- Heinlein, Robert A. and Spider Robinson.
Variable Star.
New York: Tor, 2006.
ISBN 0-7653-1312-X.
-
After the death of Virginia Heinlein in 2003, curators of the Heinlein
papers she had deeded to the
Heinlein Prize Trust discovered
notes for a “juvenile” novel which Heinlein had plotted in
1955 but never got around to writing. Through a somewhat
serendipitous process, Spider Robinson, who The New York Times
Book Review called “the new Robert Heinlein” in
1982 (when the original Robert Heinlein was still very much
on the scene—I met him in 1984, and his last novel was published
in 1987, the year before his death), was tapped to
“finish” the novel from the notes. To his horror (as
described in the afterword in this volume), Robinson discovered the
extant notes stopped in mid-sentence, in the middle of the story, with
no clue as to the ending Heinlein intended. Taking some comments
Heinlein made in a radio interview as the point of departure,
Robinson rose to the challenge, cranking in a plot twist worthy
of the Grandmaster.
Taking on a task like this is to expose oneself to carping
and criticism from purists, but to this Heinlein fan who reads
for the pleasure of it, Spider Robinson has acquitted himself
superbly here. He deftly blends events in recent decades into
the Future History timeline, and even hints at a plausible way
current events could lead to the rise of the Prophet. It is
a little disconcerting to encounter
Simpsons
allusions in a time line in which Leslie LeCroix of Harriman
Enterprises was the first to land on the Moon, but recurring
Heinlein themes are blended into the story line in such
a way that you're tempted to think that this is the way
Heinlein would have written such a book, were he still writing
today. The language and situations are substantially more
racy than the classic Heinlein juveniles, but not out of line
with Heinlein's novels of the 1970s and 80s.
Sigh…aren't there any adults on the
editorial staff at Tor? First they let three misspellings of
Asimov's character Hari Seldon slip through in Orson Scott
Card's Empire,
and now the very first time the Prophet appears
on p. 186, his first name is missing the final “h;”, and
on p. 310 the title of Heinlein's first juvenile,
Rocket Ship Galileo is
given as “Rocketship Galileo”. Readers intrigued
by the saxophone references in the novel may wish to check out
The Devil's Horn, which
discusses, among many other things, the possible connection between
“circular breathing” and the mortality rate of
saxophonists (and I always just thought it was that “cool
kills”).
As you're reading this novel, you may find yourself somewhere
around two hundred pages in, looking at the rapidly dwindling
hundred-odd pages to go, and wondering is anything ever
going to happen? Keep turning those pages—you
will not be disappointed. Nor, I think, would Heinlein,
wherever he is, regarding this realisation of his vision
half a century after he consigned it to a file drawer.
- Horowitz, David.
Radical Son.
New York: Touchstone Books, 1997.
ISBN 0-684-84005-7.
-
One the mysteries I have never been able to figure out—I
remember discussing it with people before I left the U.S., so that
makes it at least fifteen years of bewilderment on my part—is
why so many obviously highly intelligent people, some of whom have
demonstrated initiative and achieved substantial success in productive
endeavours, are so frequently attracted to collectivist ideologies
which deny individual excellence, suppress individualism, and seek to
replace achievement with imposed equality in mediocrity. Even more
baffling is why so many people remain attracted to these ideas which
are as thoroughly discredited by the events of the twentieth century
as any in the entire history of human intellectual endeavour, in a
seeming willingness to ignore evidence, even when it takes the form of
a death toll in the tens of millions of human beings.
This book does not supply a complete answer, but it provides several
important pieces of the puzzle. It is the most enlightening work
on this question I've read since Hayek's
The
Fatal Conceit (March 2005), and complements it
superbly. While Hayek's work is one of philosophy and economics,
Radical Son is a searching autobiography by a
person who was one of the intellectual founders and leaders
of the New Left in the 1960s and 70s. The author was part of
the group which organised the first demonstration against the
Vietnam war in Berkeley in 1962, published the standard New Left
history of the Cold War,
The Free World Colossus
in 1965, and in 1968, the very apogee of the Sixties, joined
Ramparts magazine, where he rapidly rose to a
position of effective control, setting its tone through the
entire period of radicalisation and revolutionary chaos which
ensued. He raised the money for the Black Panther Party's
“Learning Center” in Oakland California, and
became an adviser and regular companion of Huey Newton. Throughout
all of this his belief in the socialist vision of the future,
the necessity of revolution even in a democratic society, and
support for the “revolutionary vanguard”, however
dubious some of their actions seemed, never wavered.
He came to these convictions almost in the cradle. Like many of the
founders of the New Left (Tom Hayden was one of the rare exceptions),
Horowitz was a “red diaper baby”. In his case both his
mother and father were members of the Communist Party of the United
States and met through political activity. Although the New Left
rejected the Communist Party as a neo-Stalinist anachronism, so many
of its founders had parents who were involved with it directly or
knowingly in front organisations, they formed part of a network of
acquaintances even before they met as radicals in their own right. It
is somewhat ironic that these people who believed themselves to be and
were portrayed in the press as rebels and revolutionaries were,
perhaps more than their contemporaries, truly their parents' children,
carrying on their radical utopian dream without ever questioning
anything beyond the means to the end.
It was only in 1974, when Betty Van Patter, a former
Ramparts colleague he had recommended for a job helping
the Black Panthers sort out their accounts, was abducted and later
found brutally murdered, obviously by the Panthers (who expressed no
concern when she disappeared, and had complained of her
inquisitiveness), that Horowitz was confronted with the true nature of
those he had been supporting. Further, when he approached others who
were, from the circumstances of their involvement, well aware of the
criminality and gang nature of the Panthers well before he, they
continued to either deny the obvious reality or, even worse,
deliberately cover it up because they still believed in the Panther
mission of revolution. (To this day, nobody has been charged with
Van Patter's murder.)
The contemporary conquest of Vietnam and Cambodia and the
brutal and bloody aftermath, the likelihood of which had also been
denied by the New Left (as late as 1974, Tom Hayden and Jane
Fonda released a film titled Introduction to the
Enemy which forecast a bright future of equality and
justice when Saigon fell), reinforced the author's second
thoughts, leading eventually to a complete break with the Left
in the mid-1980s and his 1989 book with Peter Collier,
Destructive Generation,
the first sceptical look at the beliefs and consequences of
Sixties radicalism by two of its key participants.
Radical Son mixes personal recollection,
politics, philosophy, memoirs of encounters with characters
ranging from Bertrand Russell to Abbie Hoffman, and a great
deal of painful introspection to tell the story of how
reality finally shattered second-generation utopian illusions.
Even more valuable, the reader comes to understand the power
those delusions have over those who share them, and why
seemingly no amount of evidence suffices to induce doubt among
those in their thrall, and why the reaction to any former
believer who declares their “apostasy” is so
immediate and vicious.
Horowitz is a serious person, and this is a serious, and often
dismaying and tragic narrative. But one cannot help to be amused by
the accounts of New Leftists trying to put their ideology into
practice in running communal households, publishing
enterprises, and political movements. Inevitably, before long
everything blows up in the tediously familiar ways of such things, as
imperfect human beings fail to meet the standards of a theory
which requires them to deny their essential humanity. And yet
they never learn; it's always put down to “errors”,
blamed on deviant individuals, oppression, subversion,
external circumstances, or some other cobbled up excuse.
And still they want to try again, betting the entire society
and human future on it.
- Robinson, Andrew.
The Last Man Who Knew Everything.
New York: Pi Press, 2006.
ISBN 0-13-134304-1.
-
The seemingly inexorable process of specialisation in
the sciences and other intellectual endeavours—the
breaking down of knowledge into categories so narrow and
yet so deep that their mastery at the professional level
seems to demand forsaking anything beyond a layman's competence
in other, even related fields, is discouraging to those who
believe that some of the greatest insights come from the
cross-pollination of concepts from subjects previously
considered unrelated. The twentieth century was
inhospitable to polymaths—even within a single field
such as physics, ever narrower specialities proliferated,
with researchers interacting little with those working in
other areas. The divide between theorists and experimentalists
has become almost impassable; it is difficult to think of a
single individual who achieved greatness in both since
Fermi, and he was born in 1901.
As more and more becomes known, it is inevitable that it is
increasingly difficult to cram it all into one human skull,
and the investment in time to master a variety of topics
becomes disproportionate to the length of a human life,
especially since breakthrough science is generally the
province of the young. And yet, one wonders whether the
conventional wisdom that hyper-specialisation is the only way
to go and that anybody who aspires to broad and deep
understanding of numerous subjects must necessarily be a
dilettante worthy of dismissal, might underestimate the human
potential and discourage those looking for insights available
only by synthesising the knowledge of apparently unrelated
disciplines. After all, mathematicians have repeatedly
discovered deep connections between topics thought completely
unrelated to one another; why shouldn't this be the case in
the sciences, arts, and humanities as well?
The life of Thomas Young (1773–1829) is an inspiration to
anybody who seeks to understand as much as possible about the world
in which they live. The eldest of ten children of a middle class Quaker
family in southwest England (his father was a cloth merchant and later
a banker), from childhood he immersed himself in every book he could
lay his hands upon, and in his seventeenth year alone, he read
Newton's Principia
and Opticks, Blackstone's
Commentaries,
Linnaeus,
Euclid's Elements,
Homer,
Virgil, Sophocles, Cicero, Horace, and many other classics
in the original Greek or Latin. At age 19 he presented a paper
on the mechanism by which the human eye focuses on objects at
different distances, and on its merit was elected a Fellow of
the Royal Society a week after his 21st birthday.
Young decided upon a career in medicine and studied in
Edinburgh, Göttingen, and Cambridge, continuing his
voracious reading and wide-ranging experimentation in whatever
caught his interest, then embarked upon a medical practice in
London and the resort town of Worthing, while pursuing his
scientific investigations and publications, and popularising
science in public lectures at the newly founded Royal
Institution.
The breadth of Young's interests and contributions have
caused some biographers, both contemporary and especially more
recent, to dismiss him as a dilettante and dabbler, but
his achievements give lie to this. Had the Nobel Prize existed
in his era, he would almost certainly have won two (Physics for
the wave theory of light, explanation of the phenomena of
diffraction and interference [including the double slit
experiment], and birefringence and polarisation; plus
Physiology or Medicine for the explanation of the focusing
of the eye [based, in part, upon some cringe-inducing experiments
he performed upon himself], the trireceptor theory of colour
vision, and the discovery of astigmatism), and possibly
three (Physics again, for the theory of elasticity of materials:
“Young's modulus” is a standard part of the
engineering curriculum to this day).
But he didn't leave it at that. He was fascinated by languages
since childhood, and in addition to the customary Latin and Greek,
by age thirteen had taught himself Hebrew and read thirty chapters
of the Hebrew Bible all
by himself. In adulthood he undertook an analysis of four
hundred different languages (pp. 184–186) ranging
from Chinese to Cherokee, with the goal of classifying them
into distinct families. He coined the name
“Indo-European” for the group to which most
Western languages belong. He became fascinated
with the enigma of Egyptian hieroglyphics, and his work on the
Rosetta Stone provided the first breakthrough and the crucial
insight that hieroglyphic writing was a phonetic alphabet, not
a pictographic language like Chinese. Champollion built upon
Young's work in his eventual deciphering of hieroglyphics. Young
continued to work on the fiendishly difficult demotic script,
and was the first person since the fall of the Roman Empire to
be able to read some texts written in it.
He was appointed secretary of the Board of Longitude and
superintendent of the Nautical Almanac, and was
instrumental in the establishment of a Southern Hemisphere
observatory at the Cape of Good Hope. He consulted with the
admiralty on naval architecture, with the House of Commons on
the design for a replacement to the original London Bridge,
and served as chief actuary for a London life insurance company
and did original research on mortality in different parts of
Britain.
Stereotypical characters from fiction might cause you to expect
that such an intellect might be a recluse, misanthrope,
obsessive, or seeker of self-aggrandisement. But no…,
“He was a lively, occasionally caustic letter writer,
a fair conversationalist, a knowledgeable musician, a
respectable dancer, a tolerable versifier, an accomplished
horseman and gymnast, and throughout his life, a participant
in the leading society of London and, later, Paris, the intellectual
capitals of his day” (p. 12). Most of the numerous
authoritative articles he contributed to the
Encyclopedia Britannica, including “Bridge”,
“Carpentry”, “Egypt”,
“Languages”, “Tides”, and
“Weights and measures”, as well as 23
biographies, were published anonymously. And he was happily
married from age 31 until the end of his life.
Young was an extraordinary person, but he never seems to have thought
of himself as exceptional in any way other than his desire to
understand how things worked and his willingness to invest as much
time and effort as it took at arrive at the goals he set for himself.
Reading this book reminded me of a remark by Admiral Hyman G.
Rickover, “The only way to make a difference in the world is to
put ten times as much effort into everything as anyone else thinks is
reasonable. It doesn't leave any time for golf or cocktails, but it
gets things done.” Young's life is a testament to just how many
things one person can get done in a lifetime, enjoying every minute of
it and never losing balance, by judicious application of this
principle.
- Wells, David.
The Penguin Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Geometry.
London: Penguin Books, 1991.
ISBN 0-14-011813-6.
-
What a treat—two hundred and seventy-five diagram-rich pages covering
hundreds of geometrical curiosities ranging from the
problem of Apollonius
to
zonohedra. Items range
from classical Euclidean geometry to modern topics such as higher dimensional
space, non-Euclidean geometry, and topological transformations; and from classical
times until the present—it's amazing how many fundamental properties of
objects as simple as triangles were discovered only in the twentieth century!
There are so many wonders here I shall not attempt to list them but
simply commend this book to your own exploration and enjoyment. But
one example…it's obvious that a non-convex room with black
walls cannot be illuminated by a single light placed within it. But what
if all the walls are mirrors? It is possible to design a mirrored room such that
a light within it will still leave some part dark (p. 263)? The illustration
of the Voderberg tile on p. 268 is unfortunate; the width of the lines
makes it appear not to be a proper tile, but rather two tiles joined at a
point. This page
shows a detailed construction which makes it clear that the tile is
indeed well formed and rigid.
I will confess, as a number nerd more than a geometry geek, that this book comes
in second in my estimation behind the author's
Penguin Book of Curious and Interesting Numbers,
one single entry of which motivated me to consume
three years of computer time
in 1987–1990. But there are any number of wonders here, and the
individual items are so short you can open the book at random and find
something worth reading you can finish in a minute or so. Almost all
items are given without proof, but there are citations to publications
for many and you'll be able to find most of the rest on MathWorld.
- Phillips, Kevin.
American Theocracy.
New York: Viking, 2006.
ISBN 0-670-03486-X.
-
In 1969, the author published
The Emerging Republican
Majority, which Newsweek called
“The political bible of the Nixon Era.” The book
laid out the “Sun Belt” (a phrase he coined)
strategy he developed as a senior strategist for Richard
Nixon's successful 1968 presidential campaign, and argued
that demographic and economic trends would reinforce the
political power of what he termed the “heartland”
states, setting the stage for long-term Republican dominance
of national politics, just as FDR's New Deal coalition had
maintained Democratic power (especially in the Congress) for
more than a generation.
In this book he argues that while his 1969 analysis was
basically sound and would have played out much as he forecast,
had the Republican steamroller not been derailed by Watergate
and the consequent losses in the 1974 and 1976 elections,
since the Reagan era, and especially during the presidency
of George W. Bush, things have gone terribly wrong, and that
the Republican party, if it remains in power, is likely to lead
the United States in disastrous directions, resulting in the
end of its de facto global hegemony.
Now, this is a view with which I am generally sympathetic, but if the
author's reason for writing the present volume is to persuade people
in that direction, I must judge the result ineffectual if not
counterproductive. The book is ill-reasoned, weakly argued,
poorly written, strongly biased, scantily documented, grounded in
dubious historical analogies, and rhetorically structured in
the form of “proof by assertion and endless repetition”.
To start with, the title is misleading if read without the subtitle,
“The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed
Money in the 21st Century”, which appears in 8 point sans-serif
type on the cover, below an illustration of a mega-church reinforcing
the the words “American Theocracy” in 60 and 48 point
roman bold. In fact, of 394 pages of main text, only 164—about
40%—are dedicated to the influence of religion on politics.
(Yes, there are mentions of religion in the rest, but there is
plenty of discussion of the other themes in the “Too Many
Preachers” part as well; this book gives the distinct impression
of having been shaken, not stirred.) And nothing in that part, or
elsewhere in the book provides any evidence whatsoever, or even
seriously advances a claim, that there is a genuine movement toward,
threat of, or endorsement by the Republican party of theocracy, which
Webster's Unabridged Dictionary
defines as:
- A form of government in which God or a deity is recognized as
the supreme civil ruler, the God's or deity's laws being
interpreted by the ecclesiastical authorities.
- A system of government by priests claiming a divine
commission.
- A commonwealth or state under such a form or system of
government.
And since Phillips's argument is based upon the Republican party's
support among religious groups as diverse as Southern Baptists,
northern Midwest Lutherans, Pentecostals, Mormons, Hasidic Jews, and
Eastern Rite and traditionalist Catholics, it is difficult to imagine
how precisely how the feared theocracy would function, given how
little these separate religious groups agree upon. It would have to
be an “ecumenical theocracy”, a creature for which I can
recall no historical precedent.
The greater part of the book discusses the threats to the U.S.
posed by a global peak in petroleum production and temptation
of resource wars (of which he claims the U.S. intervention in
Iraq is an example), and the explosion of debt, public and
private, in the U.S., the consequent housing bubble, and the
structural trade deficits which are flooding the world with
greenbacks. But these are topics which have been discussed
more lucidly and in greater detail by authors who know far more
about them than Phillips, who cites secondary and tertiary
sources and draws no novel observations.
A theme throughout the work is comparison of the present situation
of the U.S. with previous world powers which fell into
decline: ancient Rome, Spain in the seventeenth century, the
Netherlands in the second half of the eighteenth century, and
Britain in the first half of the twentieth. The parallels here,
especially as regards fears of “theocracy” are strained
to say the least. Constantine did not turn Rome toward
Christianity until the fourth century
A.D.,
by which time, even Gibbon concedes, the empire had been in decline
for centuries. (Phillips seems to have realised this part of
the way through the manuscript and ceases to draw analogies with
Rome fairly early on.) Few, if any, historians would consider
Spain, Holland, or Britain in the periods in question theocratic
societies; each had a clear separation between civil authority
and the church, and in the latter two cases there is plain
evidence of a decline in the influence of organised
religion on the population as the nation's power approached a peak and
began to ebb. Can anybody seriously contend that the
Anglican church was responsible for the demise of the British
Empire? Hello—what about the two world wars, which were
motivated by power politics, not religion?
Distilled to the essence (and I estimate a good editor could cut a
third to half of this text just by flensing the mind-numbing
repetition), Phillips has come to believe
in the world view and policy prescriptions advocated by the
left wing of the Democratic party. The Republican party does
not agree with these things. Adherents of traditional
religion share this disagreement, and consequently they predominately
vote for Republican candidates. Therefore, evangelical and
orthodox religious groups form a substantial part of the
Republican electorate. But how does that imply any trend toward
“theocracy”? People choose to join a particular
church because they are comfortable with the beliefs it
espouses, and they likewise vote for candidates who advocate
policies they endorse. Just because there is a correlation
between preferences does not imply, especially in the absence
of any evidence, some kind of fundamentalist conspiracy to take
over the government and impose a religious dictatorship. Consider
another divisive issue which has nothing to do with religion: the
right to keep and bear arms. People who consider the individual
right to own and carry weapons for self-defence are highly probable
to be Republican voters as well, because that party is more closely
aligned with their views than the alternative. Correlation
is not evidence of causality, not to speak of collusion.
Much of the writing is reminiscent of the lower tier of the
UFO literature. There are dozens of statements like this
one from p. 93 (my italics),
“There are no records, but Cheney's
reported early 2001 plotting may well have
touched upon the related peril to the dollar.”
May I deconstruct? So what's really being said here is,
“Some conspiracy theorist, with no evidence to
support his assertion, claims that Cheney was plotting
to seize Iraqi oil fields, and it is possible that this
speculated scheme might have been motivated by fears
for the dollar.”
There are more than thirty pages of end notes set in small
type, but there is less documentation here than strains the
eye. Many citations are to news stories in collectivist
legacy media and postings on leftist advocacy Web sites.
Picking page 428 at random, we find 29 citations, only five
of which are to a total of three books, one by the present
author.
So blinded is the author by his own ideological bias that
he seems completely oblivious to the fact that a right-wing
stalwart could produce an almost completely parallel screed about
the Democratic party being in thrall to a coalition of
atheists, humanists, and secularists eager to use
the power of the state to impose their own radical agenda.
In fact, one already has. It is
dubious that shrill polemics of this variety launched back
and forth between the trenches of an increasingly polarised
society promote the dialogue and substantive debate which is
essential to confront the genuine and daunting
challenges all its citizens ultimately share.