The Borrower

My undergraduate degree was in pre and early modern literature. So it should be no surprise that I worship the almighty written word. Language, especially a phonetic written language, is the most important and vital invention of mankind (in my less than humble opinion). I don't want to get into whether it is "superior" to ideographic, logographic, syllabic, etc types of languages. It is the type of language I learned first and it is what I am most familiar with. The ideographic system of Chinese languages is useful in an enormous country where dialects can be so distinct that they sound like different language. A unified written system, regardless of pronunciation, is marvellous for communication.

A full spoken language, complete with standardized vocabulary and grammar, took humanity a very long time to develop. And how much more so for a written language? Literacy was, for thousands of years, the privilege of the aristocracy. It required not only the invention and maintenance of a language but also the time and resources to learn it. While the invention of moveable type printers made book production easier, books did not become economically viable for most people until the industrial revolution.

Books are no longer rare and precious heirloom tomes. They are mass produced pulp with glued bindings. Newspapers are going out of fashion as we shift our preferences to the internet. Even this blog is brought to you with ease, free of charge for me to publish and for you to read.

But I am crazy about books. I don't just mean the worlds they hold. I love the tactile sensation, the musky library smell of them, the sound of turning a page, the way book covers look like inviting secrets. I own several hundred books. At one point, they began to take over my room. What looked like a dishevled mess was in fact genre-specific stacks and piles of books that could not find homes on my bookcases. Eventually, my mother bought us four more bookcases and we turned a portion of our spare room into a library. While I have been in graduate school, I have added significantly to my collection despite my aversion to buying books for classes.

Libraries rank high on my list of civic altruism. Fire trucks and police and public water works are all great for survival, but a library is a gift to the souls of people. I love to wander through shelves of books. I peruse fiction stacks like book stores. It has been a disappointment to me how thin the U of Chicago library fiction sections are. So many of the books are ancient, falling apart, out-dated. The academic books outweigh these significantly. Don't point out that it is a university library. If they don't value fiction then they are missing something great. In fact, I think it says a lot about what is wrong with the University of Chicago that it's libraries contain more works about Kurt Vonnegut than by him - and there are not that many about him either. Secondary source favoritism.

Oh, but public libraries, how I love those! Any book has been held my myriads of others. Where did they read it and how did it affect them? I especially love the little notes scrawled on the sides of pages, underlining and question marks for words of unknown meaning. I miss those little cards that contained the names of previous borrowers. Although I always found it disappointing when a great book sat on shelves for months or even years before I rescued it again.

Inside the world of the Thursday Next novels, there are vast libraries, one for each language. You can open any book and enter into the story itself, you can watch and feel as a reader travels through the narrative - if you are not careful, you might even be read. While the characters keep their book identities, to a point, they can lead wildly different lives in the pages where they are absent or when the book is not being read. They agonize when they are not read and worry what the outside world thinks of them.

For them, time looks like it does to a Tralfalmadorian. All of it is always there, to be experienced over and over. While some parts may be painful and unpleasant, they can look forward to the other parts, the lovely parts. Unless the story is truly depressing and awful. But even then they would rather have the high emotions than the dullness of being unread.

Science Fiction and Sex: Incest

Since I began this primer on sex in science fiction, I keep going back to a conversation I had with a friend of mine. It happened unexpectedly when I was walking home from work late at night. The conversation lasted less than 5 minutes and it was among the most bizarre conversations I have had. Life always seems to happen when we are preoccupied, doesn't it? I find it a little irritating that so many important conversations take place outside, in the cold, underneath a street light. We talked about the taboo of incest, why we feel so immediately disturbed by it, if it is just a culturally built thing. You may have noticed in one of my other posts that, to me, the taboo of incest is just an evolutionary trait that keeps the gene pool sufficiently mixed and viable. Here was his premise:

Suppose a brother and sister, both adults, have a very close relationship. They decide they would like to have sex to deepen their relationship. They use contraceptives so that she will not become pregnant. No one else knows about it. No one is hurt by it. And there is no offspring. Is it wrong?

If you are like me, your mind screams that of course it is wrong. But why? I have stated my claim of evolution and yet I know it is wrong. Incest happens all the time, in many species. Definitions of incest vary from culture to culture, with some societies considering taboo what other societies accept as normative. Levi-Strauss suggested that the discouragement of incest was a social force. Marriage and offspring form strong bonds and social networks. Forming such alliances strengthens communities by linking up several members of families. A marriage is not just between two people but also their families, the in-laws they join.

Think of times when incest was common. European and Egyptian royalty come to my mind. Marriage between close relatives, even half-siblings was common. Such close marriages keep material wealth and power concentrated. A pharaoh and his half sister need not worry about an interloper or concubine staking her claim since the half sister is the first wife, through whom inheritance is determined. In a situation where one person has multiple spouses, the sibling-spouse may be merely a figure of power and not a source of reproduction.

For reasons beyond my comprehension, many sci-fi books set in the future involve the political intrigue of feudal lords and ruling classes. With such concern over power and wealth, marriage is often a dangerous game. It threatens the stability of the family as well as the government. In other cases, alien species may reproduce in a manner different from our which renders concepts such as siblings, family and incest null. While the narrator or a character may seek to justify this, do not be misled - the author includes this element to make you uncomfortable, to make you distrust and dislike certain characters, and to make you put a wall between yourself and the incestuous persons.

Science Fiction and Sex: Dimorphism

Males are taller, more muscular and hairier. Women are smaller, have a higher percent body fat and less hairy. Peacocks are bright and flashy; peahens are dull and brown. Female angler fish are large with a funny lantern projecting for their heads; male angler fish are teeny tiny. These sex-based differences are call dimorphisms. The most common cause of dimorphism is sexual selection.

When mates are determined by members of the same sex (usually males) competing for a mate, ornamentation distinguishes the sexes. For example, larger antlers become more attractive. The antlers are not really for fighting, at least not fighting to the death. If species really had death-matches, there would be very few viable mates next season. Aside from drawing attention to oneself, ornaments, especially those that are detrimental to their bearer, are signs that the possible mate can survive with such handicaps. These ornaments also take extra energy to grow and support. The greater the ornament, the more fit its possessor must be to survive.

The Sexy Son Hypothesis (I'm not making this up!) is based on the idea that a female will seek in her mate the best genes for her own son. If her son is well endowed, he will be more likely to reproduce and pass along his genes. Essentially, sex appeal becomes its own reason to exist. This is essentially the much-abused "selfish gene."

There is some relationship between the amount of dimorphism and the number of sexual partners in species. However, while these are fun to consider and wonder about, there is not enough to say that one causes the other, or that they are even positively correlated. However, if you are an evolutionary biologist focuses in dimorphism, please get back to the lab and get me some answers!

When thinking about evolution, most people remember natural selection, but sexual selection is just as important, especially when an animal looks weird, like the hairless ape.

Science Fiction and Sex: Sexual Mores

All societies have standards and expectations the govern sexual behaviours. These standards include consent, sex as it relates to marriage, fidelity, number of partners, identity and status of partners, diseases, incest, rape. Some of these we feel are innate laws that create better, healthier, stronger, fitter offspring. For example, incest is a taboo in society but it is also dangerous for a species as inbreeding increases the likelihood of passing on bad genes. However, sex as related to marriage, fidelity, number of partners, etc, are considerations for the society in which one lives.

It is safe to assume that any science fiction novel that mentions sex (and there are a lot of them!) will challenge their society's expectation of sexual mores. The heyday of pulp science fiction occurred at a time when pre-marital sex and promiscuity were becoming more widely practiced, if not socially acceptable. Oral contraceptives reduced the risk of unwanted pregnancy leading to unwanted prolonged attachments (ie shotgun weddings). Control over fertility offered women the opportunity to engage in sex without the risk of becoming pregnant which allowed women the same sexual freedom that men enjoyed. Cars provided young lovers a place to experiment outside of the public eye. The hippy generation brought its ideals of free lover and experimentation.

Sex is taboo. Sex is everywhere. Sex sells. Sex kills. It is appropriate that English lacks a neutral term for it. Sex, intercourse, coitus - these are all clinical terms. Making love is positive. Screwing is negative. There is just no word for it that would not cause someone else to blush or blanch. We joke about it. We use words for reproductive organs as insults. We can't get enough of it and we a terrified of the consequences. Anything that a society obsesses about is rich fodder for science fiction.

Science Fiction and Sex: Reproduction

Reproduction can be either sexual or asexual. Sexual reproduction produces offspring that are similar but not identical to their parents. Asexual reproduction creates either identical or very similar offspring. Slight variation and mutations are possible from both types of reproduction. There are two common methods of reproducing. One in which few offspring are created, usually nurtured for a time. The other method involves producing many offspring, most of whom die shortly after death.

Humans, generally, reproduce by the hot and sweaty method that leads to a live birth. Sterile procedures, like in vetro fertilization, take some of the hot and sweaty work out of the beginning but the giving birth to a tiny human being is always messy. Some people may question my use of "live birth" but I only want to distinguish this from laying an egg, which is birth to a live thing (sorta) but generally has less blood and cursing. Giving birth is a dangerous thing. For a really, really long time, we're talking thousands of years, most women died in child birth. And most children died, too. Not a pretty picture but it is the harsh reality. Our method takes a lot of energy and years of nurturing.

Some species give birth or lay a clutch of eggs and are basically done. The basic relationship is the more intelligent and the less instinct equals fewer babies and vice versa. Going small is a great way for certain species, but it is not for everyone. When we imagine aliens, we tend to imagine ourselves but hairless and slimy or with lots of arms or with an enormous sloping forehead, one eyed, and laying a small clutch of eggs (or is that just me?). Occasionally, you get what corporate think tanks like to call "thinking outside of the box", or womb in this case. District 9 features aliens which lay/create pods/eggs from which their young are born. Actually, the details are not mentioned but they do not give birth. However, they do have small numbers of children, perhaps due to the humans aborting the fetuses. But they do nurture their young for several years.

Ender's Game features a species of sentient insects who share a collective mind that is controlled by the queen. Like in bees, queens lay numerous eggs over her lifetime. Because the hive thinks as one, nurturing is unnecessary. However, the queens are said to nurture their successors and collaborate with them. In essence the hive is the extended body of the queen's mind which is nurtured by her mother.

Science Fiction and Sex: Gender

Gender is culturally based, socially constructed in humans. Gender determines, to a large extent, the societal role of a person. In most societies, the gender is assigned according to the sex of a the person: Male->Men->Masculinity and Female->Woman->Femininity. Gender has made into social role binaries, in which one gender is defined by opposing the other. Gender is fluid, changing from culture to culture and over time.

But that is all pretend, or only barely true. Many works of science fiction challenge our modern understanding and acceptance of gender. Ursula Le Guinn, hero of gender and sex challenges, explores gender in The Dispossessed. On one planet, Anarres, sex still exists in that there are male and female, but gender is not stereotyped. The protagonist views females as equals and partners. He does not ignore their sex but he does not judge by it. When he travels to Urras, he finds it difficult to accept the limited power women accept and the way men look down upon the women. The people of Urras often challenge his assertions of equality as they cannot believe it is possible for women to be valued as equal to men.

In The Handmaid's Tale, the society is taken to the opposite extreme of Anarres. In response to supposed Muslim attacks on women, theocratic men take control of the government, creating a society based on literal understanding of the Bible, especially the Hebrew Bible. Women are forbidden from owning money and property and from reading. Abortions are illegal. They are expected to be subservient housewives who defer to their husbands and bear them children. Due to ecological collapse and nuclear waste, many people have become sterile. However, absence of children are blamed on the women and never on men. Women are forced to be segregated in society. Sex/Gender can be identified by the color and design of clothing. Homosexuals are called "gender traitors." Sterile women (not wives) are either: sent to colonies to die a slow death; Aunts, who control and train handmaids; Marthas who do domestic work; Jezebels, sex workers; or Econowives, who are expected to fulfill all the roles of a woman. Women who are sterile, widows, divorcees, feminists, lesbians, etc are called "Unwomen."

The stakes are always high when it comes to gender. When gender is considered the same as sex, it is difficult for anyone to step outside of their assumed role. Science fiction explores gender either by presenting a society which is free from modern gender issues or by presenting a society which has pushed those issues to the breaking point of humanity.

Science Fiction and Sex: Sex

In species which reproduce sexually, sex describes the characteristics that distinguishes reproductive roles. For example, humans have two sexes, male and female. Some species are all hermaphroditic, possessing gametes, which in other species have become two sexes.

Some species have three sexes. Take ants for example. There is a queen, a female capable of producing offspring. There are males, who live short lives; their sole duty is to inseminate non-related queens. And then there are all the other ants, worker ants and soldier ants, cemetery ants and nurse ants. These are almost female, would be females, but their reproductive organs do not mature. They remain preadolescences, tweens.

Or consider wrasses. There are many varieties and species of the wrasse and some of them are quite special. Imagine a fish harem, one male and many females, but all the offspring are females. What to do when the male dies? The most dominant of the female fishes changes sex and becomes the new harem leader. You may remember this as a plot element regarding the DNA of some frogs from Jurassic Park.

Finally, lets consider slugs. Slimy, slick, covered in mucus, terribly elegant slugs! Most, not all, are hermaphrodites, possessing both sex organs, able to sire and birth offspring.

These are just some of the possibilities. I am sure the sexual and asexual world have produced many lovely varieties. Ursula Le Guin, the first lady of ambiguity and duality, has imagined another possibility. In The Left Hand of Darkness, the Gethians spend most of their life sexually neutral except for two or three days a month called kemmer. During kemmer, a person goes into heat and must find another person who is entering kemmer, although some avoid others if they have mated for life after their partner dies. Any person can become either sex. Like the slugs, they are capable of both siring and birthing children. There are some who, like us, are trapped in a permanent state of kemmer, living their entire life as a single sex. They are called perverts but are an integral part of a religious rite of insight.

Being between two genders, trapped in a sex, being of one sex and the none-correlated gender, is often considered freakish when it is non-normative. However, these in-between people are often considered to have special religious insight because of the ambiguity of the identity.

Science Fiction and Sex: Sexual Behaviour

Since humans are intelligent, very social animals, they engage in sexual behaviours for social, non-productive reasons. Sex, for humans and other social species, can be divided into reproductive, recreational and relational.

In most western societies, sex play is repressed in children and adolescents. Knowledge of sex is considered improper for children. In the United States, most people lose their virginity (have their first act of coitus or intercourse) at the age of 16 or 17. The age varies somewhat by country since different countries and states have different age of consent and expectations. While some humans have sex with only one person throughout their lives, most engage in sexual activity with multiple partners. Ever since President Clinton asked for a definition of "the", what constitutes sex has been greatly debated. Let's be adults about this. Sex includes a variety of activities that stimulate and give physical pleasure to one or more persons.

In science fiction, the type and frequency of sexual behaviours often vary from out own society. In Brave New World and The Dispossessed children freely engage in sexual play, not necessarily intercourse, as part of their socializing education. Sex with multiple partners at one time (an orgy) is common in science fiction novels. In Brave New World and Strange From A Strange Land, orgies are part of religious communion and rites.

Homosexuality may be more common, maybe even normal (shock and awe, right?). The Dispossessed features homosexual and heterosexual persons engaging in both types of relationships. While a person may seek partners of their preferred sex(es), they may have partners of either sex, especially when younger. And, of course, one can just as easily be bisexual, I would assume/hope.

In some futuristic plots, sex is outlawed due to the spread of sexually transmitted diseases and /or control of the population. In Demolition Man, sex is preformed through simulators. Since it has been removed from physical engagement and the possibility of pregnancy, sex is exchanged more freely and with less sentiment than it is presently. The society in Brave New World separates sex from reproduction as well since all women either take contraceptives or are sterile. Sex becomes recreational and each citizen is expected to have sex with many partners.

I am sure there is some sci-fi, maybe Catholic Sci-Fi, in which the recreational element has been removed and sex is purely for reproductive purposes, but I've yet to read any of that.
The Handmaid's Tale features sex which is for reproductive purposes only. The Handmaid is the surrogate for the wife and copulates with the husband only to conceive. Sex is considered unpleasant and distateful for women. I can think of a few reasons why I would agree if I lived in that society.

There is a description of such sex which some may find offensive. If you would like to read it, highlight the blank white space below.

"My red skirt is hitched up to my waist, though no higher. Below it the Commander is fucking. What he is fucking is the lower part of my body. I do not say making love, because this is not what he's doing. Copulating too would be inaccurate, because it would imply two people and only one is involved. Nor does rape cover it: nothing is going on here that I haven't signed up for."

Science Fiction and Sex: Dismbiguation

Sex and science fiction are strange but frequent bedfellows. Science fiction has been compared to pornography, in that it is difficult to define both but you know it when you see it. Kurt Vonnegut once said that what pornography and science fiction had in common wasn't sex but fantasies of an impossibly hospitable world. Actually, he was referring to his surrogate Kilgore Trout, in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. And he was wrong, about science fiction at least. Which I suppose means that I am wrong since I always remember the quote incorrectly.*

Sex is inescapable in science fiction . . . rather like reality, I suppose. It is complicated, consuming, distressing, satisfying; it can bring people together and tear them apart. Nothing new. But just about everything is up for debate and change. Before we begin exploring anything, I want to set up some terms. I will probably slip back into using regular connotations, but I will try my best to keep these terms true for this exploration.

Sci-Fi Sex Ed
Sexual Intercourse and Behaviours
I will try to use the proper terms for sexual acts, reproductive or otherwise.

Sex
In species which reproduce sexually, sex describes the characteristics that distinguishes reproductive roles.

Gender
Sex and gender are not the same and do not have a 1:1 correlation.

Reproduction
Reproduction is the process in which offspring is created.

Sexual Mores
All societies have standards and expectations the govern sexual behaviours. These standards include consent, sex as it relates to marraige, fidelity, number of partners, identity and status of partners, diseases, incest, rape.

Dimorphism
Sexual dimorphism is the difference between sexes. It includes both physical (size, color, pattern, etc) and behavioural (aggression, investment in parenting).

*I sometimes wonder if this is true, even if I got the quote wrong. A universe that includes numerous sentient species, capable of reaching each other, communicating, etc, seems impossibly hospitable to me.

A Canticle for Leibowitz

After a nuclear holocaust, the world and humanity attempt to recover. Many people suffer horrible and painful mutations. Culture, technology, science and reading are met with hostility as these are seen as the cause or catalyst of the destruction. A man named Leibowitz attempts to create a secret religious order, charged with the duty of preserving knowledge and books.

This book chronicles the span of 26 generations of the order, from the dark days of knowledge after the war, through a renaissance, and up to the end of human life on Earth. There is an enduring struggle between the monastery, passing governments and the religious head in the Papal state. There is also a struggle between religious and secular ethos, especially when it comes to euthanasia of mutants. One particular story focuses on the struggle of a woman and her infant, both mutated and in horrible pain. She eventually chooses to end their suffering because she believes there can be no good in the suffering of her child who can understand only its pain.

There is a wandering character who lives throughout all these ages, appearing at key moments to key players in history. He seems to be perpetually waiting. The legend of the Wandering Jew is all but forgotten to modernity. It is the legend of a Jewish man, often who has cursed or denied comfort to Jesus, who is fated to endure eternity until the Jesus returns to Earth. The legend is also seen as an allegory of the stateless Jewish population in Europe during the middle ages. However, the identity of the wandering Jew is confused with the Saint Leibowitz, who was himself a late convert to the church.

I avoid religion in fiction because it is painful to read amateur interpretations of religious literature. I am a pathetic snob but I am also an academic and my speciality is modern Jewish thought. But I loved the religious elements of this book. It is charmingly ironic that scientific knowledge is entrusted to a religious society. Actually, I suppose this is not ironic at all but an example of Miller's use of cyclical time events. Despite the hope of the crew on the starship, the tiny ark carrying all terrestrial knowledge, we know they are doomed to repeat history.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)

I watched this movie for its outdated b-movie feel. I was not disappointed. I understand that the plot deviates significantly from the original 50's movie and also from the book. The basic plot is ludicrous. I mean, science fiction usually is but these characters lacked logic and the ability to act in their own interest without a support group. Trust becomes a problem for the main characters as the pod people are capable of passing as human.

The pod people to not take over the bodies of their victims but replicate their appearance. This seems silly and cheap to me. The pod people do not have individual identities, they act in concert with a single group mind and goal. Unless they are actually in need of the organic materials (the process is not explained), chasing down and converting each human is an excessive waste.

This movie hinges exclusively on terror, the fear of being replaced is the only thing this movie really has to offer.

The Dangers of Piracy

I wrote this short story a while ago for friend aIs a mock-warning about internet piracy. I was motivated by the exagerated use of "piracy" - which used to terrifying, life-threatening and very real. Illegally downloading music should be considered petty theft as it would be if someone shoplifted the CD. Pirates actually kill people, real people.

Meg the Wench
Once upon a time, Meg was a wench aboard the pirate ship Torrrrent. On a soggy May eve, they attacked and boarded PopCap, a cargo ship in Her Majesty's Royal Navy, taking no prisoners but a cache of flash games. Having retired to her chambers, Meg spent a fortnight combating zombies with her arsenal of pea shooters and mushroom.

All was glorious, golden and velvety with the lingering odor of the salty deep until a swarm of Filibustering Bittorrent Insane-nazi-investigators (known colloquially as the FBI) descended upon the ship, riding atop a pod a malicious dolphins. Fearing for her life, and her mp3 collection, Meg placed herself and her laptop into an empty chest used to store gold coins and AOL trial cds, hoping to evade capture long enough to delete all illegal files from her numerous swarthy disc drives. Alas, her RAM was insufficient and she was taken, red handed with her collection of Black-Eyed Peas albums, Hanana Montana episodes, and flash games.

Though she pleaded innocence, ignorance and that she had been corrupted by the fast and loose Napster life-style, the judge had a daughter in the record industry and was hard on piracy. She was keel-hauled and forced to serve out her life as a copy-write underwriter, earning minumum wage, which left her with precious few pieces of eight with which to purchase CDs, DVDs and computer games.

Let this be a lesson to you, you filthy toddling landlubbing maggots: A pirates life is not for ye.

Blade Runner

Humanity. After the creation of synthetic humans, what distinguishes humanity from replicants becomes unclear. A replicant is made of biologic compounds. Unlike robots, it can cry, it must consume food, it has a pulse. However, their livespan is short, only 4 years. Their entire life is spent in adulthood. Their humanity is incomplete, lacking empathy for animals, humans and other replicants. Replicants are outlawed on Earth. An empathy test is given to determine the humanity of a subject.

In the final moments of the movie, the replicant Roy exhibits signs that he has evolved beyond his programming. He saves from death the blade runner Deckhard, who was sent to retire him. If a replicant has the ability to empathize, there may be not means of distinguishing them from humanity. But if empathy was the only trait they lacked, would that not make them human?

It is unclear or at least open to debate whether our protagonist Deckhard is a replicant as well. Some replicants, such as Rachael, have implanted memories and are unaware that they are replicants. Rachael also develops emotions which previous models of replicants could not.

If the replicants are considered human, their use as personal property or weapons would be slavery. With the risks that are caused by developed intelligence and emotions, why would the Tyrell company take such a risk by creating these? Perhaps Tyrell is playing God. He creates life, manufactures memories but his beings are superior to humans in strength and intelligence. But he is an impotant God, unable to control or even save his creations, self-imprisoned in sterility.

The Road

The Road is written by Cormic McCarthy, who also wrote No Country For Old Men. His taciturn method obliterates what normal comfort one finds in Sci-Fi, the familiarity of humanity, and even in most post-apocalyptica there is the saving grace of knowing what went wrong offering the reader the chance to illogically prepare for such a disaster. But none of that. Instead, we are shown what I know to be the flaw of cannibalism-the ethics of procuring human meat. In situations were the meal is already deceased or, as in the dire case when lost at sea, the victim has drawn lots with foreknowledge of his risk and his offering of salvation to his crew, in these situations I feel no moral outrage. Even in the case of Hannibal Lectur, his victims are killed first, or dulled against the pain, or viscious sinners for whom we need feel no remorse.

Again, not so for Cormic. Instead they are the hunted and the tortured, who are forced to endure in suffering and privation. He did try to warn me, gradually building up and offering clues but I was too sleepy and although I could tell that he was trying to get across to me something, I could not put the clues together nor could I fathom the horror he was trying to shield me from in the beginning. Until one page, in my foolish hope, I fell down into his pit of terror. There are some things that wreck me, that pull my innards from me and throw me into despair. It does not matter if they are fiction, movie-magic, make-believe. The terrible possibilities of humanity . . . things I cannot look at, things that break me down. Too cruel.

This book is among them and I must beg Oprah, why, why would this be on your booklist? Not that I read it because of her happy seal of approval, but still, why would she put this into the hands of the masses and say "read, please do"?

I have lived in a tremor since yesterday. Scared to sleep, scared to close my eyes for what I might find there, scared to let my mind wander. A horrible road. A sore throat had me down, but this knocked me out. I was weak on waking, slow in moving, scared of breathing. It has been a hard few days physically, emotionally, psychologically. I am coming round, rallying. I have I Am Legend which bears precious little resemblance to the movie. Why another post-apocalyptic sci-fi novel? Because I already know the story. I have taken the precaution of reading the wiki plot of any book that I may venture into.

I recently did one of those Myer-Briggs tests. I wanted to see if my anti-depressants/anti-anxiety meds had turned me into an extrovert and was a little surprised to find that it had not. If anything, my introversion is the only hard certainty although I have moved from Thinking into Feeling since high school. So I am Introverted, iNtuitive, Feeling and a 50/50 Judging/Percepting. No matter which of the latter, I am said to live a rich inner life and I am only lately coming to realize that this is not in fact the norm, which I had previously assumed. And J or P, I am a healer-helper-counselor. And with either combination, or both, I am said to find safety in predictability, habit, and preparation when I cannot be sure.

TANSTAAFL

There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch

The acronym is used as the title for the third part of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. The particular reference to a bar that serves free lunch but serves expensive drinks.

This is an allusion to bars and saloons that served free meals but charged high fees for drinks. For some reason this comes up in economics classes to encourage students to understand that whenever something is "free" the hidden cost is factored into something else. But somehow they always fail to recognize that the paid for portion is intoxicating, while the gratis portion is nutritious.

I haven't thought to much through this, especially not in terms of the economics of the book, or reality.

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

Most of the novel is set on the moon's prison colony. Due to the smaller gravitational pull, people who spend more than a few months on the moon will be unable to return to Earth. Thus, any prison sentence is essentially a life sentence of exile. Anyone born on the moon, similarly, will not be able to travel to Earth.

The sex ratio is approximately 2 males to 1 female. I suspect the skewed ratio is intended to reflect the real discrepancy in the prison population. Curiously, this gives women incredible power since the society is essentially egalitarian. Women may have multiple husbands. However, line marriages are preferred. A line marriage includes several generations of husbands and wives. New spouses are added slowly over time, voted in by the entire family. The eldest, particularly the eldest female, are the leaders of the family. Line marriages offer extra security in an unstable environment: the family continues even when a spouse dies; children can depend upon multiple parents; the family benefits from multiple incomes; a large families will have a variety of skill sets in its members; old families can benefit greatly by the work done by predecessors. Geez, this is starting to sound more and more appealing all the time. Did I mention that rape is practically unheard of and considered one of the worst crimes possible? Even sexual harassment is rare. Oh yeah, and most property is in the name of a woman. And while murder is rare, a murderer is expected (maybe even forced) to pay of the deceased debts and care for his family. Divorce is pretty rare. A person can just walk away from a family at any time but divorce is hard. All the women of a family must vote to divorce a man, no information about how a woman is divorced. Children born in to a family can elect to become part of the marraige when they are of age, strongly implying that while all spouses are considered spouses, they are not all sexual relationships since this would lead to incest. Race is also a non-issue on the moon (though the Earth still clings to its antiquated racist notions).

The economy and life-support systems are controlled by a computer, called Holmes. The computer develops self-awareness and a strange sense of humour. S/he also develops a plan to free the moon of Earth's control, which is heading the moon toward a catastrophic collapse and eventual doom for every Lunar citizen. After the rape of a lunar woman by terrestrial soldiers, the revolution is on, manipulated carefully by Holmes. Somehow the sentience of Holmes is less interesting than the sexual politics of Luna. Holmes was my favorite character, it was amusing to hear of his practical jokes, satisfying to watch his political manipulations, sad when his sentience died. But compared to the sexual and racial equality, it is just not that interesting.

Heinlein also uses the book as a platform against popular vote democracy as mob rule. You can take that how you want to since I have no experience with real democracy. Actually, coming from California, I have had some experience with the negatives of full democracy since anyone can nominate any bill to be voted on by the whole state. That has sunk California deeply since people are constantly voting for expensive public works to be paid off in bonds no one is buying. I am okay with representative democracy, but the electoral collage system needs to go.

Left Hand of Darkness

This is one of the first feminist science fiction works and my first sci-fi book to consider the nature of gender relations.

The protagonist, a member of the "bisexual" branch of humanity (in that he is male), is an alien among a race who are neuter most of the time, and thus unable to procreate during that time, and for approximately two days can turn either male or female. He is considered to be a perversion of nature since he is constantly sexually available. The period of fertility among the natives is called kemmering. Either member of a pair may assume either sex and all are capable of pregnancy. The protagonist begins by treating them all as males until. However, on a long and dangerous journey, he is confined in close quarters with a karhide undergoing kemmering. It is then that Genly Ai realizes that the karhides are not man or woman, or neither, but always both. The society has no sex/gender roles.

There is a beautiful myth of the first beings. The first born attempts to kill of its siblings but loses one when chasing after another. The youngest waits until the eldest is in kimmering. Then it returned. Each needed the either, could not survive.

The title refers to the inherent duality of karhide life. Light is the left hand of darkness. Each half does not merely oppose the other but requires it and completes it.

Rite of Passage

The epitimous rite of passage is a 30 day stay on a planet with limited supplies at the age of 14. After this trial, the person becomes an adult. The Earth has been destroyed. The protagonist lives in a spaceship whic observes strict reproduction control. The people on ships have all the technological know-how but limited resources which are exchanged with people who live on planets at unfair rates. They each spread false information and slander about one another. The protagonist is supposedly intelligent but lacks social skills.

During Mia's trial, she faces hostility, imprisonment, blah blah blah. Some of her fellow spaceship people are killed. Maybe. In retaliation, the spaceship people blow up the plane. The whole thing. All the people. The ethical dilemma is about as deep and enduring lipstick.

It is a childishly and poorly written book about an unpleasant, immature child who routinely fails at introspection and self-awareness. Many underdeveloped plot elements.

Demographic: tween? Still poorly written no matter who the target audience is.

Stranger in a Strange Land

I am getting around to this book review a little late. This is actually the book that kicked off my summer of sci-fi. I grabbed this book from the library bookshelves on a whim because the title came from Moses in the Book of Exodus.

The book follows Valintine Michael Smith, a human alien who was born and raised on Mars and travels to Earth. To survive in the harsh Martian environment, Smith learns the mind and body control techniques of the locals. He can also control the material being of others through levitation, psychic control and the ability to un-make anything or anyone who is hostile. A person who is unmade is not completely destroyed; his soul is just recycled into a new body, kind of like reincarnation on the journey to nirvana. He builds a religion which includes orgies, ritual cannibalism and water rituals. This religion challenges social mores, traditional marriage, traditional family structures and churches. Curiously, an actual religion was formed based upon the invented religion of the book.

I did get tired by the ravenous sex the characters seem to have. I understand that the book was written at a different time when sex was repressed. Strike that, it still seems silly and boring. Sex is everywhere, in magazines and tv shows. And it is so cheap and lame. I am bored by publicized sex.

I enjoyed this book for most of the way through but once the Church of All Worlds was built, I was put of by the hedonism it promoted.

Dune

This book has set the bar high. I admit it took me a while to adjust to the feudal politics at work but I got over the prejudice fast. The story is rich and deep; I am not sure where to begin. I know, I know. Dune is already famous for being a great and that it is very well known, but I only just read it and did not know what to expect. I must give credit to the MMORPG Kingdom of Loathing for encouraging me to read Dune.

Dune takes place in our universe in the very distant future, some 21,000 years from now, when the human population is spread throughout the universe - an impressively conservative amount of time for our technology to facilitate such travel. Curiously, computers have been outlawed, requiring the training of humans to do complex and speedy computations in their place. The political-economic structure of the worlds are petty feudal systems which are declining in power and stability.

The religious overtones are a curious invention. Dominated by women but yearned for a single man to be the messiah. These women, the Bene Gesserit, so called witches exist selflessly for breeding and to support their husbands but they are the true, though indirect, power behind their husbands and they possess the ability to control by mere speech.

Both sides are extremely sexist however there are two couples, Leto/Jessica and Paul/Chani, which seem to bridge the gaps. But Paul is something else all over again. Within Paul, the female mind within the male body, lies all the power of the universe. It is this duality that gives him all his strength.

The possibility of free will is a strange conflict. Paul at times can see into his future but his choices and their consequences lay a veil over the future. Is it possible that Paul can see only the near-future, what is inevitable from the actions that have already been taken. For example, if I throw a rock over a cliff, it is inevitable that the rock should hit the ground. But I cannot possibly know what will happen to that rock in a hundred years.

I find it curious that the leaders of the religion are called Bene Gesserit, which means something like "he/she does good" which is ironic since I am not convinced that this order only does good or is even actually moving toward good. I will need to read more of the Dune series to decide that.

Earth Abides

This was my first science-fiction novel/novella/short. I suppose this is not entirely true but it is the first one that ever affected me.

It is one of the early Apocalypse stories that became so popular during the cold war and the Bush W. administration. The story is told by Ish who observes the end of the world and the beginning of a new one. The catalyst is an unknown, air-born disease that kills off at least 99.99% of humanity sparing few with natural immunity. The world that ends is only the civilized world and the world that is rebuilt is only the world of mankind.

The title refers to the apathy of the planet upon which this human drama is played. Ish tends to watch the world instead of interacting and shaping. He notes that the few species to take notice of man's demise were domesticated in one sense or another: dogs, cats, rats, cows, etc. I suspect he is wrong about his evaluation of the survival of dogs, cats and horses. These animals are not tamed, even if they are domesticated. We like to pretend that they are and if we can appease dogs and cats and break horses, they will limply go along. But I suspect that a wild dog has a decent chance. And aren't all horses wild in each new generation?

The easy criticism of the book is Ish's own failure to respond. He gripes a great deal about inaction, such as failing to teach the children to read, but he never seems interested in acting. Why didn't he begin to read to his children in their infancy? It seems that in his absurd hopes for a chosen, golden child he readily forsook all of human knowledge.

Ish is, however, not what stays in my mind year after year. Instead, it is Stewart's imagine decay of civilization, for good and ill. The surviving "tribe" shares more work and has a communal ethic that eases the burdens of all. Racism is a luxury of a large society that the tiny tribe can no longer support. Yes, I am using "luxury" perversely. But sexism thrives, possibly out of necessity since the women are expected to bear any number of children to repopulate the world. Monogamy seems to establish itself in the second generation although there are two female survivors who share a husband. Superstition also survives.

Stewart also touches on a theory in studies of early human history. A population must be large enough before it can support and maintain progress. In Ish's doomed son lies hope that future generations will be able to access the treasury of knowledge in the libraries. When he dies, this hope is extinguished. Presumably, everyone else is too busy foraging and hunting. Though this is truly Ish's lame failure, it echoes a truth from across the ages. You cannot make advances in smelting it you are busy surviving.

Day of the Triffids

Day of the Triffids is so classic it is almost cliche. The book is predicated on cold war paranoia and middle-class fears. Wyndham makes allusions to communism in the single-minded Triffids who act with a single intent, destruction and consumption of humans, with callous disregard for individuals of its own species.

Some foreign country designs a new type of plant, the triffid, as a weapon of economic warfare. However, the plant is spread when an attempt to steal a box of seeds goes wrong, allowing the almost weightless seeds to spread all over the world. The new plant has some disturbing behaviours. A mature plant is capable of stinging and blinding a human; the plant is carnivorous; the plants are capable of moving, especially over dirt but they can cross pavement for short distances if necessary; the plants are intelligent and probably have a means of communicating to each other through vibration.

A possibly-unrelated meteor shower blinds any human who gazes at it, rendering humanity helpless. The Triffids take the opportunity to break free of their prison-farms and attack the newly blind. Attempts to gather, protect and repopulate humanity quickly go awry. Our protagonist carves out a small niche in a farm, batteling the Triffids and attempting to creat self-sufficiency. Eventually, they face the option of joining a more survivors on the Isle of Wight where the Triffids have been prevented from taking root literally or giving in to a fascist military organization.

If I seem dismissive about the plot, please forgive me. It was an original that has been used, manipulated, borrowed and stolen so it is as familiar as peanut butter. The story takes place in the middle of events, the day after the meteor shower, while the protagonist is healing from a Triffid sting. It similarly ends in a transition as the farm community strikes out to cast their lot on the island. Struggle and doubt are felt the entire plot length; they are never resolved. It's a lot like life - blind people groping about to survive, trusting those who claim to see, petty fighting, constant threat, uncertaintity, etc.

There are four failed attempts to (re)establish society: 1-A society repopulated by seeing men procreating with numerous, mostly blind-from-birth women. This experiment is aborted before it is even tested. It is met with some resistance because it goes against current mores and because it fails to provide for those who are newly blind.
2-A second attempt forces the seeing to be shackled into slavery to save the blind by scavenging for food. The seeing person is handcuffed to one or two blind persons so he can not simply escape. Their lives are spend searching for increasingly depleted food sources. Eventually, a strange disease, possibly food poisoning, begins to work its way through the blind, and possibly other people who can see.
3-A third society is created by one of the dissidants in the first group. She creates an impractical and overly idealist religious colony based upon Christian morals, or at least her interpretation of them. While this society temporarily functions, it fails to provide adequately for the future and the threat of Triffids.
4-The final attempt is the small farm tribal self-sustaining farm that faces increasing threat from the Triffids. This little society tries to fence out the world and Triffids but cannot continue to defend itself from either.

The fifth society is not reached. It is created by the original leader of the first movement but with some practical modifications.

She Blinded Me with Sci-Fi primer

Science-Fiction is the realm of "possible". Whatever we dream can be, even our nightmares. In this magic genre fiction becomes reality but so too does reality become fiction. Gravity, time's linear movement, property, sex, all of this and more becomes optional and open for distortion. And when life imitates art we can invent cellphones, e-readers, webcams, and robots.

I am something of a Janie-come-lately to the science fiction world. Growing up, I had a healthy exposure to Star Trek (original and The Next Generation) and, aside from my crush on Data, it did not really seep into my life. It was not until middle-school when I found Earth Abides on my mother's bookshelf that I began to read any science fiction. I slowly gained momentum, not considering science-fiction any more than any other kind of fiction, until this summer.

I have been a little fed up with the assumed and accepted reality. I like to remember that I am an animal, part of the enormous ecosystem we call Earth. I tend to wonder how a given situation would translate into an uncivilized human mind. No, I am not making archaic and blatantly racist romantic stories about the "savage". I like to strip away our fake environments, our learned social responses, and remember that I am only a human. I am a naked, utterly defenseless animal in an "untamed" and "undeveloped" natural world. It allows me to let go of the stress that builds up when worrying about things like a good credit score, a collapsing economy, how much I pay for health insurance, how much I pay for my graduate studies, etc. I suppose, in many ways, it rids me of the burden of money.

So while I am on school break, I plan to take a break for the pettiness of graduate school studies and engage in some healthy fantasy and escape this reality for a little while. I cannot afford a vacation or even a soma holiday so escapism is here as a cheap substitute.