- Smith, L. Neil.
Down with Power.
Rockville, MD: Phoenix Pick, 2012.
ISBN 978-1-61242-055-4.
-
In the first chapter of this superb book, the author quotes Scott
Adams, creator of
“Dilbert”, describing
himself as being “a libertarian minus the crazy stuff”,
and then proceeds to ask precisely what is crazy about adopting a strict
interpretation of the Zero Aggression Principle:
A libertarian is a person who believes that no one has the right,
under any circumstances, to initiate force against another human
being for any reason whatever; nor will a libertarian advocate
the initiation of force, or delegate it to anyone else.
Those who act consistently with this principle are libertarians,
whether they realize it or not. Those who fail to act consistently
with it are not libertarians, regardless of what they may claim.
(p. 20)
The subsequent chapters sort out the details of what this principle
implies for contentious issues such as war powers; torture; money
and legal tender laws; abortion; firearms and other weapons;
“animal rights”; climate change (I do not use scare
quotes on this because climate change is real and has always
happened and always will—it is the hysteria over anthropogenic
contributions to an eternally fluctuating process driven mostly by
the Sun which is a hoax); taxation; national defence; prohibition
in all of its pernicious manifestations; separation of marriage,
science, and medicine from the state; immigration; intellectual
property; and much more. Smith's viewpoint on these questions is
largely informed by
Robert LeFevre,
whose wisdom he had the good fortune to imbibe at week-long seminar
in 1972. (I encountered LeFevre just once, at a libertarian gathering
in Marin County, California [believe it or not, such things exist, or
at least existed] around 1983, and it was this experience that transformed
me from a “nerf libertarian” who was prone to exclaiming
“Oh, come on!” whilst reading
Rothbard to the flinty
variety who would go on to author the
Evil Empires
bumper sticker.) Sadly, Bob LeFevre is no longer with us, but
if you wish to be inoculated with the burning fever of liberty
which drove him and inspired those who heard him speak, this book
is as close as you can come today to meeting him in person.
The naïve often confuse libertarians with conservatives:
to be sure, libertarians often wish to impede “progressives”
whose agenda amounts to progress toward serfdom and wish, at the least,
for a roll-back of the intrusions upon individual liberty which were the
hallmark of the twentieth century. But genuine libertarianism, not the
nerf variety, is a deeply radical doctrine which calls into question
the whole leader/follower, master/slave, sovereign/subject, and
state/citizen structure which has characterised human civilisation
ever since hominids learned to talk and the most glib of them became
politicians (“Put meat at feet of Glub and Glub give you much good
stuff”).
And here is where I both quibble with and enthusiastically endorse the
author's agenda. The quibble is that I fear that our species, formed by
thousands of generations of hunter/gatherer and agricultural experience,
has adapted, like other primates, to a social structure in which most
individuals delegate decision making and even entrust their lives to
“leaders” chosen by criteria deeply wired into our biology
and not remotely adapted to the challenges we face today and in the
future. (Hey, it could be worse: peacocks select for the most overdone
tail—it's probably a blessing nakes don't have tails—imagine
trying to fit them all into a joint session of Congress.) The endorsement
is that I don't think it's possible to separate the spirit of individualism which
is at the heart of libertarianism from the frontier. There were many things
which contributed to the first American war of secession and the independent
republics which emerged from it, but I believe their unique nature was
in substantial part due to the fact that they were marginal settlements
on the edge of an unexplored and hostile continent, where many families were
entirely on their own and on the front lines, confronted by the vicissitudes of
nature and crafty enemies.
Thomas Jefferson worried that as the population of cities
grew compared to that of the countryside, the ethos of self-sufficiency
would be eroded and be supplanted by dependency, and that this corruption
and reliance upon authority founded, at its deepest level, upon the
initiation of force, would subvert the morality upon which self-government
must ultimately rely. In my one encounter with Robert LeFevre, he
disdained the idea that “maybe if we could just get back to the
Constitution” everything would be fine. Nonsense, he said: to
a substantial degree the Constitution is the problem—after
all, look at how it's been “interpreted” to permit all of
the absurd abrogations of individual liberty and natural law since its
dubious adoption
in 1789. And here, I think the author may put a bit
too much focus on documents (which can, have been, and forever will be) twisted
by lawyers into things they never were meant to say, and too little on
the frontier.
What follows is both a deeply pessimistic and unboundedly optimistic view
of the human and transhuman prospect. I hope I don't lose you in the
loop-the-loop. Humans, as presently constituted, have wired-in
baggage which renders most of us vulnerable to glib forms of
persuasion by “leaders” (who are simply those more
talented than others in persuasion). The more densely humans are packed,
and the greater the communication bandwidth available to them (in particular,
one to many media), the more vulnerable they are to such “leadership”.
Individual liberty emerges in frontier societies: those where each person
and each family must be self-sufficient, without any back-up other than their
relations to neighbours, but with an unlimited upside in expanding the human
presence into new territory. The old America was a frontier society; the
new America is a constrained society, turning inward upon itself and devouring
its best to appease its worst.
So, I'm not sure this or that amendment to a document which is largely
ignored will restore liberty in an environment where a near-majority of
the electorate receive net benefits from the minority who pay most of
the taxes. The situation in the United States, and on Earth, may well
be irreversible. But the human and posthuman destiny is much, much
larger than that. Perhaps we don't need a revision of governance documents as
much as the opening of a frontier. Then people will be able
to escape the stranglehold where seven eighths of all of their work is
confiscated by the thugs who oppress them and instead use all of their sapient
facilities to their own ends. As a sage author once said:
Freedom, immortality, and the stars!
Works for me. Free people expand at a rate which asymptotically approaches
the speed of light. Coercive government and bureaucracy grow
logarithmically, constrained by their own internal dissipation.
We win; they lose.
In the Kindle edition the index is just a list of
page numbers. Since the Kindle edition includes real page numbers,
you can type in the number from the index, but that's not as
convenient as when index citations are linked directly to references
in the text.
- Gordon, John Steele.
A Thread Across the Ocean.
New York: Harper Perennial, 2002.
ISBN 978-0-06-052446-3.
-
There are inventions, and there are meta-inventions. Many
things were invented in the 19th century which contributed to the
wealth of the present-day developed world, but there
were also concepts which emerged in that era of “anything
is possible” ferment which cast even longer shadows. One of
the most important is entrepreneurship—the ability
of a visionary who sees beyond the horizon of the conventional
wisdom to assemble the technical know-how, the financial capital,
the managers and labourers to do the work, while keeping all of
the balls in the air and fending off the horrific setbacks that
any breakthrough technology will necessarily encounter as it
matures.
Cyrus W. Field
may not have been the first entrepreneur in the modern mold, but he
was without doubt one of the greatest. Having started with almost no
financial resources and then made his fortune in the manufacture of paper,
he turned his attention to telegraphy. Why, in the mid-19th century,
should news and information between the Old World and the New move
only as fast as sailing ships could convey it, while the telegraph
could flash information across continents in seconds? Why,
indeed?—Field took a proposal to lay a submarine cable from
Newfoundland to the United States to cut two days off the
transatlantic latency of around two weeks to its logical limit:
a cable across the entire Atlantic which could relay information in
seconds, linking the continents together in a web of
information which was, if low bandwidth, almost instantaneous compared
to dispatches carried on ships.
Field knew next to nothing about electricity, manufacturing of
insulated cables thousands of miles long, paying-out mechanisms
to lay them on the seabed, or the navigational challenges in
carrying a cable from one continent to another. But he was
supremely confident that success in the endeavour would enrich
those who accomplished it beyond their dreams of avarice, and
persuasive in enlisting in the effort not only wealthy backers
to pay the bills but also technological savants including
Samuel F. B. Morse and William Thompson
(later Lord Kelvin), who invented the mirror
galvanometer which made the submarine cable viable.
When you try to do something audacious which has never been
attempted before, however great the promise, you shouldn't
expect to succeed the first time, or the second, or the
third…. Indeed, the history of transatlantic cable was
one of frustration, dashed hopes, lost investments, derision
in the popular press—until it worked. Then it was the
wonder of the age. So it has been and shall always be with
entrepreneurship.
Today, gigabytes per second flow beneath the oceans through the
tubes. Unless you're in continental Eurasia, it's
likely these bits reached you through one of them. It all had
to start somewhere, and this is the chronicle of how that
came to be. This may have been the first time it became evident
there was a time value to information: that the news, financial
quotes, and messages delivered in minutes instead of weeks were
much more valuable than those which arrived long after the fact.
It is also interesting that the laying of the first successful
transatlantic cable was almost entirely a British operation.
While the American Cyrus Field was the promoter, almost all of the
capital, the ships, the manufacture of the cable, and the scientific
and engineering expertise in its production and deployment was
British.
- Bonanos, Christopher.
Instant.
New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2012.
ISBN 978-1-61689-085-8.
-
The second half of the twentieth century in the developed
world was, in many ways, the age of immediate gratification,
and no invention was as iconic of the epoch as the
Polaroid instant photograph. No longer did people
have to wait until a roll of film was full, take it to the
drug store to be sent off to a photo lab, and then, a week or
so later, see whether the irreplaceable pictures of their
child's first birthday came out or were forever lost. With
the introduction of Edwin Land's first Polaroid camera in
1948, only a minute elapsed between the click of the shutter
and peeling off a completely developed black and white (well,
initially, sepia and white, but that was fixed within two years)
print. If the picture wasn't satisfactory, another shot could
be taken on the spot, and pictures of special events could
be immediately shared with others present—in a way, the
Polaroid print was the original visual social medium: Flickr
in the Fifties.
This book chronicles the history of Polaroid, which is inseparable
from the life of its exceptional founder, CEO, and
technological visionary, Edwin Land. Land, like other, more
recent founders of technological empires, was a college drop-out
(the tedium simply repelled him), whose instinct drove him to
create products which other, more sensible, people considered
impossible, for markets which did not exist, fulfilling needs
which future customers did not remotely perceive they had,
and then continuing to dazzle them with ever more amazing
achievements. Polaroid in its heyday was the descendent of
Thomas Edison's Menlo Park invention factory and the ancestor
of Apple under Steve Jobs—a place where crazy, world-transforming
ideas bubbled up and were groomed into products with a huge
profit margin.
Although his technical knowledge was both broad and deep, and he
spent most of his life in the laboratory or supervising research
and product development, Edwin Land was anything but a nerd: he
was deeply versed in the fine arts and literature, and assembled
a large collection of photography (both instant and conventional)
along with his 535 patents. He cultivated relationships with
artists ranging from Ansel Adams to Andy Warhol and involved them
in the design and evolution of Polaroid's products. Land considered
basic research part of Polaroid's mission, and viewed his work
on human colour perception as his most important achievement: he
told a reporter in 1959, “Photography…that is
something I do for a living.”
Although Polaroid produced a wide (indeed, almost bewildering)
variety of cameras and film which progressed from peel-off
monochrome to professional large-format positive/negative
sheets to colour to all-in-one colour film packs for the
SX-70
and its successors, which miraculously developed in
broad daylight after being spit out by the camera, it remained,
to a large extent, a one product company—entirely
identified with instant photography. And, it was not only a
one product company (something with which this scrivener has
some acquaintance), but a one genius company, where
the entire technical direction and product strategy resided
in the braincase of a single individual. This has its risks,
and when the stock was flying high there was no shortage of
sceptical analysts on Wall Street who pointed them out.
And then slowly, painfully, it all fell back to Earth. In 1977,
Land's long-time dream of instant motion pictures was launched
on the market as
Polavision.
The company had expended years and on the order of half a billion
dollars in developing a system which produced three minute silent
movies which were grainy and murky. This was launched just
at the time video cassette recorders were coming onto the market,
which could record and replay full television programs with sound,
using inexpensive tapes which could be re-recorded. Polavision
sales were dismal, and the product was discontinued two years later.
In 1976, Kodak launched their own instant camera line, which cut
into Polaroid's sales and set off a patent litigation battle which
would last more than fourteen years and cause Polaroid to focus on
the past and defending its market share rather than innovation.
Now that everybody has instant photography in the form of digital
cameras and mobile telephones, all without the need of miracle
chemistry, breakthrough optics, or costly film packs, you might
conclude that Polaroid, like Kodak, was done in by digital. The
reality is somewhat more complicated. What undermined Polaroid's
business model was not digital photography, which emerged only after
the company was already steep in decline, but the advent of the one hour
minilab and
inexpensive, highly automated, and small point-and-shoot
35 mm cameras. When the choice was between waiting a week
or so for your pictures or seeing them right away, Polaroid had an
edge, but when you could shoot a roll of film, drop it at the
minilab in the mall when you went to do your shopping, and
pick up the prints before you went home, the distinction wasn't
so great. Further, the quality of prints from 35 mm film
on photographic paper was dramatically better; the prints were
larger; and you could order additional copies or enlargements
from the negatives. Large, heavy, and clunky cameras that
only took 10 pictures from an expensive film pack began to look
decreasingly attractive compared to pocketable 35 mm
cameras that, at least for the snapshot market, nailed focus and
exposure almost every time you pushed the button.
The story of Polaroid is also one of how a company can be trapped by
its business model. Polaroid's laboratories produced one of the first
prototypes of a digital camera. But management wasn't interested
because everybody knew that revenue came from selling film, not
cameras, and a digital camera didn't use film. At the same time,
Polaroid was working on a pioneering inkjet photo printer, which
management disdained because it didn't produce output they
considered of photographic quality. Imagine how things might have been
different had somebody said, “Look, it's not as good as a
photographic print—yet—but it's good enough for
most of our snapshot customers, and we can replace our film revenue
with sales of ink and branded paper.” But nobody said that. The
Polaroid microelectronics laboratory was closed in 1993, with the
assets sold to MIT and the inkjet project was terminated—those
working on it went off to found the premier large-format inkjet
company.
In addition to the meticulously documented history, there is a
tremendous amount of wisdom regarding how companies and technologies
succeed and fail. In addition, this is a gorgeous book, with
numerous colour illustrations (expandable and scrollable in the
Kindle edition). My only quibble is that
in the Kindle edition, the index is just a list of terms, not linked
to references in the text; everything else is properly linked.
Special thanks to James Lileks for
recommending
this book
(part 2).
- Rawles, James Wesley.
Founders.
New York: Atria Books, 2012.
ISBN 978-1-4391-7282-7.
-
This novel is the third in the series which began with
Patriots (December 2008)
and continued with
Survivors (January 2012).
These books are not a conventional trilogy, in that all
describe events in the lives of their characters in
roughly the same time period surrounding
“the Crunch”—a grid down societal
collapse due to a debt crisis and hyperinflation. Many
of the same characters appear in the volumes, but different
episodes in their lives are described. This installment
extends the story beyond the end of the previous books (taking
into account the last chapter, well beyond), but most
of the story occurs in the years surrounding the Crunch.
In an introductory note, the author says the books can be
read in any order, but I think the reader will miss a great
deal if this is the first one read—most of the
characters who appear here have an extensive back-story in
the previous books, and you'll miss much of what motivates
them and how they found themselves in their present circumstances
if you start here.
Like the earlier novels, this is part thriller and part
survival tutorial. I found the two components less well
integrated here than before. The author seems prone to
launching into a litany of survival gear and tactics, not
to mention veering off into minutiæ of Christian
doctrine, leaving the story and characters on hold. For
example, in chapter 20:
The gear inside the field station CONEX included a pair
of R-390A HF receivers, two Sherwood SE-3 synchronous
detectors, four hardwired demodulators, a half dozen
multiband scanners, several digital audio recorders, two
spectrum analyzers, and seven laptop computers that were
loaded with demodulators, digital recorders, and
decryption/encryption software.
Does this really move the plot along? Is anybody other than
a wealthy oilman likely to be able to put together such a
rig for signal intelligence and traffic analysis? And if
not, why do we need to know all of this, as opposed to simply
describing it as a “radio monitoring post”?
This is not a cherry-picked example; there are numerous other
indulgences in gear geekdom.
The novel covers the epic journey, largely on foot, of Ken and
Terry Layton from apocalyptic Crunch Chicago, where they waited
too late to get out of Dodge toward the retreat their group had
prepared in the
American redoubt,
and the development and exploits of an insurgency against the
so-called “Provisional Government” headquartered in
Fort Knox, Kentucky, which is a thinly-disguised front for
subjugation of the U.S. to the United Nations and looting the
population. (“Meet the new boss—same as the old
boss!”) Other subplots update us on the lives of characters
we've met before, and provide a view of how individuals and groups
try to self-organise back into a lawful and moral civil society
while crawling from the wreckage of corruption and afflicted by
locusts with weapons.
We don't do stars on reviews here at Fourmilab—I'm a
word guy—but I do occasionally indulge in sports metaphors.
I consider the first two novels home runs: if you're remotely
interested in the potential of societal
collapse and the steps prudent people can take to
protect themselves and those close to them from its
sequelæ, they are must-reads. Let's call this
novel a solid double bouncing between the left and centre
fielders. If you've read the first two books, you'll certainly
want to read this one. If you haven't, don't start here,
but begin at the beginning. This novel winds up the story,
but it does so in an abrupt way which I found somewhat
unconvincing—it seemed like the author was approaching
a word limit and had to close it out in however sketchy a
manner.
There are a few quibbles, but aren't there always?
- In chapter 8 we're told that Malmstrom Air Force Base
had a large inventory of
JP-4
fuel. But this fuel, a 50–50 blend of kerosene
and gasoline, was phased out by the U.S. Air Force
in 1996 in favour of the less hazardous
JP-8.
It is unlikely that at least 16 years later an
Air Force base would still have JP-4 in storage.
- In chapter 11 we hear of the “UN's new headquarters
in Brussels”. But, if the UN headquarters in New York had
been destroyed, isn't is much more likely that the UN
would fall back on the existing European headquarters in
Geneva?
- In chapter 17, Ken is “given a small bottle of flat
black lacquer and a tiny brush from Durward's
collection…”. But Durward was the farmer
with whose family they passed the previous winter. I think
either Carl or Graham was intended here.
- In “President” Hutchings's speech in chapter 19,
he states that more than 65 million people were killed by
an influenza pandemic that swept the East and continues,
“Without antibiotics available, the disease ran rampant
until there were no more hosts to attack in the heavily
populated regions.”
Influenza
is a viral disease, against which antibiotics are completely
ineffectual. Of course, this may have been intended to
highlight the cluelessness of Hutchings and how glibly the
Provisional Government lied to its subjects.
- In the glossary,
CB radio
is defined as a “VHF
broadcasting band”. The citizens' band in the
U.S. is in the 27 MHz range, which is considered in the
HF
band, and is not a broadcast service.
So, read the first two, and if you like them, by all means get this
one. But don't start here.
- Smith, Greg.
Why I Left Goldman Sachs.
New York: Grand Central, 2012.
ISBN 978-1-4555-2747-2.
-
When Greg Smith graduated from Stanford in 2001, he knew precisely
what career he wished to pursue and where—high stakes
Wall Street finance at the firm at the tip of the pyramid:
Goldman Sachs. His native talent and people skills had landed him
first an internship and then an entry-level position at the
firm, where he sought to master the often arcane details of
the financial products with which he dealt and develop relationships
with the clients with whom he interacted on a daily basis.
Goldman Sachs was founded in 1869, and rapidly established itself as
one of the leading investment banks, market makers, and
money managers, catering to large corporations, institutions,
governments, and wealthy individual clients. While most
financial companies had transformed themselves from
partnerships to publicly-traded corporations, Goldman Sachs
did not take this step until 1999. Remaining a partnership was
part of the aura of the old Goldman: as with a private Swiss bank,
partners bore unlimited personal liability for the actions of
the firm, and clients were thereby reassured that the advice
they received was in their own best interest.
When the author joined Goldman, the original partnership culture
remained strong, and he quickly learned that to advance in the firm
it was important to be perceived as a “culture keeper”—one
steeped in the culture and transmitting it to new hires. But then the
serial financial crises of the first decade of the 21st century
began to hammer the firm: the collapse of the technology bubble, the
housing boom and bust,
and the sovereign debt crisis. These eroded
the traditional sources of Goldman's income, and created an incentive
for the firm to seek “elephant trades” which would book
in excess of US$ 1 million in commissions and fees for the firm
from a single transaction. Since the traditional business of buying
and selling securities on behalf of a client and pocketing a
commission or bid-ask spread was highly competitive (indeed, the kinds
of high-roller clients who do business with Goldman could see the bids and
offers in the market on their own screen before they placed an order),
the elephant hunters were motivated to peddle “structured
products”: exotic
financial derivatives
which the typical client lacked the resources to independently value,
and were opaque to valuation by other than the string theorist
manqués who
invented them. In doing this business, Goldman transformed itself
from a broker executing transactions on behalf of a client into a
vendor, selling products to counterparties, who took
the other side of the transaction. Now, there's nothing wrong with
dealing with a counterparty: when you walk onto a used car lot with
a wad of money (artfully concealed) in your pocket and the need
for a ride, you're aware that the guy who walks up to greet you
is your counterparty—the more you pay, the more he benefits,
and the less valuable a car he manages to sell you, the better it
is for him. But you knew that, going in, and you negotiate
accordingly (or if you don't, you end up, as I did, with a 1966
MGB). Many Goldman Sachs customers, with relationships going back
decades, had been used to their sales representatives being
interested in their clients' investment strategy and recommending
products consistent with it and providing excellent execution on
trades. I had been a Goldman Sachs customer since 1985, first
in San Francisco and then in Zürich, and this had been my
experience until the late 2000s: consummate professionalism.
Greg Smith documents the erosion of the Goldman culture in New
York, but when he accepted a transfer to the London office, there
was a culture shock equivalent to dropping your goldfish into a
bowl of Clorox. In London, routine commission (or agency) business
generating fees around US$ 50,000 was disdained, and clients
interested in such trades were rudely turned away. Clients were routinely
referred to as “muppets”, and exploiting their
naïveté was a cause for back-slapping and booking
revenues to the firm (and bonuses for those who foisted
toxic financial trash onto the customers).
Finally, in early 2012, the author said, “enough is enough”
and published
an op-ed
in the New York Times summarising the indictment of
the firm and Wall Street which is fully fleshed out here. In the book,
the author uses the tired phrase “speaking truth to power”,
but in fact power could not be more vulnerable to truth: at the heart
of most customer relationships with Goldman Sachs was the assumption
that the firm valued the client relationship above all, and would
act in the client's interest to further the long-term relationship.
Once clients began to perceive that they were mocked as “muppets”
who could be looted by selling them opaque derivatives or
unloading upon them whatever the proprietary trading desk wanted
to dump, this relationship changed forever. Nobody will ever do business
with Goldman Sachs again without looking at them as an
adversary, not an advisor or advocate. Greg Smith was a witness
to the transformation which caused this change, and this book
is essential reading for anybody managing funds north of seven
digits.
As it happens, I was a customer of Goldman Sachs throughout the
period of Mr Smith's employment, and I can completely confirm
his reportage of the dysfunction in the London branch.
I captured an hour of pure comedy gold in
Goldman
Sachs Meets a Muppet when two Masters of the Universe
who had parachuted into Zürich from London tried to
educate me upon the management of my money. I closed my account
a few days later.
- Lileks, James.
Graveyard Special.
Seattle: Amazon Digital Services, 2012.
ASIN B00962GFES.
-
This novel, set in the
Dinkytown
neighbourhood of Minneapolis, adjacent to the University
of Minnesota campus, in 1980, is narrated in the first
person by Robert (not Bob) Thompson, an art history
major at the university, experiencing the metropolis after
having grown up in a small town in the north of the state.
Robert is supporting his lavish lifestyle (a second floor
room in a rooming house in Dinkytown with the U of M hockey
team living downstairs) by working nights at Mama B's
Trattoria, an Italian/American restaurant with a light
beer and wine bar, the Grotto, downstairs. His life
and career at the “Trat” and “Grot”
are an immersion in the culture of 1980, and a memoir
typical of millions in university at the epoch until a cook
at the Trat is shot dead by a bullet which came through
the window from outside, with no apparent motive or
clue as to the shooter's identity.
Then Robert begins to notice things: curious connections
between people, suggestions of drug deals, ambiguous evidence of
wire taps, radical politics, suspicions of people being
informants, and a strange propensity for people he encounters
meeting with apparently random violence. As he tries to make
sense of all of this, he encounters hard-boiled cops, an
immigrant teacher from the Soviet Union who speaks crystalline
wisdom in fractured English, and a reporter for the student
newspaper with whom he is instantly smitten. The complexity
and ambiguity spiral ever upward until you begin to suspect,
as Robert does in chapter 30, “You never get all the
answers. I suppose that's the lesson.”
Do you get all the answers? Well, read the novel and find out
for yourself—I doubt you'll regret doing so. Heck, how many
mystery novels have an action scene involving a
Zamboni? As you'd expect
from the author's work, the writing is artful and evocative,
even when describing something as peripheral to the plot as
turning off an
Asteroids
video game after closing time in the Grot.
I yanked the cord and the world of triangular spaceships and
monochromatic death-rocks collapsed to a single white point. The
universe was supposed to end like that, if there was enough mass
and matter or something. It expands until gravity hauls everything
back in; the collapse accelerates until everything that was once
scattered higgily-jiggity over eternity is now summed up in a tiny white
infinitely dense dot, which explodes anew into another Big Bang,
another universe, another iteration of existence with its own rules, a
place where perhaps Carter got a second term and Rod Stewart did
not decide to embrace disco.
I would read this novel straight through, cover-to-cover. There are
many characters who interact in complicated ways, and if you set it
aside due to other distractions and pick it up later, you may have to
do some backtracking to get back into things. There are a few
copy editing errors (I noted 7), but they don't distract from the
story.
At this writing, this book is available only as a Kindle
e-book; a paperback edition is expected in the near
future. Here are the
author's
comments on the occasion of the book's publication. This is
the first in what James Lileks intends to be a series of between
three and five novels, all set in Minneapolis in different eras,
with common threads tying them together. I eagerly await the
next.