Book Review: Tritcheon Hash by Sue Lange

About a millennium into the future, the universe is a lot different. Many generations ago from 3011, the year in which Sue Lange's Tritcheon Hash opens, women decide they have had enough of the testosterone fueled violence and messiness of males. They pack up and over the next decade or so, leave the men behind on the polluted and resource-depleted Earth and board starships to Coney Island. Coney Island is named after the amusement park-turned woman's penal colony-turned back to amusement park on Earth. Coney Island, light years away, is the all-human female planet, a refuge from and in many ways a complete opposite of, the now completely-male Earth. Here on Coney Island, women indulge in vegetarianism, aromatherapy, and a whole lot of peaceful and "womanly" activities that are the antithesis of the aggressive male-dominated culture they left behind. The women prosper and over the generations evolve a culture and society that epitomizes everything that is the opposite of war-mongering, unhygienic, and "un-cultured" males. In fact, ever since the absolute separation of the sexes, Coney Island has over the centuries even developed technology that surpasses that of the men back on earth.

The women in Tritcheon Hash have adapted and learned to live in a world devoid of the male species. The human females on Coney Island are highly paranoid and wary of Earth. Contact with Earth is extremely limited — confined to once a year when they swap male babies for enough frozen sperm to last their planet for another year. Men, since the separation, have mucked up Earth even more — a perpetual belt of garbage now encircles the planet. This sea of crud blots out the sun, making the human males fight their petty, and numerous, wars in artificial daylight. Plant life is thus highly limited on Earth, and circumscribed to a few areas which have been painstaking reclaimed from radiation fallout.

Tritcheon Hash or Tritch is the eponymous protagonist of Sue Lange's novel. She is brash, fearless, tough, and smart . . . a woman in love with speed. She is a test pilot who loves spaceships that are fast. Her job is to test the newly developed faster-than-light spaceships. She is married to the lovely Drannie Cove and has two daughters. Tritch, on the surface, appears to have everything a woman would want from her life. But within her, there's a knot of dissatisfaction that threatens to come undone and unravel her life. Her marriage to Drannie Cove has dwindled into an unsatisfying and unhappy relationship. Drannie has been acting distant and apathetic, devoting her full attention to their two daughters. Tritch's been spending more time sitting on her butt waiting for the ships she tests to actually fly than she's been enjoying the thrill of space flight. She's also increasingly haunted by an experiment that she was a part of when she was training at Coney Island's military academy — a group of women cadets and a visiting male students are tossed together to see what would happen. The experiment is a spectacular failure, thanks to the aggressive and uncouth behavior of Slab Ricknoy and his dust-up with Tritch during an exercise in which they were to partner each other. Tritch could do with a break.

The opportunity comes in the form of a request for reunification from the males. There are enough people on both sides wondering if that may be a good idea. But paranoia of the males has become the second nature for the inhabitants of Coney Island and while there are sufficient people interested in the reunification idea they want to exercise all possible caution. A decision is made to scout the enemy. So, because of her prior dust-up with Slab Ricknoy, her excellent credentials as a pilot, and her "military" training, Tritch is recruited for a clandestine mission to journey alone to earth, make her way through the layer of garbage permanently obscuring and orbiting the old home planet, and to see if men have managed to evolve out of their wicked, meat-eating, leather-wallet-carrying, war-mongering and aggressive ways. Tritch is excited about her mission. Not just because the idea of espionage and flying the fastest spaceship around — equipped with the "Lighterator" sounds thrilling, but also due to the possible chance that she might somehow may manage to again meet the intriguing Bangut Walht — the "forbidden" and "taboo" man — she met during the experimental exercise back in military school.

Tritch's exceptional skills as a pilot see her through the layer of garbage but she damages the ship during the tricky maneuver and crash lands on Earth. The crash-landing leaves her unconscious long enough to be captured by the one man she really hopes not to see — Slab Ricknoy who is now an aggressive and bellicose military leader in charge of one of the many wars on Earth. Somehow, Bangut Walht also finds himself thrown in the mix of circumstances. Ricknoy's aggressive stance against Tritch and her and Bangut's reaction to it threatens to trigger an intergalactic incident.

Will Tritch escape the clutches of Ricknoy? Will she and Bangut "get-together"? Will she be able to escape Earth, now that her spaceship is damaged and in Ricknoy's custody? What about Drannie and the kids? And if she does manage to escape and return to Coney Island, will Tritch recommend reunification or are the sexes destined to stay apart? The answers to these questions occupy the rest of the story of Tritcheon Hash.

Though it is presented as science-fiction, Tritcheon Hash is primarily a satire. The "science-fiction" is merely a wrapper that provides a world, a reason, in which the story can be played out and explored. Sue Lange uses satire in Tritcheon Hash to poke fun of various gender stereotypes prevalent in the current times. Satire, at most times, is tough to pull off. An author can err on the side of the serious, emphasizing the "message" and alienate the audience who would find the heavy-handed treatment boring. An author can also err on the other extreme — trying to explore every incident and opportunity to poke fun, elicit laughs, and come across as silly and frivolous. Sue Lange, for most of Tritcheon Hash, manages to strike a balance between the two. The science fiction wrapper for the story allows Lange to exaggerate stereotypes and then satirize them in interesting ways by making them sound perfectly logical and sound in the fictitious world. The satire and humor is born out of the play between the exaggerated notions of the characters in the fictitious world and similar notions in the real world. For example, everything on Earth is made of meat products. Males on Earth grow plants just to feed animals and then make everything out of meat and leather. Sample Tritch's reaction on entering Bangut's living quarters for the first time:

The place was orderly—surprisingly so, in fact. No socks draped on heat disseminators, no dirty underwear hung on the back of a chair. Last week’s beer-bash flotsam was not floating about in knee-deep water. The room appeared not only neat, but also tastefully decorated: curtains matched throw pillows, furniture covers had been chosen in stylish auxiliary colors, and a big rug tied everything together. No animal heads were mounted anywhere.

Lange also uses language effectively to emphasize the separation between the sexes and further reinforce the satirical intent of the story. Anything to do with male-female relationships and procreation is described in highly technical terms (a penis is always referred to by Tritch and others on Coney Island as the "Penile Apparatus"). Tritch and the females of Coney Island over the long years of separation have created a slang and manner of speaking that is unique to the planet and that produces some very funny misunderstandings when Tritch talks to the men in the book.

While the satire and humor is definitely a strong point of Sue Lange's story, she does lose her way towards the end. For most of the length of the novel, the story is extremely fast-paced. But towards the end Lange seems to lose her grip on the plot — it almost feels like the author knew how to develop the situation and take it to its climax but hadn't given a thought to how she would handle the resolution of the story. Like Tritch, the plot of the book too drifts at the end.

The characterization in this novel is tricky. One would normally consider sketching in finer details make for a better character. Lange paints Tritch and especially her male characters with a very broad brush. The characters largely are representative of various stereotypes. General Anschoss takes on every generic characteristic of any "General" in any book ever written. Slab Ricknoy, is the archetypical swaggering, aggressive man. Bangut is the stereotypical "sensitive" male. But when you understand that the author's purpose is to make fun of various gender stereotypes, you realize that painting the characters in broad brush strokes was the right (it may have been unintentional) decision. These conventional characters make it easy for Sue Lange to satirize male-female gender perceptions about each other.

Where the novel fails to impress is in its "science" part. For a novel that positions itself as science fiction, there is very little science in the story. Most of it is cosmetic and purely used to create atmosphere. In a science fiction story, at least to me, the science (whatever rules it obeys in that world) should be the reason of the story and should be the primary means of taking the story to its climax and resolution. The only science fiction in the novel is the faster-than-light ships powered by the lighterator and a few other similar token nods to science (plants that soak up radiation, gigantic sails that filter and "mine" the air for metals). The notion of the separation of sexes which is the basic premise for the story, could be easily setup without requiring the science fiction part of the story. Tritcheon Hash is a character-driven story in which the science-fiction is merely cosmetic and incidental. To me a book that is classified into the genre and then turning out to be not hard core science fiction is a big disappointment.

Tritcheon Hash is a book with undeniable energy. It is often funny, and but for the end, never dull. The characterization fits the book's purpose perfectly. If only Sue Lange had also paid attention to the science in her book, Tritcheon Hash would have been a unique coming together of satirical intent and science fiction.

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Book Review: The Beast With Nine Billion Feet by Anil Menon

Anil Menon's The Beast With Nine Billion Feet uses "opposites" to tell its story. At the most primary level this is a story of social and ethical issues about genetic engineering. This is depicted through the covert war between two groups: one wants to make genetic engineering affordable and used for public good. It believes in propagating its boons through something similar to the current open source movement in software and is against manipulating genes to create creatures for entertainment, or engineering humans with special abilities. The other group believes such engineering is the future of the world — thus the single seed, which depending on the fertilizer can be "programmed" to grow three different kind of crops or the attempt to make humans immortal. This group also believes in monopolizing the IPR for their genetically modified creations.

This ethical dilemma and the major conflict of the novel plays out through the lives of a pair of siblings, Tara and Aditya (Adi) who are opposites of each other. Tara, the younger sibling, is a voracious reader, takes school seriously and is extremely grounded in the physical world around her. She loves her aunt, Sita, and her two friends, the twins, Ria and Francis. Her brother, Adi, on the other hand, is hooked on to virtual worlds through "illusion tech," and can't read, doesn't believe in formal education but is a genius self-taught genetic engineer. Adi finds acceptance in his virtual friends, his "posse," with whom he has worked on some genetic engineering projects. Adi also dreams of emigrating to Nurth, an artificial island near the North Pole, which believes genetic engineering of humans is the future.

The siblings' personal lives and relationships become twined in the ideological conflict around genetics engineering. Adi's mentor and friend, Vispala employs any means necessary in her pursuit for immortality. Vispala, as a diplomat from Nurth on a special mission to India, tries to kill Sivan's movement and get the Indian Government to accept Nurth's engineered life-forms. The siblings' scientist-politician father, Sivan, who earlier had been declared a terrorist for promoting "Free Life Movement" in genetics, returns from his exile after a presidential pardon to thwart Vispala's plans. Vispala is also convinced that Sivan knows the secret of longevity and is determined to wrest it from him. As Mandira, she comes to Pune, where Tara and Adi stay, with her twin children, Ria and Francis, who befriend Tara. Meanwhile Adi's resentment, partly fueled by Vispala, against his long-absent father and his ideology grows.

Who succeeds in their plans? The ruthless Vispala or the sagacious Sivan? Which of them is right? The Beast With Nine Billion Feet doesn't ostensibly take sides with anyone. It does not provide tidy answers to the questions it raises. Both Sivan and Vispala/Mandira lose some and win some. While it does raise a few questions, the inconclusive and mixed ending seems to tell readers to decide for themselves the ideology that appeals to them.

The Beast With Nine Billion Feet belongs to a sub-genre in science fiction called mundane SF — like most SF books this is set in the future but not centuries away. The novel is set in a world 30 years from now — a future that is almost tangible. Also while we have some typical sci-fi tech and concepts as a part of life — visors that spew information on the world around, genetically engineered nictating eyelids that perform a function similar to the visors, smart homes that talk, cars with AI that need to be praised, illusion pods that can transport a user virtually to another place where the avatar can touch and feel things and interact with others, and a wonderful history class set in an experience lab — it is the mundane, everyday life which is the focus Tara's problems at school, her history classes and her feelings about Sanskrit, the need for the siblings and their aunt to scrimp and manage their limited money, Tara's relationship with her friends - the twins, the rise and win of the Vermillion party and its strident manifesto in politics. It is in the interplay of these two "worlds" that the novel also focuses on an issue that is of much importance today — the ethics of biotechnology and genetic engineering. All this make the book quite interesting.

About the only quibble I have with The Beast With Nine Billion Feet is its use of its milieu. The story plays out in Pune in Maharashtra, India. For an Indian sci-fi book, there is very little of the setting in the story — few references to Appa Balwant Chowk, one mention of Shaniwarwada, a quick dash to Matheran and a passing mention of Mumbai. Nothing much else of Pune or India seep through into the story.

Do read the The Beast With Nine Billion Feet if you like science fiction and especially if you are interested in mundane SF. The book takes a look at a slice of the future which is near at hand and at an issue of today which possibly will be a bigger dilemma in the future.

God Emperor of Dune : Ink Scrawl Nugget 32

Frank Herbert's God Emperor of Dune, the fourth book in the magnificent Dune Chronicles, is a treasure trove of quotable (and insightful) passages.

Here are a few of my favorites from the novel. I decided to club all of them together rather than put up each one in a separate post.

Free Will or Destiny?

I have come to believe that holy boredom is good and sufficient reason for the invention of free will.

Good Vs. Bad Administrators

The difference between a good administrator and a bad one is about five heartbeats. Good administrators make immediate choices ... [that] usually can be made to work. A bad administrator, on the other hand, hesitates, diddles around, asks for committees, for research and reports. Eventually, he acts in ways which create serious problems ... A bad administrator is more concerned with reports than with decisions. He wants the hard record which he can display as an excuse for his errors ... [Good administrators] depend on verbal orders. They never lie about what they've done if their verbal orders cause problems, and they surround themselves with people able to act wisely on the basis of verbal orders. Often, the most important piece of information is that something has gone wrong. Bad administrators hide their mistakes until it's too late to make corrections ... One of the hardest things to find is people who actually make decisions.

On Leadership

The problem of leadership is inevitably: Who will play God?

On Love

"My uncle Malky use to say that love was a bad bargain because you get no guarantees."

"Your uncle Malky was a smart wise man."

"He was stupid! Love needs no guarantees."

[. . . ]

"You know it's love when you want to give joy and damn the consequences."

Building Civilizations

Most civilization is based on cowardice. It's so easy to civilize by teaching cowardice. You water down the standards which would lead to bravery. You restrain the will. You regulate the appetites. You fence in the horizons. You make a law for every movement. You deny the existence of chaos. You teach even the children to breathe slowly. You tame.

Only Change is Permanent

In all of my universe I have seen no law of nature, unchanging and inexorable. This universe presents only changing relationships which are sometimes seen as laws by short-lived awareness. These fleshy sensoria which we call self are ephemera withering in the blaze of infinity, fleeting aware of temporary conditions which confine our activities and change as our activities change. If you must label the absolute, use its proper name: Temporary.

On Being a Loner

Did you build high walls around you only to sit within them and indulge in self-pity?

Musings on God

How persistent it is, this demand that our gods be perfect. The Greeks were much more reasonable about such things.

How Well do you Know Your own Books?

The Guardian Books Blog has a post on the premise of Susan Hill's book: Howards End is on the Landing (read the first chapter here)— While digging around her bookshelves for an elusive book, she soon finds herself waylaid from her original purpose. She finds a book that she hasn't read, and that pulls her on to the next and then another one and the next and many more others. She realizes that she has numerous unread, long-unopened titles in her library and resolves to not buy books for another year. The year she would use to get to know her own books again.

The Guardian blogger than runs a "mental finger" down her own shelves and picks out books that she hasn't got around to reading yet. And invites us to check our bookcases, tables for unread books and read one of them over the weekend.

Well, circumstances prevented me from doing the second part of what she recommended — having come across the blog post only today morning. But I did rummage through all the books on my table (and decided to leave the shelves for later when I am feeling less lazy) and as expected came across quite a few as-yet-unconsumed books. There's Orhan Pamuk's Other Colours — an unexpected present from a friend. I do occasionally dipstick into that one, reading an essay or two. It is a slightly bulky book. The kind that is not easy to carry and read in Mumbai's crowded local trains. Most of my reading happens in the trains on my daily commute to and from office.

Just next to it, still wrapped in the plastic bag it was packaged in, I found Marjane Satrapi's awesome graphic novel, Persepolis. I assume it is awesome going by the reports and reviews. I haven't yet read it. Along with it was also The Complete Maus by Art Spiegelman. I had picked up both the graphic novels at a discount a couple of months back. Still hadn't got around to unwrapping them. On the top of another stack are a couple of books -- Stephen King's On Writing and Brenda Ueland's If you Want to Write — which a friend bequeathed to me before moving on to another city. Since, the person also happened to be my manager, who regularly plodded through and reviewed what I wrote in the line of duty, I am wondering what he is trying to tell me by giving me these books. I should get to them . . . hopefully sooner than later.

Buried under a pile of books, and long forgotten, were Vivek Tandon's A Blind Man's Map of Mumbai and Joseph O'Neill's Netherland. Under another pile was Devdutt Pattanaik's The Pregnant King — a retelling of little-known tale from the Mahabharata of a king who drinks a potion meant for his barren queens and becomes pregnant himself. I like the Mahabharata and regularly pick up literature associated with it, especially the subversive kind. I had bought a copy of The Pregnant King and I suppose I meant to read it soon. It needed some archaeological excavation to unearth it again. Also unearthed were Kankana Basu's Cappuccino Dusk and (what is happening to me!!) Milan Kundera's The Curtain and Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies. Yes, as of yet unread.

There are also two (towering) stacks of books at one end of my table — books I have read, but which I need to read over and over again. For my studies (long in a state of stasis).

And I haven't investigated my bookshelves yet.

With most books, what happens, I suppose is, I pick them up, because I find them interesting and mean to read them. But there are always other books to be read too — the ones that I have borrowed friends and need to be returned soon. The ones I borrowed from my library and which if I don't return timely, I would be paying a heavy monetary penalty. By the time I am through these books, the ones that I have bought have been buried under new ones that I have bought or borrowed. I suppose, like most others, if I don't read something I have bought in the first few days, it soon makes its way to a corner in my mind, it goes under the radar, so to speak. Each time I come across them I tell myself, I will get to them eventually, after all I own them. There's no hurry. Meanwhile let me finish the ones which my friends have lent me.

I will read these, yes. Now that I am aware again that I have all these unread books, I will get around to reading them. Eventually. Just let me finish the first two books from Cassandra Clare's The Mortal Instruments Trilogy, City of Bones and City of Ashes. Post that, I promise, (if I don't get my hands on the third book in the trilogy or any other fantasy and sci-fi) I will get around to my stack of unconsumed books.

Why are SF and Fantasy Novels the Length They are?

Followers of SF and fantasy will have noticed this  — most novels/stories are big fat tomes or are split across trilogies (I am currently reading The Tawny Man trilogy by Robin Hobb after having read The Farseer Trilogy and The Liveship Traders trilogy  — and yes, the three trilogies are related) and quartets and what not. It is almost as if a SF & F writer can't tell a tale in a slim volume. An interesting explanation for the length of a typical SF & F novel is posted by science fiction writer Charles Ross:

Until the early 1990s, mass market SF/F paperbacks in the US were primarily sold via grocery store racks, supplied by local distributors (400+ of them). The standard wire rack held books face-out, either against a wall or on a rotating stand. And that's where the short form factor novel became established. Thinner books meant you could shove more of them into a rack that was, say, three inches deep. Go over half an inch thick, and you could no longer fit six paperbacks in a 3" rack. And there was only so much rack space to go around.

During the inflationary 1970s and early 1980s, prices of just about everything soared. The publishers needed to increase their cover prices to compensate. But the grocery wholesalers who sold the books insisted "the product's gotta weigh more if you want to charge more". They weren't in the book business, after all, so just as buffalo tomatoes got bigger, so did paperbacks. (Even though this meant there was less room to go round in the wire racks.) You can only get so much milage by using thicker paper and a bigger typeface; so they began looking for longer novels.

In the 1960s, an SF novel was 60-80,000 words, with 80K being considered overblown and long. By 1990 they'd grown to 90-100,000 words. Luckily the word processing revolution came along in the 1990s, making it easier to write and revise longer books. (A different editor of my acquaintance observed that whenever one of her novelists switched to word processing, the average length of their books increased by about 10% .)

There's more in that post including an explanation about why crime and mystery novels haven't similarly bulked up. Do read.

I personally feel this could be a "chicken or egg" kind of a situation here and that there are two trends to be considered in contemporary SF & F: 

— the growing acceptance of the literary worth of SF & F and 

— the effort that these writers put into creating their fantastic worlds.  

SF & F, at least what I know about it, in its early years was much published in magazines and had roots in pulp. This is when the Astounding and other magazines established the short story or the novella as the preferred length for SF & F. Lately, SF & F has become more literary  — and writers pay much attention to the characterization, style etc. A reason for this could be that SF & F was easily appropriated by any writers who had a "political agenda" to be conveyed in their writings. Feminist writings are a case in point. As the novels and the concerns (as opposed to the earlier stories which primarily focused on adventure) became more literary the size of the books started increasing. SF & F moved away from its pulp roots and became more acceptable and thus it was alright to publish more of it. Of course, it could be that the move away from standard grocery store wire rack led to bigger books which led to a more literary style, etc in SF & F. I suspect it is a bit of both.

Compared to the earlier days, I have found that SF & F writers today (and of the past couple of decades  — the time period Ross is talking about) are more willing to take the time to build their world and characters and slowly immerse their readers in this universe that they are creating. It is almost as if the writers think and know that they are creating something so fantastic and imaginative that their readers could do with some extra help in the detailing of their universes in order to anchor themselves in the story better. This naturally leads to bigger and fatter books. A bigger book allows for more canvas, so to speak, to detail out the universe  — which is of such prime importance in SF & F. 

Book Review: George's Secret Key to the Universe by Lucy and Stephen Hawking

Warning: Mild spoilers ahead

When we design e-learning programs for kids (I work for an e-learning company), often the "teach" is camouflaged within a "wrapper." The wrapper is an interesting storyline, theme, sometimes a game that is supposed to excite the curiosity of the kids and then engage them sufficiently for the giving of the "gyaan." Coming up with a decent wrapper is actually quite tough — the wrapper has to engage and then allow the interweaving of the teach in a way that the teaching doesn't overwhelm the "fun" and make the program boring. The wrapper shouldn't also smother the teach altogether lest the primary objective, the transfer of gyaan, is lost. This is a difficult to achieve balance and possibly the chief reason why gray hair, dark circles under the eyes, and a haunted look are fashionable in my office.

The reason for bringing up all that bit of the kind of work I do (as a rule, I avoid thinking about my work . . . sometimes I manage to do that in office too) is Lucy and Stephen Hawking's attempt to bring theoretical physics to kids through George's Secret Key to the Universe. The book in the guise of a space adventure story dishes out gyaan about our solar system, our galaxy, gravity, electrons, and esoteric physics concepts like black holes, Hawking radiation and the possibility of recapturing information from black holes.

The story centers primarily on young George. George's parents are rabid environmentalists and vegetarians who disapprove of modern inventions and technology, which they believe, have harmed the earth. They don't allow him a computer at home, even though he needs it for his schoolwork. As a result George dreams of owning a computer above all else.

George’s adventures begin when one day he finds his pet pig, Freddy, missing. Following the hoof-prints, George ventures into the neighbor's overgrown garden — a place his parents have declared off-limits — to find Freddy. Eventually he enters the neighbor's home where, like Alice who went down the rabbit hole, he finds himself in a wonderland. His neighbor Eric turns out to be a scientist. He also meets Annie, Eric's daughter, a precocious girl who fancies herself a ballerina. And he is introduced to Cosmos, the world's most intelligent and powerful computer. Cosmos can not only speak (and have an attitude) but can also compress and speed up time and open "doorways" to anywhere in space and transport "approved" users there. To become an approved user, George must take the oath of the Order of Scientific Inquiry for the Good of Humanity:

I swear to use my scientific knowledge for the good of Humanity. I promise never
to harm any person in search of enlightenment.
I shall be courageous and careful in my quest for greater knowledge about the mysteries that surround us.
I shall not use scientific knowledge for my own personal gain or give it to those who
seek to destroy the wonderful planet on which we live.
If I break my oath, may the beauty and wonder of the Universe forever remain hidden from me.

After taking the oath, George too, like Eric and Annie, can use cosmos for space travel. His voyages through the vastness of space help him discover the mysteries of physics, science, and the universe.

George, of course, doesn't spend the rest of the book only exploring the universe. George soon finds that the school bullies who are after him are also seeking Cosmos. The bullies are controlled and directed by an evil scientist, Dr. Reeper a.k.a. Greeper (who happens to be George's science teacher) who wants to acquire Cosmos and then use the knowledge of the universe for his own ends and benefit. Dr. Reeper manages to trick an unsuspecting Eric into a black hole and steal Cosmos. Now George not only has to get Cosmos back, but also find a way of rescuing Eric from the black hole. George knows that nothing ever escapes from a black hole.

Thanks to a simplified book written by Eric for Annie and George, he learns about Hawking radiation. He learns that contrary to what is generally known about black holes, they do disintegrate as they leak radiation and this process eventually emits anything captured in the hole. Now all that George needs to do is find a way to speed up the disintegrating of the black hole and find a way of reconstructing Eric from the information obtained from the black hole. To achieve this, he needs to first recover Cosmos from Dr. Reeper. Does George succeed?

To compound matters he also has to make a presentation at a school science program for which he was relying on Eric's help.

Read the book to find out if and how George manages to pull off the impossible.

George's Secret Key to the Universe, however, is not merely an adventure. The adventure, as pointed out earlier, provides a stage and a context to bring in all the science. As George embarks on his various travels through space, the authors furnish the readers with fact sheets about planets, scientific diagrams, and numerous color photos of the wonders found in the universe. Science forms the backbone of the story and it is the knowledge of a scientific concept that helps George to bring back Eric — the book includes Hawking's latest theories about black holes. Appropriately, they are presented as notes for a book within the book and the notes are complete with doodles and sketches and age-appropriate language for kids (in the context of the book — Annie and George.) The book is also marvelously illustrated by Garry Parsons and his playful, fresh, and funny sketches are reminiscent of yet another charming book: The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

George's Secret Key to the Universe makes a strong case for the importance of science and the scientific way of thinking in our lives. It is also a book that has its heart in the right place — it repeatedly stresses that science is to be used for the good of humanity and the quest for scientific knowledge should not be at the cost of the planet. The book also neatly brings in the importance of scientists and environmentalists working together to save and rejuvenate the planet.

Lucy and Stephen Hawking, like the kids in their story, (though with considerably less success) manage largely to pull-off this mix of science and a children's adventure novel. While the overall book is definitely a success there are patches where the "wrapper" of the children's adventure is too weak and the "teach" overwhelms the story. The first few chapters especially, when the authors are setting up the adventure, are incredibly cumbersome. The science hardly feels a part of the story in these initial chapters. Rather like in a poor e-learning program, the story merely sets up events that offer the characters an excuse to deliver lecture after lecture of scientific gyaan. These chapters could have done with strong editing and possibly some more thinking about how the adventure was setup. Freddy, the pig, for example, plays no further role than walking across to the neighbor's home. After working as an excuse to introduce George into the wonderland of Eric, Annie, and Cosmos, Freddy more or less disappears from the story.

Considering that, the target audience of the book is kids, the portrayal of the evil teacher, Dr. Reeper, might be potentially worrying for parents and educators. Even more worrying is what Dr. Reeper does with Eric. When he tricks Eric into the black hole, he is actually committing a murder (and though the book shows how Eric can be "reconstructed" again from the black hole) the act itself is scary and deplorable. The book however expresses virtually no outrage at Dr. Reeper's deed and neither is he apprehended or punished in the end. If the reactions to the killings in Harry Potter are any indication, this incident in the book might prompt adults to reconsider before handing the book to kids.

Those quibbles apart, George's Secret Key to the Universe, does a fantastic job of invoking amazement and inspiring curiosity. It introduces kids to interesting, arcane, and mind-bending scientific concepts in a way that is easily accessible to kids (and many adults who struggled with Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time). In the process, it tells a pretty good story as well. The resultant book is highly instructive, entertaining, and infuses and enthuses readers with the wonders of the universe and science.

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The companion website for George's Secret Key to the Universe is a good resource to read an extract from the book, get acquainted with the characters and try out a few fun activities based on the book. From the website it looks like this book is first of a series. Hopefully the sequels will iron out the few crinkles of the first book and be even more informative and enjoyable.

More on Philip Pullman and His Dark Materials

Philip Pullman talks to John Mullan about plot, morality, language, and Milton in His Dark Materials in the Guardian book club podcast. Quite a fascinating interview though there are a few moments when you can't help hoping that the interviewer would stop demonstrating his learning and his deep reading of Pullman's texts and let the author speak.

It is wonderful to hear an author explain and think aloud on his craft. Don't miss Pullman's responses to the audience's questions at the end of the interview.

Some excerpts:
On the criticism of his interpretation of the Bible:

The criticism comes it seems to me from people who think there is only one way of reading the Bible and its their way and if you read it another way, you are doing something wrong or evil or something. Well that's not what I believe. I think there are many ways of reading the many books of the Bible because they are all not the same thing at all. Its appropriate to read one part of it as history, another part of it as poetry, another part of it as law, another part of it as . . . nonsense and so on and we should use our judgement out here - judgement which is formed by our education, by our experience of the world and reading other things to decide which is the appropriate way to read it in each case rather than the one literally . . this is literally true and if you read it any other way you are going to go to hell which is the fundamentalist way of reading the bible which I think is wrong. Simply wrong.

On the autocracy of authorship and the democracy of reading:

. . . Here I am wondering if I should interpret my own work and tell you what it means. I am kind of reluctant to tell you what things mean because as I am the chap who wrote it that gives me a sort of authority in this field but I am not sure that I do have that sort of authority because if you think you have got a theory about what Dust means and you have worked it out you have every right to do that. When the book is finished and published, the autocracy of writing - it is an autocratic procedure. I am a despot. I am tyrant when I write because I have the absolute power of life and death over every sentence, every comma, every character. I can kill them, I can bring them to life, I can cut off this, end this chapter, and start somewhere else. I am the authority. No one can tell me not to do it. But once the book is published the autocracy of authorship comes to an end and the democracy of reading begins and that's the point where I cease to have any authority. I can't tell you what it means. I can tell you what I think it means . . . and so can anybody else. But if I tell you what I think it means that'll, because I wrote the book, people might think that is what it really means and there is no more argument about it. But I don't want that to happen. I want there to be discussion about it. I want you to think what all the things it might mean . . .

Listen/Download the Guardian book club Pullman podcast (47 minutes, 49.2 MB mp3 file )

Elsewhere Leslie Baynes wonders if the ferment about His Dark Materials is just Harry Potter vs. Fundamentalists redux, a clash that generates heat but no light? Probably not.

If you are intrigued by what Pullman had to say about authorship and reading, do read this post on the Death of the Author.

And here's an earlier Pullman post: The Art of Darkness.

The Art of Darkness

Excerpts from an interview with Philip Pullman:

[. . .] "I'm fundamentally a storyteller, not a literary person, if I can make that distinction. If I wrote a story that had enough vigour and life to pass into common currency and be recounted by people who had no idea that I was the author, nothing would give me greater pleasure."

[. . .]

"It's a foolish thing for the teller of a story to answer critics. If you're putting forward an argument, you can argue back and demonstrate why your argument is better than theirs. But if someone doesn't like a story you've written, what are you going to say? ‘Well, you should'?"

[. . .]

"I dislike his (C.S. Lewis's) Narnia books because of the solution he offers to the great questions of human life: is there a God, what is the purpose, all that stuff, which he really does engage with pretty deeply, unlike Tolkien who doesn't touch it at all. ‘The Lord of the Rings' is essentially trivial. Narnia is essentially serious, though I don't like the answer Lewis comes up with. If I was doing it at all, I was arguing with Narnia. Tolkien is not worth arguing with." [. . .]

The complete interview here.
Do trawl through the comments and discussion at the end of the interview — there's much to be gleaned from them.

Fahrenheit 451 is not About Censorship . . .

Ray Bradbury clarifies that it is actually a novel about how television destroys interest in reading literature.

Science Fiction and the Technological Singularity

A few decades ago, the most popular science fiction epics were works like Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy or Frank Herbert’s Dune series—stories that were set thousands or even tens of thousands of years in the future but involved human beings more or less like us and societies more or less like our own, but with more advanced technology. Today, by contrast, many of the genre’s top writers are unwilling to speculate more than 20 years ahead. The acceleration of technological advance, they argue, has begun to make traditional visions of far-future humanity look increasingly myopic and parochial.

Vernor Vinge in an interview voices his thoughts on the Technological Singularity and how rapidly accelerating technological progress is building a future that may be impossible for us even to imagine.

''Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt.''

"This is a very bad book you're writing," I said to myself.
"I know," I said.

— From Vonnegut's self-reflexive Breakfast of Champions

Kurt Vonnegut, known for his works — Slaughterhouse-Five, Cat's Cradle, Breakfast of Champions — that melded satire, black humor, political commentary, and science fiction died yesterday at the age of 84.

''He was sort of like nobody else,'' said Gore Vidal [. . .]
''He was imaginative; our generation of writers didn't go in for imagination very much. Literary realism was the general style. Those of us who came out of the war in the 1940s made it sort of the official American prose, and it was often a bit on the dull side. Kurt was never dull.''

NY Times: Counterculture, Dies at 84

Star Wars Harry Potter

Luke Skywalker Harry Potter is an orphan living with his uncle and aunt on the remote wilderness of Tatooine suburbia.

He is rescued from the aliens muggles by wise, bearded Ben Kenobi Hagrid who turns out to be a jedi knight wizard.

How Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone echoes Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. (warning: opens a Jpeg [image] file)

Via: Geetha Krishnan