I’m scheduling this post to auto-publish in my absence, as by the time you read this I’ll already be in Panama. Gonna go see the canal and have some Panaman tacos or something, I guess. Back on Monday, meanwhile, here’s a quick write-up I’ve done on this year’s SF (certainly not exhaustive), in light of the Nebula Award being open for nominations.
Author Archives: J.J.S. Boyce
Five Important (To Me) Non-Fiction Books
Books that were not only interesting, but taught me something new that I also happen to think was important. In no particular order:
1) The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs: “It is easy to blame the decay of cities on traffic . . . or immigrants . . . or the whimsies of the middle class. The decay of cities goes deeper and is more complicated. It goes right down to what we think we want, and to our ignorance about how cities work. The forms in which money is used for city building — or withheld from use — are powerful instruments of city decline today. The forms in which money is used must be converted to instruments of regeneration — from instruments buying violent cataclysms to instruments buying continual, gradual, complex, and gentler change.”
2) Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond: “The history of interactions among disparate peoples is what shaped the modern world through conquest, epidemics and genocide. Those collisions created reverberations that have still not died down after many centuries, and that are actively continuing in some of the world’s most troubled areas.”
3) The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It by Paul Collier: “The left needs to move on from the West’s self-flagellation and idealized notions of developing countries. Poverty is not romantic.
“The countries of the bottom billion are not there to pioneer experiments in socialism. They need to be helped along the already-trodden path of building market economies. The international financial institutions are not part of a conspiracy against poor countries. Rather, they represent beleaguered efforts to help.
“The right needs to move on from the notion of aid as part of the problem — as welfare payments to scroungers and crooks. It has to disabuse itself of the belief that growth is something that is always there for the taking, if only societies would get themselves together.”
4) The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan: “’Eating is an agricultural act,’ as Wendell Berry famously said. It is also an ecological act, and a political act, too. Though much has been done to obscure this simple fact, how and what we eat determines to a great extent the use we make of the world — and what is to become of it. To eat with a fuller consciousness of all that is at stake might sound like a burden, but in practice few things in life can afford quite as much satisfaction. By comparison, the pleasures of eating industrially, which is to say eating in ignorance, are fleeting. Many people today seem perfectly content eating at the end of an industrial food chain, without a thought in the world; this book is probably not for them.”
5) The World Without Us by Alan Weisman: “When you examine societies just as self-confident as ours that unraveled and were eventually swallowed by the jungle…you see that the balance between ecology and society is exquisitely delicate. If something throws that off, it all can end.
“. . . Two thousand years later, someone will be squinting over the fragments, trying to find our what went wrong.”
Bonus) The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White: “To achieve style, begin by affecting none.”
A Plagiarist Confesses
Here’s an interesting story. A guy who loves to read and wants to be a great writer starts finding that his work is much improved when he spices it up with big chunks of text lifted from famous authors. He goes to college (I’m guessing English Lit), graduates, works in a bookstore, and all along is writing, with small successes here and there (a poem in a major anthology, a well-received short story).
This all culminates in a spy thriller book that receives great initial reviews and is selling well, until three weeks in it’s discovered that the first fifteen pages include twenty plagiarized passages from everyone from Robert Ludlum (creator of Jason Bourne) to the James Bond novels (created by Ian Fleming, but it’s not clear if he took anything from Fleming’s original books). All the books are now being recalled, and customers are being told to return them for a refund (though I wouldn’t, it might be worth something on Ebay one day).
The plagiarist tells his story on an addiction support site, and talks a lot about AA. Interestingly, as one commenter points out, he doesn’t actually apologize in the entire piece.
Frankenstein and Other First Novels
I look forward to a package of fresh books this week, all review copies I have requested from one publishing house or another. Meanwhile, I’ve been finishing up the last of the books I originally brought south with me, and expect to polish the last of them off next week.
I’ve just now finished Frankenstein, and yes, it is a first novel and sometimes clunky, as iconic as the story has become, but the (arguable) problems with it derive less from Shelley herself than the style of writing of the time. With respect to Austen, romantic aka pre-Victorian literature is not known for being tightly-plotted.
The 160-page novel, if you cut out all the exposition on the Swiss countryside, unnecessary back story of irrelevant minor characters, and long, melodramatic monologues by Victor Frankenstein (who, by all accounts, never was a doctor at all), you might have a decent 30-page short story (or a short graphic novel).
The 19th-century style, particularly for the pre-Victorians, is to drag out narrative, then pile it on when it comes to surprise, suspense, and terror, sometimes to the point where character behaviour makes little sense. Frankenstein brings his monster to life and as soon as it twitches, what does he do but literally run out of his own house and not return until the confused life form has stumbled off into oblivion.
He doesn’t see the monster again for a year, though we are told to believe he has maintained a frenzied sense of dread that entire time. The first few months are spent bedridden and near death, of course, since that brief glimpse of his awakened creation apparently shut down his immune system.
This is rather over the top. How frail were people in those days? Every time something unfortunate or simply unseemly happens, our poor Victor either has a nervous break-down or faints away into a coma. Either way he awakes in bed, prison, or a sanitarium to find three months (at a minimum) have gone by.
It’s certainly a lot easier to simply tell the reader a scene was horrific beyond imagination rather than actually developing dramatic tension and earning one’s emotional pay-offs. Maybe Shelley should have written teen dramas for television.
(For an example of pre-Victorian done well, although it’s faux-pre-Victorian, Susanna Clarke’s 2004 debut, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, is pretty good once it gets going. At nearly 800 pages, though, its even less concise and to the point than the works it is inspired by.)
The Burzynski Clinic
If you haven’t heard of it recently, this is a medical scam where the proprietors claim to have effective cancer treatments, for which claims, nevertheless, they are unable to marshal any real evidence. Desperate sick people and their loved ones shell out hundreds of thousands of dollars for this bogus treatment.
Recently they’ve engaged a lawyer for the purposes of threatening everybody who’s ever said anything bad about the clinic, hoping to scare them into taking down articles, blog posts, and the like which expose their dishonesty.
After all, what is a lawyer for if not to bully the little guy on behalf of those with deep pockets? The Western legal system is essentially ritualized rhetorical combat, the goal being triumph and plunder; not justice, truth, or reconciliation.
Some more details, from the perspective of one of their (17-year-old) victims, is collected on his blog. Read the full story on the fraudulent Burzynski Clinic.
Readings
I brought two volumes of stories from famed Argentine writer, Jorge Luis Borges, on this trip. A Costa Rican beach seemed as good a place as any to finally acquaint myself with the founder of Latin Magical Realism. When I started thumbing through, however, I realized I had ordered the wrong edition of Fictions. It wasn’t an English translation.
“Sure,” you’re saying, “that’s a bit of an inconvenience, but aren’t you supposed to be working on your Spanish? And if anything, it should sound even better in its original language.” Which is true, except I didn’t get the book in its original Spanish either, but a translation into French. So that’s no good to anybody.
(Honestly, a Spanish edition wouldn’t be much better. Borges is a complex writer, partly influenced by Kafka, for a start. My Spanish reading level is more appropriate to See Spot Run. Fortunately, I at least managed to order the correct edition of Labyrinths.)
At the Beach
V is with family in El Salvador, so I’m on my own for a week. I’ve been lax in my work lately, but put in a good six hours writing yesterday and am on par to match or beat that again today. I doubt I’ll take very good care of myself this next week. I’m thinking two meals a day: one smoothie and one package of ramen. Keeping things simple.
We spent this past Monday at the beach on Puntarenas, which was mostly deserted due to the slightly grey weather. Yet with December just around the corner, the water was warm. Much warmer than a Manitoba lake in the high heat of August.
(Photo by V.)
I said that day that this had been only my second time dipping a toe into the ocean, the first being some ankle-deep wading at South Padre Island, Texas, 14 years ago (it was probably early November). I was wrong, however. I remembered today that I’d spent a day at the beach (with, again, some ankle-wading) when I lived in Xiamen, China, almost exactly four years ago (it was December). It was a class trip, one of the fonder memories of my time there.
This was, however, the first time I actually swam, though I didn’t venture very deep. It took us a long time to get around to making the trip, considering how close it turns out to be. I’m eager to go back soon.
Going Nowhere
Social reformers are probably as old as society itself. I’ve been reading Thomas More, who wrote his social satire, Utopia, early in the 16th century, only a few decades after Columbus’ famous voyage, and a few years after Amerigo Vespucci published on his travels to the New World.
Spinning off of these real-life current events, More imagined yet more hitherto unknown countries, especially the nation of Utopia. He used this imagined idyllic society to critique the Tudor England of his time. Later in his life he would lose his head after going head-to-head with Henry VIII over the tyrant’s break with the church.
(Swift’s satirical work more than two centuries later, Gulliver’s Travels, did much the same for his own contemporary politics, but was a bit more light-hearted, and had more to do with parliament and less with the monarchy.)
Today utopia is used as a general term referring to any fictional perfect society, and there has been somewhat of a literary tradition in imagining such societies, perhaps as lost tribes, alien races, or our own future. But just as important has been the literary tradition of dystopias, which have exactly the same purpose at heart.
Just as a utopian work contrasts the flaws in the writer’s society (if only implicitly) with an envisioned better one, the dystopian novel exaggerates the flaws and dangers in our society by imagining how much worse they might get. The most famous example would be Orwell’s 1984, imagining a totalitarian future England (and, in fact, the rest of the world is implied to be much the same). But there are many more.
Post-acopalyptic works could be considered a major sub-genre of the dystopian novel, and there have been no shortage of them since knowledge of nuclear weapons become public in 1945, though not every imagined apocalypse is a nuclear one, and not every dystopian novel takes place after armageddon. In many, the world changes no slowly no one notices, and this can be just as scary.
More derived the name Utopia from a Greek root meaning “nowhere”. He may simply have been winking at the reader that his supposed real-life discussion of a little-known country is entirely imaginary, or he may have been suggesting that a truly perfect society could never exist.
Recommended dystopian works (novels, comics, film, gaming): 1984, Brave New World, A Clockwork Orange, The Handmaid’s Tale, Oryx and Crake, The Road; V for Vendetta; Soylent Green, Logan’s Run, The Road Warrior, Gattaca; The Mirror’s Edge.
Getting Through Asimov
Isaac Asimov published nearly 500 books in his lifetime. An oft repeated (but incorrect) claim is that Asimov has published at least one book for every category of the Dewey Decimal system. In reality he missed one, the 100 category, philosophy and psychology. Still, it’s an impressive body of work.
I have no intention of devoting that much reading time to a single author, but I’ve been hitting his major works over the last several years. His Empire series, his Foundation series (the original trilogy, but not the later books of the ’80s), two of his most critically successful novels, The Gods Themselves and, just yesterday, I read The End of Eternity (pretty good, an epic tale of time travel).
The only real “must-read” left on my Asimov list is his Robots stories (on which the film I, Robot, starring Will Smith was based). This is a bit funny, because years before I’d actually read anything by him, back in high school, I did know the name Isaac Asimov, and the one thing I knew about him is that he had written some science fiction wherein he laid out the “Three Laws of Robotics”:
1) A robot may not harm a human or, through inaction, allow a human to come to harm.
2) A robot must obey human beings, unless this would conflict with the first law.
3) A robot must protect itself, so long as this does not come in conflict with the first two laws.
That’s from memory. I’m sure just about everyone has heard of those before, even previous to the Will Smith movie. Part of the delay in reading the works in question that I’ve been trying to make sure I got the right collection. It’s not as easy as a book series; I don’t want a “best of” collection that randomly picks robot stories. I’m looking to get the complete set of stories in publication order, and it’s not always clear on product descriptions what collections include which stories. I did get the I, Robot collection to start, and will read it when I’m back in Canada.
That’s not to say I’ll be “done” with Asimov after that. But when it comes to the classics, including sci-fi classics, I try to hit the most important stuff first. I may eventually read everything Heinlein’s written, for example, but when I decided to check him out for the first time, I started with Stranger in a Strange Land, then Starship Troopers and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. I didn’t stop there, but if I hadn’t happened to like him, I would at least have wanted to see what the fuss was about with those particular novels.
Friend Reading Lists
As a rule, I’m willing to take at least one “you must read this” recommendation from each friend and acquaintance, more in the case of someone I’m closer to or have reason to think has similar tastes to my own. Sometimes they don’t even realize they’ve given me a recommendation. The advantage of this is a greater variety in reading material and education than I might come to on my own. Those lacking such recommendations can always look into literature classes via this course finding site.
An old friend that I’ve mostly lost touch with mentioned The Death and Life of Great American Cities years ago. At the time he was thinking about studying architecture, but he still has the book listed on his Facebook profile even today, so that seems as good an endorsement as any.
The book is 50 years old now, and its influence on the field is obvious even to me. I recognize her ideas from the little bit of previous reading I’ve done on city planning/urban development, and now I get to hear it straight from the horse’s mouth.
Tthere’s an obvious comparison tomake between healthy neighbourhoods and healthy ecosystems. The different aspects of a neighbourhood, different businesses, residences, and public areas all feed off of and depend on each other. Thus, mixed-use land that develops organically tends to beat out hierarchical, planned and zoned neighbourhoods. Just as biodiversity is required for a healthy ecosystem.
It makes sense when you think about it. No one wants to live in downtown Winnipeg because there’s very little parking, limited options for grocery stores or other amenities. There’s a giant arena, but that just means people who can afford to migrate in for an event and then leave when it’s over. They come downtown for a single event but don’t stick around; of course they live elsewhere.
The idea of publicly building a major designed cultural centre to renew an area is 50 years out of date. Jacobs explained in 1961 why this fails to work, time and again. Why don’t our own politicians know better?
Compare our downtown to a vibrant area like Osborne Village, where the sheer amount of diversity, and the combination of business and residential use keep the place busy all night. Everything feeds on everything else. It’s symbiosis. Downtown is most active during the day, when the nine-to-five crowd migrates in for work, but dies at night.
This might be oversimplifying, but isn’t it astounding how cities can spend massive amounts of public money on initiatives that do not reach their goals? Shouldn’t the people making the decisions have more training and education before being called on to make or approve such proposals?