garote | Entries tagged with books

I poked into this book about ten years ago, and posted a sort-of review on Amazon. Then much later Amazon notified me that an automated system had detected a violation of its content policy, and in response it was taking down every review I'd posted on the site, over approximately 15 years.

It never told me what it had found, and the process is left very deliberately opaque as a cover-their-ass legal policy. I had zero interest in making some kind of appeal. That was the last in a series of signals to me that contributing any meaningful content into Amazon's universe of data was utterly foolish, and frankly I should have known that from the start.

Anyhoo, the review I wrote is below, preserved for the heck of it:

If this book had any more strawmen in it, it would have to come wrapped in bailing wire.

But that's rather beside the point, isn't it, because you and I both know that the people who sit down to read this book will fall squarely into only one of two categories, and that will determine how much they enjoy the experience:

The categories are:

1. People who pride themselves on having an "open mind" about creationism, and are looking for some kind of balanced presentation.
2. People who feel personally invested in the idea of divine creation and are looking for reassurance (or ammunition).

To save time, I'm going to assume that anyone reading this review is in one of those two categories. Anyone who falls into any other category would steer away from this book just after reading the title. Now I'll explain why the category you're in is important.

If you're in category 1, you're going to choke right when you get to the end of the introduction, where the author states quite boldly that Darwin's theory describes evolution as "a purely undirected process". If you have sharp eyes you can stop right there. The author hopes you won't notice this little falsehood, because the entire book that follows depends on it completely.

He will spend 20 looong chapters building a castle in the sky, made of many bricks, each an example of how incredibly unlikely it is that any of the components of modern life would spontaneously form in various "undirected" ways. But you don't need any of that, because you have recognized the switcheroo, and you know that the cornerstone of Darwin's theory is that evolution is a very directed process indeed. It is directed by a process that had been thoroughly described in all its myriad forms since his time. That process is given the name "natural selection" and it is both ruthless and incredibly creative. And, unlike what this book claims a few chapters in, it applies just as well to the precursor molecules that formed the first living cells, as it does to the living cells that followed. That selection process changes the numbers drastically.

But even so, the numbers don't actually need to be changed that much. To you folks with open minds in category one, here's something that may interest you:

Did you know that the eukaryotic cell - the kind of cell that makes up all plants and animals, every creature you can see with the naked eye - was quite likely created "by accident", by a very specific collision of two types of bacterial cell - archaebacteria and eubacteria, a billion years ago? It was a very unlikely smashing-together that resulted in a viable, new creature. In fact, in all of the Earth's history, it happened only ONCE. (How do we know it happened just once? Because when we examine the genetic code of various cell components in plants and animals, we can trace their lineage back, and we find that all the lines everywhere converge to one single parent.)

(Don't just take my word for it, take the word of a textbook, for example: The Cell, 2nd edition, by Geoffrey M Cooper of Boston University. Very much worth reading.)

Before that one eukaryotic cell appeared, archaebacteria and eubacteria ruled the Earth, for three billion years. It took three billion years, of an entire planet sloshing around, for that "accident" to happen JUST ONCE.

Consider this entire planet. Not just your house, or the city you live in, but the whole planet. Now consider your lifespan, of about a hundred years. Consider that lifespan passing repeatedly, 30 times in a row. That's much farther back than you can trace your ancestry. Now consider a thousand intervals of that. You can't, really. Our brains just can't manage it. They go up to about a hundred years or so and just break. Think of it as a design constraint. A thousand of anything is too much. But now, in a purely numerical sense, think of a thousand of those intervals of a thousand intervals of 30 lifetimes. That's how long three billion years is. All your instinctive notions of what's "likely" to happen in the environment around you are completely destroyed by an interval that long.

You could take a few shots at calculating the odds of two fairly incompatible types of organism smashing together and surviving as a hybrid, applied to that interval, but all the numbers would be speculative, because we still don't know enough about early biochemistry to narrow them down. Nevertheless, once on a whole planet over three billion years is enough room for some very long odds. If the chances of a coin toss coming up heads is 50 percent, and you flip a coin twice, you would not be surprised at all if it came up heads at least once. If the chances of something happening in a year anywhere on the planet are one in a billion, and you wait three billion years, you shouldn't be surprised or even impressed if that thing happens.

And so, here we are to talk about it. Every other place in the universe where it could have happened, but didn't -- well, intelligent life isn't there, so it's not around to talk about how it didn't happen. That means the fact of our existence is not even evidence that anything truly mathematically unlikely has occurred. We can't really be surprised by our own existence.

All you folks in category one: Sorry, you'll be disappointed. You just bought 20 chapters full of strawmen, and the state of the art of biological sciences left all of them well behind at least 20 years ago when DNA sequencing got cheap enough to do on a large scale.

To you folks in category two: What can I say? You'll get exactly what you want, here. You won't encounter anything that will make you more informed of the science, except in broad strokes, but that doesn't matter to you, does it? Enjoy your guided tour through this castle in the sky. But, to steal a phrase from a classic game, "Sorry Mario, the truth is in another castle."

(Paraphrased from Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It.)

Six out of ten births to women without a high-school diploma occur out of wedlock. For women with a four-year college degree, that ratio is only one out of ten. And even if college educated women are not married by the time they have their first child, they are quite likely to be married by the time they have a second, usually to the man who is the father of both children.

Thus, marriage remains a central part of life to college-educated women, which seems like a contradiction: The women who are least likely to need a partner for economic support are the most likely to get married, and stay married.

To resolve this contradiction we acknowledge a shift in the purpose of marriage: Partners now see it as a joint venture for the purpose of parenting. A shared commitment to invest in kids, more than a commitment to financially support a spouse. "'Till death do us part" has transformed into something more like "'til the kids get into college."

Middle-class men, in white collar jobs, have seen their wages stay high, or even grow, in the last 40 years. Their access to more resources has also given them the security to evolve beyond the traditional male role, which makes them attractive prospects for affluent women.

Those women still weigh a man by his economic success, but also seek one who is "modern": Willing to share the practical duties of child-raising, more emotionally sophisticated, more respectful of women's choices.

Meanwhile, working-class men have seen their wages collectively drop. This has hollowed out their value and usefulness in the traditional male role: They struggle to be providers. To working-class women, these men are risky marriage prospects. Many women in fact choose to avoid the risk of marrying a "deadbeat", and elect to remain single parents. Not because they can thrive as single parents, but because they don't want things to get worse.

So, high earners are pooling resources in a marriage to raise kids; low earners are shying away from marriage because it threatens what little they have. And since affluent parents invest much more heavily in their kids, those kids tend to go on and become high earners, cycling this class division forward into the next generation.

So what do you do, as a working-class guy, when you barely make enough money to support yourself, and the women who will date you don't see you as marrying material? Your work life is unstable, your social life is unstable, your religious practice has atrophied, and you still somehow need to finance the core of a new nuclear family, with spouse and home and car and kids, and keep it stable. But how? Everything is telling you to be something you can't reach. Your idea of what it means to be a man, of what your own personal destiny is, starts to drift.

Viruses are very very small, and so numerous that their quantity is beyond all hope of human understanding.

Consider the ocean:

There are 10 nonillion viruses in the ocean. That's a 10 with 30 zeroes after it.

That's 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 viruses sloshing about.

Let's play around with that number a bit just to understand how we, as mere humans, cannot actually ever understand it:

There are 100 billion times more viruses in the oceans than there are grains of sand on all the world's beaches.
If you put the viruses of the oceans together on a scale, they would equal the weight of 75 million blue whales. (There are currently less than 10,000 blue whales on the entire planet.)
If you placed all the viruses in the ocean next to each other in a straight line, that line would stretch for 42 million light years.

The good news for humans is, only a minute fraction of the viruses in the ocean can infect us. Some infect fish and other marine animals, but their most common target is bacteria and other single-celled microbes.

Marine viruses are incredibly good at infecting their chosen targets. In the ocean, with every second that passes, one hundred billion trillion microbes are newly invaded by a virus. Every 24 hours, viruses kill between 15 and 40 percent of all the bacteria in the world's oceans. Those that survive, reproduce... And the next day another 15 to 40 percent are murdered by viruses. Over and over again, every day, this war rages as the ocean churns.

Paraphrased from A Planet Of Viruses, 3rd Edition

I picked this up because I was intrigued by the premise: If you want to change your behavior, don't rely on internal motivation, rely on altering your environment through various means to make the behavior you want easier to choose. I've long suspected this was a more fruitful approach, and applied it various ways, e.g. if I want to improve my health by riding my bicycle more often, I stage my biking gear in the house so it's much easier to get outside and start riding.

Alas, this book appears to be written by some kind of half-mad evangelist, who doesn't know how to construct a good analogy, or when to stop writing. I only got a couple of chapters in, but along the way I found some fun things to rant about. So the rest of this entry is ranty...

In the first chapter of this book I came across an interesting quote. "We are the average of the five people we spend the most time with." That's pithy. It also tickles my list-making brain. Who do I spend the most time with, mentally speaking?

But then I encountered: "Most people are living small, not because they lack the inherent talent, but because their situation isn't demanding more of them."

Hmm. I believe this is true for some people. But honestly, most people are "living small" because they can't put together a middle-class income using the materials at hand. Demand is not the problem. They are piled with demands. Most of those revolve around getting enough to eat and staying out of the rain. I mean, hey Benjamin, didn't you just say in this chapter that which city and county you live in has an outsized influence over your success later in life? Don't be so condescending.

Benjamin describes a friend who abandoned his career and divorced his wife. He claims that this happened due to a slow change in the friend's personality, over a period of five years, that happened because he chose to hang out with another friend, who was lazy and cynical. As Ben puts it, "he spent all his time playing video games and talking smack about other people," and so he slowly drew his friend into that way of being, causing him to abandon what Ben calls "a wonderful marriage". This is meant as a cautionary tale: Choose to spend time around a lazy video-game-playing loser, and your lovely marriage and career will go down the toilet. To me it all sounds outrageously judgmental.

But that's because I'm in my late 40's, and have way more life and romantic experience than the target audience for this book, which appears to be aimless 20-somethings who wish they were rich and/or famous. Which I can tell you, having acquired a very minor amount of wealth and fame - at least enough to impress myself, which is what matters - those things DO NOT grant you happiness. Happiness is something you find largely through other means. In fact, it's often easier to sort out the happiness angle before you embark on your pursuit of fame and fortune, because it's easier to maintain wealth via happiness than to maintain happiness via wealth.

Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, Benjamin, and then get back to me.

Any long-term relationship and career can seem ideal from the outside yet still be deeply dissatisfying from within. For example, your amazing-looking career can be a constant source of stress and feelings of inadequacy, and you may find far more satisfaction downsizing to something less glamorous but more aligned with your interests. Or, your amazing-looking significant other who is successful and unfailingly kind to your friends and family may also, for example, treat you like a doormat when no one else is looking, and you may feel so uncomfortable discussing that fact with your peers that it inevitably shocks them when you divorce. Benjamin does not come across well with this example, because he has zero idea what's truly going on with his friend ... which makes him kind of a bad friend.

Before I finished the second chapter, I knew this was going to be a consistent blind spot in the book: That the choices we make to shape our surroundings are not random even when we are not consciously attempting to shape them. We are in fact adapting to meet a need, even when we don't know what that need is. And if this guy wants to play video games and talk smack with his friend a few days a week instead of spending that time with his wife, or grinding at his fabulous career, he must figure out what need he is meeting by making that choice, because if he quits seeing his friend without finding an alternative way to meet that need, he will fail to thrive in whatever thing he replaces it with, or he will re-shape some other part of his life and make no progress overall. The point is, it's not necessarily the friend that is the crucial element here. Meanwhile, Benjamin is pointing out a symptom and then congratulating himself like he's identified a cause.

The more holistic attitude is entirely missing from the book. Benjamin concludes his anecdote with, "Matt had surrounded himself with a loser, and then he became a loser himself." A loser? Dang, it's high school all over again. Who made you the arbiter of human endeavor? Do you mock people who really enjoy video games, because it doesn't save orphans? ... Perhaps you do. Go ahead; but don't call it wisdom.

Surrounding yourself with people who have the material or social trappings of success does not automatically translate into positive pressure for you to become materially or socially successful. People who are those things are not necessarily good at teaching them. Many an optimistic person trying to improve their financial or social standing has been taken in by an apparently successful mentor only to be brutally swindled or abused, then discarded worse off than before.

Let's make the point clearer with an important distinction: While it's true that the people you are drawn to spending time with often have qualities you seek for yourself, it doesn't actually follow that you can spend time with people who have qualifications you want, and absorb those through osmosis. The difference is subtle, but it matters. For example, if you solicit input from a really good software developer, and all she tells you is "this code you've written is garbage", you learn nothing. But if you solicit some time spent pair-programming with a fellow student who is just as unskilled as you are, but is enthusiastic, you will learn together ... even if the code you write is garbage. In the second case you're seeking a quality - enthusiasm - not a qualification. I don't know why Benjamin is failing to make this basic distinction. Hell, every college student knows that a study partner is a good influence even if you and your partner are studying completely different subjects. You don't need this abrasive book to tell you that.

The first chapter ends with a rallying screed that is classic self-help dog food, and nearly made me stop reading entirely. "You are no longer willing to live a lie, and thus, you are no longer willing to tolerate a mismatch between your ambitions and your environment." Et cetera. Sir, this is a direct appeal to willpower. You just spent an entire chapter explaining that we should tinker with our surroundings to direct our behavior, and now you're beating us with the "YOU NEED TO WANT IT ENOUGH!!!!" hammer -- the one my high-school football coach beat us with before every game, because he wanted to cover over his incompetence as a teacher by goosing our enthusiasm for victory. Stop it.

Chapter 2 is where the bad analogies set in. Ben claims that epigenetics is proof that "the environment dictates the fate of cells, not their genes". Sir, if a gene is not present in a genome, no amount of external signaling will express it. This is a terrible analogy. I'm going to pretend I didn't read that. And now ... something about backflips on a motorbike, and that somehow ties in with environmental expectations? What was the point there? Did you cut and paste this from a brainfart you had while reading News Of The Weird?

Okay, it's halfway through Chapter 2 and I think I'm going to stop. I just hit the phrase, "If you're close with some people you could do brilliant and world-changing work. Among other people you may be uninspired and dull, never fulfilling your deepest dreams." Which are what exactly, Mr. Judgement-pants?

Benjamin spent the cover flap and the first chapter of the book proclaiming that history is not made by dedicated individuals working against odds, but by forces that demanded change from the collective pool of people, and the only reason we think we see otherwise is because of the way history is recorded, which focuses almost entirely on the personal narratives of a small group of actors. That's an uncommonly wise observation for someone as hyper-ambitious as he appears to be.

Now let me add to that, as an official middle-aged person: The world is also, and has also been, chock full of people who worked hard, led very interesting lives, and even struggled against terrible odds ... whose names and deeds are not recorded AT ALL. An absolute ocean of people you will live your own life utterly ignorant of, because there is absolutely no trace whatsoever left behind that individually identifies them. Not even a name. So think hard about what "your dreams" actually are, and why you think they deserve to be chased. Are you chasing fame? Ostentatious wealth? Some other young-person social goalpost?

Well, you have something in common with Benjamin's giant mixed-message of a book here, which is telling you that you should mercilessly and methodically reconfigure your social life, your living space, your geographical location, your choice of romantic partners, and your choice of food and hobbies, for MAXIMUM ACCOMPLISHMENT. And that furthermore, that pursuit is the only valid and true path to happiness: Maximum specific accomplishment. Don't hang out around those damn loser video game people, because those people are LIVING A LIE!

I'm now old enough to know that a person goes through multiple iterations, and that the goal-oriented thinking Benjamin is using as an unspoken foundation for his book has some weird limitations. The chief limitation is, you can spend time pursuing a goal that is important to an iteration of yourself that, by the time you meet that goal, no longer exists. Or, to put it the other way around, sometimes you can choose to arrange your life in pursuit of a goal that was only important to a previous iteration of you, when you might be better served taking stock of who you are now, and what that person wants instead. In this realm, Benjamin cannot help you. He assumes that your goals are clear, fixed, grand, directly bound to your happiness, and more important to you than anything.

Well, some people do think that way. I'm guessing those people skew young, aggressive, not particularly artistic, and don't have much of a sense of humor, like our friend Benjamin here, and like the would-be CEOs he is catering to. I had hope for this book, that it would live up to the premise loudly declared right on the cover. It's a bit of bait-and-switch. It's about two pages of a bulleted list of handy suggestions for environmental tweaks, and the rest is a ballast of confusing anecdotes, and breathless "FAME AND GLORY IS YOURS IF YOU HANG OUT WITH FAMOUS AND GLORIOUS PEOPLE!!"

Bleh. I feel dirty. Give me my $0.00 back.

Best enjoyed: On a long ride
Enjoyment rating (1-10) : 7
Distraction level (1-5) : 3

Fourth in a series. Entertaining characters, very intricately plotted. Part horror show, part observational comedy. No PSA-level rants about depression or survival skills this time around.

Pargin is a very strong writer in his narrow wheelhouse. He knows nerds, he knows about working-class american suffering, he knows his audience. His materialist, atheistic, engineering brain is a constant source of mini-essays which he staples roughly into his stories to add texture and perspective, sometimes not being too careful about which character gets which monologue. Entire scenes of dialogue or even plot points can feel like he constructed them from an essay outward, so he can include one he's particularly proud of.

But in the grand scheme, you don't care, because the plots are such fun to unravel and the unreliable narrator of John is so endearing. Not so much with Amy, whom Jason has struggled for several books now to try and turn into a real character. The trouble seems to be a bit of hero worship, as though he's basing Amy on someone in the real world that he has placed on a pedestal.

I blasted though this book in two days. Fun stuff!

Seven out of ten invisible alien creatures up.

The first patients from the plant had landed in Moscow soon after dawn on Sunday, April 27. They'd been met at Vnukovo Airport by doctors clad in PVC aprons and protective suits, and buses with the seats sheathed in polyethylene.

The specialists of Hospital Number 6, a 600-bed facility reserved for treatment of the nuclear workers of the Ministry of Medium-Machine Building, and home to two floors dedicated to radiation medicine, had cleared the entire department in preparation for their arrival. Some were still in the same clothes they had been wearing at the moment of the explosion. Many were covered with radioactive dust, and once they had been admitted to the hospital, their transport proved beyond the limits of practical decontamination.

The aircraft that delivered the first wave of patients was dismantled, and one bus was sent to the campus of the Kerchatov Institute, where it was driven into a pit and buried.

By evening on Sunday, a total of 207 men and women, mostly plant operators and firemen but also security guards who had remained at their posts beside the burning unit, construction workers that had waited at a bus stop beneath the plume of fallout, and the anglers from beside the inlet channel, had been admitted to the wards of the hospital. 115 of them were initially diagnosed with acute radiation syndrome. Ten had received such massive doses of radiation, that the doctors immediately regarded their survival as impossible.

-- "Midnight In Chernobyl", Adam Higginbotham

I find it quite amusingly appropriate that I generated all of these using massive help from a generative art tool. In this case, Microsoft DALL-E.

I now present to you, the gallery of trashy 1980's sci-fi novel tropes:

And of course, who could forget the thankfully out-of-style:

If you're a 1980's "space lad" you get somewhat more practical clothing:

"Disloyal", Michael Cohen:

Best enjoyed: On a long ride
Enjoyment rating (1-10) : 7
Distraction level (1-5) : 2

I'm not mentioning this book to critique it, but just to quote from it:

- - -

"What about self-funding the campaign?" Trump said to me one afternoon.

I knew there was no way he was going to spend his own money on politics. He was far too cheap to begin with, and he was far less liquid than was understood by outsiders, but he appeared to be seriously contemplating the idea.

"I don't want to take money from a Super PAC," Trump said. "A billionaire can't ask people for five bucks. Maybe I'll self-fund the primary but do it cheap. I don't need to spend a lot of money, because we'll get all the free press we want."

Please, pause over that final sentence, and read it again. And again, and again. Because if you want to understand how Donald J Trump became president, you have to grasp the essential fact that, by far, the most important element wasn't nationalism or populism or racism or religion or the rise of white supremacy or strong-man authoritarianism. It wasn't Russia, or lying, or James Comey, though all of those forces were hugely influential. It wasn't Hillary Clinton, though heaven knows she did all she could to lose the election. No, the biggest influence by far, by a country mile, was the media. Donald Trump's presidency is a product of the free press. Not free as in "freedom of expression", I mean free as "un-paid for". Rallies, broadcast live. Tweets. Press conferences. Idiotic interviews. 24-7 wall-to-wall coverage, all without spending a penny. The free press gave America Trump. Right, left, moderate, tabloid, broadsheet, television, radio, internet, facebook. That is who elected Trump. And might well elect him again.

I couldn't put it better than Sydnee McElroy put it in this episode of Sawbones.

That joker Andrew Wakefield wrote a book based on his lies, in order to cash in. He called it "Callous Disregard", and bizarrely enough, he wasn't referring to his own behavior. I came across a pirated copy and attempted to read it. It is a book written by a fellow who wants to defend himself, and not with the rigor of a peer-reviewed essay, but with the fervor of a manifesto, eagerly twisting whatever facts and history he can gather together that show him as the persecuted and beleaguered David against the Goliath of "big pharma".

(As an aside, if you want to read about the evils of "big pharma", I suggest you read another much more approachable and amusing book, called "Bad Pharma", written by a fellow called Ben Goldacre.)

A fair way into "Callous Disregard", when the one-sidedness of Wakefield's narrative was too obvious to ignore, I got curious and did some digging around. Turns out this book was released on the same day he attended his final hearing in front of the UK General Medical Council, and the conclusion of that hearing was the following:

Wakefield's infamous study in the Lancet linking the MMR vaccine to autism was a written-for-hire work. He was paid to conduct the study in the paper, by attorneys who were trying to drum up evidence that their clients' children had been harmed by the MMR vaccine, so they could sue the big pharmaceutical company that manufactured it. He never told the Lancet about this extreme conflict of interest, and he falsified the data in the paper to give the attorneys ammunition in their lawsuit.

That is an absolutely incredible violation of ethics.

The way he went about gathering his "data" in the paper was extremely callous as well. He used questionable tactics to recruit children for the study. He ordered procedures on them that were medically unnecessary, such as colonoscopies, colon biopsies and lumbar punctures, without consulting a pediatrician and without the approval of his department's ethics board.

That's not the conduct of a person who claims to love children as stridently as Wakefield does in this book.

On May 24, 2010, he was struck off the United Kingdom medical register. But that just fueled his narrative as a persecuted whistleblower. Caught with his hand in the falsification cookie jar, he doubled-down and crammed the other hand in, then two legs and most of his face. In the meantime, eight years after his faked paper ignited the media fire that he has been gleefully fanning ever since, cases of measles in Britain rose from 56 in 1998 to nearly 1,400 in 2008.

In 2006, a 13-year-old boy became the first person in more than a decade to die of the disease in Britain. This fool Wakefield has blood on his hands.

It's clear why the book is so quick to make accusations and counter-accusations, and so eager to shout "conspiracy". Wakefield wrote it during a time when he needed to convince himself that he was a good person, despite willfully committing fraud. This book is a call to gather conspiracy theorists and fearful parents around him in a protective circle, and ditch his career as a scientist before it ditched him.

Negative ten stars out of five. (And the book sucks, too.)

Best enjoyed: On a long ride
Enjoyment rating (1-10) : 8
Distraction level (1-5) : 2

Thank goodness for this book. I feel so much better after reading it. Not because of the fears it confirmed for me, but because of the suspicions and fears it has laid to rest.

All that crazy alt-right stuff? That was Bannon. Trump barely gives half a crap about it, and now Bannon is persona-non-grata to the White House. The executive order banning travel? That was Bannon failing to understand government, wanting to cause hand-wringing amongst the left and make a personal splash. Which it did. We ate it up. Was it a shot across the bow to signal a strong, rigorous follow-up? No. It was exactly what it looked like: Hilarious, half-baked incompetence, from a man in a hurry.

All those unfilled positions in cabinets? That wasn't the beginning of a big, determined, "disassemble the apparatus of the state" push. That was the fallout of the Trump campaign so thoroughly expecting to lose that they had no plans in place of any kind for a transition of power, then remaining so dysfunctional that they could not assemble a plan before day one. Or for months afterward. Can you imagine Trump sitting down, perhaps with a piece of paper and a pen, and saying "Okay, let's make a plan?" You can't. There's a reason why you can't.

It's true that Trump does not read. He is barely literate. He cannot become even halfway informed about any subject on the presidential desk, and the people around him know this, and they spend all their time "managing" him. That might seem like a threat - he would be eminently exploitable - if he wasn't thoroughly unpredictable and occasionally irrational.

All his ad-libbed speeches filled with repetitions and meaningless wandering: Yes, people do know it's garbage; even the people on his own staff. But he's the one with the power, through which they grasp their own, so they keep their expressions neutral and their mouths shut. They know there's a big baby sitting in the driver's seat grasping at the levers of power. With every lever he pulls in front of the cameras, they quickly dash behind the console and disconnect the wires.

Trump wanted the title, but not the job. He wanted to glad-hand and play golf, throw fits and fire people and lob insults, and have all cameras pointed at him all the time. That's all. The rest is bean-counting crap that he'd rather avoid. During the campaign he had to reassure his wife that he would lose the election, so she would be out of the spotlight. All those photos of her looking pissed? It's not the infidelity; it's not any sort of abuse except perhaps for the standard trophy-wife neglect. She just does not want to be there. She would rather be having lunch with her friends, raising her son, or wandering around Europe, and she is furious with her husband for actually winning the election and joining them at the hip in a way that their marriage was never about.

All that stuff you think this presidency might accomplish? All that threatening stuff that you plan to strenuously resist? If it takes hard work, or coordination, or even consistency, forget it. Trump is too old and too uninterested to care. He is not even interested in facilitating the agenda of his own political party. He is their president in the most tenuous way you can imagine. Better if Trump had not been elected, of course, but the silver lining is that any other candidate ... ANY other one ... would have given the Republican congress far more power. Trump is more interested in feuding with them in the press than conspiring with them.

Trump is not just uninformed in some correctable way - he is uninformed by design. His principles are not Republican, they are whatever the most convincing guy said in the last meeting he had. And often, that is his daughter or his son-in-law, whose politics are more Democrat than Republican. That is freaking hilarious, and a nasty punch in the eye to the Republican party. Republican pundits railed against the nepotism of the Clintons, and now they watch helplessly as nepotism drives a wedge between them and their own president. Their latest move was to try and strip his son-in-law's security clearance. How much difference do you think that will make?

This presidency ... will spin its wheels and get nothing done for another three years, and when the door hits his ass on the way out, Trump will be abandoned to auditors and lawyers like a chicken bone to dogs. He's not a new normal, he's a correction. He's the shirt-ripping self-sabotaging one night stand that the nation is having, after our steady boyfriend Obama broke up with us and tried to pawn us off on his friend Hillary and we rejected her in an angry display of pique. We don't want your boring old scraps! We want fire, and fury!!

And here it is.

This book made me laugh out loud a dozen times. It was brilliant stress relief, and had plenty of food for thought. The knowledge that the incredulity and the argument for sanity extends all the way up inside the Oval Office to the man himself is strangely reassuring. Government is too established, and full of too many sane people, for one grumpy old man to tweet it apart. I really don't have to worry so much.

I highly encourage everyone to read this book. In fact, I want to include three short excerpts from it, even though it's potentially a copyright snafu. I've boldfaced the key lines.

( Click for excerpts )

"Information coming directly from a politician or his team without being vetted by reporters is little more than propaganda.

No American voter accepts one-sided accounts in their personal life. We wouldn't trust our teenager's perspective on a fender-bender. We wouldn't trust a single co-worker's description of a crucial meeting. We wouldn't even wholly trust our best friend's version of a nasty breakup. We look for holes in the story. We look for more information. We should demand the same in politics. And yet, so often, we do not. [...] Not when there is social media to fill the gap."

-- Katy Tur, "Unbelievable: My Front Row Seat To The Craziest Campaign In American History"

I started these books quite a while ago, right around the time I got into the game Civilization V. It was part of a confluence of historical fiction and pop culture that planted strange ideas in my head, some of which are still simmering away and not ready for me to write about.

But this weekend I spent at least 12 hours applying sealant to a new fence - a very boring bit of manual labor - and I listened to some of Olympos to entertain myself. Afterwards I realized I'd never written any critique of these books at all. Not even as a brain-dump. So, when it got too dark to see the fence, I cracked open the laptop and started dumping. Spoilers ahead, and stuff.

The novel really can be boiled down to one word: Solipsism. The central idea here is that a work of genius in the arts can actually create and/or give access to an alternate universe based on that artistic work. In this case it's taken further because the fictional creations have their own agency -- for example, Cetebus busting in through the walls of an adjacent universe uninvited and unexpected.

The writer is clearly using Hockenberry as a surrogate not just for the audience, but for himself, as an aging, over-educated, but distinguished academic, thrust into a total wish-fulfillment situation where he gets to observe legendary historical events in close detail, describe and analyze them, and eventually interfere with them to suit his tastes, and engage in political intrigue - or just have sex with - the most prominent figures involved.

I wonder how much of that role was Dan Simmons just going, "wow, I'm in Troy, what would I do next? I know! I'd totally seduce Helen Of Troy! Time to arrange some wackadoo series of events to make that plausible..."

The second book - Olympos - was much more difficult reading than the first, for a number of reasons:

1. The critics are right: There aren't very many answers given for important questions, especially in the realm of science. The answers that are given, to explain central parts of the plot and the mechanics of the universe, are often dropped without comment into a single sentence, surrounded by acres of less informative or unrelated narration. If you stop the novel cold and chew on these little tidbits for a while, you can actually unravel a lot of the plot and history. If you don't catch them ... you're screwed.
2. An enormous plot point involving a far-future weapon of war - a post-nuclear submarine - poofs into existence at about the 85% mark. There is zero foreshadowing of it, and it gets only a few pages of context, but it turns out to be central in the motivations and destinies of at least seven of the major characters. It suddenly explains, in retrospect, about half of this entire very very long novel. Also, our friends the Moravecs spend 4/5 of the novel pursuing their own investigations on a trip to Earth, and then as soon as they blunder across this wrecked ship - by accident no less - they instantly abandon their business, without any discussion, and start dealing with the ship. While this happens, we are treated to page after page of dithering from Harman about the past and fate of humanity, straight from the sheep-shearing barn in Dan Simmons' head. What the hell?
3. The critics are right: Most of the action takes place in the last quarter of the novel. It's still fun getting there, but after spending so much time wondering "what the hell is going on?", suddenly everything is going on at once, and you have to just give up asking questions and roll with it.
4. The Moravecs provide great discussion, and by far the most color and humor in the novel, but they are ill-used. Their purpose in both Ilium and Olympos is to swoop in like robotic janitors and clean up whatever mess the humans get themselves into. They are Machina ex Deus acting as Deus ex Machina, whenever the plot gets too thick. After a while it creates the impression that they are crowbarred in from another novel - possibly a superior one - like The Fonz crashing into a Laverne And Shirley episode, jazzing things up, sucking all the attention out of the scene, collecting some applause, and then buggering off. The effect is that you want to follow them out the door and leave these stupid humans to flounder in the mud. I could listen to Mahnmut And Orphu Discuss The Classics for a thousand pages and not get bored. Pity it had to come woven into a turgid drama about some pathetic, clueless, almost entirely humorless teenagers slowly learning that there is more to life than dinner parties and breeding.

Setting aside things that are left totally unexplained, there are still lingering questions of plot. For such a long, long novel it's rather irritating that Simmons couldn't just toss us a single-sentence bone or two at the end. I can only conclude he meant to leave these questions unanswered. Where did Cetebus go? One moment he was there blasting thunderbolts at spaceships, the next moment he was gone. Did the beam at Delphi contain three million Earthlings - or not? Where the hell is Caliban? What happened to all the post-human gods, once Hephaestus took over? And what the hell is up with Odysseus and Circe?

Like I said, the keys to understanding huge parts of this novel are often tiny and scattered indifferently in acres of prose. I gathered what felt like many of them, but perhaps I missed even more, because I still have way too many unanswered questions.

If Caliban can free-fax (teleport anywhere at will) then how exactly was he "trapped" in orbit for so long? Wasn't there a better - and less grisly - way to feed him than moving all the medical pods there? (I can think of five better ways in less than a minute.)

There is one single instance where a character uses the Turin Cloth to actually interact with the Trojan war, not just observe it. Why mention that once, then never again? Why have the feature at all, given how easily one could disrupt the course of the war?

Why would Circe put the submarine into suspension, rather than just lifting it into space and chucking it into the sun? She clearly has the tools to do so. How in the bloody hell did Prospero know that Harman would enter the submarine? For that matter, why did he send him there in the first place? To teach him a lesson about Post-Human stupidity? Why the hell was the Atlantic Breach even there? Why would radiation poisoning slowly destroy all the proteins in Harman's body but miraculously leave his stores of vat-absorbed protein knowledge completely intact, for later transmission? That's just sloppy, Mr. Simmons. You talk up the storage capacity of DNA, then totally disregard the fact that it is incredibly sensitive to radiation.

Why were the Moravecs cruising through space in a pointlessly "steampunk"-derived spaceship, when they had far better technology just sitting around? Why would they turn their whole expedition around just to rescue one dying man in a fit of compassion, but rain fire down all around the Trojans and Greeks in their war with the gods?

Cetebus crawled through a huge doorway to get to Earth -- and since he/it can make those doorways at will, why didn't he consume the Earth thousands of years ago already? Is it because he was trapped on Mars by Prospero? If so, ... how? By big stone statues? How the hell did that work?

Also, why just Prospero and Cetebus? That's awfully arbitrary. Why isn't the universe crawling with other Shakespearean characters? Why isn't Loki running around, or Gandalf, or Sherlock Holmes, or Moses? There is some sense in the idea that Ariel and Prospero are emergent phenomenon, formed from the complexity of the engineered Earth the Post-Humans left behind. And okay, all the Greek gods flying around have a semi-comprehensible origin story, being Post-Humans who got a wild hare up their butts and decided to reform themselves into a pantheon and play in a sandbox. But ... Cetebus? Where the crap did Cetebus come from? Just ripped a hole in creation and came tumbling through? If you're gonna introduce a straight-up evil entity and declare it the villain, only to explain nothing about it, then yank it mysteriously away at the end of the novel without a fight or even an ending monologue like "I'll get you next time, Gadget, next time..." then why introduce it at all? No, seriously, just edit Cetebus right out of the novel. Hundreds of pages saved, and almost nothing lost.

Hey, don't get the wrong impression. Ilium and Olympos are still fine novels. For long stretches they are an absolute delight to read, and the weird veneer of semi-serious science over the fiction works better than you'd expect. Later on I'm sure I'll have more to say about the mental conflagration it was part of last year, but for now I guess the take-home is this: Greek mythology is a lot more interesting and influential than I thought. And: This could make a pretty good series of movies, if you cut out a whole lot of the boring Old-Style Human dithering.

Oh and one final thing: For a long time I had an old paperback sci-fi anthology sitting around my house. It was called "The Crystal Ship". Check out the cover art, and the summary of the first story, and tell me that isn't the direct inspiration for the orbital city in Ilium, including that crazy multi-seated transport platform visible in the corner of the cover!

I have an absurd amount of music, and it plays a gigantic role in my mental existence. I also have quite a lot of audiobooks, and those are often broken into lots of tiny little tracks that can overwhelm the database on an iPod. I want the best of both worlds (now that I'm using an iPod with a terabyte of storage) so I'm walking through my audiobook library and zipping all those little files together into big ones.

To verify that the files are joined in the right order, I need to listen to the middle of each book, for about 30 seconds at least. Every time, I want to keep listening longer and have to tear myself away. I've got a lot of interesting books to read.

... But I can't resist commenting on the book I just dropped into. It's "The Social Animal", by David Brooks. He just made two interesting points:

1. We often consider our lives to be at their best when we have a stable, safe home, and we get to make regular excursions outside of it.

I find it interesting that both a home and travel are fundamental components. No doubt one helps to characterize the other, as well. For all the fun and relaxing time I have at home, I still have a deep need to get outside and engage with things. Sometimes I catch myself in a ridiculous cycle where I dream about traveling when I'm at home, and I dream about being home when I'm traveling. Durrr.

I think that if I'd been raised in more threatening environment, or had a less stable home, I would be a lot less inclined to travel ... and probably a lot less able to relax at home, since I'd feel like it was constantly under threat. Truly this sense of stability is a gift. I also can't help but acknowledge the very weird sense of home that comes from a bicycle trip: The bicycle becomes a kind of mobile home. Not big enough to actually go inside, but big enough to carry all the supplies that would usually be in a house.

Then there's that strange, ironic feeling one gets, when one checks into a hotel for the night. It's four walls and a roof, and a bathroom and a bed, and usually dinner as well -- but it feels far from home, because it's not the seat of the bicycle. Sometimes the only way to combat this strange feeling is to wheel the bicycle into the room and sleep next to it, like it's the family dog!!

And here's David's second point:

2. The way parents engage in dialogue with their children does more for them developmentally than any amount of flashcards, books, tutors, travel, nutrition, freedom, or punishment. With that dialogue, they teach their children how to build their identity and navigate their own mental space, and how to send signals to - and read signals from - other people. The movement of the dialogue becomes the inner voice -- the tracks beneath the train of thought.

I think there's an awful lot of truth in that idea. Many of the formative events in my young life were conversations. One little example:

I had a CD of songs by Monty Python. I was playing it on the stereo one day, half-listening while doing some schoolwork I think, and the song "Oliver Cromwell" came up. My mother wandered into the living room. The song went:

"Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of England (and his warts)
Born in 1599, died in 1658 (September)
But, alas (Oi Vay!), disagreement then broke out (between)
The Presbyterian Parliament and the military..."

My mother was intrigued. "What song is this?" she asked.

"Oh it's just some Monty Python song about a king of England," I probably said.

"Oliver Cromwell, that rings a bell," she said, and listened for a while.

"And Cromwell sent Colonel Pride
To purge the House of Commons of the Presbyterian Royalists,
Leaving behind only the Rump Parliament"

"The Rump Parliament?" she said.

"Yeah, I don't know what that is," I said.

"Hah! I bet we can figure it out," she said, and walked over to the bookcase and sat down. After a moment she said, "here we are -- European history," and she pulled out a large book with a tall black spine.

I was intrigued. I set my homework aside, and sat down next to her on the floor. She opened the book and guided me through the table of contents, then the index, then we scoured the page together. Eventually we found it, and she read aloud:

"The Rump Parliament was the English Parliament after Colonel Thomas Pride purged the Long Parliament, on 6 December 1648, ..."

We learned a little about that, and I asked some questions. I was excited to discover that a song I liked for the silly voices was actually making social commentary about real historical events. I restarted the song from the beginning, so my Mom and I could hear it together.

"The most interesting thing about King Charles the First,
Is that he was 5'6" at the start of his reign,
But only 4'8" tall at the end of it."

My Mom laughed.

"I don't get that," I said. "Why did he get shorter? Did he have some kind of disease?"

"No," she said, and laughed again. "He was beheaded."

"OOOOOh," I said.

We found a reference to that a few pages back. I was fascinated: It felt like Monty Python had somehow managed to sneak one of their skits right into the middle of an otherwise serious history book.

We chatted some more about Monty Python and eventually Mom put the book away, and I returned to my homework. But that little exchange has stuck with me for 28 years, as a template for action and interaction. It said: Curiosity about random things, and the desire to follow up that curiosity, is normal, and rewarding in itself. It said: Research tools are good for more than just school projects. It said: Curiosity can be shared, and finding answers together is more fun.

David Brooks is really on to something with point 2 there.

As an adult, I have had a strange flipside to this experience a number of times. Usually when talking to people younger than me who are having some kind of trouble. We talk, and the person calms down and starts to think, and if I've managed to make a good impression by saying something wise or helpful, the conversation enters this interesting semi-monologue state where I talk a few orbits around whatever wise thing I may have said, reenforcing it, giving it context, backing it up. I can sense that I have been given, for a brief time, the conductor's seat in their train of thought, and I am driving it for them, laying down different track than what they were on before ... so that much later when the conversation is just a dim memory they might run that track on their own.

I also remember being on the receiving end of this state when I was young and my parents or school counselors would speak to me. If they managed to get through, my perspective would be shifted. The storm clouds would be clearing, and their words would settle into my head like they were my own. I had made an emotional and subconscious decision to let them write part of my identity.

Human minds are so strange. But how does that quote go? "If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn't."

Oh by the way; here's an illustration of Cromwell dissolving the Rump Parliament:

What the hell is up with that owl in the lower right corner??

Anyway, back to my books.

The Hammer Of God, 1992

This is a short story that Clarke turned into a full-length novel a year later. Astronomers spot a rock heading for Earth, and scientists launch a spaceship to intercept it and nudge it off its collision course. No relation to the short story of the same name by G. K. Chesterton, or the similarly-named-and-themed novel by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle from 1978.

I don't know why it took him so long to explore the scenario; he was writing about landing ships on comets over 30 years before he wrote this. On the other hand perhaps it only seems obvious in retrospect. In the 1980's, the idea of an impact killing off the dinosaurs had barely even gained traction in the scientific community, let alone for the general public. Plus, everyone was obsessed with the idea of nuclear destruction at the hands of the Soviets. Who had time to think about rocks from space?

Then, geologists found a layer of iridium sewn into the Earth's crust, and in the early 1990's they found forensic evidence of an impact crater big enough to do the job. And bingo, Clarke writes this story a year later, which uses a description of that impact as a framing device. I guess it was a blind spot for even the great "Grandmaster of Sci-Fi". He should have read Niven and Pournelle's book!

As a kid, I remember reading Orn, by Piers Anthony, and finding an "author's note" in the back of the book, confidently laying out a case for the dinosaurs dying due to temperature change, from continental drift*. I guess that was the state of the art in 1971, when Orn was written. Today that theory would be laughed at just as heartily as the impact theory was in the 80's. We've come a long way. I wonder what ideas there are today, on the fringe of science, that sound very reasonable with our present knowledge -- but will seem unworkable in ten or twenty years, after we make new discoveries that totally reframe the debate?

Here's a few I'm willing to put forward:

By closely examining the DNA of a person, and the taxonomy of their gut bacteria, a computer program can predict their ideal diet, on a meal-by-meal basis. Seems sensible now; will seem childish in 10 years.
The space elevator is a workable concept for Earth. Tantalizing now, will seem like a boondoggle in 20 years or less.
Wormholes can be used as a means of travel or communication. Plausible now; will seem like a fairy story in 20-30 years.
High-quality meat can be grown in vats, more cheaply and with less waste than well-managed pastoral farming. Seems like an any-day-now invention, but I reckon the closest we'll get will be a product of fermentation like tempeh. Not a bad outcome really, since tempeh is delicious.

It's always risky to pronounce things as wrong before they've been completely explored. I'll check back in a decade and see how I did. Terribly, I hope!

(*Now we call it "plate tectonics" of course.)

Reunion, 1971

A short one with a twist in the last four words. It's ham-handed and I might as well spoil it. An alien race makes contact, and claims that they are humans, and colonized Earth with humans ten million years ago. (Never mind our 99% of shared genes with apes, or our 50% of shared genes with all other cellular life on the planet. Did they know any of that back in 1971?) Most of the aliens abandoned the planet when the environment turned sour, leaving behind a handful of humans who had "descended to barbarism" because of a "genetic plague" that had broken out in the population and caused them shame and suspicion. The big twist: The "disease" is white skin, and the aliens are ready to "cure" it as soon as they return, so we can "join the society of the universe without shame".

This story is 45 years old, and it suffers for it. For every modern reader who would think "hah, that's a solid Take That against the white supremacists in my family!" -- there are two or even three readers who would say "Wow, you suck Clarke. The righteous response to racism is not bigger racism." And this is galactic-scale racism!!

On Golden Seas, 1986

A light-hearted mishmash about how the world governments would react to the idea of trying to pay their bills by extracting gold from seawater. Clarke gets a point for proposing that a future US President would be female. He loses that point for proposing that other world leaders would still happily make sexist jokes about her in the international media.

He keeps the tone playful here, and perhaps he is also making some clever commentary about global politics of the 80's but that commentary is lost on me now. Given how long the downtime has grown between his short stories in the 80's and 90's, I think he's actually become sick of the short-story format at this point and is using it to rid himself of half-baked ideas that he doesn't feel are worth a full-sized novel...

Improving The Neighborhood, 1999

In the introduction to this story Clarke proudly says it was the first piece of fiction to be published in Nature (which is usually restricted to very non-fictional scientific papers). He reckons it might have upset scientists who didn't know they were reading fiction.

I don't think so. The story is a dispassionate recounting of the history of a civilization of "large" "loud" beings that were so thirsty for energy to drive their machines that they accidentally blew up their entire planet, as well as its moon. Partway through it becomes clear that the narrator is actually on an alien world and the "large" "loud" beings in the story are us humans. Aside from a snide jab at how much we all love gas-guzzling vehicles, there isn't much emotion, structure, or even any real point to this story at all. Considering it was the last short story he ever published, I was hoping for something professional and clever -- something with zing to it.

Bummer!

The Wire Continuum, 1997

And here at last we come to the final story.

This is an episodic look at a technology similar to what Clarke wrote about in "Travel By Wire", except now we're hopping between two characters as they witness its long-haul development and integration into society. It offers an alternate history, branching off in the 1940's when we make the key discoveries, and transforming the future from there.

The basic technology - and the 'fiction' part of the 'science fiction' - is that humans and other objects can be "transported" by breaking them down into a digital signature and embedding that signature into materials at some distant place. Clarke and Baxter hand-wave the quantum mechanics and physics problems by the time-honored method of calling our attention to them, putting them all inside a black box, and then labeling the box by name-dropping a bunch of scientists and mathematicians that supposedly worked very hard on the contents and met with mysterious success. To take what should be a classic example, a "warp drive" engine is just like a regular engine, except somewhere in the traditional wiring diagram there is a large box called the "Einstein-Rosen-LaMarche-Baxter Box" that does all the currently impossible stuff. How does it work? It does that thing that Einstein, Rosen, LaMarche, and Baxter all talked about, very fast. Sounds classy and smart, right? You would be able to understand it, if only you were well-read enough to know what Einstein, Rosen, LaMarche, and Baxter all had in common. The author surely knows, which is why he name-dropped these specific people. (Not likely since I just made "LaMarche" up.)

Anyhoo, this story has Baxter's fingerprints all over it, since it's about the space-race and has turgid family drama very tightly knit into the narrative, as though there were something metaphorical going on that you can't quite grasp. When he integrates drama into his science it usually works out fine, and adds a very important element of human perspective to a story, but in this short form it proves a little squirrely for him. And it's clear that this is almost entirely Stephen Baxter's work. The stock Clarke characters are missing, the overt contempt for women is gone, and there isn't so much emotional distance between the narration and the protagonists. Clarke always did struggle with complex emotion in his stories, as perhaps he did in real life.

This story ends on a 2001-style note of an old man in bed, near death, encountering the future of humanity and the unknown all at once, and then doing something ambiguous that is ripe for interpretation. A pretty good story all told, and it pulls on other threads that Clarke and Baxter explored in "The Light Of Other Days," an absolute favorite of mine for its too-ambitious scope and surplus of ideas. I recommend this story, so I ain't spoiling it.

Also, I'm glad I got to this one last, because it's a good high note at the finish this project. And now that I've been through them all, I can ask some big picture questions.

Wrap-Up:

What was Clarke's best decade for short stories? I'd have to say it was the 60's, narrowly edging out the 50's. But the vast majority of his short story work was during those years, so that makes sense. How about a better question: What were his best two consecutive years?

I'm gonna say 1952, and 1953. In those years we get "The Parasite," which was the precursor to "The Light Of Other Days," "All The Time In The World," which was very smartly constructed and a fun read, and "Jupiter Five," which is enthralling and reads like a precursor to Rendezvous With Rama -- at least up to the point where Clarke rips us away from the interior of a spooky alien ship and makes the story about gravity shenanigans instead. And we also get "The Other Tiger," "Encounter In The Dawn," "The Possessed," and the whack-a-doo classic "The Nine Billion Names Of God" to round things out. Each hits on a very different theme.

Here's another question: Are there any I would consider good enough to read more than once? Yes, four of them:

Rescue Party (1946). It's so ancient it's turned Steampunk, and that makes it fun.
The Lion of Comarre (1949). Puzzling out the function of an ancient city is a premise that will grab me every time, and I've forgotten the details of this one.
All The Time In The World (1952). It's got a buildup like one of those dank Twilight Zone episodes. Fun to re-read knowing things in advance.
Before Eden (1961). The Venus that might-have-been, some chatty scientists doing their thing, and a nice twist as garnish. Worth another go-round.

Which story affected me - made me think - the most?

That's a hard one. I've been able to draw some interesting thoughts out of most of his tales. But if we're talking about influencing my worldview, or changing me, in a way that I can identity as important ... well, I don't know. I want to be able to point at one or two of these stories and go, "I am a changed person after reading that," like I can with "Rendezvous With Rama," or "The Light Of Other Days," each for their own reasons. But I can't. When I look back, it's just a pleasant blur, like that feeling you have after binge-watching a good - but not fantastic - television series. So, I have to fall back to the second level: What story made me think the most, even if it didn't change me?

That's probably The Songs Of Distant Earth, which gave me a lot to work with in the form of Clarke's ignorance - about future technology, about entomology, about civic planning, and about complex human relationships and romance. Clarke wrote this in 1958, which means he was 41 at the time -- coincidentally my own age now. I find that a little bit absurd. Not for any of the scientific inaccuracy, but because of his undercooked ideas about romance and sex. He writes about it like someone half his age.

I ranted a little bit about that in my original review, and I won't pick it back up here. Suffice to say that Clarke and I don't see eye to eye.

So hey, it took a little under SIX YEARS, but I actually went through every short story Arthur C Clarke wrote and gave each one some sort of review. I'm now much more familiar with his style. Also his flaws, and I have to admit that in spite of them, his title of "Grandmaster of Sci-Fi" is deserved. He may not know how to navigate a romance, but he sure knows how to build a story, and how to expand an idea at the corner of science, and on his best days he knows how to craft a great action scene and put you in the moment. I'm glad I went on this ride.

Thanks Arthur, wherever you are!

Dial F For Frankenstein, 1964

The beginning of this tale is the ending to the amusing cult film "Lawnmower Man". If you know the latter, don't bother reading the former. Actually the plot for this story has been so thoroughly rehashed and explored in so many other stories that it's not even worth summarizing here!

Neutron Tide, 1970

Oh my god, it's a short story whose only point is to make a ridiculous pun. Ack!!

The Steam-Powered Word Processor, 1986

A charming story told in fragments, as though excerpted from multiple accounts, about a clergyman who becomes obsessed with steam power and decides to construct what he calls a "word loom." It's a monstrous room-sized tangle of gears and pedals, and when he plays it like a church organ, it spits out typeset sermons for his congregation. Of course the project ends in explosive disaster, as one might expect from any project involving steam and/or rockets.

This era of Clarke's short story writing shows a lot more playfulness than his earlier work, and it's a welcome change. This particular tale has an almost Terry Pratchett feel to it.

Transit Of Earth, 1971

An astronaut, stranded on Mars with no hope of rescue, ruminates about his mission and his fate while performing his last assigned duty: To record the transit of Earth and its moon across the face of the sun, from the vantage point of Mars - an astronomical event that follows a 284-year cycle.

I was hoping this tale would be better, justifying its length - but nothing happens while the astronaut slowly consumes his remaining air, except for the transit itself. No rescue arrives, no aliens intervene, and the astronaut is totally resigned to his fate. How depressing. What was the point of this story?

The Cruel Sky, 1966

When reading these stories so long after they were written, it's tempting to believe that every time Clarke talks in fantastical terms about a new technology, it's the first time anyone has talked about it. So with this story, it's tempting to think that this is the first time anyone has really explored the idea of a personal gravity field manipulator: A solid-state device you can wear like a backpack that cancels the effects of gravity for the wearer. Wow; this could change everything! Why hasn't anyone explored this before?

But if I give Clarke a little less credit as the fountainhead of all new future inventions, I start to notice the way his very specific predictions don't hold up to scrutiny. Not on a scientific level - it's easy to get a scientific hypothesis wrong, as any scientist will tell you - but on a social level, at the level where the science meshes into society, and society is transformed. That level is the most fascinating to explore, and also the core of science fiction in general, which is no coincidence. And like any human being, Clarke's vision is clouded by his personal context. His vision of future society - of the way society would or should be transformed - is defined by his surroundings. "What are people around me struggling with, that they shouldn't be?" "What are the current taboos, and is it right to eliminate them, or reinforce them?" "What are my own biases, and will future humans have them too?"

Most of the time Clarke shies away from these things, choosing to talk about technology without involving the social politics. And I understand why, because when he does try to make a social point he bungles it half the time. His contempt for women is legendary, his ideas about the inevitable and eternal nature of war are very of-his-time, his attitudes about animal intelligence are very hit-and-miss, and his scientist characters often behave like boys in a tree fort role-playing their action heroes, rather than the safety-conscious, highly collaborative professionals they should be. That last problem is what comes up in this story. The Cruel Sky has two scientists as protagonists, and Clarke wants us to accept a number of points at face value:

1. One of the scientists is "world famous", strictly for being a very good scientist. The media hounds him in public.
2. The personal gravity field manipulator is the work of this one scientist, working almost completely alone, in secret.
3. This scientist knows his invention is hugely important for humanity, but he also wants to make a splash unveiling it - like he's P. T. Barnum showing off some new circus act - so he takes the only two prototypes of the invention and uses them to climb Mount Everest in secret at night.

All these things are vital to establish the scenario: Two guys alone in the mountains at night, with little chance for rescue. It's an adventure story! But, all of these things are also totally ridiculous, for a reason that every modern scientist knows:

Amazing new inventions are always the result of a huge collective effort. An entrepreneur or a showman might claim the spotlight to unveil it, but the scientists involved are quick to acknowledge their collaborators at every opportunity, because their careers live and die on the strength of their collaborative ties. One of the most famous modern entrepreneurs is the late Steve Jobs, and people credited him with a lot of things - a lot more than he actually did - but even Big Steve with his obsessive showmanship would also take time out at the end of many keynote speeches to have the developers and engineers stand up, so the audience could give them all a round of applause with the world watching. That example rests at the top of a mountain of others that collectively make the scientists in this short story - climbing Mount Everest and risking their lives (and those of the inevitable rescue crew) - look like jackasses.

But, by Clarke's personal view, scientists are ignored and frustrated eggheads, so they need to act out, with theatrics and derring-do, and be world-famous. He sees scientists of his own time a certain way, and imagines the way they will correct for it.

What's especially frustrating about this story is that Clarke puts major effort into his trapped-in-the-mountains scenario, and spends no time at all discussing the implications of his gravity field manipulator for society. It would revolutionize every aspect of the world economy, and almost every scientific discipline. Everything from farming techniques to space travel to dance parties would be changed. Clarke could have bent his considerable imagination to the task of describing this, maybe with just a handful of well-chosen examples. Instead he says nothing. Some guys get into the mountains with less effort than usual, they get lost, then they get rescued - the end.

As I said earlier, Clarke's vision for how some new invention would change society is rooted in his own context. It can't be perfect. But it can at least be compelling, and I wish he'd indulged it more here. At this point I've gone through almost all of his short stories, and looking back, I can say with confidence that he is at his most entertaining when he breaks away from the standard adventure story format and just writes about people coping with change, like in "The Songs Of Distant Earth", "The Light Of Other Days", "Second Dawn", "Sleeping Beauty", et cetera. That's what keeps me coming back. His reach may often exceed his grasp, but it always inspires a great discussion.

Playback, 1963

This story stands out from just about everything else I've read from Clarke so far, because of its narrative structure. The entire tale is a monologue, delivered under mysterious circumstances that slowly clarify for the reader at the same time they clarify for the speaker.

At first we think we are hearing from an astronaut delivering a report to his superiors. Then we deduce he is in some kind of man-made medical device, recovering from a serious accident. Then we quickly realize that is wrong too, and the astronaut is speaking to an alien life form, which is responding non-verbally with images. The astronaut establishes that he is not just injured, but has in fact lost his entire body in the accident, and now only exists as a consciousness embedded in a solid-state device. The aliens offer to rebuild his body, but first he needs to describe it to them, and that proves difficult because his memory is jumbled and distorted.

He describes a vaguely human figure, then lapses into nonsense and goes silent for an unknown time. Then the aliens show him an image of his description and he is so horrified by it he declares they need to start over, but his new description is even worse. More babbling, more silence, and we realize that we are reading the stream-of-consciousness of a mind as it is disintegrates. At the very end, he thanks the aliens for trying to rescue him, then the narrative breaks up completely into gibberish.

Impressive, and arresting. And exactly the right length. Lately I've been listening to these stories while doing chores around the house, but this one was enough to make me put down my work and just listen.

A Meeting With Medusa, 1971

Progress can spoil good science fiction. This tale is the longest one Clarke ever wrote that could still be called a short story, and he imagined some very interesting aliens for it and took his time describing them, but half a century of new information about Jupiter has turned those aliens from hauntingly plausible, to hopelessly absurd. A few moments of online research confirms it as fantasy. But it's still a fun read as fantasy, so ... there's that.

And, there's more going on in the story besides the fantastical aliens. The main character is a cyborg, one of the first successful fusions of man and machine - perhaps the very first - and he's been turned into a cyborg without his consent, by surgeons working to save his life after a horrible accident. This leaves him with a bit of an identity crisis. He decides that the only way to find meaning in his life is by acting as an ambassador, in the conflict that will inevitably begin as more cyborgs - and intelligent robots who were never human to begin with - appear in the solar system and fight with humanity for emancipation. It may take another hundred years before the conflict starts, but he can wait, since his cyborg parts makes him effectively immortal.

It all sounds like the setup for a sequel, and since Clarke never wrote one, a couple of other sci-fi authors have done the job. At some point I might pick up that book, but right now man-machine conflicts seem a little played out. I think the future is going to be all about conflicts mediated by machines, rather than conflicts with them. Death by drone-strike is just the beginning.

The Longest Science Fiction Story Ever Told, 1966

A silly exercise in recursion; a joke rather than a story.

Herbert George Morley Robert Wells, Esq, 1967

A followup essay Clarke wrote to explain an inconsistency in the previous story (The Longest Science Fiction Story Ever Told). More engaging than the story itself was, but not engaging enough for me to write about.

Besides, that would be yet another exercise in recursion.

Quarantine, 1977

A story short enough to be written on the back of a postcard - and no wonder, since that was the constraint Clarke was determined to meet in writing it. The idea is simple, and silly: A robotic alien intelligence destroys the Earth as a protective measure, because every time they send probes to it, the probes get infected with a kind of logic virus, and self-destruct. It's the old "I say we take off, and nuke the site from orbit, just to be sure" scenario. What is this logic virus? Clarke only drops a hint: It involves a king, a queen, a rook, a knight, a bishop, and a pawn.

Oho, it's chess! Computers try to ... solve? ... the game of chess, and get all frizzy and go boom, just like the old Saturday morning cartoon robots. DOES NOT COMPUTE, DANGER, DANGER, et cetera. In this modern age, the average smartphone can beat the snot out of all but the world's best chess players, and rather than explode from the effort, it will only get unpleasantly warm. (Usually. Insert topical Galaxy Note 7 joke here.) I guess that alien invasion can happen after all.

Death And The Senator, 1961

An overly-long and very heavily dramatic story with the tiniest scrap of science in the fiction. Not at all worth the read. I have just one vaguely interesting comment: The story hinges on the discovery that living in zero-gravity has amazing health benefits, and may even help cure advanced heart disease ... but in the long years since 1961, we've discovered exactly the opposite: Linger in space, and your health will only decline. In fact, unless you take strenuous measures to emulate the burden of gravity, your health will plummet.

The Secret, 1963

The plot hinges on the supposed health benefits of low gravity, in the same way as Clarke's "Death And The Senator", except this time it's scientists on the moon living an extra 100 years, and trying to keep the secret of their extended life from the rest of the population back on Earth, so they don't trigger a stampede. I get the impression that Clarke was pretty well convinced of the truth to this idea, and was probably shocked to learn how much the body atrophies out in space.

It is a pretty counterintuitive idea. Shouldn't less gravity equal less "stress", and therefore equal longer life? Perhaps, if you forget the fact that the body is working really hard, all the time, just to keep you alive, and will eagerly cut whatever corners it can.

Before Eden, 1961

Venus didn't turn out this way, but whatever. Clarke tells the story of team of explorers reaching the south pole of Venus, through terrain similar to Death Valley (but even more death-y), and finding a large, extremely hot lake, and an alien life form nearby. The alien is plant-like, flowing over the ground, and looks like an enormous transparent Persian rug when they shine their lamps on it. A pretty fascinating sight.

But in a nasty twist, the scientists leave behind some trash buried under a pile of stones, and the alien consumes it, and becomes infected with Earth-style bacteria. In a matter of months the entire population of aliens - representing all complex life on Venus - is exterminated by the infection. It's a riff on War Of The Worlds: The humans come in peace, and bring their nasty germs along by accident. Kablam!

Fun fact: The surface of Venus is actually about 860 degrees Fahrenheit on average. I don't think there are any bacteria known on Earth that can survive that; not even thermophiles. (The toughest one I know of can take up to 230 degrees Fahrenheit.) 860 degrees is hot enough to melt lead.

Global warming: It's no joke!

Crusade, 1968

A strange story told from the perspective of a sentient being the size of a planet, floating in the vast darkness between two galaxies. The being decides to search for intelligent life within each galaxy, and spends millions of years methodically constructing probes and pitching them into the collective gravity well of the stars on either side, then examining the feedback.

The first thing it learns: Galaxies are hot. Stars are really hot. Duh. So it engineers the probes to be more heat resistant, a step at a time. The next thing it learns: One galaxy is completely devoid of intelligent life. No signals are found anywhere. The other galaxy is teeming with life, and flooded with communications, which the being sets about unraveling.

The being is confounded to discover a kind of intelligent life that it hadn't expected: Extremely hot self-contained creatures, with extremely limited senses and very poor computing power, that disintegrate after unbelievably short lifespans. How could such ridiculous things even organize themselves, let alone explore space? Eww, they're all tiny and sloppy, and they have sex and stuff. Eeeeeww.

Then, scattered among them, are more familiar beings. The reader recognizes them as supercomputers and artificial intelligences constructed by humans. The sentient planet, recognizing these beings as more like itself, and obviously superior to the gross hot critters swarming around them, concludes that the supercomputers have been enslaved by the humans, and ... many years later, the stars in the galaxy start winking out, as the alien robots built by the sentient planet invade to rescue their brethren. Bam! Surprise revolution!

Far-fetched, but short enough and silly enough to be worthwhile.

The Light Of Darkness, 1964

This story immediately reminded me of his earlier tale, "A Slight Case Of Sunstroke". Let's inventory the connections:

1. It takes place in an exotic third-world (to Clarke) location on Earth.
2. It involves the military.
3. It's about taking revenge on a bad man in a position of power.
4. The plan for revenge uses trigonometry and electromagnetic waves.
5. It's written as a confession, after the plan has been successfully executed.

This time, instead of a bunch of highly reflective playbills in a stadium, it's a high-power radio transmitter. Instead of immolating a man with sunlight, he is blinded by radiation. And this time, instead of inspiring me to do some basic math to see if the plan was feasible, I just had to shrug my shoulders, because Clarke doesn't supply enough numbers to plug in to his scenario for testing.

Alas, a forgettable story. And the audio version is flawed for another reason: The performer attempts to render the whole thing in a fake-ass South African accent that only makes Clarke's own Racefail™ proclivities stand out.

Saturn Rising, 1961

This story employs a character type that has been pretty common in sci-fi: The self-made zillionaire industrialist who personally finances a huge scientific breakthrough. Very popular for sci-fi writers because it's an easy character to write, and an easy way to get a bunch of scientists into a workshop, hammering doggedly at a problem with no concern about the expense. Just reaching back into my recent reading list, there are zillionaire industrialist characters in "Proxima" by Stephen Baxter, "The Light Of Other Days" by Baxter and Clarke, "Contact" by Carl Sagan ... and now, here.

I guess the archetype seemed fresher back in 1961, because there isn't much else to this story. It's pretty much just "rich guy finances vacation spots on Saturn's moons", as told from the point of view of a pilot that he consults with a few times. Pretty dull.

Also, Clarke admits in the introduction that his predictions about the environment on Saturn's moon Titan were way off: Any building on the surface would not have a view of Saturn rising, because it would be permanently submerged in clouds! Oh well.

The Last Command, 1965

A brief us-versus-the-Russkies tale delivered in the form of a "Last Command" from a war-ravaged earth to a military base on the moon. The twist ending falls into your brain about two paragraphs in, and the story just can't make itself short enough for the waiting to be worthwhile.

The Shining Ones, 1962

It took me a while to decide whether to spoil this story so I could more fully discuss it, or just give a summary. Then I realized that there have been such excellent adaptations of this story, in literature and cinema, that simply comparing it to the works it inspired would also spoil it - and possibly the other works as well. So I feel like my hands are tied either way. I guess the best point I can make is, if you've read Rendezvous with Rama and its sequels, this story is an interesting blueprint of Clarke's vision for the aliens in those novels. I look forward to seeing them on the big screen if Morgan Freeman's project ever gets enough traction.

The Food Of The Gods, 1964

A quaint little tale about the way food culture might change in the far future. When all food is synthesized from machines, the idea of eating animals - or even plants - may seem barbaric. I can't help pointing out that in the time since this story we've discovered that food - and our own digestion - is a whole lot more complicated than anyone would have guessed, and now it seems crazy to believe that a mechanical device could synthesize a better bowl of salad from scratch more quickly and more efficiently than a farmer could grow it with soil and sunlight. Especially if the farmer is a modern farmer using genetically-engineered crops. Millions of years of relentless optimization creates a pretty high bar for chemists to clear!

On the other hand, it's worth considering the secondary point Clarke makes in the story: A good way to synthesize appealing food might be essential when humans move off-planet, because soil and properly-filtered sunlight are pretty rare in space, and even if you launch the soil up there it's a huge pain keeping it viable for long.

An Ape About The House, 1962

I had low expectations for this story going in, based on the title. How insightful could a tale about a trained primate be, if it was written 50 years ago? I pictured three scenarios: First, Clarke could oversell the natural abilities of primates to make some kind of comment on the callousness of animal treatment in the 60's. "Hey, who solved professor Farnsworth's equation that he left on the blackboard last Friday? Oh my goodness, it was Mr Bananas! We've all been so wrong about you!!" I wouldn't buy it, and the story would annoy me. Second, Clarke could undersell his primates, making them into sullen brutes, and then introduce some fanciful medical technology - an implant, or a helmet, or something - that makes them hyper-intelligent. No doubt he'd spend most of this story describing how the humans had to destroy the apes or risk enslavement. A version of Planet Of The Apes six years ahead of the film, perhaps. Also not compelling.

Or third, Clarke could get his treatment of primates spot-on, and we could all learn a Very Important Lesson about treating our close evolutionary cousins with respect and empathy. This scenario would probably end on a sad note, since it couldn't help pointing out how terrible we've been at learning this lesson in the real world - with poaching, habitat destruction, abuse and exploitation by zoos and circuses, and so on. Not exactly a fun read.

But instead, Clarke found a personal angle that was more amusing than I expected. His story revolves around a genetically augmented version of an ape, in the future, that a well-to-do household employs as a housekeeper. There are still some edgy questions about slavery and personhood to grapple with, but they get muddled by the genetic tinkering. The ape's "owners" treat her almost exactly like a 20th-century household would treat a slow but disciplined maid. She is granted humanity - but not quite autonomy.

The head of the household, a rather shallow woman who seems to live to throw dinner parties and one-up the other neighborhood wives (Clarke uses his hatred of women like garnish around a meal), has the ape doing basic household chores at first, but eventually she decides to play a trick on one of her socialite competitors, and uses her housekeeper as the means. Her competitor likes to paint, and often shows off the paintings at gallery events. The woman has some painting skills of her own, so she decides to mock her competitor by holding her own gallery event, and claiming that all the art was actually painted by her primate housekeeper. To make the scenario seem real, she teaches the ape how to sit in front of an easel and slap paint onto it with a brush, and then brings her socialite friends over to see "the artist in action".

Everyone buys it, and the word gets around, and her competitor is thoroughly humiliated. Seems like an easy victory, and the end of the story, except one day while the woman is out, her competitor sneaks over to her house, locates the ape, and commands her to do a painting on the spot so she can see the proof with her own eyes. The ape dutifully sits down at the easel and starts messing around. To everyone's surprise, the resulting artwork is quite good - better than the woman or her socialite competitor - and the story ends with another gallery showing, this time heavily attended, and filled with authentic paintings from the world-famous artist ape.

Cute, humanizing without being preachy, and mercifully short. Well played, Clarke. It could have been worse.

The Wind From The Sun a.k.a. Sun Jammer, 1964

The prosaic title hides the juvenile origins of this story, in a 1960's magazine aimed at teenagers, no doubt filled with other gee-whiz adventure stories uncluttered by boring adult crap like philosophy and romance. A rich inventor builds a solar sail, and flies it in a race against other solar sails, on a route around the Earth and out past the moon. He's got some friendly competition from a Russian cosmonaut who has his own modular sail design. The Russian discards pieces of his sail at key moments in the race to try and overtake our hero, and it's neck-and-neck until an unexpected solar flare endangers them both, forcing them into a draw.

I listened to this while coasting across town on my recumbent at night. It was like a too-serious episode of "Wacky Races". Couldn't hold my attention. In fact, when the comparison came to mind, I went to Wikipedia to find a link about "Wacky Races", and ended up reading about that cartoon and its spinoffs for longer than it took me to read "The Wind From The Sun" in the first place! Oh Jimmy Wales, you rogue!

The Other Side Of The Sky, 1957

This was a pretty interesting collection of short stories about life on a space station. The standout to me was a somewhat implausible one about an astronaut who brings a pet bird up into space, and one day the bird begins fainting from lack of oxygen, alerting the crew to a failure in the oxygen system and saving many lives.

I'm not sure if I liked it because the idea of a bird on a space station is kind of adorable, or because it brought up a series of questions that my skeptical mind began to chew on? Could a bird figure out how to fly, in an environment with no concept of "down"? Could a bird survive the launch into space, or would it have to be hatched from an egg on the station? Would the egg survive the launch? How would a bird deal with eating? Don't some birds tilt their heads up and use gravity to help them swallow or drink? Don't they rely on gravity to defecate cleanly?

I bet NASA has actually answered some of these questions.

The other stories were good, even if they didn't inspire so many questions. Clarke earned his lunch money here.

Out Of The Cradle, Endlessly Orbiting, 1959

A story framed as an interview with an old scientist, and based on an optimistic timeline for space exploration that has us heading off to colonize Mars well before the year 2000. A few minutes in, the old scientist describes the "second most awe-inspiring sound he's ever heard," and then announces that he's going to tell a story about the sound that beat it to become number one.

It's not that much of a story, so I don't feel bad for spoiling it, by saying that as soon as he made that announcement it was obvious exactly what the sound would be, just a matter of learning what parties were involved. Think about it: According to every trite storytelling trope in the world, what sound is a well-cultured adult male going to hear, that will immediately shove everything else he's ever heard into second place for "awe-inspiring?"

The birth cry of his first child. Duh. Damn it Clarke, you could have avoided telegraphing it so obviously if you'd just dropped the "second-most" setup. Oh well. (He's way too dead to care at this point.) Next story...

Dog's Star, 1962

A sappy not-science-fiction story eulogizing a dog. Not much reason for this to exist, except perhaps as a signpost for the beginning of Clarke's interest in earthquakes.

Trouble With Time a.k.a. Crime On Mars, 1960

I was certain this would be about time travel paradoxes, but it turned out to be a lightweight detective story, with a sci-fi flourish. The flourish is that the action takes place on Mars, which has no oceans, and so there is no convenient place to put the international date line. It just so happens that one of the cities on the newly colonized planet is laid right across the line, such that it's Friday on the East side of town when it's Thursday on the West side, and so forth. A burglar sneaks across town into a museum and waits until early morning to sneak out with a stolen artifact, only to realize that it's Friday all over again and the museum is open for business. He panics and the police nab him easily.

Undeniably silly, but reading it leads one to contemplate the international date line as it exists here on Earth, which can be very brain-bending. There's a good reason we've all agreed to stick it way out in the Pacific Ocean, and even zig-zagged it around various islands.

Cosmic Casanova, 1958

Like whoah. Some of Clarke's stories were first published in Playboy magazine (which all you young people may not realize was a monthly publication that was notorious from the 70's to the late 90's for being a source of naked-lady-pictures for curious teenage boys nationwide) and this story would fit right into those pages between the tastefully nude women and the advertisements for wine and cigars. But no, this was published somewhere else.

Here's the plot: In the far future, a man is doing the outer-space equivalent of long-haul trucking, spending large amounts of time alone on his ship, and repeatedly getting starved for sexual contact, then having a bunch of shallow sexual conquests every time he reaches a populated planet. (Yee haw!) This has repeated so many times that it's become a way of life for him, and he's developed quite a skill for recognizing willing partners and contriving a situation where they can get naked together. Then one day he discovers a beacon from a planet that's been out of contact with the rest of civilization for 5000 years, and as he heads for the planet to investigate, he starts up a remote conversation with an emissary from the planet, and she happens to be a pretty young lady. They plan his arrival on the planet so they can get some brief alone-time together, presumably for a quick bit of humpery, before she has to introduce him to the other officials. The plan seems perfect, and the man is practically salivating as his ship touches down and he runs outside to meet his interstellar booty-call, but then he gets a rude surprise.

The low gravity of the planet has affected this isolated group in a strange way over the last 5000 years: The woman is so tall that the man barely comes up to her knees.

What a tweeeest!

Well, even if the main character is a bit of a crawler, the story is still worthwhile, because the tweeeest ending makes for an interesting thought experiment. Could humans grow to 20 feet tall in a low-gravity environment, and still look more-or-less the same?

Well, evolution can do a lot in 5000 years, especially to species that have very short reproductive cycles. But reasonably civilized humans only reproduce every 20 years or so. That's 250 generations; doesn't seem like much... But I'm betting it's all a bit moot since a 20-foot-tall human would not be proportional, and would look quite alarming to anyone expecting a "normal" appearance.

Even if gravity is changed, physics still has its way. A person 4x taller would have 64x the mass but only 16x the surface area. Their whole physiology would have to be rearranged just to radiate enough heat and breathe in enough oxygen. Would they breathe, move, and speak at the same rate? Would their voice be the same, or would it be suspiciously deep? Perhaps we'd have to alter the atmosphere, the temperature, the light intensity, and the pressure, in very specific ways to try and counteract this - but how well would that work?

Would their hair be suspiciously dense-looking? With their eyes 4x larger on every side and 4x farther apart, would they still be able to focus them with the same muscles? The cornea takes in oxygen directly from the air - it contains no blood vessels - how well would that work in our re-jiggered atmosphere? Would they need redesigned tear-ducts to avoid dehydrating those huge eyeballs?

I'm not trying to make an argument from incredulity here, just saying that there are plenty of factors to consider in deciding how much a human's appearance might change if they were 4x taller, and reduced gravity does not eliminate very many of those factors.

Plus, we're already assuming that humans would naturally favor larger bodies in lesser gravity. Why would we do that? Perhaps because the largest mammals on Earth live in the sea, and they are less troubled by gravity there. ... But they also have pretty different body shapes, suited to moving through the water. It's not an ideal comparison since we're assuming a gaseous atmosphere on our hypothetical 5000-year backwater planet. Perhaps humans would get taller, and skinnier at the same time, and we'd end up with a planet full of gigantic slow-moving skeleton-people. Perhaps we'd have the Wookiee home world! (Except they'd be pretty lousy in a fight.)

Into The Comet, 1960

A journalist accompanies a crew aboard a spacecraft that intercepts a comet and explores its core. The core generates massive electromagnetic interference (for some reason) that causes their computers to go haywire, buggering their calculations for the return flight, and they all believe they're stranded and doomed to starve ... until the journalist remembers that he knows how to build and use an abacus. He spends a couple weeks building an abacus for each crew member and they all crunch calculations by hand until they have a trajectory that gets them back into radio range with Earth, and everyone is saved; hooray!

Absolutely freaking ridiculous.

Security Check, 1957

A reclusive craftsman gets a job doing set design for a sci-fi TV show and starts turning in designs that are a little too accurate. Hijinks ensue. Amusing, but not memorable.

I Remember Babylon, 1960

Clarke gives himself a shovel-sized pat on the back for predicting the idea of a TV broadcast that cannot be subject to local censorship in this framed-as-nonfiction story, but he's buggered it up, because he's totally disregarded an obvious point: The Russians would never launch an unauthorized satellite into geosynchronous orbit over the United States, because it would immediately be seen as an act of war and all hell would break loose.

I mean, seriously, Clarke. First military chap who spots that rocket going up is going to assume the payload on the satellite is a big old dose of nuclear death. Before you know it, other rockets will be passing each other in the air. And you want to preach doom and gloom because someone might beam nudie pictures into American living rooms from space? Damn, you wrote this in the 50's for sure.

Summertime on Icarus a.k.a. The Hottest Piece Of Real Estate In The Solar System, 1960

A guy gets trapped on the dark side of an asteroid that has somehow remained close to the sun, like near the orbit of Mercury. Only a few hours before the asteroid rotates and the sun starts baking the planet. His robotic space-suit is hilariously crude, and there is no backup system to launch him on the return trajectory to his distant spaceship. Will he be rescued by his crewmates in time? Or should he just give up and depressurize his suit to avoid the torture of being burned alive when the sun rises?

Pretty exciting scenario, even if the numbers are all way off. But worth reading? Nah, skip it. Read the intro to 2312 instead.

The Songs Of Distant Earth, 1958

This was a long one, and I had high hopes for it going in, because the title sounded very familiar. Surely his well-known stories are his better ones?

It's a story about a young woman living in small city on a planet very far away from Earth, and a man who is an engineer on a space ship making an emergency pit-stop at the planet. Even though she's already in a relationship, the woman falls hard for the guy, and the guy falls not-so-hard for the woman, and the story is about how they deal with this doomed romance over a number of months while the engineer helps his crew to repair the ship and continue their mission to colonize another very-far-away planet.

As I was going, I tapped out four lines of notes to myself:

* No cities!
* Bees transported for orchards?
* World run by a computer brain?
* OMG the guy is a dick!!

Clarke has hypothesized that large cities would eventually vanish from Earth in several previous stories. His favorite justification is that once man invents an easy form of flight, geography won't matter, and so people will spread themselves out relatively thin just because they can. In a previous story it was the mass-production of the helicopter, and in this story it's a machine that can manipulate gravity directly. He glosses over all the other needs that might arise when living far away from others - food supply, energy supply, emergency services, ease of getting together in groups to work or play - by claiming that humanity either invented ways to supply them locally, or simply moved beyond needing them.

It's pretty obvious that he's projecting his own personality onto an entire global population when he makes this claim. There are many fantastic reasons for people to live very close together indeed, even in extremely large groups, and a good question to ask is one that turns Clarke's idea on its head: If effortless transportation can provide instant access to the outdoors whenever you desire, then why would you ever choose to live outside a major city?

Clarke doesn't actually propose it himself, but it's interesting to think of large cities as a kind of artifact of technology. Like, new technology has always given us ways to cram more people closer together with less waste and discomfort, but is there a new technology out there that would actually reverse the trend, and make everyone pine for the fjords? People often move to large cities to take advantage of the greater spectrum of opportunities there. Is there some future invention that would make the wilderness the go-to place for culture, employment, and socializing? I bet there were people in the late 90's who believed the internet was that very technology. Why live in a city when you can do all your work and play via telepresence?

Well, it turns out that telepresence is still an impediment to getting work done, for the vast majority of people and jobs. But that's just because the tech isn't refined enough, right? What about when we're all walking around in telepresence drones that look just like us, with senses just as vivid as our own? I'm pretty sure it'll still be an impediment, for a simple reason: Telepresence means people can get away with not paying their full attention, more of the time. And work will always suffer for it.

The next item on my list is about bees. Clarke declares that the orchards on the island where the woman lives are abuzz with bees transported from Earth specifically to enable pollination to occur and fruit to grow. He's making some gigantic assumptions about the ecology of the planet of course, the biggest one being that trees transplanted from Earth could actually grow at all in alien soil -- and that anything like soil would be there in the first place. It's pretty wacky, and it's not connected to the plot at all, so I had to wonder: Why is he throwing it in? Perhaps it's artistic, and he's trying to evoke nostalgia for Earth. The story in general is about how the vast distances in space travel can distort human culture and relationships. Yeah, maybe it's thematic. The bees are like furniture from an old victorian house: Evocative of a grander time, but a bit weird in your modern living room.

Next up is another Clarke favorite: The big computer in control of everything. He posits that the entire Earth is managed by a one giant artificial intelligence. This story is from the late 50's, after the invention of the first solid-state transistors, but a few years before the first MOFSET transistors and half a decade before the integrated circuits that would use them. So, Clarke was making a pretty big leap of faith that computers would be way, way more powerful than anyone knew.

He's a pretty smart guy for predicting that, and if computers had remained as expensive as they were (while still getting more powerful) we would probably live in a world closer to his vision. Computers would be instruments of large corporations and governments, and ordinary people would be acolytes tending them and subject to their whims. But instead, computing is cheap -- shockingly cheap. Nowadays we embed digital voice recorders in greeting cards for a laugh. You can make your own re-usable one for ten bucks. With computing power dirt-cheap and ubiquitous, the world is so much more complicated that one big artificial intelligence would have trouble just tracking everything, let alone managing it. Things have gotten even weirder than Clarke predicted!

Which brings me to item four on my list. I don't know if the humans of the far future are supposed to be callous, womanizing jerks, but the protagonist of this story sure is. He puts his pregnant wife into cryosleep, and a few weeks later (from his point of view) during an emergency landing, he spots a hot young woman - much younger than him - who seems to like him, and for months while he's repairing his ship and she's obsessing over his glamorous space-faring ways, he completely avoids telling her that he's already married, and already a father. Obviously he just wants to bask in this girl's attention and bone her a bunch of times, then ditch her when it's time to launch, returning to his slumbering, unsuspecting wife.

And that's exactly what he does. Ugh. I felt dirty after reading it. Along the way he decides to show his frozen wife to the woman, to drive the point home that she's just being used, and that they have no future together.

Now, I've certainly read stories about infidelity before, and had a whole range of reactions. But what got me here was Clarke's matter-of-fact treatment of the guy's behavior. He doesn't feel any shame, or even ask whether he should feel it, until the last possible moment before it's obvious he's dumping her. Likewise he feels no sympathy for her when he does - only for himself and how "hard" his pre-determined, self-inflicted ordeal is. No one else in the story has sympathy for her either, but I guess that's par for the course with Clarke, who wouldn't know how to construct a dialogue between two women even if he was taking dictation in a f*#@!% nunnery.

He apparently published several drafts of this short story - the second one no less callous than the first - before expanding it into a 280-page novel almost 30 years later. The novel has a similar doomed romance but hand-waves the jealousy and deception by claiming that the natives of the planet - including the girl - have a much looser sexuality and do not get jealous because they are not burdened by religion or poverty. Yeah, I dunno, Clarke. It's true I've met a number of people - men and women - who didn't seem to experience romantic jealousy. But they all either had obvious intimacy issues, or were psychopaths*. Not exactly the core of a new utopia.

(To the polyamorous: Please realize that I'm not bashing your category ... just those who are doing it badly.)

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Page Summary

Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design
Whither working men?
Viriiiiiii
Benjamin Hardy: Willpower Doesn't Work
If This Book Exists, You're In The Wrong Universe
Every now and then this book makes me shout in astonishment
Relaxin' on a Saturday: SCI-FI novel tropes gallery
Cry wolf too many times, and...
Vaccines and Autism
Books on Bikes: Michael Wolff: Fire And Fury
An interesting summation
Ilium and Olympos
Condensing books
Arthur C Clarke Round 22: At The End Was The Wire
Arthur C Clarke Round 21: The C stands for Celeritas. (Nothing can exceed the speed of Clarke.)
Arthur C Clarke Round 20: Makin' Sci-Fi Great Again (If You Don't Mind The Sexism)
Arthur C Clarke Round 19: Like A Regular Odyssey, But In Space
Arthur C Clarke Round 18: Arthur, Arthur, Arthur!
Arthur C Clarke Round 17: Can't Teach An Old Clarke New Techs
Arthur C Clarke Round 16: The Arthur Awakens

Page generated Jan. 4th, 2026 05:26 pm

Peeks, Pokes, and Pointers!

Entries tagged with books

Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design

Whither working men?

Viriiiiiii

Benjamin Hardy: Willpower Doesn't Work

If This Book Exists, You're In The Wrong Universe

Every now and then this book makes me shout in astonishment

Relaxin' on a Saturday: SCI-FI novel tropes gallery

Cry wolf too many times, and...

Vaccines and Autism

Books on Bikes: Michael Wolff: Fire And Fury

An interesting summation

Ilium and Olympos

Condensing books

Arthur C Clarke Round 22: At The End Was The Wire

Arthur C Clarke Round 21: The C stands for Celeritas. (Nothing can exceed the speed of Clarke.)

Arthur C Clarke Round 20: Makin' Sci-Fi Great Again (If You Don't Mind The Sexism)

Arthur C Clarke Round 19: Like A Regular Odyssey, But In Space

Arthur C Clarke Round 18: Arthur, Arthur, Arthur!

Arthur C Clarke Round 17: Can't Teach An Old Clarke New Techs

Arthur C Clarke Round 16: The Arthur Awakens

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November 2025

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