional power in opposition, where a critical mass of human beings have formally banded together to remind the state the power and obedience are not the only good and to remind capitalism that money corrupts just as much as it cures? Do we somehow imagine that a bunch of atomized atheists are individually going to be able to push back against the money and power of industry and politics without some kind of institutional organization in response? Sure, institutions are by their nature corruptible, but this is a fixable problem. Do you trust the future of liberalism and morality to the hacker group Anonymous? Do you trust it to social media lynch mobs?

Maybe it's time we seriously consider some kind of religion for atheists. We don't need gods to discuss our morals and create structure and support for our moral and ethical development and to address existential doubts and questions with kindness and empathy, but maybe we can attempt to do so in a more organized and useful fashion, rather than leave it to the vagaries of who you happen to run into at the pub or the online outrage of the day.

This book is highly recommended.


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They're Redshirts, Get It?

Redshirts by John Scalzi
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is my first scalzi book, but I hope his other books are better. I love the first half, but was progressively more bored with it through the second half. Much like certain episodes of Community, the further one crawls up one's own ass in a story, the less entertaining/immersing it tends to be. The problem with going meta is it kind of kills immersion and any reason to care about the characters because one is too busy applauding the author and oneself for recognizing that these are characters in a story and someone wrote them, which, you must admit, is kind of a low bar. There's a weird trend of grown-ass adults recognizing the existential reality of a situation and waiting for the accolades to roll in.

"Well, really this is a story and stories tend to follow a formula." *stunned silence* *one man starts clapping slow, and is soon joined in thunderous applause*

It honestly seems like a cop out, a way to avoid writing an actually interesting story. Instead the author gets bored and starts dissecting the act of writing half-way through.

The other problem is, what's the end game after recognizing the meta-situation? It's just pointless. Scalzi essentially stops what is essentially a good story, by saying, "really this is just a story see?" and then it's done. There's no reason to care about the characters once they go back to the past to confront the writers. Nothing really interesting happens there. I would have been more interested somehow in a solution that involved the characters talking back to the author or fighting the narrative within the constraints of "the show." As is, I suppose it's a fine bit of navel-gazing if you're a writer, and like to mythologize and wank on about the act of writing and creating characters, but like most forms of masturbation, it's not going to be that interesting to anyone else.

That said, the first half was good enough that I'd be willing to give some of his less tongue-in-cheek books a try. This one's probably not staying on my bookshelf though.

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Technics and Civilization - Review

Technics and Civilization by Lewis Mumford
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I came to this book from Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death, curious about what he had to say about clocks and their effect on behavior. I envisioned it as a short tract, instead what I found was a glorious 450+ page in-depth philosophical examination the modern relationship of culture and the industrial machine as well as the historical events and trends that all had to converge to get to the dominance of technocratic thinking in our society at the time. I wish I had the depth of background to do a review of this book justice, but I don't, so instead I'll just mention some of the elements and ideas I found within that really appealed to me.

In retrospect Mumford seems like kind of a tragic radical. Alarmed at the direction society was heading with machines in our culture, he put a lot of time into identifying how we got here (here in 1934), and why we should change course and how we should do it. His argument is cogent, his prose is fluid and highly readable for such dense material, and his suggestions were taken up by virtually nobody. At least, nobody who controlled resources and the machines that managed and processed them. What strikes me most is his passion for a humanist society, that placed human happiness first, and wealth and efficiency second. Over and over he returns to the idea that we simply don't have to put machines (and by proxy the men who own them) first, we can put people first, and he comes at that idea from many different directions.

The man himself seems highly educated, well-read and incredibly intelligent, and indeed many of the things he advocates were well ahead of his time and frequently still relevant today, although partly because many of the real problems he addresses were never really adequately addressed.

Among his solutions to a society losing it's humanity to machine-centric thinking, are the following (some more practical than others):

1) Wind, Solar and Nuclear Energy. In 1934! Although, amusingly, he seems to doubt that atomic energy can ever really be exploited in any useable form.

2) He makes a strong case for public ownership of coal, oil and farmland. His reasoning being public resources vital to our survival should not be left to the vagaries of capitalism.

3) He advocates for a universal income, with the same arguments still used to advocate for universal income today.

4) Is almost amusingly casual in commenting that the political changes necessary for any of the ideas he advocates would be a revolution, the bloodlessness of such resting on the moral character of the revolutionaries.

Among his many thoughts and ideas about our relation to machine technology are the following (which I found helpful and thought-provoking):

1) Workers who are treated like cogs in a machine, who are stuck in jobs that are dehumanizing and soul-crushingly repetitive, will "loaf" and work as little as they can get away with and that should be understood as the natural human reaction to putting a human in an inhospitable environment.

2) There are aspects of life machines and industry are not able to address because they lie outside the purview of those things. This seems a silly thing to say out loud because it seems so obvious, but I believe it's something that could be said more often today. A modern way to say this would be something like, "There are aspects of life and human happiness that no cell-phone app or gadget you can buy will ever be able to help someone with."

3) He basically calls bullshit on the entire culture of production, advertising and identity consumerism. He call for a normalization of consumption, where over-consumption of goods would be perceived negatively, and where uniqueness and identity are broadcast through personality, not with consumer goods a substitute for personality.

4) He points out that labor-saving devices only reduce labor if we do not increase how much we consume and suggest that maybe if we didn't consume a bunch of pointless, mass-produced cheaply made and unnecessary goods, we might actually be able to work things like a 2-day work week. He suggests saving labor, only to labor more to consume more is ultimately not going to make us happy. 80 years later I'm not sure he's wrong.

5) A device or a product or a machine should only be used when it has a use appropriate to the specific moment and put down when no longer needed. Which again, seems obvious, but may still be good advice to the average cell-phone user.

There is so much more that I want to write about this book, but it would require more of me than I have to give to articulate every line of thought inspired in the reading. Perhaps in the next read-through. Quirks aside, I find Mumford a brilliant writer, with me exclaiming and highlighting nearly every chapter. If you're interested at all in the relationship between our society and technics, this is definitely one to add to your list.



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Are we not Sex Criminals?

Sex Criminals, Vol. 1: One Weird Trick by Matt Fraction
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

If the basic premise of a hipster couple who can stop time when they have sex and use that power to rob banks doesn't draw you in, I don't know what to tell you. Except to say that the story is well-executed, the jokes are some of funniest, raunchiest sex jokes I've seen in my adult life (and I am usually a big prude about sex jokes), and I enjoyed it quite a bit. Recommended.

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Saga Review

Saga, Volume 1 by Brian K. Vaughan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Gorgeous, weird, NSFW and occasionally shockingly violent. I enjoyed it quite a bit even though I'm increasingly over "shocking comic book violence." I like the premise a lot, I like the protagonists a great deal, I really like the evil aristocrats with TV screens for heads (which is not an original look, but I've always loved it in any context). Especially here, as the main villain seems to have poor control over what he displays on his monitor. Graphic sex and graphic violence, kind of a mix of gratuitous but more to sample than to drown in?

If you like your fantasy and SF well-mixed and seasoned to taste, this is a book you should enjoy.

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Science and the Afterlife Experience - Review

Science and the Afterlife Experience: Evidence for the Immortality of Consciousness by Christopher David Carter
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Well, two late night existential, mortality crises later, and here I am. I have MANY thoughts on this book, and will have a fuller review later. For now, let me say this. He makes some good philosophical points. For one, skepticism implies doubt pending evidence, not absolute denial of phenomena we don't understand. His overall thrust is that scientific materialism as practiced today can be it's own form of fundamentalism, pre-disposed to denying any evidence that doesn't point to a soulless, purposeless, mechanistic universe. Furthermore, that maybe it's possible to walk a middle path with regard to some paranormal phenomena that neither believes blindly or denies evidence. Having said that, he does seem a little too ready to believe some of the stories in this book. Although I will say he had a spectacular point about skeptics in pointing out that they are mostly psychologists, not physicists, and they are relying on out-dated physics to defend their skepticism, with no apparent awareness of the questions about consciousness raised by theories like quantum mechanics (this is a loose and potentially problematic statement, i know). And also just in pointing out that even materialists still don't have a tremendously sound definition of consciousness, although that particular claim I would like to research more.

There are many stories here submitted as evidence for reincarnation, supernatural apparitions and contact with the other side through mediums. They are well sourced generally, and he tends to pick phenomena witnessed by many people, researched by skeptics who failed to provide a definitive debunking, and in some cases became believers, where witnesses were cross-examined to see if their stories held up. He works though the possible explanations for each event, including fraud, and for many of these stories narrows it down to: evidence for survival of consciousness. He certainly acknowledges that fraud has existed in all of these areas, but takes great pains to deliver only evidence that seems to have removed the possibility of fraud. The most interesting of all these cases to me is the paranormal investigator who dies in 1903, and then, if the evidence is to be believed, sends cryptic messages from beyond through several mediums around the world which make no sense until all of them are put together. I'm not sure I believe that one, but it's an interesting idea. But that's what all this comes down to, doesn't it? You either believe that people saw ghosts, can channel living human consciousness from behond the grave or are reincarnated, or you believe the reports are bunk, that people are excitable, or impressionable, or deluded or just flat-out liars.

I'm not sure what I believe on this stuff (and I know it's not proper in this day and age to not declare all of the paranormal debunked and reassure my readers that the only mysteries the universe has left to reveal are relatively mundane time and space mathematical formulas), but I did enjoy reading this attempt at looking for evidence of the afterlife with as little prejudice as possible. The degree to which you believe the stories inside and how much the author succeeded in abandoning his biases, will still probably entirely depend on the level of skepticism you have going into it.

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Fringe-ology

Fringe-ology: How I Tried to Explain Away the Unexplainable-And Couldn't by Steve Volk
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I left my childhood religion informally at 23 or so and then formally at 34 at the same time I came out of the closet. That religion, Seventh-Day Adventism, had a very specific and science fictional eschatology and world view and I realized one day after leaving it that I had to decide what my new world view was. Did I believe in anything beyond the material? Had my views on ghosts/UFOs/Leprechauns changed? Did I believe in a universe run on numerical laws or hidden stories, the plots of which had yet to be revealed? Although, what are the mathematical laws of nature except a kind of story about how things are? In any case, the answer that night was much the same then as it is now: Hell if I know.

That night did spark an interest, however, in reading what there was to read about "fringe" topics, the branches of human experience where rational men of science have yet to give their formal blessing. So I went hunting on Amazon for anything that might fit, and almost immediately stumbled across Fringe-ology by Steve Volk. Lucky for me it's a great overview of paranormal topics.

The introduction alone was almost worth the price of the book to me, containing an earnest and well-argued plea for everyone to stop talking past each other on some of these topics and admit we don't know what we don't know. And that maybe the other side knows a little more than we want to admit.

What was worth the price of the book alone was the chapter on Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, who I not really read much about up until now. You may have heard her name, she was a ground-breaking medical researcher who identified the 5 stages of grief and who authored the book On Death and Dying, which was instrumental in getting hospice and hospital reform for dying patients, who were routinely ignored and left unattended due to psychological blind spots on the part of doctors/hospitals at the time.

What's especially interesting about her story is the promise of the paranormal and the warning contained in her story. Left out of her book was a chapter on the out-of-body experiences and end-of-life visitations she had compiled in her time with terminally ill patients. She hadn't been looking for it and she wasn't the only one to witness/notice the events, but she thought it was a topic the general public wasn't ready for (which was probably a wise choice). But it sparked an interest in her, that didn't necessarily take her to a happy place. However legitimate and interesting her personal experiences had been, they eventually led her to divorce and then falling in with a medium who later turned out to be a simple con-man. In other words, there is a serious danger in losing one's way on these topics, even for the most sober observers.

The remaining chapters cover topics like lucid dreaming, the overview effect, the mass UFO sighting in Stephenville, Texas, the attempts to study psi scientifically, the pros and cons of professional skeptics, mediumship, a potential haunting in Volk's own childhood and a PTSD therapy that has the additional and unintended side-effect of allowing the subject to converse with departed loved ones, or convincing mental replicas, in a meditative state.

Fringe-ology reads like what it is, a series of investigative reports by an experienced newspaper reporter, with no obvious pre-conceptions on what he should find. I like his open-mindedness, I like his critical thinking skills, and I like the heart he brings to the project. I'm not convinced he saw anything entirely "real" in some of his reports, but then neither is he. He really doesn't take a hard stand on any of it, just calls it like he saw it. In an age that mostly seems to breed people prone to standing on soap-boxes and confidently declaring they have seen the vast shape and scope of all creation and from that lofty perspective have a pretty good handle on what happens and what does happen here and elsewhere and what goes on in the hearts of men, it's extremely refreshing to read stories about the paranormal that's aren't "just so."

It's really a fun, though-provoking read and will at least give you something to think about even if you don't change your mind about anything. Volk's writing is accessible and compelling and will keep you turning pages well into the night. Highly recommended.

Favorite Quotes:

"The Central problem, I think, is that as a species we seem to lack humility."

"Me? I'd like to believe in an afterlife, but I'm also not interested in fooling myself."

"If we've learned one thing in this book already, people don't like the unknown very much."

"The people of Stephenville, for instance, never asked to play hose to a paranormal controversy. The people of Stephenville just looked up."

"The scientific method is itself important, but it is not antidote to the very human frailty of ignoring information we don't like and embracing the information we do."

"We don't have to make the choice that popular culture gives us; we don't have to choose one and dispense with the other. This is not a world of binary opposites. We just live that way."

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The 4-D Skinner Box

Everybody knows about the Skinner Box and operant conditioning.  Everybody knows our brains have a soft spot for prize boxes that deliver rewards at random intervals.  Most people seem pretty okay with that.  I mean, a box that delivers, say, delicious candy to you ALL the time would seem like some kind of kiss-ass.  A box that delivered no candy ever would just be some dumb, judgmental asshole.  We KNOW it has candy, and yet it never shares!  Like it's so great.  The best boxes deliver candy sometimes, when it seems reasonable, is what we seem to agree on.  The problem for capitalism's aspiring b-list villains has always been how best to dress up the box that delivers candy sometimes and sell it to an eager market, noses pressed up against glass, miming the pressing of an air lever to see if we follow.  Yes, they want candy is what they're trying to say.

Some attempts are less subtle than others.  Gambling has been around far longer than B. F. Skinner and his research, but in the modern era they've made good use of his work.  Have you been to a casino lately?  Slot machines have evolved in the last 20 years or so.  Gone are mechanical reels coupled with the simple, if exciting, plunk plunk plunk of sometimes change with a perky jingle to let you know you'd won.  Now most are touch-screen games, with embedded mini-games, a bevy of exciting sounds and animations to let you know that SOMETHING is happening.  Sometimes, when you hold your mouth just right as you pull the lever, that is.  The end result is still a machine, that sometimes, when the moon is right and you believe hard enough, delivers money to buy candy.  It's just now, instead of more or less being a naked "random rewards machine" it's been given a nice cozy cover of a "game".  It's nothing to be ashamed of, pulling a lever for sometimes candy, it's bonafide entertainment!  It's an arcade where the game periodically spits quarters back at you.  It's a mini-soap starring you and a cartoon frog.  What's not to love?

Of course, somewhere along the line, traditional video game makers reached the obvious question.  What if you could not only put chocolate in peanut butter, but also put peanut butter in chocolate?!  What if what kept a player playing a given game was not intellectual or physical challenge, but a series of increasingly subtle skinner boxes, delivering sweet digital candy?  Let's face it, delivering fresh physical or mental challenges is challenging work, why not work smarter, not harder?  I mean, you can create what you think are clever puzzles and get nothing but critical disdain, but you put someone  in front of a friendly machine that dispenses sometimes candy like a regular joe and they'll thank you for the opportunity!  And on a day that is still lauded in the halls of b-list villainy came the realization that you don't have to actually deliver anything more substantial than the cartoons and fanfares when "rewarding" players!  As it turns out, there is a market for delivering an intangible version of the sometimes candy experience and people will line up and pay you real human dollars for the privilege.  Some will even become connoisseurs of lever pressing, bragging about the random candy dispensed like they did something special to EARN that candy, "I mean yeah it was just a lever but I really PRESSED it you know?  I pressed it a LOT."

Of course, since aspiring b-list villain is not a commodity we ever seem to run out of, it became important to dress the skinner box product in a distinctive, well-branded way to distinguish it from the ridiculous swarm of competitors.  Recently, I've been pleasantly addicted, really just the tiniest modicum of discomfort, to what I call the 4-D Skinner box: Diablo 3 and Destiny.

Diablo 3 is the third skinner box in Blizzard's popular skinner box series where you beat up the devil and candy comes out.  Now, you can't actually eat the candy so it is necessary to invest the players somewhat in order to make the rewards meaningful.  You are given the task of creator in this tiny universe, and given a little man you mold out of pixels to care for.  He's a bit of a schlub to start.  A little shit in the impressive levers and candy department.  You are given a single lever to start, a basic attack, which you aim at a monster who is hiding all the candy from you.  You hit the lever, which attacks the monster, which delivers candy at a reasonable and not shitty interval:  sometimes.  The candy in this case, is clothing and weapons with which to hang upon your tiny creation, to reduce the total number of whacks needed to hit monsters and get candy more or less.  And to prevent monsters from demolishing your little man and ruining what should be a pleasant candy experience.  Of course, to keep it interesting, the monsters get harder to whack as time goes on, requiring you to hit the lever more and get more candy to get better at killing monsters who are, lets face it, only becoming more difficult about coughing up the goods. 

At regular intervals you will get more levers, like a cone of fire, and a meteor strike, with which to crack these pinatas.  Blizzard, god damn and bless them, has made the gathering of candy extremely pleasurable, if you like whacking pinatas with an increasingly insane variety of sticks.  You can burn the with fire, call meteors from heaven, whirl spinning hammers, do super-punches, shoot pointed sticks of all varieties and all this candy will keep coming out, and sometimes really good candy with blue or yellow or orange wrappers that the skinner box only delivers sometimes sometimes, or sometimes sometimes sometimes OR more rarely sometimes sometimes sometimes sometimes.  That's the best candy of all:  sometimes^4.  And doesn't it look nice on your little man.  And don't the monsters fall over so nicely now!  And doesn't it look shit 15 minutes later when after a session of persistent whacking nothing better has fallen out.  The game is a gorgeous, engaging, skinner box with so many cartoons and fanfares and flashy things that it's easy to forget it's an incredibly calculated and complex collection of reward ratios tied to a complicated multi-lever system.  This is a deluxe skinner box and it will deliver the candy that you never knew you wanted.

Hot on its heels, is Bungie's new skinner box model Destiny.   Where Blizzard gets you popping out candy like a seasoned lover, Bungie's attempts at skinner boxing seem clumsy and shy.  It's not sure where your buttons are but damn if they aren't trying to get you and your brain off as best they can.  What actually seems to be holding them back is some kind of, how do I say it, dignity?  That seems to want their game to be an actual game of some sort, and maybe some kind of MMO and, oh yes, a consensually addictive skinner box experience for the whole family to enjoy.  You also have a little man to dress in this one, but where D3 plays out like the fun adventures of a cartoon man and the candy-ripe hordes of the apocalypse in a 3rd-person isometric point of view, destiny is much more of a traditional "shooter" with manly shooty men and blocky armor.  For anyone who's been hit in the head recently, a shooter is a first-person experience wherein the player is given a variety of guns with which to caress the world.   In Destiny there is also punching and a couple of superpowers for when the shooting begins to create a sense of ennui about the limitations of self-expression in a violent post-apocalypse.  Make no mistake, the shooting is fun.  The punching is satisfyingly punchy.  The powers are glowy and boomy and very impressive.  These are the smoothly contoured levers of the Destiny experience.

The skinner box itself seems to need a little work.  The first addiction in any skinner box rpg is generally "leveling your mans" which means getting him from a dumb baby with a rags to a big-boy totally grown-up space where the only excuse for not having a nice outfit and a bigger stick is an inexcusable lack of lever pulling, which the growing up process should have instructed the player in adequately.  But once the story, such as it is, has finished and leveling, such as it was, is over, players still need some flimsy excuse to keep pressing the lever.  No one likes to see the man behind the curtain pulling the lever and stuffing candy in his face like any old schlub, they like to see a prince among princes in his finery whacking monsters until candy comes out for the good of all, in what is agreed to be a worthy and compelling exercise.  For a purpose.  If there's one thing you don't want in a skinner box experience it's a moment of existential self-reflection.  

But Destiny does try.  When you successfully shoot a monster the candy, in a perfectly sometimes way, will spill out in a glowy white, green blue or purple orb.  It is really a very sensual, pinata-like experience.  But it doesn't seem to happen as frequently as one might hope, or rather as one's brain might crave.  The reward ratio doesn't seem "sometimes" enough, you know?  After the leveling is done and the story is over, the only thing to really do is re-run all the story missions or randomly roam the world whacking monsters and hoping candy spills out.  D3 has a similar post-story mode, but it somehow seems more satisfying.  Probably because the candy flows so fast you rarely have a moment to ask why you're still doing this.  In destiny you can spend a day and not find better candy, and the candy flows so slowly there is plenty of time to reflect on what you're actually doing with your time, which, as discussed, is death to the skinner box experience.  

Which isn't to say Destiny isn't fun, it is, but for more traditional reasons.  I get very little upgradeable candy when I play, but caressing the world with bullets is still as fun as it was in the first 5 minutes and the environments are very pretty, except for the cubicles.  Which is to say, the core gameplay in Destiny is actually kind of fun, independent of the skinner box addiction mechanics, which is not something I'm sure I could say about D3.  But it also means once you've run out of new enemies to shoot, or get tired of the environments or juveniles tea-bagging your corpse in pvp, the skinner box ratios may not be enough to keep people pulling the levers in numbers large enough to satisfy the b-list villains who funded it.  I assume.  I am strictly the rube and never the mastermind in these scenarios.

The interesting thing about these games is some players are purely in it for the uncluttered skinner box experience and will focus all their efforts on reducing the extraneous "game" crap and try to arrange an experience that is more or less just pressing the lever without any distractions.  In Destiny this was accomplished by identifying a cave that spawned enemies frequently, and then standing in front of it, shooting more or less continuously, watching the cave fill up with brightly colored candy cubes.  People loved it.  Bungie, with a tinge of mild embarrassment removed the cave, because while they want people addicted, they don't want people ADDICTED, if you know what I mean.  Standing in front of a cave shooting mindlessly for hours is a tad too reminiscent of dead-eyed retirees plunking pensions into slots all night, every night hoping for some kind of transcendence, which in the religious parlance of the area is called "the jackpot" I believe.  But here in lies the problem, where Bungie wants to be in bed with the devil, but doesn't want to smell like hell.  It's like creating a funpark for heroine addicts with promises of delicious heroine and being surprised when junkies start flipping the tables and screaming about how stingy they are with the needles, or worse, the growing suspicion that this shit is methadone.  METHADONE.  You don't tell a junkie how much is enough, you know?  It's difficult to make money half-assing addiction, because junkies aren't great at moderation by definition.

Not that Bungie won't make a zillion dollars.  I believe it cost $500 million human dollars to make and that they more or less recouped that on the first day.  And, methadone or not, there's rewards ratios have certainly been strong enough to keep myself and many others playing more than we no doubt intended to.  It's a fun game, and sometimes there is candy.

Everybody knows about the Skinner box and operant conditioning.  But who doesn't love candy?

The Long Hello

The Long Earth by Terry Pratchett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

If you're looking for some light SF reading, you could do much worse than the Long Earth. I find it interesting that people are accusing this of being stealth YA material, because it read to me much more like the classic SF stories I love which are big on ideas and light on complicated prose. I love the exploration here of the Long Earth, and western civilization's tendency to push ever westward into unexplored territory. I love the push and pull between Lobsang and Joshua as two oddballs off to explore the multiverse. I even love the attempt to work old mythology into the premise, which works surprisingly well.

This is a classic adventure story more along the lines of Journey to the Center of the Earth more than anything. The premise here is so big that the potential implications of the discovery on datum Earth and humanity as a whole are only barely touched before it works its way to the big cliff-hanger finale. I like the little touches of Pratchett's humor and I like how weird it gets to towards the end.

While other discerning readers may want to quibble about the ending, or the writing style or what-have-you, all I'll say is it consistently kept me turning pages because I had to see what they discovered next. That's good enough for me to recommend it.

-1 star for the cliffhanger ending, because I hate cliffhangers.

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