Monday, 25 November 2013

Mesmerizing tales of failed emigrants in Laila Lalami's first two novels

From The Week of November 18th, 2013

Though some among us possess the talent and or the good fortune to enjoy good lives, enriched by friends, family and the rule of law, many others are not so gifted, or lucky. For them, life, and the sociopolitical circumstances that define it, is something to be endured until they can reach better horizons, distant lands where their contributions are fairly earned and properly remunerated. They are not marinated in the love and hope that characterizes the lives of the successful. They are, instead, forced to stew in a toxic sea of poverty, a place where what few opportunities exist fail to offer any chance of achieving something more, something grand, something worthy of all of us. This is the value of immigration, granting labor to advanced nations and honest prospects to the poor people trying to get there. And it's this notion that underpins both of Laila Lalami's excellent novels.

Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits welcomes us into the minds of a boat full of Moroccoan immigrants fleeing in the night across the Strait of Gibraltar. Having each paid their boat captain handsomely to sneak them into Spain, they pray for good weather and careless coast guards, both of which will aid them in finding their way off Spain's beaches and inland to where they can work to better themselves and the families they've been forced to leave behind. But when all but one of the illegals are seized by the watchful Spanish authorities, their hopes for a future in Europe are dashed and each must, in their own way, deal with the fallout of being forceably returned to the corrupt country they turned their backs upon.

Secret Son eschews such multiple, tragic perspectives to focus on the singular family drama of the Armanis. Poised at the top of Moroccan society, their hands thrust deeply into its business and its politics, they can quite literally make or break the lives of the many thousands who work for them. This not only burdens their only child, amal, with the expectations of inheriting an empire, even while she studies in America, it reaches out to forever alter the life of Yousseff el Mekki, a youthful boy living in the slums outside Casablanca who gradually realizes that he is the bastard son of the Armani patriarch. Despite his mother's efforts to keep him out of the Armani world, Yousseff falls headlong for the wealth, the power and the pride of his father's world even though it's bound to break his heart. For this is not power wielded in the name of anything like social justice. It is, like power in all corrupt nations, deployed for the betterment of those who already have it and at the expense of those who do not.

Slim volumes whose narratives are shaped by a tone akin to observational journalism, Secret Son and Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits are mesmerizing works of fiction made all the more potent by their unusual perspectives. Western culture is awash in immigrant stories, tales of hardship endured for the sake of "the children," the generation that, in following on in prosperous nations, make the enormous sacrifices of their parents worthwhile. Ms. Lalami sifts out these success stories in order to find those who tried and failed to emigrate, people who were willing to pay the same ultimate price of their successful brothers and sisters but who were ensnared by blood, by bad luck and by circumstance, compelled to linger on in a corrupt country with little hope and few jobs. The despair is a palpable throb just beneath the surface of these works which cannot be read without at least once provoking the thought "there but for the grace of god."

Though not explicitly stated, a powerful sense of fate pervades these novels. From Yousseff, the slum-dweller, to Murad, the thwarted academic, ms. Lalami has crafted a host of characters whose talents are rarely appreciated and never allowed to fully flourish. Sparked by a conscious desire to change such grim destinies, they fight for better futures, better destinies. And yet, the more they try to reject what they are, the more Fate seems to crush them beneath its jacboots, grinding them down until they are forced to return to their stations in life and accept what's coming to them, the good and the bad. Naturally, there are those in life for whom this consequential reality does not apply, but one cannot help but think of the damage one must do to oneself when forced by necessity to reject identity, reject friends, reject family, even reject station, in order to improve one's fortunes. It is impossible to imagine this deed done without a severe price.

There's no doubt that, in being exposed to the lives of the damned, we are left with some measure of despair, a sad hollowness that is not easily shaken. And yet, not only does this come to seem like a small price to pay for being amongst the fortunate, it, in Ms. Lalami's talented hands, is shaped into a powerful tool that widens our perspectives, allowing us to see more clearly the lives of those forced to bear up under life's most difficult burden, that of enduring in the face of hopeless, exploitive toil. This is a gift that cannot be overstated.

Two of the most moving reads this year... (4/5 Stars)

A forgotten stain on the American character in The Blood Telegram

From The Week of November 18th, 2013

Government, in all its forms, has forever been a double-edge sword. For all its advantages -- the organization of power and resources into the hands of the able few ostensibly for the benefit of the less able many --, it is predicated on the ancient, animalistic notion that might makes right, that the having of power is also a license to use it as the holder sees fit. This conception has been handed down for generations, from the tribes and the monarchies from which our governments evolved, a time in which all manner of ideas and mythologies were dreamed up to justify the actions of the most high. And though we have mollified such harsh views, varnished them with the veneer of electoral mandates and senatorial debates, that underlying idea of I know best still transfixes our leaders, reducing them from creatures of reason into beings of pure authority. The terrible cost of power's corrosiveness could ask for no better exemplar than Gary Bass' mesmerizing portrait of the intersection of American leadership and Bangladeshi freedom.

Separated by as much as 1,000 kilometers, the two halves of Pakistan were always fated to secede from one another. A geographic oddity born out of the great partition, which saw India declare its independence from the British Empire and Pakistan declare its independence from India, this distance irrevocably strained the natural bonds of community that evolve from humans in close proximity, causing views in both territories to become distinct from one another. And so, when Yahya Khan, then the leader of Pakistan's ruling junta, held free elections in 1970, and found the result going dramatically against him, particularly in East Pakistan, he authorized military action to bring the foolish East back into line.

Supported by the Nixon Administration and all the American materiel it could reasonably supply, the Pakistani Army's ruthless attack on East Pakistan was brutally efficient, leading to the slaughter of nearly half a million people and the conversion of millions more Bangladeshi into displaced refugees who fled to India for safety. This crisis appalled the American diplomats stationed in Bangladesh, prompting them to speak out against its depravities. At first, these warnings were private communications up the chain of command. But when this yielded only inaction, many of the diplomats went public, accusing the Nixon Administration of standing by while genocide was perpetrated by an American ally. The subsequent political fallout not only drove India closer to the Soviet Union, it ignited war between India and Pakistan in 1971 which effectively ended the crisis, the scars of which would linger for decades.

A captivating examination of the conflict, viewed through the eyes of the Nixon Administration, The Blood Telegram is powerful, emotive work that will leave few readers unmoved. Drawing upon White-House recordings, and the first-hand accounts of American diplomats in Bangladesh, Mr. Bass describes in stomach-churning detail the lengths to which Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger ignored the mass-slaughter of Hindus in East Pakistan out of loyalty and expediency to dictators and communists. Working hard to thaw relations with Maoist China, and cognizant that Yahya Khan was the best conduit through which they could work with and access China, the President of the United States armed a junta, ignored the entreaties of India, then and still the world's largest democracy, and stood by while their own weapons were used to perpetrate what their own diplomats termed as genocide. Those who objected to this strategy were dismissed as having "gone native" or as being a political enemy of the Nixon administration, neatly allowing the champion of world freedom to plow forward with its plans regardless of the terrible cost.

Were The Blood Telegram's narrative not so consumed by quotes from Nixon and Kissinger, one would be hesitant to take this chronicle at face value. After all, Mr. Bass seems, at times, eager to fit the American diplomats, particularly Archer Blood, for white hats while conversely vilifying the Nixon Administration. And yet, the filth that pours forth, first hand, from the mouthes of Nixon and Kissinger is inescapably wicked, leaving little doubt in all but their staunchest advocates, that their roles in this affair were pernicious and destructive. They are so anxious to win with China that they sneer at anyone who stands in their way, degrading them racially, ideologically and profanely in an effort to justify their actions to themselves. Sadly, despite breaking the law to support Yahya Khan, neither man was charged, much less censured, for their behavior in this matter.

The Blood Telegram is not without its own issues. Though the work is ostensibly about the brutal suppression of East Pakistan, it is far more concerned with the American role in that ugly incident than it is in actually documenting it. We are exposed to one or two refugees and the odd Indian commander, but all else is reduced to the cold statistics of those who were killed, maimed, or forced to flee. We're afforded no real sense of how Bangladesh tried to recover from its bloody,breached birth, much less what was done for the refugees after the Indo-Pakistan war. This despite the fact that Mr. Bass himself states that this is an underreported, little known bloodbath in the 20th century. It is well that we understand the heroic and the villainous roles American officials played in this affair, but not at the expense of understanding and educating ourselves on the reasons why American duplicitousness here was so damaging.

Chilling work that leaves no doubt that representative government is no better at choosing leaders of principle than randomly pulling names from a hat... The crimes of Nixon and Kissinger should not be forgotten... (4/5 Stars)

Monday, 18 November 2013

A sprawling and successful SciFi epic in Hamilton's The Void Trilogy

From The Week of November 10th, 2013

From our actions to our futures, the right to choose is one of humanity's most coveted freedoms, one that countless souls have died to ensure and to preserve. This is as undeniable as it is peculiar. After all, humans, down through the bloody centuries of their history, have spent far more time bound by coercive bondage, political, economic, social, than they have spent free to act as they see fit. Kings and chieftains, sea captains and factory owners, popes and martyrs... They have all used their power and their authority to claim our fealty. And yet, perhaps this is the very reason why the freedom to choose is so prized. For when it is so rare to be afforded with the opportunity to choose one's destiny, regardless of the consequences, then it is savored like the finest wine. But what if we were all afforded this uncoerced right? What if we could act as we pleased no matter the costs to the others around us? Would it still seem wise to hail such a right? Peter F. Hamilton speculates in his engrossing epic.

It is the middle of the fourth millennia and humanity wants for nothing. In the 1,500 years since the creation of the first computer, we have traveled to other stars, encountered alien races both friendly and formidable, and discovered wondrous technologies that have, for most, banished the very notion of suffering. Powerful artificial intelligences ensure a safe and lawful Commonwealth of worlds, most of which have access to science and immortality, art and faith. After all, there is room for any sort of life in a civilization that has done away with the scarcity imposed by finite resources and limited power. In a universe where matter and energy are equally malleable, there is little one needs be denied.

And yet, encroaching upon this utopia is the strangest of threats. The void has persisted for nearly a million years, an incomprehensible region of distorted space within the galaxy in which the physical laws as we know them seem not to apply, in which the power of the mind appears to be superior to that of the physics of spacetime. This might be nothing more than an object of curiosity were it not for the fact that the Void occasionally undergoes expansion fazes, moments of explosive violence that consume the stars and planets in its path. Despite the best efforts of the galaxy's most powerful minds and weapons, the Void has proven to be impervious and indestructible which is why entire star systems have had to be evacuated ahead of its expansion in order not to condemn the lives of countless souls to its voraciousness.

Though the Void's purpose is unknown, many factions within human civilization believe they hold the answers. The most popular of these is the Living Dream, a vaguely Christian organization that believes the Void is a kind of heaven into which they can pass. But those who've studied the Void argue that passing into it helps to trigger its expansion fazes which is why they attempt to halt the pilgrimages to the Void. And yet, these imposts only seem to encourage the dreamers to try harder to achieve their aims, no matter the cost to the universe the Void is threatening to devour.

A series as inventive as it is expansive, The Void Trilogy is epic science fiction, a 700,000-word odyssey through worlds of science and death, politics and faith, yearning and fanaticism. Mr. Hamilton, who is no stranger to thinking big with his fiction, has built here on an existing universe, introducing into it an existential threat that his protagonists fear and his antagonists hunger for. Their clashes prove to be as memorable as they are violent, leaving no doubt that humanity's thirst for destruction, its willingness to use force, has not been softened by immortality.

In its technology and its politics, The Void Trilogy is deeply reminiscent of Iain Banks' famous Culture Series, a collection of works that tried to conceptualize a utopian future for humanity unburdened by the chains of scarcity, one in which everyone would be free to pursue their interests thanks to the willingness of machines and artificial intelligences to do the unglamorous labors that underpin civilization. Certainly, some of the ideas deployed here, are fanciful unto hilarity -- weapons capable of destroying planets and stars are, at times, unleashed almost gleefully --, but Mr. Hamilton manages to largely confine his flamboyant excesses, leaving the reader with an exploration of life utterly transformed from the paradigms with which we are so familiar. To step outside those prejudices, those realities, is a significant achievement in its own right. To then manifest such a utopian civilization in which we are all free to act as we choose, be who we choose, is a feat in truth.

It is a most difficult task to maintain the reader's interest over nearly 2,000 pages and for that we have Mr. Hamilton's host of characters to thank. From the silly to the serious, from the sociopathic to the egomaniacal, we are introduced to detectives and popes, martyrs and commoners, zealots and knowledge seekers, all of whom come together to form a vivid tapestry of conflict and power. And yet, these fine actors are also the epic's most troublesome element. For though most of our prime players have existed for more than a millennia, some even back to the early 21st century, none show any sign of the immense weariness that would naturally eventuate from living so many countless years. Mr. Hamilton makes virtually no attempt to lay out the social conventions that would have to arise to grapple with such unfathomable lifespans: multiple lives, multiple partners, multiple careers. In fact, one of his main characters has been a detective for more than a thousand years. Far from admirable, this seems almost perverse. This, along with a certain plasticness of minds and deeds, troubles the work.

And yet, these flaws do not ruin the epic. For like in life, it is easy to imagine darkness and degradation, to dream up the dystopias that some secret part inside all of us hungers for. It is much more difficult to create, to conceive of a world that is wholly new, and then to animate that world with vibrancy and vitality. The Void Trilogy may be far more interested in exploding stars and weaponized black holes than it is in the sociology and psychology, but it still checks all the boxes of good SciFi while being a rollicking good time. (4/5 Stars)

The neurological mechanics of reading revealed in Proust and The Squid

From The Week of November 10th, 2013

Of the many gifts with which evolution has blessed us, none are as consequential as humanity's ability to adapt. Our physiological capacity to endure the cold and the heat, the dry and the damp, the grim and the barren, have ensured the continuance of our species, but even these achievements pale in power next to the might of neuroplasticity, the ability of the human brain to literally re-program itself in response to the necessities of the individual. In the event that areas of the brain are damaged, malformed, or even underutilized, neuroplasticity allows the brain to re-task its other regions in order to regain necessary skills. It is a wonder that has saved and empowered humanity countless times, and yet, little did we know the critical role it has played in our capacity to read. Maryanne Wolf explains in her engaging work.

Without the written word, we would not have civilization. It's a grand claim, and yet, there can be little arguing it. After all, the written word has been, throughout our history, the most stable means by which to transmit information from generation to generation. Oral traditions served admirably well in the many millennia prior to the advent of alphabets, but such a means for knowledge transfer is highly unstable, subject to misremembering and misinterpretation, not to mention genocide. More than the accumulation of knowledge, though, the written word has given us complex mathematics with which we've built up a world capable of delivering us to the stars. A substantial achievement for something that does not come naturally to the human brain.

From signs to messages, from magazines to novels, we read every day, largely without conscious effort. And yet, in Proust and The Squid, Ms. Wolf argues that this fundamental element of our daily existence is, to us, an unnatural process, one that we have trained ourselves to perform. Drawing on her own research, as well as work from neuroscientists and linguists, she describes how reading is an outgrowth of the brain's capacity to recognize patterns and to extract meaning from them. This evolutionary talent, no doubt the result of the necessities of survival, is, in the reader, cultivated, over some 2,000 hours of intense training, into a system by which the individual can associate shapes with letters, letters with sounds, and sounds with language, creating a closed, linguistic circuit that allows us to not only communicate with our fellows but to imbibe knowledge from the troves of information left to us by the countless members of humanity who have come and gone.

Proust and The Squid is more than a rumination on the mechanics of reading, however. It is an examination of the many manifestations of this talent, how languages based on alphabets and hieroglyphs make different neurological connections, and how these connections can sometimes go astray. The most famous of these maladaptations is dyslexia, a disability Ms. Wolf has clearly studied at length. For these disabilities, and the social and emotional price they exact upon their sufferers, inject passion into the author's work here, transforming it from a thing of pure science to something of a call to arms, to understand and to eliminate such challenges.

While Proust and The Squid is, at times, fascinating and inspiring, it is plagued by a troubling narrowness of perspective. Ms. Wolf uses several admittedly potent statistics correlating reading with personal success to argue that it is a talent that must be cultivated for a full and informed life. But this advocacy seems to run completely counter to her fundamental premise, that reading is an unnatural cultivation of a neurological system that isn't designed to actualize it. Is it truly possible for reading to be so profoundly important when it is clearly not intrinsic to our natures? Is it not possible that reading is, rather, the most obvious means of knowledge transfer for the present? Ms. Wolf is alarmed by the propensity of our newest generation to immerse themselves in a world of touchscreens rather than books. And yet, touchscreens seem to be far more in line with the brain's natural visual systems than reading is. Perhaps, in the future, we will discover other means of knowledge transfer that are more efficient than the laborious programming of alphabets.

In this vein, that Ms. Wolf completely ignores those who read through listening is deeply disturbing. Entire industries have been created to service the many communities that either prefer or depend upon audiobooks for learning. In fact, I read Proust and The Squid as an audiobook because I lack a visual means to consume it. By Ms. Wolf's logic here, I too am cause for concern because I've chosen another way to learn. The author's alarmism over new technologies is a rejection of the very glory that gave us reading in the first place, our ability to adapt. Trust seems in order here, not dismay.

An interesting read, but one that is far more interested in providing encouragement to the dyslexic than it is in recognizing and mitigating its author's own lack of foresight... (3/5 Stars)

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Monday, 11 November 2013

a darkly imaginative, entertaining epic in The Magister Trilogy

From The Week of November 4th, 2013

Excluding a few, notably greedy exceptions, we all want to believe that life should be lived in balance, harmonies that govern man and nature, man with his fellows, and man with himself. Humanity has invented entire faiths in hopes of propagating this notion, of establishing this karmic linkage at the root of our existences. After all, what better way to ensure that the excesses of the few are discouraged by the prudence of the many? There's only one problem with this belief however; it is a facade. Life, like the universe, is governed only by opportunity, its resources exploitable, its blessings random. Some god, some force, may indeed have conjured it into being, but that animating intelligence has done little to curb the disharmonies in our world that put the lie to such utopian notions as fairness and equality.

But what if the world was karmic? What if the universe was chained to balance in such a way that consequences automatically followed on from actions? What would such a world look like? C.S. Friedman imagines in her enthralling trilogy.

In a medieval world of kings and magic, sins and sacrilege, life, for all but a few, is difficult and often all-too brief. While royals wile away their years with the plots and the rivalries that define their existences, the commonborn put their shoulders to their many labors, hoping to fashion for themselves lives for which they can be proud. In the event that they succeed, they might even live long enough to pass down these hard-won advantages to their sons. After all, in such a world, a woman's place is either prone upon her back, a willing vessel for the desires of others, or stooped over a stove, in order to provide for her family.

Kamala should be no exception to this rule. Sold by her mother into a life of sexual slavery while still a child, she has known only degradation and forced service to the whims and pleasures of others. And yet, a fire burns inside her that cannot be so easily put out by such darkness. For Kamala is a witch, a relatively rare soul born with the ability to draw upon her own life's essence to perform feats of magic. From healing to the manipulation of the weather, she, like witches the world over, can win honor and acclaim with her powers, and yet, each mystic act, each re-arranging of the stuff of the world, saps her lifeforce until she is a spent shell, ready for death's cold embrace.

Of course, there is one way to circumvent this inviolate rule, to cheat death on the road to immortality, and that is to become a magister, a witch who uses the lifeforces of others instead of her own to perform her feats. Only, there has never before been a female magister, that is, until Kamala's indomitable will rewrites history. And just in time. For her world is facing an old foe so long banished that it has become nothing more than faintest myth. And if the world is to not be devoured by this darkly jewelled threat, then it will need her and more besides to face it down and restore the balance that has been upended.

Successfully building upon some of the vampiric themes explored in her Coldfire Trilogy, Ms. Friedman's The Magister Trilogy is dark fantasy at its most sublime. Not only does it lay claim to a magic system that is as exquisitely simple as it is brilliantly karmic, it cheerfully gathers up some of the genre's more lazy tropes, shapes them to its own, wicked designs and then gleefully unleashes them upon the unsuspecting reader. This boldness, this willingness to make firm choices and stick to them, to have enough respect for the laws of the world that refusing to break them for the sake of convenience is virtually taken for granted, establishes a bond of trust wit the reader that allows the work to be thoroughly enjoyed without any fear that he is being beguiled into wasting his time on some dull, derivative adventure through well-trodden lands.

More than Ms. Friedman's authenticity of form and function, though, The magister Trilogy is remarkable for its heroine. For this is no abused spirit waiting for the love of a good man to make her whole. She is a creature that burns with her own ambition, her own desire, her own lust for triumph. Others have tried their hands at featuring such anti-heroines before -- The Mistborn Trilogy perhaps coming closest --, but these creatures were ultimately meant to be seduced into reform, raised up by loving hands into a melodramatic world of love and grace. Not so Kamala whose evolution is not towards being lovable, being clean, or even being pretty, but to be strong and whole, a self-sufficient sword forged of stuff far too stern to ever be broken by the selfish desires of others.

For all her thrilling independence, though, Kamala is simultaneously the work's primary weakness. For we are never really allowed to see Kamala's painful, formative years, the events, emotional and otherwise, that scarred her. Given the nature of Kamala's abuse, it's understandable why the author chose to tread lightly here. However, without any real experience with the most scarring and transformative moments of Kamala's life, her anger is rather pale, something we are asked to take as fact instead of witnessing it first hand. Ms. Friedman's choice to leave these dark events out is prudent, but it does rather mute Kamala's emotional impact on the reader.

Certainly, The Magister Trilogy indulges in its fair share of familiar themes: the unstoppable evil, the aloof magicians, the powerful and despotic kings. But even these are given new and interesting slants that, though not as authentic as Kamala'sevolution, do well to provide her a supporting and supportive cast. This, along with one of the best magic systems in recent memory, makes this a winner any lover of fantasy would be happy to encounter. (4/5 Stars)

A fascinating, educational takedown of atavistic thinking in Paleofantasy

From The Week of November 4th, 2013

While most of us look forward to the hope of tomorrow, its implicit promise that life will continue to improve, there are some for whom progress, in all its forms, is anathema. For these unchanging few, the world as it was is how it should be today, a place where man lives in harmony not only with the land but with himself and the countless generations that preceded him. There is value in this philosophy; after all, it is within our nature to be reckless, to adopt both technologies and social systems with an eagerness that defies both prudence and patience. The instinct to fall back, re-group and re-trench is one that should be cherished as inherited wisdom. But sadly, too often, this becomes an excuse to eschew progress, to continue forever as we were, out of some outmoded deference to tradition. This is not wisdom. It is wishful thinking. And that truth Marlene Zuk makes wonderfully clear in this engaging examination of humanity's past.

There can be no doubt that man is getting fat. As machines increasingly take up the burden of manual labor, and as our food continues to be charged with fats and sugars, there seems little hope for the expanding waistlines of humans the world over. Dieting offers some recourse to slimming down, but selecting the right one from the sea of options can be both daunting and aggravating. And even then, often the diets fail to yield the desired results. While most accept this as a fact of both existence and genetics, others see it as an outgrowth of a deeper problem. After all, if humanity has lived one way for hundreds of thousands of years and then, over the span of no more than a few millennia, suddenly revolutionizes every aspect of his traditional existence, from food to running, from society to population control, is it not possible that our physiological ills, from cancers to obesity, are outgrowths of this radical change? Evolution is surely too slow to make the adjustments we need to harmonize with our modern, agricultural, technological environment.

Marlene Zuk, an evolutionary biologist, begs to differ. Deploying examples of notable evolutionary changes that have required only a few thousand years to become mainstays of human genetics, she strongly goes to bat for evolution, arguing that the proof of its swiftness lies in the very creatures with whom we share a planet. Insects, for instance, require sometimes only 20 generations to adopt or discard fundamental traits. Translated into human years, this would represent a mere five centuries, well within the window of time with which humanity has lived the very agricultural lifestyle that is supposedly so harmful to all and sundry. Perhaps the problem is within our minds and not within our pasts.

Adopting a lighthearted tone that does little to damage its credibility, Paleofantasy is an excellent takedown of the atavism that underpins fads like the Paleo Diet. And it is the thinking that is Ms. Zuk's target, not the diet itself. For such dieters are basing their assumptions of the effectiveness of their methods on what they consider to be scientific truths about humanity and evolution which the author argues are patently untrue. Throughout these 300, breezy pages, Ms. Zuk systematically disassembles the contentions of these paleoists, leaving little doubt in the minds of all but Paleo's most staunch supporters that, whatever it is, whatever it does, it is not scientific. Which takes us to the work's subtle but enduring theme.

Just because we can reason our way to a sensible conclusion doesn't mean the conclusion is right. On the contrary, history is littered with ironclad frameworks of logic that proved to be completely false, eugenics being both the most obvious and the most supposedly scientific example. Science, nay life in general, is strewn with false positives whose truths either contain so much beauty, or so much obviousness, that they simply had to be right. In fact, this is the very reason why science exists and is so important to the human endeavor. For if our instincts and our guesses were correct far more often than they were wrong, then we wouldn't need the scientific method to understand the truths around us. We could simply arrive at them through reason. This is clearly not the case.

This is not some mean-spirited polemic seeking to ravage the spirits and the hopes of those seeking answers. If it were, it would be no better than those it aims to discredit. No, it is an attempt to warn people that wanting to believe something is true doesn't make it so. And on the way, it is an excellent introduction to evolutionary biology, its fascinations, its glories and its frustrations. Excellent and engaging work... (4/5 Stars)

Monday, 4 November 2013

the risks and rewards of machine intelligence in On The Steel Breeze

From The Week of October 28th, 2013

For all but the last hundred years of human history, which now spans more than ten millennia, we have been the masters of our destinies. The social constructs into which we've been born have certainly constrained us, influenced us, coerced us, but nonetheless our labors were our own, our survival due in whole to our own talents, our own capacities. But now, with the rise of the technological age, all of that has changed. Where once we fashioned our own tools, measured our own medicines and manufactured our own weapons, these tasks and skills have been increasingly given over to machines which hold advantages over us in speed, efficiency and tirelessness. In fact, the disparities between man and machine when it comes to production are so wide that it would be nothing sort of self-sabotage to not surrender these traditional functions to them. And yet, they are not us; they will never be us. And so, when we do inevitably become completely reliant upon them for our societies, what will our futures hold? Alastair Reynolds deliciously speculates in his engaging novel of the future.

It is the 24th century and humanity has climbed off an environmentally ravaged Earth to live amongst the stars. Moons and habitats throughout the solar system have been colonized while Earth cools, populations free to experiment with technologies, with governments, even with immortality. Despite the obvious divisions this would cause, human civilization has been harmonized and pacified by the Mechanism, a pervasive network of machines, both neural and nano, that ensure that individual humans live nonviolently with their fellows. Cooperation and discovery have become the hallmarks of society which has largely abandoned the destructive sins of slavery and discord.

Quietly, however, matters have begun to change. With the discovery of an inhabitable, extraterrestrial world which has clearly been touched by aliens, humanity has been moved to journey to this distant place aboard Holo Ships, city-sized conveyances that can accelerate to significant fractions of the speed of light. Ahead of these voyagers have been sent Providers, great machines that will land on this alien world and build cities for the adventurers to live in when they reach their new home, but the intelligence designed to govern these Providers has become temperamental and difficult, growing beyond its design specks to become something new, a mind unto itself, a force to be reckoned with. And it is willing to do what it takes to ensure its survival, placing it on a collision course with humanity.

The successor to Blue Remembered Earth, On The Steel Breeze is a work of singular creativity from one of science fiction's most innovative minds. Mr. Reynolds, who rose to prominence with Revelation Space, is an imaginative thinker who, throughout his published career, has rejected the notion that the laws of physics are too stultifying for fiction. Instead, he has embraced them and their limitations, providing for the layman some sense of the phenomenal spans of space and time that are unavoidable obstacles for any civilization with ambitions of being interstellar. In the past, this interest in the technicalities has sometimes lapsed into the obsessive, coming at the expense of qualitative storytelling. Not so here, where his characters, both human and artificial, run the gamut from desperate to ambitious while always remaining convincing and entertaining.

Notwithstanding its delightful creativity, On The Steel Breeze has the heart of a very old novel, asking an age-old question. How will man and machine coexist? Here, humanity has relied upon the Mechanism for so long that it has become unthinkable for it to be corrupted in any way, a truth that breeds the very complacency that allows it to be abused by an intelligence grown far too clever and powerful for any individual human to match. And yet, both the mechanism and the intelligence threatening it provide immeasurable benefits to humanity, organizing it, pacifying it, enabling it, in ways both wonderful and fantastic. Is the risk of the technology wriggling out of our control worth its many, glorious rewards? The answer to this question will be disputed for decades to come, and likely long after we have become far too dependent upon our machines to return to a simpler, more self-sufficient time.

Mr. Reynolds' view of this question is admirably pragmatic. He acknowledges both sides of the argument, the usefulness and the fear of losing command and control, all without siding with any particular faction. This allows his work to adopt an open mind about one of, if not the most, formative and pressing questions of the century to come.

Despite its engaging mysteries and fascinating actors, On The Steel Breeze is far from a perfect work. While Mr. Reynolds' choice to honor the laws of physics is respectable, this adherence boxes the author into a narrative corner he never escapes. On Earth, more than a full century expires while the work's core drama is unfolding in interstellar space, all without the author giving any sense of changing governments, social mores, even the forces of dogma. Providing such detail would have certainly prolonged an already sizeable tome, but its omission leaves the reader feeling as though nothing else in human civilization is taking place between moments of explosive action on the holo ships and the alien world they are destined for. The whims, the pursuits and the ideologies of an entire civilization are abandoned to service the plot which is primarily why we are here. But this lost color leaves the work feeling oddly disjointed, like a movie with no sound, or music with no message. It's an absence that is distractingly apparent.

Notwithstanding its flaws, Mr. Reynolds is worth reading for his creativity alone. Any sin of literature is forgivable when we can watch a skilled mind at play amongst the stars. (4/5 Stars)