The Triple Strand

Kim Stanley Robinson on religion, via his character Bai in The Years of Rice and Salt:

What the Chinese were fighting for, Bai decided, was …clarity, or whatever else it was that was the opposite of religion. For humanity. For compassion. For Buddhism, Daoism and Confucianism, the triple strand that did so well in describing a relationship to the world: the religion with no God, only this world, also several other potential realms of reality, mental realms, and the void itself, but no God, no shepherd ruling with the drooling strictures of a demented old patriarch, but rather innumerable immortal spirits in a vast panoply of realms and being, including humans and many other sentient beings besides, everything living, everything holy, sacred, part of the Godhead—for yes, there was a GOD if by that you meant only a transcendent universal self-aware entity that was reality itself, the cosmos, including everything, including human ideas and mathematical forms and relationships. That idea itself was God, and evoked a kind of worship that was attention to the real world, a kind of natural study. Chinese Buddhism was the natural study of reality, and led to feelings of devotion just from noting the daily leaves, the colors of the sky, the animals seen from the corner of the eye. The movements of chopping wood and carrying water. This initial study of devotion led to deeper understanding as they pursued the mathematical underpinnings of the ways of things, just out of curiosity and because it seemed to help them see even more clearly, and so they made instruments to see farther in and farther out, higher yang, deeper yin.

What followed was a kind of understanding of human reality that placed the greatest value on compassion, created by enlightened understanding, created by study of what was there in the world.

Book Review: The Years of Rice and Salt

Kim Stanley Robinson
2002
Awards: Locus
Nominations: Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ – – – 

The Years of Rice and Salt is something of a departure from the last books of Robinson's I read (his earlier hard-SF Mars trilogy). This novel has a similarly ambitiously enormous scope and similarly thorough background research to the Mars books, but it is set entirely on Earth and focuses almost completely on history and philosophy rather than science. The main problem with it is that it is a mile wide and an inch deep: it covers a ton of ground, both physically and temporally, but doesn't get deep enough into any one character or plot line to allow me to get invested in it.

Most of the plot summaries I saw for this book, both on the cover and on bookseller websites, tease solely with its initial premise, which is: what if, when the bubonic plague hit Europe in the Middle Ages, it had had a 99% fatality rate and wiped out essentially all of the Europeans? I thought that meant that the book was going to be set in Europe, during the time of the plague, and that we were going to see what life would be like during a cataclysm such as that. But the premise is really just a brief starting point, setting the stage for what the book really is: a sweeping alternate history of the world from the Middle Ages until the present, in which the major emperors, explorers, inventors, scientists, politicians, and eventually world superpowers are Middle Eastern, Asian, and Native American.

Robinson tells his story through a pair of central characters who are reincarnated over and over again in different times and places. These two people are cosmically joined, always fated to live and work closely together in some way, regardless of who they are or when they are reborn. You can tell who they are in each incarnation because their names always start with the same first letters (B and K), and they retain much of their own distinct personalities. "B" is a soft-hearted, inquisitive person who tends to be optimistic and think the best of people, while "K" tends to be ambitious, opinionated, skeptical, and sometimes violent.

These two people, or spirits, or souls, or whatever, are born into more or less difficult situations depending on how they behaved in past lives. They are usually also reincarnated together with other more peripheral members of their jati, or larger spiritual family, so some of the same supporting characters crop up repeatedly (also identifiable from the first letters of their first names).

Between lives, B and K wait in the bardo, which is a sort of a purgatory-like holding area in which they discuss the lives that just ended and await their new ones. It is only in the bardo that they can really remember the long line of people that they have been--although occasionally they do have a sense, while alive, of having been somewhere or having met someone before that they have only been to or met in a previous life.

B and K move through history, appearing as people of any nationality in any land across the world. They switch back and forth between man and woman, gay and straight, Muslim and Buddhist and agnostic. They are never biologically related, instead showing up as lovers, best friends, student and teacher, or army comrades.

They are friends, an Islamic sultana and cleric, when they lead the re-population of Europe; they are a Chinese navy man and a native girl when the Chinese "discover" North America and give the indigenous people smallpox; they are an indigenous Hodenosaunee and a Japanese immigrant when the Iroquois found their confederacy of native nations; they are variously Islamic and Indian and Chinese and Tibetan when they invent telescopes and microscopes and the printing press and come up with the law of gravity and the theory of relatively and the atomic bomb.

The book is by Kim Stanley Robinson, after all, so everything geographical and historical is impeccably researched. The settings are vivid and rich and colorful and exotic, yet familiar; the characters are well developed and their motives are understandable.

You also certainly get a sense of the vast sweep of history, and of how much all of our technological advancements rely on earlier peoples' knowledge and experimentation, so that our current achievements are the result of thousands of years of thought and learning. His more academically advanced characters have a keen awareness of this, too: that they are tiny parts part of a much greater historical picture.

I also appreciated at least one of the lessons that I think Robinson was trying to get across: that humans are fundamentally the same, for good or for ill, across all of our cultures. That if there had been no white Christian Europeans to establish a world empire, someone else from somewhere else would have. That we would have had scientific and industrial revolutions in different places led by different people. That we would have invented weapons of mass destruction and had long, bitter, pointless world wars. And that we would still struggle with the same issues of slavery, poverty, equality, and environmental destruction.

I also appreciated Robinson's dips into overt self-awareness. He makes you very aware that he is very aware of what he is doing. For example, one of K's incarnations, a teacher in an Islamic city on the west coast of repopulated France, says that musing over alternate histories is a waste of time: it is "such a useless exercise," she says, to constantly debate "what if this had happened, what if that had happened." And during another episode, a Chinese scholar talking about reincarnation references an ancient anthologist who put together a "reincarnation compendium," in which his characters were always reincarnated with names that begin with the same letters.

But it is a frustrating format because you can never get truly invested in any single incarnation. It is less like a single novel and more like a very long series of separate short stories, where you only just get familiar with the location and the people, and then it's all over and you have to move on to the next story.

And the stories and characters were not distinct enough from each other to be immediately memorable in themselves. No one single episode really stood out enough for me to remember specific names and incidents, except for one in which K makes a major mistake in one life and comes back in the next as a tiger.

And the years go by, and the characters are reborn over and over, and the names and places change, but the lives of the individual incarnations never reach any kind of satisfying resolution. After B and K get out of slavery and are done with world exploration, and achieve a sort of comfortable professorial status, they don't make that much more progress. They seem to just stay at that level, expounding and philosophizing, making the necessary era-appropriate inventions and discoveries to advance the world as a whole, but their individual lives often are disappointingly short and unresolved. They usually die without really finishing that life's work.

Maybe that's another of Robinson's points--that most lives are somewhat unresolved. One of B's incarnations reflects at one point upon how most lives are wasted, cut short, lived in "ignorance, hunger, and fear." There really are very few real-life stories with Hollywood-level excitement.

But that doesn't make for a really gripping novel. This book would have been a real page-turner if he had taken any one of the incarnations of B and K, fleshed it out and given it more drama and suspense, and let them complete a major discovery or invention and then have a moment of celebration, rather than just having them work hard for a lifetime and then slip to the next life to start all over again.

I appreciate the idea, the premise, and the effort. I really do. And in many ways, Robinson executed the individual elements excellently. I just need more of a hook and more exciting storytelling to keep me at attention.

It's All Too Much: Rape in A Game of Thrones

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Why Reality TV is Necessary for a Docile Society

Fire Chief Beatty explains to Guy Montag why books are dangerous:

“If you don’t want a man unhappy politically, don’t give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none. Let him forget there is such a thing as war. If the government is inefficient, topheavy, and tax-mad, better it be all those than that people worry over it. Peace, Montag. Give the people contests they can win by remember the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of ‘facts’ they feel stuffed, but absolutely ‘brilliant’ with information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving. And they’ll be happy, because facts of that sort don’t change. Don’t give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy.”

Fahrenheit 451

Ray Bradbury

Classical Elements in Modern Science Fiction

In 2011 Tor.com published a series of posts by Liz Bourke about how modern science fiction builds upon elements from classical literature.

I just found out about it, so I am re-posting it herewith in case anyone else is interested and also hadn't heard of it until now.

SFF and the Classical Past

Bourke talks about how many common themes in modern SF actually come from Greek and Roman antecedents. 

If I were so inclined I might tend to argue that some of these themes--such as meddlesome gods, gladiators, and odysseys--might actually rather be common human themes, even older, perhaps, and more international, than Greek and Roman mythology. But it still makes for an interesting read.

Book Review: Fahrenheit 451

Ray Bradbury

1953

Awards: Retro Hugo

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

Fahrenheit 451 is about a man, Guy Montag, who is a fireman. In Montag’s time, many years in the future from ours, it is illegal to read books. And the job of a fireman is not to put out fires, but to burn any books he finds.

The reason that books are illegal (we hear from Montag's boss, the Fire Chief) is that books make people unhappy. Books can be violent, melancholic, confusing, requiring of deep thought, and full of different philosophies and conflicting ideas that require hard work to reconcile. This makes people confused and upset. By burning the books, firemen are standing guard against societal unhappiness.

To make themselves even more constantly happy, people have also surrounded themselves with distracting stimuli in their homes, businesses, and subways. Everywhere they go they are assaulted by advertisements, jingles, and empty, content-free virtual reality dramas. Left with nothing but vapid entertainment and an absence of introspection or critical thought, society has become almost sociopathic. Suicide, murder, and drug overdoses are common. People think nothing of hitting animals and even people while they are driving.

          

At the beginning of the book, fireman Montag loves his job; he gets a ridiculous grin on his face as books turn into ashes. He enjoys having a respected place in his community. And he thinks he has a perfectly fine relationship with his wife Mildred.

But one day on the way home from work he meets a girl, Clarisse, and her conversation is so radically different from what he’s used to that it sets him off balance. Clarisse observes the world, asks questions, notices details. She likes having actual conversations with other people. She gives him presents of flowers and chestnuts and autumn leaves.

He can’t stop thinking about Clarisse, and that makes him start questioning everything. And once he starts questioning, it isn’t long before everything starts falling apart. He realizes that his life is empty. He and his wife never have conversations; she spends all day watching empty dramas on their wall-size TVs. And when she’s not watching TV, she listens to constant chatter on her earbud radios, or takes sleeping pills to conk out.

And he realizes that all this time he has been burning books without even once reading any of them, to see if they really are as bad as he’s been led to believe.

So at his next book burning call, he slips one into his shirt and takes it home. And then we discover that he’s been doing that almost unconsciously, blindly, for quite a while.

And then Clarisse and her entire societal-norm-flouting family mysteriously disappear from their house.

And then Montag goes to a call where they are burning the books hidden in the home of an elderly woman. She is so distraught by them burning her library that she throws herself on the fire, and he sees her burn to death before his eyes.

Oscar Werner as Guy Montag in François Truffaut's
somewhat plot-altered, but still Bradbury-approved,
film version of Fahrenheit 451

At this point, Montag knows he can never go back to his job. He is so distraught at having to question everything that he has taken for granted that he makes a series of bad missteps, from showing his wife and her friends his books to getting in contact with a member of the book-saving underground. And when the firemen finally show up at his own house, Montag knows he’s in deep trouble.

~

When I was in sixth grade, a family friend gave me an anthology of Ray Bradbury’s short stories. I didn’t have any idea who Bradbury was, but I gobbled the book up. Stories like A Sound of Thunder, Skeleton, and There Will Come Soft Rains were vivid and disturbing and delightful; I read them over and over again. When I was able to get my hands on more of his short stories and a copy of The Martian Chronicles, I gobbled those up, too.

             

But I only first read Fahrenheit 451 because I had to, for a class assignment in junior high school. I liked it all right; I enjoyed the story and I was surprised that my teacher would assign such a modern and readable book. But it didn’t make much of a deep philosophical impact on me at the time. I don’t think I had enough life context to give it meaning.

When I was in college and had gained a little more experience and knowledge of world history, I read Fahrenheit 451 again. It had a lot more power for me than it had before. It resonated with my outrage at real-life book burnings and at people who wanted to proscribe what other people could read and think simply because it bothered them. I saw it as an artful illustration of the evilness and impossibility of thought censorship.

And now, many years later, I have read it a third time. My life is completely different now than it was when I was in either junior high school or college. I have a full-time job that eats up the bulk of my week. I have family obligations and stresses and much less leisure time to fit in all the projects and travel and socializing I want to do. In the evenings I often sit on the couch and watch TV and let my mind go blank. And this book spoke to me now in a different way than it had before: this time, it made me think about how I am constantly running, fending off demands on my attention, and how I allow the self-centeredness and lack of content in the media around me to use up my time and mental energy so that I don’t take the time to observe, listen, create, and think.

Fahrenheit 451 is, itself, the kind of book that the firemen were protecting society against. It is melancholic, unresolved, and requiring of deep thought. It is fiction, but it forces us to take a hard look at our reality. And that’s exactly what makes it so important.

I think one of the marks of a great book is that it has richness enough to mean many things to many people, and all of them can be true. This is certainly true of Fahrenheit 451. It carries many messages: about the destructiveness of censorship, about the need to step back and be in the world, about the need to relate to other people, about the need to be curious, about coping with clashing inputs to come up with your own standards of what is right. To do all this and to do it in the form of a well-written and entertaining story is beyond impressive.