- Halperin, James L. The First Immortal. New York:
Del Rey, 1998. ISBN 0-345-42182-5.
- As Yogi Berra said, “It's hard to make predictions,
especially about the future.” In this novel, the author tackles one of
the most daunting challenges in science fiction: the multi-generation
saga which spans its publication date. There are really only two
ways to approach this problem: show the near future in soft focus,
concentrating on characters and avoiding any mention of news and
current events, or boldly predict and take your lumps when you
inevitably get it wrong. Hey, even if you do, odds are the books
will either be on readers' shelves or in the remainder bins by the
time reality diverges too far from the story line. Halperin opts for
the latter approach. Preachy novels with an agenda have a tendency
to sit on my shelf quite a while until I get around to them—in this
case six years. (The hardcover I bought in 1998 is out of print, so
I've linked to the paperback which remains available.) The agenda
here is cryonics, the resurrection myth of the secular humanists,
presented in full dogmatic form: vitrification, cryogenic storage of
the dead (or their heads, for the budget-conscious), nanotechnological
restoration of damage due to freezing, repair of disease damage and
genetic defects, reversal of aging, organ and eventually full body
cloning, brain state backup and uploading, etc.—the full mambo chicken
meme-bag. The book gets just about everything
predicted for the years after its publication as wrong as
possible: Xanadu-style back-links in Netscape, the
Gore administration, etc. Fine—all were reasonable extrapolations
when the first draft was written in 1996. My problem is that the
further-out stuff seems, if anything, even less plausible than the near
term predictions have proved to be. How likely is it that artificial
intelligences with a hundred times the power of the human brain will
remain subservient, obedient slaves of their creators? Or that a
society with full-on Drexler nanotechnology and
space stations outside the orbit of Pluto would be gripped by mass
hysteria upon learning of a rain of comets due a hundred years
hence? Or that a quasi-socialist U.N. style World Government would
spontaneously devolve freedom to its subjects and reduce tax rates
to 9.5%? And doesn't the requirement that individuals brought back
from the freezer be sponsored by a living person (and hence remain
on ice indefinitely if nobody steps up as a sponsor) represent an
immoral inter-generational breach of contract with those who paid to
be frozen and brought back to life under circumstances they
prescribed? The novel is well-written and presents the views of the
cryonicists faithfully and effectively. Still, you're left with the
sense of having read an advocacy document where story and characters
are subordinate to the pitch.
- Novak, David P. DownTime: A Guide to Federal
Incarceration. Vancouver, WA: Davrie Communications,
2002. ISBN 0-9710306-0-X.
- I read this book in the interest of research, not career
planning, although in these days when simply looking askance at
some badge-wearing pithecanthropoid thug in a U.S. airport can
land you in Club Fed, it's information those travelling to that
country might be wise to take on board before getting on board.
This is a 170 page letter-size comb bound book whose camera-ready
copy appears to have been printed on a daisy wheel printer.
I bought my copy through Amazon, but the publisher appears to have
removed the book from the general distribution channels; you can
order it directly from the publisher.
My comments are based upon the March 2002 edition.
According to the publisher's Web site, the book
was completely rewritten in January 2004, which edition I've not
seen.
- Beckerman, Marty. Generation S.L.U.T.. New York:
MTV Books, 2004. ISBN 0-7434-7109-1.
- I bought this book based on a recommendation by
Hunter
S. Thompson. I don't know
what the good doctor was smoking—he rarely knows what
he's smoking—but this is one messed up, incoherent, choppy,
gratuitously obscene, utterly amoral mix of fiction, autobiography,
cartoons, newspaper clippings, and statistical factoids seemingly
aimed at an audience with an attention span measured in seconds.
All together now, “Well, what did you expect from something
published by MTV Books?” The “S.L.U.T.” in the title stands
for “Sexually Liberated Urban Teens”, and the book purports to be a
view from the inside (the author turned 20 while writing the book)
of contemporary teenage culture in the United States. One can only
consider the word “Liberated” here in a Newspeak sense—the picture
painted is of a generation enslaved to hormones and hedonism so
banal it brings no pleasure to those who so mindlessly pursue it.
The cartoons which break up the fictional thread into blocks
of text short enough for MTV zombies are cheaply produced—they
re-use a few line drawings of the characters, scaled, mirrored, and
with different backgrounds, changing only the text in the balloon.
The Addendum by the author is a straight rip-off of Hunter Thompson's
style, right down the signature capitalisation of nouns for emphasis.
The reader is bludgeoned with a relentless vulgarity which ultimately
leaves one numb (and I say this as a fan of both Thompson and
South Park). I found
myself saying, again and again, “Teenagers in the U.S. can't
possibly be this vapid, dissolute, and depraved, can they? Can
they?” Er, maybe so, if this Teenwire site, sponsored by
the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, is any indication.
(You may be shocked, dismayed, and disgusted by the content of this
site. I would not normally link to such material, but seeing as how
it's deliberately directed at teenagers, I do so in the interest of
showing parents how their kids are are being indoctrinated. Note how
the welcome page takes you into the main site even if you don't click
“Enter”, and that there is no disclaimer whatsoever regarding the
site's suitability for children of any age.)
- Carr, Nicholas G. Does IT Matter? Boston: Harvard
Business School Press, 2004. ISBN 1-59139-444-9.
- This is an expanded version of the author's May 2003
Harvard Business Review paper titled “IT Doesn't
Matter”, which sparked a vituperous ongoing debate about the rôle
of information technology (IT) in modern business and its potential
for further increases in productivity and competitive advantage for
companies who aggressively adopt and deploy it. In this book, he
provides additional historical context, attempts to clear up common
misperceptions of readers of the original article, and responds to
its critics. The essence of Carr's argument is that information
technology (computer hardware, software, and networks) will follow
the same trajectory as other technologies which transformed business
in the past: railroads, machine tools, electricity, the telegraph and
telephone, and air transport. Each of these technologies combined high
risk with the potential for great near-term competitive advantage for
their early adopters, but eventually became standardised “commodity
inputs” which all participants in the market employ in much the same
manner. Each saw a furious initial period of innovation, emergence
of standards to permit interoperability (which, at the same time,
made suppliers interchangeable and the commodity fungible), followed
by a rapid “build-out” of the technological infrastructure, usually
accompanied by over-optimistic hype from its boosters and an investment
bubble and the inevitable crash. Eventually, the infrastructure is
in place, standards have been set, and a consensus reached as to how
best to use the technology in each industry, at which point it's
unlikely any player in the market will be able to gain advantage
over another by, say, finding a clever new way to use railroads,
electricity, or telephones. At this point the technology becomes a
commodity input to all businesses, and largely disappears off the
strategic planning agenda. Carr believes that with the emergence
of low-cost commodity computers adequate for the overwhelming
majority of business needs, and the widespread adoption of standard
vendor-supplied software such as office suites, enterprise resource
planning (ERP), and customer relationship management (CRM) packages,
corporate information technology has reached this level of maturity,
where senior management should focus on cost-cutting, security, and
maintainability rather than seeking competitive advantage through
innovation. Increasingly, companies adapt their own operations to
fit the ERP software they run, as opposed to customising the software
for their particular needs. While such procrusteanism was decried in
the IBM mainframe era, today it's touted as deploying “industry best
practices” throughout the economy, tidily packaged as a “company in a
box”. (Still, one worries about the consequences for innovation.) My
reaction to Carr's argument is, “How can anybody find this remotely
controversial?” Not only do we have a dozen or so historical examples
of the adoption of new technologies, the evidence for the maturity
of corporate information technology is there for anybody to see.
In fact, in February 1997, I predicted that Microsoft's
ability to grow by adding functionality to its products was about
to reach the limit, and looking back, it was with Office 97 that
customers started to push back, feeling the added “features” (such
as the notorious talking paper clip) and initial lack of downward
compatibility with earlier versions was for Microsoft's benefit, not
their own. How can one view Microsoft's giving back half its cash
hoard to shareholders in a special dividend in 2004 (and doubling
its regular dividend, along with massive stock buybacks), as anything
other than acknowledgement of this reality. You only give your cash
back to the investors (or buy your own stock), when you can't think
of anything else to do with it which will generate a better return.
So, if there's to be a a “next big thing”, Microsoft do not anticipate
it coming from them.
- Ryn, Claes G. America the Virtuous. New
Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2003. ISBN 0-7658-0219-8.
- If you've been following political commentary of the more
cerebral kind recently, you may have come across the term “neo-Jacobin”
and thought “Whuzzat? I thought those guys went out with the tumbrels
and guillotines.” Claes Ryn coined the term “neo-Jacobin” more than
decade ago, and in this book explains the philosophical foundation,
historical evolution, and potential consequences of that tendency
for the U.S. and other Western societies. A neo-Jacobin is one who
believes that present-day Western civilisation is based on abstract
principles, knowable through pure reason, which are virtuous, right,
and applicable to all societies at all times. This is precisely what
the original Jacobins believed, with Jacobins old and new drawing their
inspiration from Rousseau and John Locke. The claim of superiority
of Western civilisation makes the neo-Jacobin position superficially
attractive to conservatives, who find it more congenial than
post-modernist villification of Western civilisation as the source of
all evil in the world. But true conservatism, and the philosophy shared
by most of the framers of the U.S. Constitution, rejects
abstract theories and utopian promises in favour of time-proven
solutions which take into account the imperfections of human beings and
the institutions they create. As Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. 6, “Have
we not already seen enough of the fallacy and extravagance of those
idle theories which have amused us with promises of an exemption
from the imperfections, the weaknesses, and the evils incident to
society in every shape.” Sadly, we have not, and are unlikely to
ever see the end of such theories as long as pointy-heads with
no practical experience, but armed with intimidating prose, are
able to persuade true believers they've come up with something
better than the collective experience of every human who's ever
lived on this planet before them. The French Revolution was the
first modern attempt to discard history and remake the world
based on rationality, but its lessons failed to deter numerous
subsequent attempts, at an enormous cost in human life and misery,
the most recently concluded such experiment being Soviet Communism.
They all end badly. Ryn believes the United States is embarking on
the next such foredoomed adventure, declaring its “universal values”
(however much at variance with those of its founders) to be applicable
everywhere, and increasingly willing to impose them by the sword
“in the interest of the people” where persuasion proves inadequate.
Although there is some mention of contemporary political figures,
this is not at all a partisan argument, nor does it advocate (nor
even present) an alternative agenda. Ryn believes the neo-Jacobin
viewpoint so deeply entrenched in both U.S. political parties, media,
think tanks, and academia that the choice of a candidate or outcome
of an election is unlikely to make much difference. Although the
focus is primarily on the U.S. (and rightly so, because only in the
U.S. do the neo-Jacobins have access to the military might to impose
their will on the rest of the world), precisely the same philosophy
can be seen in the ongoing process of “European integration”,
where a small group of unelected elite theorists are positioning
themselves to dictate the “one best way” hundreds of millions of
people in dozens of diverse cultures with thousands of years of history
should live their lives. For example, take a look at the hideous draft “constitution” (PDF)
for the European Union: such a charter of liberty and democracy that
those attemping to put it into effect are doing everything in their
power to deprive those who will be its subjects the chance to vote
upon it. As Michael Müller, Social Democrat member of parliament
in Germany said, “Sometimes the electorate has to be protected from
making the wrong decisions.” The original Jacobins had their ways,
as well.
- Winchester, Simon. The Map that Changed
the World. New York: HarperCollins,
2001. ISBN 0-06-093180-9.
- This is the story of William Smith, the son of an
Oxfordshire blacksmith, who, with almost no formal education but
keen powers of observation and deduction, essentially single-handedly
created the modern science of geology in the last years of the 18th and
the beginning of the 19th century, culminating in the 1815 publication
of Smith's masterwork: a large scale map of the stratigraphy of
England, Wales, and part of Scotland, which is virtually identical
to the most modern geological maps. Although fossil collecting was
a passion of the aristocracy in his time, Smith was the first to
observe that particular fossil species were always associated with
the same stratum of rock and hence, conversely, that rock containing
the same population of fossils was the same stratum, wherever it
was found. This permitted him to decode the layering of strata and
their relative ages, and predict where coal and other minerals were
likely to be found, which was a matter of great importance at the
dawn of the industrial revolution. In his long life, in addition
to inventing modern geology (he coined the word “stratigraphical”),
he surveyed mines, built canals, operated a quarry, was the victim
of plagiarism, designed a museum, served time in debtor's prison,
was denied membership in the newly-formed Geological Society of
London due to his humble origins, yet years later was the first
recipient of its highest award, the Wollaston Medal, presented to
him as the “Father of English Geology”. Smith's work transformed
geology from a pastime for fossil collectors and spinners of fanciful
theories to a rigorous empirical science and laid the bedrock (if
you'll excuse the term) for Darwin and the modern picture of the
history of the Earth. The author is very fond of superlatives.
While Smith's discoveries, adventures, and misadventures certainly
merit them, they get a little tedious after a hundred pages or so.
Winchester seems to have been traumatised by his childhood experiences
in a convent boarding-school (chapter 11), and he avails himself of
every possible opportunity to express his disdain for religion, the
religious, and those (the overwhelming majority of learned people in
Smith's time) who believed in the Biblical account of creation and
the flood. This is irrelevant to and a distraction from the story.
Smith's career marked the very beginning of scientific investigation
of natural history; when Smith's great geological map was published
in 1815, Charles Darwin was six years old. Smith never
suffered any kind of religious persecution or opposition to his work,
and several of his colleagues in the dawning days of earth science
were clergymen. Simon Winchester is also the author of The Professor and
the Madman, the story of the Oxford English
Dictionary.
- Scott, David and Alexei Leonov with Christine Toomey. Two Sides of the Moon. London:
Simon & Schuster, 2004. ISBN 0-7432-3162-7.
- Astronaut David Scott flew on the Gemini
8 mission which performed the first docking in space, Apollo 9, the first
manned test of the Lunar Module, and commanded the Apollo 15 lunar landing, the first
serious scientific exploration of the Moon (earlier Apollo landing
missions had far less stay time and, with no lunar rover, limited
mobility, and hence were much more “land, grab some rocks, and scoot”
exercises). Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov was the first to walk in space
on Voskhod 2, led the training of cosmonauts for lunar missions and
later the Salyut space station program, and commanded the Soviet
side of the Apollo Soyuz Test Project in 1975. Had the Soviet
Union won the Moon race, Leonov might well have been first to walk
on the Moon. This book recounts the history of the space race as
interleaved autobiographies of two participants from contending
sides, from their training as fighter pilots ready to kill one
another in the skies over Europe in the 1950s to Leonov's handshake
in space with an Apollo crew in 1975. This juxtaposition works very
well, and writer Christine Toomey (you're not a “ghostwriter” when
your name appears on the title page and the principals effusively
praise your efforts) does a marvelous job in preserving the engaging
conversational style of a one-on-one interview, which is even more an
achievement when one considers that she interviewed Leonov through
an interpreter, then wrote his contributions in English which was
translated to Russian for Leonov's review, with his comments in
Russian translated back to English for incorporation in the text. A U.S. edition is scheduled for publication
in October 2004.
- Lelièvre, Domnique. L'Empire américain en échec sous l'éclairage
de la Chine impériale. Chatou, France: Editions Carnot,
2004. ISBN 2-84855-097-X.
- This is a very odd book. About one third
of the text is a fairly conventional indictment of the
emerging U.S. “virtuous empire” along the lines of America the Virtuous
(earlier this month), along with the evils of globalisation,
laissez-faire capitalism, cultural imperialism, and the usual scélérats du jour. But the author, who has published
three earlier books of Chinese history, anchors his analysis of
current events in parallels between the present day United States
and the early Ming dynasty in China, particularly the reign of Zhu
Di (朱棣), the Emperor Yongle
(永樂), A.D.
1403-1424. (Windows users: if you
didn't see the Chinese characters in the last sentence and wish
to, you'll need to install Chinese language support using the
Control Panel / Regional Options / Language Settings item, enabling
“Simplified Chinese”. This may require you to load the original
Windows install CD, reboot your machine after the installation is
complete, and doubtless will differ in detail from one version
of Windows to another. It may be a global village, but it can
sure take a lot of work to get from one hut to the next.)
Similarities certainly exist, some of them striking: both nations
had overwhelming naval superiority and command of the seas, believed
themselves to be the pinnacle of civilisation, sought large-scale
hegemony (from the west coast of Africa to east Asia in the case
of China, global for the U.S.), preferred docile vassal states to
allies, were willing to intervene militarily to preserve order
and their own self-interests, but for the most part renounced
colonisation, annexation, territorial expansion, and religious
proselytising. Both were tolerant, multi-cultural, multi-racial
societies which believed their values universal and applicable
to all humanity. Both suffered attacks from Islamic raiders,
the Mongols under Tamerlane (Timur)
and his successors in the case of Ming China. And both even fought
unsuccessful wars in what is now Vietnam which ended in ignominious
withdrawals. All of this is interesting, but how useful it is in
pondering the contemporary situation is problematic, for along with
the parallels, there are striking differences in addition to the six
centuries of separation in time and all that implies for cultural
and technological development including communications, weapons,
and forms of government. Ming dynasty China was the archetypal
oriental despotism, where the emperor's word was law, and the
administrative and military bureaucracy was in the hands of eunuchs.
The U.S., on the other hand, seems split right about down the middle
regarding its imperial destiny, and many observers of U.S. foreign
and military policy believe it suffers a surfeit of balls, not their
absence. Fifteenth century China was self-sufficient in everything
except horses, and its trade with vassal states consisted of symbolic
potlatch-type tribute payments in luxury goods. The U.S., on the other
hand, is the world's largest debtor nation, whose economy is dependent
not only on an assured supply of imported petroleum, but also a wide
variety of manufactured goods, access to cheap offshore labour, and
the capital flows which permit financing its chronic trade deficits.
I could go on listing fundamental differences which make any argument
by analogy between these two nations highly suspect, but I'll close by
noting that China's entire career as would-be hegemon began with Yongle
and barely outlasted his reign—six of the seven expeditions of the
great Ming fleet occurred during his years on the throne. Afterward
China turned inward and largely ignored the rest of the world until
the Europeans came knocking in the 19th century. Is it likely the
U.S. drift toward empire which occupied most of the last century
will end so suddenly and permanently? Stranger things have happened,
but I wouldn't bet on it.