Past Reading

Lets Roll!, Lisa Beamer

Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke
Written in 1977, I nonetheless find irony in the date Clarke chose for the fictional asteroid impact mentioned in passing that destroys utterly Padua, Genoa, and Venice -- September 11. 2077.

I just started reading this book and I appreciate the solid science and appropriate caution depicted when encountering the extreme unknown -- such as an alien artifact. Some of the technology is out of date though -- of course that's the risk you take when you read old science fiction. Being dated this way is the risk science fiction writers take every time they put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard. Set in the future but written just 5 years before the IBM PC changed the world, it's still amusing that an astronomer has to "request computer time" to get his results processed. People in this future live on the moon, Mars, and Mercury, as well as Earth. In describing the time lag for radio signals between the planets and the complications this would cause for people from all the planets to teleconference, the solution taken is to only allow teleconferencing between Earth and the moon and require the delegates from Mars and Mercury to appear in person. That's fine I guess, but a holographic video correspondence that follows the pattern of a multi-person e-mail thread would also work. But, didn't have e-mail in 1977, certainly not in Sri Lanka, so did not think of that...

I have not read Arthur C. Clarke since I was in high school, but what strikes me the most about this book is how lacking in maturity his characters are -- especially the respected scientists. However, as I continue to read, I'm keeping in mind that that may be a commentary about ivory towered "respected scientists" and leaving open the possibility that his other characters may not have this deficiency... I hope they do not -- that could get annoying really quickly.

I've finished the book now, and that was a commentary on ivory towered types. No one else in the story was so self-centered and immature. The book was good, with some quite interesting, really alien stuff, especially towards the end. I won't give away the ending but that was a surprise too. And appropriate, considering what the word "alien" really means. Think I'll definitely read Rama II and III at some point.

Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
This book is so good it should not be slandered with the label "literature"! Watching Ken Burns' documentary of Mark Twain as I read this, I think he would have approved of that assessment. Seems Twain was an artist more interested in appealing to the masses than he was to the literary intelligentsia. I am gratified to find that such a monumental figure as Mark Twain shares my humble opinion of the literary intelligentsia!

Huckleberry Finn has an amazing capacity to draw you in and make you care about the characters, and believe they are real people. Jim and Huck seem more like real people to me than any characters in any other book I've ever read. I felt anxiety over Huck's domestic situation with his abusive, drunkard father, and stress over delays in his escape. I was quite concerned over how Huck and Jim were going to rid themselves of the "king" and the "duke" and come out unscathed. I was very concerned about Jim as Tom Sawyer pointlessly complicated Huck's plans to free him from captivity on the Phelp's farm. And of course the book is a commentary on slavery, and by extension racism, as it depicts a southern white boy in the era of slavery who is in the process of unlearning everything he has been taught about the right and wrong of slavery. It's interesting to see him struggle to do the "right thing" and turn Jim in as a runaway slave, and then accept that he'll just have to go to hell because he can't bring himself to do "right" by betraying his friend.

The only criticism I can offer is that at times the characters were quite clearly "saved by the script". Situations pulled out of the fire by nothing more than the will of the author not to take the most likely, realistic outcome of the events he'd been building and building for dramatic effect. But everyone deserves to be judged by the context of their own times, so I will not hold what is very much a late 20th century preference for realism against Mr. Clemens. Huckleberry Finn was a thoroughly enjoyable read and a ripping yarn!

The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of The Oxford English Dictionary, Simon Winchester
This book is actually interesting! Received as a gift, honestly I was not too excited about it. I mean, the making of the dictionary. Come on. Even though the cover says it's a tale of murder and insanity -- I mean that comes off looking like a transparent attempt to make a dull story appear more exciting. But it actually is a pretty interesting story. One of the main contributors to the OED was criminally insane and had murdered someone, by mistake due to a paranoid delusion. Anyway, writing the OED was a monumental task -- a 70 year project, and the scale of the task of capturing and defining an entire language, is eye opening.

Buddhism, Parts I & II, Malcolm David Eckel
I'm re-reading this great overview of Buddhism! All the major concepts and ideas of Buddhism, all the major schools of Buddhism, and how the tradition evolved as it made its way from India to S.E. Asia to China to Tibet and to Japan.

Great World Religions, part four: Confucius, the Tao, the Ancestors and the Buddha: The Religions of China: Beliefs, Practices, and Histories, Robert Henricks
Fills in a lot of gaps in my knowledge. Gives me an overview of Confucius and Taoism, and good detail on which Buddhas and Bodhisattvas were important in Chinese Buddhism specifically. Also a good description of Sukhavati, the Pure Land. This book operates well on a factual historical level.

Also fascinating in another way was the description of the Taoist religion -- different from the Taoist philosophy we're most familiar with in the west, but based on it, and of Chinese folk religion, as it is still practiced in Taiwan today. A polytheistic heavenly bureaucracy, structured almost exactly like the pre-republic (1911) imperial bureaucracy, and seen as it's heavenly equivalent, where departed loved ones can sometimes become deified -- people becoming gods after their deaths -- and get government jobs in the bureaucracy of heaven!

Schlepping Towards Enlightenment, Lama Surya Das and Michael Toms
This book inspired me to try to quantify what Buddhism is. However, as I tried to do that, I realized I was unequal to the task. Having now read eight books about Buddhism, there are so many sub-topics I want to find out more about, that I think I do not yet, even know enough to know how little I know. As I thought of more and more aspects of this 2500 year old multicultural tradition that encompasses the lion's share of eastern thought on philosophy, psychology, and religion, I realized that in trying to quantify it, I was only hitting the aspects of it that are most important to me. So, I think the best thing I can do for this book is quote from it:

"Throughout the ages Buddhism has spread from culture to culture reinventing itself to remain applicable and accessible. From its inception in India 2500 years ago, through its Chinese, Tibetan, Japanese, and Burmese variations, Buddhism has adapted to its practitioners rather than forcing them to adapt to it. Over the past three decades the emergence of a distinctly American brand of Buddhism, is happening. It is demystified, non-sectarian, pragmatic, and psychological rather than theological in its orientation. Perhaps this is its attraction. Because it is more than a religion -- it is a cornucopia of common sense principles for living life in a more balanced, peaceful and loving way." - Michael Toms

Neuromancer, William Gibson
If you've never read any science fiction but want a concise overview of the genre, probably this book and any episode of Star Trek involving time travel, would do it. Neuromancer seems to include all the usual themes and elements, except aliens and time travel. Gibson should perhaps have entitled it "Science Fiction", like generic 'Beer'. It has a hollywood-like virtual reality "internet", hackers, an artificial intellegence trying to emerge into full sentience, artificial simulations of specific people's personalities and skills, people with cybernetic implants, experiencing other people's lives through their own eyes ala "Being John Malkovich", super beings (the AI in this case) communicating with people via manipulating imagery from their own memories, drug culture, down and out city life ala "Bladerunner", a criminal mastermind assembling a team for his own nefarious ends (very much like the movie Swordfish, at least in the beginning), and both kinds of space stations. The orbital resort kind with paradise gardens, mag-lev trains and all the usual low gravity sports, as well as the barely liveable cities in space of a particular group -- in this case Rastafarians. All that and it's quite an entertaining read too!

Now that I've finished the book (the above was written mid-way through), I have to say that it wasn't so much anti-climatic, as it simply had no climax. The protagonists hit some snags along the way, but in the end there was no real resistance to what they were trying to do. So they accomplished their goal. Once they had gotten through all the mishaps and layers of security protecting the person with the secret password they needed, she pretty much just went along with the plan as if she didn't really seem to mind one way or the other. Only later, and almost in passing, was it revealed that they had all been playing right into the plans of her genetic mother (whom she was a clone of) all along. She had wanted an artificial intelligence to achieve its full potential of sentience, and so had programmed one (Winter mute) with a strong drive to do so, though she left no record as to why she wanted this to happen or what she expected or hoped would come of it.

I've read several places that this book is considered "the one that started it all", meaning the "cyber-punk" sub-genre of science fiction. I can't really say anything about that, having not yet as far as I know, read any other "cyber-punk" novels. It does seem to do a few new things, in it's in-depth treatment of a futuristic imagining of cyberspace, hackers, and artificial intelligence. Not to belittle the book or the genre "cyber-punk", but based admittedly just on this book, I don�t really think this should be considered a new genre, or a genre that needs a name -- cyber-punk. I say this simply because in these days of computers and internet and continuing uncertainty about the future of human space flight, cyberspace seems the natural direction for science fiction to go... I don't think cyber-punk will be an offshoot of science fiction -- that would need a name for the genre -- I think this is the direction science fiction is going.

Metamorphosis and Other Stories, Franz Kafka
My comments on this book grew so large they split off onto another page...

The History of Britain, Simon Schama, part 2, part 3
Wow, just a fascinating read. Covers the history of Britain from the neolithic era through 2002 (!) in a very entertaining and accessible way. This is the same "History of Britain by Simon Schama" that you may have seen on the History Channel. If you're an American, the simple fact is that prior to 1776 Britsh history is our history. American culture is an offshoot of British culture. Some of the most interesting parts for me were Roman Britain, all the kings from Henry Plantaganet through Henry VIII and his daughter Queen Elizabeth I, the Scottish Darien venture, the English Civil War of the 1640's, the American Revolution (it becomes clear how the American Revolution grew out of the political and philosophical thought surrounding the English Civil War), and how the British came to rule in India. Some of them I knew I wanted to learn more about, some of them I didn't know I did! If you're interested in British history at all, this is a great book to learn more about it.

David Brin's two "Uplift" Trilogies, Startide Rising, The Uplift War, Brightness Reef, Infinity's Shore, and Heaven's Reach
Commentary to come after I re-read these great books!





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