Book Reviews

From the sublime to the ridiculous.

I've been on a reading kick lately, and since I'm a blogger I know you're all dying to know what I think about whatever.  So here are some (very) short reviews:

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea - Jules Verne

A fascinating story by the father of science fiction.  Part nature documentary, part high-seas adventure, it's kind of like a 19th-century underwater Star Trek.  Highly recommended.

Bartleby The Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street - Herman Melville

Funny short story about the passive-aggressive office worker that won't be pushed around, and the power of behavioral precedent.  It has a poignant touch to it, too.  Good story.

A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

A popular classic is both for good reasons, one of those stories where you can call it "heartwarming" without being just an over-used cliche.  Read it.

Daemon - Daniel Suarez

It's about a dying brilliant computer game programmer that takes revenge on the world by writing what is both the ultimate virus and the ultimate computer game.  What's really scary is that all of the technology in the story exists.  It's totally possible!  I do believe this will get made into a movie, and there is a sequel on the way.  Highly recommended for nerds, geeks, other techies, or paranoid conspiracy theorists.

The Zombie Survival Guide - Max Brooks

The son of Mel Brooks writes the ultimate survival guide on how to survive the coming zombie apocalypse.  Hint: be prepared, and aim for the head.  Great dry humor.

A Brief History of Time - Stephen Hawking

A summary of physics from the Greeks to string theory, this book is basically a recap of how man has tried to understand the workings of the universe.  It's well-written and easy to understand, although it's a little frustrating for someone like me who knows enough about the topics to have serious questions, which to answer would require detail well beyond the scope of this book.  Oh, and he repeats the usual nonsense about Gallileo (Church vs. Science!).  I have the original 1988 edition, so I don't know if this was corrected along with the changes made in later editions.  Still, everybody should read this book.

Orphans/Fugitives/Titans of Chaos - John C. Wright

Sort of Harry Potter meets Star Wars meets The Box of Delights, it's one of the most imaginative stories I've read, it's hard to figure out exactly which genre it's in.  Maybe fantasy, maybe sci-fi?  The characters are interesting, and it's just impossible to tell where the story is going to go.  One of the characters can move and see in four dimensions, which presented some difficulty for me since I visualize everything I read.  It also has the most ominous line I've read lately: "Prepare the thousand-dimensional object!"  Recommended.

Watchmen - Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons

Who reads the Watchmen?  I did, and it was actually pretty good.  I had read the whole debate about the book vs. the movie, and I already knew most of the plot (including the ending), but it was still very interesting.  What you get out of the story depends on your world view.  The point of view of the story is very nihilistic and cynical, although the characters are quite deep and draw you in.  I thought the ending was disappointing, in part because I don't see the universe in the way the author portrays it in this story, although as a whole I enjoyed reading the book.  Although I haven't seen the movie, from what I've heard it's much much more violent than the comic.  The worst violence in the comic is described or implied, and not depicted.  And Nixon isn't portrayed as evil (he's hardly portrayed at all).  Recommended for those who are interested.

Currently reading:

The Night Land - William Hope Hodgson

Set one million years in the future when the sun has burnt out (written in 1910, they didn't how long it would actually last back then), one of the last survivors of the human race sets out across a land of perpetual darkness to rescue his beloved.  It's very atmospheric, early sci-fi, and I'm only halfway through it, so don't tell me how it comes out.

Ender's Game - Orson Scott Card

A fellow geek chastised me for not having read Ender's Game, so I just started that one today.  I don't have anything to say about it yet.  Don't spoil it!

Idiot of the Day/Week/Month.

Haven't had one of these in a while.

Click here to kill even more brain cells.

Key quotes: “We spent a lot of time in the ’90s trying to distance the network from science fiction, which is largely why it’s called Sci Fi,” Mr. Brooks said. “It’s somewhat cooler and better than the name ‘Science Fiction.’ But even the name Sci Fi is limiting.”

[...]

“When we tested this new name [SyFy], the thing that we got back from our 18-to-34 techno-savvy crowd, which is quite a lot of our audience, is actually this is how you’d text it,” Mr. Howe said. “It made us feel much cooler, much more cutting-edge, much more hip, which was kind of bang-on what we wanted to achieve communication-wise.”

[...]

“We need an umbrella brand we can attach to new businesses: Sci Fi games, Sci Fi kids. It does no use to attach ‘Sci Fi’ because there’s hundreds of sci-fi Web sites and sci-fi publications. So it’s changing your name without changing your name,” Mr. Howe said.

There are no words in Elvish, Entish, or the tongues of Men for how much of a tool this guy sounds like.

A Moral Quandry.

Perhaps I've been reading John C. Wright's blog too much (why aren't you?), but a question of morality popped into my head yesterday and has been bugging me since. It concerns science fiction/fantasy.

If voluptuous space alien babes were to land on the planet Earth tomorrow, could I (assuming I'm single), morally wed one? The answer I devised for this question was based on the intercompatibility of the species. Since marriage is an institution designed to promote the family, and since we know through faith and reason that the sex act must be ordered towards procreation, I think the morality of that marriage would depend on if the voluptuous space alien babes (VSAB from here on in) are biologically similar enough to humans to be able to procreate.

(Note that the chances of some random ET landing on Earth and being able to produce offspring with humans are probably something in the order of one in the XKCD number, where the XKCD number is the Ackermann function, with Graham's number as both arguments. This is one problem with Star Trek, where people are always mating with other aliens. There is no way Spock, being half-human, half-vulcan, is even remotely biologically likely.)

So with the easy question out of the way, we come to the hard one. What if you don't know if you're biologically capable of producing offspring with VSABs?

Of course, with modern technology, we could probably answer this question just by examining the genetics of the two species. But suppose that technology is not available.

Perhaps I should go back to what inspired the question in the first place.

In World of Warcraft (those of you who didn't see that coming obviously don't know me very well), one of my main characters is a Draenei, while The Resident Murloc's is a Night Elf. We typically play these two characters together, and I began to wonder whether they could marry. (Note that I am presupposing, even though Christianity doesn't exist in the Warcraft universe, that sex is intended for procreation and any use if it that contradicts that purpose is illicit and contrary to the natural law, which is independent of religion.)

Within the lore, I don't know if it has been established if Night Elves and Draenei are biologically compatible enough to produce offspring with one another. (I know other races are compatible; Garona is a half-human, half-orc.) So, the question poses serious ramifications for Golyath, being an upstanding and noble Shaman who wishes to do what is right by Nevlonniel. How can he, morally, determine if he is biologically compatible with a night elf, and until that is known, how does that affect his prospects for marriage to this lovely night-elf?

(For all zero of you who are interested, I used to play another Night Elf, Legolamb, along with Nevlonniel. I imagine that Outland changed Lego, and he became cold and distant from his former love, until he finally left her (his change is manifested in his new haircut). In reality, I got tired of playing the most useless class in the game, and wanted to actually feel like I was contributing something in a raid.)

This question has plenty of other contexts aside from WoW, too. For instance, what if some humans were taken by Ra through the Stargate, where they lived separated from their Earth-living relatives for tens of thousands of years, before being reunited, only to discover that they have evolved along different paths and are not biologically compatible with each other? In this case, they might even still be considered the same species.

It does have interesting ramifications, too. We know that homosexuality is disordered because it involves the desire to use the sexual facilities in an unnatural way, that is, in a manner that is contrary to the nature of the sexual act (that nature being the unity of the spouses and procreation). But what about my heterosexual desire for the non-biologically-compatible VSABs? Even though that union is innately contradictory to the nature of sex, is my desire for the well-endowded female aliens also perverse? Suppose we take it one step further and say that they look like Earth-women, only hotter, how is my... how am I supposed to know the difference?

It would also make for an interesting science fiction story. Space Babe lands on earth. Earth man falls in love with, and weds, Space Babe. 193 pages of hot alien-tentacled love later, they determine their species are biologically incompatible. Action sequences ensue, perhaps involving Space Pirates. And of course the Space Babe is also a Space Princess, so it can be considered part of the New Space Princess movement of speculative fiction.

Someone call Mr. Wright. I would write it myself, but with 4 and 2/3 books left to go in my own series, it will be a while before I can get to it.

Why yes, it has been slow at work recently.